Frau Schmidt fährt über die Oder

Playwright Anne Habermehl is writing the first part of a trilogy for the Kammerspiele. Her stories are poetically condensed found pieces from biographies that feature departures and new beginnings, but also repetitions and patterns. History inscribes itself in our bodies. In 1990, a full-of-hope Anne Habermehl travels with Mrs Schmidt across the Oder, from East to West – which in this case means to a Bavarian backwater. She follows the life of a late re-settler who continuously encounters traces of the violent history between Poland and Germany in her everyday life, without ever being able to fully decode them. Mrs Schmidt neither wants to be displaced nor to be left behind. She wants to leave on her own terms, raise a child, live her own life. Systems of government are collapsing and, in the cracks between, people patch together their own social structures, searching for a future, sometimes for utopias. In snapshots from 1990, 2003 (after the great Oder flood) and shortly before Mrs Schmidt’s death in 2021, Anne Habermehl explores the friction between a rather non-utopian present and the spirit of optimism felt 30 years ago. What power relations do we carry within us? How much escaping towards the future is possible?

Photo: Julian Baumann

Photo: Julian Baumann

Photo: Julian Baumann

Photo: Julian Baumann

Photo: Julian Baumann

Photo: Julian Baumann

Photo: Julian Baumann

Photo: Julian Baumann

Photo: Julian Baumann

Photo: Julian Baumann

Photo: Julian Baumann

Photo: Julian Baumann

Photo: Julian Baumann

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