Stanislava Jevic

Anastasia remembers her childhood clearly: the magical tower block where she grew up, right next to the canal that could turn into a raging river, the lift that took her up to the sixth floor to Fantomas and his wolf, the playmates with whom she and her sister Anita secretly watched horror films at night, the sound of her parents' language and the distant land of Yugoslavia that once existed and has now sunk - like Atlantis. And she remembers her mother's beatings and ghosts, her father's tender hands that can't always save her, her sister's smile and the tears in her big sad eyes. She remembers the wide, yellow fields in her father's village and the blue sea and the spray in her mother's white, Venetian coastal town - and all the people who still populate these worlds and her head.
Die Erfindung meiner Kindheit oder All das, was mir das Leben rettete tells the story of a tough childhood in the Yugoslavian guest worker milieu of the 1980s in Germany. Anastasia and her family, who have not really arrived in Germany, are at the centre of the story. Her mother's mental illness shapes the socialisation of Anastasia and her sister. A traumatic childhood is described, whereby the text repeatedly creates poetic and humorous images of liberation. The play is a multidimensional narrative cosmos that switches back and forth between the perspective of the adult woman coming to terms with her past and the child's perspective, blurring the boundaries between reality and invention. The result is an aesthetic maelstrom in which childhood is evoked as if in a song of praise and lamentation - the invention of one's own childhood becomes a never-ending process and an attempt to seize control of the interpretation of one's own life.