HERZFADEN

After a performance by the Augsburger Puppenkiste, a girl slips through a wooden door into a mysterious attic. There, Jim Knopf, Urmel, Princess Li Si and Kalle Wirsch come to life. And the woman who carved all these dolls: Hatü or Hannelore Oehmichen, the daughter of the inventor of the legendary puppet theater, Walter Oehmichen. She ran the Augsburger Puppenkiste with him and was its most important puppet maker. It is the story of a fairy tale and at the same time part of a hellish story: in the middle of the Second World War, the young girl Hatü also experiences the deportation of Jews, flight and destruction. A modern fairy tale about the power of the imagination in dark times, but also about the traces that ideological resentments leave in our souls and that haunt us right into the darkest corner of an attic.

Thomas Hettche was born in a village on the edge of the Vogelberg and lives in Berlin. His essays and novels, including Der Fall Arbogast (2001), Die Liebe der Väter (2010), Totenberg (2012) and Pfaueninsel (2014), have been translated into over a dozen languages and awarded numerous prizes, including the Premio Grinzane Cavour, the Wilhelm Raabe Prize, the Solothurn Literature Prize and the Josef Breitbach Prize. His latest novel Herzfaden (2020) was shortlisted for the German Book Prize and spent weeks on the SPIEGEL bestseller list. The Wolfgang Borchert Theater is the second theater to bring the novel to the stage.

Production_Stage | Meinhard Zanger
Costumes | Linda Scaramella-Hedwig

Dramaturgy | Laura Ritter, Tanja Weidner
Cast | Florian Bender, Katharina Hannappel, Edina Hojas, Niclas Kunder, Tara Oestreich