Loher

[This page by Michael Navratil]

Dea Loher

Dea Loher, a German playwright, is one of the most prominent exponents of contemporary German drama, alongside such writers as Albert Ostermaier, Roland Schimmelpfennig and René Pollesch.

Loher was born in Traunstein, Bavaria, in 1964. After the completion of her studies of philosophy and German at Munich in 1988, Loher spent one year in Brazil before starting her studies of dramatic writing at Berlin University of the Arts under Heiner Müller and Yaak Karsunke. Her first play Olgas Raum; Olga’s Room premiered in Hamburg in 1991. Loher lives and works in Berlin.

Until now, Loher has written nearly 20 plays; she also published a collection of short stories (Hundskopf; The Dog’s Head) and a novel (Bugatti taucht auf; Bugatti Appears). Her work has received numerous literary awards, such as the Else-Lasker-Schüler-Dramatikerpreis, the Bertolt-Brecht-Literaturpreis and the Berliner Literaturpreis.

In her plays, Loher deals repeatedly with questions of politics, history, feminism and social ills as well as with issues of personal happiness and private life. Without regressing to a naturalist aesthetics, Loher does not − unlike many postmodernist writers − abandon concepts such as plot, directed action or successful communication in her plays. Her work has consequently been claimed as part of the neo-dramatic theatre movement in the German-speaking countries, which distances itself from the positions of ‘post-dramatic theatre’ (Peter Weiss, Elfriede Jelinek, René Pollesch) and strives to reestablish a more coherent and semantically contained aesthetics of the theatre. Her eminently political, yet non-moralising dramatic work has been interpreted as a productive appropriation of the legacy of Bertolt Brecht (Birgit Haas).

Plays include:

Olga’s Raum (1992); Olga’s Room

Tätowierung (1992); Tattoo

Leviathan (1993)

Blaubart − Hoffnung der Frauen (1997); Bluebeard − the Hope of Women

Adam Geist (1998)

Manhattan Medea (1999)

Unschuld (2003); Innocence

Das Leben auf der Praça Rooseevelt (2004); Life on Praça Roosevelt

Das letzte Feuer (2008); The Last Fire

Diebe (2010); Thieves

Other works include:

Hundskopf. Erzählungen (2005); The Dog’s Head. Short stories

Bugatti taucht auf. Roman (2012); Bugatti Appears. Novel

Further Reading in English

Birgit Haas, ‘History Through the Lens of the Uncertainty Principle: Dea Loher’s Leviathan’, The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 39:1 (2006), 73-88

Birgit Haas, ‘Sexual Abuse: Dea Loher’s Tätowierung (1992)’, in Birgit Haas (ed.), Modern German Political Drama 1980-2000 (New York: Camden House, 2003), pp. 146-48

Malgorzata Sugiera, ‘Beyond Drama: Writing for Postdramatic Theatre’, Theatre Research International 29:1 (Chicago University Press: 2004), 16-28

Further Reading in German

Nikolaus Frei, Die Rückkehr der Helden: Deutsches Drama der Jahrhundertwende (1994-2001) (Tübingen: Narr, 2006)

Jens Groß, Ulrich Khuon (eds.), Dea Loher und das Schauspiel Hannover (Niedersächsisches Staatstheater Hannover: 1998)

Birgit Haas, Plädoyer für ein dramatisches Drama (Wien: Passagen, 2007)

Birgit Haas, Das Theater der Dea Loher: Brecht und (k)ein Ende (Bielefeld: Asthesis, 2006)

Birgit Haas (ed.), Dea Loher. Special Issue. Monatshefte 99 (Madison, Wisconsin: 2007)