About the work
“Muna oder Die Hälfte des Lebens” (Muna, or Half of Life) is a novel by Terézia Mora, published in 2023 by Luchterhand Literaturverlag and conceived as the first part of a planned trilogy about womanhood. The stage adaptation by Leonie Rebentisch, who also directed it, premiered on 23 May 2026 at Theater Osnabrück (emma-theater) with a cast of three actresses.
Plot
Muna grows up in Jüris, a small town in the GDR, with her widowed mother, an actress with a drinking problem. In 1989, shortly before her final school exams, she spends one night with Magnus, a much older photographer, who soon afterwards vanishes to the West. Seven years later they meet again in Berlin and become a couple. Across some twenty years and places such as Berlin, London, Vienna and Basel, Muna herself tells how she slides into a dependency marked by coldness, moods and violence, which for a long time she takes to be a home.
Cultural significance
The novel was shortlisted for the German Book Prize in 2023 and received consistently positive reviews in the major German papers. Critics singled out its unreliable first-person narrator and Mora's precise language for a relationship in which power and violence gradually become normal.