I’ll never run away. The Struggle of Felix Fechenbach

A play by and starring Gerda Pethke, Konrad Schreier and Jan Uplegger

A guest performance supported by the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony as part of the ‘Tacheles’ year

Using a combination of puppetry and live acting, this Berlin theatre production tells the life story of the Jewish journalist and politician Felix Fechenbach, who was born in Bad Mergentheim and grew up in Würzburg. His fate serves to illustrate the ominous slide towards dictatorship in Germany. Fechenbach stands as a symbol of both the beginning and the end of the Weimar Republic. At the same time, his life story reflects the fate of many of his Jewish fellow citizens in Germany. Although himself a distinguished veteran of the First World War, he repeatedly becomes the target of anti-Semitic hostility and, particularly during the Lippe election campaign – which proved decisive for the Nazis – is branded by them as a ‘Jewish November traitor’.
Other key figures in the play are his comrades-in-arms during the Munich Revolution of 1918–19: the Jewish intellectuals Gustav Landauer, Erich Mühsam and Kurt Eisner.
Felix Fechenbach came from a strictly religious family; his father was the only kosher baker in Würzburg. He himself later turned his back on religion, but grappled with his Jewish identity throughout his life. This led him to spend his honeymoon in Palestine. His second wife, Irma Epstein, came from an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Augsburg, who rejected the poor baker’s son from Würzburg. Nevertheless, the family later supported her when she fled Nazi persecution from Detmold and helped arrange her exile in Switzerland.
The play premiered in Detmold on 28 January 2025, marking the 131st anniversary of Fechenbach’s birth, and has since been performed 32 times throughout Germany to great acclaim. The production was made possible by the Detmold Community Foundation, the Felix Fechenbach Foundation, the Lippe Regional Association, the Work and Human Dignity Foundation, the Standortssicherung Foundation, the LWL Cultural Fund, the Meyer-Siekendiek Foundation, the Foundation for Lippe and the German Resistance Memorial Centre, Berlin.

Photos: Karsten Lämmchen

• Duration: approx. 1 hour 30 minutes, including an interval
• Haus Görlitz, Main Hall
• Guest performance