Va†erzunge 2025

Based on a true historical event, the young South Tyrolean author Miriam Unterthiner tells the story of a young woman's life and her emancipation. She skilfully interweaves speech and language levels and in this way makes the narrowness of village society as well as the deformation of women and their rebellion tangible. The main character, Maria, is in search of her own identity, her own self, her own voice. Unterthiner writes Maria a new ending that she was not allowed to experience herself.

Maria gives voice to herself.
In short, musical prose, a woman's fate is dealt with in an exemplary way: born, emotionally neglected, deformed, not recognised as a daughter. This has an effect on the body: a hump forms as a kind of protective posture.

Like this. Head down. Like this. Back forwards. With. Face down. So with. Facing the floor
She is corrected from the outside. A wooden corset is pushed into the stream of speech and over her body. But Maria has an ally: this very floor.

I am speaking here. Yes. I am speaking here. As the floor. Is spoken here.
Like the chorus in Greek tragedy, the floor cradles and cares for the "Måidel" or, even more minimising, the "Is Måidele" and provides a firm foothold - set across the bottom of the text page, as a secure base in which Maria is in good hands.

And really, as in a philosophical fable, in the struggle for language, she succeeds, defying everything, in taking a step forwards, towards herself! AAAAAAAAAAAAA she makes up her birth cry and appropriates her name: MARIA ICH.