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Die Kulturtechniker's new form of music
and word performances feature both voice and violincello which are amplified
and electronically modified. Samples and pre-recorded environmental
sounds are added to the live performance. The sound of compositions
and improvisations range from chamber music to new jazz. The text
fragments are located in Cologne, the hometown of Heinrich Boll. They
start with the melancholy of the post-war ruins, move to humorous and
satirical scenes of the 1950s and 1960s and end up with pars of Heinrich
Boll's late poetry. The focus is always on the timeless beauty of
his writing. The show includes moments of a music theatre play as
well as a concert. Projections of black and white photographs by
Chargesheimer (a friend of Heinrich Boll and one of the best photographers
of his period) produce and atmostphere true to the feeling of the texts.
The German Actor, Martin M. Hahnemann is from Berlin and the German
Musician, Ralf Werner, is from Cologne.
Novelist Heinrich Boll chronicled his
life in post-war western Germany and received the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1972. According to his Nobel Prize citation, his novels and short
stories "contributed to a renewal of German literature" from
the ashes of the second World War. Mr. Boll was the first German
citizen to win the Nobel Prize for Literature since Thomas Mann in 1929.
In 1974, when Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet
Union, is first refuge was at the farmhouse of Mr. Boll.
Born in Cologne, December 21, 1917, it
has been reported that Mr. Boll was one of the few boys in his Cologne
secondary school who did not join the Hitler Youth. Mr. Boll was
assigned a front-lie infantry unit at the outbreak of World War II, served
on the eastern and western fronts, and was repeatedly wounded. Taken
prisoner in April 1945 by the American army, Mr. Boll was released and
later matriculated at the University of Cologne where he began his writing
career. He wrote and published such novels as The Train Was on Time
(1949); Traveller, If you Come to Spa (1950); Adam, Where
Art Thou (1951); Billiards at Half-Past Nine (1959); The
Clown (1963); Safety Net (1979); and Whats to Become of
the Boy: or : Something to do With Books ( 1981). Mr.
Boll died at the age of 67 in 1985.
The Heinrich Boll Foundation, associated
with the German Green Party, is a legally autonomous and intellectually
open political foundation with local orginazations in each of the German
Lander (states) and with representative offices abroad, including Washington
DC. Its task is political education in Germany and abroad with the aim
of "promoting informed democratic opinion, socio-political commitment,
and mutual understanding." The Heinrich Boll Foundation supports
artistic, cultural and scholarly projects. The political values
of ecology, democracy, gender democracy, solidarity, and non-violence
are its chief points of reference. Heinrich Boll's belief in and
promotion of citizen participation in politics is the model of the foundations
work.
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