It Was Murder! True Crimes from Modern History

Four people. Four fates. Four crimes that shaped history.

With "It Was Murder!" we combine true crime, classical music and political contemporary history into an extraordinary concert evening. What fascinates millions in podcast or streaming formats, we bring to the stage in concentrated form: gripping, reflective and musically dense.

At the heart of our evening are four real cases from the 20th and 21st centuries:

Matthias Erzberger - Imperial Finance Minister, peace negotiator and victim of a far-right assassination in 1921. His murder marked a turning point for the young Weimar Republic.

Hans Litten - the brilliant lawyer who brought Adolf Hitler before the court as a witness in 1931. After the Nazi takeover, he was arrested, transported through several concentration camps and systematically tortured. In captivity, it was above all the music of Johann Sebastian Bach that gave him support and inner dignity - a spiritual resistance against dehumanisation that accompanied him to the end.

Petra Kelly - co-founder of the Greens and symbolic figure of the peace movement of the 1980s. Her death in 1992 raises questions to this day and stands for the tensions and ruptures of an era.

Anna Politkovskaya - investigative journalist who fearlessly reported on the Chechen wars and publicly exposed systematic human rights violations. She was murdered in Moscow in 2006. Her death fell on October 7, Vladimir Putin's birthday - a circumstance that raises questions to this day.

These four crimes represent political violence, ideological radicalisation and the high price of civic courage. Together with Roman Knižka, we guide you through these stories, reconstruct the historical background and make the human dimensions of these events tangible.

Music here is not a side note, but a dramaturgical partner.