Roland Schimmelpfennig

A country house in the middle of winter. A young woman thinks she can recognise the watchtower of a concentration camp in the logo of her mobile phone. A young man stands at the front door and wants to visit his father Heinrich – the father he has never seen in his whole life. Heinrich, an ageing intellectual who has been retranslating Paradise lost into German for years, has fallen in love with his young niece, Sonja, with whom he has just shot a duck – but nobody knows what to do with the animal. Do you gut it first or pluck it? Edith, Heinrich’s wife, falls in love with her husband’s newly arrived son, but he sleeps with Sonja on the day he arrives – and with Marietta, who has also come to visit.
Isabel, the young woman with the telephone, has been engaged by a theatre, but she doesn’t get any roles there. The Professor, an old companion of Heinrich’s from his student days, brings him an old photo that he thinks is someone else. And Nadja, her daughter, a student, ruins the Russian private library, which means nothing to the man of the house.
At the end: violence. At night in the bedroom, father and son threaten to shoot one another. (Roland Schimmelpfennig)

This family reunion quietly and calmly takes its course. Little annoyances are obscured by the seeming banality of everyday life like the green of the garden under the snow. And so the days and nights drift away with deceptive sluggishness, while those driven by desire become ever more entangled. Roland Schimmelpfennig’s story of these people is both comic and tragic.
Besuch bei dem Vater, the first part of the Trilogie der Tiere, revolves around the young man and seducer, Peter.