"Mein wahrer Name ist Elisabeth"
Thalia presents
In collaboration with the Institut français Hamburg
Reading and moderated discussion
in French and German (translation)
Who was Elisabeth? In her family, she remained for decades little more than a name, a rumor, and a taboo. Locked away, lobotomized. It is only her great-granddaughter Adèle Yon who begins to reconstruct the story of this woman. From letters, medical records, interviews, and the gaps of family silence emerges the haunting portrait of a life that was meant to be erased from memory.
“Mein wahrer Name ist Elisabeth” is much more than a novel. The award-winning debut combines autobiographical research, scientific inquiry, and literary storytelling. Documents, family letters, conversations, and personal reflections coalesce into a polyphonic narrative in which the author simultaneously makes her own search for truth comprehensible. In doing so, she depicts a personal as well as societal panorama of silence and forgetting, but above all, the impact of traumas across generations.
The fate of her great-grandmother also reveals a dark chapter in the history of psychiatry. Women who did not conform to the socially expected image were quickly deemed "hysterical" or "difficult" and were locked away. Self-determination became a diagnosis, and medicine served as a means of control. This led to lobotomies, forced treatments, and decades-long internments. Biographies were erased, often also from the memory of their own families. Adèle Yon brings this repressed chapter back into public consciousness and shows impressively how power, violence, and silence continue to resonate to this day.
Adèle Yon, born in Paris in 1994, studied at the École Normale Supérieure and is working on her doctorate at the creative research laboratory SACRe. She works as an author, film scholar, and cook in Paris. “Mein wahrer Name ist Elisabeth” is both a literary debut and the foundation of her dissertation. In France, the book has been celebrated as an extraordinary work that impressively connects literature, documentary research, and family history.
Entry: 7:00 PM
Hallo, ich bin Maya.
