Turkish-German Scripts of Postmigration: Mimesis and Mimeticism in the Plays of Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Feridun Zaimoglu/Günter Senkel

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1 This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given.

2 Turkish-German Scripts of Postmigration: Mimesis and Mimeticism in the Plays of Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Feridun Zaimoglu/Günter Senkel Lizzie Stewart Thesis Submitted for Degree of PhD in German Studies University of Edinburgh 2014

3 Declaration This is to certify that that the work contained within has been composed by me and is my own work. No part of this thesis has been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. 1

4 Abstract Fifty years after large-scale Turkish labour migration to the Federal Republic of Germany began, theatre by Turkish-German artists is only now becoming a consistent feature of Germany s influential state-funded theatrical landscape. So whilst much scholarship in recent years has focused on Turkish-German literature and film, very little research has been conducted into Turkish-German theatre. This doctoral thesis addresses this neglected field of study and examines contemporary theatre practice and theatrical representation in the Federal Republic of Germany as a country of immigration. It traces the fascinating fates of five plays by two Turkish-German playwrights who are already well-known for their award-winning prose work: Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Feridun Zaimoglu, who writes for the stage with Günter Senkel. The thesis focuses on these plays in performance and examines the dramatic and performance texts negotiations of 1) mimesis the artistic representation of the real and 2) mimeticism a mechanism identified by cultural theorist Rey Chow as relying on Platonic concepts of idealised originals to keep certain subjects in their place. The thesis argues that Özdamar s plays in production function as touchstones for thinking through broader tendencies in the German theatrical establishment s inclusion of theatre by, with, and concerning Turkish-Germans, while Zaimoglu/Senkel s reveal points at which these paradigms shift. The earliest production which the thesis examines, Özdamar s Karagöz in Alamania, was premiered in 1986, and the most recent, Özdamar s Perikızı, in The intervening years are marked by the examination of Zaimoglu/Senkel s Othello (2003), Schwarze Jungfrauen (2006), and Schattenstimmen (2008). As theatrical production in Germany is a process which tends to take the play out of the author s hands, the thesis aims to unpack the negotiations between text and performance, author and director, ensemble and audience in each production. In doing so it makes use of extensive field and archival work. For each play addressed, the thesis moves beyond the dramatic text to draw on a wide range of sources including audiovisual recordings, prompt scripts, programmes, and interviews with the directors and authors. This historicising approach to performance analysis allows connections to be made between the performances as historical events taking place within an institutional context and 2

5 the negotiations of mimesis and mimeticism within the mise-en-scène of each play in its world premiere and beyond. Key questions addressed throughout include: in what context were these plays staged? How were migration and migrant or postmigrant figures represented within them? How were productions received? And what does this have to tell us about cultural production and aesthetics within the very particular circumstances created by twentieth-century Turkish migrations to Germany? A focus on mimeticism allows this thesis to explore the ways in which the productions examined approached the representation of ethnicised figures. It also reveals the extent to which a positioning of plays by Özdamar and Zaimoglu/Senkel as Turkish, Turkish-German, or postmigrant may also have affected their production and reception. A complementary focus on mimesis then allows this thesis to examine the degree to which these performances were intended or received as aesthetic interventions relevant to the social reality of contemporary Germany. Indeed, the trajectories which this thesis traces over the past quarter of a century see Turkish- German theatre move not only geographically, but also symbolically, from the margins to the centre of theatrical life in contemporary Germany. Rather than seeing this relatively late success as reason to obscure earlier Turkish-German theatrical productions, this study places that success in context. It thus highlights the role which Özdamar's and Zaimoglu/Senkel's script[s] of multiculturalism (B. Venkat Mani) have played in a larger, ongoing re-scripting of the German stage, which has taken place as Germany adjusts to its status as a country of immigration. 3

6 Turkish-German Scripts of Postmigration: Mimesis and Mimeticism in the Plays of Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Feridun Zaimoglu/Günter Senkel Table of Contents Declaration... 1 Abstract... 2 Table of Figures... 7 Preface Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations CHAPTER ONE. Introduction: Turkish-German Scripts of Postmigration Turkish-German Theatre: From the Wings to Centre Stage Scripts of Postmigration: Methodology Literature Review Mimesis and Mimeticism in the Turkish-German Context Overview CHAPTER TWO. Mimesis and Mimeticism in Alamania: Emine Sevgi Özdamar s Early Plays Performing Karagöz and Keloglan in Alamania Production and Reception History: Karagöz in Alamania Karagöz as Postdramatic Performance: Against a Theatre of Enlightenment Oh Those Turks! Intertextuality, Orientalism, and Dreams of Capital Keloglan in Alamania: Mimesis and Mimeticism in the Year CHAPTER THREE: Rewriting and the Real: Zaimoglu/Senkel s Othello Zaimoglu / Senkel / Shakespeare Situating Zaimoglu/Senkel s Othello: Race and the Rewrite

7 3.3 Offending the Audience? Beyond the Protestant Ethnic Othello in Performance: Casting and Coercive Mimeticism After Othello: Rewriting the German Stage CHAPTER FOUR. Staging Close Encounters with Islam: Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel s Schwarze Jungfrauen The Neo-Muslima Enters the Scene Beyond Belonging: The Multiple Authors of Schwarze Jungfrauen Mimeticism, Subalternity, and an Unheimliche Emanzipation Sci-Fi and the Semi-Documentary: Spielberg meets Kreuzberg Schwarze Jungfrauen as event sociologique CHAPTER FIVE. (Semi-)Documentary Theatre and the Postmigrant Ensemble: Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel s Schattenstimmen Migration and Documentary Intercultural Mainstreaming : Situating Schattenstimmen (Semi-)Documentary Commissions and the Professional Ethnic Mimesis, Mimeticism, and Cologne s Multicultural Ensemble Schattenstimmen in Dogland: Shaping Institutional Realities CHAPTER SIX. Performing Diversity: Emine Sevgi Özdamar s Perikızı Migration as Odyssey: Myth and Mobility Approaching Perikızı: Gender and Migration in the Festival Context Assimilationsdiskurs : Mimeticism, Memory and the Premiere Production Odyssee Europa: Interkultur, Mimesis, and Mobility Perikızı at the Ballhaus: Textuality, Sexuality and 50 Jahre Scheinehe CONCLUSION Mimesis, Mimeticism and Turkish-German Scripts of Postmigration Özdamar and Zaimoglu/Senkel: Touchstones and Motors Unfolding Oeuvres, Concluding Remarks

8 BIBLIOGRAPHY Unpublished Scripts Stage Manuscripts Published for Sole Use of Theatres Audiovisual Recordings Publicity Photographs Theatre Programmes Personal Interviews Reviews Cited (Listed by Production) Secondary Literature

9 Table of Figures Figure 1. Screenshot from unpublished audiovisual recording, Emine Sevgi Özdamar's Karagöz in Alamania, dir. by E. S. Özdamar (Frankfurt: Frankfurt am Main, 1986) Figure 2. Unpublished photograph, Emine Sevgi Özdamar's Karagöz in Alamania, dir. by E. S. Özdamar (Frankfurt: Frankfurt am Main, 1986) Figure 3. Screenshot, unpublished audiovisual recording: Karagöz in Alamania, Figure 4. Poster for the 1986 premiere of Emine Sevgi Özdamar s Karagöz in Alamania.. 77 Figure 5. Programme for Emine Sevgi Özdamar s Karagöz in Alamania (Frankfurt am Main: Schauspiel Frankfurt, 1986) Figure 6. Unpublished photograph featuring Şemsettin (Volker Spengler), waiter (Senih Orkan), and donkey: Karagöz in Alamania, Figure 7. Unpublished photograph, Emine Sevgi Özdamar's Keloglan in Alamania, dir. by Murat Yeginer (Oldenburg: Oldenburgisches Staatstheater, 2000) Figure 8. Unpublished photograph: Keloglan in Alamania, Figure 9. Publicity photograph, interior of the newly refurbished Münchner Kammerspiele Figure 10. Publicity photograph, Shakespeare's Othello, in a new version by Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel, dir. by Luk Perceval (Munich: Münchner Kammerspiele, 2003) Figure 11. Publicity photograph featuring Desdemona (Julia Jentsch), Othello (Thomas Thieme), and Jago (Wolfgang Pregler): Othello (2003) Figure 12. Publicity photograph featuring Othello (Thomas Thieme) and Jago (Wolfgang Pregler): Othello (2003) Figure 13. Gorki Theater advertisement for 2014 revival of Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel's Schwarze Jungfrauen, dir. by Neco Çelik Figure 14. Publicity photograph, Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel's Schwarze Jungfrauen, dir. by Neco Çelik (Berlin: HAU, 2006) Figure 15. Screenshot from unpublished audiovisual recording, Schwarze Jungfrauen (2006) Figure 16. Screenshot from unpublished audiovisual recording, Schwarze Jungfrauen (2006) Figure 17. Screenshot from unpublished audiovisual recording, Schwarze Jungfrauen (2006)

10 Figure 18. Screenshot from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, dir. by Steven Spielberg (Columbia Pictures, 1977) Figure 19. Screenshot from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) Figure 20. Screenshot from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) Figure 21. Screenshot from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) Figure 22. Publicity photograph, Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel's Schattenstimmen, dir. by Nora Bussenius (Cologne: Schauspiel Köln, 2008) Figure 23. Publicity photograph, full cast: Schattenstimmen (2008) Figure 24. Screenshot from online audiovisual recording, featuring The Dealer (Patrick Gussett): Schattenstimmen (2008) Figure 25. Publicity photograph, featuring the Minus-Maroc (Andreas Grötzinger). Schattenstimmen (2008) Figure 26. Screenshot from unpublished audiovisual recording, featuring unnamed guide: Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel's Schattenstimmen, dir. by Nurkan Erpulat, (Berlin: Ballhaus Naunynstraße, 2008) Figure 27. Screenshot from unpublished audiovisual recording, featuring The Dealer (Vernesa Berbo): Schattenstimmen, dir. by Nurkan Erpulat (2008) Figure 28. Screenshot from unpublished audiovisual recording, showing the final scene and full cast: Schattenstimmen, dir. by Nurkan Erpulat Figure 29. Map of the Ruhrgebiet provided for Odyssee Europa audience members Figure 30. Publicity Photograph featuring Heino (Frank Wickermann) and Perikızı (Katja Stockhausen) in Emine Sevgi Özdamar s Perikızı, dir. by Ulrich Greb (Moers: Schlosstheater Moers, 2010) Figure 31. Publicity photograph, featuring the grey wolf (Magdalene Artelt) and Perikızı (Katja Stockhausen): Perikızı (2010) Figure 32. Publicity photograph, featuring Perikızı (Katja Stockhausen): Perikızı (2010). 248 Figure 33. Publicity photograph, featuring Perikızı (Katja Stockhausen): Perikızı (2010) 250 Figure 34. Screenshot from unpublished audiovisual recording, featuring Nationalist Gastarbeiterinnen/Hens and musicians: Perikızı (2010) Figure 35. Screenshot from unpublished audiovisual recording, featuring the audience and two Armenian brides: Perikızı (2010) Figure 36. Screenshot from unpublished audiovisual recording, featuring the audience: Perikızı (2010) Figure 37. Screenshot from unpublished audiovisual recording: Perikızı (2010)

11 Figure 38. Screenshot from unpublished audiovisual recording, featuring the audience: Perikızı (2010) Figure 39. Publicity photograph, featuring Perikızı (Elmira Bahrami) and the ringmaster (Mehmet Yılmaz) in Emine Sevgi Özdamar s Perikızı, dir. by Michael Ronen (Berlin: Ballhaus Naunynstraße, 2011) Figure 40. Advertising material for Perikızı, Ballhaus Naunynstraße, October Figure 41. Publicity photograph, featuring Perikızı (Elmira Bahrami): Perikızı (2012)

12 Preface Note on spelling. In the spelling of Turkish names and titles in this thesis I use the Germanised variant only when this appears to be actively preferred or purposefully used by the person in question. Thus I refer to Feridun Zaimoglu rather than Feridun Zaimoğlu, for example, and Shermin Langhoff rather than Şermin Langhoff. The exception to this rule is when I am quoting another s work. All reasonable effort has been made to trace the holders of copyright for materials reproduced in this thesis and permissions for interviews. Any omissions will be rectified in future publications arising from the thesis if notice is given to the author 10

13 Acknowledgements The research presented in this thesis was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) and also benefitted significantly from additional funding for research trips in Germany provided by the DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) and the AGS (Association for German Studies, UK). The research and writing of this thesis would not have been possible without this financial support and I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks to each of these funding bodies. If making theatre is a collaborative process, so too is researching it, and I am incrediably grateful to all those authors, theatre practitioners, and administrators who gave up their time and energy by making themselves available to interview, or assisting me with access to sources. First and foremost, my thanks go to Emine Sevgi Özdamar for our conversations, a wonderful day in the park, and for access to some of the sources used in this thesis. The pleasure her work gives me is immense and I do hope I have done this some form of justice here. My thanks also to Feridun Zaimoglu for allowing me to visit him at home for a fascinating conversation in Kiel. I am particularly grateful to both authors for agreeing to speak to me for this project despite their personal differences. My sincere thanks also go to my other interview partners throughout the project for racking their memories of past productions and answering my questions with such generosity of spirit: Nora Bussenius, Neco Çelik, Axel Gade, Stefan Nagel, Luk Perceval, Michael Ronen, Christian Scholze, Lars-Ole Walburg, Ingo Waszerka, and Anja Wedig. Although direct quotations from these interviews may seem relatively few, they were an invaluable part of the process of creating a picture of each production and the broader theatrical landscape in Germany. Ingo Waszerka in particular kindly put me in touch with E. S. Özdamar and the Abisag Tüllmann archive, while Nora Bussenius provided me with materials and put me in touch with Omar El-Saeidi. Neco and Nermin Çelik also kindly gave me additional materials from their own personal holdings. I am grateful to Cory Tamler and Melanie Dreyer-Lude for introducing me to Neco. Christian Scholze also deserves special mention for giving me working space in his theatre and support at an early stage in the research for this thesis. 11

14 I am grateful to the following archives and archivists for access to many of the materials in this thesis: the Abisag Tüllmann Archiv of the Deutsches Theatermuseum; Ann Kersting-Meuleman of the Abteilung Musik, Theater, Film at the Universitätsbibliothek J. C. Senckenberg, the Goethe Universität Frankfurt; Carsten Niemann of the Theatermuseum Hannover and the staff of the Münchner Stadtarchiv. Special thanks also go to the very helpful Thomas Maagh of Theater der Autoren and Tanja Müller of the Rowohlt Theaterverlag. I am also very grateful to all of the adminstrators and theatre practitioners who turned archivist for me, giving me access to materials otherwise unavailable. In addition to those already named above, these incude: Isabelle Yeginar, Stefan A. Schulz, Sophie Fleckenstein, Sabrina Schmidt, Flori Gugger, Maike Lautenschütz, Thile von Quist, Christina Ratka, Felix Mannheim, Monica Marotta, Chantel Kohler, Tunçay Kulaoğlu, Eva Linke, Osman Tok, Sarah Reimann, Lutz Knospe, Insa Popken, Jenny Flügge, Verena Schimpf, and Julia Mayr. The late Fereidoun Ettehad was particularly helpful and deserves special mention here. Finally, a thank you to Tuğsal Moğul, who introduced me to Herr Ettehad and sneaked me in to see Verrücktes Blut in This thesis would not have been possible without the supervisory dream team of Laura Bradley and Frauke Matthes. They have been a constant source of support and advice, and I am extremely grateful to them both for guiding me so expertly, so elegantly, and so very patiently through the PhD. Their careful reading, eye for detail, and excellent advice on everything from comma placement to carrying out research trips has been invaluable, and I would like to thank them for the time and energy they put into this work. I have learnt a huge amount from both their examples and hope this will continue after the PhD as well! All errors are of course my very own. In terms of further academic support, I would also like to thank Christel Weiler for hosting me during my DAAD fellowship at the Freies Universität Berlin. The fellowship allowed me to do so much in terms of the field work for this thesis, which would otherwise have been impossible. I am also grateful to Christel Weiler for discussing the thesis and postmigrant theatre with me, and making it possible for me to attend discussions within the Research Group Interweaving Performance Cultures. Two postgraduate summer schools/workshops were also of particular influence and so deserve mention here: the University of Utrecht School of Critical Theory s Intensive 12

15 Programme on G-local Cosmopolitanism and the people I met there shaped my thinking in ways which have seeped into this research in many ways and the Transnational German Studies workshop organised between the Universities of Warwick, Michigan and the Humboldt, Berlin provided invaluable input and inspiring conversation at just the right time. Thanks also to Joe Twist for discussions on Zaimoglu and for his thoughts on my conclusion. The University of Edinburgh German department and the LLC postgraduate community has also been a constant source of stimulation and support. Special thanks also go to Sarah Colvin for encouraging me to go postgrad. I am also very grateful to my incredibly supportive colleagues Majied Robinson and Sabine Rolle for advice, friendship, and flexibility at work while I finished the thesis. A few further Edinburgh people deserve special mention here. Joanna Neilly, for her cheerfulness, the sluts spaghetti which sustained us both, and tales of feeding, taming, grooming and then slaying the PhD beast. Dora Osborne for rants, reading groups, cups of tea, and career support. Mikey Wood for theatrical chats and Laura Chapot for drinks and smokes. Lila Matsumoto for Susie s lunches and roamings on Eigg. Muireann Crowley for walking me to school, much coffee, and garden writing sessions. To all my PhD office mates, but particularly Hannah Lena Hagemann and Yusef Hamdan it was a joy and an honour to share space and ideas with you throughout: I miss you both now the office is no more. Special thanks to also to Hannah for advice on several things German and occasional use of her German bank account! Beyond Edinburgh, I would also like to send my thanks and love to Dieuwke Borsma, Hanna Wolf, Nina, Rose Mallard, and Ninnette Poetzsch for Berlin times, and to the amazing Izzy Madgwick, who took me along to the theatre for the first time as well as to a class on Interkulturelle Germanistik in Heidelberg, prompting two interests which come together in this thesis. Finally, I would like to thank my mum, Claire Stewart, and my sister Jennifer Stewart, for helping me understand and have faith in the process. My thanks and love to them, my sister Megan Stewart, and my dad, Dougal Stewart for always being available at the end of a phone to support me through it. I am equally grateful to Bella Adey, for being a wonderful friend, who has been there for me in more ways than can be counted the whole way through the PhD process and long before. And, last of all, 13

16 to James Leveque, for his support, patience, intellect and love throughout. Thank you for living with me in chaos in the final few months of the PhD, and, particularly, for doing all the washing up towards the end. 14

17 List of Abbreviations FRG Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) CDU Christian Democratic Union (Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands) SPD Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) 15

18 CHAPTER ONE. Introduction: Turkish-German Scripts of Postmigration 1.1 Turkish-German Theatre: From the Wings to Centre Stage Fifty years after large-scale Turkish labour migration to the Federal Republic of Germany began, theatre by first-, second- and third-generation Turkish-German artists is only now becoming a consistent feature on Germany s influential state-funded stages. In 2006 Schwarze Jungfrauen, a controversial play by Turkish-German writer Feridun Zaimoglu and his co-dramatist Günter Senkel, became the first play written and directed by Turkish-German artists to be the main feature on the front cover of influential theatre magazine Theater heute. In 2008 the Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Berlin opened as the country s first forum for postmigrant theatre, creating an important space for both established and emerging artists. Then, in 2011, Turkish-born, Berlinbased director Nurkan Erpulat became the first Turkish-German director to be invited to present a production at the prestigious annual theatre festival, the Berlin Theatertreffen. While the FRG officially accepted its role as a country of immigration in 2000, a decade later this shift appears to be gradually effecting change within the state-subsidised theatrical landscape. Large-scale immigration to the FRG in the twentieth century has occurred from a variety of contexts including Turkey, Italy, and the former USSR: today one in five Germans are considered to have what is termed a Migrationshintergrund, and the FRG is home to 2.8 million residents of Turkish origin. 1 National discussions of citizenship, integration, assimilation, and multiculturalism are therefore frequently conducted around, and increasingly with, the Turkish population in Germany. 2 1 Robin Harper, Making Meaning of Naturalization, Citizenship and Beyond from the Perspective of Turkish Labor Migrants, in 50 Jahre Türkische Arbeitsmigration in Deutschland, ed. by Şeyda Özil et al., Türkisch-deutsche Studien, 2 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), pp (p. 21). 2 Ruth Mandel, Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany (Durham, N. C., and London: Duke University Press, 2008). The diversity of this population, which includes Kurds, Armenians, Muslims, secularists, and communists is also sketched out in Mandel s book. Labour migration generally occurred from more rural areas of Turkey, with families joining workers several years later as a result of family reunification measures. However, following the worsening political situation in Turkey in the 1970s and the military putsch in 1980 a number of Turkish intellectuals also came to Germany seeking exile. Migration to and from Turkey and Germany has also 16

19 Although B. Venkat Mani writes that one of the lead actors in the drama of globalisation in the twentieth century is the immigrant labourer, this drama and the Turkish-German actor, playwright, director or dramaturge have long seemed notably absent from the actual theatrical spaces of the Federal Republic. 3 Erol Boran, one of the few scholars to have carried out detailed research in this area, explains that until very recently, theatre by Turkish-German actors, directors, ensembles, and playwrights was left to take place überwiegend in einer Art Grauzone, far from the national stages, mainstream audiences, and critical attention. 4 In 2002 Berlin-based actor and theatre organiser Mürtüz Yolcu sardonically summed up the general attitude to this lack of attention as follows: schließlich ist der Türke ja auch nicht nach Deutschland gekommen, um Theater zu spielen. 5 This study explores the form, content and performance history of five plays which bridge this period of transition for Turkish-German theatre practitioners from exclusion to celebration within the German theatrical establishment. The playwrights on whose work I focus are Emine Sevgi Özdamar (born in Malatya, Turkey, 1946), and playwriting duo Feridun Zaimoglu (born in Bolu, Turkey, 1964) and Günter Senkel (born in Neumünster, Germany, 1958). Özdamar and Zaimoglu are two of the first German-language playwrights of Turkish origin to have made it out of the grey zone of amateur or off-scene theatre and onto the mainstream, state-subsidised German stage. 6 Both Özdamar and Zaimoglu are also well known within German Studies for their prose work, having been among the first writers of Turkish origin to gain prominence within the German literary scene. Senkel, on the other hand, was an unknown bookseller prior to his collaboration with Zaimoglu and so has been the subject of less critical attention. 7 continued throughout this period, making it more sensible to speak of Turkish migrations to Germany in the plural. 3 B. Venkat Mani, Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2007), p Erol M. Boran, Eine Geschichte des türkisch-deutschen Theaters und Kabaretts, (unpublished doctoral thesis, Ohio State University, 2004), p. 78 < [accessed 01/05/2010]. Chapter three of Boran s thesis focuses on theatre by Turkish and Turkish- German practitioners in Germany. 5 Mürtüz Yolcu, quoted in Boran, p Others include Renan Demirkan and Yüksel Pazarkaya. 7 Contributions by Senkel have been included in two recent edited volumes dedicated to Zaimoglu s work: Günter Senkel, Recherchen mit/researching with Feridun Zaimoglu, in Feridun Zaimoglu, ed. by Tom Cheesman and Karin Yeşilada (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012), pp ; Günter Senkel, Hinter 17

20 Although very different in tone and technique, as novelists both Zaimoglu and Özdamar have often been praised for the theatricality and performativity of their prose work. Özdamar s training and work as a theatre practitioner in both Turkey and Germany are key subjects in the semi-autobiographical novels and short stories for which she is best known. This is reflected in a focus on the role of mimicry and theatrical intertexts in the reception of her prose work. 8 Zaimoglu s almost legendary reading tours of his first prose success Kanak Sprak and his frequent and energetic media appearances have also been the impetus for many readings of his work (and his authorial persona) as performative. 9 As a result, Özdamar and Zaimoglu/Senkel are perhaps the most studied German dramatists of Turkish origin to date. However, this interest has mainly stemmed from scholars familiar with their prose writing: as a result analysis of their plays in production, or as theatrical events is largely absent. Those analyses of Özdamar s theatrical work which do exist tend to be brief, embedded in a wider discussion of her other work or of a broader concept, and based primarily on a reading of the dramatic text, rather than the corresponding performance texts. 10 A range of Zaimoglu/Senkel s theatrical work has begun to attract dem Vorhang der Vernunft: Über meine Theaterarbeit mit Feridun Zaimoglu, in Feridun Zaimoglu in Schrift und Bild: Beiträge zum Werk des Autors und Künstlers, ed. by Rüdiger Schütt (Kiel: edition fliehkraft, 2011), pp Zaimoglu discusses the duo s working partnership in: Denise Solmaz, Ich bin Sagengestalt, Krüppel oder Frau zugleich, Nationaltheater Mannheim, 21/01/2010, < [last accessed 26/08/2014]; Marion Tiedke...die Flammen der wahren Hölle. Ein Gespräch mit den Autoren Feridun Zaimoglu und Günter Senkel, in Othello, by William Shakespeare, Feridun Zaimoglu, and Günter Senkel (Münster: Monsenstein & Vannerdat, 2004), pp ; Friederike Gräff, Ich werde als Onkel Horst verhöhnt, Die Tageszeitung, 26/09/2010, < [last accessed 24/08/2014]. 8 This point is also made by Karin Lornsen amongst others: Karin Lornsen, The City as Stage of Transgression: Performance, Picaresque Reminiscences, and Linguistic Incongruity in Emine Sevgi Özdamar s The Bridge of the Golden Horn, in Gender and Laughter: Comic Affirmation and Subversion in Traditional and Modern Media, ed. by Gaby Pailer et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp (p. 205). I will discuss aspects of this secondary literature in more detail in Chapters Two and Six. 9 Tom Cheesman and Karin Yeşilada, Preface, in Feridun Zaimoglu, ed. by Tom Cheesman and Karin Yeşilada (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012), pp (p. 4). See, for example, Liesbeth Minnaard, Playing Kanak Identity: Feridun Zaimoglu s Rebellious Performances, in TRANS: Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften, 15 (2003), < [accessed 01/06/2010], n. pag.; Gary Schmidt, Feridun Zaimoglu s Performances of Gender and Authorship, in German Literature in a New Century: Trends, Traditions, Transitions, Transformations, ed. Katharina Gerstenberger and Patricia Herminghouse (New York: Berghahn, 2008), pp See, for example, the analysis of Keloglan in Alamania Oder die Versöhnung von Schwein und Lamm in Katrin Sieg, Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 2002), pp ; Helga Kraft, Staging Xenophobia in the 1990s: The Political Plays of Bettina Fless, Anna Langhoff, and Emine Sevgi Özdamar, in Writing Against Boundaries: Nationality, Ethnicity and Gender in the German-speaking Context, ed. by Barbara Kosta and Helga Kraft (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), pp (pp ). 18

21 critical attention from scholars, and their most successful play, Schwarze Jungfrauen, has been the focus of much performance analysis. 11 However, this has thus far resulted in several separate articles rather than a broader overview. Indeed, while much scholarship in recent years has focused on Turkish- German literature and film, little research until very recently has been carried out into theatre by Turkish-German practitioners. 12 This stands in stark contrast to the level of scholarly attention paid to other forms of cultural production by Turkish-German artists, or even to performance events in which Turkish-Germans may choose to participate. A large amount of research has been done on events such as the annual Karneval der Kulturen in Berlin, for example. 13 To a degree this reflects the longstanding lack of plays which are either produced by Turkish-German writers and directors or which thematise the Turkish-German relationship on the larger and more influential German national stages. However, such work does have a longer history than often assumed: writing in Die Zeit in 1982, Danja Antonovic highlighted the existence of Theater, Literatur, Musik: Gastarbeiterkultur Kultur, die keiner haben will. 14 While academic studies have focused on the literature and music referred to here, this theatre has largely been written out of history See, for example, Tom Cheesman, Shakespeare and Othello in Filthy Hell: Zaimoglu and Senkel s Politico-Religious Tradaptation, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 46.2 (2010), ; Katrin Sieg, Black Virgins: Sexuality and the Democratic Body in Europe, New German Critique, 37.1 (2010), Many cross-media studies omit theatre completely. See, for example, Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf et al., Transkulturalität: Türkisch-deutsche Konstellationen in Literatur und Film (Münster: Aschendorff, 2007). In response to the recent boom in Turkish-German and postmigrant theatre, this tendency has begun to shift, however. Chapters on theatre are included in Maha El Hissy, Getürkte Türken: Karnevaleske Stilmittel im Theater, Kabarett und Film deutsch-türkischer Künstlerinnen und Künstler (Bielefeld: transcript, 2012) and Claudia Breger, An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance: Transnational Theater, Literature, and Film in Contemporary Germany (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012). 13 See Katrin Sieg, German Theatre and Globalisation, in Theatre in the Berlin Republic: German Drama since Reunification, ed. by Denise Varney (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), pp (pp ). 14 Danja Antonovic, Mehr als Schnaps und Folklore, Die Zeit, 08/01/1982, repr. in Transit Deutschland: Debatten zu Nation und Migration, ed. by Deniz Göktürk et al. (Konstanz: Konstanz UP, 2011), pp (p. 636). 15 The most significant exceptions here are Erol Boran s 2004 doctoral thesis, discussed in more detail in section 1.3, and a study carried out in the early 1980s by Manfred Brauneck et al., Ausländertheater in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und in West-Berlin, 1. Arbeitsbericht zum Forschungsprojekt Populäre Theaterkultur, (Hamburg: Pressestelle der Universität Hamburg, 1983). The findings from this report which relate directly to Turkish-German theatre at the time are summarised in: Georg Stenzaly, Ausländertheater in der Bundesrepublik und Berlin-West am Beispiel der türkischen Theatergruppen, Lili, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 56 (1984),

22 This is partly due to what could be considered a double minoritization within the academic sphere, in which the frequent assignation of literary products of Turkish- German authors to a minor literature might combine with an understanding of theatre as a minor art form and theatrical theory as a minor field of study. 16 This situation may also be exacerbated by the perception that the ephemeral nature of theatre makes past productions inaccessible. 17 As Laura Bradley highlights, however, there is no difference in principle between performance analysis and any other form of historical investigation. 18 The traces or artefacts which may remain of a piece of theatre include prompt scripts (versions of the script edited and annotated with sound, lighting, and actors cues), theatre stills, video and audio recordings, set models, set designs, pieces of scenery, programmes, publicity materials, reviews, diary or autobiographical entries by practitioners or audience members, rehearsal recordings or notes, recordings of post-show discussions, audience questionnaires, and interviews. As Bradley points out, frequently only the most accessible artefacts, such as reviews, are used in performance histories or to supplement analyses of the dramatic text. This has been the case particularly with analyses of Özdamar s plays and the majority of Zaimoglu/Senkel s. 19 More ambitious use of artefacts relating to both historical and more recent productions, however, allows the theatre researcher to investigate the genealogy of the production (how it developed from planning, to rehearsal, to staging), the reception of the production, and the mise-en-scène, that is, the staging of the play. 20 This doctoral thesis uses a combination of archival and field work to examine 16 Immacolata Amodeo, Die Heimat heißt Babylon : Zur Literatur ausländischer Autoren in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996); Patrice Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, trans. by Loren Kruger (London: Routledge, 1992), pp Both Amodeo and Pavis use minor in the sense established by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze here, i.e. to indicate not merely a marginalized position within a larger matrix but also the ethical action of becomingminor. For a Deleuzean reading of novels by Özdamar and Zaimoglu see also Margaret Littler, Anatolian Childhoods: Becoming Woman in Özdamar s Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei and Zaimoğlu s Leyla, in Edinburgh German Yearbook, 1: Cultural Exchange in German Literature, ed. by Eleoma Joshua and Robert Vilain (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007), pp On ephemerality see Christopher Balme, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p Laura Bradley, Brecht and Political Theatre: The Mother on Stage (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), p The main exception here is Zaimoglu/Senkel s Schwarze Jungfrauen (2006). The premiere production of this play has been analysed by a number of scholars. See Katrin Sieg, Black Virgins ; Breger, Aesthetics, pp ; El Hissy, pp This production will also be discussed in Chapter Four of this thesis. 20 As detailed further in section 1.2 my methodological approach draws on that outlined by Bradley, Brecht, p. 14; Balme, Cambridge Introduction, pp ; Guido Hiß, Der theatralische Blick: Einführung in die Auffühungsanalyse (Berlin: Reimer, 1993), pp

23 contemporary theatre practice and theatrical representation in the Federal Republic of Germany as a country of immigration. Such an approach is important both as a means of bringing theatrical work more prominently into discussions of Özdamar s and Zaimoglu s respective oeuvres and as a means of moving beyond the recent hype around postmigrant theatre in Germany to a more critical overview of the challenges this theatre has faced. The study of these plays in performance and their production histories therefore has much to contribute to an emerging field of interest in contemporary postmigrant theatre. Given the relative scarcity of scholarship on Turkish-German or postmigrant theatre, this approach also has the advantage of being able to draw on and expand approaches taken to Zaimoglu and Özdamar as significant authors in their own right. As the products of authors already well-known and researched in the literary sphere, these plays can also be situated both in relation to their authors prose output and in relation to more specifically theatrical scholarship. 21 One of the key questions at the start of a critical academic engagement with Turkish-German literature was posed by Arlene Akiko Teraoka s influential essay Gastarbeiterliteratur: The Other Speaks Back in In this essay, Teraoka uses the silence of the Turks in works of contemporary [German] drama, as the impetus for her re-assessment of what happens [w]hen the silent Turk begins to speak in the dominant language, that is, to write literature in German. 22 This question addresses not just the phenomenon of writing in a second language but also the issue of articulating and being heard in one s own terms within an already loaded space of signification. 23 It has been explored extensively in relation to the medium of literature the area that Teraoka s essay in fact proceeds to focus on. However, more than a quarter of a century later it has yet to be related back to theatre written, directed or 21 This has made the theatrical work of Özdamar and Zaimoglu/Senkel particularly attractive to those scholars beginning to bring a discussion of Turkish-German theatre into broader discussions of Turkish- German cultural production. El Hissy, for example, devotes one chapter of her monograph to two plays by these authors and also makes use of scholarship on Turkish-German literature in situating her approach to their work; pp I argue here that a more extended focus on theatre as a medium is necessary. 22 Arlene A. Teraoka, Gastarbeiterliteratur: The Other Speaks Back, Cultural Critique, 7 (1987), (p. 77; p. 80). 23 It thus relates to the question famously posed in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak (1985), repr. in Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Hemel Hampstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp

24 performed by Turkish-German artists. My intention in this thesis is to shift this question to include visual language and theatrical signifying practice. In doing so, I will use the theoretical concepts of mimesis and mimeticism as tools which allow this visual language and practice to be unpacked. While mimesis appears throughout the history of European aesthetics as the supposedly neutral representation or imitation of reality in art, its progress has in fact been accompanied by a series of power struggles. 24 This is partly because the nature of the real can be defined as a set of socially constructed conventions which shift over time. The attribution of mimesis is therefore guided by the culturally defined realm of possibility that defines the we of the readership. It invokes and creates the social group, even as it depends on it. 25 This is particularly the case in theatre, the mimetic art par excellence. As Claudia Breger and Marvin Carlson highlight: performance [ ] always involves mental comparison with a potential, an ideal, or a remembered original model [ ]. [T]heatricalized performance thus attains its significance by virtue of how it repeats, or restages, its models. 26 If mimesis is the representation or imitation of reality, this thesis will ask whose reality is articulated in productions of Özdamar s and Zaimoglu s plays and in what forms? How does this relate to the long-denied reality of Germany as a country of immigration? In exploring these questions, I will also make use of the term mimeticism, as indicated above. Mimeticism is a term used by cultural theorist Rey Chow to identify mechanisms which use concepts of idealised originals and their imperfect imitation to measure the authenticity of certain subjects and cultural productions, and so keep them in their place. 27 This mechanism seems to be reflected in the growth of 24 Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Kultur Kunst Gesellschaft (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1992), p Stefan Senders, Jus Sanguinis or Jus Mimesis? Rethinking Repatriation, in Coming Home to Germany? The Integration of Ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe in the Federal Republic, ed. by David Rock and Stefan Wolff (New York: Berghahn, 2002), pp (p. 90). 26 Breger, Aesthetics, p. 34; quoting Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction, 2 nd edn (London: Routledge, 2004), p Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp Mani and Adelson both identify Chow s work on ethnicity and representation 22

25 nativism in Europe today, which designates authority via authenticity, often with very material effects. 28 The FRG is no exception here: although the country adapted its citizenship law from the concept of jus sanguinis to a version of jus soli in 2000, since doing so it has also tightened up its naturalisation requirements significantly, specifically by raising the language level expected and by introducing citizenship tests. 29 In light of these changes one could argue that the country has gone from defining the authentic German citizen by inherited blood to inherited culture, using the citizenship tests to probe even the values of its potential citizens for authenticity. 30 A central concern of this study will therefore be how mimeticism might be critiqued by or figure in the commission, production, and reception of performances of these plays. 1.2 Scripts of Postmigration: Methodology As dramatists, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Feridun Zaimoglu, and his co-writer Günter Senkel have very different histories not only of migration, but also of authorship and of working with the theatre. Özdamar grew up in post-war Turkey, moving to West Germany first temporarily aged nineteen as part of the early wave of labour migration to the FRG. She then returned to Turkey where she trained as an actress, before political violence led her to move to Berlin in the late 1970s. As will be seen in more detail in Chapter Two of this thesis, Özdamar is an actress trained both in the East German post-brechtian ensemble system and in the transnationally-influenced Turkish acting schools of the 1960s and 70s, who has actively explored and created as relevant to German-Turkish literature and particularly that of Zaimoglu: Mani, Cosmopolitical Claims, p. 30; Adelson, Turkish Turn, pp Jan-Willem Duyvendak, The Politics of Home: Belonging and Nostalgia in Europe and the United States (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p Until 1 st January 2000 German citizenship was based on the principle of German descent (jus sanguinis). Following 1 st January 2000 citizenship can be granted to children born in Germany, irrespective of descent, if one parent with a valid residence permit has lived in the country for eight years. Those resident in Germany but born before 2000 must pass a naturalization course, language test, and in some states the so-called Muslim Test. See Robert Carle, Citizenship Debates in the New Germany, Society, 44.6 (2007), ; Mark Terkessedis, Interkultur (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), pp Mani, p. 30. See also Terkessedis discussion on the norm against which successful integration is measured: Interkultur, pp

26 intersections between these multiple performance traditions in her theatrical writing, adopting what Loren Kruger terms a syncretic approach. 31 The active discouragement of this kind of work in German cultural policy in the 1980s meant that younger artists such as Zaimoglu were unlikely to come into contact with these methods. 32 Instead, Zaimoglu, who was born in Turkey but has lived in the FRG since early childhood and associates himself more with the so-called second and third, or postmigrant, generation, was brought up in a Turkish- German working-class household with little interest in the theatre. He began to gain popularity first as a prose writer and moved into the role of dramatist when invited to be writer in residence for a number of theatres. 33 The usage of the label Turkish- German within this study is therefore intended to contextualise but in no way essentially define theatrical work by these dramatists. Both Tom Cheesman and B. Venkat Mani consider the literary texts they deal with, which in each case include literary works by Özdamar and Zaimoglu, to be Turkish-German literature in the sense of literature whose production, themes or reception have been marked by the specific historical situation of Turks in the FRG. 34 It thus also extends to include Zaimoglu s co-dramatist and friend, Günter Senkel. Senkel, who appears to have no personal experience of migration, runs a bookshop in addition to joining Zaimoglu in his writing for the theatre. 35 The process of their collaboration is described by Zaimoglu as follows: Ich bin der Extremist, bin fur die Sprache und Ideen zuständig. Ich schlüpfe in die Rollen [ ] Meine Aufgabe[n] sind Gefühle und 31 Loren Kruger, Post-Imperial Brecht: Politics and Performance, East and South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp This will be discussed in more detail in Section 2.2 of this thesis. 32 For a detailed overview of Turkish-German theatre in this period see Boran, pp On the negative effects of cultural policy on Turkish-German theatre see also Azadeh Sharifi, Postmigrantisches Theater: Eine neue Agenda für die deutschen Bühnen, in Theater und Migration: Herausforderungen für Kulturpolitik und Theaterpraxis, ed. by Wolfgang Schneider (Bielefeld: transcript, 2011), pp (p. 36). 33 See, for example, Solmaz. 34 Cheesman, Novels, p An author biography for Senkel is provided in: Rüdiger Schütt (ed.), Feridun Zaimoglu in Schrift und Bild: Beiträge zum Werk des Autors und Künstlers (Kiel: edition fliehkraft, 2011), p. 85. The lack of attention given to Senkel s background in the existing scholarship, theatre reviews, and interviews is indicative of the way in which both authorship and ethnicisation work in contemporary Germany. The literary star-system leaves little space for acknowledgement of collaborative writing practices, while an emphasis on the author s background as heuristic device appears only in relation to Zaimoglu. 24

