By Gili Izikovitz
19.02.2026 / Haaretz
This article was originally published in Hebrew. This is an automated translation.
The realization that something profound had changed in her relationship with her father struck playwright and author Helgard Haug in the second year of his illness. It was 2015, she was 46, and alongside moments of lucidity, her father was already showing signs of confusion and disorientation, unfamiliar forgetfulness, and suspicion accompanied by fits of rage. At a family gathering on Christmas Day, after several worrying months, he himself said that he feared he was developing dementia; but it was only in the spring that Haug, the second of four children, understood the true significance of his medical condition. That day, she went to visit her father at the convalescent home, and together they went for a walk in the nearby forest. They always did this, walking without a clear destination, relying on his navigational skills and sense of direction. But this time, after walking for a long time, she realized that they were completely lost in the dense forest. Now, she realized, her father was confused, and she had to find the way for both of them. Keep walking, yes, but where to?
“Dementia invites a broader discussion than what happened at that moment,” she says with a quarter smile. "It forces us to ask what ground we are standing on. Anyone who comes into contact with dementia patients experiences this feeling that you have no idea where they are. Parents are the pillars on which your world is built. They are the solid ground. Sometimes you want to get closer to them and sometimes you want to distance yourself, but everything you do will be in relation to what they represent in your life. Dementia brings you face to face with this man who is your father. He is there, he looks like himself, but the relationship changes suddenly. Now the responsibility is yours. I remember that moment on the trip when I understood this literally. I never had to rely on myself to find our way; my father always knew where to go to get there, and it never even occurred to me not to be completely relaxed on these father-daughter trips. Suddenly, it became clear to me that this was no longer the case; the responsibility was mine, and I had to take control of the situation, to navigate us literally—both on this particular path and on every level of meaning.
The idea of disappearance, of a person being erased, echoed in Haug's mind throughout her father's eight years of illness, from the moment he showed early signs of dementia until his death from COVID-19 in early 2021. She turned to it and then focused her professional attention on it. This was not particularly unusual: Haug, a theater maker and playwright, one of the founders of the German theater group Rimini Protokoll, had done this before, becoming absorbed in a subject, researching it, and then creating something inspired by it. She did not intend to draw on her personal experience; at first, her research took her to completely different areas, but as she continued to delve into the subject, it seemed to her that two parallel storylines were forming before her eyes, and their combination provided a profound answer to the big question that interested her.
Haug found herself caught up in the details of the investigation into the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH 370, which departed from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing on March 8, 2014. The fog surrounding the circumstances of the plane crash and the deaths of the 239 passengers and crew members on board has never been cleared, and mountains of theories and explanations have been built around the event. On the other hand, there was the disappearance of her father, who sank and disappeared somewhere in the darkness of his mind while still alive. The fact that these two events happened at the same time, in early 2014, seemed to fuse the two disappearances together and raised the same questions: Where are you? Where did you go? How do you cope? In both cases, shocked and grieving relatives were left behind, plunged into uncertainty in the face of an unsolved disappearance.
At some point, Haug came across a theory called Ambiguous Loss, a term coined in the 1970s by American researcher Dr. Pauline Bose to describe a deep sense of grief that cannot be healed due to a lack of clear facts or an unambiguous conclusion. Hogg connected the two topics, and in 2022, she wrote a play that premiered. She called it All Right. Good Night, after the last words spoken by the captain of Flight 17 to the control tower in Kuala Lumpur, 39 minutes after takeoff, as he left Malaysian airspace. The play, which has since been staged throughout Europe and translated into French, English, and Spanish, deals with metaphysical questions of death and presence. “All Right. Good Night” is also the title of an unusual memoir that Haug wrote based on the play, which was published in Hebrew earlier this month (Ruth Library, translated by Tali Kons).
"The big issue that interested me was disappearance, and ostensibly it was a theoretical matter. The idea of disappearance is contrary to theater, which wants to happen, to make itself present, to put itself on stage. I was fascinated by the question of whether we could create a work that questions existence, that examines disappearance, in the medium that most seeks presence and visibility. I began to meet many people who could tell me something about disappearance. My family history was not present at this stage; in principle, I would never reveal my feelings or personal experiences in this way.
