February 1, 2026, 5 PM, reading and discussion with the protagonist Ella (Gabriela Rollnik) and author Michael Weber
ELLA. Have nothing, change everything.
at Druckereihalle/Ackermannshof, Basel
The protagonist ELLA, once a member of the June 2nd Movement, an armed group from the 1970s in West Germany, looks back on her own history from the perspective of 2022. While today the state proclaims a “turning point” in which war and violence are becoming normal again, she remembers another turning point: the period from the mid-1960s onwards, when the old world order of colonialism and imperialism began to falter internationally and, in West Germany too, the stagnation of the post-war years, with its majority society socialized by fascism and war, was broken by a large section of the youth; a time when a window of history seemed to open, through which one could glimpse a different future. What is happening today, now that this window of history seems to have closed again, at least in the old metropolises?
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February 9, 2026, 7 PM, Reading from Ingrid Strobel’s
‘Vermessene Zeit – Der Wecker, der Knast und ich’
at Cheesmeyer, Sissach
Ingrid Strobel, 1952–2024, was a journalist, activist, author and documentary filmmaker. Without her tireless research, establishing contact and talking to the surviving women who were active in the resistance against National Socialism, this part of female history would also have remained unheard.
Her book ‘Never Say You’re Taking Your Last Walk’, about women in the armed resistance against fascism and German occupation, is now considered a standard work and was written by her during her imprisonment, which she describes in ‘Vermessene Zeit’. Carmen Dalfogo and Anina Jendreyko will talk about and read from her life and work.
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February 15, 2026, 5 PM, reading and song
Nitsa Gavriilidou – Women on Makronisos
at Cheesmeyer, Sissach
Clémence Gabrielidis and Anina Jendreyko. About the lives and resistance of women on the prison island of Makronissos, Greece.
Thousands who had participated in the resistance against the German Wehrmacht in Greece were persecuted after liberation and dragged from one prison island to the next. Many lost their lives. Nitsa was among them – until she ended up on Makronissos with 5,000 other women. Her book is a historical document.
Picking up a pen and writing a book about Makronisos is difficult, especially when you are already seventy-eight years old. I decided to do so because I read a report in a newspaper that left me speechless. It said: ‘During the years when the island functioned as a national reformatory, there were no women on Makronisos (…).’
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March 1, 2026, 5 PM, Courageous Women – Remembering in the present
From the lives of Gertrud Woker, Clara Thalmann and others, film excerpts, biographies, texts with the ensemble of the Volksbühne Basel
at Cheesmeyer, Sissach
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April 19, 2026, 5 PM, Rose Ausländer
An evening exploring the work of Rose Ausländer
Poems, texts and biography
at Cheesmeyer, Sissach
Rose Ausländer (born 11 May 1901 in Czernowitz, Austria-Hungary; died 3 January 1988 in Düsseldorf) was a poet from Bukovina. She lived in Austria-Hungary, Romania, the USA, Austria and Germany. For Rose Ausländer, writing was synonymous with life and survival in a life marked by flight, exile, homelessness and searching.
“Why do I write? Because, in search of my identity, I speak more clearly to myself and to the wordless arc. It stretches me. I am eager for the words that want to come to me. I talk to them, to myself, to you, I talk to you, asking you to listen to me.”
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The readings at Cheesmeyer are held on a donation basis.