Shortly before her death, Susanne receives another visit from the pastor. He has a bottle of schnapps with him, “filled to the top with self-pity,” she smokes. So much that she has an eviction order on her neck. And that’s not healthy either. But: “Excessive smoke was blown into the air in this country. The bodies didn’t get hold of that either.” She doesn’t want a sip from the priest’s bottle, she’s already racing, inside, which the actress Johanna Eiworth turns outward, the inside of a torn, deadly unhappy woman who is splintering in many directions.
Anne Habermehl wrote the first part of a trilogy for the Münchner Kammerspiele and staged it herself, which she often does, in the Werkraum. “Ms. Schmidt drives across the Oder”, so the title, sounds a bit like a coffee trip, but that is deceptive. The Oder not only marks the border between two countries, but also between times, peoples and people. Anne Habermehl tells of three generations, of grandpa, Mama Susanne, born in 1959, daughter Annemarie, born in 1990. Then there is Micha (Frangiskos Kakoulakis), a being that appears in all time levels, sometimes as a Polish worker in 1944, sometimes as a shy youngster and tries to win the favor of the young Annemarie.
It is a text of the search for clues and assumptions, about which much remains vague. Anne Habermehl puts stammering insecurity in the mouths of the characters, a few puns – “the only common ground here is loneliness” – invents monologues, some of which are actually dialogues or vice versa, she stumbles around between the ages in such a way that some things would like to be clearer which Habermehl avoids as much as possible.
The mother and also a little bit the daughter are homeless between two worlds behind which the dark wall of the Holocaust stands
But: Out of the murmur a peculiar, human truth emerges again and again, which one cannot escape, especially not if one had a father who dreamed of what was once property in Silesia for a long time and of a Polish woman in the last years of his life and a Pole was cared for. When the grandpa, the wonderful Walter Hess, who also plays the pastor and a doctor, tries hesitantly to put together his own memories to answer the granddaughter’s question, what was going on back then, in 1944, when the Nazis were the Polish workers murdered, then one’s own father comes to mind, although he never experienced anything like that. As far as you know.
It’s strange: while the critic is writing this, he reads in the newspaper that Poland is pushing out of the EU, at the same time he traces Habermehl’s cross-border lifelines. In 1945 the family was chased away from the farm near Breslau (now Wrocław), and it is not known what happened afterwards. Then Susanne was born in Poland, somehow there was a Piotr later in her life, in 1990, the border opened, she went west, ended up in Marktredwitz, the daughter was born. The mother works as a caregiver, the daughter becomes a photographer, perhaps also because the thousands of photos that the mother carries around with her have no truth for her and she has to create one for herself.
The mother and also a little bit the daughter are homeless between two worlds behind which the dark wall of the Holocaust stands. They also remain vacant on the cubist, mint-green stage – Micha’s suit is the same color, it disappears in front of the interior. Anne Habermehl’s own staging remains cool, dissecting, clinical, also a little awkward, but it radiates the open curiosity of Anna Gesa-Raija Lappe. She plays Annemarie, but also her mother when she was younger. She also embodies a principle of hope, and if she ever manages to travel across the Oder, she will perceive the country beyond, this Poland, which no longer wants to be Europe, very differently than her mother and grandpa ever could .