Flucht nach vorn
Gesprochene Autobiografie und Materialien
Andrzej Wirth/Thomas Irmer

Andrzej Tadeusz Wirth was born on April 10, 1927 in the small town of Wlodawa, now on the border between Poland and Belarus. He says: One cannot choose that. Wirth then lived in Warsaw, New York, London, Berlin and Venice and was seemingly always in the right place at the right time when it came to new theater. He saw Brecht's Berliner Ensemble, the beginnings of Grotowski in Poland, was there when Peter Handke read the riot act to Group 47, and followed Robert Wilson's rise from the basements of Manhattan. In 1982, Wirth founded the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Giessen, the cadre forge - Gerhard Stadelmeier spoke of the forge of misfortune - of post-dramatic theater. A term that Wirth coined in New York in the early seventies, but which no longer seems useful to him today, when practically everything has somehow become post-dramatic. He has now recounted this and almost his entire life in an interview book: “Flucht nach vorn” (Escape to the Front).