The Berlin theater group andcompany&Co. is staging an “adult play for children” from the age of 10 – inspired by a novel by author Irmgard Keun, who herself had to flee from the Nazis. The story of the eleven-year-old novel character Kully is interwoven with the personal narratives of the players, such as the author and performer Luna Ali, who fled Syria with her family as a child, or the German-Iranian Damon Taleghani, whose parents came to Germany from Iran.

“Explain ‘border’, please?” asks 11-year-old performer Zümra – and she answers the question herself with the help of Kully, the 10-year-old main character in the novel CHILD OF ALL COUNTRIES: “Borders are invisible. They are something that happens between officials who are on the train”.  “But how are you going to prove that you have crossed the border if it is invisible?” asks Rokia (11), immediately exposing the absurdity of such words that try to describe something that is almost impossible to explain. 

The intersection of narratives, personal and temporal perspectives creates an immediate, humorous and, above all, timeless description of German exile, in which pressing questions about flight, emigration and the problem of human rights are dealt with in a child-friendly way: Who vouches for those for whom no one can vouch? What does it mean to be a child of all and thus of no country? Be when more and more of these words are questioned by the children, turned upside down and renegotiated, until the adults on stage run out of breath, uh, words, while the visa that is supposed to bring to a new country continues to expire. Is this already the land of all children, or is this just a just a stopover?