By Yade Yasemin Önder / “We live somewhere in Germany” — this is how Yade Yasemin Önder’s play begins. Yet in Die Worte gehören uns, this seemingly ordinary sentence describes the very opposite of normality. Here, in the country that is meant to be a place of refuge for Lale and Lilo’s family, nothing seems right within the family microcosm: Mama lies on the couch all day, ever since Papa forbade her to write. Lilo has to deal with the fact that he has “a girl’s name.” And Lale is the only one in the family who does not speak Turkish. When things around them begin to disappear — and eventually even Mama cannot be found — the last sense of stability for the two children seems to vanish. Why Lale cannot relate at all to her parents’ language, why Mama’s writing — something deeply important to her — puts everyone in danger, why words and sentences break apart into individual letters, and what this disintegration has to do with politics in Turkey, the country from which Lale and Lilo’s parents were forced to flee — all this the siblings discover with the help of a most unexpected friend, both new and ancient at once: a talking, flying sofa that takes them on a fairy-tale journey across Europe. The siblings’ journey brings them geographically closer to their origins, but it also leads them through time and, above all, along the boundaries of language. Turkish and German flow poetically into one another, and the play with language becomes an exploration of identity.