WERKstatt Direction – Der Untermieter

After a failed marriage, the writer and translator B. lives as a lodger in his native Budapest. Caught up in a writing frenzy, he is constantly haunted by memories of the past; fragments of thoughts that seem much more real and closer to the truth than his present and future. And so B. writes a Kaddish, a prayer of praise or prayer for the dead for a never-born, non-existent child, his child, “because there is only an explanation for what was not, what is not or what has not been.”
Based on motifs from the novel “Kaddish for a Child Not Born” by Imre Kertész, the directorial exercise is dedicated to the principle and significance of storytelling. At the center of the rehearsal process is the question of what role writing plays in the survival and survival of a person after Auschwitz and why this story in particular is still of unbroken relevance and urgency.

Content Notes:
Anti-Semitism
Violence
War
Death