NOVEMBER 1918 * 1989

Year & Context

1991 · Premiere 30 October

Co-production with the Bauhaus Dessau

About the Production

“The revolution is no disgrace. It was – especially after four years of hunger and bloodletting – a deed of glory. The disgrace is the betrayal that was perpetrated against it.”

— Sebastian Haffner

This sentence was not a history lesson for Theater der Klänge in 1991. It was a diagnosis. In 1989, we had all witnessed a revolution unfold – on streets we knew from maps, in a language that was our own, at a speed nobody had predicted. And what almost no one seemed to remember any longer: that Germany, seventy years earlier, in November 1918, after four years of war, hunger and social exhaustion, had experienced a revolution that failed – not because it was too weak, but because it was betrayed from within. The parallels were obvious. Naming them was the point.

“NOVEMBER 1918 * 1989” was created in 1991 through collective authorship: the ensemble itself developed the piece over months of rehearsals and evening sessions, drawing on historical sources, eyewitness accounts and direct encounters in Dessau. Form followed content – a revue-like collage of drama, allegory, farce, mask improvisation, mime and puppet theatre, placed against dance and Meyerholdian biomechanics. Live-electronic music, controlled by two percussionists, did not connect the scenes: it confronted them. Documentary film collages and slide projections inserted themselves as temporal layers into the play. All of this on a mobile, adaptable trestle stage with movable screens – a theatre apparatus that produced its own images.

The premiere took place on 30 October 1991 at the Theaterhaus Düsseldorf, as the first co-production of Theater der Klänge with the Bauhaus Dessau. A total of 19 performances in Düsseldorf and Dessau followed. What this piece signified reached beyond the production itself: the ensemble that formed for NOVEMBER was the first to work under professional conditions in the company’s own rehearsal studio in Düsseldorf-Pempelfort and, intermittently, in the Bauhaus stage in Dessau. Many members became long-term collaborators across subsequent productions. The working principles established then – in late-night conversations after rehearsals – continue to shape Theater der Klänge’s practice to this day.

Co-production with the Bauhaus Dessau. Funded by: City of Düsseldorf, Land NRW, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau