"We Are the Expelled, the Banished" - Bertolt Brecht in Exile - and Before

Poems, texts, songs

"I have always found the name they gave us wrong: emigrants. That means people who emigrate. But we / Did not emigrate of our own free will / Choosing another country. We did not enter / A country to stay there, perhaps forever. / But we fled. We are the expelled, the banished."
(Svendborger Gedichte)

Driven from Germany by the Nazis in 1933, Brecht's work thereafter revolved around the "duration of exile", remaining a stranger in a foreign land, writing against Hitler and defending poetry under oppression - fifteen years in which he "changed countries more often than his shoes" and was driven around the globe. Yet had exile not already begun earlier? Many texts before the flight shape the experience of being foreign in one's own country, exile before exile.

Corinna Harfouch and Die Tentakel von Delphi - Paula Sell, Hannes Gwisdek, Boris Nielsen, Moritz Bossmann and Johannes Döpping - interpret exile poems and texts from the 1920s, including "Aus dem Lesebuch für Städtebewohner".

Corinna Harfouch has performed at the Berliner Ensemble and worked with directors such as Heiner Müller, Frank Castorf, Jürgen Gosch and Herbert Fritsch. She has received numerous awards, including the Gertrud-Eysoldt-Ring, the Grimme Prize and twice the German Film Prize. She has recently also been performing at Thalia Theater.