Stella - the blonde ghost from Kurfürstendamm

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Musical dates
Title: Stella - the blonde ghost from Kurfürstendamm
Original language: German
Music: Wolfgang Böhmer
Book: Peter Lund
Lyrics: Peter Lund
Premiere: June 23, 2016
Place of premiere: Neukölln Opera , Berlin
Place and time of the action: Berlin , during and after the Second World War
Roles / people
  • Stella Goldschlag ; a Jewish Gestapo agent
  • Rolf Isaaksohn ; an equally unscrupulous Nazi collaborator
  • Walter Dobberke ; a Gestapo officer
  • Samson Schönhaus ; a Jew immortally in love with Stella
  • Friedheim Schellenberg ; Stella Goldschlag's third husband
  • Stella's father ; a man who loves Schubert

Stella - The blonde ghost from Kurfürstendamm is a musical by Wolfgang Böhmer (music) and Peter Lund (text), which the author himself describes as a German Singspiel . The piece premiered on June 23, 2016 at the Neukölln Opera in Berlin , with Frederike Haas playing Gestapo agent Stella Goldschlag in the title role . Many scenes in the play are based on facts and the real life of the Jewish woman born in 1922, other scenes are exaggerated. The production was nominated a total of nine times for the German Musical Theater Prize 2016 and was awarded in six categories.

content

Stella Kübler living in the time of World War II in Berlin , and their credo is survival; that is all that matters to her, because Stella is not only young, beautiful, blonde and adored, but also a Jew . However, she cannot do anything with this religious identity and cannot identify with the Orthodox hat-wearers who wrap their sidelocks around their fingers. The 20-year-old loves jazz and would love to emigrate to America and become a big star there, like Marlene Dietrich . Unfortunately, however, the family did not get an exit visa after Hitler ordered that Berlin be finally made free of Jews . Nothing seems to come of her great career, instead Stella receives a yellow star .

She was arrested in the spring of 1943, and in order to protect her parents from deportation, Stella agreed to SS-Hauptscharführer Walter Dobberke to collaborate with the National Socialists . Her job is to scour Berlin for Jews who have gone into hiding, because Stella has knowledge of the lifestyles, whereabouts and meeting places of other Jews. She pretends to be a helper and is informed of the whereabouts of other people in hiding from those exposed. She betrays a large number of Jews to the Gestapo . She does not reveal her childhood friend Samson Schönhaus, who works underground and gets forged papers for Jews who want to go into hiding, but usually delivers people who are less close to her to the knife.

In the play, Stella's thoughts jump back and forth between the post-war trials when she was 35 and the Nazi era , and she is flanked by a male quintet made up of lovers, her father and the Gestapo commander . Her father, who loves Schubert , cannot kill another person and also firmly believes that no person who values ​​this composer could do something like that. Little does he know that fear makes people do inhuman things and that his own daughter will also make cruel decisions. Stella is naive, but at the same time unscrupulous, and she finds a similarly naive and unscrupulous partner in Rolf Isaaksson, her second husband. Stella later marries the ex-Nazi Friedheim Schellenberg, converts to Christianity and remains silent about her previous crimes. None of this can distract the German public from being outraged by Stella, whom she describes as a traitorous full Jew . Still, nobody really knows what really happened in Berlin back then. At the end it becomes clear that Stella has never given up the dreams of her early youth when she sings: "I am your eternal Jew, your only German star."

characters

The five men who are placed alongside the title character in their individual stages of life are all based on real people who played a role in Goldschlag's life. Such was Samson Schönhaus a graphic artist who was sought during the Second World War by the Gestapo because of his Jewish origin and was able to escape including through passport forgery. Schönhaus died only a few months before the play premiered. Walter Dobberke was SS-Hauptscharführer and Gestapo officer and was therefore responsible for the arrest of many Jews, but he still collaborated with selected Jews and on April 22, 1945 resisted the order of the Head of the Department for Jews, Erich Möller, to shoot all Jews who remained in the assembly camps .

