"Uwe Johnson. Jahrestage - aus dem Leben von Gesine Cresspahl"

A performance
With: Ninon Gloger (piano)
Text montage/direction: Wolfgang Stockmann

In April 1961, a few months before the Berlin Wall went up, Gesine Cresspahl - a single mother - emigrates from Mecklenburg to New York with her young daughter Marie. In the pivotal years of 1967/68, events come thick and fast: the US Air Force strikes Vietnam, Martin Luther King is shot, violent clashes erupt in Black neighbourhoods, and students rebel across the US and the wider Western world. This is the world of Uwe Johnson's novel - alongside the story of how Gesine, day after day for an entire year, tells her now ten-year-old daughter stories from their family's past: the Weimar Republic and the Nazis, the Soviet occupation zone and the early years of the GDR, all set in the fictional Mecklenburg town of Jerichow. Running through it all are the latest dispatches from the New York Times.

This performance does not aim for a quick summary but seeks a way into Johnson's narrative current: characters, episodes, conversations, memories, news items and everyday events from 1967/68, set against the Vietnam War, student protests and the build-up to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The FAZ wrote of the underlying audiobook edition that this is "not the comfortable consumption of a classic" but "an engagement with a difficult, monumental work"; Charly Hübner was called "an ideal choice" for the role.

Caren Miosga studied history and Slavic studies in Hamburg, worked in radio and television, and became widely known as the presenter of "Tagesthemen". She now hosts the ARD political talk show "Caren Miosga".

Charly Hübner was born in Neustrelitz and studied acting at the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst "Ernst Busch" in Berlin. He has performed on many stages - most recently at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg - and is well known from film and television.