In the summer of 2017 I started conducting interviews with my father, about his childhood in the newly formed GDR, life in what was then Karl-Marx Stadt, the traces of the Second World War, his grandparents, studying, first experiences in the theater and the founding of the Zinnober theater group in East Berlin. And at some point also about how he met my mother and his first memories of me. At this point the conversation suddenly breaks off and he asks me to switch off the recording device.

"What Remains" is the result of an intensive examination of the question of where one's own biography actually begins and how the pictures and stories of the mothers and fathers usually unconsciously shape us more than we suspect. Based on my father's concrete biographical experiences, the work tries to tell something about a generation and its life in the GDR  and at the same time seeks the possibility of mediation. How do you tell about a country  that no longer exists?

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For each performance, I design a new sequence of dialogue parts and stage directions, which the young performers receive via headphones. Through the composition, the biography of a man arises again and again, filled with new details, which, like memory, is fragile and erratic. The performers only know text fragments in advance and repeat the recorded texts live. Through this constellation, the fragility of memory is reflected in the way young people speak  an ambivalent relationship between the questioning child and the answering father -  a relationship that shapes and at the same time leads to an undescribed adulthood  with their own responsibilities and tasks.