Fremd

Michel Friedman was born in Paris in 1956. As a stateless person. As the son of Holocaust survivors who came from Poland and, also stateless, sought refuge in France, later in Germany, the country of the murderers. They sought refuge from a world in which people had decided that they were not human beings, that they should no longer exist – they could be saved. But shortly after the war, no one wanted to know about it, no one wanted them: the memory, the guilt; no one wants them: the survivors, the "strangers." In 2023, it is still, once again, a world of war and hatred. Even after almost 80 years of "never again," parties in Germany, Europe, and around the world continue to use politics to deny people the right to be not just strangers, but human beings. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, one could say that those who are attacked as strangers can only respond as strangers. Those who are made strangers from the outside remain so on the inside; they live in fear and remain silent. Remaining silent is not Michel Friedman's way, and so he has written a very personal book entitled "Fremd" (Stranger): about growing up as a stranger, as a migrant, as a Jew, as a child who was supposed to remain a nobody and yet struggled to be somebody. The book is an account of the will to live, the need to survive, which goes far beyond a single destiny. The multi-award-winning actress Sibel Kekilli reads this moving text in a staged reading by director Max Lindemann, making her theater debut. By Johannes Nölting