27 Affekte. Günther [sic] ist der Techniker, der sich überlegt: Die Affekte, Ideen und die Sprache geht das überhaupt auf?! Funktioniert die Geschichte?! 36 Situating the plays as products of successful literary authors does mean that Senkel recedes into the background slightly in the analysis presented in this thesis. This is not intended to obscure Senkel s contribution to his and Zaimoglu s plays, but simply reflects his reportedly more technical role in the writing process and the fact that he, unlike Zaimoglu, is not known as an author in his own right. The very brief outline of these authors theatrical biographies provided above illustrates that the new postmigrant theatre does not necessarily constitute a continuation or validation of earlier attempts at creating a syncretic theatre, epitomised by those of Özdamar (see Chapter Two, section 2.2). 37 Rather they stand in a broken relation to one another, linked only by the degree to which gaps and breaks in theatrical projects can be considered a constitutive part of the history of Turkish-German theatre as outlined by Boran. 38 At the same time, new funding for and interest in postmigrant theatre theatre by and with postmigrant artists which aims to bring a postmigrant perspective into the theatrical sphere is also slowly creating forums in which these distinctly developed ways of working are coming together and interacting further. The Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Berlin, is an important theatre to name here. As will be seen throughout this thesis, the Ballhaus is an institution which has functioned to bring together those who have long been active in the Turkish-German theatrical off-scene with theatre practitioners experienced within Germany s statefunded stage system, as well as with newer names arising from projects such as those discussed in Chapters Four and Five. In other parts of the country such approaches are also increasingly being taken up by key theatres in the state-funded theatrical landscape, as indicated by the fact that references to particular directors and theatres such as Schauspiel Köln and Karin Beier, or Schauspiel Hannover and Luk Perceval also recur throughout this thesis. This marks 36 Solmaz, n. pag. The process is described similarly in Gräff, n. pag. 37 On Özdamar s theatre as syncretic see Kruger, pp The term broken tradition is borrowed from: Derek Paget, The Broken Tradition of Documentary Theatre and Its Continued Powers of Endurance, in Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present, ed. by Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp

28 a stark change from a previous reluctance to stage stories of migration by or with postmigrant artists within the Federal Republic of Germany. 39 The source of this seachange appears to be the alteration of German Citizenship Law in 2000 and the subsequent adoption of interkulturelle Handlungskonzepte by the cultural senates of areas such as North Rhine-Westphalia and Berlin. 40 Azadeh Sharifi explains that since the 1990s, German cultural policy has followed the motto of Kultur für alle ; a model in which öffentliche Kulturförderung nur legitimierbar sei, wenn neben der Kunstförderung auch eine offensive Bemühungen [sic] zur Beteiligung der Bevölkerung am Kunst- und Kulturleben vorliege. 41 Following the expansion of citizenship law in 2000 to include those born in Germany rather than just those of German blood, [wird] das Bürgerrecht Kultur nicht nur auf deutsche Bürger, sondern auch auf Bürger mit Migrationshintergrund angewandt. Interkulturalität sollte [ ] Grundlage und Ausgangspunkt aller Aktivitäten sein. 42 A sense of the need for theatres to legitimise their heavily state-subsidised programmes in relation to the rapidly increasing postmigrant demographic also seems to have been a key factor. 43 Both of these developments will be explored critically in this thesis, with a view to what such shifts both enable and demand in terms of the aesthetics of postmigrant theatre and those involved in its production. 44 I have thus far focused on introducing the dramatists whose texts form the core of this thesis. Theatre does not take place in a vacuum, however, but rather in a complex and shifting web of institutions, funding bodies, producers, directors, ensembles, and audiences. 45 This makes it important to stress that authorship in the theatre functions very differently to authorship in literature. As Margaret Jane Kidnie 39 See Boran, pp For a more detailed discussion of these intercultural action frameworks see Terkessidis, Interkultur, Chapters Four and Five. 41 Azadeh Sharifi, Theater für alle? Partizipation von Postmigranten am Beispiel der Bühnen der Stadt Köln (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011), p Ibid., p See the discussions in Wolfgang Schneider (ed.), Theater und Migration: Herausforderungen für Kulturpolitik und Theaterpraxis (Bielefeld: transcript, 2011). 44 Charlotte MacIvor identifies the way in which interculturalism functions as both grass-roots and topdown change and the effects of this on the position of postmigrant playwrights in another European context in Charlotte MacIvor, Staging the New Irish : Interculturalism and the Future of the Post- Celtic Tiger Irish Theater, Modern Drama, 54.3 (2011), While literary products such as books, magazines, online writings are produced in particular contexts and systems, their multiple circulations mean that as both artefact and artwork they can be considered to have independent afterlives. 26

29 puts it, [t]he playwright s creative labour ends with the completion of the script, but the work itself is located with the performance event. 46 While the playwright s name may stand on the programme or published text, collaboration is key in the creation of a performance of the dramatic text. The director s artistic concept, dramaturge s reworking and cutting of the script, and actors bodies and voices therefore all contribute to the transformation of the author s words into the theatrical work itself. Within the German theatrical tradition in particular, the director claims the authorial function to a much larger degree than in, for example, the British tradition. 47 As a result, his/her artistic vision generally takes priority over that of the dramatist and dramatic texts are often used as raw material rather than as blueprints to be realised. While an overly biographical reading of this dramatic work would in any case be problematic, the theatrical medium functions to further disrupt the often assumed associations between the author as biographical person and the author as literary person which played such a large role in the reception of texts such as Özdamar s Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei hat zwei Türen aus einer kam ich rein aus der anderen ging ich raus (1992) and Zaimoglu s Kanak Sprak: 24 Mißtöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft (2005). 48 Rather than looking at what these plays have to tell us about migration, one key area of exploration in this thesis will therefore be the degree to which the authorial function colours the reception of the plays in production. In taking the dramatic texts as my starting point, it is also important to acknowledge that: [t]he identity of the work of dramatic art [ ] is not limited by a supposed originary moment of publication, either theatrical or textual, but continually constructed in response to production by 46 Margaret Jane Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p David Bradby and David Williams, Directors Theatre (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), p On this reception see, for example, Yasemin Dayıoğlu-Yücel, Authorship and Authenticity in Migrant Writing: The Plagiarism Debate on Leyla, in Feridun Zaimoglu, ed. by Tom Cheesman and Karin E. Yeşilada (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012) pp ; Chantelle Warner, A Turkish Tale: Genre, Subjectivity, and the Controversy around Feridun Zaimoğlu s Leyla, Gegenwartsliteratur, 10 (2011), pp These articles also address an event which directly links public discourses on authorship and Özdamar and Zaimoglu s prose work; the public accusation that Zaimoglu s novel Leyla (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2006) plagiarised Özdamar s first novel Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei hat zwei Türen aus einer kam ich rein aus der anderen ging ich raus (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch: 1992). The debate over this is not something I wish to enter into in this thesis. However, it is addressed in fictionalised form in Özdamar s 2010 play Perikızı, the subject of Chapter Six of this thesis, and so will be outlined briefly there. 27

30 users as varied as theatrical practitioners, spectators and readers, and publishers and editors. 49 My research for this thesis shows that this is no less the case with the work of Özdamar and of Zaimoglu/Senkel. While some of the play-texts have been published, others are held by the publishers and are only available on request. As a result often the only version of the play an audience has access to is that given in performance. 50 The image of these works will thus be shaped as much by the advertising of these performances, the cutting and interpretation of the play by the theatrical team involved in producing it, and an audience member s memories combined with the record of the play provided in reviews. Equally, where the play-text is published, it rarely corresponds to the often heavily-edited script which was used as the basis for a performance. While the dramatic text and two/three particular dramatists form the starting point for this study, I therefore want to emphasise these texts as scripts from which multiple theatrical performances and events can arise. These realisations are dependent on the agency not only of the playwright but also of the multiple theatre practitioners, funding bodies, and audiences involved. The productions I will examine here took place over thirty years and were accompanied by varying degrees of success, attracting different amounts of archival attention. 51 For each production examined here then, my aim was to find sufficient 49 Kidnie, p As Kidnie puts it: play often seems a bit of a fudged term it is neither text or version [ ], or theatrical enactment. It is all of these, and more : p This ambiguity has certainly been an issue in the reception to date of the dramatic texts and productions to be examined in this thesis. Here I will only use the term play when referring to the matrix created by dramatic text, production, and event; otherwise I will refer specifically to the dramatic text, a production, or a particular performance event. 51 My experience researching for this project shows that outside of the larger and most significant German theatre houses, the degree to which theatrical material is archived varies greatly from theatre to theatre. Some of the theatres at which the plays I examine here had premiered gave material to specialist theatre archives or town or regional archives rather than maintaining internal archives. The archives of Schauspiel Frankfurt, for example, where the first play this thesis examined premiered, are held not by the theatre but by the Archiv zu den Städtischen Bühnen Frankfurt at the Universitätsbibliothek Johann C. Senckenberg, part of the Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main. University. Similarly, the archives of Schauspiel Hannover were to be found in the associated Theatermuseum next door. In other theatres, materials and particularly recordings, seemed to move with particular directors when they moved on to another theatre. At the Staatstheater Oldenburg, where Özdamar s Keloglan in Alamania premiered, for example, there was merely a gap in the shelf where the chronology of the otherwise extensive archive suggested that materials relating to the play would be stored. In still other cases materials had been kept but not in an archive which the theatres were willing to give me access to, or the productions were so new that the material available was yet to be archived. In these cases artefacts were gathered from the theatres during my own trips to see the plays and were 28

31 materials to allow the negotiations leading up to a performance, the publicity surrounding it, the aesthetics of the mise-en-scène, and its public reception to be considered. In doing so, I follow the pragmatic approach of Guido Hiß, who compares a number of approaches to performance analysis and highlights the need for researchers to react creatively and flexibly to die Besonderheiten des gewählten Gegenstandes, so that das rezeptive Simulacram auf das produktive [reagiert]. 52 In approaching each production, I examine programmes and, where possible, marketing materials, as these help shape audience expectations and the frames against which the play will be read. Reviews also have a role to play here, not only as evidence of one type of reception, but also as a form of marketing which may influence the expectations a post-premiere audience brings with them into the theatre. I also draw on the director s cut of the scripts, audiovisual recordings, and publicity photographs to explore the aesthetics of each play in production. Although an audiovisual recording on its own might seem sufficient, I preferred to use all three of these sources as well as reports of performances in reviews and in the interviews I conducted. This is partly because the audiovisual recordings accessed were mainly for the theatres own internal uses and so are of variable quality. In many of these recordings the view is very dependent on the camera operator, thus at times the whole stage can be seen, meaning that blocking is readily viewable, however, the details of the actors expressions are not; at other times the camera might focus in on particular actors or parts of the action, obscuring the broader view and locking the viewing of the researcher to that of one single audience member. 53 The audiovisual recordings also show only one instance of the play in production; generally the first performance or in some cases the dress rehearsal. As complemented by internal documents kindly made available by employees of the theatre or the directors themselves. In some cases directors personal collections were also drawn on. While I have been as thorough as possible, other materials may still become available. 52 Hiß, pp This approach also draws on the methodology outlined in Balme s Cambridge Introduction, pp , as well as that employed in Bradley, Brecht, p See also Balme, Cambridge Introduction, pp ; Bradley, Brecht, p. 14. My approach to the use of video is also informed by the debates on the use of audiovisual recordings in performance analysis which were carried out in, for example, Gay McAuley, The Visual Documentation of Theatrical Performance, New Theatre Quarterly, 38 (1994), ; Annabelle Melzer, Best Betrayal : The Documentation of Performance on Video and Film, Part 1, New Theatre Quarterly, 42 (1995), ; Denise Varney and Rachel Fensham, More-And-Less-Than: Liveness, Video Recording, and the Future of Performance, New Theatre Quarterly, 61 (2000), 88-96; Marco De Marinis, A Faithful Betrayal of Performance : Notes on the Use of Video in Theatre, trans. by Glyn Jones, New Theatre Quarterly, 4 (1985),

32 many theatre scholars have highlighted, each theatrical happening is unique: actors play slightly differently on different nights, a production may develop or stagnate over time, and the audience and experiences they bring with them into the theatre may change. In some cases I was also able to see the plays in production; an experiential mode of encountering the plays which also shaped my understanding of them. However, the lighting, blocking, costume, sound, and scenery i.e. the components which make-up the mise-en-scène are more constant elements of a production and are therefore relatively accessible for analysis. 54 Indeed, the mise-en-scène can be considered as much an example of careful construction by the director, actors, and production team, as that of the dramatic text by the playwright. 55 The use of interviews with dramaturges, directors, and the playwrights involved in the productions of the plays I examine here also has an important role to play in this research. The aim of these interviews was not to engage in systematic discourse analysis or any other type of sociological qualitative analysis. Rather, they served as a way of bringing in the voices and knowledge of the real experts in this field; those involved in the practice of the theatre which I am examining here. As a result the interview questions were production-specific and while I asked about the commission, inspiration, rehearsals, performance, and reception of the plays in each case, each interviewee was encouraged to lead the discussion into the areas they found most important. This was particularly useful in terms of constructing the genealogy of a production. Although narratives and memories provided by interviewees are a highly subjective and often anecdotal form of evidence, used together with the material artefacts arising from a production they become a useful source which helps contextualise the material remains of a production. Indeed, in some cases these interviews were not only useful in the process of setting artefacts in context, that is, in helping me read the documents which I had found, but also in the process of finding the artefacts in the first place As Balme highlights, the mise-en-scène of a production is made-up of more-or-less constant features ; particular stagings thus reveal a high degree of consistency, and can therefore be analysed as works in themselves: Cambridge Introduction, pp See also the entry on Staging in Patrice Pavis, Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis, trans. by Christine Shantz (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1998), pp Ibid. 56 My interview with dramaturge Ingo Waszerka, for example, led me to search for the photographs of the premiere of Emine Sevgi Özdamar s first play taken by Abisag Tüllmann. These images are 30

33 Throughout I combine an understanding of the play as presented to audiences with access to reviews of the production to gain a more nuanced picture of each play s reception. As Christopher Balme summarises, reception analysis is notoriously problematic: Obwohl die Theaterwissenschft auf dem Mantra basiert, dass der Zuschauer oder das Publikum die Hauptrolle im Theater besitzt, verweisen beide Begriffe auf einen hypothetischen (sehr selten empirischen) Rezipienten eines ästhetischen Produkts, der Aufführung. 57 Balme does offer a solution to this conundrum though. He differentiates between the individuals and collective audience present at a given performance, and a third entity, the Theateröffentlichkeit tied neither to the individual audience member nor to the performance itself. Although the former are both present at a performance and antworten auf und dekodieren eine Aufführung, the latter ist eine Entität der Meinungsbildung, die auf das Theater einwirkt, befindet sich jedoch weder räumlich noch zeitlich in unmittelbarer Tuchfühlung mit einer Aufführung. 58 The reactions or consensus of the more abstract theatre public to which Balme refers are more easily traced than those of the immediate, individualised audience members and can be examined via the reactions published in the form of reviews and articles or interviews addressing each play. Anecdotal evidence of individual audience members reactions does also exist in the case of some of the plays examined here and can be gathered from reactions reported in reviews of productions and anecdotes told in interviews with directors of the productions I am examining here. While the highly subjective discussed in my 2013 article: Lizzie Stewart, Countermemory and the (Turkish-)German Theatrical Archive: Reading the Documentary Remains of Emine Sevgi Özdamar s Karagöz in Alamania, Transit, 8.2 (2013), 1-23 < [last accessed 02/08/2014]. My interview with Neco Çelik also led to his wife, actress Nermin Çelik, kindly giving me a copy of the audio-videorecording of the premiere production of Zaimoglu/Senkel s Schwarze Jungfrauen and other materials relating to the production, in which she originally played one of the characters. 57 Christopher Balme, Gefährliche Bilder: Theater und Öffentlichkeit in einer multireligiösen Gesellschaft, in Irritation und Vermittlung: Theater in einer interkulturellen und multireligiösen Gesellschaft, ed. by Wolfgang Sting et al. (Berlin: Dr W. Hopf, 2010), pp (p. 58). 58 Ibid. 31

34 nature of this anecdotal evidence must be stressed, I will draw on it where possible, in order to create a more nuanced and detailed picture of each play s reception. 1.3 Literature Review As Denise Varney highlights, the German stage bears a metonymic relation to the nation-state, which subsidises it, as in the part for the whole. 59 The close relation between German stage and German state dates back to the eighteenth century when statements such as Friedrich Schiller s wenn wir es erlebten eine Nationalbühne zu haben, so würden wir auch eine Nation, provided rallying points for the construction of an imagined community called Germany. 60 As in many European countries, the nation-building role of theatre in the newly-created German state was continued into the twentieth century via strict censorship of the stage in World Wars I and II. 61 Individual artists of the avant-garde in Germany have focused on creating a theatre of dissent rather than consensus throughout the twentieth century. However, following the country s post-war division, a plentiful state funding system in both East and West Germany also aligned theatre with the discourses of democratic sovereignty in the two states. 62 Although the state theatre systems experienced significant financial upheaval following reunification, this was mainly the result of the difficulties inherent in absorbing a socialist system into the capitalist economy of West Germany and could be seen as part of a broader process of consolidating, rather than opening up, ethnically defined notions of Germanness. Katrin Sieg argues that the introduction of European Union funding for projects with specific remits intended to promote diversity on the stage has functioned to 59 Denise Varney, Transit Heimat: Translation, Transnational Subjectivity and Mobility in German Theatre, Transit, 2.1 (2005), 1-22 (p. 2) < [last accessed 25/07/2014]. 60 Friedrich Schiller, Die Schaubühne als moralische Anstalt betrachtet (1784), in Friedrich Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 4 (Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta, 1879), pp (p. 46). On imagined communities see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London; New York: Verso, 1983). 61 Wilhelm Hortmann and Maik Hamburger, Shakespeare on the German Stage: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p Sieg, German Theatre, p Within this broader alignment, the legacy of particularisation and decentralisation has created a theatrical system characterised by strong regional centres 32

35 disrupt the close relationship between the German theatre and nation, forc[ing] open the demographic structure of the institution [ and] achiev[ing] what a century of feminist complaints and several decades of immigrant activism have not been able to accomplish. 63 However, it was only in May 2011 that the Dramaturgische Gesellschaft felt the need to ask itself Wer ist Wir? and take die interkulturelle Gesellschaft as the theme for its annual conference. 64 As will be seen below, the metonymic relationship between stage and state also reflects a long existent lack of acceptance of the Turkish presence in the FRG on an institutional level and a hesitancy when it comes to offering immigrant or postmigrant playwrights, actors, and directors a stake in the theatrical imaginary. Erol Boran, one of the few scholars to have worked on providing a systematic overview of this area of cultural production, traces a history of what he terms Turkish- German theatre from the arrival of the first Gastarbeiter, some of whom were greeted by the young Turkish student and future dramatist Yüksel Pazarkaya. His thesis details the development of amateur and off-scene Turkish theatre groups in the FRG and the repeated failure of attempts to establish permanent theatre groups with institutional recognition or funding within West Germany. 65 According to Boran, this history is characterised both by disagreements among the artists involved over the function of the theatre in question and by a sense of cultural isolation resulting to a degree from failings on the part of the German state s attempts at engaging with Turkish-German ensembles or theatre artists. 66 As Sven Sappelt points out, for a long time the German government had no cultural policy in place for a group it had never expected and was not keen to encourage to stay. 67 As a result, funding for Turkish-German theatre was frequently low, drawn from social funds rather than cultural budgets, and rarely continuous in nature, consisting rather of short-term, project-based subsidies. 68 This in particular hindered rather than promoted the development of existing theatre groups Ibid., p The conference is documented in Dramaturgie: Zeitschrift der Dramaturgischen Gesellschaft (Feb. 2011). 65 Boran, pp ; pp ; pp Ibid; see also p. 104; p Sven Sappelt, Theater der Migrant/innen, in Interkulturelle Literatur in Deutschland: Ein Handbuch, ed. by C. Chiellino (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2007), pp (p. 277). Also quoted in Boran, p Boran, p. 79; p. 158; p Boran names the Tiyatrom theatre in Berlin as the main exception here. 69 Sappelt, p Also quoted and commented on in Boran, p

36 Turkish-German theatre has thus followed a very different path of development and recognition from that of Turkish-German literature or even film. 70 Disagreements over the aim of the art form, or the way in which it should be received, as well as a lack of institutional acknowledgement of its aesthetic value are also characteristic for the history of Turkish-German literature and affected both this literature s dissemination and reception. 71 However, it seems that these factors did not affect the production of literary works in quite the same way as these circumstances would act negatively on theatre an art form dependant on collaboration, access to professional training, and, frequently, funding. 72 In highlighting these challenges, Boran effectively denaturalises the lack of Turkish-German theatre and theatre practitioners on German state stages. This is a move taken further more recently by Mark Terkessidis, who argues that many state-funded institutions, including theatres, still function to serve the ethnically defined Volk rather than the diverse and actually existent Bevölkerung of the Federal Republic of Germany. 73 While it will be useful to situate the plays my study will examine within the framework of the literary study of the authors in question, it is also important to remember that Turkish-German literature and theatre have been moulded by their common history in materially different ways. As can be seen from the brief discussion provided thus far, Boran s thesis will be an invaluable resource in terms of situating this study historically. Boran performs important work by drawing attention to companies and individual playwrights who otherwise remain unrecognised by the majority of German theatre scholarship. 74 This attention to the personal and institutional circumstances which have shaped Turkish- German theatre is highly effective in revealing the material factors such as funding which have led to the frequent exclusion of the work of Turkish playwrights and ensembles from the German stage, as well as in exposing institutional attitudes toward Turkish artists in the FRG. The historical focus and breadth of his study mean, though, that it is necessarily descriptive rather than analytical as regards the aesthetics of the plays produced. Despite the thesis being finished in just 2004, it is also already slightly 70 Boran, p See Tom Cheesman, Novels of Turkish German Settlement: Cosmopolite Fictions (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007), pp On the role of access to training see also Sieg, Black Virgins, p Terkessidis, Interkultur, p As noted earlier, the study conducted by Brauneck et al. is a significant exception here. 34

37 dated. At the time of writing, Zaimoglu, a key figure for my study, was yet to establish himself as a playwright together with Senkel, although Boran does mention his early stints as house dramatist at the Nationaltheater Mannheim and Schauspielhaus Frankfurt. 75 As already noted, significant changes in the way German theatre is funded and the perception of whom that theatre should serve have also recently taken place, which alter the situation as outlined by Boran in his study. As a result it is only in the past few years that contemporary theatre productions written by, directed by, or starring Turkish-German and other postmigrant artists in Germany have begun to attract significant and sustained academic attention. 76 A more up-to-date overview of current theatrical practice is therefore provided in the recently published Theater und Migration (2011). This collection of articles, edited by Wolfgang Schneider, is the first to explicitly focus on this theme and illustrates the diversity of approaches which can be taken towards this theatre. The collection ranges from case studies of particular theatres and performances to overviews of trends in areas such as audience development and youth theatre; from the experiences of practitioners and the views of reviewers to more programmatic declarations on the part of cultural researchers. 77 Many of these contributions will be drawn on within this thesis and so are discussed in more detail in individual chapters. For the purposes of a broader overview, however, the sections which Schneider s collection is divided into are also worth highlighting as indicative of some 75 Boran, p See, for example, the collection of essays in Wolfgang Sting et al. (eds), Irritation und Vermittlung: Theater in einer interkulturellen und multireligiösen Gesellschaft (Berlin: Dr W. Hopf, 2010). The following monograph provides an interesting point of comparison as it focuses more on the transnational context of German influences on and attitudes to Turkish theatre, although it also contains sections on Robert Ciulli s international Theater an der Ruhr as well as documenting the author s own use of theatre pedagogical work with postmigrant students in Duisburg-Essen: Zehra İpşiroğlu, Eine andere Türkei: Literatur, Theater und Gesellschaft im Fokus einer Randeuropäerin (Frankfurt am Main: Brandes & Apsel, 2008). See, for example, pp ; pp ; pp A number of articles on theatre and (Turkish) migration did also appear in the mid-1980s, when a number of ensembles appear to have briefly flourished: cf. Boran, pp however,this does not appear to have resulted in a sustained scholarly focus on this area of cultural production, making it difficult to track earlier individual interventions. See, for example: Gerhardt Haag, Nein! Hayir! Ein Theaterprojekt mit türkischen und deutschen Jugendlichen, TheaterZeitSchrift, 14 (1985/86), 42-48; Lutz Tantow, Jetzt geht es los mit den fremden Sitten: Der Wandel in der Ausländer-Darstellung des deutschen Gegenwartstheaters, TheaterZeitSchrift, 14 (1985/86), 49-59; Lutz Tantow, Unsere Kanaken sind halt so komisch! Supplement zum Gastarbeiter -Theater, in Fremdworte, 1.1 (1985), Schneider, passim. 35

38 of the main current approaches to postmigrant and specifically Turkish-German theatre. Schneider divides the contributions into those which address Theater als Bühne kultureller Identitäten, Theater als Auseinandersetzung mit dem Fremden, Theater als Ort gesellschaftlicher Partizipation, Theater als Angebot interkultureller Spielpläne and Theater und Migration als Auftrag einer Kultur- und Bildungspolitik. 78 Hanna Voss, who also cites these headings in the introduction to her 2014 monograph on Reflexionen von ethnischer Identität(szuweisungen) im deutschen Gegenwartstheater, highlights that this somewhat sociological focus on identity, othering, and art as means of communication or interaction leaves little space for [einen] aesthetisch-politische[n] Ansatz. 79 Together with the resurgence of the term intercultural in many contributions this sociological bent may also seem worryingly familiar to scholars coming from a background of research into Turkish-German literature. In this field a focus on literature by Turkish-German authors as intercultural literature has long been criticised as one which reduziert die Werke in ethnozentristischer Weise auf einen kulturvermittelnden Nutzwert and functions to anchor literature by authors of non- German ethnicity firmly in their otherness. 80 Unlike literature, film, visual art, or even the dramatic text, however, the theatrical work is also only received or encountered when performed. The social is thus built in to the form. My approach will therefore differ from that of Voss, who explicitly concentrates allein auf das ästhetische Produkt, sprich auf die Theateraufführung, arguing that this focus ist under anderem auch dem mir vorliegenden Material geschuldet: Das Wahrnehmen und Erleben einer Aufführung lässt nur eine Aussage über die Gestalt und die Wirkung des ästhetischen Endprodukts zu. 81 As this thesis will show, a more ambitious approach to both historical and contemporary performance allows the plays also to be located as historical and social events in a manner which informs the reading of their aesthetics. 78 Schneider, pp Also quoted in Hanna Voss, Reflexion von ethnischer Identität(szuweisung) im deutschen Gegenwartstheater (Marburg: Tectum, 2014), pp Voss, p Karin Lornsen, Transgressive Topographien in der türkisch-deutschen Post-Migrantenliteratur (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of British Columbia, 2007), p. 12, n. 14. This critique emerges from a number of quarters in German Studies. See also, for example, Leslie A. Adelson, Against Between Ein Manifest gegen das Dazwischen, in Text und Kritik, 9.6: Literatur und Migration ed. by Heinz Ludwig Arnold (2006), Voss, p

39 The impact which funding schemes, for example, are having on the structures of theatre in Germany and discourses surrounding them is reflected in the title of Franziska Schößler s recent monograph Drama und Theater nach 1989: Prekär, interkulturell, intermedial. 82 Schößler s approach aims to explore the ways in which cultural policy affects aesthetics, and her methodology lies perhaps closest to my own, although, as will be discussed in more detail shortly, her exploration of intercultural theatre creates a focus on more high-profile and established German artists such as René Pollesch. 83 As Schößler argues, the focus on project-based Internationalisierung, Flexibilisierung und Mobilität in current EU arts policy presents a particular challenge for the German Stadttheater, das sich mit Mehrsprachigkeit, dem Migrationshintergrund der Stadtbevölkerung und Interkulturen grundsätzlich schwer tut. 84 While the milestones outlined in section 1.1 suggest this situation is changing, that is not to say such change is easy or unproblematic. In a 2011 discussion on postmigrant theatre at the Heidelberger Stückemarkt, Turkish-born and -educated, Berlin-based director Nurkan Erpulat goodhumouredly answered the question of what making theatre with his background means as follows: mit meinem Hintergrund Theater zu machen. [...] Das bedeutet, dass viele Leute in mir tatsächlich eher einen Türken sehen als Regisseur. [...] Das bedeutet, wenn ich irgendwie eine Liebesgeschichte thematisiere, es eher als Migrationsgeschichte eingeordnet wird. [...] Und das bedeutet [...], wenn ich irgendwelche Schauspieler auf die Bühne schicke, schwarz-haarig, schwarz-augig, und ich [sie] irgendwelche Randale machen lasse [...], [es] sofort als authentisch begriffen wird Franziska Schößler, Drama und Theater nach 1989: Prekär, interkulturell, intermedial (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2013). 83 Ibid., p Ibid., pp ; p. 12. Sieg cautiously positions EU intervention in national theatre funding positively: German Theatre, p In Schößler s view this intervention creates further precarity rather than stability within an already insecure profession, is less well-suited to the aesthetics of German postdramatic theatre, and risks disrupting the strong relationships theatres in Germany have built with local audiences. As will be seen throughout this thesis, the relationship between theatre and locality has had a significant role to play in opportunities for performing the scripts of postmigration examined here. 85 Nurkan Erpulat, my transcription from: Jan Linders, Nurkan Erpulat, Jens Hillje, Tuğsal Moğul, Aljoscha Begrich, Jenseits von Identität Postmigrantische Kultur: Diskussion mit Autoren und Theatermachern, unpublished audiovisual recording of public discussion, 4/06/2011 (Heidelberg: Heidelberger Stückemarkt, 2011). My thanks to Jenny Flügge for access to a copy of this recording. 37

40 In B. Venkat Mani s study of Turkish-German literature, including that of Zaimoglu and Özdamar, he highlights the ascription to certain people of racially encoded privilege, an iconicity, thus creating the native informant, and examines how this functions with respect both to Turkish-German authors and to characters within the Turkish-German novel. 86 As Erpulat s comments above suggest, a focus on theatre in performance raises the question of the extent to which theatre as a more mediated art form (in so far as the playwright s dramatic text is mediated via the director, mise-enscène, and actors bodies) might function, or fail, to disrupt this iconicity. Other issues raised in the Heidelberg discussion quoted above included clichéd casting practices, audience expectations surrounding the type of German accent they encounter on the German stage, the lack of Turkish-German presence in administrative and production roles in the German theatrical landscape, and the lack of interest and determination until recently in engaging with theatre as a means not just to mirror society but also to thematise and challenge established Sehgewohnheiten. 87 Several of these issues are also addressed in some recent publications: Onur Suzan Kömürcü Nobrega discusses the structural dimension of discrimination in the theatre industry in her articles on the leadership of the Ballhaus Naunynstraße. 88 Contemporary debates about ethnicised casting practices and the politics of racial representation on the German stage are also examined by Voss and Azadeh Sharifi amongst others. 89 Rather than focusing a sociological gaze on work presented as art, in this thesis I will make use of these studies to examine the plays as part of the fabric of German theatre. Such an approach allows me to trace the often double-edged nature of the shift outlined 86 Sara Suleri, quoted in Mani, Cosmopolitical Claims, p Jan Linders et al., unpublished audiovisual recording. 88 See Onur Suzan Kömürcü Nobrega, We Bark from the Third Row : The Position of the Ballhaus Naunynstraße in Berlin s Cultural landscape and the Funding of Cultural Diversity Work, in Türkischdeutsche Studien, 2: 50 Jahre Türkische Arbeitsmigration in Deutschland, ed. by Şeyda Özil et al., (Göttingen: V & R, 2011), pp ; Onur Suzan Kömürcü Nobrega, Alienation in Higher Education: Lived Experiences of Racial and Class Based Inequality in Film and Drama School, in The Living Archive: Cultural Productions and Spaces (Berlin: Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 2013), < [last accessed 07/08/2014], n. pag. 89 Voss, pp ; pp ; Azadeh Sharifi, Blackfacing, Kunstfreiheit und die Partizipation von Postmigrant_innen [sic] an den Stadttheatern, migration-boell.de (July 2012), < [last accessed 26/08/2014], n. pag. 38

41 above and ask how it affects and is affected by the realisation of Turkish-German scripts of postmigration. In the latter part of this thesis, I will address interculturalism (Interkulturalität) as a funding concept currently structuring aspects of the German state-funded theatre system. Intercultural theatre is not a term I will be making use of either as a descriptor for particular types of theatre or as the way into a particular theoretical approach, however. Until very recently, in a theatrical context interculturalism has more generally been used to explore how the semiotics of a piece translates across boundaries. 90 The use of interculturalism by Erika Fischer-Lichte and Patrice Pavis, for example, occurs in analyses which focus on the transfer of a play written in one cultural context to another radically different one (for example, Chekhov in Japan), rather than plays produced within one locality. 91 An intercultural approach to analysing theatre produced by playwrights of another ethnic origin within Germany would therefore seem inappropriate. Indeed, I would argue that a focus on intercultural theatre results either in a preference for analysing theatre companies invited to Germany from other countries over the products of, for example, resident Turkish-German theatre artists, 92 or risks suggesting that the Turkish-German playwright is as culturally foreign to Germany as nineteenth-century Russia may be to the modern Japanese audience. Furthermore, Hans-Thies Lehmann highlights that in a theatrical production, [e]s begegnen sich ja gar nicht Kulturen als solche, sondern konkrete Künstler, Kunstformen, Theaterarbeiten. 93 As a collective nominer the term is therefore also somewhat problematic. Franziska Schößler sketches out the flexibility of the term and 90 Patrice Pavis, Problems of Translation for the Stage: Interculturalism and Post-Modern Theatre, in The Play Out of Context: Transferring Plays from Culture to Culture, ed. by Hanna Scolnicov and Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp See also McIvor, p See, for example, Christine Regus, Interkulturelles Theater zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts: Ästhteik, Politik, Postkolonialismus (Bielefeld: transcript, 2009); Erika Fischer-Lichte, Intercultural Aspects in Post-Modern Theatre: A Japanese Version of Chekhov s Three Sisters, in The Play out of Context: Transferring Plays from Culture to Culture, ed. by Hanna Scolnicov and Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp See the approach taken by Erika Fischer-Lichte, Patterns of Continuity in German Theatre: Interculturalism, Performance and Cultural Mission, in A History of German Theatre, ed. by Maik Hamburger and Simon Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater, 3. rev. edn (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 2005), p

42 the many areas of research open to a scholar who uses it as a category of analysis in her recent monograph as follows: Das Thema Fremdheit und Interkulturalität, das zunehmend an Bedeutung gewinnt, ließe sich im deutschsprachigen Gegenwartstheater auf vielfältige Weise behandeln, beispielsweise im Zusammenhang mit dem Regielabel Rimini Protocoll, dessen Produktionen vielfach interkulturelle Erfahrungen zum Gegenstand machen und zu ermöglichen versuchen. [ ] Man könnte sich, um sich dem Thema Fremdheit zu nähern, auf die Kölner Intendanz von Katrin Beier konzentrieren [ ]. Oder aber man könnte sich mit Theatertexten auseinandersetzen, beispielsweise mit Elfriede Jelineks [ ], mit Dea Lohers [ ], Günter Senkel/Feridun Zaimoglus [ ], mit Theatertexten von Kerstin Specht, Emine Sevgi Özdamar und anderen. 94 In the section of her book which deals explicitly with interculturalism, Schößler herself examines Yoko Tawada s use of both Japanese Nō-theatre and Brecht, Rene Pollesch s work with African popular culture, the theatre festival as point of encounter between East and West (this section includes a discussion of the dramatic text of Özdamar s most recently performed play), and the effect of German reunification on the Theaterhaus Jena. 95 Given the lack of purchase afforded by the flexibility and ambiguity of this term, I prefer to make use of the term postmigrant theatre which narrows the field of enquiry to theatre practices involving (although not limited to) practitioners with a so-called background of migration and a foreground of life in contemporary Germany. 96 The term postmigrant theatre has been popularised by the work of one particular theatre, the Ballhaus Naunynstraße. The particular uses of that term by theatre practitioners involved in this institution will be outlined in more detail in Chapters Four, Five and Six of this thesis, as productions of several of the plays I examine took place there. 94 Schößler, Drama, p Helga Kraft, for example, provides an overview of theatre texts which address Fremdheit in Staging Xenophobia, passim; see also Haas, Modern German, pp Schößler, Drama, pp For a critique of the term Migrationshintergrund see Selim Özdoğan, Vibrationshintergrund, Die Zeit, 13/05/2009, repr. in Transit, 8.1 (2012) < [last accessed 02/08/2014]. 40

43 My approach in this regard is also heavily influenced by the scholarship that already exists on the literary work of Özdamar and Zaimoglu. Leslie A. Adelson s work in this field advocates leaving behind categories of identity (even hybrid identity), and probing instead the textual structures of prose by Zaimoglu, Özdamar, and other Turkish-German authors. 97 In place of the intercultural cultural fable of two worlds which effectively imposes the same reading on various texts, Adelson works from the texts themselves to suggest touching tales as a productive heuristic device. By this she means the existence of lines of thought emanating from Turkish or Turkish-German authors which touch on and intertwine with those which combine to constitute the German national imaginary. 98 Such a line is [d]ependent for its own manifestation on the discursive means with which it is never identical, i.e. the product, but not necessarily the continuation, of the cultural context from which it arises. 99 Turkish literature of migration in Germany is thus for Adelson a phenomenon which developed from within (but was not identical to) a cultural context formed by political decisions and pre-existing cultural structures of the geopolitical entity, the Federal Republic of Germany. Adelson s focus on theory-inflected readings driven by the texts is an approach which I intend to follow in my own study of Özdamar and Zaimoglu/Senkel s plays. 100 As outlined above, however, I will look not only at the dramatic texts of the plays but will also probe the aesthetic structures of the plays in production. This approach also builds on and expands work by Katrin Sieg, who adopts an earlier version of Adelson s touching tales specifically as a basis for thinking through the semiotic triangle of actor, role, and referent in the context of racialised representation in the FRG. 101 If Boran might be said to look at the ethnic make-up of 97 Margaret Littler, Review: Adelson, Leslie A. The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration, German Quarterly (2006), (pp ). 98 Leslie A. Adelson, The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp Claudia Brodsky Lacour, quoted in Adelson, The Turkish Turn, p Etienne Balibar identifies culturalism as the way in which culture is made to function like a nature, thus becoming the ground for discriminatory behaviour: Balibar quoted in Chow, p. 14. The advantages of a more concentrated theoretical approach informed by research into Turkish-German literature are illustrated by Maha El Hissy s recently published monograph, where Bakhtin s theorisation of the carnivalesque is used to analyse two of the plays also addressed in my own thesis: pp Sieg, Ethnic Drag, p. 14. Adelson herself stresses her respect and admiration for Sieg s work; however, she also makes a point of emphasising that Sieg s understanding of referentiality in ethnic drag departs from my understanding of referentiality in the literature of migration, i.e. it proceeds from 41

44 German theatre on an institutional level, Katrin Sieg s study, Ethnic Drag, looks at ethnic make-up quite literally tracing the performance of race both on and off the German stage over the course of the twentieth century. Moving between Nazi Jew farces, Red Indian hobbyism, and plays by minority playwrights and ensembles (including Özdamar), Sieg explores the practice of ethnic drag, or dressing up as an ethnic character in West Germany. In summary, she identifies ethnic drag as a figure of substitution, a crossing of racial lines in performance, a pedagogy, a technique of estrangement, a ritual of inversion, a symbolic contact zone between German bodies and other cultures, and as a simulacrum of race. 102 Ethnic drag thus also becomes a tool for revealing the continuities, permutations, and contradictions of racial feelings in West German culture. 103 A concern with these permutations and contradictions also informs Sieg s reading of the world premiere of Zaimoglu/Senkel s Schwarze Jungfrauen as well as other productions at the Ballhaus Naunynstraße. 104 Sieg s study is situated at the intersection of German and Performance Studies, and shows just how productively these two areas can intersect. According to literary scholars such as B. Venkat Mani, if scholars such as Adelson carve new spaces from which newer questions arise, these questions pertain to historicity, spatiality, locality, translatability. 105 These questions have not only been enthusiastically taken up in the critical literature relating to Zaimoglu and Özdamar, but are also key components of the study of theatre. 106 In drawing on both the historicising, poststructuralist-inflected approaches taken by Adelson and continued in the work of Mani and others, what we have is a critical vocabulary frequently consisting of terms which also have a specific but also significantly differs from Adelson s use of referentiality. Adelson then takes this difference as an opportunity to argue that the cultural effects of Turkish migration to Germany manifest themselves variously in medium-specific ways : Turkish Turn, pp It is this medium-specificity which I believe is key for my study. 102 Sieg, Ethnic Drag, pp Ibid., p Sieg, Black Virgins, p See also Katrin Sieg, Class of 1989: Who Made Good and Who Dropped Out of German History? Postmigrant Documentary Theater in Berlin, in The German Wall: Fallout in Europe, ed. by Marc Silberman (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), pp Mani, Cosmopolitical Claims, p Take, for example: Kate Roy, Re-membering Heterogeneous Histories: How the writing of Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Leïla Sebbar reinscribes the Other in a European Past, in The Poetics of the Margins: Mapping Europe from the Interstices, ed. by Rossella M. Riccobono (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), pp ; Kate Roy, Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Leïla Sebbar: Mapping Global Intertexts in Local Texts, International Journal of the Humanities, 4.8 (2007): 73-82; Kristen Dickinson et al., Translating Communities: Rethinking the Collective in Feridun Zaimoglu s Koppstoff, Transit, 4.1 (2008), 1-33 < [last accessed 05/08/2014]. 42

