Sasha Marianna Salzmann is a novelist, essayist, playwright, and curator, widely regarded as one of the most significant voices in contemporary European literature and theatre. Born in 1985 in Volgograd, she grew up in Moscow before emigrating with her family to Germany in 1995 — an experience that would profoundly shape her later explorations of identity, migration, and belonging.
She studied literature, theatre, and media studies at the University of Hildesheim and later joined the prestigious “Szenisches Schreiben” (Writing for the Stage) program at the Berlin University of the Arts. Early in her career, she worked as an assistant director and assistant dramaturg at Schauspielhaus Hannover and Theaterhaus Jena, while simultaneously publishing poems, essays, and short dramatic texts in various literary magazines.
In 2002, Salzmann co-founded the cultural and social magazine freitext, which she co-edited until 2013. Her theatrical writing quickly gained recognition: her early play White Bread Music received the Wiener Wortstaetten Prize in 2009 and IKARUS 2012, and was invited to several international festivals. In 2012, she was awarded the Kleist Prize for Young Dramatists for her play Birthmarks Window Blue, while Mother Tongue Mameloschn was nominated for the Mülheimer Audience Award as Best Play of the Year in 2013.
Since the 2014–2015 season, Salzmann has been writer-in-residence at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin, where she also served as artistic director of Studio Я until 2015. Her plays are staged internationally and have received numerous awards and distinctions.
In prose, she made her literary debut in 2017 with the novel Beside Myself (Außer sich), which was shortlisted for the German Book Prize. Her second novel, Im Menschen muss alles herrlich sein (Everything Must Be Wonderful in Human Beings), published in 2021, was also shortlisted for the German Book Prize and later received the Heinrich Heine Prize, the Hermann Hesse Literature Prize, and the Literary Houses Prize.
Today, Sasha Marianna Salzmann works as a freelance writer and lives between Berlin and Istanbul. Alongside her literary and theatrical work, she teaches creative writing in Germany, Turkey, Moldova, Spain, Italy, and the United States.
Based on an award-winning novel that received multiple distinctions in Germany, adapted for the stage of Thalia Theater Hamburg by author Sasha Marianna Salzmann together with director Hakan Savaş Mican, the play creates a vast fresco of the disintegration of a world and of the historical forces that continue to fracture individual identity and family memory.
The story follows the fate of two women who, in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the proclamation of Ukraine’s independence, emigrate to Germany together with their daughters. Arriving in a post-reunification Germany marked itself by uncertainty and profound transformation, they are forced to abandon not only their former professions and social status, but also an essential part of their own identity. Doctors, dancers, intellectuals of a system that disappeared overnight, these people become the “losers of history”, compelled to rebuild their lives from scratch within a society that tolerates them, yet never fully integrates them.
At the heart of the play lies the relationship between generations: the mothers, shaped by a culture of survival and compromise, and their daughters, raised in an apparently free Europe, yet incapable of fully understanding their own roots.
Translated by: Ciprian Marinescu
Cast: Emőke Boldizsár, Johanna Adam, Fatma Mohamed, Vivianne Havrilla, Ada Bicfalvi, Cătălin Neghină, David Cristian
.png?locale=en)
