Tatiana Liani
School of Drama at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
In 1939, Renato Mordo, the Viennese Jewish artistic director of Deutsches Theater in Prague, arrives with his wife, actress Trude Wessely-Mordo, and his son Peter, in Athens. The forgotten Greek citizenship that his father had retained saved him from the fate of countless other Jewish artists in Mitteleuropa: the Holocaust.
Mordo became the first director of the newly founded Greek National Opera until he was imprisoned by the Germans in Haidari Concentration Camp in the summer of 1944. After his release, he wrote the play Haidari about his experience, which was staged at the Kotopouli Theatre. The details of his own liberation, as well as that of Greece, are described in a series of short, unpublished autobiographical texts that have been preserved in an unclassified archive at his grandson’s home in Stuttgart. This archive also contains Mordo’s articles about the Dekemvriana (the December ’44 Battle of Athens), which he experienced very dramatically, as his house was located in the war zone. The Stuttgart archive also holds Trude Mordo’s fascinating handwritten memoirs of the Liberation and the Battle of Athens. These autobiographical notes provide a rare account of the solidarity shown by the women in her neighbourhood, who overcame the language barrier to support her during an extremely traumatic time.
This paper, based on previously unexploited archival material, will attempt to highlight a double Liberation, by mapping how Renato and Trude Mordo experienced and recorded Renato’s release from Haidari along the Liberation of Athens and the Dekemvriana, with particular emphasis on the different gender perspectives, but also on their role as foreign witnesses.
Tatiana Liani studied German and Comparative Literature in Thessaloniki and Berlin (MA, PhD), and since 2013 she has been teaching at the School of Drama at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.