Transfer! was staged at the Współczesny Theatre in Wrocław, a city which, pursuant to international treaties, experienced a total replacement of the population. The performance documents the post-war fate of uprooted Germans and Poles. The script is based on the accounts of living witnesses and participants in the tragic events who Jan Klata invited to participate in the project. The director created a story about people who were exposed to the cogs of history and were merely pawns on the great political map.
Transfer! is an attempt to deal with the memories of both Poles and Germans. These two perspectives are complemented by historical references to Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. Klata attempts to talk about this painful history from today's perspective, and seeks to investigate and describe the contemporary awareness of Poles and Germans. The performance is one of the outcomes of the Büro Kopernikus Polish-German cultural projects. Büro Kopernikus operates within the framework of the Kulyurstiftung des Bundes (Federal Cultural Foundation). The German premiere of Transfer! was held in January 2007.
I do not believe in the guilt of my parents
"I do not believe in the guilt of my parents", says one of the women, and together with her compatriots, she focuses on rapes committed by Soviet soldiers. You have to understand a daughter’s pain: she witnessed the assault suffered by her mother.
While working on the show, I noticed how we – Polish participants and our German counterparts – are estranged. We are detached not just because of the language barrier. Generally, we do not know each other. We hardly know anything about one another. That is what happens among the nations; their leaders meet, talk, and the people as a nation live their own lives. Maybe this performance will result in a better mutual understanding. This lesson of history may be really important – said Jan Klata in interview for Rzeczpospolita.
Jan Charewicz, who took part in the performance and was resettled from Vilnius, said:
There are many war memoirs, but no one wants to read them. So far, too few people cared about my story. My granddaughters turned a deaf ear to it, because they have other things to do – clubs, computers, the Internet. Thanks to the Transfer! play by Jan Klata, I could finally speak out and be sure that I was heard, and even bear witness to history. When the war broke out, I was young, idealistic, and perhaps a little naive. Like many of my generation I went to the underground. And when our commander was caught, I had to flee with my army until we reached Wał Pomorski (the Pomeranian Wall). Please do not ask how I managed to survive the hell of war. I can’t believe it either.
This theatre makes your eyes sting
Apart from Wrocław, the performance has been shown in Warsaw and Kraków and on foreign stages in Germany, Serbia, Slovakia and France. And it divided the audience with regard to its reception – this theatre "makes your eyes sting, it shakes you up, it provokes", "it's fascinating, it's beautiful, it's scary" "Jan Klata opens up new chapter in Polish theatre" – these were the comments of French critics noted by Dwutygodnik.com:
Brigitte Salino wrote in Le Monde – Transfer!, a sarcastic and convincing performance that returns to the time of the twentieth-century history which redefined the boundaries between Germany, Poland and the Soviet Union, causing wandering peoples, which radically changed the lives of displaced persons.
Commenting on Polish theatre in general and presenting the artistic silhouette of the director, a critic from Le Monde wrote – Together with Jan Klata, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, a new chapter in Polish theatre opens up which has nothing do to with the one opened up by Krzysztof Warlikowski.
Transfer! – Directing and music: Jan Klata, dramaturgy: Ulrike Dittrich, Dunja Funke, Zbigniew Aleksy, Sebastian Majewski, stage design and costumes: Mirek Kaczmarek, lighting: Jan Sławkowski, choreography: Maćko Prusak, video projections: Robert Baliński, cast: Przemysław Bluszcz/Wojciech Ziemiański, Wiesław Cichy, Zdzisław Kuźniar, Karolina Kozak, Ilse Bode, Angela Hubricht, Hanne-Lore Pretzsch, Jan Charewicz, Jan Kruczkowski, Zygmunt Sobolewski, Andrzej Ursyn Szantyr, Matthias Goeritz, Guenter Linke. Premiere: Edmund Wierciński Współczesny Theatre in Wrocław 18 November 2006.
Source: dwutygodnik.com, ninateka.pl, ed. AL, August 2014, transl. GS, 27.10.2014