"I have become a stranger to myself"
Voices from the Hoheneck women's prison (GDR)
The Hoheneck women's prison is the symbol of politically persecuted women in the GDR. With draconian punitive measures that violated human rights, degrading prison conditions and forced labour in the textile industry, the GDR power apparatus tried to break its political opponents here. The most common "offence" was attempted or planned escape from the republic.
In a joint project, the music theatre collective "Schatz & Schande" and the ensemble "Neue Kammer" present poems that were written during imprisonment in Hoheneck and set to new music by composer Philipp Rücker. They will be accompanied by a light installation that captures the colourlessness, confinement and monotony of imprisonment: Like in a black and white film, the light bathes the ensemble in shades of grey. The actors are cut off from each other by the use of light. Every now and then you can see a face, a hand, a shadow or the silhouette of a figure.
With this hybrid of concert and performance, the artists want to venture a new form of remembrance culture that conveys a sense of the prisoners' situation, recalls the crimes of the SED dictatorship and creates a memorial to the imprisoned women.
The project was supported by Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur, ie Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen, Kulturamt der Stadt Leipzig, Zentrum für Kultur und Geschichte e.V. / Sehnsucht nach Freiheit and Karin und Uwe Hollweg Stiftung.
