Fences eat people up: That was Katja Riemann’s Dresden speech
In a moving speech in Dresden, actress Katja Riemann speaks about the fate of homeless people on the run.
By Karin Großmann
8 min. Katja Riemann gave a moving speech at the Dresden Schauspielhaus on Sunday morning. © Jürgen Lösel
There’s this young tiler. He completed his training in Schweinfurt, found a job, had a good relationship with his boss, had friends and a girlfriend. But he failed to apply for an extension of his residence permit in time. So he was taken from his accommodation at night, put on a plane in handcuffs and deported to Afghanistan. He’s never been there. He was born in Iran to Afghan parents. Now he walked from Kabul across the green border to his mother. With a small group he continued over the mountains towards Turkey. Snow up to my thighs. By boat to Lesbos. Camp Moria was the most notorious of all miserable refugee camps. It had not yet burned down when actress Katja Riemann met the young man there for the first time in 2019. He called himself Mo. Maybe because the others were already called Mohammed or because he thought it was cool or because it was his German nickname. “Everything changes,” she says, “as soon as you get to know someone who has had a story happen to you that you otherwise only know from the news.”
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