Luna Stage Presents Mrs. Stern
Exploring a Critical Moment for Hannah Arendt
By: Susan Hall - Dec 18, 2024
Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library, a new play by Jenny Lyn Bader, takes place in a prison cell in Alexanderplatz, Berlin. Mrs. Stern is better known today as Hannah Arendt, her birth name.
By the time she was seventeen, Arendt, a brilliant thinker, was in the midst of a hot affair with the philosopher Martin Heidegger. At 23 she married Günther Stern and thus is Mrs. Stern in the play.
The playwright imagines Karrl, a German political officer who is about the same age as Arendt. In his new job, he picks up Arendt in the State Library on Unter den Linden, across from the opera house. Karl arrested her.
The arc of the play follows his increasing personal interest in her, They are, after all, both German and highly educated. He is interested in her work on St. Augustine and love.
Arendt realizes that this commonality, the importance of which has been snuffed out only recently by Hitler’s ascension to power, was her way to manipulate herself out of a jail cell.
The playwright brilliantly takes a pivotal moment in German history, as Hitler becomes chancellor in 1933, and looks at it close up and personal. Before Hitler’s rise, Arendt thought of herself as a German Jew. You could no longer be both. For to be German was to be antisemitic. That didn’t happen in an instant, but for Arendt it hinged on one event.
As they engage in the cell, we learn that they had similar upbringings. Karl is a man of culture. He knows poetry. He knows Goethe. One senses by the time he asks if she has any German blood, that he wishes she would say yes. Yet Arendt knows what he means. No, she has no German blood, although her family has been in the country for more than two centuries.
A lawyer Erich comes to represent Arendt. She throws him out. Engaging her Officer/ally is a better course to release. And the release happens. Arendt leaves immediately for Czechoslovakia and finally for Lisbon and New York. She was stateless for a decade. But for Karl's help, she might have been dead.
Ari Laura Keith directs the duet. Ella Dershowitz plays Arendt and Brett Temple, Karl. Drew Hirshfield does an effective turn as the lawyer.
Hannah Arendt Street is near the Teirgarten and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Germans remember. This engaging play forces us to.
Presented by Luna Stage at WP Theater in New York through January 17. Tickets here.