Im Menschen muss alles herrlich sein

About the production

Based on an award-winning novel that received multiple distinctions in Germany, adapted for the stage of Thalia Theater Hamburg by author Sasha Marianna Salzmann together with director Hakan Savaş Mican, the play creates a vast fresco of the disintegration of a world and of the historical forces that continue to fracture individual identity and family memory.

The story follows the fate of two women who, in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the proclamation of Ukraine's independence, emigrate to Germany together with their daughters. Arriving in a post-reunification Germany marked itself by uncertainty and profound transformation, they are forced to abandon not only their former professions and social status, but also an essential part of their own identity. Doctors, dancers, intellectuals of a system that disappeared overnight, these people become the “losers of history”, compelled to rebuild their lives from scratch within a society that tolerates them, yet never fully integrates them.

At the heart of the play lies the relationship between generations: the mothers, shaped by a culture of survival and compromise, and their daughters, raised in an apparently free Europe, yet incapable of fully understanding their own roots.

The reading was presented on 24 June 2026 at Casa Artelor, in the reading section “Virgil Flonda” of the Sibiu International Theatre Festival, in the Romanian translation by Ciprian Marinescu, and closed that year's series. It was moderated by Bobi Pricop and recorded by the Romanian National Radio Theatre. The text is published in the festival's anthology of plays.

“Directors like Petra Rațiu, Bobi Pricop or Bogdan Sărătean put structure where others would have let things take their own course.”