Die Ausweichschule

Kaleb Erdmann was eleven years old on 26 April 2002, when a nineteen-year-old walked armed into the Gutenberg-Gymnasium in Erfurt and killed sixteen people on the last day of the school's Abitur examinations. He wrote about it more than twenty years later, and the book's question is not what happened but how it can be told at all — a search for the memories, and for a language equal to violence he lived through. Robin Ormond's stage version follows that search to the point where language gives out, without losing its humour along the way.