Sebastian Nübling

There are moments in which everything comes together. Arda's 18th birthday, for example. Without a plan but with his friends Bojan, Danny and Savas. On a park bench without a park at the train station, skinheads to the right, cops to the left, and music in the middle. There are moments in which you're sure that someone understands your language without you having to tell them too much. Moments in which that point on your tattered biographical map comes up, in which you spend your last childhood summer, right before your friends disappear and you realize: You are alone in a country that calls you a foreigner. So get up! Run as fast as you can and then faster. Because that's the way it is: if no one wants to know who you are, you have to find out yourself. Out of breath, Arda Yilmaz searches for the fragments of a language that recalls memories of childhood in Almanya and a German-Turkish family history amidst the turmoil of »guest« work and the Turkish putsch. Above all else Arda is searching for an unknown father, to whose failed revolution he is somehow related, without ever having dreamt of it. Where is the land of the de-integrated? Who sings the songs of the mothers who fight alone? How does the chorus sound, the chorus of those who eternally flee and never arrive? There are moments in which all these questions flare up before they disappear, as in a fade-out on the last track of the record of your life.

Necati Öziri, born in 1987, is an author, dramaturg and the artistic director of Studio Я. His debut play Vorhaut (Foreskin, created together with Tunçay Kulaoğlu and Miraz Bezar) was premiered in 2014 at the Ballhaus Naunynstraße. His new text, Get deutsch or die tryin', is an album with an A- and B-side that tells of mothers who are keen on Columbo and vodka, of absent fathers, of deported friends, of birthdays in the corridors of the Foreigners' Registration Office, of hip hop, soul, violence and life in a language that does not belong to you.

A young woman, who finds the love of her life in a chat, entrusts herself to him, and is ready to leave for Syria. When her plan fails, she packs her rucksack full of knives and goes to the nearest train station. He flees to a friend, the one his parents warned him about.

»You expect something, you expect something from the world, and that expectation is a nerve that twitches.«

Sasha Marianna Salzmann's new text for the theatre, Zucken (Twitching), tells of young people who feel an increasing distance between themselves and the usual uncertainties of everyday life: political doubt, sexual surprises and the impossibility of responding to life's big, honest questions with indifference. Why do people whose lives are just beginning embark on a journey to find radical alternatives to what the social consensus has arranged for them?