“Carpets are woven from stories”. Problems of generational storytelling in NINO HARATISCHWILI’S Das achte Leben (Für Brilka) and JETTE STECKEL’S adaptation at the Thalia Theater Hamburg

Abstract

In NINO HARATISCHWILI’S Das achte Leben (Für Brilka) the novel’s narrator, Niza, unsuccessfully attempts to relate Georgia’s Soviet history and her family’s history between 1900 and 2006. The paper argues that the deficits in Niza’s narrative programme are actually productive contradictions, which are typical of the narrative poetics of the generational novel, in that it does not succeed in synthesising the individual, familial and political histories into one meaningful narrative. The end of the novel therefore changes to a new medium: from the literary representation of history, to its performative embodiment in dance. This anticipates the theatrical adaptation of the novel by JETTE STECKEL at the Thalia Theater Hamburg in 2017.