The Last
Summer

We lay on the grass and let our minds wander.

Peace at last! Put the newspaper away, leave all the news behind for a while. Now it’s time for some ‘me-time’. Lying on green meadows, by blue lakes, under a sky dotted with white clouds, letting our minds wander. You can’t constantly burden yourself with the world’s suffering; your own life is exhausting enough. We are in Mariefred, Sweden. A couple’s holiday. Sights: Gripsholm Castle. Mood: light-hearted and cheerful. There’s lovemaking, sunbathing, rowing, schnapps and good cheer; we have a little threesome, refreshing body and soul in the lake. Admittedly, disaster does occasionally intrude on this idyll – in the form of a sadistic children’s home manager – but the foster child can be saved, for good triumphs. Life is beautiful. Welcome to Tucholsky’s Schloss Gripsholm.

Back home, a far-right party is racking up one election victory after another; the political climate is growing harsher and more hostile. But you don’t just take a break from home; you also take a break from your problems. Summer, sun, köttbullar. Next year – it is, incidentally, August 1929 – the NSDAP will become the second-strongest force in the Reichstag. Anyone willing to read the signs can see what is coming.

At least Kurt Tucholsky knows what is coming. He is one of the very first to write stoically against the National Socialists. He dissects his political surroundings with precision and becomes the political barometer of the age – to his own dismay, all too accurately. With Schloss Gripsholm, Tucholsky once again writes the shadows from his soul, before, disillusioned by political developments, he falls silent as a writer and takes his own life a few years later.

Mathias Spaan, winner of the Nestroy Prize and most recently resident director at the Bühnen Bern, explores in his production the question of how one writes a summer story when one can already see winter approaching. He weaves Tucholsky’s narrative with letters, newspaper clippings and contemporary voices into an evening that oscillates between holiday idyll and the broader political climate, asking just how much light-heartedness we can allow ourselves without losing sight of who we are.