City of Ashes

An inspiring story of love, rape, and redemption in defeated Berlin in 1945.

In the chaos following the German surrender, Berlin roommates Lotte and Lili toil by day as Trümmerfrauen, long lines of women in blue aprons passing buckets of rubble hand to hand. At night, they are at the mercy of the Russian Army. Raped more times than they can count, haunted by suicides of neighbors and friends, they vow to survive at all costs. For protection from the Russians, Lotte sets out to find a ‘wolf,’ shamelessly seducing Owen, the Welsh officer in charge of their work detail. Love, the farthest thing from her mind, soon takes the upper hand. The two are planning a new life in Wales, when Lotte realizes she is pregnant. The problem is she doesn’t know if the father is Owen or a rapist. Fearful that the news will break his heart, she sacrifices her love for him, sending him away without telling him about the child. The tragic cruelty in City of Ashes is both an old story and a disturbingly new one. So, happily for us, is the power of love.

HISTORY: City of Ashes was commissioned in 2013 by the Opéra de Poche and premiered in Paris at the Théâtre Adyar in November 2015. Its Asian Première was in Beijing in 2016, its North American in Knoxville in 2018. The opera has been performed nine times. A special performance was filmed at La Nef Glauser, Paris, on 21 June 2018, by Anne Georget for her documentary ‘Une saison à l’opéra de poche.’