About the work
Die Holländerinnen is a stage adaptation of the novel of the same name by Dorothee Elmiger, which won the German Book Prize, the Swiss Book Prize and the Bavarian Book Prize in 2025. Deutsches Theater Berlin brings the material to the stage in 2026 (premiere 16 October 2026). Elmiger's text is less a conventional narrative novel than a many-layered reflection on storytelling itself.
Plot
A nameless writer receives a call from a celebrated theatre-maker who wants to win her over for an audacious project: in a Central American rainforest, the disappearance of two Dutch students is to be reconstructed on stage. The narrator joins the theatre troupe on its journey into the depths of the jungle. From this framing story, numerous tales unfold about fear, violence, lostness and the failure of narratives — a text that deliberately blurs the lines between reality, reconstruction and fiction.
Cultural significance
Dorothee Elmiger's novel is among the most awarded German-language works of 2025 and is regarded as an image-rich, unsettling meditation on the power and powerlessness of storytelling. The Deutsches Theater adaptation carries this nested narrative structure onto the stage — a subject whose very core, a theatre troupe re-enacting a real case, already points back to theatre itself.