About the work
familienalbum ('family album') is a documentary play by Lisa Sommerfeldt for audiences aged 12 and over, written as a commission for the Junges Staatstheater, the young people's company of the Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe. It draws on diaries, letters and archival documents of the family of the Karlsruhe architect and composer Richard Fuchs, on photographs and on conversations with relatives; the publisher S. Fischer lists it for four performers. The world premiere is scheduled for 24 September 2026 at the Insel venue in Karlsruhe, there under the title familienalbum.karlsruhe and directed by Kevin Barz.
Plot
Karlsruhe, 1934: six-year-old Soni is growing up sheltered in a large house with her sister Eva, her mother Dora and her father Richard Fuchs, a respected architect and composer. Because the family is Jewish, over the following years it is excluded and persecuted step by step. After the November pogroms of 1938 the family escapes at the last minute via the Netherlands and England to New Zealand. The play weaves together documents, diary extracts and Richard Fuchs's music and asks about the loss of home, identity and the invisible wounds of survival.
Cultural significance
The play commemorates Richard Fuchs (1887–1947), who was held for several weeks in Dachau concentration camp after the pogrom night of 1938, emigrated to Wellington with his wife and two daughters in 1939, and whose compositions for the most part were never performed. For her research Sommerfeldt drew on holdings of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, the Arolsen Archives and Exilarte in Vienna, among others.