A few hours before the premiere, a concert dedicated to the memory of Buchenwald prisoners took place at the Church of St. Peter and Paul in Weimar. The concentration camp was located near the city, and its grounds are now home to a memorial museum.
Before the concert began, historian and human rights advocate Irina Shcherbakova addressed the audience. Speaking in German, she talked about Russia’s past and present. Her remarks included the names Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Solzhenitsyn, Bulgakov — not as literary classics, but as reminders of people affected by the regime and political persecution.
She then mentioned Navalny and Putin, along with words that needed no translation: GULAG, Faschismus, Propaganda, Zensur and politische Repressionen. Immediately afterward, Brahms’s “German Requiem” began.
According to the author’s description, the music picked up those words and carried them into another dimension of mourning, memory and silence. The idea of pairing the memorial concert with the premiere belonged to festival director Rolf Hemke.
“I quickly decided that this play’s premiere would take place at our festival. We immediately agreed with producer Svetlana Dolya that the concert and the premiere had to be held on the same day. It is a very important conversation, especially here in eastern Germany, where people do not always want to hear what contemporary Russia is. We told them this in two ways at once — through a historian’s speech and through the artistic language of the performance,” Hemke said at the reception after the premiere.