Sunday 17.10.2021 6.00 p.m. - 11.59 p.m.
Concert performance for historians, flute, percussion, string quartet and electronics (world premiere)
/ Further events on 15.10.2021, 7:30 p.m. and on 16.10.2021, 7:30 p.m.
/ Admission: 18 €, reduced 12 € (no box office)
/ Tickets at eventbrite
/ Duration: approx. 90 minutes
/ Location: ZAK – Center for Contemporary Art, Hall A and B
Who was John Rabe? Human rescuer and hero on the one hand, member of the NSDAP, profiteer of colonial structures and defeated man on the other. The Japanese composer Mayako Kubo, who lives in Berlin, has long had the idea of illuminating the ambivalent personality of John Rabe artistically. For the modern art ensemble she has developed a sequence of scenes based on diary entries under the title “John Rabe – Endstation Siemensstadt”, which traces the person of John Rabe. The Historikerlabor e.V. creates the framework for the historical facts and sources about the contradicting living conditions of this Spandauer. A musical-documentary search for traces.
About John Rabe:
In 1908, John Rabe moved to China, which after the first opium war had to open some ports for the colonial value chain and enable free trade for foreign merchants. China became more and more a colony of Europeans. Since 1931, John Rabe has been managing director of the Siemens branch in Nanking, where he campaigned for the protection of the civil population there in the 1937 Japanese-Chinese war and, as chairman of an international committee, played a key role in saving thousands of Chinese from murder by the Japanese army was involved. At the same time he was a member of the NSDAP, was ordered back to Germany, interrogated by the Gestapo, forced to remain silent and lost his previous position at Siemens. In 1945 he experienced the end of World War II in his apartment in Siemensstadt.
