Leopoldstadt by Traditional, Tue 01 Oct 2024, From (2024/2024), Directed by Johanna Schall, Theater Münster, Münster, Germany

Vienna 1899: The Jewish Merz family, which has long included Christian members, is celebrating Christmas in their upper-class apartment on the Ringstrasse. A new century is about to begin and they are looking forward to it with great hope. Jews are still discriminated against - but the Merzens have come a long way, socialize with Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud and Arthur Schnitzler, and almost everyone finds Theodor Herzl's idea of ​​a Jewish state quite absurd. Over 50 years later - after two world wars, a global economic crisis and the Holocaust - the last Merz descendants meet again in the same apartment and bear witness to the cruel consequences of fascist ideology and rule. Tom Stoppard is one of the most important voices in contemporary British drama. In Leopoldstadt, he deals with his own Jewish origins, which he himself was unaware of for a long time, and translates his own autobiography into motifs in a large-scale stage work that presents the history of the Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries in a multifaceted and tragicomic way. After successful productions at the National Theatre in London, on Broadway and at the Vienna Theater in der Josefstadt, the director Johanna Schall is now staging the German premiere of the play at the Theater Münster. Never again is now!