Die zerrissenen Jahre

Get to know our ensemble from another side, in the intimate setting of the Kammerspiele! A book, five chapters, a big lecture event. Throughout the entire season, the Bochum ensemble will read from the book Die zerrissenen Jahre (Fracture: Life and Culture in the West) by author Philipp Blom. It begins exactly 100 years ago, after the end of the First World War in 1918, and describes developments up to 1938. Newspapers and radio are experiencing their best years, but books are still on fire in Berlin. The time that led to the Second World War becomes vivid in a unique way with eyewitness accounts, letters, live music and reference to Bochum’s history.

With the ensemble of Schauspielhaus Bochum

Language: German


Chapter 1 (1918 – 1922): New beginning and fight for freedom (war traumata, Otto Dix and artists in Europe, prohibition and jazz in the USA, Russian revolution and Lenin's death, African-American struggle for equal rights)
Dramaturgy: Koen Tachelet
23.11.18

Chapter 2 (1923 – 1925): New start in science, art, philosophy (exploration of the universe, physicists in Europe, Dada and Surrealism, Friedrich Nietzsche, theory of evolution and eugenics)
Dramaturgy: Dorothea Neweling
18.01.19

Chapter 3 (1926 – 1928): The Roaring Twenties (robots and machinists, cinema and Bauhaus, Judaism in Austria, Broadway, Berlin nightclubs)
Dramaturgy: Felicitas Arnold
March 2019

Chapter 4 (1929 – 1932): The World in Crisis (Stalin in Russia, Great Depression, End of the Weimar Republic, theater in Berlin, Max Reinhardt and Marlene Dietrich, Mussolini‘s and Hitler's rise)
Dramaturgy: Tobias Staab
May 2019

Chapter 5 (1933 – 1938): The End’s Beginning (Hitler‘s seizure of power, persecution of the Jews, emigrants in Paris, Olympic Games in Berlin, Civil War and Hemingway in Spain, Mahler's 9th Symphony)
Dramaturgy: Vasco Boenisch
June/July 2019


​Philipp Blom, Die zerrissenen Jahre. 1918-1938
© 2014 Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, München