Das blaue Haus

by Laura N. Junghanns (winner of the Jakob-Michael-Reinhold-Lenz Prize Jena 2024)

The world premiere by Merle Zurawski and the team tells the story of a house where a family lives, loves and argues – and of the entire universe that emerges between its walls.

Moving between fragments of memory and a television drama, the piece explores questions surrounding life, living together and living past one another, with the ever-present awareness of mortality hovering over it all.

How can a community emerge from the fragments of a mother, a father, a daughter, a son who has been absent for some time, and a grandmother who spends all day in front of the television?

How do collective and individual memories work? And what remains when memories, time and space begin to blur?

Junghanns’ text unfolds in fragments: shards of family life increasingly break away from logic and chronology. Conversations trail off, thoughts overlap, and time shifts. Gradually, the impression emerges that it is not only the characters who carry memories, but the house itself – becoming a shared space of memory for the family. At the same time, a mysterious fur begins to spread, slowly engulfing the house and its inhabitants.

»Das blaue Haus« does not portray a broken family in the conventional sense. Instead, it creates the image of a system in which language disintegrates, time becomes unstable, and what has been repressed gradually comes to light. The house is not merely a backdrop, but a space of memory – a place where past, present and future meet.

World premiere: 15 October 2026