Name: Balta drobulė (White Shroud)
Start: 2026-09-01T19:30
End: 2026-09-01T21:30
Location: Kulturforum Görlitzer Synagoge

About the production

Start

7:30 p.m.

End

9:30 p.m.

»Balta drobulė« (White Shroud) is a landmark work of modern Lithuanian literature. Written whilst in exile in New York, Antanas Škėma draws on his own life story to recount the life of the Lithuanian exile Antanas Garšva. In early 1950s New York, he works as a lift boy in the city’s largest hotel. His daily up-and-down in the lift strikes him as the labour of Sisyphus (which earned Škėma the title »Lithuanian Camus«). The mind-numbing repetition of the same routine, coupled with the sensory overload of the American megacity’s illusory reality, wears on the nerves of the already neurasthenic Garšva, who nevertheless sees himself as a poet, born to leave behind verses for eternity.

In an expressionist and associative style, interspersed with episodic flashbacks to the author’s own childhood and youth, the awakening of first love and its inevitable loss, political indoctrination in his homeland, and finally emigration, the narrative reveals not only a precise, multi-faceted psychological portrait of a man driven and adrift, but also a scornfully distorted mosaic of the 20th century dominated by ideologies: from socialist Kaunas in Lithuania to the spiritually hollow, capitalistically hollowed-out New York of the post-war years, beneath whose glittering surface the oozing pus becomes visible through Škėma’s mercilessly scalping gaze.

The translator Claudia Sinnig has rendered this finely crafted tirade in all its harshness, despair and linguistic power, thereby giving Škėma a German voice for the very first time. For German readers, this is a belated yet genuine rediscovery. 

Music also plays an important role in the reading. Pianist Hideyo Harada will perform pieces ranging from Bach, Mozart, Chopin and Schumann to Čiurlionis and Bartók. 

The bookshop in Zittau Buchkrone am Markt is setting up a bookstall for the event, where the Guggolz Verlag edition of the book (German edition: »Das weiße Leintuch«) will be available for purchase.

Video recommendation:

»Das weiße Leintuch« by Antanas Škėma – presented by Thoralf Czichon | LiteraturNews

Thoralf Czichon, the new literary dramaturg at the Lausitz Festival, runs the highly recommended literature blog LiteraturNews on YouTube alongside his studies in Comparative Literature and his part-time job at a small, owner-run bookshop in Vienna.

In a recently recorded episode, he reads from the novel, which he intends to introduce to us in more detail at the event with Corinna Harfouch and Hideyo Harada on 1 September at Kulturforum Görlitzer Synagoge. And in this video, he talks about the work that so fascinates and inspires him.

Existenzialismus aus Litauen: »Das weiße Leintuch« von Antanas Škėma

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Reading

Corinna Harfouch

Corinna Harfouch works as an actress and director. It was her love of acting that drew her to the theatre. She studied at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts and took up her first roles in Karl-Marx-Stadt, at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and at the Berliner Ensemble. She has been a freelance actress since 1991 and is a member of the ensemble at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. Corinna Harfouch’s acting is characterised by versatility, precision, physicality, poetry and wit. Her characters are multi-layered, socially recognisable and individual. Her voice is unmistakable and richly modulated: girlishly bright, naive, stern, sensually deep, matter-of-fact, and full of wonder.

In the theatre, Corinna Harfouch worked with directors such as Heiner Müller (»Macbeth«, 1983), Horst Sagert (»Faust Szenen«, 1984), Frank Castorf (»Des Teufels General«, 1996), Jürgen Gosch (»Wer hat Angst vor Virginia Woolf?«, 2004, »Ein Sommernachtstraum«, 2007, »Die Möwe«, 2008) and Herbert Fritsch (»Die Physiker«, 2013). As a director, she has staged works by Chekhov, Marguerite Duras, Etel Adnan and others.

Her most notable film and television works include »Die Schauspielerin« (1988), »Treffen in Travers« (1988), »Charlie & Louise« (1994), »Sexy Sadie« (1996), »Gefährliche Freundin« (1996), »Der große Bagarozy« (1999), »Vera Brühne« (2000), »Bibi Blocksberg« (2001), »Der Untergang« (2004), »Rose« (2005), »This is Love« (2009), »Giulias Verschwinden« (2009), »Was bleibt« (2012), »Puppe« (2012), »Der Fall Bruckner« (2014), »Lara« (2017), »Deutschland 89« (2019), »Alles in bester Ordnung« (2020), and many others. Since 2023, she has played the role of Berlin »Tatort« detective Susanne Bonard.

Corinna Harfouch is passionate about literature. For her own reading theatre, she has developed programmes – often in collaboration with other artists – based on texts by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Karl Kraus, Else Lasker-Schüler, Heiner Müller, Etel Adnan, Christa Wolf, Philippe Malone and others. She is in great demand as a narrator for radio plays and audiobooks, including works by James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Katia Mann, Arno Schmidt, Christa Wolf, Lothar Trolle and Thomas Heise.

Corinna Harfouch has received the Gertrud Eysoldt Ring, the Actress of the Year award, the Berlin Theatre Prize, the Grimme Prize, the Golden Camera, the German Actors’ Prize and numerous other awards.

Hideyo Harada

The Japanese pianist Hideyo Harada began her musical training in Tokyo before continuing her studies with Lieselotte Gierth in Stuttgart and with Hans Kann and Roland Keller in Vienna. She honed her skills under Viktor Merzhanov at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow. Among other accolades, Harada won the Concours International d’Exécution Musicale in Geneva and first prize at the International Schubert Competition in Dortmund. She was also a prize-winner at the International Rachmaninoff Competition in Moscow.

In addition to a Schubert cycle, which she staged in Tokyo in collaboration with renowned partners, the promotion of contemporary music also plays a significant role in the pianist’s work. Notable examples include composers such as Viktor Ullmann, Ernst Krenek, Toru Takemitsu, Toshio Hosokawa and Tan Dun. Harada also gave the Japanese premiere of Alfredo Casella’s Scarlattiana, Op. 44, for piano and orchestra.

Her chamber music partners include the Borodin Quartet, cellist Jens Peter Maintz and baritone Roman Trekel. Hideyo Harada collaborates on musical-literary programmes with the actors Corinna Harfouch, Peter Lohmeyer, Thomas Thieme and Hanns Zischler. Recordings for international radio and television broadcasters round off her activities.