About the work
"Taras Augen" ("Tara's Eyes") is a young-adult novel by Katharina Bendixen, published in 2022 by Mixtvision Verlag, combining a love story with a near-future dystopia about environmental destruction and state surveillance. Christina Rast wrote the stage adaptation for Staatsschauspiel Dresden, which she directed together with Philipp Lux; it premiered on 6 March 2026 in the Kleines Haus 1.
Plot
Fifteen-year-olds Tara, a competitive swimmer, and Alún are in love when an explosion at a chemical plant devastates their home town and a wide area is evacuated. While Alún stays behind in the distant city, making himself noticed through street art, Tara secretly returns as one of the "returnees" to the contaminated exclusion zone, where more and more people are falling ill. Together with other young people she resists the planned demolition of the area and an authoritarian surveillance state, while both fight for a reunion and their freedom.
Cultural significance
The novel received the 2022 Lesekompass award from the Stiftung Lesen and the Climate Book Tip from the German Academy for Children's and Youth Literature, as well as the "Bayerns Beste Independents" award; several youth literature prize nominations followed in 2023/24. It is required reading at secondary schools in Saxony and counts as one of the better-known German-language examples of climate fiction for young adults.