Table Talk

I AM SITTING on a bench in Viktoria-Luise Platz in Berlin, during the hot summer of 2018. The immigrant family next to me in the Platz appear to be on the move. They have several huge, battered suitcases on wheels, along with a shopping cart full of miscellaneous belongings, backpacks, and smaller handbags. Everything looks scuffed. And they look tired. It’s a little uncomfortable to see that, in this heat, they’re wearing jackets—a sign perhaps that they’re living outdoors, as even on hot days Berlin cools down at night. I can’t make out where they’re from; they’re not speaking Arabic or what sounds like a language from the region. Could they be Roma? The husband, unshaven and courtly, is holding two large glass beer mugs in one hand and carefully pouring a pint in equal measures; he hands one to the mother and they clink. The oddity of the scene—the bags, the cart, the look and bearing of itinerant weariness, coupled with the suggestion of domestic comfort and settlement that comes with heavy glass mugs and an impromptu toast—drops the situation into an ambiguous space. What is happening?

The question echoes a startling moment in a stage adaptation I saw recently of Christa Wolf’s novel . It was so good I hunted down a copy of the novel at St. George’s English Bookshop, a mecca for the Anglophone bookhound in Prenzlauer Berg. The work—Wolf calls it “a modern retelling”—is a prism of perspectives, polyvocal and contradictory, and the Deutsches Theatre production brightens the point by holding fast to the German title, . At the center, of course, is hers, but it is interleaved with dramatic monologues by other principle figures that, in the dramatic interpretation, interrupt