45 significance within the vocabulary of drama and theatre. Katrin Sieg points out in her analysis of Özdamar s Keloglan in Alamania Oder die Versöhnung von Schwein und Lamm in Ethnic Drag that this makes Özdamar s plays, in particular, ideal for an examination of how the theoretical preoccupation with identity and performativity of the last decade translate into theatrical and political terms. 107 While her analysis of Keloglan in fact concentrates on the dramatic text, rather than on the play in performance or as event, her comment here highlights the shared vocabulary which creates an area of overlap between the literary scholarship on Zaimoglu and Özdamar and potential approaches to their plays from the specifically theatrical angle of performance analysis. This thesis will therefore take mimesis a term which like those discussed above also slips between the theatrical context and broader discourses of representation and its related term mimeticism as the theoretical Leitfaden around which to focus its analysis Mimesis and Mimeticism in the Turkish-German Context Mimesis, a key term for this thesis, has a particular meaning in each of the contexts outlined in the literature review above. According to Matthew Potolsky, the three most common and important elements in the thematic complex of mimesis [are]: the imitation of role models; the imagery of theatre and acting; and the problem of realism. 109 Potolsky continues: The imitation of role models concerns the relationship between past and present, original and copy, and defines mimesis as a historical phenomenon. Theatre, by contrast, emphasizes the relationship between the work and its audience, and defines mimesis by its presentation and effects. Realism, finally, concerns the relationship between work and world, and defines mimesis by its more or less accurate reproduction of nature. In each case, these relationships are governed by social and artistic conventions that in large part 107 Sieg, Ethnic Drag, p Keloglan is the germanised spelling of the Turkish word Keloğlan. In this thesis I maintain the spelling as used in the play-text as published by Verlag der Autoren. 108 As will be discussed in the following section and in Chapter One, mimesis is also a key concern for Sieg in her discussion, albeit in a different manner. 109 Matthew Potolsky, Mimesis (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), p

46 determine whether a literary, artistic or theatrical work strikes us as mimetic. 110 This thematic complex can be said to originate in a certain semantic instability at the root of the word group to which mimesis belongs. The oldest member of this group is generally considered to be the noun mimos, an ancient Greek term dating from at least the fourth century B.C. which referred to both mime as a genre of performance (in the ancient Greek context meaning subliterary, low-life dramatic sketches ) and to the actor of the mime. 111 Elin Diamond uses this double meaning at the heart of the noun from which mimesis developed to draw attention to the following paradox: mimesis denotes [...] both a doing and a thing done. 112 This duality has been to a certain extent both continued and obscured by way of a complex translation history, in which for long periods of time the now standard translations for mimesis, imitation, or the German equivalent Nachahmung, were used interchangeably with representation or Darstellung, suggesting an equivalence between them lost in the more delineated modern-day usage of these words. 113 It is also precisely this flexibility which allows the term to slip so easily between its place within a vocabulary of theatre and its use in wider discourses of representation. As Günter Gebauer and Christoph Wolf put it, Mimesis wird kein ordentlicher Begriff, sie fügt sich nicht, sie widerstrebt der Theoriebildung als ein in diszipliniertes Denken hineingeholtes Wildes. 114 In contrast to the unruly beast which mimesis is sketched as being above, Sieg uses the term very specifically in her interaction with Özdamar s work and her theorisation of ethnic drag as a whole. In Sieg s work mimesis appears mainly as a synonym for a politically conservative naturalism and as an antonym to a politically engaged, Brechtian masquerade or drag. 115 This is understandable given the fact that 110 Ibid., pp Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre (London: Routledge, 1997), p. v. 113 Halliwell p. 364 n. 46 and p Mimesis is given as nachahmen in entries including Hubert Zapf, Mimesis, in Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie, 2nd rev. edn, ed. by Ansgar Nünning (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2001), pp Gebauer and Wulf, p Sieg, Ethnic Drag, pp ; p

47 within the language of the stage mimesis has often been aligned with the mimetic property of acting that semioticians call iconicity, or the conventional resemblance between the performer s body and the object, or character, to which it refers. 116 An aesthetic which naturalises rather than highlights social inequality was famously rejected by one of the most influential figures of the German twentieth-century stage, Bertolt Brecht. Thus a key issue for Sieg is disidentification with mimetic modes of perception which engage in reading a social role for racial truth. 117 The move away from naturalism has also been taken further by the subsequent postdramatic turn in contemporary German theatre which is generally considered to break with its supposed predecessor, the dramatic, partly in that it turns away from a mimetically referential relationship to reality. 118 Sieg s rejection of mimesis as a politically problematic aesthetic technique is thus very in-vogue. Several scholars have contested this opposition between mimesis and the postdramatic, however. Claudia Breger, for example, in her development of an intermedial theory of what she calls narrative performance in contemporary Germany, points to the approximation of mimesis and performance in the context of what she sees as a cross-media turn to presence-orientated forms in twenty-first century Germany. 119 For Breger, who highlights Aristotle s use of mimesis, conceptualizing mimesis as a process of active reconfiguration coshaped by available sociosymbolic scripts is crucial in that it allows for moving beyond antirepresentational post/structuralist [sic] purism [ ] without sacrificing the productive aspects of later twentieth-century critiques of representation. 120 I adopt a similar position here, in that within this study mimesis will be considered in the broader sense of an unstable and relational element, which links the real world to 116 Diamond, p. 45. Diamond herself explains, like many I viewed mimesis as a version of dramatic realism and linked them both to a rather simple referentiality a view reductive both to realism and mimesis, p. xiii. 117 Sieg, Ethnic Drag, p. 223; p Jerome Carroll, Karen Jürs-Munby, and Steve Giles, Introduction: Postdramatic Theatre and the Political, in Postdramatic Theatre and the Political: International Perspectives on Contemporary Performance, ed. by Karen Jürs-Munby, Jerome Carroll, and Steve Giles (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p Breger, Aesthetics, p. 14; p Ibid., p

48 representation or imitation in the work of art. When discussing what is sometimes referred to as mimetic acting I believe it will be clearer to use the terms naturalistic and non-naturalistic acting or performance. 121 Indeed, Elin Diamond points out that even Bertolt Brecht, most commonly considered the hero of supposedly anti-mimetic practices in the theatre, in fact called for more mimesis not less. 122 Brecht differentiated between Realisten and Realismus, that is, between artists for whom reality is a concern to be addressed in multiple ways and an aesthetic movement characterised by particular conventions. 123 Positioning himself in the former category, he suggested that in the object to be represented there are, for the artist, zwei Dinge, ein vorhandenes und ein zu schaffendes, ein sichtbares und ein sichtbar zu machendes; da ist etwas, und etwas steckt dahinter. Hier spuken noch die Urbilder, die Ideen des Plato. 124 For Brecht, however, it was not discrete models which stecken dahinter but gesellschaftliche Prozesse. 125 In making the act of representation visible, he aimed to reveal these processes: to show the real nature of social relations as historical and therefore changeable, rather than as natural and only repeatable. Similarly, in the postdramatic turn, the scholar who coined the term postdramatic, Hans-Thies Lehmann, suggests that theatre jenseits der Repräsentation [ ] bedeutet freilich nicht ohne Repräsentation, sondern: von ihrer Logik nicht beherrscht. 126 Lehmann therefore emphasises die fürs neue Theater entscheidende Idee des aus reaktiven Stimmund Körpergesten zusammenschießenden Signalements, das mehr zu tun hat mit Adornos Begriff von Mimesis der sie als ein vorbegriffliches, affektives Sichgleichmachen [ ] auffaßt als mit Mimesis im verengten Sinn von Nachahmung Compare the entries on Naturalistic Staging and Mimesis, in Pavis, Dictionary, pp ; pp Diamond, p. viii. Emphasis in original. 123 Bertolt Brecht, Realismus (1938), in Bertolt Brecht, Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, 30 vols (Frankfurt am Main and Berlin: Suhrkamp and Aufbau, ), 22.2 (1993), pp (p. 1047). Hereafter referred to as BFA. 124 Bertolt Brecht, Notizen über realistische Schreibweise (1940), in Brecht, BFA, 22.2 (1993) pp (p. 625). Capitalisation as in original. 125 Ibid. 126 Lehmann, pp Ibid., p

49 Seen in this light, it is not mimesis itself which his concept of the postdramatic rejects. Rather the postdramatic is concerned with the Erlöschen genau dieses Dreigestirns von Drama, Handlung und Nachahmung, in dem regelmäßig das Theater dem Drama [ ] zum Opfer fällt. 128 The theorisation of the postdramatic can thus be considered a means of asserting the need to engage with performance and its effect on an audience over and above a concern with the dramatic text and the action and transformations within the play. The conflation of mimesis with political conservatism in Sieg s approach to Özdamar s work amongst others is also problematised by the fact that in Özdamar s novels imitation frequently also appears in a positive light, not as Kennzeichen einer Identitätsproblematik, sondern stilisierende Elemente einer Ästhetik which highlights the creativity of the protagonists in migration. 129 Furthermore, Özdamar s relationship to the Brechtian practice of Verfremdung or estrangement as acting methodology is more ambivalent than often suggested in the secondary literature: Özdamar gives equal attention and an equal dose of irony to the methods of the Brechtian and Stanislavskian or naturalist tutors represented in Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn, for example. 130 Likewise, in interviews she has stressed [i]ch habe bei Brecht vor allem die Gedichte geliebt. Der Verfremdungseffekt war dagegen für mich wie ein Damoklesschwert. 131 While Sieg sees mimesis as an aesthetic strategy tied to an investment in neocolonial, ethnic truths, Elinor Fuchs has recently used a historical study of 128 Ibid., p. 55. Breger also discusses Lehmann s conceptualisation of representation in postdramatic theatre: Aesthetics, pp Anıl Kaputanoğlu, Hinfahren und Zurückdenken: Zu Konstruktion kultureller Zwischenräume in der türkisch-deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2010), p Kaputanoğlu s section on Nach-Singen, Nach-Ahmen, Nach-Sprechen in Özdamar s prose explicitly relates this imitation to mimesis as theorised by anthropologist Monika Ritter as a sensual means of Orientierung des Menschen in seiner Lebenswelt : ibid. Imitation and mimesis are also highlighted as tools Özdamar uses politically and figures positively in, for example: Sohelia Ghaussy, Das Vaterland verlassen: Nomadic Language and Feminine Writing in Emine Sevgi Özdamar s Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei, The German Quarterly, 72.1 (1999), 1-16 (p. 9); Kader Konuk, Identitätssuche ist ein [sic] private archäologische Graberei : Emine Sevgi Özdamars inszeniertes Sprechen, in AufBrüche: Kulturelle Produktionen von Migrantinnen, Schwarzen und jüdischen Frauen in Deutschland, ed. by Cathy S. Gelbin et al. (Königstein / Taunus: Ulrike Helmer, 1999) pp (p. 65). 130 Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2002), pp Analyses of her work as Brechtian are legion: see, for example, Patricia Simpson, Brechtian Specters in Contemporary Fiction: Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Rohinton Mistry, The Brecht Yearbook, 32 (2007), von Saalfeld, pp

50 performance practices in encounters between Early Modern Europe and the Islamic World to highlight the potential within mimesis to question the privileging of originality by suggesting how closely it is tied to exclusion and political discrimination. 132 In doing so, Fuchs argues for a revaluation of imitation as a cultural and political practice that challenges established national narratives. 133 A more open view of mimesis here thus allows a nuanced exploration of the ways in which theatre practitioners involved in the productions to be examined themselves turn to or away from mimesis as both artistic and cultural practice. This brings me to the point at which an examination of mimesis opens up into one of mimeticism. Stefan Senders, amongst others, argues that: Aristotle stressed the importance of cultural norms in determining mimetic practice; poetry was to represent the world not as it is but as it is most plausible. From this perspective to analyse mimesis would be to investigate the internal logic of representation, to seek the cultural reality of the true. 134 Notably, while the invocation of mimesis seems to suggest something about universal truths, aspiring as it does toward an undefined real, this often functions to screen its appropriation by particular causes. As Halliwell and Gebauer and Wulf point out, historically the rejection of what was at the time considered to be the only or truthful mimesis has been bound up with an attempt to claim cultural currency for a new set of artistic practices or a new conception of what constitutes reality, rather than with a refusal to represent or imitate reality in itself. 135 For example, Plato uses mimesis in order to distinguish between philosophy and poetics as the best interpreter of reality, and, in the German context, the supposedly antimimetic Romantics merely replaced an outer reality which art was supposed to represent or imitate with an inner one Sieg, Ethnic Drag, p. 223 (my emphasis); Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p Fuchs, p Senders, p Halliwell, p. 360; Gebauer and Wulf, p Halliwell, p

51 We can therefore see that mimesis is produced by, but at the same time produces, ideology and that by attending to the mimetic, we are also forced to confront those ideological structures that produce and mediate the phenomenon that we clumsily, if not inaccurately, call reality. 137 This is particularly the case when it comes to East-West relations; in the context of a study which examines theatre by Turkish-German dramatists, it is notable that the universality of mimesis often functions to screen its appropriation as a specifically Western phenomenon. Steven Halliwell thus asserts that the concept of mimesis lies at the core of the entire history of Western attempts to make sense of representational art and its values. 138 Similarly, the very title of what is generally considered the twentieth century s seminal work on the concept of mimesis, Erich Auerbach s Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur, implicitly suggests that this term stands not only at the heart of Western attempts at understanding the relationship between representation and reality, but also at the heart of the West s understanding of itself and its own aesthetic legacy and behaviour. In her study of the circumstances in which Auerbach wrote this work, Kader Konuk observes that through its exclusions [of, for example, references to Turkish literature], Mimesis exemplifies how the West came to think of itself as different and separate from what is now called the Middle East. 139 This cultural appropriation of the ability to represent is one I will explore in relation to the plays to be examined here under the nominer of mimeticism. Noting that the issues of representation and imitation key to mimesis are also key to postcolonial understandings of the construction of the colonial or postcolonial subject, 140 cultural theorist Rey Chow has argued that: In cross-cultural situations where the history of colonialism has played a part, mimeticism is further complicated by the fact that it is, often, an existential as well as a representational issue: just as there are texts that are considered to be imitating reality, so, too, are there human beings who are considered to be mimicking others in 137 Jonathan Holmes and Adrian Streete, Introduction, in Refiguring Mimesis: Representation in Early Modern Literature, ed. by Jonathan Holmes and Adrian Streete (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2005), p Halliwell, pp and p. vii. 139 Kader Konuk, East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), p See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp

52 order to exist as themselves. In both cases, it is easy to understand why mimeticism has such explosive ramifications, for it touches on precisely mutually implicated questions such as: what/who is there first, and what/who is second? What/who is the more authentic? What/who is the copy, the mere reproduction? 141 Chow goes on to outline the ways in which this existential dimension manifests itself in cross-ethnic relations, describing it as operating in three main modes. In the first mode Chow discusses, the white male and his culture function as idealised model, which the colonised subject must copy in order to legitimate him/herself, but of which s/he will always remain a bad copy. 142 The second mode corresponds to that of Homi K. Bhabha s mimic man, where the split subject of the colonial copy and, by extension, the cultural productions of this split subject become potentially resistant and threatening in themselves, but are still defined in relation to the white man as unitary model. 143 Finally, the third mode is what Chow terms coercive mimeticism, in which the ethnic person is expected to come to resemble what is recognizably ethnic. 144 Although here the mimeticism takes place with reference to an image, a stereotyped view of the ethnic, as with the other levels, this ethnic original remains an unattainable model, leaving ethnic subjects once again in the position of inferior imitations, copies that are permanently out of focus. 145 The ability to imitate without becoming merely a copy is thus reserved for the subject construed as non-ethnic, allowing that subject full freedom of social and artistic movement, while restricting the ethnic subject into particular ways of being. 146 The degree to which the Turkish-German encounter can be considered a crosscultural situation where the history of colonialism has played a part has of course been much debated. 147 Turkish migration to the FRG is not a direct result of Germany s 141 Chow, p Chow, p Ibid., pp See also Bhabha, pp Chow, p On coercive mimeticism and prose by Zaimoglu and Özdamar, see Mani, Cosmopolitical Claims, pp Adelson, Turkish Turn, p. 195, n Ibid., p. 107 and p Ibid., p See, for example, Hito Steyerl and Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Einleitung, in Spricht die Subalterne deutsch? Migration und postkoloniale Kritik, ed. by Hito Steyerl and Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez (Münster: UNRAST, 2003), pp. 7-16; Dirk Göttsche, Emine Sevgi Özdamars Erzählung Der Hof Im Spiegel: Spielräume einer postkolonialen Lektüre deutsch-türkischer Literatur, German Life and Letters, 59.4 (2006), ; El Hissy, pp

53 colonial past, however, the role of Orientalism, a mode of thought arising out of French and British colonial encounters in the Middle East, in the perception of Turkish- German subjects and their cultural production has been the subject of much analysis. 148 The role of Turkish-German artists as cultural brokers and native informants analogous to postcolonial writers is also frequently broached. 149 While most of this analysis has originated from a focus on the reception context and the transnational circulation of racialising and orientalising discourses within Germany, Kader Konuk s recent work on mimesis in early twentieth-century Turkey explores the specifics of the circulation of similar discourses within the Turkish context. Konuk provides a useful historical perspective and in doing so warns against equating colonial strategies in [for example] British India with Turkey s self-imposed appropriation of Western European culture, emphasising Turkish agency in the process of Turkish modernisation. 150 At the same time, though, for Konuk: Thinking about imitation and authenticity in modern Turkey brings to mind Homi Bhabha s useful insights into the politics of appropriation. [ ] Bhabha s insights help us understand the anxieties that were triggered by the Europeanization of Turkey, for his notion of mimicry highlights the difference between representation and repetition. Translated into the Turkish context, Bhabha s notion of mimicry demonstrates the difference between the European, who stands for Europe, and the Europeanized Turk, who is thought merely capable of aping the foreign. 151 Konuk therefore outlines the dilemma that arises from a mimetic process that equates modernity with a simple vision of Europe as follows: From a Western European point of view, Turkish modernity was, at best, a Platonic copy, not the result of a mimetic process in the Aristotelian sense. As a result, Turkish history, like all non- 148 Ibid. In terms of the theatrical sphere in Germany, El Hissy and Sieg both argue that an Orientalist mode of seeing is present there: El Hissy, pp ; Sieg, Ethnic Drag, p. 242; p See, amongst many others, Mani, Cosmopolitical Claims, pp ; Mandel, p Konuk, East West, p. 87. Konuk distinguish[es] between mimesis as a textual practice used for representing reality and mimesis as a form of cultural practice deployed in the Westernization of Turkey as a whole : p Ibid., p

54 European histories, has simply become a variation on Europe s master narrative. 152 The way in which this view of Turkish modernity as Platonic copy, that is, as a second order, deviant imitation of a European model has played out in the later context of Turkish migrations to Germany is addressed by the work of Ruth Mandel amongst others. Mandel s anthropological study of the diverse Turkish community in Berlin outlines the selective cosmopolitanism at work in contemporary German society and the Turkish challenges to citizenship and belonging in Germany created by labour migration and its after-effects. 153 Mandel s study is extremely wide-ranging, however, her observations of identitarian strategies employed by Turkish-Germans in the FRG prior to the recent alterations to the citizenship law there map almost exactly on to Chow s description of the workings of mimeticism: On the one hand, Turks are thought to reinforce their originary cultural, linguistic, and religious affiliations. On the other, sometimes Turks who have succeeded in German society are seen at worst as traitors or at best as hybrid, unable to achieve a genuine status. 154 While Mandel s anthropological accounts are focused more on social than on artistic practices, she highlights that [p]rocesses of mimetism [sic] are found in the variety of assertions of visibility created by work such as Zaimoglu and Özdamar s literary writing. 155 In doing so, Mandel draws on the work of anthropologists such as John 152 Ibid., p Mandel, passim. 154 Mandel, p For a discussion of auto-ethnicization as a mutually entailing, mimetic play of mirrors in Turkish-Germany which corresponds closely to Chow s discussion of coercive mimeticism see Mandel, p. 21. Mandel also notes here that [i]n this mirroring back and forth, deformations emerge, so that, as Homi Bhabha has argued about colonial mimicry, irony, displacements, and other features enter this identitary picture and what results usually diverges from initial image. 155 Ibid., p. 4; see also p. 86. Mandel is far from alone in conceptualising Zaimoglu this way, however, I find her brief analysis of both his and Özdamar s work somewhat lacking in comparison to the more nuanced readings already produced by numerous literary scholars in this field. Zaimoglu s work is discussed in a more nuanced manner as providing insight into the social and discursive violence of prescribed ethnicised identity categories in: Liesbeth Minnaard, New Germans, New Dutch: Literary Interventions (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), p. 177; See also Minnaard s nuanced close reading of Özdamar s work: pp

55 Borneman and philosophers such as Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. 156 Mandel sees their work as particularly relevant in the post-reunification context of contemporary Germany as [m]imetism [sic] for these authors [Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy] consists of the search for models or types on the basis of which to identify and reinforce a national identity. 157 In contrast I will rely on the more extensively elaborated concept of mimeticism which is outlined by Chow, a theorist whom Mani and Adelson also make extremely productive use of in their analyses of prose work by Zaimoglu and Özdamar. 158 Chow s work also takes us beyond a model applicable only to the question of national identity into a multiple set of models used to shore up structures of inclusion and exclusion in various power relations. This seems particularly important in a globalising context where the national is still significant, as exemplified by the issues still surrounding citizenship law in Germany, but is both modified and compromised by the globalised economic sphere and the transnational legal and socio-economic realm of the EU. 159 Adelson draws on Chow s work as part of her exploration of the imaginative labor of Turkish-German authors and the thingliness of Turkish figures in German life which is traded like a commodity and which the literary may exceed, while Mani brings a discussion of Chow s coercive mimeticism into the study of Turkish-German cultural production and employs this as part of his discussion of hybridity and the abject in Zaimoglu s prose work. 160 In this thesis, however, I will also explore the ways in which this socio-political mimeticism relates to and manifests itself in the theatrical sphere. Returning to the overlap between theatrical metaphor and theatrical practice, if the focus in Mandel s work is on the ways in which social actors mimetically recreate themselves and their social landscapes in relation to their imagined homeland and diaspora, this thesis asks how these processes of cultural 156 Mandel, p Mandel, p. 8. Mandel draws on the work of Senders who describes the mimetic qualities of German citizenship law as follows: all identity law is fundamentally mimetic. [ ] The project of producing citizens, and identities generally, entails what we could call mimetic identification, the reproduction of conceptual categories in human consciousness : Senders, p Mani, Cosmopolitical Claims, pp ; pp ; p. 30; p. 36. Adelson, Turkish Turn, p. 126; pp ; pp ; p. 152; p On the importance of maintaining reference to the national in the Turkish-German context see Minnaard, New Germans, pp Adelson, Turkish Turn, pp ; Mani, Cosmopolitical Claims, pp

56 mimesis are represented, critiqued, or reimagined when the social actor and theatrical actor converge Overview To be able to start to give each play examined in this thesis its due, I have had to be selective. Rather than attempting to cover all of the theatrical work of Özdamar and Zaimoglu/Senkel superficially, or only as written texts, I have therefore chosen to focus on several key plays both as dramatic and performance texts. 162 In order to reflect the changing socio-political and cultural contexts in which the dramatic texts were written and the theatrical productions took place, I proceed mainly chronologically. As a result, the study begins and ends with plays written by Özdamar, with the central section focusing mainly on those of Zaimoglu/Senkel. The earliest production which the thesis examines, Özdamar s Karagöz in Alamania, premiered in 1986, and the most recent, Özdamar s Perikızı, in The intervening years are marked by the examination of Zaimoglu/Senkel s Othello (2003), Schwarze Jungfrauen (2006) and Schattenstimmen (2008). The majority of the plays which will be addressed here have been staged in a number of productions, so in each case I will begin with a detailed examination of the premiere production, before placing this in relation to subsequent productions. The thirty-year period covered by these plays has been one of transition not only for Turkish-German theatre, but also for the Turkish population in Germany. 161 Mandel, p As my focus is on the plays in production, in Özdamar s case this means that I omit an examination of her unperformed dramatic texts, Hamlet Ahmet, Karriere einer Putzfrau Erinnerungen an Deutschland and Der Hof im Spiegel, as well as her children s play, Noahi (written 2001; performed 2003, Theaterhaus Frankfurt). Instead I focus on those of her plays designed for the adult stage and successful in being performed. Zaimoglu/Senkel are currently the authors of sixteen dramatic texts. I have chosen to omit a closer examination of those productions in which Zaimoglu s sole authored prose work is adapted for the stage, and of Zaimoglu/Senkel s three early plays Casino Leger (2003), Ja. Tu es. Jetzt (2003), Halb So Wild (2004). The duo s numerous other rewrites Lulu Live (2005), Romeo und Julia (2006), Max und Moritz (2007), Molière: Eine Passion (2007), Nathan Messias (2009), Hamlet (2010), and Julius Caeser (2011) are not examined in detail but will be brought into Chapter Three as points of comparison. Since I began this research, Zaimoglu and Senkel have also written a number of newer plays Discount Diaspora (2011), Alpsegen (2011), Bildergeschichten I and II (2011 and 2012), and Moses (2013); these will be discussed briefly in the conclusion. 54

57 During these years the Federal Republic of Germany radically altered as a space to live in due to unification with the former German Democratic Republic, the increasing influence of the EU, changing citizenship laws and its late acceptance of itself as a country of immigration. At the same time the Turkish population expanded from one of first-generation immigrants to third-generation postmigrants and, often, citizens. 163 Following the attacks of 11 th September 2001 in the USA, and the subsequent bombings in European capitals by so-called home-grown Islamic terrorists, the drama of globalisation came to play in another way as in media discourse the Turkish-German population increasingly came to be perceived as Muslim. 164 Adopting a historicising approach to performance analysis throughout allows connections to be made between the performances as historical events taking place within an institutional context and the negotiations of mimesis and mimeticism within the mise-en-scène of each play in its world premiere and beyond. Key questions addressed throughout include: in what context were these plays staged? How were migration and migrant or postmigrant figures represented within them? How were the productions received? And what does this have to tell us about cultural production and aesthetics within the very particular circumstances created by twentieth-century Turkish migrations to Germany? A focus on mimeticism allows this thesis also to explore the ways in which the productions examined approached the representation of ethnicised figures. It reveals the extent to which a positioning of plays by Özdamar and Zaimoglu/Senkel as Turkish, Turkish-German or postmigrant may also have affected their production and reception. A complementary focus on mimesis then allows this thesis to examine the degree to which these performances were intended or received as aesthetic interventions relevant to the social reality of contemporary Germany. In his analysis of Özdamar s Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn, B. Venkat Mani explains that his aim in analysing the text is, 163 A form of jus soli was only introduced in the FRG in As a result there still exists a significant disjunction between birth and socialisation in Germany, and citizenship of the country. 164 Yasemin Yildiz, Turkish Girls, Allah's Daughters, and the Contemporary German Subject: Itinerary of a Figure, German Life and Letters, 62.4 (2009),

58 to render transparent the performative aspects of the narrative in order to trace the trajectory along which Özdamar, in her script of multiculturalism, detaches her first person narrator from the figure of native informant and moves her toward the figure of a cultural performer. 165 While I am also concerned with trajectories of change here, I begin, rather than end, with the figure of the Turkish-German cultural practitioner and move beyond the theatrical metaphor to examine the narratives surrounding theatrical productions as historical events as well as those present within the aesthetic products. Notably these trajectories are not driven by the Anglo-American meta-scripts of multiculturalism, or even dramatic scripts which might embrace multiculturalism as a political concept. Instead, they are driven by individual artists, shifting degrees of mainstream interest, the cultural capital which has accumulated around Turkish-German artistic practice following successes such as Fatih Akin s work in film, and particularly in recent years, funding based on a model of interculturalism. Adapting Mani s phrasing, while I talk of Turkish-German scripts in this thesis, I argue that they are also scripts of postmigration: scripts which form the basis for an engagement with postmigrant life in the FRG from a number of quarters, by actors with complex agendas, and with results which may diverge from these. 165 B. Venkat Mani, The Good Woman of Istanbul, Gegenwartsliteratur: Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch, 2 (2003), (p. 35). 56

59 CHAPTER TWO. Mimesis and Mimeticism in Alamania: Emine Sevgi Özdamar s Early Plays 2.1 Performing Karagöz and Keloglan in Alamania In 1985, Lutz Tantow made one of the first attempts to bring theatre produced by migrants in Germany into the broader discussion of what was then called Gastarbeiterliteratur, with an article on Aspekte des Gastarbeiter -Theaters in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und West-Berlin. 1 Along with giving a more general overview of amateur theatre productions by Gastarbeiter in the FRG, his article highlighted one unperformed dramatic text in particular: Karagöz in Alamania, written in Tantow introduces this play, written by a young Turkish actress and director, as the first full-length Gastarbeiter -Drama to be published as a manuscript available for performance and to be taken up for premiere by a major German theatre. 2 He describes the author of this dramatic text to his readership as follows: Emine Sevgi Özdamar [...] würde sich nie als Schriftstellerin bezeichnen, sondern ist in erster Linie Schauspielerin. 3 Today, following the success of the very same Emine Sevgi Özdamar in the literary world, Tantow s 1985 statement is clearly somewhat dated. In 1991 Özdamar was famously awarded the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis for an extract from her first novel, Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei, and she has since been the recipient of a steady stream of literary prizes including Berlin s prestigious Fontane Prize for literature. 4 However, Tantow s introduction foregrounds an aspect of her artistic life 1 Lutz Tantow, aber mit ein bißl einem guten Willen tät man sich schon verständigen können : Aspekte des Gastarbeiter -Theaters in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und West-Berlin, Info DaF, 12.3 (1985), Ibid., p This title, although with fewer qualifiers, is taken up in all of the research to follow: see, for example, El Hissy, p. 89. However, as Erol Boran points out [n]och vor Özdamar s Karagöz kam Nezihe Meriçs (*1925) Sevdican (übersetzt als Tor zur Hoffnung) in den Jahren an etablierten deutschen Theatern zur Aufführung : Boran p. 354, n Renan Demirkan also lists a number of selfdirected solo-productions from the early 1980s on her website: Renan Demirkan, Gespieltes, renandemirkan.de < [last accessed 03/08/2014]. Yüksel Pazarkaya s Ohne Bahnhof (1966) is also worth highlighting in this regard: see Boran, p Tantow, aber, p See also Boran, pp On the reception of Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei see Karen Jankowsky, German Literature Contested: The 1991 Ingeborg-Bachmann-Prize Debate, Cultural Diversity and Emine Sevgi Özdamar, The German Quarterly, 70.3 (1997), ; David Gramling,

60 that Özdamar herself frequently calls attention to in interviews and speeches: her career as director s assistant and actress, during which she trained and collaborated with influential figures in East German, West German, and Turkish theatre. As we saw in Chapter One, Özdamar, born in 1946 in Malatya, was raised in Turkey, and first moved to West Berlin temporarily in 1965 to work in a factory. 5 During this initial two-year stay, Özdamar, who had already had an interest in acting as a young girl in Turkey, came into contact with Vasıf Öngören, a Turkish director studying at the Berliner Ensemble in East Berlin. As Boran highlights, this encounter was rewritten in fictive form in Özdamar s novel Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (1998). 6 While in Berlin, Özdamar also took German language classes at the Goethe Institute and spent a semester at the Fritz Kirchhoff Schauspielschule in West Berlin. 7 On returning to Turkey, she enrolled in a prestigious theatre school in Istanbul and, according to Boran, then took her first professional theatrical roles in Öngören s Ankara-based theatre as the Widow Begbick in Mann ist Mann by Brecht and Charlotte Corday in Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss. 8 These roles, and the transnational movement of theatre practitioners such as Öngören and Özdamar, highlight the interweaving of multiple German and Turkish performance cultures already long at work in Turkey in the 1970s. 9 The 1971 military putsch in Turkey made life and work increasingly difficult for Özdamar, however, and in 1976, she returned to Germany to work with the acclaimed Swiss director Benno Besson a former The Carawanserai Turns Twenty; Or, New German Literature Turns Turkish?, Alman Dili ve Edebiyati Dergisi/Studien zur deutschen Sprache und Literatur, 24 (2010), 55-83, pp ; Although Özdamar first came to Germany as a Gastarbeiterin, her reasons for doing so were slightly different from the usually cited economic push-and-pull factors. She and her mother were not getting on well and as a result of the bilateral recruitment agreements [d]ie Tür nach Deutschland war plötzlich offen : Özdamar, quoted in von Saalfeld, p See Boran, pp ; Stenzaly, p. 133; Sappelt, p. 67. Öngören would later ground the influential Birlik Tiyatrosu [ Kollektiv-Theater ] in Turkey, a project he continued in political exile in the 1980s in West Berlin and then Amsterdam. As Boran notes Öngören directed several of his own plays in West Berlin, including one in a German translation during this period: p For Boran, das Beispiel Öngörens aber zudem verdeutlicht [ ] wie schwierig es zu Beginn der achtziger Jahre war als türkischer Theatermacher selbst mit einem Renommee wie dem Öngörens in der deutschen Theaterszene Fuß zu fassen : p Boran, p Ibid., p Based on the information in Boran the theatre programme would appear to be the LCC (Language and Culture Center / Lisan ve Kültür Merkezi T.C.), Istanbul, directed by Beklan Algan from 1966 < Algan also worked at the Schaubühne in West Berlin in the early 1980s. 9 Ibid., pp ; İpşiroğlu, pp On Brecht s influence in particular see: Albert Nekimken, Brecht in Turkey, : The Impact of Bertolt Brecht on Society and the Development of Revolutionary Theater in Turkey (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1998). 58

61 collaborator of Brecht at the Volksbühne in East Berlin. 10 When Besson left Germany for Paris in 1978, Özdamar followed him as director s assistant. 11 Following this engagement Özdamar returned to Germany to join Claus Peymann s Bochumer Ensemble at the Schauspielhaus Bochum in There, as at the Volksbühne, Özdamar worked with Manfred Karge and Matthias Langhoff, some of the leading theatre artists of the day. 13 The presence of the stage looms large not only in Özdamar s biography, but also throughout her prose work. This is particularly the case with the semiautobiographical novels Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (1998) and Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde (2003), in which the protagonist Sevgi trains as an actress and works at the Volksbühne. 14 Despite a focus in the secondary literature on performativity or theatrical elements in her prose work, Özdamar s actual theatrical output, which 10 Besson was perhaps the least strongly influenced by Brecht of all his pupils, being also strongly influenced by commedia dell arte. 11 Boran, p During that time Özdamar was registered as a postgraduate student studying theatre in Paris. 12 Boran, p According to Boran, Özdamar was also briefly involved in assisting Beklan Algan with the Türkische Ensemble der Schaubühne Berlin, p This ensemble was founded in 1979 by Peter Stein and Meray Ülgen and is discussed in detail in Boran, pp , who highlights many practitioners view that [d]as türkische Theater [ ] hätte damals die einmalige Gelegenheit gehabt, sich in der deutschen Theaterlandschaft zu etablieren, but in practice was characterized by ganz blutige Kämpfe between those involved: pp At Bochum she is credited as directorial/dramaturgical assistant on productions such as Marie.Woyzeck (15/11/1980), for example. She also appeared playing a Turkish cleaning woman in Lieber Georg (2/2/1980), shared the role of Lydia Antonowa with Gabriele Gysi in Karge and Langhoff s production of Brecht s Die Mutter (2/10/1983), and played a Turkish singer in Heiner Müller s own production of Der Auftrag (13/2/1982): Hermann Beil et. al (eds), Das Bochumer Ensemble: Ein deutsches Stadttheater (Königstein: Athenäum, 1986), p. 520; p. 594; p In 1984 Özdamar left Bochum but continued her work as an actress in theatrical productions in Germany and France: Knut Lennartz, Die Putzfrau an der Oper, Die Deutsche Bühne, (2000), (p. 29). She is also known as die Mutter aller Filmtürken, for her roles in films such as Hark Bohm s Yasemin (1988) and Doris Dörrie s Happy Birthday, Türke (1992): Peter Laudenbach, Die Zunge hat keine Knochen, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 276, 29/11/2002. This interview was accessed in the Archive of Verlag der Autoren: File Autoren Archiv O: Sev Öz: über die Autorin. In a further intertwining of life and art, in 2002 Özdamar also became the subject of a play, Die Deutschlandtür geht auf und gleich wieder zu eine fiktive Biographie by Renate Lorenz, Brigitta Kuster, Pauline Boudry at the Volksbühne, Berlin. This is discussed in the interview with Laudenbach and in Beverly M. Weber, Violence and Gender in the New Europe : Islam in German Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp For an analysis of the semi-autobiographical nature of these works see, for example, Elizabeth Boa, Özdamar s Autobiographical Fictions: Trans-national Identity and Literary Form, German Life and Letters, 59.4 (2006), ; Laura Bradley, Recovering the Past and Capturing the Present: Özdamar s Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde, in New German Literature: Life-Writing and Dialogues with the Arts, ed. by Julian Preece, Frank Finlay, and Ruth J. Owen (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), pp

62 includes six plays, has remained largely overlooked. 15 This seems a particularly striking omission given that, as Liesbeth Minaard points out, Özdamar s novels and the shorter pieces of prose refer to, and even pre- and re-tell, each other. Together they can be seen as a complex web of oeuvre-immanent intertextualities. 16 Although Minaard does not include reference to the plays here, they too form part of this oeuvre. Özdamar s first play, Karagöz in Alamania (1982), for example, was later rewritten and published as a short story under the same name in Özdamar s 1991 prose collection Mutterzunge. 17 Unlike the dramatic text, this short story has been the subject of a large number of detailed analyses. 18 The two texts do overlap closely for the main part, however, apart from the differences to be expected in which pieces of dialogue or stage directions from the dramatic text are glossed over and reworked as descriptive passages in the short story, the short story also contains new material, not present in the published version of the dramatic text. 19 As this chapter will show, the world premiere, directed by the dramatist herself, appears to have provided some of this material. The 1986 premiere which took place at the Schauspielhaus Frankfurt under Özdamar s own direction was also the subject of a further short piece of writing 15 Karin Lornsen focuses on ways in which Özdamar s prose work equates theatrical role and gender role, for example: The City, pp Kader Konuk discusses the inszeniertes Sprechen she sees as typical of Özdamar s prose: Inszeniertes, pp Monika Shafi argues that intertextual references to theatre in her novels mean that Özdamar s narrator suggests a performative approach to contemporary, multicultural life : Monika Shafi, Joint Ventures: Identity Politics and Travel in Novels by Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Zafer Şencak, Comparative Literature Studies, 40.2 (2003), Minnaard, New Germans, pp Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Karagöz in Alamania (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 1982); Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Karagöz in Alamania, Schwarzauge in Deutschland, in Mutterzunge (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1990), pp Within this chapter unless explicitly stated otherwise Karagöz in Alamania will always refer to the 1982 dramatic text: the full title and date of the 1990 short story will be given in references to the later short story. Likewise, Karriere einer Putzfrau Erinnerungen an Deutschland and Der Hof im Spiegel both also began life as dramatic monologues registered with Verlag der Autoren prior to their publication as short stories in Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Mutterzunge (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1990), pp and Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Der Hof im Spiegel: Erzählungen, 2nd edn (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2005), pp , respectively. 18 See, for example, Annette Wierschke, Schreiben als Selbstbehauptung: Kulturkonflikt und Identität in den Werken von Aysel Özakin, Alev Tekinay und Emine Sevgi Özdamar (Frankfurt am Main: IKO, 1996), pp ; Norbert Mecklenburg, Leben und Erzählen als Migration: Intertextuelle Komik in Mutterzunge von Emine Sevgi Özdamar, in Text und Kritik, 9.6: Literatur und Migration ed. by Heinz Ludwig Arnold (2006), 84-96; Sabine Milz, Comparative Cultural Studies and Ethnic Minority Writing Today: The Hybridities of Marlene Nourbese Philip and Emine Sevgi Özdamar, CLCWeb, 2.2 (2000), 1-14 < [last accessed 06/08/2014]; Azade Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 101; p. 105; pp Quotations from Marx s Das Kapital, for example, are present in the 1990 short story (Özdamar, Karagöz in Alamania, Schwarzauge in Deutschland, p. 80), but not the 1982 dramatic text. Other differences will be discussed in section 2.3 of this chapter. 60

