Performance | LottEmma: Theater version of the escape diary by Charlotte Teipel

February 1945 - an escape diary in the form of music, narrative, shadow and object theater at the Centre Culturel Français.

Henrietta Teipel describes the project:

In February 1945, at the end of the Second World War, Charlotte "Lotte" Teipel, my great-grand-aunt, had to flee from the advancing Russian army from Königsberg in Prussia together with her sister Hilde and her children Hannelore and Frank, who were 1.5 and 3.5 years old at the time. In this diary, which Lotte wrote with incredible accuracy of memory just one year after her ordeal, she describes all the atrocities of the long-lost end of the war that one can imagine: Hunger, wandering, looting, repeated rape, illness, near-death experiences...A five-month odyssey through the Neumark and Brandenburg, even though the family was only 120 km from Berlin....

During the corona pandemic, my aunt Hannelore set about transcribing the original of this diary, which was sleeping in her attic, from Sütterlin into High German. Today, this script is in my hands and its power and simplicity, its historical reality, the discrepancy between history and stories, i.e. between the general narrative about this war and the German people on the one hand and my personal family history on the other, lead me to turn it into a play in German and French, accessible to an audience aged 12 and over.

Today I want to tell this story, which could have happened (and did happen) in reverse. I want to show that it's not about where we come from, but about "which camp we belong to". It is our actions, not the labels, that define and tell history and stories. That confirm or break through the perpetrator-victim schema.
break through it. In fact, "Lotte" is interchangeable. Germany and Russia are interchangeable. For this reason, I wanted to tell the same story, the same scenario, against a different political background: Emma, a young French woman from northern France, has to flee from the German army in 1940. She experiences exactly the same atrocities as Lotte in Königsberg five years later. These two storylines, that of Lotte, the German, and that of Emma, the Frenchwoman, are schematized, evoke the same images and are interwoven. Emma and Lotte meet on a temporary, non-linear, vertical axis outside of historical possibilities and will form a community of destiny. They shake hands!

Henrietta Theresa Teipel is an actress and singer. She completed her training at the "École de l'acteur et des arts de la scène de la Compagnie Maritime" in Montpellier. Today she works bilingually in France and Germany, living near Strasbourg since 2019 and working regularly with the Franco-German theater group Theater Baden-Alsace, among others. She is a founding member of the Oberrheintruppe and has been involved in all of its creations as an actress or director since its early days.

Wednesday, November 20 | 7:30 p.m.
CCFF
Registration: kultur@ccf-fr.de
Language: F/D
Price: 9€ | €6
In cooperation with: Compagnie du Rhin Supérieur