Die Frau mit den vier Armen

Inline skates on his feet, strangulation marks on his neck, headphones in his ears. The body of a young man lies on the banks of the river Ihme in Hanover. A case for the equally brilliant and brusque Rita Aitzinger and her colleague Ilia Schuster from the homicide squad. Between the opera, a railway station pub and a burger joint, they get deeper and deeper into a thicket of references: Pop songs, dating app profiles, mysterious tattoos - they are the key to solving the case, Rita is convinced. Or has she fallen into the snare of a psycho killer? Was Sebastian Tamm not the first victim? And what does the shy patrolman Gerd Lampe have to do with it?

The Woman with Four Arms tells the story of sad boys who seek happiness and find death. Abysmal, full of quirky characters and with humour, Nolte shows a Hanover that has never existed before and invents a Lower Saxony noir. It is about police work, justice and the question of whether one can be guilty of thinking like others.

Jakob Nolte, born in 1988, grew up in Barsinghausen am Deister. His theatre plays have won several awards and have been performed on numerous stages across Europe. His debut novel ALFF was honoured with the Kunstpreis Literatur 2016. His novel Schreckliche Gewalten was nominated for the German Book Prize in 2017. He is co-curator of the website tegelmedia.net and lives in Berlin. Kurzes Buch über Tobias is his first book published by Suhrkamp Verlag.

A series of events organised by Mülheimer Theatertage in cooperation with Theater an der Ruhr and the bookshop Bücherträume.