63 published in Özdamar s second short story collection Der Hof im Spiegel in This has also been the subject of some study, resulting in a slight skewing of critical emphasis in which more scholarly attention is paid to Özdamar s fictionalised account of the rehearsal process of Karagöz, for example, than to the dramatic text itself. The Karagöz in the title of the 1982 dramatic text is the name of both a traditional form of Turkish shadow theatre and the main character of this performance style. In migration, however, Karagöz becomes an alienated Gastarbeiter, played in the 1986 production by Turkish actor Tuncel Kurtiz, who was living in exile in Germany at that time. Alamania is of course a fictionalised West Germany, although in fact the action moves between rural Turkey, Istanbul, the Turkish border, the West German border, West Germany and Yugoslavia, as well as between reality and dream. In a series of 19 scenes the 1986 production charts the fate of Karagöz, a Turkish peasant turned Gastarbeiter; his loyal talking donkey, Şemsettin; and his wife Ümmü as they migrate back and forth between Turkey and Germany. Along the way they encounter a treasure hunter, a Doctor Mabuse figure, German and Turkish border officials, other Gastarbeiter and their wives, a belly-dancing fridge, a semi-naked intellectual, and an aggressive Opel car. 21 While Karagöz s earnings lead to property and increased status back in Turkey, his physical decline in Germany is evidenced by injuries to his head, and he becomes increasingly tormented by the potential betrayal of his wife with his uncle back in Turkey. This leads to the central question of the play: is Ümmü herself guilty of this betrayal or is it a circumstance of capitalism and the migration Karagöz is forced to undertake in its service? The play ends with a dreamlike encounter with Karagöz s younger self and a lone return to Germany for what may or may not be the final time. 22 As Marion Victor, the editor of the publishing house which held the rights to the play, suggested in 1985, Karagöz in Alamania can be positioned alongside the 20 Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Schwarzauge in Deutschland, in Der Hof im Spiegel, by Emine Sevgi Özdamar (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2001), pp This text first appeared in Die Zeit (1992), then in David Horrocks and Frank Krause, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Black Eye and his Donkey : A Multi-Cultural Experience, in Turkish Culture in German Society Today, ed. by David Horrocks and Eva Kolinsky (Oxford: Berghahn, 1996), pp (pp ). 21 Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Karagöz in Alamania, dir. by Emine Sevgi Özdamar, unpublished audiovisual recording, Schauspiel Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Accessed thanks to Emine Sevgi Özdamar. 22 In the 1982 dramatic text Karagöz returns with Şemsettin and Ümmü, in the 1986 production he returns with only his beloved car. 61

64 work of artists such as Heiner Müller: Denn bei aller Unterschiedlichkeit der Stücke [ ], eines ist ihnen gemeinsam: sie entziehen sich einem herkömmlichen Abbildungsverfahren von Wirklichkeit. 23 This is not to say, however, that the relationship to reality is fully absent. Matthias Langhoff, the director Özdamar worked with at length in Berlin and Bochum, describes the potential inherent in a Dramaturgie, die nicht mehr auf die Erklärung einer Geschichte aus ist, sondern eine Geschichte, die von Unklarheiten lebt und so durch dieses Aufeinandertreffen von nicht Zusammengehörendem auf eine Welt hinter der Geschichte zielt. 24 Similarly Beverly M. Weber highlights the relationship to reality suggested by Özdamar s novels in her analysis of Özdamar s third novel Seltsame Sterne (2003): [in this novel] Özdamar turns to the theatre and to literature as the place of revolutionary action, but does so without claims to an authentic story or vision of the future: she is continually concerned with imagining yet another reality behind the reality. 25 Scholars such as B. Venkat Mani have suggested that in using narrative techniques drawn from traditional Turkish theatre within her novels, Özdamar reveals that representation can be accomplished only in approximation. 26 According to Mani s reading, Özdamar s later self-adopted role as author lies in translating the two disparate discourses for the two parties and changing the discourse, deauthenticizing it, indeed, corrupting it, for there is never the possibility of an authentic discourse Marion Victor, in Peter Sterz, Marion Victor, and Klaus Völker, Erfahrungen mit Gegenwartsthemen und -stoffen: Drei Arbeitsberichte, TheaterZeitSchrift, 14 (1985/86), (p. 63). 24 Matthias Langhoff, Zu Büchners Woyzeck Sehnsucht nach einem Theater des Asozialen, in Theater heute, 22 (1981), While Brecht is often highlighted as an influence on Özdamar s prose work, Langhoff, Besson and Müller, all of whom she actually worked with, would seem the more direct influence on her theatrical work at the time. The production Langhoff refers to here is one Özdamar was also involved in. Loren Kruger also briefly highlights the influence of Langhoff and Besson but suggests that [a]lthough clearly drawing on Brecht, she also highlights the limits of Brecht s own relatively unreflected use of racial, especially orientalised stereotypes : Kruger, pp Weber, Violence and Gender, p Here Weber quotes Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde (Cologne: Kiepenhauer & Witsch, 2003) p. 118; Weber s own translation. The quotation is taken from the narrator s discussion of the work of Heiner Müller. A similar relationship to reality is articulated by Özdamar in interviews: Lornsen, The City, p. 204, n Mani, Good Woman, p Ibid., p

65 A key question here will therefore be how such an aesthetics translates into the theatrical sphere when it comes to the play in production. Many analyses of the Karagöz in Alamania matrix of texts have focused, like Mani here, in situating this set of texts in relation to Turkish traditions; this is an important step to take in a context which often overlooks the specifics of Turkish intertexts. In her 2012 discussion of Özdamar s third novel, Seltsame Sterne, however, Claudia Breger emphasises the post-brechtian experiments Özdamar s protagonist saw in the making. Such experiments can also be considered part of a move toward what today would be considered postdramatic theatre. Indeed, although Breger s comment comes in a discussion which situates this novel in the context of the 1990s trend for pop literature in Germany, she argues that: It seems almost self-evident to position Özdamar s poetics, with its focus on perceptions, bodily sensations, and things, at the (historical and conceptual) point where transnational pop art meets the theater forms traced also thematically in the book. 28 Self-evident as a relationship between Özdamar s aesthetics and the experiments with representation and affect which characterise postdramatic theatre may seem to Breger, however, aside from occasional references to Heiner Müller in analyses of Özdamar s novels and short stories, this has yet to be explored in any detail with respect to her plays: 29 perhaps because the majority of work on Özdamar has been carried out by literary scholars rather than specialists in theatre. 30 While Breger concentrates primarily on situating Özdamar s aesthetics of presentification-at-a-distance in relation to pop literature, 31 I will situate this premiere in relation to Özdamar s work 28 Breger, Aesthetics, p Boran suggest the mise-en-scène can be seen as [eine] an ihren Mentor Heiner Müller erinnernde Theatermaschine ; however, he focuses more on this as a link to Brechtian aesthetics: p Apart from this, Müller is generally referred to in analyses of Karriere einer Putzfrau rather than with regard to the Karagöz texts: see, for example, Stephanie Bird, Women Writers and National Identity: Bachmann, Duden, Özdamar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp Even Breger, who writes extensively on theatre in her most recent monograph stops short of extending her insights to Özdamar s theatrical work and focuses instead on the way in which theatre is figured in Özdamar s semi-fictional narratives: ibid., pp The exception to this rule is provided by Moray McGowan, Sie kucken beide an Milch Topf : Goethe s Bürgergeneral in Double Refraction, in Sprache Text Bildung: Essays für Beate Dreike, ed. by Andreas Stuhlmann and Patrick Studer (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005), pp Breger, Aesthetics, p

66 within the postdramatic turn towards evoking affect and away from the transmission of knowledge. This is extremely useful in terms of making sense of the aesthetics employed in the 1986 world premiere of Karagöz in Alamania. Quoting Özdamar s claim that die wahre Begegnung fände dann statt, wenn man sich in der Fremdheit begegnet, Erol Boran reads the aim of the play as follows: mittels der Verfremdungstechnik konventionelle Sichtweisen hier bezüglich des Gastarbeiterbildes zu durchbrechen und Lernprozesse zu initiieren. 32 Similarly, David Horrocks and Frank Krause tentatively suggest the 1986 production, as described in the article which later became the 2001 short story Schwarzauge in Deutschland, can be read as a Brechtian Lehrstück, in which the focus is on the performers, rather than the audience, learning from the experience. 33 Here I will move away from a pedagogical interpretation of this production and use a focus on mimesis and mimeticism to explore the ways in which a focus on encounter moves the play into postdramatic territory, presenting a challenge to a theatre of enlightenment model of stage-audience interaction. In the final section of this chapter I also address the premiere production of Özdamar s second play, Keloglan in Alamania: Die Versöhnung von Schwein und Lamm. Despite being available for premiere since 1991, this play only premiered at the Oldenburg Staatstheater in 2000, a year which also marked the second production of Karagöz in Alamania in a production at the Innsbrucker Kellertheater. 34 Katrin Sieg analyses the dramatic text of this second play as an exercise in disidentification with mimetic modes of perception and their investment in neo-colonial, ethnic truths. 35 Highlighting the ways in which the main character of this later play, Keloglan, is both demanded to perform and labelled unable to perform an adequate version of Germanness, Sieg outlines the play s engagement with a discourse of assimilation, which predicates recognition on imitation yet precludes certain subjects from mimesis altogether. 36 Having established imitation as a bodily practice with political implications however, Sieg s analysis stops short of a consideration of how the casting and performance style adopted for performances of Özdamar s plays might complicate 32 Boran, p Horrocks and Krause, p. 70, n For an analysis of the pig and lamb of the subtitle see Kraft, Staging Xenophobia, p Sieg, Ethnic Drag, p Emphasis my own. 36 Ibid., p

67 such a scenario. 37 In this chapter I will ask whether concerns such as Sieg s affected the casting decisions made around the premieres of both Özdamar s Alamania plays. How is the actor s work delineated from the labouring migrant s/he performs? To what extent is the actors representational work acknowledged in or related to the play s reception? An inclusion of an examination of Keloglan in Alamania is important not only for extending an examination of Özdamar s Alamania plays in performance in terms of mimesis and mimeticism but also in bridging the gap between the 1980s context of Karagöz and the twenty-first-century positioning of the other plays considered in this thesis. Within the theatrical sphere, access to what Sieg names the privileged sphere of mimesis is also bound up with access to the means of producing and distributing a play. In a 2012 publication, Maha El Hissy highlights that in the opening scene of the dramatic text of Keloglan in Alamania it is only while the (unethnicised) actors take a break in rehearsals for an opera, that the story of Turkish-German Keloglan and his mother Kelkari is given space to begin; a scene which for El Hissy steht paradigmatisch für die Funktionalisierung von kanonischen Werken, um sich vom Rand ins Zentrum zu bewegen. 38 In examining not only the aesthetics of Özdamar s Alamania plays in production, but also their performance history, I will argue that this scene might also be read as paradigmatic for the marginal place of Turkish-German theatre in general on Germany s stages at the time as performances which had to find a way in between other, more canonical, spectacles. 2.2 Production and Reception History: Karagöz in Alamania Karagöz in Alamania is not only the first of Özdamar s texts to be registered with a publisher, thus marking the beginning of her career as a writer; it also occupies a significant place in the history of Turkish-German cultural production. 39 Boran, for 37 This is not immediately clear as Sieg s use of vocabulary such as spectators, photographs from the actual production and the discussion of masking and masquerade which pervades her analysis create the impression of an analysis of play in performance. Closer examination strongly suggests, however, that her discussion of artistic strategies for dealing with this frame of reference remains limited to those undertaken by the author and the dramatic text. 38 El Hissy, pp Boran, p

68 example, sees it as a forerunner of a significant alteration in Turkish-German off-scene theatre which was to develop in the late 1980s and early 1990s: die konsequente Hinwendung zur deutschen Sprache. 40 In the section on this play in Boran s 2004 doctoral thesis, he begins to piece together aspects of the production history, mise-enscène, and aesthetic adopted in the 1986 production from interviews with Özdamar and from the reviews of the play. His focus, however, is on reading the reviews of the play in order to illustrate the reception context in which this and other Turkish-German theatre was operating. 41 Similarly, with regard to Keloglan in Alamania, scholars such as Helga Kraft and Katrin Sieg seem largely to rely on the published dramatic text as the definitive version of the play, rather than as the basis for an array of performance texts. 42 El Hissy acknowledges this, stating that keine bekannte Dokumentation der Aufführung exists. 43 However, while I was unable to locate an audiovisual recording or director s cut of the script of the premiere and only staging of Keloglan in Alamania, I was able to locate other, less immediately obvious documentary traces and to conduct interviews with some of those involved in the play s production. Boran s work makes a pioneering contribution by moving beyond the accounts of Karagöz in Alamania preserved in Özdamar s short stories and engaging with some of the material remains of the actual production in the form of reviews. 44 Given the significance of Karagöz in Alamania both in Özdamar s oeuvre and in the broader history of Turkish-German theatrical production, I would argue that Boran s approach can and should be taken further. With respect to Karagöz in Alamania, further enquiry also revealed the existence of an audiovisual recording of the premiere, and copies of the programme as well as of the flyer circulated by the artistic director of Schauspiel Frankfurt in the opening performance of the production explaining its peculiarities 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., p Sieg, Ethnic Drag, pp ; Kraft, Staging Xenophobia, pp El Hissy, p. 88, n As Boran s use of sources is necessarily limited, it does lead to some inaccuracies. Stage directions from the 1982 text are often taken as evidence for the appearance of the 1986 production and the date of the premiere given is incorrect. Boran has this date as 26 April 1986: Boran, p The eventual date of premiere, 4 th May 1986, can be seen on the programme for the 1986 production: Schauspiel Frankfurt, Karagöz in Alamania programme (Frankfurt am Main: Schauspiel Frankfurt, 1986). Accessed in the Archiv zu den Städtischen Bühnen Frankfurt am Main, located at the Universitätsbibliothek Johann C. Senckenberg, part of the Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main, Abteilung Musik, Theater, Film. Schauspiel Inszenierungsmappen, Spielzeit 1985/86: Mappe Nr. 17. Schauspiel, Karagöz in Alamania,

69 to the audience. 45 Building on the work of Boran then, in this chapter I will draw on the documents which constitute the material remains of the two Alamania premieres, as well as interviews with some of those involved. 46 Loren Kruger identifies Özdamar as a playwright who has begun to explore the possibilities of syncretic theatre in Germany. 47 Syncretic theatre is a term coined by Christopher Balme for a conscious, programmatic strategy to fashion a new form of theatre in the light of colonial or post-colonial experience. 48 According to Balme while theatrical exoticism involves the use of indigenous cultural texts purely for their surface appeal, but with no regard for their cultural semantics, syncretic theatre incorporates texts from several traditions based on their cultural semantics and the way these will interact. 49 Kruger limits her examination of this to its manifestation in Özdamar s own fictionalised narrative of the 1986 Karagöz premiere and the dramatic text of the later play Keloglan in Alamania. 50 Doing so is slightly problematic; as Laura Bradley highlights, Özdamar often retells stories but changes the punchline according to her novelistic intention, suggesting that Özdamar is blending fact with fiction, that she is concerned less with le vrai than with vraisemblance. 51 Kruger s description of this work as syncretic also does not take us much beyond discussions of intertextuality present in examinations of Özdamar s other short story of the same 45 These materials were accessed in holdings such as the archive of Verlag der Autoren, the theatrical archive of the Universitätsbibliothek Johann C. Senckenberg, part of the Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main, or were kindly made available by the author. This flyer is humourously critiqued in Özdamar s 2001 short story, Schwarzauge in Deutschland. See also the brief analysis of this moment in Krause and Horrocks, p In an article resulting from research for this thesis which was published in 2013 I explore the ways in which the photographic remains of the 1986 production produce and preserve a counter-memory to the written accounts of the play. There I argue that the photographs of the play taken by renowned photographer Abisag Tüllmann embed the play in Tüllmann s own intertextual project; anchoring the 1986 production in a chronicle of a changing Germany, rather than excluding it from a neater history of theatrical successes. In doing so I focus on one particular scene in which Karagöz and other prospective Gastarbeiter are subject to medical inspection prior to recruitment, and the associations created by this photographic record. In this chapter I do not return to the analysis of that particular scene or of the implications of Tüllmann s involvement in the documentation of the play, although some material is repeated; instead I extend an analysis of the overtly theatrical aesthetic which was at odds with a more naturalistic mode of seeing Turkish Gastarbeiter prevalent in German society at the time to other scenes within the play: Stewart, Kruger, pp Christopher B. Balme, Decolonising the Stage: Theatrical Syncretism and Post-Colonial Drama (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), p Ibid., p Kruger, p Bradley, Recovering, p

70 name. 52 This is because Özdamar s plays in fact serve mainly as a contextual preamble to Kruger s real focus, Merhaba und Tschüss, a Turkish-German adaptation of Athol Fugard s 1965 Hello and Goodbye which premiered in July 2000 at the Berlin Tiyatrom theatre. 53 It is telling that Kruger s treatment of Özdamar s plays differs significantly from that of the productions of plays by Fugard on which her monograph focuses. Indeed Kruger s examination of the musical and visual aspects of the staging of Merhaba und Tschüss suggests that syncretic or intertextual elements are of interest in the performance text of the play as much as in its writing, an insight which I will extend to the 1986 premiere of Karagöz in Alamania. As will become clear in section 2.3, within the 1986 production intertextuality literally takes on new dimensions, becoming by turns oeuvre-immanent, visual, and aural. Karagöz in Alamania was written during Özdamar s time as director s assistant and ensemble member at Bochum under artistic director Claus Peymann. 54 Peymann s aim at that time was to make theatre which reflected contemporary West Germany and was relevant to the industrial, working-class town the theatre served. 55 This allowed Özdamar as director s assistant and actress to begin her project of smuggling the role of the Turkish Cleaning Lady onto the West German stage. 56 In this role, Abfälle einsammelnd, fegend, staubwischend, Özdamar brought Arbeitsrealität von heute in das Spiel ; 57 however, a full play addressing this reality was ultimately not deemed relevant to the demographic of the town. Although a number of sources refer to plans for Karagöz in Alamania to be staged at Bochum, 58 according to Ingo Waszerka, a member of the dramaturgical department at Bochum during Özdamar s time there and 52 For a detailed examination of intertextuality in the 1990 short story, see Mecklenburg, pp Kruger, pp In a personal interview Özdamar explained that she was commissioned to write the piece, and had three months to begin this work. At the end of this time period she showed the piece to Peymann and Langhoff, who approved it. This allowed her to continue writing. 55 Claus Peymann, quoted in Beil et. al, p Özdamar refers to this project in interviews. See, for example, Lennartz, pp The dramatic text of Keloglan in Alamania was printed alongside this interview: Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Keloglan in Alamania Oder die Versöhnung von Schwein und Lamm, Die deutsche Bühne, (2000), Anon., Auf dem Eis, im Eis, Theater heute, 21.3 (1980), (p. 12). 58 A two-page spread advertising Verlag der Autoren s new play, Karagöz in Alamania, announces that Karagöz in Alamania will premiere that year at the Schauspielhaus Bochum, for example: Verlag der Autoren, Programmheft, advertising material for plays available for premiere (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren [1982/3]). Accessed in Verlag der Autoren holdings on Özdamar. 68

71 the eventual dramaturge of the 1986 Frankfurt production, ultimately Peymann hat das Stück nicht interessiert, weil Bochum [ ] keine Türkenstadt [ist]. 59 Although Karagöz in Alamania was never staged at Bochum, its inception there was still key to its eventual premiere. In the early 1980s Waszerka moved on from the Bochumer Ensemble and, after stints at various other theatres, became an inhouse director and dramaturge at Schauspiel Frankfurt. 60 It is there that he apparently remembered Özdamar s play and, with Frankfurt s large Turkish population in mind, first began re-considering it for production. 61 In the meantime Karagöz in Alamania had received its first public dramatic reading as part of a prize for new dramatic writing in Bayreuth in October 1983; an event which will be examined in more detail in section An announcement in Theater heute then has the play as being taken by Schauspiel Frankfurt as early as 1984, and Lutz Tantow s article of June 1985 sheds more light on the play s development there. 63 Tantow refers to plans to stage Karagöz in Alamania in a tent in the centre of Frankfurt, by the Frankfurter Römer, but also highlights the change of artistic director at that time as a factor which made the production nochmals fraglich. 64 In 1986 Frankfurt finally staged Özdamar s Karagöz in Alamania, not in a tent but on the main stage of the Schauspielhaus, Frankfurt. The recording of the show I am working with suggests each performance lasted approximately 2 hours and 22 minutes, with no interval. 65 As can be seen from the brief pre-production history provided here, despite a lack of new writing at the time and the prestige which premieres bring, a variety of complex factors, from the responses of individuals to the ethos and location of a theatre 59 Ingo Waszerka, personal interview, Recklinghausen, 23/05/2011. The decision of whether it should still premiere at Bochum then seems to have come down to a vote in the dramaturgical department. Waszerka was for the play, however, two dramaturgs voted against including the play in the programme for the season, while the fourth dramaturge effectively abstained, leaving Waszerka outvoted. 60 Waszerka, personal interview. 61 Waszerka, personal interview. 62 Lea Lorenz, Sieben suchen eine Bühne, Saarbrückener Zeitung, 26th October Frankfurt, VdA, Autoren Archiv O. The play was selected as one of 7 plays out of 100 submitted for a theatre workshop for new dramatic writing in Bayreuth. The workshop included the opportunity to have a scene of approximately 15 minutes worked on by the workshop s dramaturges and played in front of an audience: ibid. 63 Michael Merschmeier, 10 Neue Stücke in der Saison 1984/85, Theater 1984: Jahrbuch der Zeitschrift Theatre heute, ed. by Peter von Becker et al. (Zurich: Orell Füssli + Friedrich, 1984), p. 144; Tantow, aber, pp Tantow, aber, p. 219, n The video recording was kindly lent to me by Emine Sevgi Özdamar. 69

72 combined to stand in the way of the play s performance. 66 The stageability of the play may well also have been an issue. The inclusion in Karagöz in Alamania of speaking gravestones and a man being eaten alive on stage certainly competes with Heiner Müller s frequent inclusion of ghosts, pumas, and torn-apart bodies in terms of challenging stage business. Notably, however, in each case outlined thus far it is the degree of relevance of the play to particular localised realities that seems to be most contested. The production history therefore presents a strong link between the attribution of mimesis and the desires and expectations of the receiving audience. Research by Erol Boran shows that Karagöz was also considered for production at Schauspiel Köln. However, according to Boran s interviews with both Özdamar and the Cologne-based Turkish actress and writer Renan Demirkan, here it was Demirkan who was instrumental in blocking the play. Demirkan was engaged in the ensemble at Cologne and would have been offered the key role of Ümmü. She refused it though due to what she considered the play s folkloristisch elements and negative portrayal of the working class. 67 While the production history outlined above leads us to focus on mimesis, Demirkan s critique of stereotyping and her concerns about the context these representations enter into alert us to issues of mimeticism, both as a theme of the Alamania plays and in their reception. In her prose writing Özdamar has often been accused of recirculating stereotypes or coming dangerously close to doing so, in particular with regard to the Karagöz texts. 68 In their examinations of Özdamar s short stories and novels, Azade Seyhan, Claudia Breger, Kader Konuk, Karin Lornsen, and Sohelia Ghaussy all identify mimicry as a strategy by which an author situated as other can use a distorted imitation to challenge dominant discourses, but also highlight how close this can lie to simply repeating such discourses. 69 Karagöz for example is often inarticulate, beats his 66 The Bayreuth competition is intended to counter this, see Lorenz. 67 Boran, p According to Boran Demirkan confirms this: Boran p. 354, n See Mecklenburg, p. 91; Wierschke, pp ; Azade Seyhan, Is Orientalism in Retreat or in for a New Treat? Halide Edip Adivar and Emine Sevgi Özdamar Write Back, Seminar, 41:3 (2005), (p. 215). 69 Konuk, Identitätssuche, pp ; Lornsen, The City, pp ; Claudia Breger, Meine Herren, spielt in meinem Gesicht ein Affe? Strategien der Mimikry in Texten von Emine S. Özdamar und Yoko Tawada, in AufBrüche: Kulturelle Produktionen von Migrantinnen, Schwarzen und jüdischen Frauen in Deutschland, ed. by Cathy S. Gelbin, Kader Konuk, and Peggy Piesche (Königstein / Taunus: Ulrike Helmer, 1999), pp Mimicry is also discussed in a number of other articles on Özdamar. 70

73 wife, drinks, and attempts to seduce women in Germany putting him perhaps dangerously close to the stereotype of the hyper-sexualised, oriental, male other. At the same time, multiple episodes in the dramatic text itself highlight the problematic nature of mimeticism and the images to which the Gastarbeiter must correspond. In one scene German doctors inspect Turkish men like horses before offering them a work permit, for example, highlighting a mimetic measuring up as a process built into the very fabric of the recruitment process. 70 Comments such as Demirkan s also overlook the potential inherent in the realisation of the characters in the performance. The ways in which the mimicry typical of Özdamar s prose work translates into theatrical performance is thus of particular interest in this chapter. The audiovisual recording of the 1986 production reveals that the performance took place on a Brechtian simultaneous stage, the centrepiece of which was a large, branching wardrobe structure, consisting of three levels, and surrounding the centre stage on three sides. This structure was hung with costumes and interspersed with giant light bulbs (Figure 1 and Figure 2). On either side of this structure the wings were left open to the audience, displaying the actors preparing for their entrances, the props, and the prompt book (Figure 3). Tethered to the left hand side of the central stage area throughout the two-and-a-half-hour performance was a live donkey, and at various points a live sheep, lamb, and chickens as well as a real car were also brought onto the stage. 71 Throughout the course of the action the stage became littered with the debris accumulated by the characters. By the final curtain, the mise-en-scène thus also featured an abandoned fridge, a bath, many torn cushions, and an entire but battered car. Although there is no curtain, scene changes were marked variously by a slowing of tempo, alterations in the lighting and recorded sound indicating change of place, and the introduction of props onto the stage which indicated the situation at hand For a fuller account of this scene in performance see Stewart, pp Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Karagöz in Alamania, dir. by Emine Sevgi Özdamar (Schauspiel Frankfurt, 1986). Özdamar s description of the mise-en-scène in Boran is also useful here: Boran, pp Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Karagöz in Alamania, unpublished audiovisual recording. The quality of images taken from this recording is poor, however, this is due to the poor quality of the recording itself and highlights the need to make use of as many materials as possible in addition to the videorecording. 71

74 Figure 1. The mise-en-scène of the world premiere of Karagöz in Alamania. Screenshot taken from Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Karagöz in Alamania, dir. by Emine Sevgi Özdamar, unpublished audiovisual recording, Schauspiel Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Accessed thanks to Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Figure 2. The mise-en-scène in close-up. Two German border guards play classical violin as Karagöz and Şemsettin queue at the Deutschland Tür. Image Abisag Tüllmann/Deutsches Theatermuseum. Accessed in Deutsches Theatermuseum, Munich. Abisag Tüllmann Archiv, 86/4/1 K 86/4/62 K. 72

75 Figure 3. The mise-en-scène in close-up, showing the wardrobe structure. An actress studies the prompt book behind the scenes, while an actor addresses the audience. Screenshot taken from Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Karagöz in Alamania, dir. by Emine Sevgi Özdamar, unpublished audiovisual recording, Schauspiel Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Accessed thanks to Emine Sevgi Özdamar. In reference to the scenery of the 1986 production of Karagöz in Alamania, Özdamar herself is recorded by Boran as saying: Wir wollten [...] zeigen, dass diese Menschen keine Bühne mehr haben, sondern nur einen Fundus, einen Wartesaal. 73 Özdamar is clearly speaking metaphorically here: if, as Shakespeare suggests, all the world s a stage, [...] And one man in his time plays many parts, the parts available to play for Turkish subjects become fundamentally altered by the material conditions of labour migration. 74 The wardrobe structure thus references the concept of migration as a metaphorical no-man s land in which pre-prepared identities must be taken on and off, or alternatively left suspended, waiting to be one day reclaimed or rejected. The use of costumes also suggests a specifically theatrical storeroom, emphasising the meta-theatrical element of this metaphor Boran, p William Shakespeare, As You Like it, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. by Peter Alexander (London: Collins, 1951), pp , Act II, Scene VII, p The permeability of this structure, which is played with by the actors and props appearing and disappearing, transforming this structure into other spaces also disrupts the impermeable image of a fixed Deutschland-Tür. 73

76 Özdamar s comment above also directly reflects the conditions under which it was generally necessary to produce theatre as a foreigner in West Germany at the time. In the 1980s West German policy was still officially geared to encouraging Gastarbeiter and other migrants to eventually return to their countries of origin. As Manfred Brauneck s study of Ausländertheater in the Federal Republic of Germany and West Berlin highlights, official documents, such as a 1983 report from the Kommission für Ausländerpolitik aus Vertretern von Bund, Ländern und Gemeinden unter Federführung des Bundesminister des Innern, did encourage the Förderung heimat- und herkunftsbezogener Kultur- und Freizeitaktivitäten der Ausländer auf kommunaler Ebene. 76 However, as the document then summarises, this was with an eye to die Erhaltung der Rückkehrfähigkeit im Rahmen der Freiwilligkeit. 77 The express intention was thus to encourage migrants to retain links to their own culture, rather than creating links with the host country, West Germany. As Azadeh Sharifi highlights, policies such as this had a negative effect on the professionalisation of Turkish theatre in Germany. 78 Brauneck s study also shows that while theatre groups made up of so-called Ausländer were numerous and had diverse aims, national makeup, and aesthetic interests, they were united by a lack of an actual theatre in which to rehearse or perform, a lack of funds, and as a result minimal resources in terms of costumes, scenery, lighting, and sound equipment. 79 This stands in stark contrast to the ample resources available to productions taking place in Germany s state theatres. The many costumes hanging on the wardrobe structure which constitutes Özdamar s scenery in 1986, for example, display the costume store of the Frankfurt Schauspielhaus. The scenery thus arguably uses the exceptional resources at its own disposal to reference the material issues which generally surround the production of theatre in migration. 76 Kommission für Ausländerpolitik aus Vertretern von Bund, Ländern und Gemeinden unter Federführung des Bundesminister des Innern, Bonn, 2. März 1983, p. 143, quoted in Brauneck et al., pp , n Ibid., p Sharifi also makes reference to a different extract from this report: Postmigrantisches, p. 36. Her argument in this regard echoes Boran s broader point. 79 Brauneck et al., p

77 2.3 Karagöz as Postdramatic Performance: Against a Theatre of Enlightenment As the first German-language play by a Turkish dramatist on the subject of Turkish labour migration to be performed on a major German stage, 80 Özdamar s self-directed premiere attracted significant amounts of media attention. The piece was reviewed and featured in major theatre journals such as Theater heute and Die deutsche Bühne as well as in the cultural pages of the local and regional newspapers and the influential magazine Der Spiegel. 81 Despite the level of interest the existence of these reviews evidences, as Erol Boran s analysis has highlighted, the reviews themselves were less than enthusiastic. 82 As Boran points out, one reviewer mistakenly states [dass] die meisten ausländischen Mitspieler Laien sind, die überhaupt Schwierigkeiten mit der Schauspielerei, mit dem Ausdruck, der gestischen Umsetzung von Ideen haben. 83 Another laments: Wo bleibt der Dramaturg, der darauf dringt, dass mit den ausländischen Schauspielern gearbeitet wird, bis man sie versteht, wo das nötig ist? Wo bleibt der Dramaturg, der durchsetzt, dass das szenische Geschehen klarer und durchsichtiger wird? 84 In fact, the cast included only one amateur actor, and the leads Jürgen Holtz, Sonia Theodoridu, and Tuncel Kurtiz were established professionals. 85 Nevertheless, Horst 80 Boran, p Yüksel Pazarkaya s Ohne Bahnhof (1966), an earlier example of Turkish-German theatre, in comparison was not taken up by a theatrical publisher and was performed at the Theater der Altstadt in Stuttgart, a more minor stage, in 1968: Boran, p Verena Auffermann, Alltagshölle Alamania, Theater heute, 27.6 (1986), 41-42; Thomas Delek, E. S. Özdamar s Türkenstück: Schwarzauge in Deutschland, Die deutsche Bühne, June 1986, These reviews and all others cited in this chapter were accessed in the Archiv zu den Städtischen Bühnen Frankfurt am Main, at the Universitätsbibliothek Johann C. Senckenberg, part of the Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main. Abteilung Musik, Theater, Film. Schauspiel Inszenierungsmappen, Spielzeit 1985/86: Mappe Nr. 17. Schauspiel, Karagöz in Alamania, Boran, pp Ruth Fühner, Von der Uraufführung des deutsch-türkischen Theaterstücks Karagöz in Alamania, transcript of review broadcast on Texte und Zeichen, 07/05/1986, NDR Felix Schneider, Moralisches Muß oder reueloses Vergnügen, Pflasterstrand (n.d.), p Holtz was a member of the East German Berliner Ensemble before emigrating to West Germany in 1983, Theodoridu is a professional opera singer, and Kurtiz, a Turkish theatre and film star in exile in West Germany, had just been awarded the Silver Bear at that year s Berlinale. 75

78 Köpke, writing in the Frankfurter Rundschau concludes that mehr als wir schon wissen, erfahren wir in der zweieinviertelstündigen, entgegen der Programmankündigung pausenlos gespielten Aufführung über die Türken in und außerhalb unseres Landes nicht. 86 The implication is clear: not only has the play failed to conform to the critic s expectations in terms of length and structure, his expectation of learning about the play s subjects has not been adequately met. As the programme for the 1986 premiere explicitly stated, however, this play was kein Zeitstück, keine Reportage, kein Sozialdrama, sondern ein Traumspiel über die Wirklichkeit. 87 Indeed, the relationship between reality and representation is complex in both the dramatic text and its performance. Özdamar generally claims to have been inspired to write Karagöz in Alamania both as a result of her own experiences in Germany, and following the reading of a letter by a Turkish Gastarbeiter. 88 The programme produced by the dramaturgical department for the 1986 premiere also consists mainly of a reprint of an article from Der Spiegel chronicling the dangers presented by migration along the transnational E5 motorway and including the story of a Gastarbeiter caught driving backwards, a trope which reappears in the play in the final scene. 89 Several elements of the framing of the play thus point to a documentary basis for the play s inception. At the same time, the reuse of the Turkish stock-figure, Karagöz, and the dream sequence which frames the action (to be discussed in more detail in section 2.4) create a certain distance from this reality. The poster which the programme unfolded to create displayed Karagöz, played by Tuncel Kurtiz, leading his donkey through a hazy pink and orange landscape, framing the presentation of this character in the colours of dream (Figure 4). In similar fashion the image on the front cover of the programme shows the actor playing Şemsettin, Jürgen Holtz, encountering the real donkey also used in the production staging and highlighting the tension between original and actor (Figure 5). 86 Horst Köpke, Türkische Selbstpersiflage, Review of Karagöz in Alamania, Frankfurter Rundschau, 6 May Schauspiel Frankfurt, programme. 88 Özdamar, Schwarzauge in Deutschland, 2001, pp Schauspiel Frankfurt, programme. 76

79 Figure 4. Tuncel Kurtiz as Karagöz in a poster for the 1986 premiere of Emine Sevgi Özdamar s Karagöz in Alamania. The 1986 programme folded out into this poster. Schauspiel Frankfurt, Karagöz in Alamania, programme (Frankfurt am Main: Schauspiel Frankfurt, 1986). Accessed in Archiv zu den Städtischen Bühnen Frankfurt am Main, at the Universitätsbibliothek Johann C. Senckenberg, part of the Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main. Abteilung Musik, Theater, Film. Schauspiel Inszenierungsmappen, Spielzeit 1985/86: Mappe Nr. 17. Schauspiel, Karagöz in Alamania, Figure 5. The front cover of the programme: Schauspiel Frankfurt, Karagöz in Alamania, programme (Frankfurt am Main: Schauspiel Frankfurt, 1986). Accessed in Archiv zu den Städtischen Bühnen Frankfurt am Main, at the Universitätsbibliothek Johann C. Senckenberg, part of the Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main. Abteilung Musik, Theater, Film. Schauspiel Inszenierungsmappen, Spielzeit 1985/86: Mappe Nr. 17. Schauspiel, Karagöz in Alamania,

80 Boran sees the complaints highlighted above as a result of the language the script demands the actors speak, rather than as a reflection on the actors themselves. 90 Similarly, Özdamar herself highlighted in interviews with both Boran and myself her emphasis on an aesthetic of Sprachdadaismus in which clear comprehension is actively avoided. 91 However, this does not fully explain the negative comments in the reviews above. Indeed, in performance the scripted language becomes only one of the levels of communication through which a production speaks. In both of the reviews quoted above visual as well as aural issues are cited as problematic and an overall lack of stage presence subtly becomes linked to the actors nationality. This positions the Turkish theatre practitioners, in Orientalist manner, as unable to represent. Notably, neither the later Austrian production in 2000, nor the 1983 dramatic reading staged in Bayreuth appear to have suffered from the same issues regarding lack of clarity on the level of accent or dramaturgy; instead reviews of both were positive and encouraging: the 1983 dramatic reading is described as saftiges und handfestes Volkstheater, for example. 92 While Boran highlights Özdamar s nationality as a factor which may have made the production suspect in the eyes of many German reviewers, here I would like to turn to compare the aesthetic approach to the 1983 dramatic reading with that of the 1986 world premiere of Karagöz in Alamania. In doing so I will consider the ways in which the inclusion of other bodies on stage may also have affected the reception of this performance. 93 An interview found in the Verlag der Autoren archive in which Özdamar discusses the dramatic reading with an unknown interviewer sheds further light on the 1983 dramatic reading. The interviewer outlines the two aesthetics she considers a director might have to choose between when directing Karagöz in Alamania: on the one hand an exaggeratedly theatrical commedia dell arte style, translating the text s partial roots in Turkish shadow theatre into an actor-based form; on the other, a filmic realism. This latter approach is then qualified by the interviewer as follows: dann 90 Boran, pp Boran, p. 154; Konuk, Identitätssuche, p Lorenz, n. pag. 93 Boran, p

81 könnte nur ein Türke so eine Rolle spielen. 94 Although not explicitly excluded from the commedia style, the association of the Turkish body with a naturalist aesthetic is telling here. Following the dramatic reading, the aesthetic of which seems to have lain somewhere between the two poles outlined above, the interviewer goes on to summarise Karagöz in Alamania as follows: politisches Theater im besten Sinne. Nachdem man das Stück gelesen, gesehen hat, weiß man mehr über unsere türkischen Mitbürger, man weiß mehr über die Probleme der Türkei und auch über unser eigenes Land, das Deutschland heißt. 95 The political aspect of the play is thus explicitly linked to its informative nature. Clarity and learning are emphasised in the best tradition of a Theatre of Enlightenment, in which a potent observant spectator could subject a field or a bounded space to its gaze, in order to learn about it and benefit in terms of moral or political selfimprovement as a result. 96 As Helga Kraft argues, the prevalence of this mode of theatre in Germany has its roots in the concept of theatre as national pedagogy noted in Chapter One. Positioning die Migrantenfrage auf der Bühne as one specifically linked to Schiller s concept of theatre as a moral institution, Kraft highlights that: In Schillers Nachfolge steht bis heute der Wunsch in der Theaterwelt, das Publikum durch die Institution des Theaters aufzuklären und in seiner bürgerlichen Moral zu bessern. 97 This moral and informative or educational function stands in an uneasy tension with the avant-garde, politicised theatre of the early twentieth century in Germany which aimed not only to inform but to agitate and to do so using a variety of aesthetic means, appealing to the senses and emotions, as much as to the intellect. The avant-garde project was continued in the late twentieth century with many theatre practitioners becoming more concerned with affect and the relationship between audience and stage; at the same 94 Kohl and Jonquiere [first names unknown], undated eight-page manuscript recording Emine Sevgi Özdamar in conversation on the occasion of the 1983 dramatic reading at Bayreuth, p. 4. Accessed in the holdings of Verlag der Autoren, Frankfurt am Main. 95 Ibid., p Sue-Ellen Case, Performing Science and the Virtual (New York: Routledge, 2007), p Helga Kraft, Das Theater als moralische Anstalt? Deutsche Identität und die Migrantenfrage auf der Bühne, in GeschlechterSpielRäume: Dramatik, Theater, Performance und Gender, ed. by Gaby Pailer and Franziska Schößler (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), pp (p. 123). 79