The disappearance of the Malaysian plane was one point I thought about in my research, but once you turn your attention to the Malaysian plane, it's very difficult to leave the research because there are countless theories and conspiracies, the story is torn and fragmented and makes no sense in any way, and it involves so many victims. I dove into it and got lost in it, and because it was still ongoing and completely unsolved, I couldn't figure out how to bring it to the stage. Turning the unprocessed loss of the victims' families into dramatic material seemed flawed to me, but I found that I identified with some of what they described. The loss of my father's memory is, of course, not comparable to the terrible uncertainty they faced, but emotionally I felt I had a deep understanding.
Pauline Boss writes about her patients whose family members disappeared or were victims of the September 11 attacks, as well as about caring for family members of dementia patients. The feeling of separation from those you love is common. I tried to combine the two. It was a hesitant and risky move; I never mix my life with my work, but I decided to try and see how I might succeed in doing so without shocking or exploiting my personal story. I wanted to get closer and further away all the time, not to flaunt my feelings, and that's how these two lines, these two plot threads, were created."
The two plot lines that intertwine in Haug's memoir create both high tension and intellectual detachment. The combination of the two stories forces readers not to get emotionally carried away by either of them. The insights that arise regarding one topic immediately apply to the other. Haug explores the grief of the victims' families and the many theories that seek to explain the plane's disappearance (she lists more than 70 books written on the subject). She recounts what is known about what happened on board the plane before its mysterious disappearance from radar and what happened in the search for its remains. She returns to the same names again and again and recounts what investigators and experts have uncovered and how the families acted. At the same time, she reconstructs what happened in her father's life during his eight years of illness, but also wanders into the distant past, which she did not know at all or knew only vaguely — from her father's childhood during World War II, through the young, rigid man he grew up to be, who divorced her mother and remarried, to the clear and tough way in which he looked at what lay ahead of him and prepared for it.
In a relaxed video chat, she explains: "I felt I had to look for him in his biography, in his history, and in areas he never shared with me, and I didn't know what he had been through in them. These are, of course, the moments when you realize that he was there your whole life, but you only appeared in his life at a certain moment. In fact, you only exist there for a short part of the time. When he fell ill, I realized that I had a task — to adapt myself to who my father is now. If you have the opportunity to play along with him, it's better. When I stopped insisting on the facts, insisting that today is Monday, that the date is this and that, and that I am your daughter and you are my father, it was the key to better times for us. We could laugh again and enjoy each other's company. I could forget myself and who I was in relation to him, and that was nice, but alongside that, he also had a history. He was something, and I didn't know everything.
Egbert Haug, who is not mentioned in the book by name but only as “Father” or “Dad,” was born in 1938 to a poor German family. His daughter writes in the book about a conversation in which he tells her how, after he was born, a family friend advised his father to join the Nazi party out of a sense of responsibility for providing for the family. That was the obvious reality: Mein Kampf in the library (her father does not remember if he read it and if the family got rid of it after the war or simply moved it to the back shelves, as many households did), a picture of the Führer on the wall, and a terrible fear of bombing, which he returns to again and again. In his notes, which she quotes in the book, she finds a memory he wrote after “we finally lost.” He recalls how he sat and stared at the bright square left by the picture that had been suddenly removed from the wall, surrounded by yellowed wallpaper. She quotes from his soul-searching: “Fascism settled in our thoughts and feelings, mostly secretly. It really left a deep mark on the early, fateful years of our generation. Biographically speaking, it's not our parents who are the fascist generation, but us.”
Later, despite coming from a poor family, he was accepted into an academic high school and, against his parents' wishes, enrolled in theology studies. After college, he moved to New York and also lived in Cleveland. He was deeply influenced by Martin Luther King's “I Have a Dream” speech and returned to his country with the belief that every Christian must be radical and strive for change. He left her mother, whom he had met when he was a pastor in a small village, in the 1980s and moved into a men's cooperative apartment in Frankfurt. For a time, he was involved in local politics and served as a city councilor for the Social Democratic Party. She remembers the demonstrations he took her and her older sister to and the social initiatives he conceived and implemented. One of them, a cooperative community for the elderly that included a sheltered apartment for dementia patients, was where he ultimately ended his life. He was, she explains, a strict and organized man who carefully prepared for the last chapter of his life. She describes how she and her brother—he had two other children from his second marriage—sat with him after his diagnosis in the garden of the senior community where he had moved, silently watching the dementia patients with him.
