Book and lyrics: Beate Haeckl / Music: Danny Ashkenasi
There are also French and English versions of the lyrics.
SUBJECT
Tamara Bunke, born in 1937 in Argentina as the daughter of German communist parents who had fled National Socialism, moved to the GDR with her family after the war. There she went through the stages of political education and, due to her Spanish skills, was assigned as an interpreter to Che Guevara, Cuba’s newly appointed trade minister, during his official visit to East Berlin. Inflamed by his ideas, she emigrated to Cuba to help with the building of the country and asked to be trained as a secret agent. Under an assumed identity she settled in West Berlin and was later sent to Bolivia to investigate the country’s ruler. As Che’s failed attempt to start a revolution in the Congo showed that world revolution would certainly not be ignited from there, he decided to begin in Bolivia instead. This decision sealed both his and Tamara’s fate, for the two died in the jungle only a short time apart, both victims of a violent death.
CONCEPT
Tamara Bunke´s life, the absolute commitment to the cause and her courage to follow this path to the very end have always deeply impressed me. For her, Che Guevara was both catalyst and focal point of a life quite out of the ordinary. To my mind, her story lent itself perfectly to a musical with a political background.
The creation of the musical Tania La Guerrillera took place in several stages: first came the attempt to win supporters for the project in Cuba’s Ministry of Culture, followed by years of effort to find production partners in Germany. In the year 2000, the Theater des Westens took over the production of the show Tania La Guerrillera, but the 2001 banking scandal and the subsequent privatization of the Theater des Westens ruined this plan. Stage Holding—since 2005 Stage Entertainment—as a large conglomerate showed no interest in the subject matter.
And so we had to say goodbye to the performance of the finished musical, complete with through-composed music.