82 time more traditional forms persisted. 98 A theatre of transformation and a theatre of observation are thus inextricably linked in the German context, a factor which, as this thesis will demonstrate, significantly affects the reception of Turkish-German themes and actors on the German stage. 99 The reception of the 1983 dramatic reading outlined above positions Karagöz in Alamania alongside the numerous contemporaneous artistic attempts to explain the Gastarbeiter to a German audience. In the first half of the 1980s West Germany engaged in what Katrin Sieg has described as a spectacular, national pedagogy concerning its Turkish immigrants. 100 While in the late 1970s public and political discourse had shifted from considering Turkish migrants as temporary Gastarbeiter to positioning them as ausländische Mitbürger, the economic slump of the early 1980s and shift from an SPD-dominated coalition to a CDU government inaugurated a far less positive approach to the Gastarbeiter problem. 101 As mainstream Germany became increasingly invested in taking a position with regard to the Turkish presence in Germany, a series of dramatized encounters with fake Turks was embarked on by journalists such as Gerhard Kromschröder and Günter Walraff. 102 Sieg highlights the subtitle of Kromschröder s book, Als ich ein Türke war: Ein Lehrstück zur Ausländerfeindlichkeit (1983), as a Brechtian reference which embedded the author s adventure of passing as a Turk in a didactic project of considerable scope. 103 This 98 Birgit Haas, Modern German Political Drama, (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003), p. 7. Haas also argues that a return to dramatic drama marks a return to the concept of mimesis in a twofold sense; first, it represents reality on stage as the relationship between the individual and the real; second, it is mimetic in the sense that it harks back to previous forms of theatre : Birgit Haas, The Return of Dramatic Drama in Germany after 1989, in Theatre in the Berlin Republic: German Drama since Reunification, ed. by Denise Varney (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), pp (p. 93). Haas use of mimesis here differs somewhat from my own as outlined in section In discussing the theatre as a place of viewing as well as a place of experience, I want to highlight that the panoptic gaze of Michel Foucault s disciplinary state is not to be confused with the bounded gaze of the theatrical audience: an over-simplified association often made in analyses of this work (see Chapters Four and Five). However, while Turkish-German and other postmigrant artists strive for access to theatre as a sphere of exploration and transformation, audiences and critics often seem to approach this work as an opportunity for the more scientific gazing outlined by Case; an approach at odds with the emphasis on an involved as opposed to observing spectator in much contemporary work. 100 Sieg, Ethnic Drag, p Chin, Guest Worker, p Sieg, Ethnic Drag, p Ibid. 80

83 didactic project was continued on the stage with plays such as Franz Xaver Kroetz s Furcht und Hoffnung der BRD (1983). 104 Özdamar, however, appears to have reacted quite differently to the 1983 dramatic reading from her unknown interviewer. While stressing how much she has enjoyed seeing the play partially staged, the approach taken also seems to have altered her own ideas of how the play could best be performed: Zuerst dachte ich nur an deutsche Schauspieler, aber dann habe ich festgestellt, dass man es von deutschen Schauspielern nicht verlangen könne, dass sie sich innerlich so leer machen, dass sie diese Sprache, ohne sich darüber lustig zu machen, sprechen können. Ich meine nicht, dass sich heute abend irgend jemand lustig gemacht hat. Ihr habt versucht, das, wie Ihr es verstanden habt, unbedingt weiter zu geben. 105 Several subsequent analyses of Özdamar s prose writing have pointed to her use of a Bhabhian or Irigarayian mimicry as a strategy which, rather than ignoring stereotypical attitudes to or ideas about Turks in Germany, cites mainstream discourse in order to acknowledge but simultaneously debunk it. 106 As Özdamar s comment above suggests, despite having conceived of the play for the professional milieu in which she worked in Germany (i.e. mainly German actors), the 1983 dramatisation appears to have revealed that when the German actor s body cited mainstream German stereotypes of the Turkish body, it became more difficult to maintain the specular and critical aspect of mimicry, without it collapsing into an uncomfortable mockery or repetition of stereotypes a factor which may have affected Özdamar s subsequent decision to make use of a multinational cast in The dramaturge involved in the 1986 world premiere, Ingo Waszerka, described the acting style adopted for the 1986 production as follows: 104 Kroetz s drama included one scene titled Ausländerdeutsch, featuring a male Gastarbeiter unable to speak. It was this which, in 1989, led Arlene Akiko Teraoka to question what might happen within German literature, when the silent Turk begins to speak in the dominant language : Teraoka, p. 70; p. 80. Also discussed in this thesis, section Özdamar in interview with Kohl & Jonquiere, p See, for example, Ghaussy, p. 9; Breger, Spielt, p. 32. Sieg also highlights Keloglan as a Bhabhian mimic man : Ethnic Drag, p

84 auf dieser Bühne war ein Realismo [...]. Diese Commedia- Atmosphäre, die haben wir versucht herzustellen realistisch, aber gleichzeitig theatralisch. Wie eine realistische Commedia. 107 As noted in section 2.2, Demirkan feared the collapse of the character of Karagöz into folkloristic stereotype; however, in a personal interview Özdamar also highlighted the overtly theatrical manner in which she saw workers: nicht als arme Menschen, sondern als Chaplin. 108 In the 1986 production, the use of Chaplinesque movements and humourous set pieces inspired by the Marx brothers amongst others helped create the realistische Commedia mentioned by Waszerka. This acting style reflects the tension between reality and fiction highlighted by the programme for the production and the inclusion of live animals in the staging. 109 The use of real animals in theatre has been characterised as a Dauermotiv of the postdramatic turn by Hans-Thies Lehmann, who explains that this vermittelt eine mythische Dimension of engagement between stage and audience at the same time as the animals denunzieren durch ihr bewußtloses Dasein die Fiktion. 110 Similarly, these elements of the real were described by Waszerzka as kein Versuch, Leben zu imitieren, sondern vielleicht in Details zu zitieren. Also der Esel war ein Zitat, weil er so viel für Karagöz und für die Türkei ist. 111 Rather than as signifiers of a naturalist aesthetic, the donkeys, sheep, and chickens on stage in the 1986 production, who interrupted the action with uncontrollable noise, movement, and bodily functions, could also be seen to highlight the play as spectacle as well as, more prosaically, providing a further comic element. 112 While on the whole the role allocation meant that Turkish actors played Turks and the Germans played Germans, it was also up to each actor to bring their own 107 Ingo Waszerka, personal interview, Recklinghausen, 23/05/ Emine Sevgi Özdamar, telephone interview, Edinburgh/Berlin, 9/01/ Breger, Aesthetics, p Similarly, discussing the concept of theatre presented in Seltsame Sterne, Breger argues: Although championing bodily presence or anarchic physicality against the strictures of representation, Özdamar s [narrator s representation of] theater does not turn against mediation, or the word. Breger does not relate this to Özdamar s own theatrical work, instead this quotation is part of an extended discussion of the ways in which political theatre becomes active also within the imaginations of the narrator and character of Seltsame Sterne; the piece of Özdamar s work which Breger analyses. 110 Lehmann, p Waszerka, personal interview. 112 In the performance documented in the audiovisual recording, the donkey interrupts the action by braying, for example: Özdamar, audiovisual recording. 82

85 interpretation to the roles at hand: Die Schauspieler müssen aus sich heraus Figuren entwickeln. 113 Although it is often assumed that a Brechtian Verfremdung is characteristic of Özdamar s creative work, Waszerka s description of the acting techniques preferred for the 1986 production suggest these had closer links to the postdramatic concern with the actor as a creater of presence, which was developing in Germany at the time. 114 In the short story Karagöz in Alamania. Schwarzauge in Deutschland (1990) based on the dramatic text of the same name, Özdamar s use of realistic elements such as dialogue of mixed German and Turkish is identified by scholars such as Norbert Mecklenburg as zitiertes und montiertes Gastarbeiterdeutsch, Originalton und literarische Verfremdung in einem. 115 Although the real props and animals alongside the real Turkish bodies on stage may have created confusion amongst the reviewers, in mainly casting Turkish and other non-german actors in the Turkish roles in 1986 Özdamar does not seem to have been returning to a kind of filmic naturalism but rather attempting to maintain this specularity; a factor largely overlooked in reviewers for whom the real props and animals alongside the real Turkish bodies on stage suggested that a Hauch von Naturalismus pervaded the production. 116 In her analysis of the presence of migrant authors in the German literary sphere in the 1980s, Rita Chin argues that institutions such as the newly established Institut Deutsch als Fremdsprache in Munich hoped to promote the minority author who could speak to the German public from the outside in a way that made his or her foreign experience more intelligible, familiar, and even close. 117 As Chin explains, such explanatory efforts were consistent with a political positioning aligned to the leftist SPD and thus stand in contrast to the more aggressive anti-foreigner rhetoric of the dominant political party of the time, the CDU. At the same time, rather than breaking with a broader hegemonic discourse, these efforts often further cemented other problematic tendencies. Chin s examination of the cultural politics of institutions like 113 Waszerka, personal interview. 114 See Lehmann, pp Mecklenburg, p. 85. Mecklenburg also refers to the 1991 Karagöz short story as eine Realgroteske p Lutz Tantow, Türkischer Eulenspiegel: Karagöz in Alamania in Frankfurt uraufgeführt, Saarbrücker Zeitung, Accessed in holdings of Verlag der Autoren, Frankfurt am Main. 117 Chin, Guest Worker, p

86 the Munich Institute highlights that the DaF [Deutsch als Fremdsprache] leadership chose subjects remarkably similar to the rhetoric and ideology produced by social scientists and SPD politicians from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. 118 According to Chin, in doing so they constructed a category of Ausländerliteratur that operated squarely within the terms of public debate during the late 1970s. 119 The construction of this category of literature by organisations such as the Munich Institute, and the role of the intellectual in explaining the Gastarbeiter, is famously parodied by Özdamar in an oft-cited scene from the 1990 short story Karagöz in Alamania, Schwarzauge in Deutschland. There an enlightened intellectual seated in a bathtub holds forth on the need for a poetry competition to measure how Turkish and how German migrants have become. 120 The bath-tub in which the intellectual sits in the short story creates an intertextual reference to Peter Weiss play Marat/Sade which Sabine Milz reads as a device that discloses intellectual patronising and stereotyping and exposes the intellectual s unwitting complicity with the dominant discourse. 121 Özdamar thus uses this reference to distance herself from a position of narrating the truth in addition to, as Annette Wierschke highlights, critiquing the attitude to fostering cultural production taken by bodies such as the Munich Institute at the time. 122 This critique was also present in the 1982 dramatic text and, in sharpened form, in the 1986 premiere of Karagöz in Alamania. There the intellectual, played by Volker Spengler (one of the few instances where one of the German actors took on a Turkish role), addressed the audience directly. He was thus the only figure to interpret the Turkish Gastarbeiter for the waiting audience: Was meint ihr dazu: man müßte unter den Gastarbeitern einen Gedicht- oder Kleidernäh-Wettbewerb machen. Dann könnte man prüfen, wie sie aus deutschen Stoffen ihre türkischen Kleider nähen; so könnte man sehen, wieviel von ihrer Identität noch da ist Ibid., p Ibid. 120 See Wierschke, pp ; Mecklenburg, p. 90; Seyhan, Outside, p Milz, p Wierschke, p Özdamar, Karagöz in Alamania, 1982, p.41. Also quoted in Wierschke, p

87 However, his attempts at enlightenment are undermined by his bathtub and association with the out-of-touch intellectual Marat. 124 Close examination of Özdamar s Karagöz matrix of texts shows that while the figure of the enlightened intellectual does appear in the 1982 dramatic text, he does so without bathtub. The audiovisual recording of the 1986 premiere reveals that it is here, in the performance text, that the bathtub makes its first appearance, only moving later into the textual Karagöz matrix when the play is rewritten as short story. While in the 1990 short story the image of the intellectual in his bathtub and the association created with Peter Weiss Marat/Sade might function to point to the theatrical origins of that text, on stage, I would argue this intertextual reference becomes explicitly metatheatrical, building on the metatheatrical element of the staging as a whole discussed in section 2.2. Indeed as will be seen in Figure 6 some of the costumes hanging in the background appear to be those used in a production of Marat/Sade staged earlier at Schauspiel Frankfurt. Within the 1986 production the Marat/Sade reference also functions to highlight the performance s links with the post-brechtian tradition of Peter Weiss. It therefore not only explicitly highlights Özdamar s inheritance of a number of transnational dramatic traditions but explicitly parodies the idea of theatre as a place of enlightenment or as an opportunity for Germans to learn about, rather than engage with their Turkish compatriots. With reference to Özdamar s novel Seltsame Sterne, Breger suggests that Özdamar s narrative technique of generating critique primarily through montage provides the reader with opportunities to repeatedly reevaluate the complex, overdetermined constellations unfolded and so champions the active thinking recipient. 125 Boran interprets the mise-en-scène of the play as described in his interviews with Özdamar as follows: Das Befremdliche, Chaotische war also ein durchaus beabsichtigtes, zentrales Element der Inszenierung: Da es darum ging, das existentielle Ins-deutsche-Leben-Geworfensein der Gastarbeiter auf die Bühne zu bringen und dem Publikum gefühlsmäßig zu 124 Ibid. 125 Breger, Aesthetics, p

88 vermitteln, war eine leichte, beziehungsweise vollständige Verständlichkeit keinesfalls angestrebt. 126 Boran reads the chaotic aspect of the premiere identified in reviews as an aesthetic that mirrored the experience of migration. It can also be positioned as a purposeful and comic interference with the transparent representation demanded from a variety of sides at the time. While the 1986 production of Karagöz was frequently received as a (failed) attempt to bring Turkish theatre to a German audience, as will also be seen in section 2.4, a re-reading of the multi-medial material remains of the production reveals it as a rejection of a museal discourse of preservation of original cultures preferred in cultural policy at the time. Discussing the relationship between mimesis and intertextuality in general, Gebauer and Wulf suggest that, [i]f texts are understood as combinations of signs, then mimetic processes take place, not between texts and a reality existing external to them, but only inside texts. 127 In the context of German cultural policy at the time, Özdamar s refusal to subscribe to an understanding of culture as constituted by nationality as reality rather than a web of texts can in fact be seen as a radical move. Equally her refusal to contribute to the homogenisation of Turkish culture often positioned as a necessary precondition for syncretic artistic practices in Germany is inscribed in her refusal to draw on only Turkish texts or actors. Rather than any original, in Karagöz in Alamania Özdamar privileges the shadow puppet turned Gastarbeiter, Karagöz, and his double in order to counter the possibility of ready representation of individuals and supposedly homogeneous cultures. 126 Boran, p Wierschke also questions whether the irritierende Vielfalt der Eindrücke in the short story might not be a method of doing justice to sich verändernder Realitäten : Wierschke, p Gebauer and Wulf, p

89 2.4 Oh Those Turks! Intertextuality, Orientalism, and Dreams of Capital In the 1986 production, the difference between perception of visual representation and knowledge is also thematised by repeated intertextual references to the act of looking. Take for example, the quotation of Socrates dialogue in Plato s Theaetetus by the speaking donkey Şemsettin: 128 Sollen wir also eingestehen, was wir durch Sehen wahrnehmen oder durch Hören, dass wir all dieses auch zugleich verstehen? Zum Beispiel, Ausländer, deren Sprache wir noch nicht gelernt haben: Sollen wir leugnen, daß wir die hören, wenn sie darin sprechen? Oder sollen wir sagen, daß wir sie nicht nur hören, sondern auch das verstehen, was sie sagen? Ebenso, wenn wir Buchstaben noch nicht kennen, doch aber unsere Augen auf sie richten: Sollen wir behaupten, daß wir sie nicht sehen, oder daß wir sie auch verstehen, wenn wir sie doch sehen. 129 This extract comes from a dialogue that questions the relationship between knowledge and perception, which is posited by the young Theaetetus. Socrates aim with this rhetoric is to show his pupil that mere perception is not the same as knowledge, in order to help him answer the broader, abstract question of what knowledge is. 130 The performance of this section in 1986 explicitly linked the question of perception and knowledge with that of the situation of the Turkish worker in contemporary Germany. On the audiovisual recording of the premiere production, the donkey Şemsettin sits centre stage, facing the audience, at a laid table. He drinks wine, smokes cigars, and orders food from an obsequious waiter who lights his cigars for him as he philosophises (Figure 6). The actor playing the waiter is Senih Orkan who has already played multiple parts in the performance including an old man with sheep, 128 Mecklenburg identifies the source of this quotation: Mecklenburg, p. 88. The figure of the animal narrator who confronts the audience with the inadequacy of their perceptual habits and does not allow the audience to occupy any secure ground of knowledge is also highlighted in Sieg s reading of the character Tekir the cat in Özdamar s later play, Keloglan in Alamania: Ethnic Drag, p Özdamar, Karagöz in Alamania, 1982, p Benjamin Jowett, Plato s Theaetetus with Introduction and Analysis (Rockville: Serenity, 2009). 87

90 the rich neighbour, and one of the men examined by the German doctor. 131 Because we are in the theatre, therefore, when he reappears as a waiter we see this as yet another role, unrelated to the others he has thus far played or to him as a private person offstage. At the point in the Socrates monologue where Şemsettin says Ausländer, however, he turns from the audience to stare at the waiter, identifying him within the play as a foreigner playing the part of a German waiter. The waiter starts, looking frightened at having been identified thus. Figure 6. The waiter Senih Orkan (left) and Şemsettin (Volker Spengler, seated) with real donkey in background. Karagöz in Alamania, dir. by Emine Sevgi Özdamar (1986). Image Abisag Tüllmann/Deutsches Theatermuseum. Accessed in Deutsches Theatermuseum, Munich. Abisag Tüllmann Archiv, 86/4/1 K 86/4/62 K. According to Dirk Göttsche, intertextual references in Özdamar s writing function in several ways. Firstly, they inscribe the author in a West-European literary tradition, ohne diese als fremde abzugrenzen. 132 Secondly, they introduce citations 131 Schauspiel Frankfurt, programme, p Göttsche, p

91 from Turkish artists or traditions into German-language texts as equals alongside citations from artists or texts considered to be canonically West European. 133 Thirdly, they can also be interpreted as a komplexes Reflektionsmodell within a text itself. 134 While several scholars have traced the quotation above back to Socrates, its inclusion in Karagöz in Alamania has generally been attributed to the generalised conception of Özdamar s use of intertextuality voiced in Göttsche s first and second conclusions. 135 As Kate Roy points out, however, in her work on Özdamar s texts as Deleuzian assemblages, these first two conclusions are still rooted in a concept of interculturality. 136 While I do not focus on an explicitly Deleuzian reading myself, Roy s positioning of intertexts as in alliance with the primary text and focus on not just the origins of intertexts but also their transformation is one which seems both productive and in keeping with Özdamar s own aesthetic project. 137 Following Roy, then, I would suggest that within the 1986 performance the Socrates quotation in fact functions as this third complex model of reflection. While in Theaetetus the specific example of the foreigner helps Socrates to make his broader, abstract point, in Özdamar s text it functions on two levels the philosophical and the concrete. The emphasis placed on the use of the word Ausländer in performance, a word commonly used to denote people of non-german origin resident in Germany at that time, thus points to a contemporary situation in which a certain knowledge of people is assumed based on foreign appearance. Moving beyond the page to the stage also reveals that the 1986 production as a whole was framed by an audio intertext wholly absent from the dramatic text or subsequent short stories. On the audiovisual recording as the lights go up at the beginning and down at the end of the performance, the hall of the Schauspielhaus Frankfurt is filled with the sounds of a record: Uska Dara by Eartha Kitt (1953) Ibid. 134 Ibid. 135 See Wierschke, p. 199; Mecklenburg, p Kate Roy, Cartographies of Identity: East and West in the Works of Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Leïla Sebbar (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Manchester, 2008), p In her article on Mapping Global Intertexts in Özdamar s work, Roy differentiates between seeing literature as assemblage rather than as reflecting the known world : p. 74. I find her focus on identities that emerge through encounters equally useful for understanding the reality of relations which I understand Özdamar to be exposing, exploring, and transforming here. 137 Roy, Mapping, p Özdamar, audiovisual recording. 89

92 Kitt, a black American singer better known for her rendition of Santa Baby, her role as Catwoman in several Batman films, and her outspoken political stances, based her Uska Dara on the Turkish folk song Üsküdara gidir iken or Kâtibim, which Kitt apparently learned while touring Turkey in the early 1950s. 139 The Turkish part of the song performed by Kitt dates back to the Ottoman Empire and describes a woman s attraction to a handsome clerk a position symbolic of modernisation and westernisation in Turkey at that time with whom she has a romantic tryst in the town of Üsküdar. 140 Musicologist Donna Buchanan translates the Turkish as follows: On the way to Üsküdar it began to rain hard. The clerk I love wears a long frock coat; its long skirt is muddied. My clerk just awoke; his eyes are still languid. That clerk is mine - I am his that s no one else s business. That starched shirt looks so lovely on my clerk. Going to Üsküdar I found a handkerchief, And filled it up with Turkish delight. [...] 141 In addition to the Turkish lyrics, in her 1953 recording Kitt also sings her own English translation of these lines. In the background is an orchestra which Buchanan describes as deliberately playing slightly out of tune, thus conveying their misguided perception of a Turkish ensemble s heterophonic texture and use of untempered intervals. 142 The English Kitt sings is as follows: Üsküdara is a little town in Turkey. And in the old days, many women had male secretaries. Oh well, that s Turkey. 139 Donna A. Buchanan, Oh, Those Turks! Music, Politics, and Interculturality in the Balkans and Beyond, in Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene: Music, Image, and Regional Discourse, ed. by Donna A. Buchanan (Plymouth: Scarecrow Press, 2007), pp (p. 37). 140 Ibid., p. 9. A version of Üsküdara is also sung by the protagonist to her lover Jordi in Özdamar, Die Brücke, p Üsküdar, today a district of Istanbul, is also referenced in Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Ein unzeitgemäßer Üsküdarer: Über den Dichter Ece Ayhan, trans. by Dilek Dizdar, Akzente, 5.5 (2008), This is an extract from Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Kendi Kendinim Terzisi Bir Kambur, Ece Ayhan'lı anılar, 1974 Zürih günlüğü, Ece Ayhan'ın makrupları [Ein buckliger Mann, Schneider seiner selbst, Erinnerungen an Ece Ayhan, Das Züricher Tagebuch 1974, Briefe von Ece Ayhan] (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2007). 141 Buchanan, pp Ibid., p

93 They take a trip from Üsküdara in the rain, and on the way they fall in love. He s wearing a stiff collar and full dress suit. She looks at him longingly through her veil, and casually feeds him candy. Ooooh, those Turks! 143 Thanks to Buchanan s translations and transcriptions it is clear to see that the Turkish and English sung by Kitt differ significantly. For example, in the Turkish noun kâtibim, my clerk, the possessive case is used to denote possession in a metaphorical sense, indicating an emotional relationship, i.e. the clerk whom the singer loves. Kitt s English translation makes this possession literal: although remaining the singer s lover the clerk also becomes her secretary, a move which plays with the gender roles both of the Turkish original and the 1950s American context Kitt was translating into. Although this could be put down simply to faulty translation, Kitt s periodic growls of Ooh those Turks throughout the song and the purposefully misspelled title suggest that an orientalised image of Turkey is purposefully being played with here. 144 In her broader study of adaptations of the song, Buchanan files Kitt s adaptation under American Orientalism for precisely this reason, a labelling which seems to suggest the adaptation as inherently problematic. 145 Although Kitt s reduction of the clerk from a position of power and influence as town clerk to the mere secretary of a woman might be considered to correspond to the feminisation of men commonly found in the mechanism of Orientalism, 146 it also conjures up an image of a world which offers a radical escape from the gender relations of the 1950s. While leaving the Turkish as incomprehensible and thus also incommensurable, suggesting a certain exoticism, Kitt s playful translation might also be said to parody the Anglo-American stereotype of the Turk. Following such a reading I would suggest that framing the 1986 performance within this audio citation functions on several levels. Firstly, the use of a song widely 143 Ibid p Cf. Özdamar s subtle distortion of the Turkish word for Germany Alemania to Alamania. 145 Buchanan, p Said, pp

94 disseminated and adapted throughout the former territories of the Ottoman Empire and beyond arguably reflects the fluidity of musical culture enabled by the process of covering. 147 Özdamar s use of Eartha Kitt s version to frame the 1986 performance thus refuses the nationalism potentially associated with a purely Turkish version of the song, asserting the continual flow of artistic texts from context to context as a more natural process than a retention of strict boundaries. The inclusion of a Greek opera singer in the role of Ümmü arguably functions similarly; to share, rather than claim the heritage of Karagöz (a theatre style and figure often disputed over as a national symbol between Turks and Greeks). 148 Secondly, the inclusion of this song as a further framing device explicitly conjures up Orientalism as a further framework which the play may have to position itself in relation to. Rather than countering Orientalist expectations with a refusal of folkloristic aspects and so cutting Turkish culture down to size, the production also makes use of this framing song as a purposefully inauthentic performance of Turkish folk culture. 149 By performing the Turkish lyrics alongside her own adaptation, Kitt s rendition, like Özdamar s play as a whole, allows a version of Turkish culture to be presented without offering it up for easy consumption. Returning to our Socrates quotation, the act of hearing is removed from the production of knowledge in that the non-turkish speaker is left merely to guess to what extent the translation is an accurate or faithful rendition of the original. This undermines the authority of the audience member not versed in Turkish, English, and German to interpret what the play is about to present to him or her. This audio intertext also has a bearing on a framing device already present in the dramatic text, that of the dream. The dramatic text opens with a framing narrative 147 Buchanan, p Frank Krause notes that scholars such as Metin And have tried to claim Karagöz as an emblem of a homogenous Turkish nation, but that Özdamar s emphasis on the diversity of the Karagöz tradition disrupts such attempts: Frank Krause, Shadow Motifs in Emine Sevgi Özdamar s Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn, Debatte, 8.1 (2000), (p. 83). On the multiethnicity of the Karagöz tradition and its place in Özdamar s work, see also Mani, Good Woman, p. 38. Greek-Turkish relations play a significant but under-researched role in Özdamar s prose work. 149 As Kader Konuk suggests in her analysis of the presence of Else Lasker-Schüler s Orientalized language in Özdamar s Seltsame Sterne, Özdamar s relationship to Orientalism in her literary narratives not only extends lines of commonality between the narrator and other marginalized figures such as Lasker-Schüler but also complicate[s] the wholesale dismissal of Orientalist discourses as hegemonic : Kader Konuk, Taking on German and Turkish History: Emine Sevgi Özdamar s Seltsame Sterne, Gegenwartsliteratur: Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch, 6 (2007), pp (p. 242). 92

95 actively marked in the written texts as Ümmü s dream in which a double of Karagöz is caught in a tree stealing apples. Although Karagöz pretends to be a nightingale, and an inexperienced one at that, suggesting he is stealing apples for the first time, the rich apple tree owner takes this as an opportunity to extort Karagöz s uncle. Their argument is interrupted by a third party, however, who promises to put up the money for Karagöz to travel to Germany in exchange for the uncle s field, thus ostensibly offering a way out of the conditions in rural Turkey. 150 In this way the opening sequence prefigures the real Karagöz s initial journey from Turkey to Germany, where he is expected to earn as much for his uncle as twenty-five workers like Karagöz would at home. While the closing sequence of the dramatic text is not marked so explicitly as a dream, in it the young dream double from the opening sequence reappears and events repeat themselves. The only exception is that Karagöz has become the owner of the apple tree which his younger double steals from. Both Karagöz figures claim to be the real Karagöz until the older Karagöz bundles Ümmü and Şemsettin into his car and drives off, in reverse, to Germany. This framing narrative has been identified as significant by a number of critics. It is commonly understood to demonstrate Karagöz s self-alienation as a result of his experience as a Gastarbeiter, his poor working conditions, and his life between two countries and cultures. 151 I would like to move beyond a reading of the dream as a between two worlds narrative however, and compare Özdamar s framing narrative to another instance in which fruit is stolen by a younger Doppelgänger or dream figure from an older tree owner: Brecht s Der Kirschdieb. 152 An einem frühen Morgen, lange vor Hahnenschrei Wurde ich geweckt durch ein Pfeifen und ging zum Fenster. Auf meinem Kirschbaum Dämmerung füllte den Garten Saß ein junger Mann mit geflickter Hose Und pflückte lustig meine Kirschen. Mich sehend Nickte er mir zu, mit beiden Händen Holte er die Kirschen von den Zweigen in seine Taschen. 150 Özdamar, Karagöz in Alamania, 1982, pp Mecklenburg, p. 87. See also Boran, who relates this to the Selbstentfremdung einer ganzen Generation von Gastarbeitern : p For a criticism of the limitations of the two world narrative see Adelson, Against Between, passim; Jim Jordan, More than a Metaphor: The Passing of the Two Worlds Paradigm in German-Language Diasporic Literature, German Life and Letters, 59.4 (2006),

96 Noch eine ganze Zeitlang, als ich wieder in meiner Bettstatt lag Hörte ich ihn sein lustiges kleines Lied pfeifen. 153 While in Der Kirschdieb the speaker calmly watches the younger generation steal his fruit, in Özdamar s Karagöz retribution is speedily enacted on the protagonist. The nod within the Brecht poem suggests a recognition of one figure in another and the theft takes place in a spirit of friendly complicity which emphasises solidarity across the generations. At the end of Özdamar s text, however, Karagöz s inability to recognise his younger self can be read not only as evidence of his self-alienation but also of a failure to recognise how his own actions reproduce the conditions which have created that alienated state of being. 154 The 1986 production retains this framing dream narrative, using visual markers to emphasise the continuities and differences between the first and last scene. The white suit of the old landlord is echoed, in grotesque register, by the real Karagöz s white suit and bandages; the same younger actor, is used to play Karagöz s young double in both. 155 Within the 1986 performance of Karagöz in Alamania the violence done by the older Karagöz to his younger self is also comically indicated by the older figure attacking his young double until the double s leg falls off. 156 Such physical generational violence could be seen to stand for the violence which Marxist theory sees one generation practising on another in its reproduction of capitalism. If the reproduction of relations of capitalism is something which the dream sequence of doubling within the play might draw attention to, the inclusion of Kitt s song may be read as an attempt to produce an alternative process of interaction between the audience and the action on stage. This would be consistent with two contemporaneous concerns: firstly the need to question or challenge mimeticist representation of the Gastarbeiter figure and secondly the postdramatic experimentation with audiencestage relationships at the time. 153 Bertolt Brecht, Der Kirschdieb, in Bertolt Brechts Gedichte und Lieder: Auswahl Peter Suhrkamp (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1956), p Wierschke suggests that although more predominantly read as a scene of Betroffenheit, this scene could also be read as Marxist critique of capitalism: Wierschke, p Also noted in Boran, p Özdamar, audiovisual recording. 156 Ibid. In the video recording neither Şemsettin nor Ümmü join him in his final journey away from Turkey. 94

97 According to Katrin Sieg, Özdamar is one of a number of playwrights in Germany whose work functions to: privilege the vantage point of those who, as Barbara Christian has indignantly phrased it, have never conceived of themselves as somebody s other [...], yet who do not remain unaffected by the visual technologies that continue to construct postcolonial relationships in the binary terms of classical mimesis. 157 Although the Turkish-German relationship is generally not considered to be a postcolonial one, 158 as detailed in section 1.4, the mimeticist logic which characterises particular subjects in relation to supposedly pre-existing models is also at play in the context. A critique of mimeticism, or the binary terms which Sieg relates to classical mimesis, does appear to be evident in the 1986 premiere. In an early scene of the 1986 production, on the way from their village to Istanbul, Karagöz and Şemsettin are photographed by an American tourist along with some antique jugs. 159 Susan Sontag famously associated photography with tourism and colonialism, suggesting: there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. 160 At first glance Sontag s analysis seems to describe the process depicted by Özdamar in the scene above exactly: the photographer is literally a tourist whose photography makes Karagöz and his donkey into objects that can be taken away with her. By equating them to the antique jugs the tourist also takes away with her, this process figures Karagöz and his donkey as representatives of a culture characterised in Orientalist terms as pre-modern and incapable of change. 161 Indeed, in the Sieg, Ethnic Drag, p This issue is debated at length in, for example, the collection edited by Steyerl and Gutiérrez Rodríguez. See also the discussion in section 1.4 of this thesis. 159 Video recording. The 1986 production deviates from the 1982 dramatic text in which it is only the character of the treasure hunter who is photographed. Cf. Özdamar, Karagöz in Alamania, 1982, p Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1979), p On ruins, modernity, and Turkey see Konuk, East West, pp

98 performance Karagöz, played by Tuncel Kurtiz, initially defends himself from the camera, covering his face with his arm and backing away; a gesture which positions the photographic eye as intrusive and predatory. Having never conceived of himself as somebody s other, Karagöz, like the Turkish actor he is played by, is, however, by no means obliged to take on this role when interpellated as such. In the 1986 video recording, while the character of touristphotographer attempts to capture an authentic Turkish peasant, Karagöz quickly begins to perform for the on-stage camera, actively posing and inserting himself into shots even when not desired. 162 In this highly comic turn he, and by extension the performance as a whole, arguably refuses the coercive mimeticism at work in the photographer s gaze, disrupting the binary terms of classical mimesis suggested by Sieg and continued by an equation of presence with truth. 163 The photographer is then left not with knowledge of him that he can never have but with an image which may mark both a desire and a failure to engage. Although performance is privileged, this performance is situated both in relation to but also at a remove from any easily assignable original. 2.5 Keloglan in Alamania: Mimesis and Mimeticism in the Year 2000 The importance of interventions such as Özdamar s has been highlighted in the numerous examinations of her prose work and even in examinations of her plays as dramatic texts. Helga Kraft argues that: Governmental measures and an improving economy can help in the acceptance of foreigners, but playwrights add a dimension that only the stage allows [...] Özdamar s postmodern juggling of discursive clichés engage[s] the German theatregoing public in a debate on political, economic, legal, and customary xenophobia in its country Video recording. 163 Sieg, Ethnic Drag, p Kraft, Staging, pp

99 Similarly, while Katrin Sieg is primarily concerned with the exclusion of particular subjects from mimesis within the dramatic text of Keloglan in Alamania, her reading of the long delay in staging Keloglan as one which measures the resistance to publicly considering cultural differences along with political equality around the time of reunification in Germany suggests that the inclusion or exclusion of particular subjects from the repertoires of German theatres is also relevant to a discussion of mimesis and mimeticism. 165 The production history of Karagöz in Alamania, for example, reminds us that the symbolic and affective potential of work such as Özdamar s remains mere potential unless taken on by a theatre willing to stage the play and an audience interested in the version of reality presented. In briefly tracing the contours of the production history of Keloglan in Alamania here I want to unpack this possibility further and explore the ways in which this lag may have framed the 1991 text in its performance in While the dramatic text can be said to critique geopolitical divisions of labour and practices of labelling and exclusion in German society, the play as event may expose and allow us to briefly explore other contradictions in the German theatrical relationship to issues of migration within the period which spans the transition from a focus on the 1980s and the 2000s. In 1991 Keloglan in Alamania, newly registered with Verlag der Autoren, was featured in the publishing house s brochure Stücke gegen Rassismus, Fremdenhass, Ausländerfeindlichkeit, Nationalismus as available for a premiere. 166 While the reunification period is often characterised as one in which the artistic establishment neglected its foreign fellow citizens in order to focus on German-German concerns, as this brochure suggests less visible efforts to engage more broadly did continue. 167 One year later Keloglan in Alamania was featured again, together with another play focusing on migration to Germany. Although Keloglan was still available for premiere at this point, this was not due to public resistance to considering the issues it raises but rather due to a change of artistic director at the Schiller Theater in West Berlin, where 165 Ibid., p Verlag der Autoren, Programmheft: Stücke gegen Rassismus, Fremdenhaß, Ausländerfeindlichkeit, Nationalismus, advertising material for publishing house (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, June 1991). Accessed in the holdings of Verlag der Autoren, Frankfurt am Main. 167 On this neglect see Sieg, Ethnic Drag, pp

100 the play had been intended to premiere also saw a series of right-wing attacks on foreigners and asylum seekers in Germany, a circumstance which Verlag der Autoren highlight in their marketing of the play: Jetzt ist wieder die Zeit für Solidaritätserklärungen und Unterschriftenaktionen. Aber müßten die Theater heute nicht besser solche Stücke spielen, diese Menschen auf die Bühne bringen? Die multikulturelle Gesellschaft hat ein Existenzrecht auf unseren Bühnen, und die moralische Anstalt Theater muß sich mit ihr beschäftigen. 169 The rhetoric here echoes that of the later postmigrant theatre movement which has highlighted the need for the faces on German stages to better represent the faces on German streets, and will be discussed in more detail in Chapters Four, Five, and Six. This rhetoric had little of the latter s success, however. 170 Indeed it was not until 2000, that Keloglan in Alamania was first staged in Oldenburg as a piece of youth theatre. According to my interview with the dramaturge involved in the Keloglan premiere, Axel Gade, the play was chosen in 2000 as the theatre s annual theatre project for giving local young people a taste of working with the theatre. While the main roles of Keloglan, Kelkari, and Tekir were filled by professional actors from the Oldenburg ensemble, the variety of smaller parts made Özdamar s piece ideal for offering young amateurs supporting roles. 171 Gade also mentions the dramatic text s inclusion of musical citations from both high and low culture as an element which particularly suited the play to production as part of this project, suggesting that the mixture of fairy tale and opera also spoke to the position of the age group involved in the play as somewhere between adulthood and childhood. 172 Murat Yeginer, a Turkish- German director and playwright in his own right, was one of the actors and directors at the Staatstheater Oldenburg at that time and his presence as director and interest in staging a piece on Turkish migration to Germany is cited by Gade as a further reason 168 Verlag der Autoren, Sprachkurs Deutsch, advertising leaflet (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 1992). Accessed in the holdings of Verlag der Autoren, Frankfurt am Main. 169 Ibid. 170 See Chapter Five of this thesis. 171 Axel Gade, personal interview, Kaiserslautern, 19/05/ Ibid. 98

101 for taking on the play. While this may suggest an overly simplistic equation of personal biography with artistic interest, it also highlights the difference which the much fought-for inclusion of Turkish-German theatre practitioners within the state theatres can make in terms of the willingness to stage plays with particular themes. The timing of the Keloglan premiere is also telling as in 2000 migration, racism, and nationalism came into the spotlight once again in the German-speaking world. As we saw in Chapter One of this thesis, this was partly as a result of the change in German citizenship law from a model of jus sanguinis to jus soli which also resulted in a reactionary backlash. 173 The formation of a coalition government with the right wing Freedom Party (FPÖ) in Austria also became a major point of concern for many on the Left. While speeches by influential figures of the theatrical establishment such as Elfriede Jelinek at Austrian anti-racism demonstrations became editorials in Theater der Zeit, in the same year the section of Wer spielte Was charting events and trends in German theatre reports the following: Auftakt gegen Fremdenhass, unter diesem Motto ruft Bühnenvereinspräsident Jürgen Flimm die Theater und Orchester in Deutschland zum Beginn der Spielzeit auf, gegen Fremdenfeindlichkeit und Rassismus durch eine geeignete Aktion Stellung zu beziehen: Theater und Orchester sind in ihrer Internationalität auch ein Ort der Verständigung, dies gelte es zu pflegen und zu fördern. Dem Aufruf folgen in diesen Wochen viele Theater. 174 The topical nature of Keloglan in Alamania clearly made it an attractive proposition at that time. Gade notes that an awareness of a reactionary turn in Germany at the time during which Keloglan was being discussed for inclusion in the 2000/01 season led him and others at the theatre to the question: Wie geht man mit Migranten um? Sind das Migranten? 175 Equally, however, the need for such an extreme context to make the piece relevant highlights the dependence of its staging precisely on those voices keen to deny the Turkish population in Germany access to the nation-state. 173 Ibid. 174 Deutscher Bühnenverein, Wer spielte was? Werkstatistik des Deutschen Bühenvereins 1999/2000 (Cologne: Mykenoe, 2000), pp Gade, personal interview. 99

102 Figure 7. Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Keloglan in Alamania, dir. by Murat Yeginer (2000). The stage can be seen here, and Keloglan (Guido Wachter) is present in a blonde wig on the right. Unpublished photograph, Stefan A. Schulz. Accessed thanks to Isabelle Yeginer and Stefan A. Schulz. Figure 8. Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Keloglan in Alamania, dir. by Murat Yeginer (2000). The firefighting equipment littering the stage can be seen here, next to one of the young amateur actors. Unpublished photograph, Stefan A. Schulz. Accessed thanks to Isabelle Yeginer and Stefan A. Schulz. 100

103 The precarious place of Turkish-German theatre in this period can also be read to a degree in the mise-en-scène of Keloglan in Alamania. Although the evidence of the mise-en-scène is fragmentary, publicity photographs taken of the performance show that the premiere of Keloglan in Oldenburg was set in a burnt-out container hung with a fire hydrant (Figure 7 and Figure 8). Comments in the reviews and my interview with the dramaturge Axel Gade confirm that the premiere s mise-en-scène used visual citations of events which had taken place in the intervening years. 176 The most prominent of these is the Solingen attack of 1993 in which five Turkish-German family members were burned to death. Karin Yeşilada highlights the attacks on Ausländer in Rostock, Hoyerswelda, Mölln, and Solingen as constitutive of a caesura in Turkish-German history and experience, and analyses the way in which this has entered into Turkish-German poetry when she writes of a Poesie post Solingen. 177 In the 2000 performance of Keloglan in Alamania, the burnt-out walls and fire extinguisher hung around the stage unmistakably referenced the Solingen attacks. The fire extinguishers thus index the renewed insecurity of Turkish residents of Germany in their place of residence; a device similar to that of the ready-packed suitcase often referenced in Jewish-German post-war narratives. 178 A further visual citation of contemporary discourses on, or debates surrounding, migration and ethnicity in the German-speaking context is created by the container in which the production was staged. This is a clear reference to Christoph Schlingensief s performance piece Bitte liebt Österreich a performance piece in which a number of figures identified as asylum seekers were placed in a large container and voted out for deportation on a nightly basis. 179 Much as in the plot of Keloglan in Alamania, in Schlingensief s performance piece [d]em Sieger winkt ein Geldgewinn und eventuell, so sich Freiwillige finden, die Einheirat in die 176 Gade, personal interview. 177 Karin Yeşilada, Poesie der dritten Sprache: Türkisch-deutsche Lyrik der zweiten Generation (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2012), p. 23; pp Turkey s ambassador in Bonn, Onur Öymen, warned his compatriots to brace [themselves] for more attacks and urged them to purchase fire extinguishers and secure their doors : Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos, Becoming Multicultural: Immigration and the Politics of Membership in Canada and Germany (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2012), p My thanks to Karin Yeşilada for highlighting the exhortion to buy fire extinguishers to me. 179 For a discussion of this play see: Kraft, Theater, pp

104 österreichische Wahlheimat. 180 Both Schlingensief s 2000 performance and the narrative of Keloglan in Alamania highlight the discrepancy between the real result of a situation such as Keloglan s and that provided by the theatre money and security provided by an arranged marriage into the country in question. 181 In referencing Schlingsief s container action, however, a further frame is added to this commentary: one which highlights the discrepancy between the attention accorded representations of migration in which the migrants are objects (however ironically in Schlingensief s case) and that awarded to those in which the migrant subject initiates representation, such as Özdamar s play. Such a framing, combined with the visual citations of the attacks of Solingen and Mölln in the mid-1990s, indicates that the mise-en-scène positioned the place of the migrant in German society as still dependant on the whims and desires of the German majority. The fact that Keloglan was staged as part of the theatre s youth programme also suggests a lack of interest for such material amongst adult audiences at the time. Much as the fire extinguishers of the mise-en-scène symbolised the insecurity of Turkish residents of Germany at that time, the ten-year lag between the writing and performance of this play points to a theatrical system in which stories of migration, much like migrants themselves, were still considered exceptional rather than as having a constant right to a presence on German stages. 180 Bitte liebt Österreich - Erste Österreichische Koalitionswoche, schlingensief.com < [last accessed 03/08/2014]. 181 The difference between the solutions provided by reality and those provided by the playwright in Keloglan in Alamania form the basis of much analysis in: Sieg, Ethnic Drag, p. 241; Sieg, Class, p On the marriage scene of the dramatic text see Sieg, Ethnic Drag, pp ; El Hissy, pp

105 CHAPTER THREE: Rewriting and the Real: Zaimoglu/Senkel s Othello 3.1 Zaimoglu / Senkel / Shakespeare As the case of Keloglan in Alamania demonstrates, in the 1990s, following the turbulence of the Wende and German reunification, the performance of Turkish- German identities moved largely into arenas other than theatre those of literature, film, and comedy. One of the most notable Turkish-German literary figures to emerge out of this period apart from Emine Sevgi Özdamar was Feridun Zaimoglu. Known as the enfant terrible of Turkish-German literature, the performative aspect of his persona as author, as well as of his writing style, has drawn much attention. 1 Looking towards the future for Turkish-German performance culture in 2004, Erol Boran suggested that [t]atsächlich kann man Zaimoglus Publikationen wie auch seine öffentlichen Lesungen und Auftritte in jeder Hinsicht als Schauspiele und Spektakel bezeichnen. 2 While these readings may be spectacles and performances in a broad sense, they were far from theatre in the strict sense of the word. This was not to remain the case for long though, and, as debates about German citizenship filled the headlines of Germany s newspapers, adaptations of Zaimoglu s texts Kanak Sprak (1995) and Koppstoff (1998) began to make their way onto German stages: namely those of the Kampnagel, Hamburg (1997), the Junges Theater Bremen (1998), the Nationaltheater Mannheim (1999), the Maxim Gorki Theater (2001), and the Westfälisches Landestheater (2003). 3 This interest on the part of a range of theatres in Zaimoglu s work and his growing profile as critical commentator eventually translated into opportunities for Zaimoglu, and then Zaimoglu together with his writing partner in the theatre Günter Senkel, to experiment with the role of playwright. In 2003 Zaimoglu and Senkel made 1 Cheesman and Yeşilada, Preface, p. 4. See also, for example, Minnard, Playing, pp ; Schmidt, pp Boran, pp See also sections 4.5 and 5.1.

