Begräbnis einer Gräfin
(Burial of a countess)
‚A glance, a walk, a sentence said in a certain way,
a laugh, a silence. Her face and the unfolding of an emotion.
It is true, because it is beautiful. Or is it beautiful because it is true?‘
Wolfgang Kohlhaase about Jutta Hoffmann
Wolfgang Kohlhaase‘s novella Begräbnis einer Gräfin is based on a true story, freely retold with all of the poetic licence of a talented writer and so much irony that its origins soon become obvious: It was inspired by the widowed Countess of Schwerin, who was the last aristocratic mistress of Stolpe Castle on the island of Usedom. At the end of the Second World War, she refused to flee from the advancing Red Army but was subsequently forced to leave the family estate, which was expropriated quite early on during the enforced land reforms in the Soviet sector of Germany, in 1945. She moved to Lüneburg in West Germany. The countess died in the spring of 1957, and her body was transferred to Stolpe as ‚unspecified cargo‘, not without difficulties, and buried there in the village cemetery. Her fate was similar to that of Carl Hans von Hardenberg and his wife Renate, who were also forced to leave Neuhardenberg Castle, and whose burial in the Schinkel Church family grave the GDR authorities prevented. They were not buried in Neuhardenberg until after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Wolfgang Kohlhaase is generally considered to be one of the most important screenwriters in the history of German film. He has also penned an extensive literary oeuvre as an author. His works are worldly-wise and nonchalant, full of witticisms yet also by all means laconic, sometimes more humorous, and sometimes more melancholic. The great actress Jutta Hoffmann will read Wolfgang Kohlhaase‘s novella and then discuss it with the author Wolfgang Kohlhaase.
Jutta Hoffmann has time and again delivered impressive performances in films and in theatres since the early 1960s. She has been cast by some of Germany‘s best-known film and TV directors, including Frank Beyer, Herrmann Zschoche, Thomas Langhoff and, repeatedly, Egon Günther, with whom she collaborated closely and successfully for many years. Productions by Ruth Berghaus, B. K. Tragelehn, Benno Besson, Peter Zadek or Einar Schleef, for example, proved her mastery and were some of the most outstanding events in German theatre history.