"I think my father was characterized by very clear thinking about what happened and what was happening around him. This caused him to be a political person throughout his life and to be characterized by rigidity and judgmentalism. He was not necessarily a pleasant person; he had very high expectations of others and a clear view of good and evil and how one should behave. He did not sugarcoat anything. After he retired from work, he prepared well for old age. As a teenager and young woman, it was difficult for me, but knowing that he had considered and prepared for all kinds of endings was a relief. We knew what scared him most and what he feared above all else, which was losing his dignity, becoming an object that was moved from place to place, and being isolated. He believed that even dementia patients should have contact with people. And so we knew what our responsibility was.
Do you think he would have liked what you wrote about him?
That is the question. I believe he would have appreciated the work, but not the fact that it is about him. He would have enjoyed the thought-provoking effect that this work has. I meet viewers and readers and people who share their stories with me. It's different from anything I've done before. This topic is a trigger for many, and it's something I think he would have liked. He would have appreciated the fact that it makes people aware of the issue, talk about it, and not repress it. I hope so."
Haug, 57, is a well-known and respected name in her country's theater scene. She has won numerous awards, and her works, which have been performed in Europe, Australia, and the US, have often sparked heated debate and even protest and anger, such as the play "Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf 1 and 2," which dealt with Hitler's book and was performed under security due to fears of disturbances or demonstrations. She lives in Berlin, but our conversation takes place while she is working on a new play and is in the university town of Marburg for research. She wonders how Israeli readers will feel about the description of her father's biography and nods when I tell her that it was particularly strange to read about him after the war that has raged here for the past two years, and when I think about the horror of the children. All the children.
“My father spent his entire life trying to understand the war, to understand the Holocaust, to learn about it,” she says. "He knew that as a child he belonged to the fascist generation; that's how they grew up. They weren't enthusiastic fascists, his parents just played the game, but precisely because of that, he grew up to be extremely critical of them and was deeply troubled by the need to get rid of it, to shake off that education. There were times when I wished for an easier parent. Today I appreciate him. I also think that thanks to him, I grew up to be a conscious person who observes reality. I know that I look at people and see them in all their complexity, and I am also inspired by them."
This inspiration can also be found in the way she relates—in great detail and with endless questions—to the aviation disaster. A year after the crash of Flight MH 370, another Malaysia Airlines passenger plane crashed. In this case, it was discovered that it had been shot down over Ukraine. Haug was supposed to be on that plane—probably another reason for her meticulous interest in the crash—and at the last minute it was decided that she would fly on another plane, but questions of fate and deliberate intent hover over the book. What was the meaning of the strange cargo that was loaded onto the plane that disappeared on its way to Beijing? Who caused the sudden drop in air pressure on the plane, which one of the investigators found to have been done deliberately? How did the telescopes on Diego Garcia allegedly fail to see the plane? Next month will mark 12 years since the disaster, and it does not seem to be close to being solved.
How did the families of the survivors react to your work?
"During my research, I think many of them were very tired of describing their feelings, of being asked again and again what happened, while at the same time they never received answers and were unable to find out anything about what happened. Over the years, many fell silent and disappeared. They decided to disconnect. It was difficult to contact family members. There was someone who lost his wife and told me that from the beginning it was clear to him that she was gone. There was no chance she had survived, so he had to express that fact in his own life. He painted the walls of his house, changed the rooms, and brought in plastic utensils, which his wife had never agreed to. He wanted to prove that life was different now. For me, this was equivalent to an approach that acknowledges what happened and gives it a clear name. Others did the opposite. The wife of one of the missing men decided not to change anything; she didn't even mow the lawn at her house, so that it wouldn't seem like she had stopped waiting.
"There were conversations that I kept to myself. I felt that what was said was not processed at all, and I was afraid of exploiting people's grief. Everyone I spoke to heard from me that I intended to compare what happened to my father to the disappearance of their loved ones, and I was very afraid of their reaction at first. I didn't want them to think that I was comparing or minimizing their tragedy, but somehow they understood what I wanted to do and understood that I wasn't looking to exploit their tragedy."
Do you believe any of the theories?
I think the last theory I mention in the book, that the plane was deliberately shot down because of the military technology it was carrying, is possible. I don't believe the story of the pilot's heroic suicide. To cover up the truth in such a big case, there must be international will and cooperation between countries. So many countries are involved, there must be a unifying desire among them. I try to think of a possible solution, not too crazy, but this story is unsolvable and full of huge question marks. Every time I tried to investigate, I found myself diving down a new rabbit hole and ultimately becoming more interested in the people who investigated or were affected than in the facts and evidence,“ she smiles. ”But that's how it always is with me."