106 their dramatic debut, when they were commissioned to write a new version of William Shakespeare s Othello. 4 The result was a controversial piece, which radically transformed Shakespeare s words. The language of Zaimoglu/Senkel s rewrite incorporated everything from the streetwise lexicon of the sub-literate skinhead, brutalized squaddie sociopath, or marginalized and euphemized alien guest worker to paraphrases of the then German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Franz Kafka, and Frederick the Great. 5 Jago, for example, tells foul jokes about women and refers to Othello as unser FickerNiggerFegerNeger, while Rodrigo explains the plot as n Amokthriller, Alter. 6 Tom Cheesman s detailed analysis of the dramatic text has highlighted the range of registers used by the other main characters: Brabantio s diction is aristocratic, featuring recherché, French-derived vocabulary. Cassio speaks the smug jargon of a leftist intellectual. 7 However, it is the fouler and more extreme language highlighted above which appears to have stuck in reviewers ears, leading many to characterise the play as an exercise in Fäkalsprache. 8 The play premiered at Munich s newly re-opened Kammerspiele in a two-hour production by director Luk Perceval. The staging was stark and bare, couched in what numerous reviews have referred to as a film noir or expressionist style. The casting was unusual for Germany in that Othello was played without make-up by white actor Thomas Thieme, while Emilia was played by the only black cast member, Sheri Hagen. According to numerous reports, large numbers of audience members walked out of the premiere production before the play s end, while others stayed in order to emphatically boo or cheer the result. A scandal was born and has been the impulse for a relatively large amount of scholarly interest in this particular translation as well as for attention from the international theatrical community. The Kammerspiele 4 Later the same year Zaimoglu/Senkel s Casino Leger premiered at Schauspiel Frankfurt (dir. Marlon Metzen) and their Ja. Tu es. Jetzt premiered at Junges Theater Bremen (dir. Nomena Struß). These plays are published in: Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel, Drei Versuche über die Liebe (Münster: Monsenstein & Vannerdat, 2004). 5 Carol Chillington Rutter, Watching Ourselves Watching Shakespeare Or How am I Supposed to Look, Shakespeare Bulletin, 25.4 (2007), (p. 49). My thanks to Stefan Nagel for pointing out the Gerhard Schröder references when he met with me in Cologne, 20/04/ William Shakespeare, Feridun Zaimoglu, and Günter Senkel, Othello (Münster: Monsenstein & Vannerdat, 2004), pp ; p. 37; p Tom Cheesman, Filthy Hell, p This term is used by many reviewers. See, for example, Christine Dengler, Marode Männergesellschaft, Reichenhaller Tagblatt, 14/04/2003. All reviews in this chapter unless noted otherwise were accessed in the Münchner Stadtarchiv. File Kammerspiele

107 production has since toured to Poland, Denmark, the UK, Holland, Lithuania, and South Korea and the premiere production remained part of the repertoire at the Kammerspiele until it moved with director Luk Perceval to the Thalia Theater Hamburg in Further productions have also been put on at the Schauspiel Graz, Austria (dir. Christina Rast, 2008) and Theater der Keller, Cologne (dir. Stefan Nagel, 2011). 9 The controversy that Zaimoglu and Senkel s Othello rewrite caused in 2003 was nothing new for Zaimoglu. He is best known for Kanak Sprak, a 1995 collection of angry young Turkish-German male voices, which aimed to reappropriate a derogatory term often used to refer to Turks in Germany, Kanake, as a term of radical empowerment. This was followed by Koppstoff in 1998, a collection similar in style but offering the female perspective. In 1998, extracts from Kanak Sprak and the follow-up piece Koppstoff were performed by actors from the Junges Theater Bremen as a telegenic example of Zaimoglu s work on a television debate involving the author. 10 According to Tom Cheesman s commentary on the transcript of this section of the programme, the selection of extracts played whether made by Zaimoglu, the theater, or the television channel, evidently aims to provoke a native German audience. 11 The presenter of the show refers to the extracts as Allemannbeschimpfungen, a term which, as Cheesman points out in a footnote, evokes Peter Handke s play Publikumsbeschimpfung (1966). 12 This equation of audience with offended Germans and Zaimoglu with oppositional ethnic artist thus seemed to reach its culmination with the premiere of Zaimoglu/Senkel s Othello at the Münchner Kammerspiele in It certainly offered theatre scholars such as Kaynar a ready model for understanding the dynamics at work in the controversial premiere of Zaimoglu s Othello: 9 The full dramatic text is published in two editions: in addition to the Monsenstein & Vannerdat edition which is quoted from here, see also William Shakespeare, Othello neu übersetzt von Feridun Zaimoglu und Günter Senkel (Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2008). 10 Cheesman, Novels, pp This programme can be seen at Feridun Zaimoğlu vs. Heide Simonis (1), youtube.com < and Feridun Zaimoğlu vs. Heide Simonis (2), youtube.com < [both last accessed 17/07/2014]. 11 Cheesman, Novels, p. 4, n Ibid., p. 7, n

108 Through such means of vandalizing an icon of high European culture, Zaimoglu appropriates and colonizes the symbolic capital of his implied spectators. [...] The translation of Othello, rather than affirming an updated conception of Shakespeare, subverts the classical notion of the play that is inextricably bound with a phenomenological model of a hierarchical cosmic order (and, if you wish, German middle class Law and Order). 13 As the Nigerian writer Ben Okri points out, even [i]f Othello is not a play about race, then its history has made it one. 14 As a result the play has often been turned to in postcolonial theatre or as a means to work through race relations in the UK and American contexts. 15 An emphasis on the oppositional nature of Zaimoglu/Senkel s rewrite in the secondary literature on this play is therefore perhaps unsurprising. According to Dirk Delabastita, in post-modernity [t]ranslation throws overboard its subservience to the original along with its claims of being the original s authentic representation. Translation thereby asserts its transformative nature. 16 The radical image of the translation or rewrite freeing itself from subservience certainly echoes Petra Fachinger s reading of Zaimoglu s earlier work, Kanak Sprak, as a rewrite with parallels to a postcolonial tradition of writing back to a hegemonic centre; a factor which perhaps adds to the temptation to see the Othello rewrite in a similar light Gad Kaynar, Dramaturgical Translation in the Post-Dramatic Era: Between Fidelity to the Source Text and the Target Dramaturg-as-Text, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, 4.3 (2011), (p. 235). 14 Ben Okri, quoted in Sujata Iyengar, White Faces, Blackface: The Production of Race in Othello, in Othello: New Critical Essays, ed. by Philip C. Kolin (London: Routledge, 2002), pp (p. 103). 15 Okri, quoted in Iyengar, p A similar point is made by Tom Cheesman, Diversity in Cultural Representations: Comedy and Othello, MMG Working Paper (Göttingen: Max-Plank Institut, 2009), 1-35 < [last accessed 26/08/2014], (p. 23). See also Philip C. Kolin, Blackness Made Visible: A Survey of Othello in Criticism, on Stage, and on Screen, in Othello: New Critical Essays, ed. by Philip C. Kolin (London: Routledge, 2002), pp For an example of this in the Anglo-American context see the discussion of Djanet Sears Harlem Duet (2007) provided by Kidnie, pp I draw on Kidnie s work on Shakespeare adaptation throughout this chapter. 16 Dirk Delabastita, quoted in Hoenselaars, Tom, There is Tremendous Poetry in Killings : Traditions of Shakespearean Translation and Adaptation in the Low Countries, in Translating Shakespeare for the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Rui Carvalho Homem and Ton Hoenselaars (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), pp (p. 97). 17 Petra Fachinger, Rewriting Germany from the Margins: Other German Literature of the 1980s and 1990s (London: McGill-Queen s University Press, 2001), pp. 5-10; pp The link between postcolonial writing back and the context of migration to Germany is also made in, amongst others: Karin Yeşilada, Das Empire schreibt zurück: Deutschsprachige Autoren nicht-deutscher Herkunft, in Weltliteratur: Vom Nobelpreis bis zum Comic, ed. by Thomas Böm et al. (Köln: Könemann, 2001), pp

109 The presence of vulgar language and a desire to discomfort the audience are in fact far from unusual on Germany s most prestigious and influential stages, however. Handke s original Publikumsbeschimpfung dates from 1966, for example, and productions of work by British playwrights of the In-Yer-Face school, such as Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane, are extremely popular in Germany: indeed the pose of provocation is often considered a defining feature of German theatre in other countries. 18 Furthermore, while a section of the German middle class present on the night of the premiere and at subsequent performances was clearly provoked, Law and Order remained very much in place. Indeed the cast and other guests proceeded to the theatre s restaurant um den Skandal zu feiern. 19 Critics who reviewed the premiere were also considerably less divided than the reactions they reported. Almost all saw the production as a success aesthetically, and while the less enthusiastic identified the language of the play as a weakness, others considered this a strong contribution to the play. 20 It is in the relationship between the original and the adaptation that mimesis again becomes a productive tool for analysis. Matthew Potolsky highlights that mimesis, for the Romans meant imitatio, a process of reworking the classic models, whereby something new could be created from the old. 21 Rather than as site of rebellion, Potolsky sees this as an indispensable mechanism for cultural stability and a powerful means of asserting the unity of contemporary culture with the past. 22 Thus [i]mitation makes the original an original, renders it a classic and a model for further imitation. 23 While we live in a cultural moment which privileges the authentic and original and is particularly suspicious of imitation, Potolsky s reminder of earlier practices of rewriting allow Zaimoglu and Senkel s Othello rewrite to be placed in a slightly different light. As Frauke Matthes points out, Zaimoglu s development as an established novelist via the rewriting of traditional German genres since Kanak Sprak 18 The fact that Perceval s production began with the actor playing Brabantio slowly taking off his clothes is seen by Dobson as the perfect comic undergraduate parody of every cliché [ ] of modern German theatre : Michael Dobson, Shakespeare Performances in England, 2006, Shakespeare Survey, 60 (2007), (p. 287). 19 Sven Seidenberg, Erst Buh, dann Bier, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 31/03/ For contrast see, for example, Peter von Becker, Stupid White Man, Der Tagesspiegel, 31/03/2003, and Egbert Tholl, Krass heutig, böse, schwarz und hart, Financial Times Deutschland, 31/03/ Potolsky, p Ibid., p Ibid. 107

110 has also been a process of emphatic inscription of the author within German literature. 24 Indeed Zaimoglu s self-identification with the Romantic movement is particularly pronounced, leading Michael Hofmann to recently elevate him from childish enfant terrible to dashing Romantic Rebel. 25 Hofmann then goes on to position Zaimoglu as an alien-german writer [who] presents contemporary German literature with both the danger and attraction of its repressed self in the form of Romantic rebellion. 26 This maintains the writer s role as protestant ethnic, a term developed by Rey Chow to characterise the manner in which contemporary constructions of the ethnic often place this figure in the position of a captive, whose salvation lies in resistance and protest. As Chow argues, paradoxically this creates a situation in which ethnicised subjects are: by logic, people who must continue to act as victims to protest and struggle continually for what has been stolen from them for the entire world to see. [ ] In this context, to be ethnic is to protest but perhaps less for actual emancipation of any kind than for the benefits of worldwide visibility, currency, and circulation. 27 In this chapter, however, I follow Margaret Littler s reading of Zaimoglu s Romantic turn as a means of thinking beyond identity and laying claim to Romanticism s affirmation of the power of fantasy, faith and feeling which creates a transformative site of intensity. 28 In doing so with respect to Zaimoglu/Senkel s theatre, I explore the complex ways in which mimetic questions of image and original, authenticity and representation manifest themselves not only thematically, but also formally through Zaimoglu/Senkel s Othello. This allows me to move away from a reading which positions Zaimoglu as Othello to one which aligns him with Shakespeare. In terms of 24 Frauke Matthes, Writing and Muslim Identity: Representations of Islam in German and English Transcultural Literature, (London: IGRS, 2011), p Ibid. For a detailed discussion of Zaimoglu s relationship to the German Romantic movement see Michael Hofmann, Romantic Rebellion: Feridun Zaimoglu and Anti-Bourgeois Tradition, in Feridun Zaimoglu, ed. by Tom Cheesman and Karin Yeşilada (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012), pp ; Margaret Littler, Between Romantic Love and War Machine: Liebesbrand, in Feridun Zaimoglu, ed. by Tom Cheesman and Karin Yeşilada (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012), pp ; Joseph Twist, The Crossing of Love : The Inoperative Community and Romantic Love in Feridun Zaimoglu s Fünf klopfende Herzen, wenn die Liebe springt and Hinterland, German Life and Letters, 67.3 (2014), Hofmann, p Chow, p Littler, Between, pp

111 mimesis and the sites of intensity Littler identifies as characteristic of Zaimoglu s writing, the role of director Luk Perceval in the commission and production of the world premiere of this rewrite is also important to emphasise. Perceval is a Flemish director who emphasises a theatre of ritual, affect, and transformation in his postdramatic works. Rather than simply setting Zaimoglu in othered opposition to European high culture, in this chapter I will use an examination of mimesis and mimeticism in the world premiere to sketch out the alliances with particular members of the theatrical establishment in Germany, who were involved in the commission of the premiere. This approach also allows me to explore the tensions within the commission and reception of the world premiere, tensions between a turn away from Zaimoglu s association with Kanak Sprak and the insistent return to Zaimoglu s ethnic identity as a category of interpretation. Since the success of Othello, Zaimoglu and Senkel have produced fourteen dramatic texts for theatres across Germany, both on and off scene. Of these half have been rewrites of classics of the German stage. As the first of Zaimoglu/Senkel s commissions for the theatre to be premiered, their Othello also provides an interesting example of another mode of entry into the theatrical establishment than that of Özdamar. A similar route has been taken by other emerging Turkish-German playwrights such as Nuran David Calis, whose rewrite of Frühlings Erwachen received much critical acclaim, and Nurkan Erpulat, whose reworking of Schiller s Die Räuber was invited to the 2011 Theatertreffen. 29 This chapter will focus on Othello (2003) both as Zaimoglu/Senkel s first commission, and as a rewrite which had particular impact. In doing so it will ask what limits and possibilities are involved for Turkish-German playwrights in entering the theatrical establishment via re-writing rather than new writing, and will explore the ways in which mimetic tensions run through the commission and production of the subsequent rewrites on a larger scale. 29 Frank Wedekind and Nuran David Calis, Frühlings Erwachen (LIVE FAST DIE YOUNG), dir. by Nuran David Calis (Schauspiel Hannover, 2007). Nurkan Erpulat and Jens Hillje, Verrücktes Blut, dir. by Nurkan Erpulat (Ballhaus Naunynstrasse / Ruhrtrienniale, 2009). 109

112 3.2 Situating Zaimoglu/Senkel s Othello: Race and the Rewrite In his review of the premiere production during its 2006 tour to Poland, Russell Jackson highlighted that the terminology which is used to describe Zaimoglu/Senkel s German-language Othello varies even within the marketing material surrounding it. 30 This piece has been variously referred to as Shakespeare neu übersetzt von Feridun Zaimoglu und Günter Senkel, a Bearbeitung by Zaimoglu and Senkel, and just plain Othello von William Shakespeare. 31 Zaimoglu himself argues with respect to his own work, [m]an spricht ja von Neu-Adaptationen, Bearbeitungen nein es ist die Neu- Schreibung eines Klassikers. 32 While Tom Cheesman suggests the Quebecois term tradaptation as a useful compromise, the more accommodating and less contextspecific term rewrite seems to be the closest English equivalent to Zaimoglu s own definition of the form of his Othello as dramatic text. 33 This is the term I will adopt here when talking of the dramatic text. 34 André Lefevere defines the rewrite as anything that contributes to constructing the image of a writer and/or a work of literature. 35 The image of the original Othello has certainly loomed large in both this play s popular and academic reception, a factor which is of particular interest for an exploration of the relationship between the Turkish-German playwright, pre-conceived models, and representation. 30 Russell Jackson, Shakespeare Performed: Shakespeare in Gdańsk, Shakespeare Quarterly, 58.1 (2007), (p. 96, n. 3). 31 Shakespeare, Zaimoglu and Senkel, front cover; p. 3; Münchner Kammerspiele, Othello von William Shakespeare, programme (Munich: Münchner Kammerspiele, 2003), front cover; Thalia Theater, Othello von William Shakespeare, programme (Hamburg: Thalia Theater, 2009), front cover. Accessed thanks to the Münchner Kammerspiele and Thalia Theater respectively. 32 Feridun Zaimoglu, in Gräff, n. pag. 33 Cheesman employs the term tradaptation in the proper meaning of that originally Quebecois term: a version which uses a literary idiom based on an underclass demotic language, in cultural opposition to canonical Shakespeare languages, and which refigures the action in terms of an oppositional political agenda : Cheesman, Filthy Hell, p Cheesman later qualifies this statement, however: [u]nlike Quebecois tradaptations, Zaimoglu and Senkel s work has the opposite of a separatist agenda : p This is an argument I will take further in this chapter 34 Ana R. Calero Valera also employs the term rewrite [ reescritura ] throughout her article: Ana R. Calero Valera, Ich hasse Originaltreue wie den Pest : Othello revisitado, in Bestandsaufnahme der Germanistik in Spanien; Kulturtransfer und methologische Erneuerung, ed. by Miguel Ayerbe et al. (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), pp My thanks to Isabel Adey for translating this from the Spanish for me. 35 André Lefevere, quoted in the entry on Rewriting, in Mark Shuttleworth and Moira Cowie (eds), Dictionary of Translation Studies (Manchester: St Jerome, 1997), pp (p. 147). 110

113 Both Cheesman and Ana Calero Valera outline in detail the differences between the dramatic text of Zaimoglu and Senkel s Othello and that of Shakespeare s Othello in terms of plot, character, and language used. While in many sections of the resultant text Shakespeare s words are matched approximately phrase for phrase, sentiment for sentiment, in others they are deviated from wildly. Cheesman thus identifies between eighty and ninety percent of the rewrite as based on Shakespeare s text. 36 As Calero Valera highlights, these changes range from very minor semantic differences within certain lines to the inclusion of modern prejudices about black culture, such as an association with drugs in Brabantio s assumption that Othello has drugged Desdemona in order to marry her. 37 The structure of the play is also altered significantly in the process. At some points, such as the beginning of Act II, fully new text is inserted here an eloquent monologue by Othello on his love for Desdemona. 38 At others both minor and major scenes present in the Othello quarto and folio are cut altogether. 39 Characters such as Emilia and Bianca are condensed into one, new, Emilia; Jago 40 kills both Cassio and Rodrigo; and the action stops with Othello s murder of Desdemona rather than carrying on until Othello s own suicide. 41 As a result although some of Shakespeare s ambiguities are resolved or given a particular interpretation, Zaimoglu s own literary input means that new ambiguities also flow into the text. 42 The overt and direct interventions/alterations by Zaimoglu and Senkel in the source text render the duo very visible as translators or rewriters in Lawrence Venuti s sense of the word. 43 Indeed, the text points to its own status as rewrite not 36 Compare Cheesman, Filthy Hell, p. 208 and Cheesman, Diversity, p Calero Valera, p Cheesman, Filthy Hell, p. 216; Shakespeare, Zaimoglu, and Senkel, pp None of the articles to draw comparisons between Zaimoglu and Senkel s Othello and the original explain which version of Shakespeare s text they take as their point of comparison. In my interview with Zaimoglu he was unable to remember which English-language edition he and Senkel had used as the primary basis for their translation: Feridun Zaimoglu, personal interview, Kiel, 05/06/2012. In my own comparisons between the Zaimoglu/Senkel Othello and that of Shakespeare, I made use of the Arden edition: William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. by E.J. Honigmann, 3 rd rev. edn (London: Arden, 2001). 40 When referring to the character of Iago in Zaimoglu/Senkel s Othello I retain the German spelling to avoid confusion. 41 Calero Valera, pp ; Cheesman, p See also Calero Valera, p Lawrence Venuti, The Translator s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 1-42; Kaynar describes the piece as explicitly translated, p

114 only via the significant changes it makes to the plot and characters, but also via the insertion of self-referential lines absent from any version of the original Shakespeare such as Rodrigo s despairing cry: Wenn s so weiter geht dreh ich durch, un werd n Scheiß Poet. 44 This line does not appear in the cut of the script used in the world premiere, however, which further condensed and adapted Zaimoglu and Senkel s rewrite to form the basis for a striking two-hour performance. 45 This is particularly important to bear in mind as the uneven nature of Zaimoglu/Senkel s rewrite outlined above means that how it is cut for performance will partly determine how close or far from the original the performance, perceived by the audience as the play, will be. Calero Valera frames her summary of the play in relation to cultural journalist Katja Werner s description of the tumultuous reception of the world premiere in Munich. Although focusing on a reading of the dramatic text of the play, Calero Valera suggests that it is the choice of Zaimoglu as author and the Kanak-Sprak-style language used in the play which called forth such reactions: what we can imagine is that the language used by Zaimoglu and Senkel must have been one of the essential motives for provoking the hostility of the most sensitive of ears in this Munich audience. 46 The use of language in the play and its relation to Zaimoglu s Kanak Sprak have indeed been the focus of the majority of scholarly articles on the play so far. Kaynar, for example, refers to the language of the play as a vulgar German- Turkish Berlin argot although, as Cheesman highlights, there is nothing about the play s language itself to suggest a Turkish or migrant underclass is speaking here. 47 Similarly, for many of the UK-based Shakespeare critics to have seen the production on tour at the Royal Shakespeare Company s Complete Works Festival in 2006, the emphasis on Zaimoglu as Turkish-German anti-racism activist in the RSC programme led to curious speculation and wild surmises over the play s original 44 Shakespeare, Zaimoglu, and Senkel, p William Shakespeare, Feridun Zaimoglu, and Günter Senkel, Othello, unpublished cut of the dramatic text used for Othello, dir. by Luk Perceval (Hamburg: Thalia Theater, 2011). Accessed thanks to Luk Perceval/Thalia Theater. Page numbers here will refer to the Mosenstein & Vanndersat edition. Unless noted otherwise all quotations from the published text used in this chapter were also present in the Kammerspiele/Thalia production. 46 [L]o que sí podemos imaginar es que el lenguaje utilizado por Zaimoglu y Senkel fuse uno de los motivos esenciales para despertar la animadversion de los oídos más susceptibles del público de München : Calero Valera, p Translation by Isabel Adey. 47 Kaynar, p. 226; Cheesman, Filthy Hell, p The language of the play is also discussed as an example of Kanak Sprak by Calero Valera, pp

115 context. Director of the Shakespeare Institute, Michael Dobson, for example, speculates somewhat facetiously: The adaptor is of Turkish extraction, so are the grotesques which he is putting through a vastly simplified version of the plot of Othello intended as an angry outsider s satire on the attitudes of white Germany? How offensive did this show seem in Munich, and was its offensiveness purposely designed to shock a complacent bourgeoisie out of their prejudices, or does Zaimoglu just genuinely suffer from a virulent dramaturgical equivalent of Tourette s syndrome? [ ] [I]t would be just as possible to hypothesize that the Münchner Kammerspiele s regular audience must consist of baying Neo-Nazis as to picture an auditorium full of anxious and masochistic liberals. 48 While Dobson is clearly being polemical here, the frustration he expresses and the crude stereotypes he invokes illuminate the frustrated expectations of a UK audience in the face of a production which allows them to read neither Shakespeare nor Germany in terms of pre-conceived ideas. 49 Other Shakespearean scholars have also provided detailed (and less inflammatory) accounts of the play on tour to the UK and beyond, and these provide an excellent source of further documentation with which to supplement the reviews published by theatre critics in newspapers and magazines. They also serve to illustrate how the rewrite reflected back into its source culture and the extent of its impact beyond Germany. However, the historically and culturally contingent criteria within which the initial reactions are to be framed in the German context are yet to be explored. This is partly because while English-language Shakespeare scholars have thus far concentrated on the play in performance, those with access to German have mainly addressed the play as dramatic text and translation. Tom Cheesman, who has published two articles on the play, for example, reads it as a break with the type of strategies used 48 Dobson, p These questions are also raised in a more earnest and reflective manner in Christian M. Billing, Othello Was a White Man : Review of Othello (directed by Luk Perceval for Münchner Kammerspiele) at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, April 2006, Shakespeare, 3.2 (2007), (p. 198 n. 2). Of the English-language Shakespeare scholars to have explored the play only Russell Jackson seems to be aware that Zaimoglu does not write in street language most of the time and suggests that this may be a post-post-colonial reading : Jackson, p Kidnie highlights the way in which the heritage context of the RSC can lead to particularly adverse reactions to more adventurous Shakespeare productions: pp

116 to talk about race in German translations of Othello and, less convincingly, as an example of Zaimoglu s faith-inspired iconoclasm. 50 As Carol Chillington Rutter s self-reflexive and thought-provoking attempt to interrogate her own and her students reaction to the premiere during its visit to the Royal Shakespeare Company s Complete Works Festival highlights, however, there are two levels at which this play must be examined: as a new Othello on stage [performance] and a new Othello in the surtitles [translation]. 51 In this chapter I will address both levels and will also return to Chillington Rutter s central question: How am I supposed to look at racial representation in this production? 52 The very white casting and lack of any reference to Turkish or even German culture in the sparse aesthetic of the premiere production actively work against the suggestion of parallels between the world of the play and a specific instance of race relations in Germany. Thus as Chillington Rutter puts it, race, paradoxically, was both situated at the center of this production and blanked from the center ; this is a paradox which I will unpack further in section The only significant attempt to move beyond the text-performance binary so far has been provided by theatre studies scholar Gad Kaynar. Kaynar s article focuses on changes to dramaturgical practice in Germany related to the rise of postdramatic theatre and coins the term dramaturgical translation. Kaynar stresses that by this he does not mean linguistic translation, but rather the translation or transposition of theatre into theatre. 54 This can be considered a dramaturgy in which the dramaturge s translation or materialisation of rehearsal processes into a finished product for the spectator puts the dramaturge s role on a par with that of the director. 55 According to Kaynar, as a result, the dramaturge explicates himself or herself (i.e. biography, associations, Weltanschauung etc) through the text, and thereby textualises him/herself. 56 His article thus focuses on the role of the dramaturge in German postdramatic devising processes rather than text-originated, modes of the postdramatic theatre Cheesman, Diversity, p. 33; Cheesman, Filthy Hell, p Chillington Rutter, p Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Kaynar, p Ibid., p Ibid., p Ibid., p

117 Curiously, given that this is the focus of his article, Kaynar takes Zaimoglu s literary translation of Othello for Perceval as a paradigm par excellence of a postdramatically influenced appropriation of the classical play by the dramaturg-as-text [which] typifies contemporary German dramaturgy. 58 According to Kaynar, Zaimoglu engaged here with his own biographic otherness that of the privileged Turkish outcast in the xenophobic German society. 59 This is a reading which leads Kaynar to see the language of the play not only as an example of what he terms dramaturgical anti-translation, which challenges the accepted reception modes and secure reality convention of the implied spectators, but also as outstanding evidence of the dramaturg s self-textualization and appropriation of the Shakespearean source text. 60 Certainly as Cheesman s work shows, Zaimoglu and Senkel s rewrite is vulgarly inventive, [and] vehemently opposes the dominant translation tradition [of Shakespeare in Germany], which avoids offence even at the cost of fidelity. 61 As will be seen in the reading I provide of the world premiere in sections 3.3 and 3.4, I would agree that the language of the play contributes to a premiere in which spectators are forced to face crude reality as is instead of their beautiful reality convention and that this involves not only apparent disloyalty to the source text but deliberate disloyalty to the implied spectators preconceptions. 62 The influx of elements of contemporary reality into the text via the language of the rewrite, and the perception of that language as ethnicised will form a particular focus in my reading of the premiere in section 3.4. Kaynar s argument becomes problematic, however, when he claims Zaimoglu/Senkel s Othello rewrite as one which manifested the otherness of migrating populations as experienced by the dramaturge himself. 63 While Kaynar problematically uses assumptions of racialised identity to conflate Zaimoglu with his 58 Ibid., p Ibid., p Ibid., p. 226; p Cheesman, Filthy Hell, p As Cheesman explains, translators of Shakespearian bawdy must choose between the surface, innocuous meanings, or the pornographic insinuations: sanitise or be explicit. The German translation tradition, steeped in philological expertise, but mindful of cultural proprietaries, prefers the former course. Zaimoglu and Senkel opt for the latter : ibid., p Kaynar, p Ibid., p Kaynar also consistently refers to Zaimoglu as Turkish, despite the author s German citizenship, while Senkel s name receives little mention. Similar associations are also made by Ana Calero Valera, p

118 main character Othello and so set up an opposition between the Turkish author, Zaimoglu, and implied German spectators, this is an opposition which Zaimoglu himself takes care not to enter into. When repeatedly asked in published interviews conducted by the premiere s actual dramaturge, Marion Tiedke, about his view on the play as a Turkish-German, Zaimoglu emphatically counters this kind of positioning: Es geht doch darum, Kunst zu machen, und sich nicht in eine Ethno- Niesche [sic] drängen zu lassen. [ ] Wenn ich mich auf meine ethnischen Muster oder aber auch auf die Muster der Aufnahmegesellschaft beziehe, dann merke ich, dass ich mich auf einem sehr niedrigen Niveau bewege. 64 That is not to say that Zaimoglu denies any personal draw to the text, nor that similar thinking had no role to play in the commission of the play. In interviews I conducted with Luk Perceval he explained that it was precisely the fact that the theme of Othello at first seemed to be that of otherness which made him and the team look for a new translation from an author with a background of migration. Perceval and his team thus approached Zaimoglu and Senkel eigentlich mit der Begründung, dass es natürlich in Othello um Fremdsein [geht], [ ] [um] jemanden, der in der fremden Kultur ankommt and so eigentlich müsste man einen Autor fragen, der damit Erfahrung hat. 65 However, in the published interviews which accompany the published text of the play and which appeared in the premiere s programme, Zaimoglu emphasises his identification with the main character with respect to his own self-designation as former Schwerathletiker der Eifersucht, rather than with respect to his Turkish-German background. 66 Similarly, for Perceval, over the course of the rehearsals and work on the play, this focus appears to have shifted. In our 2012 interview Perceval, for example, emphasised the portrayal of a kind of Macho-Trauer at work in the world premiere through which das Stück eine sehr große Einsamkeit aus[drückt]. 67 Jealousy, a fear of abandonment, and a related entrenchment in a self-defeating macho identity thus 64 Feridun Zaimoglu, in Marion Tiedke, Flammen, pp Luk Perceval, personal interview, Hamburg, 06/06/ Zaimoglu in Tiedke, Flammen, p Perceval, personal interview. 116

119 became major themes of the production. Furthermore, although the initial interest in the Othello commission appeared to arise from a desire to incorporate Zaimoglu s specific experience as racialised other into the play, when discussing the subsequent collaborations in our interview, it was similarity of background which Perceval stressed as part of the reason for the success of this relationship. 68 Kaynar s reading of Zaimoglu s self-inscription as other within the Munich premiere is not only extremely reductive, but also rests on a confusion of Zaimoglu as (co-)translator with Zaimoglu as dramaturge. 69 As the programme to accompany the premiere and the published version of the dramatic text clearly state, the role of dramaturge for the world premiere was in fact occupied by Marion Tiedke. 70 Indeed, according to interviews published alongside the dramatic text of the play, the impetus for Zaimoglu and Senkel s rewrite of Othello came from the side of the theatre rather than from Zaimoglu himself. Perceval and his lead actor Thomas Thieme had formed a close working relationship and the decision to rewrite Othello originated not with Zaimoglu as oppositional figure but partly with a desire to have Thieme play the part. 71 Rather than using one of the existing German-language translations, it was decided to commission a new translation as Perceval and his team were dissatisfied with the existing translations of Othello into German which either obscured key aspects of the play through an overly literal approach to translation or were too heavily influenced by the context in which they emerged. 72 Although the director Luk Perceval 68 In our interview Perceval also explained the effectiveness of their work together as follows: Wir sind nicht so die Jungs, die aus der deutschen Bildungsbürgertum kommen. Feridun ist auf der Straße aufgewachsen, ich auch. [ ] Wir haben beide Lust den heiligen Umgang der Deutschen mit Kultur zu zerstören, und wir haben beide Lust irgendwie die Türe aufzukicken - dieser deutsche Kulturtempel - und da mal Luft reinzulassen [ ]. Ja, wir sind halt so Streetkids und ich glaube, das ist es, was uns zusammenbringt : Perceval, personal interview. 69 Apart from this Kaynar s description of the dramaturgical process is an interesting insight into dramaturges own views of their changing roles in German theatre and the ways in which shifts in form influence these roles. 70 Münchner Kammerspiele, programme, p. 2; Thalia Theater, Othello von William Shakespeare, programme, p. 4. This information is also available in the Monsenstein & Vannerdat edition of Shakespeare, Zaimoglu and Senkel, Othello, p Luk Perceval, quoted in Marion Tiedke,...das verlorene Paradies : Ein Gespräch mit dem Regisseur Luk Perceval und dem Pianisten Jens Thomas, in Othello, by William Shakespeare, Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel (Münster: Monsenstein & Vannerdat, 2004), pp (p. 144). 72 Tiedke, Flammen, p Tom Hoenselaars, who has worked on Perceval s earlier Shakespare productions points out this is not unusual practice in the Low Countries. The multi-lingual background of many directors there and the expense involved in obtaining the copyright for a contemporary 117

120 liaised with Zaimoglu and Senkel during the writing process, the playwrights themselves were little involved in the rehearsals and production developed from their text. 73 Kaynar s mistake of Zaimoglu for the dramaturge thus demonstrates both the complexity of assignations of authorship in theatre and the importance of turning to artefacts such as programmes in order to verify assumptions about authorship. Zaimoglu highlights, for example, that the alteration in the number of characters had much to do with Perceval: Luk Perceval wollte deshalb von Anfang an die Figur Bianca streichen und zugleich die Figur Emilia in der Bearbeitung aufwerten. 74 Perceval s hand in the commission of the play as well as his role as director for the play s premiere production complicates the question of authorship in a way which Özdamar s own direction of her first play in 1986 did not. Such complications are in fact typical of theatrical production in Germany. In my own work on Zaimoglu/Senkel s Othello then, I will draw on the Strichfassung used for the premiere, two different recordings of the Kammerspiele production, programmes, and reviews as well as interviews with Perceval to help build up a clearer picture of the play s development, production, and reception. These materials were kindly made available to me by the Münchner Kammerspiele and the Thalia Theatre, Hamburg, or were accessed in the holdings of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and the Münchner Stadtarchiv. This approach is important not only in terms of providing a more accurate record of the circumstances of and actors involved in the play s production. In terms of mimesis and mimeticism, it will also allow me to return to the context and aesthetics of the world premiere and re-address statements such as Kaynar s claim that: on the one hand, the production emphasized Schoko s ostensibly perfect assimilation [...] On the other hand, however, this approach also emphasized the protagonist s and the other figures awareness that his whiteness is but a histrionic mask for the part that he acts on the void, heterotopic, barren, imagistic stage, of his exploitation by translation combine to make the use of the director s own translation or the commission of a new translation particularly attractive: Hoenselaars, pp Zaimoglu, personal interview. 74 Zaimoglu quoted in Tiedke, Flammen, p

121 white society as Gastarbeiter (guest worker) or hired army general; Zaimoglu seems to see no difference. 75 The mimetic trap of being not quite/not white 76 which Kaynar appears to identify here is one I will explore further in my analysis not just of the dramatic text, but also of the world premiere as performance. I will argue, however, that Zaimoglu and Senkel do mark this difference, and that the way in which this figures in the premiere production in fact takes us far beyond a simplistic conflation of Turkish-German playwright and racialised main character. 3.3 Offending the Audience? Beyond the Protestant Ethnic As noted in section 3.1, from a rewrite of Shakespeare, and particularly his Othello, by the former enfant terrible of Turkish-German literature one might expect to see a kind of postcolonial gesture emerge a writing back to the German establishment. However, moving beyond this reading is important in terms of breaking with what might be called a captivity narrative, which it is perhaps too easy to weave around this Othello. In Chillington Rutter s thoughtful discussion of her own and her students reactions to the play, she asks: Were Shakespeare and Othello tied to the title and publicity around this production the bait that trained [sic] me white, middle class, female, nice into the theatre to experience the play as graffiti, forced to listen to, take on a sub-culture that s out there on British as much as German streets, a sub-culture I normally blank? 77 The play s title is perceived as a guerrilla tactic which coerces a certain audience into participating in an encounter it would usually avoid. The perceived violence involved is also stressed when Chillington Rutter suggests that: If translation liberated 75 Kaynar, p Schoko is used as a nickname for Othello by other characters in this rewrite. 76 Cf. Bhabha, p Chillington Rutter, p

