Es ist nie Sommer im Ruhrgebiet I Ruhrfestspiele 2025

It's never summer in the Ruhr area by Guido Wertheimer
Director: Guido Wertheimer
Co-production of the Ruhrfestspiele with Theater Münster

World premiere

The author and director Guido Wertheimer was born in Buenos Aires in 1996 as a descendant of Jewish-German exiles. This is where his great-grandmother Julia Studinski fled from the Nazis in 1939 - and built a new life overnight with her husband and 13-year-old son. They were incredibly lucky: a distant relative who had emigrated to Argentina between the wars provided the family with a letter of invitation and a ticket to a foreign country. The family's possessions were confiscated by the Nazis in the port of Hamburg.

Before their escape, the family lived in Berlin and Recklinghausen. There they owned a shoe store at Markt 8, which was also expropriated by the Nazis and still exists today (under a different name). The bells of St. Peter's Church, which Julia Studinski heard as a child, still ring today. However, Julia's love and passion for the piano and Chopin was lost with the Steinway grand piano that was in the confiscated container.

Guido Wertheimer, in-house author at Theater Münster, has delved into private and municipal archives and uncovered stories of Jewish victims and German perpetrators as well as a miraculously crazy connection between the former Münster rabbi Fritz Steinthal and his own Argentinian family. Guido Wertheimer has written a docu-fictional piece about the Münster-Recklinghausen-Berlin-Buenos Aires quadrangle and the ghosts of his ancestors. In it, he confronts the long shadow of his family history and searches for the dead of the past among the living of the present. His authorial self embarks on a search for traces that uses his own body as a starting point and a reason not to let the past rest.