CRASSH

The Terezín Ghetto was, according to many of the inmates, a very surreal place. Both “anteroom to hell” and “cultural capital” (Karl Braun) of occupied Europe: Teachers and university professors, army officers, writers, playwrights, painters, even politicians, together with “normal people”, were all sent to the former military fortress of Theresienstadt, Terezín – and soon, they built up a creative community that held regular lectures, performed music, cabaret, plays, and opera. In Terezín, cultural life became a means of spiritual survival for the inmates. In the middle of hunger and death, illusions provided hope for those whose fate had already been decided upon at the Wannsee conference – imagining a way out of hell was an everyday activity Victor Ullmann's and Petr Kien's opera “Der Kaiser von Atlantis, oder: Der Tod dankt ab”, I will argue, provides unique insights into the cultural world of the Terezín ghetto, both on the harsh realities of camp life, and on the strategies of coping with pain. However, this opera, in which death abdicates to save humanity, can also be interpreted as performance against illusion. By putting a life without death on stage, a life that is nevertheless in constant pain and without hope for an end to suffering, Ullmann and Kien shocked their viewers and listeners into recognizing their own fate. In the Terezín ghetto, a place that was so much governed by illusion, by escape from reality by all means possible, this meant re-introducing reality, it meant opening the eyes to a bitter truth, to the idea that illusion will not end pain.