Lothar Kittstein

The country is uncanny, as are the house and home in which Janine and Graeck found their home and their old friend Tosch. Tosch wants their old life back—the long drives and nights in the camper in the German countryside, between hardware stores and drive-in restaurants, to the East, where the sun rises auspicious and blood red. The trio share a memory of murder and violence, and their nationalistic, fantasy-ridden conception of a hated society, cobbled together from history, trivial myth, and nightmares. In his new piece, written for Schauspiel Frankfurt, Lothar Kittstein asks questions about the abysses of civilization present in enlightened, reunified Germany, setting his piece against the backdrop of the discovery of the Neo-Nazi group “NSU.”

“You carry it inside yourself. The whole country. Dark and warm. Germany. It grows in you. Doesn’t it? You are made of it, after all. Of this earth. Your belly is made from this earth. Your little belly.”