V13 – Die Terroranschläge in Paris

Six years after the Bataclan attacks in Paris on 13 November 2015 the men who helped the terrorists in their preparations are put on trial. The name of the court case is V13, short for Vendredi treize: Friday the 13th. Witnessing the events was the writer Emmanuel Carrère, who reported in detail on the court proceedings for the weekly newspaper “Le Nouvel Obs”. Carrère is motivated by the question of “where madness begins when God is involved” and the desire to be present as a collective narrative unfolds. He spends month after month in the “windowless white plywood box” that has been constructed in the Palace of Justice on the Île de la Cité due to level of public interest. In clear language that shows an awareness of nuance and potential legal traps, Carrère enables his readers to experience the trial at close quarters. On the 10th anniversary of the attack, director Stephan Kimmig takes Carrère’s journal as a starting point in his search for the roots of Islamist violence and the delicate machinery of justice. How can the victims be given a voice? How does a society that wants to go on living deal with this kind of trauma? In an intimate on-stage arrangement this evening of theatre also turns into a declaration of love for the rules of justice which – as Carrère writes – attempt “to put the world back into joint.”