Marie Sophie Heinen

One last day in Paris, the final hours of a great love affair and the certainty that nothing will ever be the same again. In «Abschied (Parting)», Sebastian Haffner recounts his last encounter with his beloved Teddy. Between cafés, museum visits, fleeting encounters and intense conversations, the carefree attitude to life of the early 1930s becomes increasingly apparent. The novel accompanies the two through hours of closeness, doubt and hope until the moment on the platform that irrevocably separates them. Poetic, atmospherically dense and very personal, Sebastian Haffner describes not only the end of a great love, but also the farewell to his own youth and an era shortly before its demise. Haffner needed only a few weeks in 1932 to write this novel, which until recently had remained unpublished. Director Matthias Rippert is now bringing the material to the stage for the first time, continuing his work at the Residenztheater after the success of «Blind».