Zeit ohne Gefühle

Feldafing lies some way outside of Munich on Lake Starnberg. It is a beautiful place for relaxation, even Sissi and Thomas Mann holidayed there. But Feldafing’s history has a darker side, too. Take a closer look, and various layers of Germany’s past unfold. Between 1934 and 1945, the town was shaped by the ‘Reich School’, a training centre for the Nazi elite. After the end of World War II, the abandoned school grounds were transformed overnight into a camp for ‘displaced persons’: a reception centre for Jews who had survived the concentration camps. Today, a German army barracks stands on the very same spot. Feldafing: a magnifying glass of German history?

Writer and journalist Lena Gorelik is looking through this magnifying glass, writing a play for the Münchner Kammerspiele that searches for strands of the past in our contemporary world and examines the connections between memory and the present. Based on the biography of Holocaust survivor Mordechai Teichner, who was brought to Feldafing at the age of 14, the different temporal levels unfold and intertwine.

“We have accounted for the past. We have remembered. We have learned. This is our German legend, told in the present perfect. But have we really? What happens when the tenses flow into one another – when past tense becomes present becomes future?”

– Lena Gorelik