Thomas Perle

karpatenflecken
Gewinnerstück des Retzhofer Dramapreises 2019
3 D, 2 H
UA: 10.12.2021 · Deutsches Theater Berlin · Directed by: András Dömötör
Thomas Perle belongs to a minority, or actually two. He was born in Romania as a descendant of the "teitschen" population who immigrated from the Salzkammergut and Tyrol in the 18th century. When his family moved to Germany in 1991, he was once again part of a minority that should have always been part of the majority: "Do you profess to be German?" was the question asked at the time of immigration.

karpatenflecken places three women from three generations at the centre of a large historical panorama that takes its starting point from a small patch of land in the Romanian Carpathians. The grandmother Margarethe, her daughter and her granddaughter are driven across political, geographical and linguistic boundaries through the history of the 20th and 21st centuries. Thomas Perle, who is one of the few people left who speak Spišerian, which is amalgamated from Old Austrian, Romanian, Hungarian and Yiddish, has written an unsentimental play that is familiar with all these languages. How politics shape languages and shift their boundaries and meanings, and how much sense of self is nevertheless contained in languages, is something em>karpatenflecken knows how to tell about, and about a small spot on the map that could be called Europe. (Announcement of the Burgtheater Vienna)
In 2019 Thomas Perle won the Retzhofer Drama Prize with karpatenflecken.
Translated into: Hungarian, Italian, Romanian