About the work
“Im Herzen der Gewalt” (original title “Histoire de la violence”, in English “History of Violence”) is the second novel by the French writer Édouard Louis. It was published in 2016 by Éditions du Seuil and in Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel’s German translation by S. Fischer in 2017; it follows on chronologically from Louis’s debut “The End of Eddy” and is based on an act of violence the author himself suffered on Christmas Eve 2012. The stage version was developed jointly by Thomas Ostermeier, Florian Borchmeyer and Louis and premiered on 3 June 2018 at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin, directed by Ostermeier.
Plot
The first-person narrator Édouard, a young man in Paris, takes a stranger named Reda back to his flat on Christmas night. When he finds his missing phone in Reda’s coat the next morning, the encounter turns: Reda strangles and rapes him. Édouard reports the crime to the police and experiences the questioning that follows as a further injury. The novel is told non-chronologically; part of the events Édouard secretly overhears as his sister Clara recounts them to her husband.
Cultural significance
The novel was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2020; Lorin Stein’s English translation appeared in 2018. Ostermeier’s stage version was co-produced with partners including the Théâtre de la Ville Paris and St. Ann’s Warehouse, where it was also shown in New York in 2019. Critics praised the precise ensemble work but asked whether the radically subjective force of the source survives on stage.