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The monosyllabic title of this one-act play, the latest work from the prolific Tankred Dorst, is vaguely reminiscent of Helmut Qualtinger's 1962 drama Der Herr Karl. Here, however, the locale is not quaint Austria but rather a run-down and newly liberated East Germany. A longtime squatter living in a nearly abandoned factory now faces its eager and enterprising new owner. He represents the new heir, the "Erbe"--a word loaded down with years of the ideological baggage the East Gennans either carried over, or rejected, from the past.
A seemingly incongruous interchange develops between the new owner Helm, the squatter Paul, and Paul's opera-loving sister Luise. Slowly and deliberately, and at times seemingly incongruously, they begin unraveling threads of the German past on several levels, and at various stages. Their focal points are the times during which the factory's previous owners were pushed out. One such instance is a...