Self Care Strandbefehl

The coastal resort Prora on the east coast of the island of Rügen does not hold a special place in Germany’s culture of remembrance. The fact that the National Socialists once planned a huge recreational facility for 20,000 members of the “Volksgemeinschaft (national community)”, a place for recuperation and propaganda purposes, has been as good as forgotten. The Second World War prevented the building complex’s completion. During the time of the GDR, it was used as barracks for the NVA (the National People’s Army), and after German reunification, private investors developed it into living and hotel facilities. In their work “Self Care Beach Command”, the collective fachbetrieb rita grechen discover Prora as a place of remembrance, where different time planes between 1936 and today are combined with poetic and documentary texts and images in a collage-fashion, overlapping and sometimes commenting. The audience is drawn into the maelstrom of memories and becomes an immediate part of this exploration of questions about how and why we should remember the past. If the visualisation of memories allows new perspectives on the future, this piece provides an interesting way of examining the upheavals and continuities of the relationship between past and present: What exactly are our goals as a society?

fachbetrieb rita grechen is an inter-disciplinary theatre collective with alternating associates. It develops music theatre shows, exhibitions, installations, durational performances, texts, films and process-oriented works. The collective’s network-like structure and the frequent collaboration with other collectives allow a wide range of artistic positions to feature in fachbetrieb rita grechen, depending on the project.