Here we are again! Bringing three new ladies to regale you with! Not outdoors, because it’s November, but with excellent ventilation and a strict 2G+ formula.
Next Tuesday, join our guest presenters, the impressive writers Asal Dardan and Hinemoana Baker, along with your beloved co-host Florian Duijsens, to learn about three women who changed the world. All held together by your other beloved co-host, Katy Derbyshire. There’ll be an anti-fascist adventurer, a convention-breaking writer, and a real lady of a lady who brought the idea of vaccination to Western Europe. We’ll be rocking the ACUD Studio as the night sets in, celebrating lives lived to great effect.
Presented in a messy mixture of English and German. €7 or €4 reduced entry. Generously supported by the Berliner Senat. Doors open 7.30 pm – come on time to get a good seat!
We have limited space, so please book in advance via Eventbrite. 2G+ entry only – so scannable proof of being either geimpft or genesen, plus a recent Burgertest. To ensure everybody’s safety and peace of mind, we will also ask you to wear a mask even while seated. Thank you for your understanding and support!
*******
OLGA BENÁRIO PRESTES was a Jewish communist from Munich, who joined the party at the age of 15. A youth instructor with military training and experience with jailbreaks, she was assigned as a bodyguard to her later husband and tasked with helping him return from the Soviet Union to Brazil. There, they were eventually arrested and the pregnant Olga was extradited to Nazi Germany, giving birth to her daughter in Barnimstrasse women’s prison. She was gassed with hundreds of other women political prisoners in 1942; her daughter is a professor of Brazilian history, still teaching occasionally in retirement.
KATHERINE MANSFIELD was an influential modernist writer from New Zealand. She wrote from a young age, leaving for England at 19. Dispatched to Bavaria after leading a fast-paced life in London, including various male and female lovers, she discovered Chekov and started writing in earnest, culminating in her first collection, “In a German Pension”. Back in England, World War I sparked her most prolific period, producing many short stories and poems. Her lasting legacy was partly published posthumously, following her early death of tuberculosis in the company of her “wife,” her fellow Bloomsbury Group writer Ida Baker, in Fontainebleau, France.
LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU was an English aristocrat famed for her wit and beauty. When her husband became ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1716, she accompanied him to Constantinople. Gaining access to female spaces in Turkey, she witnessed smallpox inoculations there and had her son immunized in the same way, using a small sample of the live virus that had killed her brother and caused severe scarring to her own face. The principle was adapted into what we now know as vaccination. Lady Mary later left her husband behind in England after falling for an Italian count, only returning after she was widowed. She wrote poetry, essays, and copious letters, many of which were published after her death, encouraging other ladies to travel as she had done.
The Dead Ladies Show 