Country of all Children
based on the novel “Child of All Nations” by Irmgard Keun
The Berlin theater group andcompany&Co. is staging a “children’s play for adults” that appeals equally to adults and children – inspired by the novel “Kind aller Länder” (1938) by the German author Irmgard Keun, who had to flee from the Nazis and tells her escape from the child’s perspective of the 10-year-old novel character Kully. Kully’s stories are interwoven with current tales about experiences of flight, and from personal and temporal perspectives an immediate, humorous and above all timeless description of German exile is created, in which urgent questions about flight, emigration and the problem of human rights are dealt with in a child-friendly way: Who vouches for those for whom no one can vouch? What does it mean to be a child of all countries and therefore of no country? On stage, the youngest performers Rokia and Zümra expose concepts such as borders, turn them upside down and renegotiate them until the adults run out of breath, er, words – while the visa that is supposed to take everyone to a new country continues to expire until it is finally no longer valid. Is this already the “land of all children” or just a stopover?