Blutbrot

In the organizer's words:

by Miriam Unterthiner

World premiere

Winner of the Kleist Prize 2025

The Brenner Pass: a path between mountains in an idyllic landscape and a border crossing between Austria and Italy. A relatively unknown crime took place here 80 years ago. High-ranking Nazi officials such as Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann used secret smuggling routes across the green border to flee from the Allies and their just punishment, first to Italy and from there to the rest of the world. And they had help from the local population. Miriam Unterthiner's new play "Blutbrot", which was awarded the Kleist Prize for Young Dramatists in 2025 and will be premiered at Theater Aachen, is about the so-called "rat line", as this escape route was called. The "bread of blood" is a metaphor for repressed guilt: the ground on which this happened produces the bread that we are supposed to eat today. Can we chew it, swallow it and digest it? Or will we not be able to swallow it? Poetically condensed and at the same time concrete, virtuoso and powerful, with subtle humor and great images, "Blutbrot" literally digs into the past and builds a bridge to today.