Project Overview
Abteilung Verkehr – Konspiration zwischen Ost und West (Department Traffic – Conspiracy between East and West) is a site-specific game theater production that takes place in a former SED department at the exact location where it once existed – the grounds of the Fahrbereitschaft in Berlin-Lichtenberg. The production explores the bureaucratic, sometimes Kafkaesque apparatus of Cold War espionage and the financial flows of SED West companies.
Media
Concept & Approach
The production sends audiences on a time journey through the history of this former SED department using an app, a site plan, and other tools. As players, they are integrated into a bureaucratic apparatus based on the transmitted history of the department. They experience a kind of espionage or economic thriller, discovering the means by which propaganda between East and West was used to find out what path the money earned by SED West companies took.
Participants take part in meetings of functionaries of the illegal KPD after 1956 and the sector leaders of the department, whose goal was to optimize the bumpy process of smuggling people, propaganda material, and above all money from East to West, and to distinguish themselves as "secret bearers."
The interdisciplinary and participatory production allows players to travel through time from 1956 onwards and experience the changes after 1968 through the founding of the DKP. They gain insight into the work of a department whose purpose was first the financial and propagandistic support of the illegal KPD, and which finally had to hand over financial control to the Commercial Coordination area, which gave the GDR a "capitalist heart."
Project Details
- Year: 2023-2024
- Venue: Performing Arts Festival Berlin
- Location: Fahrbereitschaft, Herzbergstraße 40-43, Berlin-Lichtenberg
- Genre: Site-Specific Game Theater / Historical Documentary Theater
- Format: Interactive app-based experience
- Performances: March 2023, June 2024
- Age Recommendation: Adult audiences
- Duration: Full evening experience
Credits
Creative Team:
- Regie / Game Design: Rolf Kasteleiner
- Programmierung: Markus Schubert
- Game Design Beratung: Philipp Bunkus
- Ausstattung: Annabel von Berlichingen
- Dramaturgie: Luise Curtius
- Regieassistenz: Elisa Ender
- Inspizienz / Soufflage: Mariia Chechel
Production:
- Theatre: BORGtheater Berlin
- Festival: Performing Arts Festival Berlin
- Location: Fahrbereitschaft, Herzbergstraße 40-43, Berlin-Lichtenberg
- Schirmherr: Dr. Stefan Donth, Gedenkstätte Berlin Hohenschönhausen
- Produktionsleitung: Leonard Beck
- Fotocredit: André Leischner
- Years: 2023-2024