Was geht es uns an?

In the organizer's words:

"What's happening to us?" asks the helmsman Jörgen in Maria Lazar's drama "The Stowaway" when his crew pulls a Jewish refugee fleeing the Nazis out of the water in a German port and takes him on board the Danish ship. The play, which remained undiscovered in the author's estate for almost ninety years and had its world premiere at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus in spring 2025, is a gripping parable of civil courage. In this impressively written and harrowingly contemporary play, the Jewish author Maria Lazar, who herself had to emigrate to Denmark with Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel in 1933, repeatedly asks the question that runs through her entire oeuvre like a common thread: "What's happening to us?"

The reading in the Unterhaus with Rainer Philippi and other members of the ensemble brings together texts, poems and excerpts from novels and provides insights into the work of an author whose works provide a seismographic image of her present that could hardly be more timeless.