Mascha K. (Tourist Status)

Play by Anja Hilling

Mascha Kaléko experienced her first successes in Berlin during the Weimar Republic and became a shooting star of the New Objectivity movement with her "Gebrauchslyrik" before she was banned from writing under National Socialism. She and her family emigrated to New York via Hamburg and Paris to escape persecution under National Socialism. Later encounters with Germany are also shaped by this time. In 1959, she turned down the Fontane Prize because the jury member Hans Egon Holthusen was a member of the SS.

One hundred years after the peak of Kaléko's work, the poet Anja Hilling approaches her biography and work. The result is a theater text of subtle musicality that sketches its characters in places of transition and gives expression to the multilingualism and speechlessness of exile.

Ebru Tartıcı Borchers uses Hilling's text to tell the story of Kaléko's life and at the same time understands the languages of the two poets as a common narrative of migration and exile across the ages.