Thomas Herget

Thomas Herget was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1964. He studied plastics technology and mechanical engineering in Darmstadt, and also wrote for newspapers and magazines in German-speaking countries. After receiving awards and scholarships in the 1980s and 1990s, he initially turned away from the literary world. As a journalist, he contributed articles to the business, science, culture and society sections of taz, Frankfurter Rundschau and various magazines, and wrote film reviews for the Passauer Neue Presse and Junge Welt, for example. For over three and a half decades, Herget was responsible for the culture editor of a city magazine; today he writes mainly for and about the theater and radio.

In his partially fictional theater and radio plays, he often contrasts interpersonal catastrophes and the banality of everyday life with black humor and absurd comedy. His burlesques, influenced by bigotry and existentialism, are set in marginalized environments and in the midst of dystopian settings such as trailer parks or abandoned power plants. In the style of high-speed conversational comedies, his damaged characters often regain their private happiness through civil disobedience or the mystery of the imagination by indulging their anarchic pleasure in inventing crazy stories.

In March 2020, Herget was also the world's first playwright to make the corona pandemic a stage theme - at the same time, the first two people in Germany died of Covid-19, including a seventy-eight-year-old with pre-existing conditions from the Heinsberg district. In the years that followed, epidemics and natural disasters increasingly found their way into his play developments. Herget lives near Kiel.