Our volume »Young European Narrators«, edited in both languages, German and English, contains Katrin Hauau's narration »The Inner Island«.

 

Katrin Heinau is born in 1965 in Berlin, where she lives. After the Abitur and training as a bookkeeper Katrin Heinau studied sciences of literature and was employed in a second-hand bookshop.

At the same time she begann working for the theatre: From 1993 till 1997 she was trained as an actress, and then practised on stage in several ensembles.

She has been dramatic adviser at the Freies Schauspiel Berlin (Free Theater of Berlin). After attending different theat-rical productions she wrote her first own stageplay, the comedy »Schwerdtgeburth«, which has found a publisher immediately.

In 1997, the year her own carrier as an actress started, her first volume of short prose is published. It is the book »Die Fahrt ins Weiße« (»Voyage into the White«) with six concentrated and dense texts. Here Katrin Heinau narrates „about the difficulty of getting into reality uninjured“. Or as the critic Clara Steinhaus put it: „Actually, what do they all want, all these people? To get rid of their every-day life, I spontaneously decide. And then I leaf through the book again—and I am refuted. What they really want is to drill themselves right into this life as into a protecting skin which all of them are missing.“

It fitted this début that she has been honored with a scholarship by the Senate of the City of Berlin. – This gave way for her dicision to live as a free-lancing writer.

And the dicision turned out to be right; for in January 1998 Katrin Heinau’s play »Marlon Brando in Tahiti. Four Scenes« had his first performance. It was put on stage at the Nordhausen Theatre, directed by Nina Tanneberger.

With her operetta »Hotel Cumulus« Katrin Heinau takes the plunge of modernizing a genre that on one hand has a rich tradition, but also is widely neglected by contemporary writers. The theme of the operetta is acute, the plot is at right angles to the expectations one has towards operettas: it shows a society, which pays people for being allowed to do senseless work… With the music by Arno Hüsges and under the direction of Suse Kipp the realisation of such daring lies ahead: It will be performed in September 1999.