About the work
Herkunft (Where You Come From) is the stage version of the eponymous, much-honoured autobiographical novel (2019) by Saša Stanišić, for which the author received the German Book Prize in 2019. The work combines a personal story of migration with universal questions of memory, identity and the meaning of "origin" when the homeland has collapsed in war.
Plot
The narrator — an alter ego of the author — navigates between different times and places: childhood memories of Višegrad in the former Yugoslavia, the family's flight from the Bosnian War, arrival and growing up in the German city of Heidelberg, and visits to his grandmother, who suffers from dementia and whose fading memory makes storytelling itself a theme. In episodes, digressions and splinters of memory, the text circles the question of where a person comes from when the place of origin no longer exists — and culminates in a fairy-tale-like, playful resolution in which the reader or spectator helps decide how the story continues.
Cultural significance
Stanišić's Herkunft became one of the most discussed German-language books of recent years and, with its blend of refugee experience, family history and literary self-reflection, struck a social nerve. Stage versions transfer the fragmentary, polyphonic narrative style to the theatre and make the engagement with migration and identity directly tangible — a central theme of the German-language present.