Looking back over the 70 years of GSTT's existence, we realize that the history of this East-Central European German scene, which essentially dates back to the 18th century and has been very eventful, remains as fragile as it is worthy of protection.
Today we are celebrating a theater whose continued existence has not been self-evident: after the great upheavals of the 70s and 90s, times could have been different. But this theater has had and continues to have not only committed people, but also many reliable helpers and a large dose of luck. The consistent and meritorious involvement of the NiL school theater troupes of the 'Nikolaus Lenau' High School, the inspired and long-term measure to set up the German acting department at the West University of Timișoara in 1992, the status maintained - and which must be defended above all else - as a public cultural institution and repertory theater, a Romanian legal entity, with all the obligations and opportunities that derive from this, the support of the Romanian public authorities in the form of an annual subsidy from the budget of the Municipality of Timișoara and the project funding received from a large number of internal and external partners, all of this leads us to believe that many things in the development of this theater have been in the right direction, so that today, more than 30 years after the events of 1989, this theater appears to be on relatively stable footing, even though needs and constraints are not lacking.
And there is something that makes this theater so rich today: its people. While it was primarily the actresses, directors and teachers Ildikó Jarcsek-Zamfirescu and Ida Jarcsek-Gaza who set the course for the theater's sustainable development in the troubled times, today we often have here a transgenerational, committed, ambitious, experimental, and professionally conscious theater community. This has allowed the theater to earn an honorable place in the Romanian theatrical landscape.
And all this is a performance that obliges us to do more. In this spirit, I wish our German State Theater Timișoara many more fruitful, artistically valuable and memorable years!
Lucian Vărșăndan
Manager of the German State Theater Timișoara