Audience favorite Gerti Drassl, singer Ethel Merhaut and dramaturge Barbara Juch weave their first artistic collaboration around three pioneering women of the 1920s and 1930s.

Gerti Drassl reads selected texts by Vicki Baum, Else Lasker-Schüler and Else Feldmann. Ethel Merhaut, a proven expert on the music of the 1930s, complements this musically with her trio. Together they explore the tense relationship between female experiences and span the arc from the 1920s and 1930s to the present day: between self-empowerment and repression, between idealization and devaluation, between intimacy and publicity.

The pioneers

Vicki Baum (*1888 Vienna, †1960 Hollywood) was the undisputed queen of light fiction and one of the most widely read authors of her time. Her novel "Menschen im Hotel" was her greatest success and was filmed in Hollywood with Greta Garbo.

Else Lasker-Schüler (*1869 Elberfeld, †1945, Jerusalem) was also ahead of her time: with her expressionist poetry and her exalted self-presentations in pageboy cut and pluderhosen, she really shook up the self-image of her male colleagues.

And finally, Else Feldmann (*1884 Vienna, murdered in Sobibor in 1942) caused a sensation with her literary milieu studies of Vienna's slums. She countered the image of the privileged, independent "New Woman", which was so popular at the time, with the reality of life for workers - also in the story "Travesty of Love", which gives the book its title.

Gerti Drassl reads selected texts by these important Jewish voices and provides insights into their biographies, while Ethel Merhaut provides musical accompaniment with her trio. A varied evening about the tense relationship between female experience: between self-empowerment and oppression, between idealization and devaluation, between intimacy and publicity.