The director Jessica Glause developed a play for the 1915 Women’s Peace Congress in The Hague. It is supposed to be an evening about female figures who once stood up for pacifism. A conversation about earlier protests and what they have to do with us today.
Interviewed by
Yvonne Poppek
The story is unbelievable and yet is never told: More than 1500 women came together in 1915 – in the middle of the war – in The Hague for a women’s peace congress and in the end passed a far-reaching resolution. The director Jessica Glause, born in 1980, conceived the theater evening “Anti War Women” on the basis of the congress reports, as a kind of successor to her production “Bayerische Suffragetten” – and as the opening of the “Female Peace Palace” festival. The premiere is on Friday, March 31, in the Kammerspiele. The production tells of how women from warring and neutral countries came together and of the courageous actions of the writer Franziska zu Reventlow and the gynecologist Hope Bridges Adams Lehmann. Reason enough to talk about the power of the early women’s movement and what it might be compared to today.