A play by Jaroslav Rudiš | Commissioned work for the Gerhart-Hauptmann-Theater Görlitz-Zittau | World Premiere
Advance ticket sales start: 09 June 2026
The forest tells stories. The beech forest in the Jizera Mountains tells very special ones. They are stories of accidents and misfortunes, of hikers and hunters, poachers, assassins and foresters, of high-spirited drinkers, of railway and forest workers, and of the beautiful suicide Marie. There are many of them.
They tell of forgetting and remembering, they recall people who could be rescued from mortal danger, but above all, they remember those who remained in the forest, the lost ones, the dead. In the mountains on the former German-Bohemian, today Polish-Czech border between Liberec and Jelenia Góra, one can find their traces. Amidst the majestically towering beeches stand – sometimes on moss-green rocks, sometimes by the roadside, at times well hidden in the thicket of the forest – some 500 modest iron crosses, about half a meter high: so-called 'Marteln'. One cross is dedicated to the forester Johann Bäumel, who was presumably killed south of Hejnice, the pilgrimage site of Haindorf, on 22 November 1842 by an accidentally fired shot from his assistant.
Jaroslav Rudiš, the literary border-crosser between Bohemia and Saxony, indeed between the Czech Republic and Germany, has set off into the forest on behalf of the Gerhart-Hauptmann-Theater. He has written a play. About the mountains at the three-country border and about the boundaries of life and death, a piece full of poetry and wonderfully quirky humor. Rudiš lets the forest and the dead speak.
This is a continuous multi-day event
