Reto Finger

In the kebab street, the cars are honking as if Hoffenheim had won the German football cup. The people are queuing in front of NORMA. Biking pants are €6.99, beer cans 39 cents. Three Indians are playing cricket in the bomb hole. Two old Turks are watching them. The bomb hole is really called Swansea-square, but everyone just calls it bomb hole. A sloppy plane is looking for Mannheim airport and, on the balcony across, in the central institute for mental health, someone is screaming for his life. It smells terribly of chocolate, but everyone pretends not to smell it. People are meeting around square H5, seemingly coincidentally. An honest cashier, a manager in love, an unemployed dreamer, a depressed housewife, her terminally ill husband and an uninhibited drunkard. Until, suddenly, there is a shot.

Reto Finger, former in-house author of the Nationaltheater, has lived in H7/2 for two years and was inspired to write Norma in that time.