It starts in a barren office in Marseille.

The blinds are down.

The neon light is reflected in the linoleum floor.

Numbers are recited.

People wait on the benches, waiting for a visa and a ship passage overseas.

The war has put them on hold, with no prospects.

It is a theater scene based on a European story of fate.

Kevin Hanschke

Volunteer.

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Anna Segher's novel “Transit”, published in 1942, is one of the most important works of exile literature and has been processed several times in theaters.

Together with this year's Kunstfest Weimar, the Thalia Theater Hamburg has dared to adapt the story of the escape, which takes place at the height of the Second World War.

The Iranian director Amir Reza Koohestani, whose play premiered in Weimar, has developed an intimate chamber play from the material, which shows the madness of escape.

Marie, portrayed by Toini Ruhnke, is looking for her husband, the writer Weidel, in Marseille, who has fled to France because of the persecution by the National Socialists.

A lover who forgets morals

A doctor, played by Oliver Mallison, who wants to emigrate to Mexico and has started an affair with Marie, is waiting for a ship to Oaxaca. And a young German, portrayed by Nils Kahnwald, without a passport or identity, is on the lookout. What he's looking for, he doesn't know himself. In his hand he is holding a suitcase filled with documents from Weidel, about whose fate only he knows. Their life stories meet in the waiting room. Koohestani lets the actors sit stoically, trench coats cover up their insecurities.

Their poker faces are only slowly loosening and unleashing the stories that lead them to this transit point. At first they speak in monologues, which increases the oppressive atmosphere to the unbearable - "At the moment everyone is fleeing in all directions, but they all have to come here," says the young man without a name - it is this sentence that leads to a flirtation with Marie. He falls in love with her and still has to lie to her because he won't reveal what happened to Weidel. From a daredevil he develops into a lover who forgets morals. “If nobody knows you, you can be anyone” - he shouts in the waiting room. From there on, a triangular story unfolds, which ends again and again in the embassy waiting room, also because all the protagonists are traumatized by their experiences of fleeing - “Marie loves to float in the air.Marseille is the city for its history, ”says the doctor with a blank expression.

There doesn't seem to be a way out for anyone

The stage design consists of speaking booths that are framed by LED walls. The director satirizes the Kafkaesque visa bureaucracy, which knows no individual fates, but only case numbers. In doing so, he also creates a future dystopia - the interviews about obtaining the visa take place at the machine. And if there is a mistake, Artificial Intelligence has no mercy: “Your application will be suspended. Your visa has been declared invalid ”, it sounds from the loudspeakers. And although Koohestani is also grappling with the current refugee crisis, the connections he makes are subtle. For example, when Marie is questioned about her relationship with Weidel - an interrogation develops, a marriage of convenience is the accusation in order to obtain a visa. Marie is crying. But her life in the waiting room doesn't stop there.

Other contributions to the Weimar Art Festival, which this year was subtitled “Bundesgeistesschau”, are also dedicated to the subjects of exile and home. The directors Nuran David Çalış and Tunçay Kulaolu recreate the court case against Beate Zschäpe in seventeen episodes in “438 days of the NSU trial”. Among other things, Thuringian state politicians like Benjamin-Immanuel Hoff or Antje Tillmann read the witness minutes in this impressive lecture performance and show the perversion of a misguided concept of home. In contrast to this is the project "Thuringia - the whole truth" of the ACC Gallery Weimar, in which twelve groups of artists in twelve Thuringian communities have artistically processed regional rumors and fake news. There, too, the consequences of false claims are shown.All of these program items underline what terror and violence make of people - this is particularly sobering in “Transit”. For none of the three refugees there seems to be a way out, as the nameless person states - “I'm tired of running, always waiting. The escape is just changing from one lifeboat to the next, in a bottomless sea ”.