122 Othello from Shakespeare s original words, it produced other words that captured Shakespeare s play for that new lexicon, perhaps taking his play hostage in the process. 78 Although within both Zaimoglu/Senkel and Shakespeare s versions of the play, Othello and Desdemona are the actual victims of this coercive rewriting of reality, phrasing such as Chillington Rutter s problematically functions to re-position or substitute the audience as the victim, positioning the audience as captive in the postmigrant world. As Margaret Jane Kidnie points out in her introduction to her work on Shakespeare adaptation in the UK, a particularly moralistic vocabulary is frequently used in the process of fidelity criticism, i.e. the process of critics positioning a certain production in relation to their image of the work. 79 While such language in Chillington Rutter s discussion of Zaimoglu/Senkel s Othello suggests the theatre as being taken over, held captive by the Turkish-German playwright, and thus in danger or in need of rescue by the threatened audience group, in fact Zaimoglu/Senkel s adaptation is an unusual success for a Turkish-German author within a stage which until very recently has been constructed as the exclusive preserve of German-German culture. Such a narrative thus both expresses the anxieties of the reviewer and positions the Turkish-German writer as radical or as Rey Chow would put it as the protestant ethnic. 80 While this seems to acknowledge the strength of the author s rewrite, in fact the captivity narrative runs the risk of keeping that author/play in their place outside, rather than inside a German Shakespeare tradition. A similar use of language might be expected in the reviews of the premiere in Munich, but curiously it was mainly absent. Instead the criticism focused on the perceived faithfulness or faithlessness of the language and performance to Shakespeare s original play. While some reviews characterised the Munich production as Klassikerverhunzung and Etikettenschwindel, others referred to it as Shakespeare pur : although still moralistic in tone, this language focussed on the 78 Chillington Rutter, p. 49. Emphasis in original. Similarly the language of capture, criminality and aggressive re-appropriation is employed by Kaynar, who characterises the play as hostile, vandalizing, and claims it colonizes Shakespeare: Kaynar, p Kidnie, p In Chow s description of the captivity narrative, contemporary constructions of the ethnic often place this figure in the position of a captive, whose salvation lies in resistance and protest : Chow, p

123 audience s relationship to the source text rather than the author. 81 Kidnie, who has worked extensively on Shakespeare adaptations (as opposed to new translations) in the UK context, has suggested that audiences have two main reactions to a new production of a classic work: An encounter with an instance of dramatic production prompts one either to find a place for it within an already-existing conception of a dramatic work (or to make a place for it, if necessary, by adjusting one s expectations of the work), or to identify it as a first encounter with what seems, in one s own experience and according to one s own historically and culturally contingent criteria, a new work. 82 As the reviews quoted above and the reports of audience reactions to the first few performances in Munich suggest, the degree to which audiences at the world premiere were willing to accept or exclude this Othello from their conception of the work varied wildly. Unlike in the critical literature, the debates in Munich seem to have revolved around the image of the original author Shakespeare, rather than that of Zaimoglu (or even Senkel). The reasons for this can be illustrated by a closer look at the commissioning context. The rewrite was commissioned during a period of upheaval for the theatre at which it premiered. From 1983 to 2001 the Kammerspiele had been led by Dieter Dorn, a director particularly well-known for his very faithful renderings of classic texts such as those of Shakespeare. 83 Following a decision taken by Julian Nida- Rümelin, then Head of the Municipal Department of Arts & Culture of Munich, Dorn was replaced in 2001 by the younger and more experimental director Frank Baumbauer. According to a review by cultural journalist Katja Werner for the Berlinbased newspaper Freitag, this context played an important role in the controversy surrounding the Othello premiere: Was aber die Exaltation einerseits und andererseits 81 Mirko Weber, Wenn Möchtegerns Shakespeare erledigen, Stuttgarter Zeitung, 31/03/2003; Alexander Altmann, Am Gängelband genormter Affekte, Bayerische Staatszeitung, 04/04/2003. As the plethora of poor puns on the topic of blackness in the titles of many of the reviews show, the German context has its own issues in terms of the language used to discuss race and ethnicity in theatre. 82 Kidnie, p. 32. Emphasis in original. 83 Dorn had also been a director there since

124 die vehemente Ablehnung hervorgerufen hat, das müßte man dem unvoreingenommenen Beobachter von auswärts erst erklären. 84 Werner characterises Nida-Rümelin s move as [e]ine programmatische Entscheidung für zeitgenössisches Theater und gegen unangreifbaren Klassizismus. 85 In response the CSU politician and head of the Bavarian Ministry for Science, Research and Art, Hans Zehetmair, then hired Dorn as head of the Münchner Staatstheater, retaining his style of theatre for Munich and constituting a direct challenge to Baumbauer only a few doors down at the Kammerspiele. 86 At the same time the Kammerspiele building itself, a Jugendstil theatre built in 1901, was closed for three years of costly renovations. While the Kammerspiele s official re-opening ceremony was consciously placed a few days earlier than the Othello premiere, numerous reviews link the two, reflecting the fact that the two occasions were closely associated by the Munich theatre-going community. 87 Certainly the contrast between the concern with heritage performed by the restoration of the building of the Kammerspiele and the anti-museum-theatre sentiment performed by the mise-en-scène could hardly have been greater. 88 The black, sparse stage with its evocation of 1920s expressionism or seedy 1940s dives created a cold atmosphere on stage which contrasted starkly with the golden proscenium arch and pastel-coloured Jugendstil embellishments of the building which framed it (see Figure 9 and Figure 10). As one review points out, the black box staging also formed a stark contrast to Dorn s typical white wonderlands, thus a use of black-box staging [w]as anderswo nicht weiter auffällt, erscheint hier als Kampf zweier Prinzipien. 89 This tension seems to have been further played on by Wolfgang Pregler s Jago. In Zaimoglu/Senkel s rewrite Jago is the most foul-mouthed of all the characters. In the premiere production, Pregler, playing Jago, repeatedly leaned on the golden 84 Katja Werner, Theater muss wie Kaffee sein, Freitag, 18/04/2003. Calero Valera also draws on this review but ignores the fact that Werner views not just language but also context as perhaps the key factor in the play s reception: Calero Valero p Werner. 86 Ibid. 87 Andres Müry, Othello darf nicht platzen, focus.de, 17/03/2003 < ien/theater-othello-darf-nicht-platzen_aid_ html> [last accessed 01/03/2014]; Bert Bugdahl, Ungezügelt sollt ihr sein, Saarbrücker Zeitung, 31/03/ Rolf May, Museales Theater interessiert mich nicht, Tz.de, 29/03/2003 [Accessed as print out in the Stadtarchiv München: URL not listed]. 89 Peter Michalzik, Liebe ist schwarz-weiss, Frankfurter Rundschau, 31/03/

125 proscenium arch surrounding the black stage, so highlighting the contrast between the aesthetics of the staged production and those of the theatre building itself. 90 Figure 9. The interior of the newly refurbished Münchner Kammerspiele. Image Münchner Kammerspiele. Figure 10. The view from above of Perceval s mise-en-scène for the premiere production of Shakespeare, Zaimoglu and Senkel s Othello. Image Andreas Pohlmann. Accessed thanks to Münchner Kammerspiele. 90 William Shakespeare, Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel, Othello, dir. by Luk Perceval, unpublished audiovisual recording, Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich, 29/03/2003. Accessed thanks to Münchner Kammerspiele. This contrast is highlighted in Ulrich Seidler, Gestopfte Polster, Berliner Zeitung, 31/03/2003; Hans-Dieter Schütt, Scheiß Schoko, Neues Deutschland, 04/04/

126 The very different attitudes which Dorn and Baumbauer had to theatre can be illustrated through a brief comparison between the translations used for the Shakespeare productions under their leadership. Dorn s preferred translator of Shakespeare, Michael Wachsmann, aimed to produce translations, die sich möglichst eng soweit das überhaupt von einer Übersetzung gesagt werden kann am Original orientierten. 91 The fidelity to the words of the original text aimed at in Wachsmann s translations was mirrored in the directing style Dorn favoured. In an interview in 1997, Dorn characterised his vision of the Münchner Kammerspiele under his leadership as follows: Ein Theater für Regisseure, die das Stück inszenieren (also weder ihre Obsessionen noch einen Kommentar). 92 Dorn followed this approach consistently during his time as Intendant and as a result gained a reputation for Werktreue, or fidelity to the text. 93 In contrast, Luk Perceval s earlier Shakespeare productions have been characterised by an admiration for Shakespeare [which] produces a need to destroy the sacrosanct image that Shakespearomantics [sic] have been constructing since the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth century. 94 Similarly Zaimoglu, the re-writer then commissioned by Perceval, summarises his own attitude to the source text as follows: Ich hasse Originaltreue wie die Pest. Dass ein Text hoch und heilige Miasmen ausströmt, das peitscht mich eher an, dem Text den Garaus zu machen. Ich will die Menschen vor mir haben, ich will die Geschichte verstehen, und was im Original steht, das interessiert mich nicht vom Wortlaut her sondern vom Sinn. [...] [I]ch [habe] den Acker umgepflügt, denn ich hatte die Geschichte verstanden Yvonne Poppek, Was ist ein Dorn? Die Shakespeare-Inszenierungen des Regisseures Dieter Dorn (Munich: Herbert Utz, 2009), p Dorn quoted in Poppek, p Werner refers to Dorn s theatre as Werktreue, for example, in her review of the premiere. On Werktreue as politicised term in German theatre see also Gutjahr. 94 Ibid., p Zaimoglu, in Tiedke, Flammen, p. 123: also quoted in Calero Valera, p. 408; Cheesman, Filthy Hell, p

127 The invocation of religious imagery via words such as sacrosanct and heilige Miasmen in both Zaimoglu s and Perceval s case suggests a shared preference for an iconoclastic approach to rewriting Shakespeare. 96 While for Wachsmann and Dorn the exact and individual words of the original constitute its meaning, Zaimoglu here chooses to draw a distinction between the words and the meaning of the Shakespeare text. Although an attempt to stay true to a canonised and sanctified original is vehemently rejected, the fact that Zaimoglu s understanding of the real meaning of the text is used to justify his own authority as rewriter, suggests a form of being true to the spirit of the original still has a role to play here. Tom Cheesman argues that Zaimoglu/Senkel s Othello breaks with a long history of German translations in its approach to the language of race within the text. 97 At the same time this Romantic approach to the spirit of the text situates the text in a particularly German translation tradition. Eighteenth-century thinkers Friedrich Gottlieb Kloppstock and Johann Gottfried Herder, for example, invested the spirit of the original with the ultimate authority, as did August Wilhelm Schlegel s Shakespeare translations. 98 Zaimoglu/Senkel s translation thus simultaneously breaks the text free from the letter of the original, but embraces the spirit of precisely the Schlegel sche Romantisierung which Wachsmann rejects. Tiedke asks of Zaimoglu and Senkel: Beabsichtigt ihr den Tabubruch anhand eines Klassikers im Kulturtempel Theater? Zaimoglu, however, answers wryly Tabubruch ist was für pubertierende Bettnässer. 99 The biblical tale of overturning of temple tables which Tiedke s wordchoice brings to mind was one in which disruption of the status quo was designed not to destroy but renew the faith of those worshipping there. Similarly, Zaimoglu/Senkel s radical rewrite can be perceived not merely as a grober Fall von Klassikerverhunzung, but as a Romantic gesture in which the true spirit of the work is defended via a deviation from the original text Hoenselaars also refers to Perceval as iconoclastic: p. 97. In the literary context, iconoclasm in Zaimoglu s prose work is also discussed in: Adelson, The Turkish Turn, p Cheesman, Diversity, pp Harald Kittel and Andreas Poltermann, German Tradition, in Routledge Encyclopaedia of Translation Studies, ed. by Mona Baker (London: Routledge, 1998), pp (p. 422). 99 Tiedke, die Flammen, p This is the quotation taken from the review of the premiere by Focus magazine given on the back cover of the Monsenstein & Vannerdat edition of Zaimoglu/Senkel s Othello. For a discussion of Zaimoglu s relationship to the German Romantic movement as one opposed to monumentalism and the creation of (religious and national) idols, see Littler, Between, pp

128 The mise-en-scène is also significant in terms of the production s selfpositioning in relation to the original. Centre stage were two large pianos, one black piano standing over an upturned white one (Figure 10). The black piano was played throughout by Jens Thomas, a musician known for his jazz style, who apparently improvised his soundtrack anew every night. A key aspect of the performance was thus constantly being rewritten each evening, drawing attention to the production s indefinite status. 101 In our interview Perceval explained that this created space for the production to develop over time: nach drei, vier Jahre, wo sie das immer gespielt haben, sind die Schauspieler immer freier [ ] und auch immer musikalischer mit dem Text [geworden]. 102 The pianos themselves function similarly. Carol Chillington Rutter touches on the associative quality of Katrin Brack s stage when she says, for anyone who knew Shakespeare s script, the constant visual citation was a black ram tupping a white ewe. 103 While an established idea of Othello is cited or forms the basis for the rewrite and play in production, both riff on this freely and self-consciously. 104 The initial audience responses can thus be situated in a particular discussion about theatre in Munich, which in turn relates to a broader and ongoing argument in German theatre as to whether the dramatic text should be the basis for a production or whether the director s vision should take priority. Not only did the play open the newly restored Münchner Kammerspiele, it consciously made a statement as to the future of that theatre s artistic direction. That Baumbauer s move with this play was no less programmatic than his appointment by Nida-Rümelin two years earlier is also clear from his own comments in interviews: 101 The production in fact toured not only to international Shakespeare festivals, but also to the 2008 Copenhagen jazz festival. Luk Perceval s production of Othello is mentioned in a chapter on Shakespeare and Jazz in: Julie Sanders, Shakespeare and Music: Afterlives and Borrowings (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), p. 26. As Sanders also notes elsewhere, in postcolonial Othello rewrites such as Harlem Duet, jazz is also invoked as a particularly black tradition: Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 33. Billing, who provides a detailed description of Jens Thomas music in his review, argues that the German context alters the way in which this music signifies, however: Billing, p. 198, n Perceval, personal interview. 103 Chillington Rutter, p. 50. Shakespeare s Iago uses this phrase in Act I, scene i, and the line is retained in Zaimoglu and Senkel s version of the dramatic text (Shakespeare, Zaimoglu, and Senkel, p. 9). 104 That this riffing is typical of Perceval s productions is clear from Hans van Dam s comment that even in productions where music is not a focus [e]in Vergleich mit Jazz oder Free Jazz liegt ohnehin nahe : Hans van Damm, Ohne Scheu erzählten alle, was sie zu sagen hatten : Ein Essay über Luk Perceval, in Luk Perceval: Theater und Ritual, ed. by Thomas Irmer (Berlin: Alexander, 2005), pp (p. 108). 126

129 Wir trugen Luk dieses Stück zur Eröffnung an, gerade auch um eine besondere, jüngere Tradition, die dieses Haus mit Shakespeare pflegt, fortzusetzen. Als dann die Radikalität von Feridun Zaimoglu und Günter Senkels Bearbeitung für diesen Othello hinzukam, wurde uns bewusst, dass dadurch eine neue Positionierung des Theaters, wie wir sie uns wünschten, deutlich zum Ausdruck kommen würde. 105 The intention was that the audience members displaced from their familiar seats in the Kammerspiele by the long renovations which the theatre had undergone nicht mehr in ihre Vertrautheit zurückkehren würden. 106 Although the new Othello presented by Baumbauer, Perceval, Zaimoglu, and Senkel in Munich was subject to criticism then, this had as much to do with the attitude to the Shakespeare material displayed via the cutting of scenes and the production s visual aesthetics as with the language itself. 107 Despite being repeatedly referred to as shocking, in fact the foulest points of the script drew several laughs at the premiere as documented in a audiovisual recording of the first performance. 108 This recording also shows the final distribution of the much reported boos and applause more clearly. While little apart from general applause can be heard during the actors curtain calls, it is when the director and authorial team join them on stage that the booing can be heard clearly over the continuing applause. 109 The displeasure of a section of the audience was clearly reserved for the approach taken rather than the quality of its execution. Returning to reviewers reception of the Zaimoglu rewrite of Othello, the wildly differing statements about how true to Shakespeare s original the rewrite and its staging are in the reviews of the premiere 105 Frank Baumbauer, quoted in Thomas Irmer, Ein Glücksfall, auf den wir lange warten mussten. Thomas Irmer im Gespräch mit Frank Baumbauer, in Luk Perceval: Theater und Ritual, ed. by Thomas Irmer (Berlin: Alexander, 2005), pp (p. 209). 106 Ibid. According to Werner s review, the reactions of the audience at the premiere can be seen as eine letzte Rebellion gegen den Verlust des Wohlvertrauten, Wiedererkennbaren : Werner, n. pag. 107 The programmatic nature of this production is also reflected in the fact that Frank Baumbauer marked the end of his time as artistic director at the Kammerspiele with a performance of this production: Peter Michalzik, Vorbei, vorbei, vorbei, Frankfurter Rundschau, 2008 < [last accessed 12/01/2012]. 108 William Shakespeare, Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel, Othello, unpublished audiovisual recording, 29/03/ Ibid. See also: Joachim Kaiser, Schoko Weiß, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 31/03/

130 production, can thus be read as signs of either support for or condemnation of the new direction being taken by the theatre. 110 Both the commissioning of the play and the emphatic audience reactions recorded in reviews of the premiere can thus themselves be understood as performative contributions to a discussion of what theatre in Munich should be. Correspondingly, Zaimoglu s own role in the dynamics of rewriting Othello in 2003 can be figured as a very different type of intervention than that created by his earlier work Kanak Sprak. Petra Fachinger has read Zaimoglu s Kanak Sprak in particular as a contribution to dismantling traditional notions of what constitutes German literature through abrogation and appropriation, a strategy which she links with a postcolonial tradition of writing back to a hegemonic centre. 111 This earlier writing back was in response to a particular context of political exclusion of Turkish- Germans from the German nation-state. A close examination of the dynamics surrounding the controversial Othello rewrite suggests that in contrast to his early work, Zaimoglu is not using the rewrite here to align himself with the identity politics of a particular minority group. According to Perceval, the Schlegel-Tieck translation was often cited as the original translation by members of the audience in post-show discussions. Perceval himself sees this translation as a verharmloste Version of Shakespeare s work, explaining: Shakespeare war ein Provocateur, hat die Geschichte verfälscht. Das war ein Volksautor. Er hat gespielt mit der Provokation. 112 Interestingly, the same description could equally apply to Zaimoglu. Rather than Zaimoglu s otherness becoming a way into that of Othello, here it is his pose as author which becomes a way into re-reading Shakespeare. In her discussion of Zaimoglu s earlier prose work, Leslie A. Adelson differentiates between a figural representation of iconoclastic Turks, that occasionally reinforces stereotypes [...] and a more iconoclastic mode of representation that 110 As a point of comparison, the second German production of the play, a piece directed by Stefan Nagel for off-scene theatre Theater der Keller in Cologne, provoked nothing like the same degree of controversy. The association of off-scene theatres with less bourgeois audiences may well have had a role to play here, however, the marketing of the play may also have made a difference. While the world premiere had positioned itself firmly within the Shakespeare matrix, as Stefan Nagel explained when I met him in 2012, the Theater der Keller production appeared as part of the theatre s programme for a season exploring adaptations of stage classics. 111 Fachinger, p Perceval, personal interview. 128

131 excitedly gestures toward new ways of imagining a Turkish presence in Germany. 113 The Othello rewrite wholly leaves behind the figural representation of the Turk, although several scholars have found it convenient to play on the associative relationship between Othello as a racialised outsider in the world of the play and the position of Zaimoglu as a Turkish-German writer. 114 While Cheesman positions the iconoclasm at work in the play as one issuing from Zaimoglu s idiosyncratic relationship to the Muslim faith, 115 there is little to link Zaimoglu s own faith to the character of Othello within the rewritten text. A focus on mimesis and mimeticism rather reveals a destruction of a false image of Shakespeare as a broader concern of the rewrite. This rewrite thus also functions to identify Zaimoglu with other avantgarde artists such as Luk Perceval; its iconoclastic attitude signals a process of intervention in artistic practices within a particular locality. 3.4 Othello in Performance: Casting and Coercive Mimeticism The nuanced nature of the iconoclasm at work here can also be seen when we move beyond a construction of Othello as iconoclastic Turk and take a closer look at the role of representation within the world premiere and its relationship to mimesis and mimeticism. According to G. K. Hunter, writing on the original Othello, [t]he relationship between these two [Othello and Iago] is developed in terms of appearance and reality. Othello controls the reality of action; Iago the appearance. 116 This aspect of their relationship is emphasised in particular by the Kammerspiele production where Schein becomes Sein to disturbing effect. Alexander Altmann, reviewing the premiere for the Bayerische Staatszeitung reads the language used in the rewrite as a sign of contemporary spiritual degradation: Diese Menschen-Automaten aus Fleisch und Blut leben in einer Welt des Scheins und Scheinmüssens. Die Verstellung ist ihnen zur 113 Adelson, p Ironically, as Cheesman notes, offensive references to the Turkish enemy do occur throughout the playscript, but no Turkish characters appear: Filthy Hell, p Cheesman, Filthy Hell, p G. K. Hunter, quoted in Kolin, p

132 tödlichen Natur geworden [...] Was wir da sehen ist unsere Tragödie. Eine Wirklichkeit, in der Authentizität durch Posen ersetzt ist. 117 Indeed, several reviews refer to the Giftspur des Wortes in the production: 118 that this poison is specifically Jago s is particularly clear in the distribution of the most vulgar language of the play. As Cheesman notes, Othello initially speaks an elevated German with touches of archaic syntax. 119 It is only from Act III that his language begins to descend to the level of Jago s. 120 Notably this also signals the point at which Othello takes on Jago s world view. In the following scenes Jago s words, re-voiced by Othello, degrade the Desdemona the audience still sees as innocent girl-child from Zuckerschnütchen to Hurensau. 121 Although Zaimoglu/Senkel s Desdemona fights back against Othello s accusations which here are clearly false, in the moment where he exercises physical power over her body and begins to choke her, it is what is said about Desdemona, i.e. her representation, that counts, rather than her actual actions or words. In Luk Perceval s production this process was also emphasised via the blocking. In Act II, scene i, for example, Jago is mid-way through one of his most offensive speeches a string of misogynistic, racist jokes when Thomas Thieme appears onstage as Othello. As Jago declaims [w]as haben Fotzelecken und die Mafia gemeinsam? Ein Ausrutscher mit der Zunge und du steckst in großer Scheiße, Thieme jogs lightly on the spot then takes a run up to Julia Jentsch s Desdemona, who turns away from Jago to face him. 122 They embrace, nuzzling one another in silence for several minutes. The intensity of their intimacy interrupts the action onstage and slowly stills even Jago mid-diatribe. As can be seen in Figure 11, their white clothing on the dark stage echoes the purity of their silence in comparison to Jago s vulgar chatter, and the blocking excludes both Rodrigo and Jago completely from this 117 Altmann, n.pag. 118 DPA, Wild im Wort, Kieler Nachrichten, 01/04/ Cheesman, Filthy Hell, p Cheesman locates this turning point at Act II: ibid. I would argue that Othello s language only becomes vulgar, as opposed to angry, in Act III. 121 Shakespeare, Zaimoglu, and Senkel, Othello, Fassung Münchner Kammerspiele/Thalia Theater, Act III, Scene i, p. 34; Act IV, Scene ii, p. 62. Accessed thanks to Luk Perceval/Thalia Theater. 122 Ibid., Act II, Scene i, p. 18. Billing also comments on the particularly misogynistic as well as racist bent of many of the jokes in the play, including this one: Billing, p. 194; p. 199, n

133 grouping. 123 As Christian M. Billing suggests, [t]he result is a series of haunting juxtapositions of vocal, physical and emotional difference, not between black and white characters, but between Othello/Desdemona and the rest of the play s dramatic constructs. 124 Chillington Rutter points out that the embrace also functions as a visual sign of the point of view that Othello takes as his own, allowing us to trace changes in his positioning. The point of no return in this tragedy occurs when Othello takes on Jago s language. As can be seen in Figure 12, it is precisely at this point that Thieme s Othello corrupted to his [Jago s] point of view, bear-hugged him, made him [his] own. 125 What is obscured in Figure 12 but can be seen in the audiovisual recording of the premiere of the Munich production is that Desdemona remains shut out of the Othello- Jago unit, emphasising the patterns of exclusion and inclusion created via language. 126 Figure 11. Desdemona (Julia Jentsch) and Othello (Thomas Thieme) embrace. Jago (Wolfgang Pregler) looks away. Publicity photograph Andreas Pohlmann. Accessed thanks to Münchner Kammerspiele. 123 This scene is grudgingly admitted to be gelungen even by the mainly negative review given by Mirko Weber: Wenn, n. pag. Both Figure 11 and Figure 12 also feature in the programme for the Munich production. 124 Billing, p Chillington Rutter, p William Shakespeare, Feridun Zaimoglu, and Günter Senkel, Othello, dir. by Luk Perceval, unpublished audiovisual recording; see also 3sat, Othello, dir. by Luk Perceval, pre-recorded audiovisual recording for television, Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich, broadcast on 29/03/2003. Accessed thanks to Münchner Kammerspiele. 131

134 Figure 12. Othello (Thomas Thieme) embraces Jago (Wolfgang Pregler). Publicity photograph Andreas Pohlmann. Accessed thanks to Münchner Kammerspiele. The disruption in the production between the reality of the Othello- Desdemona relationship and its distortion via a false representation in words seems to highlight mimesis or mediation as something negative. An authentic feeling, a more positive and purer reality becomes poisoned by the circulation of discourse. This concern with distortion, reality, and the circulation of signs also sheds light on some of the contemporary allusions within the dramatic text. Written in the wake of 9/11, and in the year of the discovery of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and subsequent war, the text reflects the new discourses which arose as a result. As Cheesman points out, Othello refers to the threat from suicide bombers on Cyprus (ZS 49); Cassio to Brabantio s sleepers, a term used for members of covert Islamist cells in Europe (ZS 32). 127 These allusions were also played on by a marketing campaign prior to the play s premiere which featured a poster of George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice. 128 While Calero Valera identifies the use of contemporary reference points purely as a way of modernising the play, Billing identifies the linguistic references from contemporary racism, European colonialism, Nazism, and Shakespeare s day as 127 Cheesman, Filthy Hell, p Anon., Bilderrätsel mit Condi, George, and Shakespeare, Focus, 24/02/

135 creating instead a certain co-temporality. 129 This leads to a historically indeterminate effect in which audiences are made to understand that the racial horrors that were supposed to be left in the past persist in the present. 130 What all of these movements might be said to share is the privileging of a certain version of reality to the benefit of one group in society and the detriment or danger to the others this discourse fixes on. Within Kanak Sprak and Zaimoglu s earlier work language was used as a tool in the service of a rebellion against the place in German society assigned to second- or thirdgeneration migrant youth, but it was never a theme in itself. 131 Here it seems, however, that the emphasis shifts, and the power of discourse to shape reality is emphasised. 132 This shift is also of interest in relation to the representation of ethnicity within the play. Chillington Rutter questions her students interpretation that the Munich Kammerspiele production they saw at the RSC in 2006 was not about race: Were they deaf to the textual imperative (all the sickening racist ugliness) that here didn t translate into the material, that didn t fix on actual black bodies? For them, Zaimoglu s Othello was about what they saw. And what they saw was a different visual regime: stupid, ugly, white men [...]. But maybe racism wasn t it. Maybe racism offered a residual language men could mobilize to do other cultural work, homophobic work. Was this a production, I wondered, not about whites hating blacks but about men hating men? 133 The idea of racism as a language which can be mobilized is important here. Cheesman calls Zaimoglu s text an example of political anti-racism, a form of antiracism which links the construction of race with that of class and focuses on how mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion function. While Zaimoglu stresses his role as artist rather than executor of irgendeine mühselige Anti-Rassismus-Hausaufgabe, he also states: 129 Calero Valera, p Billing, p Yasemin Yildiz, Critically Kanak : A Reimagination of German Culture, in Globalization and the Future of German, ed. by Andreas Gardt and Bernd-Rüdiger Hüppauf (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004), pp (p. 320). 132 See also Kidnie s summary of scholarship which highlights Othello s function of laying open to view a discourse [of racialisation] it is itself instrumental in making available : p Chillington Rutter, p. 59. Emphasis in original. 133

136 Wir wollten dem Original dahin gehend so entsprechen, dass wir die tatsächlichen Verhältnisse bewahren wollten. Man mag das als sexistisch oder rassistisch bezeichnen, aber wir sind Realisten. Die Geschichte geht so und nicht anders: Wenn man sie durchliest, stößt man im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes auf Kriegsschauplätze. 134 Although Zaimoglu does not deny or exclude the sexism or racism inherent in the play s language, he stresses its function as weapon or tool. As such I would suggest that racism is still an issue here, but is addressed from a different perspective. In this production, as in many academic readings of Shakespeare s Othello, the focus is on who this racist language benefits, on how and why it works. 135 Racism is thus revealed as not about whites hating blacks, i.e. the putting into language of a pre-existing essentialist division, but as a language which allows the wielder to create and propagate difference to his advantage. Interestingly, the meaning of the actor s whiteness becomes an issue here in a way which is rarely encountered in German theatre. As Katrin Sieg has shown, the white actor on the German stage is usually cast as neutral a carte blanche rather than already coloured in some way. 136 In his 2002 exploration of tendencies in the casting of Othello in Germany, Christopher Balme highlights German theatre s preference for the metaphorical, rather than metonymical, traditions of acting. While the possibilities of casting a white actor as Othello are frequently played with critically as in Peter Zadek s 1976 production where Othello s greasepaint smeared onto Desdemona throughout the show, highlighting the actor s own make-up and costume in a metatheatrical manner the idea of a black actor playing Othello is seen as too reductive. 137 At the same time, however, actors of colour are rarely used for white parts Zaimoglu, in Tiedke, Flammen, p. 128; p Also quoted in Cheesman Filthy Hell, p. 213; p See Kidnie, p Sieg, Ethnic Drag, pp Christopher Balme, Wie schwarz muss Othello sein? Polemische Überlegungen zur Repräsentation kultureller Fremdheit im Theater, in Inszenierungen: Theorie Ästhetik Medialität, ed. by Christopher Balme and Jürgen Schläder (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002), pp (p. 108). 138 Sieg, Ethnic Drag, pp See also the recent critiques of blackfacing in German theatre documented in Voss, pp

137 Unusually for most German Othellos, Thieme played the part without blacking up at all. Instead it is through the other characters language and labelling of him that he becomes other. For dramaturge Marion Tiedke: Da Othello nicht sichtbar der schwarze General ist, sondern gleichsam zu diesem schwarzen General durch die anderen gemacht wird, ist der Fokus auf das Stück plötzlich ein anderer. Ich sehe nicht schon von Anfang an das Opfer. 139 While the 2008 production at the Schauspielhaus Graz retained a similar casting choice but made this visible for the audience by daubing the word Neger on the white, unmade-up lead actor s back, in the Munich production this process takes place purely via language. 140 Although visually white (and aurally from Saxony), 141 Thieme s Othello is referred to throughout either affectionately or aggressively by names such as Schoko, der Neger, or Schokoplätzchen. 142 The visual sign thus becomes overwhelmed by the linguistic ones for the audience as well as for Othello. At the same time, however, the divide between signifier and signified undermines an essentialist conflation of the subject of racist language with the terms of that language. It remains emphatically others discourse, and the audience s own acceptance of that, which defines Othello as black, rather than visual or essentialist difference. The rewrite thus re-colours the white actor both within the play and within the theatrical context, revealing whiteness as a construct just as much as blackness is. This casting is played on purposefully in the script, which as we have seen followed rather than preceded the casting decision. Frequent references to race as mask present in the full dramatic text, but struck out in the Munich version, highlight 139 Tiedke, Das verlorene Paradies, p William Shakespeare, Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel, Othello, dir. by Christina Rast, unpublished audiovisual recording, Schauspielhaus Graz, Graz, Accessed thanks to Schauspielhaus Graz. 141 The Saxon accent is often looked down on and ridiculed as an East German accent; this identifies the actor as Other in a German context in a different way. 142 For examples of this naming see, for example, Shakespeare, Zaimoglu, and Senkel, Othello, Akt II, Scene I, p. 32; p. 36; p. 35. The association with traditional German words for sweets such as the Negerkuss and Mohrenkopf created by many of the confectionary terms used is discussed in more detail by Cheesman, Filthy Hell, p

138 its distinction from a core identity: Vor dir bin ich unmaskiert declares Othello to Desdemona, for example. 143 According to Gad: this approach also emphasized the protagonist s and the other figures awareness that his whiteness is but a histrionic mask for the part that he acts [...]. The tragedy of the foreign author-dramaturge, as well as of his theatrical agent, lies in the fact that, unlike Pirandello s Enrico IV, the outsider especially the privileged and successful one such as Othello or Zaimoglu is neither capable of being his authentic self nor is he incapable of internalizing the white mask that he himself has grafted onto his face. 144 The problematic conflation of author and character already discussed in section 3.2 is clearly visible in this quotation, however, it is the related discourse of authenticity I wish to focus on here. In Pirandello s work mask after mask is typically revealed in an unending and ultimately impossible search for the authentic self, a process which suggests that freedom is only possible in the flow between forms. 145 Gad seems to suggest, however, that it is Othello s failure to wholly occupy only one position, to internalise rather than play with the mask, which constitutes the tragedy here. Rey Chow identifies the assumption that the ethnic person is expected to come to resemble what is recognizably ethnic, as coercive mimeticism. She sees this as a trap similar to that identified by Frantz Fanon, in which the ethnic subject is doomed to fail to live up to an idealised image of the authentic white person. 146 In coercive mimeticism, however, it is an adequately authentic image of the ethnic person, which a subject fails to live up to. 147 As Desdemona starts to sense Othello turning away from her, she tells him, Du liegst auf dem gepanzerten Rücken, du strampelst wie ein dicker Käfer. 148 This is clearly a gloss of the opening lines of Kafka s Die 143 Shakespeare, Zaimoglu, and Senkel, Othello, Act II, scene ii, p. 40. The postmodern, knowing metatheatricality which such references indicate would perhaps have been an uneasy fit with the intensity Thieme bought to the role of Othello. 144 Kaynar, p See, for example, Wladimir Krysinski, Pirandello in the Discursive Economies of Modernity and Postmodernism, in Luigi Pirandello. Contemporary Perspectives, ed. by Gian-Paolo Biasin and Manuela Gieri (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), pp Chow, p Cf. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967). 147 Chow, p Shakespeare, Zaimoglu and Senkel, Othello, Act IV, scene ii, p

139 Verwandlung and, via the associations of that text in particular with Kafka s experience of the Jewish condition, could be said to align Othello with the figure of the historical ethnic other in German society, the Jew. 149 However, this alignment with the ethnic other is also complicated by Othello s simultaneous alignment with thoroughly German figures such as Frederick the Great via his repetition of their language: Ich bin meines Staates Diener he declares in Act I, Scene iii. 150 In performance these Prussian words would have been further defamiliarised through the Saxon accent. Othello s points of identification are thus multiple and complex, far from merely those of stand-in ethnic other. Notably, while Gregor Samsa waves his legs because he is a beetle, according to Desdemona Othello is merely acting like a beetle, and failing to do so convincingly. As Desdemona s words suggest, it is also Othello s fall into the mimetic trap suggested by Gad which causes him to lose faith in her. This then forms the core of the tragedy, rather than his failed ethnicity in itself. 151 Moving again from the play s content to the effect of the Kammerspiele production on its audiences, it can be seen that the power of language to shape reality was felt not only by the characters presented within the performance. Carol Chillington Rutter identifies the experience of watching the play as coercive : her choice of words seems to suggest that Jago rewrites not only Othello within the play but also the impressions of the audience watching. This coercive aspect functions for Chillington Rutter on several levels. It is first of all associated with the delivery of the language via surtitles. While reading the play-script at home allows the reader to take control of how they access the language, according to Chillington Rutter, [a]t the Kammerspiele Othello, that control in my case was coercively requisitioned to the theatrical experience. 152 Surtitles were obviously not present in the performances in Germany, however, the relentless violence of the language delivered would have been as inescapable, and arguably more visceral, for the audience hearing and understanding, 149 Cheesman also identifies this quote more broadly as Kafkaesque in his discussion of the existential aspects of the play, Filthy Hell, p Shakespeare, Zaimoglu and Senkel, Othello, p. 19. See also Akt V, Scene II, p. 118 This motto was seen to differentiate the rule of Frederick the Great from that of the French model of Louis XIV, epitomised by the phrase L Etat c est moi!. Via this citation, Othello thus becomes a General whose downfall is linked to a specifically Prussian militarism. 151 See also Kidnie, p Chillington Rutter, p

140 rather than reading these words. 153 Secondly, as outlined in section 3.3, the play s title itself is perceived as a guerrilla tactic which coerces a certain audience into participating in an encounter it would usually avoid. Phillip Kolin argues in his survey of Othello criticism: Historically, audiences have inscribed themselves in the text: [...] audiences have been ejected from the safety of readership/spectatorship and press-ganged into collaboration with or against the characters. 154 While Zaimoglu s early works carved a reputation as the voice of a certain Kanakster sub-culture, a fact Chillington Rutter is clearly aware of and uses to try to situate her own reactions, in Shakespeare criticism Iago is commonly considered as the voice of common sense, the ceaseless repetition of the alwaysalready known, the culturally given. 155 Rather than articulating the view of a particular sub-culture, then, Zaimoglu/Senkel s Jago can be considered to be voicing an underlying normative discourse. This can be seen very clearly by looking at the language shared by Jago and Zaimoglu s earlier Kanaksters. The word Menschenmüll appears in reference to ethnicised figures in both texts, for example. In Zaimoglu s Kanak Sprak the poet Memet uses this word to claim an alternative yet inclusive position outside of the mainstream: sie sind Menschenmüll [...]. Deshalb sind sie kanaken, deshalb bin ich ein kanake, deshalb bist du ein kanake. Wir sind bastarde, freund. 156 In Jago s mouth, the same words become purely negative. Having manipulated Rodrigo into an attack on Cassio as part of his plan to bring down Othello, he declares: Menschenmüll braucht Verwendung. Recycling auf hohem Niveau. 157 The violence implicit in his statement becomes clear when, having used Rodrigo to dispatch Cassio, Jago himself does the same for Rodrigo. 158 In his exploration of white self-fashioning in Shakespeare s Othello, Peter Erickson points out that the overt racial prejudice of not only Iago, but also Brabantio and Rodrigo, suggests that the views expressed by Iago are not an isolated aberration 153 Vasco Boenisch refers to the language as fast unerträglich, but sees this as a positive aspect of the play: Vasco Boenisch, Othello als Schocker, Bild, 31/03/ Kolin, pp Peter Stallybrass, quoted in Kolin, p Zaimoglu, Kanak Sprak, p This quotation is analysed in: Matthes, Writing, p Shakespeare, Zaimoglu, and Senkel, Othello, Act II, Scene ii, p Shakespeare, Zaimoglu, and Senkel, Othello, Fassung Münchner Kammerspiele/Thalia Theater, Act IV, Scene ii, p. 67. In the Monsenstein & Vannerdat edition this takes place in Act IV, Scene i: pp

141 in an otherwise unprejudiced white society. 159 While Jago coerces the audience into accepting his vocabulary, the overtness of the manner in which Zaimoglu s adaptation gave spectators an Othello hijacked to Iago s point of view, rendered in his limited but relentless pornographic vocabulary, is relevant here. 160 According to Edward Pechter, Shakespeare s Othello makes sure that Iago is injected into us right from the beginning, undiluted, not just before we know what is happening but as the way we know it is happening. 161 Phillip Kolin uses this reading to suggest that the epistemology and disease of the play comes from Iago. 162 As we have seen, this is undoubtably also the case with Zaimoglu/Senkel s Othello, and is an aspect emphasised in the Munich production. The exaggerated overtness of Jago s diseased epistemology created by his use of language is thus doubly significant. By highlighting this epistemology as disease via its very extremity, the play allows the audience to reject it. It is only within the action on stage that mimeticism remains purely coercive. Tiedke summarises her own understanding of the production s effect with reference to critical theory: Adorno geht so weit zu sagen, dass man das, was ist, nur beschreiben kann als das, was nicht sein soll, und nur daraus kann der Vorschein dessen entstehen, was sein soll. Und so kommt es mir manchmal in der Inszenierung vor. 163 The focus thus shifts from the question of presenting ethnicity authentically to the question of authentic representation at all. At first Tiedke s words seem to bring us back to a Platonic rejection of representation altogether. However, my reading of the Kammerspiele production thus far suggests that this rejection is focused specifically on the poisoned word : [d]urch das Wort, das in die Welt fällt, wird die Welt verändert. 164 Although this leads unstoppably to tragedy within the world of the play, on the Kammerspiele stage other postdramatic forms of expression were successfully 159 Peter Erickson, Images of White Identity in Othello, in Othello: New Critical Essays, ed. by Philip C. Kolin (London: Routledge, 2002), pp (p. 137). 160 Chillington Rutter, p Edward Pechter, in Kolin, p Kolin, p Tiedke, Das verlorene Paradies, p Ibid., p

