SchwarzRotGeil

In the organizer's words:

Zero hour. Germany remembers, commemorates and wants to make amends. Germany remembers well. Suffering is locked away in monuments and memorial days, right-wing continuities become individual cases - this creates new space for national identity. Finally, Wetten, dass..., the City Palace and the Ministry of Homeland again. The Nazi past seems to be only a small part of the otherwise great positive German history.

we wave a flag.
we take handkerchiefs with us in front of the television:
on national mourning day we mourn and on remembrance day we remember,
so let us stand up,
let us be silent for a minute,
then you can hear the grass grow better.

Schwarz Rot Geil deals with questions of forgetting, remembrance and identity. The German self-image has long since ceased to be an anti-fascist one. The actual goal is being forgotten: history must never be allowed to repeat itself. Confronting the structures of forgetting is political remembrance work. Political remembrance work is shaping the future.

About the development of the play
Based on the legacy of Attorney General Fritz Bauer and his work in Braunschweig, cindy+cate embarked on a research process. They were guided by Bauer's call to "go into court with yourself". The basis for this are biographical and collective memories of the German perpetrator community as well as the negotiation of one's own position in society. Max Czollek's analyses of the German culture of remembrance serve as a theoretical foundation for cindy+cate. His division of this into three phases forms the basic framework of this stage format. In developing the play, cindy+cate takes stock of the German culture of remembrance, both personally and socially. With an ironic twist, the production shows the dangers of social patriotism and traces the process of the so-called
process of Germany's so-called Wiedergutwerdung on stage and calls it into question. In times of a growing right-wing populist party and a shift in discourse to the right, the play offers a highly topical examination of previous strategies for coming to terms with the past, highlighting continuities and dangers without coming across as preachy.

Schwarz Rot Geil premiered on 01.04.2023 at the Quartiertheater Hannover and has since been shown in Braunschweig, Hildesheim and Hamburg. The play development was nominated in the trainee category at the Best OFF Festival Niedersachsen and invited to the NEXT Festival at LOT-Braunschweig.

The Best OFF Festival writes about cindy+cate: "They reflect on memory work in an approachable way and place a strong focus on presenting their own young perspective."

Website

@cindypluscate