Gespräch with Kathrin Röggla

a Talk with the author Kathrin Röggla about the background and special features of her theater text “Kein Plan (Kafkas Handy)” with text intervention by the ensemble.

The Theater an der Ruhr has commissioned the renowned author Kathrin Röggla to write a play for the GEHEIMNIS season. The starting point was the idea of writing a text for the Kafka anniversary in 2024 that refers to the frightening and enigmatic worlds of Kafka's literary work. The result is a theatre text that traces ‘the Kafkaesque’ in a disturbing way in our socio-political present. Among other things, Röggla incorporates observations from the ‘Reichsbürger’ trials, which she attended.
 

"A theatrical road movie. Not child's play at all. We find ourselves in a topsy-turvy world that has been with us for a long time." 
 

Kathrin Röggla was born in Salzburg in 1971 and has been active in the literary world since 1988. Her extensive work, which includes novels, theatre plays and radio works, has been awarded numerous prizes. She has been a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin since 2012 and was its Vice President from 2015 to 2024. She is also a member of the Academy for Language and Poetry and the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts. She has been a professor of ‘Literary Writing’ at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne since 2020. Her latest text ‘Laufendes Verfahren’, published by S. Fischer in 2023, is about the NSU trials.