Stella Goldschlag : a Jewish Gestapo agent

Rolf Isaaksohn: an equally unscrupulous Nazi collaborator and Stella's future husband

Walter Dobberke: an SS-Hauptscharführer and Gestapo officer for whom Stella tracks down Jews in hiding

Samson Schönhaus : a Jew immortal in love with Stella who deals in forged papers underground

Friedheim Schellenberg: Stella Goldschlag's third husband

Stella's father : a man who loves Schubert

Background and title

The Jewish life in Berlin looks back on a long history. Since 1671 there has been a permanent Jewish population in Berlin, which grew in the 19th and early 20th centuries to 173,000 people in 1925. The Jewish population played an important and formative role in Berlin during this period. During the National Socialist era, 55,000 Jews were victims of the Shoah. During the National Socialist era, Kantstrasse 158 was the seat of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany . With the expulsion and murder of the Jews, who had shaped the appearance and charisma of the Kurfürstendamm , the city also changed. There were exclamations in Berlin like Expel the Jews from Kurfürstendamm! and out with the last Jews from Germany! , and many years before the November pogroms in 1938 there was the Kurfürstendamm riot of 1931 , in which passers-by who looked Jewish were assaulted, as was the Kurfürstendamm riot of 1935 shortly before the Nuremberg Laws were passed .

In March 1943, around 5,000 Jews were hiding in Berlin from being deported. The Gestapo recruited Jewish investigators to track down these “illegals”. Stella Goldschlag , who was later called Stella Kübler, was one of the most effective "grabbers", as the "Jewish investigation service" was called by the people in hiding. The blonde, blue-eyed beauty, daughter of two musicians, who only found out about her Jewish origins with the Nuremberg Race Laws, aspired to a career as a singer, but had to study fashion drawing before she was forced to work. However, she fled, was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, but escaped from prison again in an air raid. After that, however, Goldschlag surrendered to the assembly camp where her parents were also, and in order to save her parents' life and her own, she undertook to track down Jews in Berlin who were then taken to the concentration camps. She received a pistol from the Gestapo and even arrested some of the exposed Jews herself. The number of those she betrayed is said to be in the hundreds or even thousands, others assume up to 300 Jews in hiding, and so she became the Gestapo's most feared grabbers. It was nicknamed the "blonde ghost of Kurfürstendamm". Goldschlag fled to Liebenwalde during the Battle of Berlin and had a daughter, but she was betrayed when the Soviet secret police equated them with the Gestapo and initially handed them over to the Jewish community. Here she tried to submit a status as a victim and to receive an ID card as a "victim of fascism", but was recognized by survivors, shaved her head, whereby the Jewish woman, also referred to as the "blonde poison" by her community, lost her trademark, the golden locks , and handed over to the Soviets.

After the Second World War, Goldschlag was brought to court as a “traitor to the people”. The trial witness Paul Regensburger reported how Goldschlag tracked down Jews through a ruse, particularly on Kurfürstendamm, by identifying herself as Jewish and thus gaining the trust of those in hiding. Preferably she should have betrayed them to Walter Dobberke. The former Buchenwald prisoner Robert Zeiler, who testified as one of the first witnesses for the prosecution against Goldschlag, knew them from childhood. During the trial he described what he had seen in June 1943 on the corner of Kurfürstendamm and Leibnizstrasse. Goldschlag and her friend Rolf Isaaksohn were helping the Gestapo to load some Jews they had tracked down in nearby cafes onto a truck. Even though Goldschlag stubbornly denied her actions in court, she was sentenced to ten years of forced labor.

Stella Goldschlag did not want to wear a Jewish star. Today your place of work is paved with stumbling blocks Stella Goldschlag did not want to wear a Jewish star. Today your place of work is paved with stumbling blocks
A Jewish star wanted Stella Kübler not wear.
Today your place of work is paved with stumbling blocks

Goldschlag later converted to Christianity, married a Nazi for the third time in 1958 and became an avowed anti-Semite. In 1994, Goldschlag committed suicide at the age of 72. Peter Wyden , who only found out about Stella Goldschlag's betrayal after the war, later wrote a book as part of his Holocaust research with the title Stella - a Jew on the hunt for Jews for the Gestapo in the Berlin Underground (III) , in which he used his as an example former classmate Stella Goldschlag showed how Jewish Nazi victims in Berlin became accomplices. In Berlin-Charlottenburg alone , 1337 stumbling blocks remind of the fate of the people who were murdered, deported, expelled or driven to suicide under National Socialism, many of them on Kurfürstendamm, one of the main places of activity of Goldschlag.

Wolfgang Böhmer and Peter Lund have knitted a Singspiel from this apparently unsuitable musical material . Ingrid Wanja remarks on this that it is hard to believe that the fate of the Jewish German or German Jewess Stella has never before attracted the interest of novelists or theater writers, film directors or composers, and this, apart from a few artistic adaptations, with Stella - The blond ghost from Kurfürstendamm happened for the first time. For Anja Röhl from Junge Welt , Lund and Böhmer took the risk by uncovering the background, especially in this case, where the perpetrator belongs to the main group of victims, to arouse pity for gold strike, but this is prevented again and again shortly before it occurs imposes. The piece is based on good research, according to Röhl, which shows how a person becomes what he becomes.

