How Benno Besson liberated the theater in East Berlin

The glittering era of the Zurich Schauspielhaus during the Second World War has an after-story. It leads to East Berlin, where the theater people left Zurich with Bertolt Brecht after the end of the war. Among them was the young Benno Besson from western Switzerland, who turned out to be Brecht's most talented student. His directorial work delighted East Berlin audiences, but irritated politicians.

The exhibition sheds light on Besson's role as a liberator for the GDR theater. Wherever he worked, a lively theater flourished with exciting authors such as Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Müller, Peter Hacks, Wolf Biermann and Christoph Hein. The exhibition tells of them as well as of Max Frisch and Emine Sevgi Özdamar.

The exhibition begins in the vineyards of Vaud with open-air theater and horse-drawn carriages. It then leads to East Berlin with film footage from Besson's time with Brecht. In the form of a thriller, she investigates the mystery of why Besson's production of "The Dragon" was not banned in the GDR despite blatant criticism of the dictatorship. Using Stasi files, she shows how Besson created a protective workshop for controversial artists at the East Berlin Volksbühne.

Curated by Christian Mächler in cooperation with Verein Schweizerisches Theatermuseum and Schauspielhaus Zürich


Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.