Edelmanns Tochter

A railway station in reunited Germany. Hinz and his daughter Ruth are sitting in the back room of the station restaurant, waiting. After four decades, the father can no longer elude his daughter's questions and suspicions. In his struggle for a new identity which he hopes will make it easier for him to draw a veil over his guilt and his fate, the old man has become deeply enmeshed in a tangle of lies, helplessness, desolation and self-reproach.§§A play about mutual respect, about the relationship between a father and daughter, and about the point at which the exertion of influence becomes unacceptable. Jakob Arjouni does not take sides; he observes human beings rather than literary models. In tight, telling sentences without too much detail, the young author writes about the phenomenon of Germany: guilt and the past, the Third Reich, the Reunification, and the fact that nothing is yet really over and done with...

A railway station in reunited Germany. Hinz and his daughter Ruth are sitting in the back room of the station restaurant, waiting. After four decades, the father can no longer elude his daughter's questions and suspicions. In his struggle for a new identity which he hopes will make it easier for him to draw a veil over his guilt and his fate, the old man has become deeply enmeshed in a tangle of lies, helplessness, desolation and self-reproach.§§A play about mutual respect, about the relationship between a father and daughter, and about the point at which the exertion of influence becomes unacceptable. Jakob Arjouni does not take sides; he observes human beings rather than literary models. In tight, telling sentences without too much detail, the young author writes about the phenomenon of Germany: guilt and the past, the Third Reich, the Reunification, and the fact that nothing is yet really over and done with...