List of songs (selection)

  • be right
  • The process
  • star
  • Eichmann's statement
  • Dance to me
  • The song of the unwanted inheritance
  • Where
  • Honey where have you been so long
  • The moritat from the moving van
  • The letter of complaint
  • In passing

First season in Berlin (June 23 to August 7, 2016)

Performance information

The play celebrated in the Neukölln Opera in Berlin its premiere

The piece celebrated its premiere on June 23, 2016 at the Neukölln Opera in Berlin . Berlin is also the location of the play and the birthplace of Stelle Goldschlag.

Staging

Martin G. Berger directed the film. According to Julia Weber from MusikulturBerlin , the staging is multi-layered and closely meshed, and the director repeatedly blurs the boundaries between the time of the trial and the flashbacks of Stella's actions in the war.

Cast and ensemble

Jörn-Felix Alt plays Isaaksohn in the play Rolf Israel
Samuel Schürmann plays Samson Schönhaus

occupation

ensemble

reception

Reviews

Gunda Bartels from Tagesspiegel says about the leading actress of the first season: “Great as well as differentiated and with a powerful use of voice and body, Frederike Haas plays Stella who is sometimes driven by self-interest and fear and love. She embodies the ruthless aura that enables people to be extraordinary, for better or for worse. "

Awards

German Musical Theater Prize 2016

German Musical Theater Prize 2018

  • Nomination for Best Revival

literature

  • Peter Wyden : Stella . Simon & Schuster, New York 1992, ISBN 0-671-67361-0 .
  • Peter Wyden: Stella , Steidl Verlag, Göttingen 1993, ISBN 3-88243-241-1 (translation from English by Ilse Strasmann).
  • Martin Ros: Jackals of the Third Reich. Downfall of the collaborators 1944–1945 . Neske, Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 3-7885-0516-8 .
  • Doris Tausenfreund: Forced betrayal. Jewish grippers in the service of the Gestapo 1943-1945 , Metropol, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-938690-27-5 , pp. 142–151.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stella - the blonde poison from the Kürfürstendamm In: peterlund.de. Retrieved October 16, 2016.
  2. ↑ Julika Bickel: Das Sterntaler-Mädchen der Gestapo In: taz.de, June 28, 2016.
  3. ^ Frederik Hanssen: Musicals in Germany. Promote and Celebrate In: Der Tagesspiegel, September 29, 2016.
  4. ↑ German Musical Theater Prize 2016 awarded In: deutschemusicalakademie.de, October 10, 2016.
  5. ^ German Musical Theater Prize 2016: The winners In: musical1.de, October 11, 2016.
  6. ↑ Peter Schneider: 'Konrad' or 'The love of music'. How a Jewish musician survived the Nazi years in Berlin. In: Der Spiegel, October 16, 2000.
  7. ↑ Hermann-Josel Fohsel: Stella - The blonde ghost from Kurfürstendamm In: zitty.de, July 7, 2016.
  8. ↑ a b c Ingrid Wanja: Stella In: Der Opernfreund , June 27, 2016.
  9. ↑ 'Stella' at the Neuköllner Oper Berlin. The blonde evil In: Der Tagesspiegel, June 24, 2016.
  10. ↑ Peter Wyden: A Taboo of Holocaust Research In: Der Spiegel, November 2, 1992.
  11. ↑ Peter Wyden: A Taboo of Holocaust Research In: Der Spiegel, November 2, 1992.
  12. ↑ 'Stella' at the Neuköllner Oper Berlin. The blonde evil In: Der Tagesspiegel, June 24, 2016.
  13. ↑ 'Stella' at the Neuköllner Oper Berlin. The blonde evil In: Der Tagesspiegel, June 24, 2016.
  14. ↑ Peter Wyden: A Taboo of Holocaust Research In: Der Spiegel, November 2, 1992.
  15. ↑ 'Stella' at the Neuköllner Oper Berlin. The blonde evil In: Der Tagesspiegel, June 24, 2016.
  16. ↑ Anja Röhl: In den Spiegeln In: jungewelt.de, edition of July 27, 2016.
  17. ↑ Julia Weber: Touching: 'Stella - The blonde ghost from Kurfürstendamm' in the Neukölln Opera ( memento of the original from August 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / musikulturberlin.com archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: musikulturberlin.com, July 1, 2016.
  18. ↑ 'Stella' at the Neuköllner Oper Berlin. The blonde evil In: Der Tagesspiegel, June 24, 2016.