EX-EAST - A journey into the past for the future

The bus has no driver. Unfortunately, it’s leaving anyway. On October 15th and 16th, a bus will stop at Moritzhof—one for which you’d normally be better off not buying a ticket. It doesn’t go to Berlin, Leipzig, or Buckau. It travels to 1928. To 1944. To 1989. And sometimes, straight back into your own family history. Before the journey begins, every audience member must submit a request: If you could change one single thing in the past, what would it be? After that, things get complicated. Joseph Stalin boards, wanting to go back to 1928 to stop Stalin, of all people. A young man wants to find the day his grandfather decided to work for the Stasi. A Crimean Tatar woman wants to return to her family in 1944 one last time. A young Bulgarian claims that the real catastrophe of 1989 was perhaps that everyone went home too early after the revolution. And then there is Albina, born in Mykolaivka in the Donbas. She doesn’t want to fix world history. She is trying to figure out who you become when the place you called home is suddenly no longer reachable. The journey is accompanied by Sofia, a thirteen-year-old girl with a bowler hat, a coat, and a leather suitcase, who strolls quite unmoved through 1,700 years of European history, collecting things that you really shouldn't be taking back from the past.

The audience listens to all the requests, asks questions, and votes. Who gets to go back? Who has to get off? Which past do we actually want to change—if change suddenly has consequences? There is no predetermined outcome. That is arguably democratic. For a bus without a driver, it is even surprisingly democratic.

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Following up "Heimatlos(er)," the team led by director Georg Genoux and artist Anastasia Tarkhanova is now presenting their second production at Moritzhof, created in collaboration with Eastern European and East German residents of Magdeburg.