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On Saturday, June 20, 2026, the Kunstverein für Mecklenburg and Vorpommern in Schwerin will present the performance Trauerspiel by artist Luzie Meyer in the historic Perzina-Saal in Schwerin. The play will be performed by actress Leila Gray. The Perzina-Saal underwent multiple functional and ideological transformations in the 20th century—from a concert and performance hall for a piano factory to a printing site for Nazi and later SED publications, and on to cultural and educational uses in the GDR and the present day. In Trauerspiel, Meyer explores questions of German identity and repressed grief by examining Baroque forms of representation and questioning their contemporary relevance. Theater—particularly the tragedy in Walter Benjamin’s sense—thus becomes, rather than a narrative of individual fates as in ancient tragedy, an allegory of sociopolitical developments. Like the Angelus Novus described by Benjamin, which is driven backward into the future, Meyer turns her gaze to the tension between continuity and decay inscribed in the historical form of the tragedy. In doing so, Meyer takes as her starting point an understanding of history as a process shaped by ruptures, shifts in power, and political crises, in order to question both historical and contemporary systems of meaning. The play interweaves fictional elements with references to Baroque dramatic texts by Daniel Casper von Lohenstein and Andreas Gryphius, as well as to Margarete Mitscherlich’s Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern, a psychoanalytic social critique that examines the repression of experiences of guilt and loss, as well as their lingering effects on the social consciousness of postwar Germany. The voice becomes a carrier for an affective language that negotiates the fragility of the present. 

Admission is free.