WEISSE ROSE

Udo Zimmermann

Cast

Announcements

Hartmut Bohmhoff – Jüdische Zeitung

“This September scenes for two singers and 15 musicians will be performed in the Görlitz Theatre within the “Kunstverfolgen” festival (following the art)” […] “According to Udo Zimmermann his chamber opera is a play against indifference. Our production follows exactly this intention” –the Görlitz director Sebastian Ritschel says. “Especially in times of a severe shift to the right we have to recognize that indifference and disenchantment with democracy are a hazard to everybody.” As a reminder – In Saxony the NPD holds seats in the state parliament and in county councils. Ritschels production shows the people behind the Scholl myth. The message is that each individual is able to understand, adopt a definite position and to reconsider how he or she acts. This is also clearly reflected by the biographies of the Scholl siblings with all their discrepancies. Convinced supporters of the system with anti-Jewish resentments and an elitist self-conception became active resisters who finally sacrificed their lives for their conviction.”

Reviews

Boris Michael Gruhl – DNN

“Behind the Iron Curtain in the Görlitz Theatre, on the stage designed by Tamara Oswatitsch, mighty concrete letters bulkily shape the word freedom into the death row. Between these solid parts of a superhuman idea that became reality you can see two people. Sophie and Hans Scholl – Antje Kahn and Christian Miedl- seem to be lost in this labyrinth of disfavour but they also oppose tender, even affectionate emotions of hope against the rough implacability of the scene by using their voices and movements. [...]  Basically the director Sebastian Ritschel was able to find concentrated and appropriate images for Udo Zimmermanns music theatre about visions of the moments before dying. Ritschels optical approach and the musical composition of the chamber music score in the design aiming at clarity and conciseness created by the Görlitz instrumentalists under the baton of Jan Altmann complement each other extremely well. [...] A strong evening for the weak. At the end Sophie and Hans Scholl are singing “Give light to my eyes...” the door in the Iron Curtain opens. Soft light shines into the room, for a brief moment – motionlessness. Silence. Is the concrete crumbling? Deceptive beauty. In the door the guillotine crashes down.”

Ines Eifler - Sächsische Zeitung

“White roses and applause for the drama about two siblings who did not remain silent. Thousands of leaflets fall down from the sky. Brother and sister are holding their hands. Their death row is bathed in red light. The door - from which a dazzling white light schone -  slams shut. The scaffold has done its duty, the darkness talks about the death of the two who no longer only wanted to watch the cruelty of the Nazis. Only in the last minutes of “Weiße Rose” the thin yellowed pages fall down - the pages on which Hans and Sophie Scholl wrote with a typewriter their call for resistance against the National Socialist Regime and for which they were executed on 22 February 1943. […] Don’t remain silent! Don’t claim it is for your fatherland! No longer hide your hatred for those who do not stop killing! All of you will become guilty!” When finally the light is switched on and the leaflets cover the floor the audience claps. Flowers are thrown onto the stage by some of the spectators in the completely sold out Görlitz Theatre. Those flowers are white roses.”