The Silence

“Doesn’t writing down a memory always involve creating a fiction, too?” asks author and director Falk Richter. In the exploration of his own family history, he records a dialogue with his mother where they talk about traumas, silence and repression. Soon, the autobiographical mixes with the fictitious, memories contradict each other and new realities emerge.
In the auto-fictional play “The Silence”, the author himself isn’t on stage; instead, actor Dimitrij Schaad takes on the part of Falk Richter. At times, he comments on Richter’s story, at others, he gives it scenic form. An impressive journey into the abysses of the bourgeois West German society from the post-war era to the present, and a story about how generations struggle to understand each other.

Statement of the Jury

An aged father who still has nightmares about the war, a mother who inspects her children’s diaries, parents who show no pity when their son falls victim to a homophobic attack: In his auto-fictional play “The Silence”, author and director Falk Richter sets out to find the reasons behind the silence that shaped his childhood and adolescence in the Nordheide, a region south of Hamburg. He confronts his mother in documentary film footage where she describes her life as a story of perseverance, of “resilience”; he invents wickedly funny dialogues with his old school-friend and with a therapist. On a stage designed to resemble a front garden in Buchholz, he is represented by actor Dimitrij Schaad who furiously empathizes with the artist – and yet he has his own views of this kind of self-exploration. In “The Silence”, Falk Richter has not only created a captivating and reflected analysis of how deeply the traces of fascism and the experience of war have penetrated into the mentality of people in the Federal Republic of Germany. He also allows the audience to share the struggles and shifts of perspective that may perhaps allow a new beginning.

Tojuror Eva Behrendt’s video statement in the Berliner Festspiele Media Library (in German)

ProgrammeBooklet (pdf, 0.7 MB)