DIE PASSAGIERIN

The plot spans two time periods: The frame story is set on a transatlantic ocean liner around 1959 / 60; flashbacks lead to the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp in 1943 / 44. In the new Munich production, the action is expanded at the beginning to include a third time level set in the present day.

FIRST ACT
THE TRANSIT
Lisa is a passenger on a cruise ship. Together with her husband Walter, a German diplomat, she crosses the Atlantic. Both are happy to leave their homeland Germany and the past of the war years behind them. The emigration to South America should be the start of a time of new beginnings. Shortly after the journey begins, however, the marriage idyll ends: Lisa thinks she recognizes Marta, a former inmate of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp, in one of the passengers. Lisa was also in Auschwitz – as a member of the SS and a guard. Up to this point, Lisa has kept her crimes in the concentration camp a secret from Walter. The two get into an argument, but reconcile when a steward reassures them both that the mysterious woman Lisa thought she recognized as Marta is British, not Polish. Nevertheless, Lisa is increasingly overtaken by memories: memories of the head warden and the other SS men; of the inmates of the camp with their stories of suffering and their hopes; but most of all of Marta herself. The two share a complex history of dependence and humiliation. What happened between them catches up with Lisa. A confrontation with her past becomes unavoidable.

SECOND ACT
CLOSE TO DEATH
Lisa‘s experience oscillates between the events on board and her memories of the death camp: the Auschwitz camp commandant wants Tadeusz, a famous musician interned there, to play his favorite waltz for him. During the concert preparations, Tadeusz meets his fiancée Marta again for the first time. Lisa grants them a forbidden moment of togetherness and demands gratitude for her courtesies. She proposes to organize further rendezvous and thus wants to become a kind of protégée of Marta and Tadeusz, who are to become completely submissive to her. Tadeusz insists on his autonomy and self-determination – at the risk of not seeing Marta again. Meanwhile, the murder continues: the camp inmates confront the Auschwitz extermination machine with moments of mutual empathy, but are unable to escape death. The brutality and perfidiousness of the camp are brought to Lisa‘s full con-sciousness. The steward has to recant his information: the mysterious passenger is Polish after all. She could be Marta. An evening dance on board overlaps with the concert in the concentration camp: Tadeusz commits an act of resistance in front of the camp commandant. Instead of the requested waltz, he begins to play Johann Sebastian Bach‘s Chaconne. Tadeusz is murdered. Marta addresses the afterworld: "When your voices have disappeared one day, then we will all perish." Lisa is not granted redemption.

There is no statute of limitations on murder. Neither does guilt. Lisa, an SS guard at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Second World War, is confronted with the perpetrator role of her youth in old age. On a boat trip, she believes she recognises Marta in a passenger, a prisoner she perfidiously oppressed in the concentration camp. The past, which she has so meticulously tried to suppress over the years, forces its way back into her consciousness. The two-act opera by Mieczysław Weinberg was composed in 1968; Weinberg's parents and sister perished in the Trawniki concentration camp. The libretto was based on the story by Zofia Posmysz. She was a Polish resistance fighter, editor and author. She was interned in Auschwitz from 1942 to 1945 and was liberated in the Neustadt-Glewe concentration camp. Posmysz, who was involved in several memorial and educational organisations until the end, died in a hospice in Oświęcim in 2022, just two weeks before her 99th birthday. The new Munich production is the first production since her death. Die Passagierin revolves around the themes of memory and guilt from a contemporary perspective.

The Passenger with Tobias Kratzer, born in 1980 in Landshut, Bavaria, now stages his first opera at the National Theatre. The same team has accompanied him on all new productions he has directed in recent years: Rainer Sellmaier is responsible for stage and costume, Manuel Braun is responsible for video, in the new production also with Jonas Dahl. General Music Director Vladimir Jurowski conducts, Christopher Warmuth is the dramaturge, Michael Bauer does the lighting.