Treuhandkriegspanorama

A small family in the Eichsfeld region of Thuringia: The father was a miner in the potash mine in Bischofferode and lost his job after it closed; the mother, a trained educator, had to work at the hardware store checkout after the fall of the Wall. The son, too young to grasp the events of the early 1990s, returns to his old home because his father is in a coma with a pulmonary embolism. For him, this is the occasion to embark on a search for clues into the past, deep into the mountain of his own family memories. He wants to find out how his parents experienced this time of upheaval and why they cannot come to terms with it. He encounters the miners' labor struggle, disappointed hopes and contemporaries who, like ghosts between the past and the future, cannot find peace: For example, Helmut Kohl, Gerhard Schürer and Klaus Schucht, the Treuhand director for mining, outline the historical environment of reunification and economic restructuring after 1990. In addition, Treuhand employees themselves have their say, reporting on their work and telling of their perceptions of this period.

Using documentary sources and central motifs from Werner Tübke's 1722-square-meter panorama painting »Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany« playwright Thomas Freyer developed this commissioned work for the DNT. He combines a fictional narrative thread with documentary sources to create an ambivalent, perhaps contradictory picture of the Treuhand and the effects of its activities in northern Thuringia. A picture in which contrary opinions and experiences have a place. Director Jan Gehler - who, like the author, grew up in Thuringia - hereby presents his first work in Weimar.

Cooperation with the State Archive of Thuringia and the Institute of Contemporary History Munich-Berlin, sponsored by the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Thuringia and GLS Treuhand e.V.
The author is a scholarship holder of the Stiftung Preußische Seehandlung Berlin.

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We would like to thank VG Bild-Kunst for providing us with the monumental painting "Frühbürgerliche Revolution in Deutschland" (excerpts, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021, painter: Werner Tübke, photographer: Prof. Dieter Leistner)