Pietro Floridia founded Teatro dell'Argine in Bologna in 1994. He is the author and director of Tiergartenstrasse 4 A Garden for Ophelia (2006), a stage play published by Filema, a small Neapolitan press.
In crafting this play, Floridia drew extensively from rich historical documentation, especially the testimonies collected in the records of the Nuremberg trials. The stage holds only two characters: Gertrud Danicher and Ophelia von Pohlisch. Gertrud was one of the nurses at Langehorn State Hospital in Hamburg, where she worked from September 1940 to June 1945. Ophelia is a young adolescent, daughter of a high-ranking German military officer, with intellectual disabilities that place her mental age at eight or nine. Gertrud is accused of her murder.
Gertrud was one of the cogs in the infamous T4 program. Her job was to round up adults and children with disabilities—lives deemed, under T4 logic, unworthy of living—and send them toward a death coldly planned and organized according to the Führer's directives. A well-oiled machinery, capable of convincing families of these "unworthy" beings to entrust them to public hospitals with promises of miraculous medical care. The program, though, had carefully arranged for the slow elimination of patients, immediate cremation of bodies, and the dispatch of a letter to the family announcing their loved one's death from sudden complications.
A true extermination machine whose horrors came to light only gradually, late, and incompletely. An industrial-scale genocide featuring crematoria in remote locations far from populated centers; vans carrying their grim cargo moving only at night; the first use of gas chambers, lethal drugs, forged death certificates sent to families citing various causes—tuberculosis, heart attack. The central office of this abominable machine of death stood in Berlin, at Tiergartenstrasse 4.
On stage, Gertrud faces interrogation by an Allied tribunal. She recounts what was, what she witnessed and carried out, with clarity and precision. Yet she firmly denies having sent Ophelia to her death, and reveals the surprising bond of affection that had formed between herself and the child she was meant to consign to the institution.
Pressed by the magistrates, Gertrud walks through the entire history of the T4 program, including interventions by prominent Catholic Church figures, such as Bishop von Galen—called the Lion of Münster—whose actions had persuaded the Führer in 1941 to officially suspend the program. But it was only a façade. The elimination of the "unworthy" continued, no longer within specialized centers but as routine practice in ordinary state hospitals. When the ten-thousandth patient was killed, there were celebrations at Hadamar, with extra rations of alcohol distributed to the staff.
Parallel to Gertrud's testimony, woven through it, runs the delicate and guileless speech of Ophelia, enclosed in her enchanted world. She speaks to the flowers and plants in her garden, in the beautiful house where she waits for her father's return—a father, we learn, who died in war.
Ophelia is full of grace and gentleness. She tends her roses, cyclamen, lilies, cultivating the poetic fragility of beauty in the midst of the evil that dominates the world. Her "madness" is the only light in such darkness, and it will move the conscience of the woman who was meant to deliver her to death. Gertrud claims she saved Ophelia—in the only way the rigid logic of the machinery she served would allow.
