For his autofictional play The Silence, Falk Richter goes back into his own family history. His father died without being able to have a reconciliatory dialogue with his son.
In a dialogue with his mother, he examines truths that have remained unspoken for decades, suppressed secrets and unresolved traumas that have not left him in peace to this day.

How did the atrocities that his father experienced during the war leave their mark on the family history and his parents’ marriage, and how did the trauma of his mother’s expulsion and flight from West Prussia? What was kept secret in the family for years? How did the author and his sister grow up in post-war provincial West Germany, how did the family construct itself? How was the author’s gay identity, which was already emerging in his teenage years, suppressed and fought against by his parents? How did they react to the homophobic hostility he experienced? How did trauma, silence and violent repression continue in the author’s own relationships?

The confrontation between mother and son becomes a journey into the abysses of West German bourgeois society from the post-war period to the present day. But how reliable is the author’s own memory, how credible is the mother’s life story? And couldn’t everything have been completely different? Soon the autobiographical and the fictional intermingle, memories contradict each other and possibilities of other realities open up. In playing with autobiography and fiction, in the contradictions of one’s own history, hope also germinates: What other models of masculinity, and thus other types of fatherhood and parenthood, are possible? What forms of relationships exist beyond patriarchal oppression and violence? What could a completely different life look like?