dasvinzenz zu Gast im EineWeltHaus: Ich will keinen Trost von Niemandem – De algún tiempo a esta parte

Reading after Max Aub in Spanish and German

On the occasion of the commemoration day of the liberation of Dachau concentration camp on 29.04.1945

EineWeltHaus, Schwanthalerstr. 80, 80336 Munich

Tuesday April 29, 2025, 8:00 pm

Reading: Sibylle Canonica and Elina Fernández

Music: Ardhi Engl; Set design: Eos Schopohl

Vienna 1938, after the annexation of Austria. After the expropriation of her apartment, the Jewish woman Emma lives tolerated in the attic of the house and ekes out a living as a cleaning lady at a theater. Her grief for her husband Arnolf, who was murdered in Dachau, and the unexplained death of her son Samuel, who perished in Spain, has turned into cold rage with which she, like a witness against her will, observes the brutalization and atrocities that formerly friendly neighbors and fellow human beings are suddenly capable of. With a distance that frightens her, she registers the jubilation surrounding the burning synagogue and tells her dead Arnolf every day about the humiliations she has to witness and endure herself. But like her best friend, she refuses to give up. She wants to see what hell awaits those responsible for the regime. As a baptized Catholic, she believes in divine justice. Against the coldness, she often humorously conjures up scenes of her happy marriage, with small quarrels, fears, jealousy, and at the same time asks herself whether her earlier politically disinterested existence in quiet prosperity is not also partly to blame for her present misery.

Max Aub - the son of Franco-German parents, a Jewish writer and playwright born in Paris and raised in Spain - wrote this monologue in Spanish while in exile in Paris in 1939 and saved it through the years of camps, war and further exile. The German version of this touching and clairvoyantly prescient text, discovered by translator Stefanie Gerhold in Max Aub's estate, describes how quickly the humane environment for those affected changed as a result of hatred and constant agitation.