Frau Schmidt und das Kind aus Charkiw

Mannheim-Ludwigshafen, late 1940s: the Second World War is over, the bombs have stopped falling and Mrs Schmidt is wondering what kind of a husband has actually been returned to her after his “civilian deployment” as an engineer in the Ukraine in 1944. He is unable to speak, but he is also unable to be silent. Anne Habermehl observes ten years of a family’s attempts at survival and reconstruction in the American zone – father, mother and child – and the formation of democracy in West Germany. At the same time in her play, the writer has a second Schmidt family – seventy-two years later – direct their gaze towards Ukraine. In 2022, to everyone’s surprise, a war has broken out in Europe, interrupting the Schmidt’s search for the birth family of their adopted Ukrainian son whose origins they have kept secret since 1990.

Where do the blind spots in family histories originate? Is there a system to them? Which narratives are erased so that (West German) life can continue to thrive in peace and freedom?

In the second part of her Europe trilogy, Anne Habermehl reverses her perspective: following “Frau Schmidt fährt über die Oder“ (“Mrs Schmidt Crosses the River Oder”), this time round, rather than looking from the East into a future in the West, her protagonist looks from deep in the West towards the East to explore the concealed past. In Habermehl’s plays, history becomes tangible and poetically alive.

“We are a people of psychopaths that other peoples must now keep an eye on.”