Martha disappeared in November 1989, shortly before the end of the Ceaușescu dictatorship. She didn’t tell anyone. One day she was gone. Wanted to start a new life in the west. Her mother Kathi, on the other hand, wanted to stay more than forty years earlier. She married a Romanian so she wouldn’t be deported to Siberia. As a native of German in Transylvania, this fate threatened her after the end of the Second World War.
Stay or go Every generation asks this question anew in Elise Wilk’s radio play Disappear. Emma is also faced with this decision. She is Martha’s daughter and Kathi’s granddaughter. She doesn’t have to flee if she wants to leave her home, doesn’t have to make a lazy compromise in order to be able to stay. It is 2007 and Romania becomes a member of the EU.
But what do home and community mean in a country from which large numbers of people are disappearing? Wilk tells this based on the fate of these women. It is also a story about the lies that circulate about one another in this family. About the corrosive power of distrust. About the painful feeling of being in the wrong place. Disappear is about the fact that an external always results in an internal bondage.
Disappearance, DLF Kultur, October 13, 2021, 10:03 p.m.