Hi, I’m Petra Tabarelli, a German playwright, historian and archivist working between theatre, cultural memory and public history.
I’m particularly interested in the stories societies tell about their past: what gets remembered, what quietly disappears, and how ideas of history, identity and place are shaped over time. That question has followed me through much of my work, although the form in which I explore it has changed considerably over the years.
Today, an increasing part of that work happens through theatre.
I write plays alongside my career as head of the municipal archive in Bingen am Rhein, and I’m currently developing my work primarily within the UK theatre landscape. I have trained in playwriting with the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and London Playwrights.
My first full-length play, Pebbles, grew out of historical research into British travellers on the Rhine in the early nineteenth century. Set in 1825, it follows a young Englishwoman travelling through a landscape already being turned into the Romantic Rhine of the British imagination. The play is currently in development, with R&D taking place in London.
I am also adapting the life of Simon Rosenberger for the stage. Rosenberger was a Jewish-German football pioneer, referee and administrator whose contribution to the early history of German football was largely erased from later accounts. My biography Simon Rosenberger: Der vergessene Fußballpionier was published by Hentrich & Hentrich in 2022.
Theatre is a relatively new medium in my work, but many of the questions behind it are not.
For more than a decade, I have worked with different forms of public history and historical storytelling. In 2013, I was one of five historians behind the digital history project @9Nov38. Using diaries, contemporary documents and historical research, we reconstructed the events surrounding the November pogroms of 1938 seventy-five years later, day by day and, where possible, hour by hour. The project reached more than 11,000 followers within two weeks, received widespread national and international media coverage, won the Golden Blogger Award for Best Twitter Account and was later recognised with the dpa news talent award.
The same team returned in 2015 with @DigitalPast – Heute vor 70 Jahren, tracing the final months of the Second World War in Germany through contemporary voices and documents. The project was accompanied by the book Als der Krieg nach Hause kam, published by Propyläen/Ullstein, to which I contributed as a researcher and writer.
For several years, another major strand of my research was the cultural and institutional history of football. I specialised particularly in the development of the Laws of the Game, refereeing and forgotten or marginalised figures within football history. In 2023, I was appointed a member of the German Academy for Football Culture, an expert network bringing together people from football, academia, journalism and cultural life.
My work as an archivist has developed alongside all of this.
As head of the municipal archive in Bingen, I am responsible for preserving and making accessible the documentary memory of the city. Just as importantly to me, I develop ways of bringing local history beyond the archive itself. My public-history work has included exhibitions, publications, social media, photography, oral history and increasingly performative forms of historical storytelling. My talks often make use of costume, objects, character and staging rather than following the format of a conventional academic lecture.
That gradual movement towards performance is one of the reasons theatre now feels less like a departure from my earlier work than a continuation of it in another form.
Much of my recent historical research has centred on Britain, the Long Regency and Romantic period, and the cultural memory of England and Germany. I am particularly interested in how landscapes and national identities become imagined: the Romantic Rhine as seen by nineteenth-century British travellers, for example, or the enduring idea of an idyllic, timeless rural England and the way it resurfaces in contemporary culture.
My research into Midsomer Murders sits within that wider interest. Rather than treating the series simply as television history, I use it as a way of examining nostalgia, Englishness, rural idylls and the cultural afterlives of older ideas about England.
Across these different projects, I keep returning to similar questions.
Who gets remembered? Who does not? What happens when a historical reality becomes a cultural story? And what happens when we put that story in front of an audience and allow them to make something of it for themselves?
That last question is increasingly where my work as a playwright begins.