Violine II (Brüche)

The more elastic a body is, the easier it is to mould. The denser its molecular structure, on the other hand, the more likely it is to break under pressure. It is exactly the same with people: While the lives of people who are happy to adapt to their circumstances rarely go off track, fractures are the biographical characteristic of people with a firm character, strong will and pronounced individuality.

"Brüche (Breaks)" owes its genesis to the study of the extraordinary life and work of Franz Jung, born in Silesia in 1888 - expressionist author, journalist, Dadaist and revolutionary; in 1921 he worked for the Comintern in Moscow and was later responsible for the construction of industrial plants in Novgorod and Petrograd; in 1923 he travelled to Germany illegally, became a collaborator of Erwin Piscator and Bertold Brecht, wrote several plays and worked as a journalist. Plans a garden estate based on designs by Le Corbusier. In 1936 he is arrested as a resistance fighter and emigrates after his release, first to Prague and later to Vienna. After the German invasion, he fled to Switzerland, but was soon expelled from there on suspicion of espionage and went to Hungary as an employee of a Swiss insurance company. Arrested by the German security service in 1944, he managed to escape to Italy, where he was arrested again and interned in the Bolzano concentration camp. Jung emigrated to the USA in 1948 and became an American citizen in 1955; seriously ill, he finally returned to Europe in 1960 and lived in France and Germany, where he died in 1963.

Parts of this string quartet were used as incidental music for Franz Jung's drama "The Prodigal Son", which premiered at the Ulm Theatre in November 1992.