Eine Version der Geschichte

Jury Statement

“He is dead. That is how it has to be.” These are the first lines of Simone Kucher’s play “Eine Version der Geschichte (One version of the story)”. It recounts what remains and what disappears. A search for traces, triggered by an encounter. After a violin concert by Armenian composer Khatchaturian, an old man approaches Lusine, a musician. He quotes a poem by the Armenian poet Hamo Sahjan. She knows the poem. “Eine Version der Geschichte” is a play for 3 women and 3 men of different generations, and a tape recorder. It deals with memory, with products of creative work as starting points for one’s own history and with taking responsibility for one’s own biography. There are stories of Armenians in exile, of a planned journey to Turkey, a relationship between a female musician of Armenian origins and a Turkish-French conductor, of a genocide not acknowledged by the country of the perpetrators and of documents that prove the involvement of the German Reich in this genocide. And for good measure, there are the voices of prisoners of the First World War, from a time when linguists set out to collect foreign languages with the aid of a phonograph. In those days, the play says, phonographs were advertised with this slogan: “Now spirits can speak. Or better: The dead can speak.” The dead can speak when we get involved with them. A precise text that chooses a poetical form to address stories of displacement, the construction of identities and the public debate about official histories of a genocide. A line in the play says “We are looking for people who will follow the traces”. Simone Kucher’s text encourages us to do just that.

Hans-Werner Kroesinger