Anyone who goes to the Schaubühne looks in the mirror. He doesn't see a big cinema, or avant-garde theatrical art, he gets to see himself in all his small superficiality. He has the feeling that he could also be sitting two streets or three capital cities away, in one of the Charlottenburg apartments in old buildings or in the new bourgeois center of London or Paris. It comes over you, as soon as you have taken a seat here as a spectator, the strange feeling of being under self-observation, not being spellbound by strangers, but being told something from familiar people that you have already said or thought in one way or another or felt. Maybe just yesterday, at that dinner on the roof terrace,when it came to homelessness or when the woman sitting next to you complained about the racism of the working class and suddenly quarrel broke out because someone wanted to take inheritance tax too seriously. Or just when the successful art agent announced her second pregnancy beaming with joy and the faces of the host couple suddenly twisted painfully.
You meet the two of them again on this summer evening in the west of Berlin: behind brightly cleaned glass panes, Caroline Peters and Christoph Gawenda lie sipping champagne on the floor of their new two hundred square meter apartment, telling dirty things, showing off their unabashed manner, about sex, Talking about porn and her pubic hair, very casually, without pressure, without consequences, and suddenly she says, as if it was another raunchy joke, that she would like to have children. One or two, there would be enough rooms now and the moment - she 38, editor-in-chief of an important newspaper, he, recently well in business and with a light leather bag on the way to the investors during the week - was favorable. Yes, he says hesitantly, yes, he could imagine that too: being a child, being a father,change the diaper - at least every now and then.
It must be because of something
There are now five agonizing years ahead of the two, in which Yerma, as the author of a widely read social blog is called, is doing everything she can to get pregnant.
She plans, she tenses, she takes hormone preparations.
But it just won't work.
In her blog she writes maliciously frankly about her ill-disposed feelings when she hears about her younger sister's pregnancy, writes about a possible erectile dysfunction of her husband (which turns out to be a mistake), writes about the complicity of her emotionally cold mother.
It must be because of something that she, who is otherwise always successful, fails here, that her "uterus remains empty".
Over time she becomes more and more cynical, more and more hostile, the motherly happiness of the other is disgusting.