HERKUNFT

About the show

Imagine that your past fits in a suitcase. Or on a sheet of paper. Or in a theatre show. Imagine you had to tell someone where you come from, who you are – and you knew: there are many different versions of the truth. In his award-winning novel "Herkunft" ("Where you come from"), Saša Stanišić writes back against all-too-easy truths and against forgetting – with wit, anger, warmth and an eye for the absurdities of remembering. Between Višegrad, Heidelberg and the labyrinth of his own biography, Stanišić’s novel forms the basis of a multi-voiced game around identity, fleeing war and family – and the power of story-telling and the urge to reinvent oneself again and again. Stanišić, who was born in 1978 in former Yugoslavia and came to Germany in 1992 as a young teenager, makes his own story the starting point of a literary journey of exploration: What remains of a person when they lose their home? How much provenance is there in what we call the future? And maybe home can be found precisely where stories are shared and memories find a shared a language? Ukrainian director Stas Zhyrkov, who has lived in Germany in exile since the Russian invasion, takes up this theme. He too carries the experience of suddenly leaving his country, being uprooted, in his work. Together with his team and the ensemble, he doesn’t just stage "Herkunft" as a pure adaptation, but as a dialogue between different biographies that shifts the questions of identity and home into the present.