142 set in opposition to the word. In the audiovisual recording of the Munich premiere Othello expresses his boyish joy at his love for Desdemona with a cartoon-like yell of Yabadabadoo!, lending his feelings the innocence and simplicity of a 1950s cartoon world. Rodrigo expresses his frustration and discontent through a laconic dance, while Jago s staccato line delivery almost frames his words in quotation marks, indicating their emptiness. 165 Finally there is also the musical accompaniment by Jens Thomas. In both audiovisual recordings I have access to, while Emilia watches Jago destroy her lover Cassio s jacket following his murder off-stage, responding to her husband s taunts as coolly as any film noir character, Jens Thomas is silent for a moment one of the few such moments in the performance. Following the couple s listless farewell, however, he fills the silence with an impassioned musical attack on the piano accompanied by deep, almost animalistic yelps of distress. 166 Perceval explains the role he envisioned for music in the production in an interview with Tiedke: durch die Präsenz der Musik erhalten diese Wörter ihre Schattenseiten. Und die Schattenseite ist universalle Einsamkeit oder besser: Diese Sehnsucht nach Liebe. 167 The contrast between Thomas s impassioned playing and the actors cool demeanour creates a longing in the spectator for real emotion and leads to the cathartic desire for a language free of the illusions created by Jago. 168 As the translation returned to the original by rewriting it, so too the production returns to the real via its very artificiality. 3.5 After Othello: Rewriting the German Stage Following the success of the Othello rewrite, Zaimoglu/Senkel have rewritten a further seven texts which occupy a canonical place in German (and world) theatrical repertoires. These include three further Shakespeare rewrites: Romeo und Julia (2006), 165 William Shakespeare, Feridun Zaimoglu, and Günter Senkel, Othello, dir. by Luk Perceval, audiovisual recording of the world premiere by the Münchner Kammerspiele on 29/03/2003. Accessed thanks to Münchner Kammerspiele. This recording was filmed separately and so differs from that broadcast on 3Sat. 166 Ibid. 167 Perceval, in Tiedke, Das verlorene Paradies, p This longing was expressed by, for example, Alexander Altmann in his review for the Bayerische Staatszeitung. 140

143 Hamlet (2010) and Julius Caesar (2011). A reworking of Molière s texts and life story for the Salzburger Festspiele under the name Molière: Eine Passion (2007) was also successful and was followed by rewrites of German classics: Frank Wedekind s Lulu, which became Lulu Live (2005), Wilhelm Busch s children s story Max und Moritz (2007) and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing s Nathan der Weise, which became Nathan Messias (2009). 169 The number and commissioned nature of Zaimoglu/Senkel s rewrites suggests that the rewrite is also a particularly practical way of establishing oneself as a playwright within the German theatrical establishment. Katharina Koch highlights the difficulties facing any new writer attempting to establish themselves within the German system. 170 Although the spectacle provided by a new writing premiere initially pulls in crowds, factors such as a failure to develop longer-lasting playwright-centred relationships, a limited audience with an interest in new writing within the theatregoing community, and specific ideas about what the subject matter of such writing should be, make new writing difficult to sustain. 171 To counter this, the current artistic director of the Deutsches Theater, Ulrich Khoun, stresses the importance of bringing authors and directors together. 172 The effectiveness of such an approach is reflected in the fact that three of the rewrites mentioned above, Hamlet, Moliere: Eine Passion, and Lulu Live, were also commissioned and directed by Perceval. 173 The Perceval- Zaimoglu/Senkel relationship thus indicates the importance of establishing a connection with a particular theatre or director for new playwrights. The advantage of the rewrite as a form can also be seen in that, in contrast to new writing, classic plays, such as those of Shakespeare, are seen as a reliable attraction and regularly feature on the lists compiled by Wer spielte was of the best attended performances. 174 As a result of the turn to Regietheater since the 1960s in 169 For a discussion of this play see, Tom Cheesman, Nathan without the Rings: Postmodern Religion in Nathan Messias, in Feridun Zaimoglu, ed. by Tom Cheesman and Karin Yeşilada (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012), pp Katharina Koch, Traversing Berlin: The Absence of a Theatre for New Writing in Berlin Today (unpublished MSc dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 2010), pp Ibid., pp Ulrich Khoun, in Ortrud Gutjahr et al., Diskussion: Theater ist auch eine soziale Kunst, in Regietheater! Wie sich über Inszenierungen streiten lässt, ed. by Ortrud Gutjahr (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2008), pp (p. 62). 173 Cheesman, Nathan, p Zaimoglu/Senkel also returned to the Kammerspiele in 2011 with their play Alpsegen, directed by Sebastien Nübling. 174 Koch, p

144 Germany, it seems that audiences are interested less in a new play, than in a new perspective on a familiar story. 175 That this has provided a hurdle for the development of Turkish-German theatre in particular is clear if we refer back to Erol Boran s work. Boran demonstrates that for a long time state theatres in Germany operated as a kind of geschlossene Gesellschaft, where the politics of the Federal Republic of Germany were mirrored in cultural policies which discouraged the development of Turkish- German theatre practitioners. 176 The first Turk offered a place studying directing at the prestigious Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch, Berlin, for example, was Nurkan Erpulat in In a landscape where the dramaturge or director increasingly shapes the theatrical work, and few Turkish-German practitioners have access to these positions, the role of rewriter might be said to become particularly effective as it allows the authorial function generally allotted to the director to be recaptured to a degree by the playwright. Indeed, as already noted in section 3.1, the rewrite is a form which has also been taken up briefly by Erpulat, as well as by popular director Nuran David Calis. Calis, for example, received much critical acclaim for his rewrite and direction of Frank Wedekind s Frühlings Erwachen, under the title of Frühlings Erwachen (LIVE FAST DIE YOUNG) at the Schauspiel Hannover in Similarly, Nurkan Erpulat and Jens Hillje s 2009 Verrücktes Blut, a rewrite of French film La journée de Lupe and Schiller s Die Räuber directed by Erpulat, was successful enough to be invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen in While Zaimoglu/Senkel s Othello moved away from specifically Turkish-German concerns, both Calis and Erpulat/Hillje s rewrites are, however, firmly situated within a Turkish-German or postmigrant context. Calis s Frühlings Erwachen used contemporary rap and music to combine street with high culture, merging various performance cultures. 179 Erpulat and Hillje took a different approach, allowing the postmigrant context to become a way of exploring the classic itself. 175 Gutjahr, p Boran, p Kömürcü Nobrega, Alienation, n. pag. 178 Frank Wedekind and Nuran David Calis, Frühlings Erwachen (LIVE FAST DIE YOUNG), dir. by Nuran David Calis, unpublished audiovisual recording, Schauspiel Hannover, Hannover, Accessed in Archiv des Theatermuseums Hannover. 179 Ibid. 142

145 Set in a contemporary German classroom, Verrücktes Blut portrays a teacher s attempts to teach a class of postmigrant teenagers Schiller s Die Räuber. The chaotic class is interrupted by the appearance of a gun, brought into the classroom by one of the students. The teacher, Sonia, confiscates the gun but rather than sending the teenager to be punished, reaches breaking point and uses the loaded firearm to hold the class hostage for a lesson on Schiller and the concept of aesthetische Erziehung. 180 While the questions of honour, family, and individuality raised in Die Räuber are shown to have clear parallels, and so relevance, to the lives of the postmigrant teenagers, the forced recognition of this created by the hostage situation calls into question Sonia s own grasp of the enlightened values she is supposedly imparting. The meta-theatrical element of Verrücktes Blut emphasised by the Schiller play within a play and the discussion of the teenage characters failings as actors, creates parallels with contemporary discussions on the role of theatre in a Federal Republic of Germany characterised by diversity and the difficulties facing actors with a particular accent or skin tone. Erpulat has voiced precisely this concern at events such as Jenseits von Identität Postmigrantische Kultur, a discussion on postmigrant theatre at the 2011 Heidelberger Stückemarkt. 181 In an interview cited in Azadeh Sharifi s chapter on Postmigrantisches Theater, Erpulat, who grew up in Turkey and studied theatre there before coming to Germany as a young artist, explains the discrepancy between the way his ethnicity positions him in Germany and his own selfperception as a director: Ich behaupte mal, dass ich Shakespeare besser kenne als Neuköllner Straßengeschichten. Aber den Intendanten fehlten bis jetzt der Mut, mich auch solche Stoffe inszenieren zu lassen. Das ändert sich gerade Nurkan Erpulat, and Jens Hillje, Verrücktes Blut Strichfassung Stand , unpublished script used for Verrücktes Blut, dir. by Nurkan Erpulat (Berlin: Ballhaus Naunynstraße/Ruhrtriennale, 2010), pp Act I, Scene i, p. 17. Accessed thanks to Fereidoun Ettehad/Ballhaus Naunynstraße. 181 Linders et al., unpublished audiovisual recording. 182 Azadeh Sharifi, Postmigrantisches, p. 42. Sharifi also discusses Verrücktes Blut, however, her discussion focuses on the way in which the piece plays with concepts of identity without relating this to the meta-theatrical elements of the play: pp See also Voss, who views the play as an example of performative Reflexion von ethnischer Differenzierung, pp

146 While for Zaimoglu/Senkel the rewrite of classical material has opened the way for a variety of other theatrical commissions in Germany, conversely for director Nurkan Erpulat, the rewrite has provided a means of using Neuköllner Straßengeschichten to deal with the classics he originally entered the theatre to direct. The revelation that Sonia, the director both of the rehearsals and the hostage situation within Verrücktes Blut, is Turkish German is of particular interest here: MARIAM: Bist du Türkin oder was? MUSA: Warum haben Sie uns das nicht gesagt? SONIA: Weil das niemand was angeht! Das hier ist eine deutsche Schule, hier wird deutsch gesprochen, klar? 183 Sonia s assumption is that within a public institution the ethnic background of a person should make no difference. As the responses from her audience of teenagers suggest, however, Sonia s ethnicity still alters their perception and reception of the cultural goods she presents them with. Although the teenagers at first perceive Sonia as another example of German society forcing irrelevant high German culture down the throats of postmigrant others, the revelation of her own ethnicity highlights the fact that Turkish Germans themselves engage with cultural goods coded as German for a variety of reasons. While it is easy to position the rewrite as an oppositional impulse, and characterise it in the language of opposition and destruction as a Klassikerverhunzung, Erpulat/Hillje like Zaimoglu/Senkel, explicitly situate themselves within German traditions, in this case Sturm und Drang. This suggests rather a desire for a renewal and reengagement with the transgressive elements of both classic plays and the German theatre as a whole. The way in which such attempts are received, however, can be very subjective. The reception of the second of Zaimoglu/Senkel s Shakespeare rewrites for Luk Perceval, Hamlet (2010: Thalia Theater, Hamburg) is particularly interesting in this regard. Although again the immediate reception of the piece was mixed, Alan Posener s review in conservative national newspaper Die Welt stands out as unusually 183 Erpulat and Hillje, Act II, scene iii, p

147 problematic. Posener, like many of the initial reviewers of the 2003 Othello premiere, complained of the sacrifice of Shakespeare s original to a director s concept and a disrespectful translation. However, he articulated this in particularly loaded imagery and word choice: Dieser Text verhält sich zum Original wie der Koran zur Bibel. Er hat dem Urtext alles Widersprüchliche ausgetrieben und mit ihm auch alle Poesie, alle Tiefe. Der Rest ist Plattheit. 184 Despite his acknowledgement that the production is shaped to a large degree by Perceval s Buddhist world view, Posener insisted on an islamophobic and mimeticist vocabulary which positions the Qur an as inferior copy of the Bible. This suggests that his comments were directed at Zaimoglu, not as racialised author this time, but as practising Muslim. 185 Posener s comments were objected to in the strongest possible terms by the artistic director of the Thalia Theatre, Joachim Lux, and were debated heavily on influential theatre websites such as nachtkritik.de. 186 This alerts us both to the changing context which theatre by authors such as Zaimoglu was entering into in the late 2000s and the new debates which their presence on Germany s most influential stages have provoked. As can be seen above, no matter what the playwright or even director s intention, reception can be overdetermined by preconceptions and prejudice concerning postmigrant authors. In the next chapter the ways in which Islam has begun to take on a significant role in discussions of theatre and postmigration will be the focus. 184 Alan Posener, Hamlet für Blöde, Die Welt, 20/09/2010 < article /hamlet-fuer-bloede.html> [last accessed 26/08/2014]. 185 Jens Thomas s musical accompaniment was also criticised by Posener as a Mischung aus mongolischem Obertongesang, Muezzin-Ruf und Jodeln, i.e. as having been somehow islamicised. The audiovisual recording I had access to did not suggest anything similar to me: William Shakespeare, Feridun Zaimoglu, and Günter Senkel, Hamlet, dir. by Luk Perceval, unpublished audiovisual recording, Thalia Theater, Hamburg, Accessed thanks to Thalia Theater 186 Esther Slevogt, Redaktionsblog Zum offenen Brief des Hamburger Thalia-Intendanten Joachim Lux, nachtkritik.de, 22/09/2010 < article&id=4688&catid=315&itemid=105> [last accessed 26/08/2014]. This debate is also touched on in Gräff. 145

148 CHAPTER FOUR. Staging Close Encounters with Islam: Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel s Schwarze Jungfrauen 4.1 The Neo-Muslima Enters the Scene Following Othello, Zaimoglu and Senkel continued their writing for the stage with two original plays focusing on love, Casino Leger (2003) and Halb so wild (2004), and one further with a similar theme but set in a theatre itself, Ja. Tu es. Jetzt (2003). These were succeeded by two further rewrites of classics of the German repertoire: Lulu Live (2005), a version of Frank Wedekind s Lulu, and a further Shakespeare rewrite, Romeo und Julia (2006). While each of these plays was received relatively well, it was in 2006 with the premiere of their seventh play, Schwarze Jungfrauen, that the pair once again drew the attention of the theatrical community in Germany as a whole. Schwarze Jungfrauen premiered in the tiny HAU 3 theatre space in Berlin, Kreuzberg, as part of a new experimental festival, Beyond Belonging. As Claudia Breger has highlighted, HAU 3 is the smallest stage of Berlin s Hebbel am Ufer theatre complex; yet despite the premiere s modest setting Schwarze Jungfrauen attracted the attention of major German theatre critics. 1 This landed the world premiere a front page placement in the May 2006 issue of Theater heute, where a section of the dramatic text was also reprinted. The success of the world premiere led to Zaimoglu/Senkel being listed second in the Playwright of the year survey in Theater heute for 2006 and to the play s 2007 nomination for the prestigious Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis, the main prize for new dramatic writing in Germany. Since 2006 the premiere production, directed by Turkish-German director Neco Çelik, has followed the curator of the first Beyond Belonging festival, Shermin Langhoff, in her move up through Berlin s theatrical institutions. Having initially reappeared in subsequent Beyond Belonging festivals, in 2010 the premiere production 1 Breger, Aesthetics, p For more on the Beyond Belonging festivals, see Sieg, Black Virgins, p. 149.

149 reopened in Langhoff s own new theatre, the Ballhaus Naunynstraße. This theatre has aimed to provide a platform both for what it calls postmigrant perspectives and for the work of artists with a background of migration within the theatrical establishment. 2 Following Langhoff s more recent move to the Maxim Gorki theatre in 2013, the premiere production can now be seen there on one of Berlin s most significant historic stages. In this process, the production has assumed a flag-ship status for postmigrant theatre: it was recently advertised on the Gorki s facebook feed as Schwarze Jungfrauen - der Klassiker, for example (Figure 13). However, this is far from the only form in which Schwarze Jungfrauen has made its way into the German theatrical consciousness. In the wake of the successful premiere, Schwarze Jungfrauen has not only been produced as an audio play but has also appeared in a staggering eleven further professional productions in Germany alone. This signals an industry interest in postmigrant perspectives previously absent from the theatrical sphere in Germany. Figure 13. Screen capture of Maxim Gorki Theater, Facebook advertisement, facebook.com, March Tunçay Kulaoğlu, Das kulturelle Kapital der Postmigranten ist riesig, in Kultur mit allen! Wie öffentliche deutsche Kultureinrichtungen Migranten als Publikum gewinnen, ed. by Vera Allmanritter and Klaus Siebenhaar (Berlin: B&S Siebenhaar, 2010), pp (p. 162); Sharifi, Postmigrantisches, pp

150 The dramatic text consists of ten monologues, each corresponding to a different Neo-Muslima or radical Muslim woman. This is a term popularised by Zaimoglu in his discussions of the play, but which was already in use in sociological studies of postmigrant women s relationship to Islam in Germany. 3 The monologues are the result of conversations apparently conducted by Zaimoglu with Muslim women living in Germany. From these he and Senkel selected those they found most interesting to then rework for the theatre in their own inimitable style. 4 The result is a fiercely delivered combination of accounts of everyday experiences, family life, inter- and intra-religious conflicts, extreme and extremist political statements. Stories of love and sexuality are interspersed with declarations of belief, and the narratives presented often revolve around questions of tradition and modernity, identity, and belonging. In monologue six, for example, the speaker exclaims: Ich trage kein Mumientuch, ich bin nicht... wie sagt man?... enthaltsam. Gott verzeih mir, ich muß es sagen: ich ficke immer noch, weil ich weiß, es schadet nicht meinem Glauben. Ich bete fünf Mal am Tag. Ich faste im Ramadan, und ich bin überzeugte Moslemin. 5 Here we see the combination of sexual freedom, violent language, emphatic selfassertion, and religious devotion which the play s title encapsulates; the black virgins are thus no saints but rather nuanced figures who complicate received ideas of religious, cultural and sexual purity and whose narratives point to the intersections between these discourses. 6 3 It is used, for example, by sociologist Sigrid Nökel, in Die Töchter der Gastarbeiter und der Islam (Bielefeld: transcript, 2002), pp For further discussion of the ways in which the Neo prefix can be read, see El Hissy, pp Zaimoglu, personal interview. 5 Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel, Schwarze Jungfrauen (Reinbek: Rowohlt Theater Verlag, 2006), p. 31. Ellipses in original. My thanks to Tanja Müller at Rowohlt for providing me with a copy of the full dramatic text. 6 As Frauke Matthes highlights, compared to the idea of virginity typical in Germany, Zaimoğlu s women are not as ideal, as white, and certainly not like the promised forty perpetual virgins awaiting Islamic martyrs in heaven, but show their flaws, their dark sides, and their difficulties with both their Islam and their non-muslim surroundings : Frauke Matthes, Authentic Muslim Voices? Feridun Zaimoglu s Schwarze Jungfrauen, in Religion and Identity in Germany Today: Doubters, Believers, Seekers in Literature and Film, ed. by Julian Preece et al (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), pp (p. 206). For a discussion of the title and summary of the play see also El Hissy, pp ; p. 131; Sieg, Black Virgins, p

151 The format of the dramatic text remained very similar to that of Zaimoglu s earlier interview-based prose collections, Kanak Sprak and Koppstoff, which have been read as fact, fiction, and a hybrid of the two. 7 However, when the monologues of Schwarze Jungfrauen entered the theatrical context they attracted the label of semidokumentarisches Theater. 8 This is perhaps unsurprising given the contemporary trend for and historical tradition of documentary theatre in Germany. 9 There are certainly similarities between the play s interview-based form and the form of much contemporary documentary theatre which claims to use verbatim material. 10 As Katharina Keim explains: Die Garanten für die Verortung in realer Gegenwart können im semi-dokumentarischen Theater [ ] auf verschiedenen Ebenen angesiedelt sein, zum einen auf der Ebene der Darsteller, die tatsächlich ihre eigene Biografie verkörpern, und zum anderen auf der Ebene der dokumentarischen Rede. Insbesondere das Verfahren, auf der Grundlage von Interviews mit speziellen Zielgruppen semidokumentarische Stücktexte zu entwickeln, ist durch die Texte Kathrin Rögglas wie etwa wir schlafen nicht [2004] bekannt geworden. 11 The (semi-)documentary labelling of this play might at first seem to take us beyond the territory of mimesis, the representation or imitation of reality, into the realm of the real itself. However, as theatre scholar Janelle Reinelt has shown, discourses of 7 See Matthes discussion of this: Authentic, p See Eva Behrendt s use of this term in the influential Theater heute article: Eva Behrendt, Zumutung gegen Vermutung, Theater heute, 47.5 (2006), (p. 40). 9 For a discussion of the form of the dramatic text in relation to both the documentary theatre of the 1960s and its contemporary incarnation see also Breger, Aesthetics, p. 232 and Ingrid Hentschel, Dionysos kann nicht sterben: Theater in der Gegenwart (Berlin: Dr. W. Hopf, 2007), p Ingrid Hentschel therefore includes Schwarze Jungfrauen as one of only two examples of the contemporary documentary tradition in her recent book: Hentschel, p Other productions from 2006 which use similar techniques include Karl Marx: Capital, Vol 1. (Karl Marx: Das Kapital, Erster Band) by Rimini Protokoll which combined quotations from Marx with verbatim material drawn from interviews with individuals. The authors of this piece won the Mülheim prize for new dramatic writing in 2007, the year Zaimoglu / Senkel were also nominated. 11 Katharina Keim, Der Einbruch der Realität in das Spiel: Zur Synthese von Faktizität und Fiktionalität im zeitgenössischen semidokumentarischen Theater und den Kulturwissenschaften, in Reality Strikes Back II: Tod der Repräsentation: Die Zukunft der Vorstellungskraft in einer globalisierten Welt, ed. by Kathrin Tiedemann and Frank Raddatz (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2010), pp (p. 135). Keim also discusses Schwarze Jungfrauen as semi-documentary or postdramatic theatre in: Allah ist kein Ausländer Transkultureller religiöser Fundamentalismus in zeitgenössischen deutschsprachigen Theatertexten, in Irritation und Vermittlung: Theater in einer interkulturellen und multireligiösen Gesellschaft, ed. by Wolfgang Sting et al. (Berlin: Dr. W. Hopf, 2010), pp

152 mimesis and theatricality have a key role to play in the construction of and reactions to the documentary in theatre. In her work on documentary theatre in the British context, Reinelt argues that as documentary theatre is [o]verdetermined by anti-theatricalism s distrust of mimesis, it is easy to see why documentary claims are almost always met with both suspicion and excitement. 12 Certainly suspicion and excitement are appropriate descriptions for the reactions of many reviewers for whom Schwarze Jungfrauen seemed to promise an insight into the lives of women otherwise beyond their ken. 13 In the judging of the Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis, for which the play was nominated in 2007, for example, jury member Til Briegleb voted against the play being selected as overall winner for the following reasons: Weil ich die, in ihrer Konstruktionsart und -weise, manipulativ finde. Ich finde, wenn man das sieht und keine Hintergrundsinformation hat, hat man keine Ahnung, ob einem hier dokumentarisches Theater vorgeführt wird, ob das von den Autoren wild zusammen konstruiert ist, und wo sie genau damit hinwollen. [...] [E]s erweckt den Eindruck repräsentativ für etwas zu sein, und das glaube ich auch nicht die Bohne. 14 Here we see the high expectations associated with the documentary or semidocumentary labelling in terms not only of the function of the play (it should be informative), but also in terms of the ethics of representation present within it (it should contain a clear truth value) Janelle Reinelt, The Promise of Documentary, in Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present, ed. by Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp (p. 8). She continues, however: [...] Arguments about the purity or contamination of the document/ary have since needlessly obfuscated the recognition that an examination of reality and a dramatisation of its results is in touch with the real but not a copy of it (ibid.). 13 Matthes, p Til Briegleb, transcribed from the audiovisual recording of the jury discussion: Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis, Diskussion der Jury um die Vergabe des Mülheimer Dramatikerpreises, audiovisual recordng, Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis Archiv 2007, Mülheim 02/06/2007, < [last accessed 26/08/2014]. A brief mention of the jury s designation of the play as manipulativ is also to be found in Hentschel, p See also Reinelt s discussion of the promise which the documentary genre seems to offer its audiences: Promise, passim. 150

153 As Katrin Sieg, Frauke Matthes, and Ipek A. Çelik all suggest, the play can be read as a response both to the extremely negative representations of Muslim women (and Islam in general) circulating in Germany at that time and to a concurrent increased public interest in Islam. 16 The contemporary image of the Muslim woman is clearly disrupted by the sexualised and assertive texts of Schwarze Jungfrauen, suggesting an anti-mimeticist thrust to the play. 17 At the same time, this anti-mimeticism is potentially in conflict with an Orientalist positioning of the Muslim woman (albeit as character rather than necessarily as actress) on stage as object of information. 18 This is a tension which will inform and be further unpacked in my own reading of the dramatic text and world premiere. Discussing Zaimoglu s earlier prose work, Chantelle Warner has argued that questions of genre and authenticity have implications for the documentary aspect of texts such as Kanak Sprak (1995): Framed as social autobiography, the value of these works comes to be measured by their documentariness, which in turn is evaluated in terms of preconceived notions. 19 What these preconceived notions might be for Schwarze Jungfrauen in terms of the Muslim woman as source has already been discussed at length by Sieg. In particular Sieg highlights the public acceptance of voices such as that of Necla Kelek, a Turkish-German sociologist who writes semiautobiographical books condemning Islam and propagating secularism as freedom from oppression. 20 Sieg contrasts this with the lack of public interest in the better researched and less inflammatory popular and scholarly works of other sociologists. 21 As Sieg concludes: the notion of ethnic authenticity is already scripted in advance. 22 It is also important to bear in mind, however, that the aesthetic and documentary genre 16 Sieg, Black Virgins, p. 151; Matthes, p. 199; Ipek A. Çelik, Performing Veiled Women as Marketable Commodities: Representations of Muslim Minority Women in Germany, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 32.1 (2012), (p. 116). In order to easily differentiate between I. A. Çelik, the academic, and Neco Çelik, the director, their first names will accompany their surnames in the main body of the chapter. 17 Ibid. 18 Terkessedis highlights the danger of postmigrants being used as Rohstoff zur Belebung des Theaters : Interkultur, p Warner, pp Sieg, Black Virgins, p Ibid. 22 Ibid. As Sieg notes, such scripting locate[s] agency in the German public rather than in the professional ethnic : ibid. In this chapter I want to focus on creating a detailed picture of the world premiere in order to unpack the power relations at work between postmigrant theatre practitioners and a nicht nur German public. 151

154 conventions in relation to which Schwarze Jungfrauen as a piece of theatre will be viewed are also pre-scripted, a factor which has been largely overlooked in discussions focusing on more literary intertexts such as those of Kelek. 23 In this chapter, I will use a focus on mimesis and mimeticism to unpack the ways in which the dramatic text and premiere production of Schwarze Jungfrauen have been received in relation to preexisting models of both genre and Islam. 4.2 Beyond Belonging: The Multiple Authors of Schwarze Jungfrauen As Chantelle Warner, amongst others, points out, by 2006 Zaimoglu s prose work had moved on from the more protocol-based work of his earlier writings. 24 Schwarze Jungfrauen, however, to a degree signalled a return to this genre, albeit with a change in focus from the ethnicised, gendered groups which were the subject of his early prose works such as Kanak Sprak (1995), to a gendered group which share a religion. 25 This move echoed a contemporary shift both in the ways which postmigrant women in Germany were being portrayed in the media and in which many postmigrants were identifying: a shift which has been sketched by Yasemin Yildiz as that of representation as Turkish Girls to Allah s Daughters. 26 According to Zaimoglu when I interviewed him, the motivation for such an alteration in focus in his own work was the changed political climate in Germany at the time: Nach 9/11 herrschte ein großes Interesse und die Leute waren sensibiliert [...]. Die öffentlichen Diskurse dienen nur dazu, die Herrschaftsverhältnisse zu zementieren, es werden viele Lügen verbreitet, es ist kein öffentliches Gespräch: In den meisten Fällen 23 Sieg, for example, discusses the play in relation to semi-autobiographical novels by women who had freed themselves from Islam at the time: ibid., pp While it is important to situate the play within discourses circulating in multiple media, a focus on this overlooks similar discourses in the theatrical sphere. 24 Warner, p Sieg also highlights the move from the ethnic to religious community in Schwarze Jungfrauen: Black Virgins, p See also Matthes, pp ; Keim, Transkultureller Fundamentalismus, p. 80; Breger, Aesthetics, p. 231; El Hissy, pp ; p Yildiz, Turkish Girls, pp

155 ist das Provokation, es ist Hetze. [...] Und diese [muslimischen] Frauen lesen und lesen und niemand fragt sie. 27 Zaimoglu s comments here and in other published interviews concerning Schwarze Jungfrauen suggest a concern not only with asking these women about their lives, but also with assisting them in being heard. 28 While this seems very laudable, scholars such as Sieg, Matthes, and I. A. Çelik all problematise Zaimoglu s presentation of the play and address the question of who speaks in Schwarze Jungfrauen. 29 They identify Zaimoglu s potentially problematic ventriloquism of the female figures as a key concern. 30 In doing so they draw attention to the power relations at work with respect to the play as dramatic text as well as with respect to the performance created for the world premiere. Sieg, for example, in the first of her articles to address the play, highlights the cutting and reassembling of the individual monologues which took place for the premiere production as a factor which compromises the already problematic issue of authorship in the case of the premiere. 31 In fact such reworking is typical of much supposedly verbatim theatre, the name of which suggests a correspondence to the words of an original speaker rarely matched in practice. 32 Indeed the very length of 27 Zaimoglu, personal interview. For a similar use of what might be considered the language of subalternity, see: Burgtheater, Schwarze Jungfrauen, programme (Vienna: Burgtheater, 2007). Accessed in holdings of Rowohlt Theater Verlag, Reinbek. File Zaimoglu: Schwarze Jungfrauen Wien 07 ÖU. 28 Cf. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean, Subaltern Talk: Interview with the Editors (29 October 1993), in The Spivak Reader, ed. by Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean (London: Routledge, 1996), pp , (p. 289; p. 291). 29 This creates particular resonances with the work of Spivak, which will be explored briefly in section Sieg, Black Virgins, pp and p. 185; Matthes, pp ; I. A. Çelik, pp ; El Hissy, p. 119; Hentschel, p Sieg, Black Virgins, pp Breger also emphasises Neco Çelik s pocketing claim to female cultural representation as problematic, Aesthetics, p See, for example, the discussion of David Hare s ambiguous use of verbatim dialogue in his recent plays in Stephen Bottoms, Putting the Document into Documentary: An Unwelcome Corrective?, TDR, 50.3 (2006), (pp ), and of Culture Clash s improvements on source dialogue in their verbatim theatre in Dorinne Kondo, (Re-)Visions of Race: Contemporary Race Theory and the Cultural Politics of Racial Crossover in Documentary Theatre, Theatre Journal, 52.1 (2000), (p. 95). This is also the case with Eve Ensler s The Vagina Monologues, a play to which, as Matthes and Sieg point out, Schwarze Jungfrauen has repeatedly been compared (Matthes, pp ; Sieg Black Virgins, p. 174). See Sal Renshaw, Divine Gifts and Embodied Subjectivities in The Vagina Monologues, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 6.2 (2004), (p. 324, n. 3). Attention to the German theatrical context shows that Volker Lösch has also been criticied in similar terms. 153

156 Zaimoglu/Senkel s complete collection of monologues suggests a need to cut the texts prior to performance: taken in their complete form they are simply unwieldy. 33 Furthermore, as directors of the productions that followed the premiere, such as Christian Scholze and Lars-Ole Walburg, highlighted when I interviewed them, the lack of stage directions almost forces the director to create an overarching framework to link, and mediate, the monologues on stage. 34 As will be seen in section 4.4, this is something which the framing of the world premiere actually attempted to highlight to audiences. However, Sieg s intervention is also important as earlier articles concerning Schwarze Jungfrauen have tended to take the version of the monologues published in Theater heute as the script used in the world premiere. 35 In fact, as Sieg highlights, these monologues do not correspond to the version of the script used in the premiere production. 36 Theater heute published only five of the ten monologues which make up the dramatic text of the play, while the dramaturgical team involved in creating the 2006 world premiere made use of material from seven of the monologues present in the full version of the dramatic text. 37 The dramaturgical team occasionally merged characters together and, as Sieg has highlighted, cut the texts in such a way as to highlight aspects of the monologues which addressed sexuality. 38 My own comparison of the scripts shows that several of the sections cut for the premiere production also contained much of the dramatic text s more anti-semitic language. 39 Sieg s article on Schwarze Jungfrauen then goes on to concentrate on a very convincing reading of the play as a challenge to the rise in what many have termed 33 Only Christian Scholze has produced all ten monologues almost in full. In this case two separate productions were necessary, each of which used a different conceit to link the monologues together. 34 Lars-Ole Walburg, personal Interview, Hannover 07/06/2012; Christian Scholze, personal interview, Castrop-Rauxel, 13/05/ See, for example, Matthes, Authentic, p. 202; Helga Kraft, Das Theater, pp ; Toni Müller, Was schaut ihr mich an? Darstellungen von Menschen mit Behinderung in der zeitgenössischen Dramatik (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2012), pp Sieg, Black Virgins, pp This is not made clear in the Theater heute imprint. 37 Ibid. Insa Popken and Tunçay Kulaoğlu, Textfassung Schwarze Jungfrauen Stand: 23. Februar 2006 nach Feridun Zaimoglu/Günter Senkel, unpublished cut of the dramatic text used for Schwarze Jungfrauen, dir. by Neco Çelik (Berlin: HAU, 2006). Accessed thanks to Fereidoun Ettehad/Ballhaus Naunynstraße. Breger also makes mention of the discrepancy between the version printed in Theater heute and that used in the production, however, she does not seem aware of the cutting and splicing between monologues which Sieg highlights: Breger, Aesthetics, p Sieg, Black Virgins, pp Compare Zaimoglu and Senkel, Schwarze Jungfrauen, with Popken and Kulaoğlu. 154

157 sexual nationalism, in which critique of gendered oppression is aligned with a static, essentialist, und supremacist concept of European culture. 40 However, I. A. Çelik takes Sieg s original point of critique further and draws on Michel Foucault s paradigm of the confessing and disciplined modern subject to analyse the descriptions of sex and the language of confession invoked within the monologues. 41 Taken together, I. A. Çelik argues, these elements of the play create a situation in which the male artists involved in the play s success effectively sell out a sexualised version of the Muslim woman to a German-German audience. 42 This is an extremely important intervention in the story of the play s success. The questions raised by these critics of how power, voice, and the gaze figure in the commission and subsequent productions of Schwarze Jungfrauen will be returned to as key concerns in my exploration of mimesis and mimeticism in the dramatic text and world premiere. As a more detailed examination of the circumstances surrounding the commission and production of the world premiere will highlight, however, a focus on the gendered power relationships between the women supposedly at the play s origin and the male author and director overlooks the female agency which was present at several key levels of the production. The HAU complex where the premiere production of Schwarze Jungfrauen was first performed in 2006 is comprised of three previously separate theatres located in Berlin-Kreuzberg: the Hebbel Theater, Theater am Halleschen Ufer, and the Theater am Ufer. These stages were united in 2003 under the name Hebbel-Am-Ufer or HAU, and placed under the artistic direction of Matthias Lilienthal, previously head dramaturge at the Berlin Volksbühne. 43 Nina Peter, who charts the rise of postmigrant theatre in Berlin, describes the HAU as follows: Das HAU-Konzept erinnerte an das Profil britischer Community Theaters, die es darauf anlegen, die direkte Nachbarschaft und die Summe unterschiedlicher Kulturen ins Theater zu holen. Beim HAU 40 Sieg, Black Virgins, p On sexual nationalism, see Bracke. 41 I. A. Çelik, p Ibid., pp The gender of the author and the director of the premiere are likewise highlighted by Matthes, p Friedhelm Teicke, Theaterkombinat der anderen Art, HAU < de/geschichte.html?hau=1 > [last accessed 01/07/2012]. 155

158 waren das zunächst die Berliner bzw. Kreuzberger mit türkischem oder arabischem Hintergrund. 44 A similar concern with making theatre for the town or community which a theatre serves can also be traced within the German theatrical tradition: a result of the decentralised system where funds are predominantly allocated by the Länder rather than at a national level. The importance of the regional base of a theatre for its repertoire can already be seen in the case of the Bochumer Ensemble in Chapter Two of this thesis. While in 1986 the make-up of the surrounding community there was one of the factors which led Claus Peymann not to premiere Emine Sevgi Özdamar s Karagöz in Alamania though, in twenty-first century Berlin-Kreuzberg it had the opposite effect, leading Lilienthal to make a focus on theatre by and for a postmigrant public part of his very application for his post at the HAU. 45 In fact the HAU soon became best known for postdramatic experimentation, but its already loose structure enabled Lilienthal to organise it differently from the standard state-funded houses. 46 As he explained in an interview with Theater der Zeit in 2008: Wir haben kein festes Ensemble, sondern arbeiten mit einem Kreis von 40 oder 50 Gruppen. Das gibt uns die Freiheit, jedes Mal das System neu zu erfinden. 47 As part of this reinvention Lilienthal engaged Shermin Langhoff as curator of the aforementioned Beyond Belonging festivals a series of festivals designed both to appeal to Kreuzburg s large migrant or postmigrant population, and to engage artists with this background. Langhoff was born in Turkey but moved to Germany as a young child. She was active in the German film industry before moving into the theatre, although her connections to both artistic spheres were close as suggested by her 44 Nina Peters, Die Umkehrung des eigenen Blickes: Beobachtungen und Bekundungen aus dem Blickwinkel Berliner Theater, in Theater und Migration: Herausforderungen für Kulturpolitik und Theaterpraxis, ed. by Wolfgang Schneider (Bielefeld: transcript, 2011), pp (p. 171). 45 Lilienthal, quoted in Frank Raddatz, HAU 1, 2, 3: Matthias Lilienthal im Gespräch, Theater der Zeit, 63.2 (2008), (p. 18). 46 This loose structure and its benefits in terms of opening doors for artists with a background of migration is also discussed in detail by Peters, pp Lilienthal, quoted in Raddatz, HAU, p

159 marriage to Lukas Langhoff, whose grandfather, Wolfgang, father, Thomas, and uncle, Matthias, are renowned German directors. 48 While Lilienthal s approach to the HAU provided the framework within which the Beyond Belonging Festival came into operation, it was Shermin Langhoff who was instrumental in the creation of Schwarze Jungfrauen. With the upcoming Beyond Belonging festival in mind, the focus of which was Migration hoch 2 Migranten, die die künstlerische Aufarbeitung der Migration schaffen, Langhoff approached Zaimoglu with a commission for a sort of Kanak Sprak or Koppstoff reloaded. 49 Zaimoglu, together with Senkel, accepted the commission but decided to shift the focus to Muslim women in Germany. 50 As can be seen from the outline of the commissioning context provided here, female agency had a decided role to play in the play s commission and the premiere s dramaturgy, to say nothing of the narrative choice exercised by the women supposedly interviewed by Zaimoglu. The focus on creating a space within which postmigrant artists can be heard is also important to bear in mind when looking at Zaimoglu s own emphasis on the women whom he interviewed as eine Minderheit in der Minderheit, in der Minderheit, in der Mehrheitsgesellschaft : that is, as women who practise a radical version of a religion, within a postmigrant community which includes a range of both religious and secular thought systems, within a nation-state that still overwhelmingly self-identifies on the basis of shared (German) ethnicity and a Christian past. 51 Matthes suggests such positioning implies a limited reference to reality, which does not, however, prevent audiences from potentially perceiving the play as a means of gaining information about Islam. 52 Rather than an act of representation designed to shed light on a typical migrant life (as indeed the play often seems to have been understood), the women thus 48 Both Wolfgang and Thomas were artistic directors of the Deutsches Theater, while Matthias directed to acclaim at the Berliner Ensemble and Volksbühne before moving to West Germany in See Chapter One of this thesis on Emine Sevgi Özdamar s work with Matthias Langhoff. 49 Shermin Langhoff, quoted in Hartmut Krug, Postmigrantismus für alle, Freitag ( ) < > [last accessed 07/08/2011], n. pag. See also El Hissy, p Feridun Zaimoglu, personal interview, Kiel, 05/06/ Zaimoglu, personal interview. Zaimoglu refers to the Minderheit in der Minderheit in der Minderheit in multiple other published interviews, and this is also commented on in El Hissy, p. 118; Matthes, Authentic, p Matthes, Authentic, p. 208; p

160 form a limit case allowing the playwright to probe the areas of postmigrant Germany wo es kracht. 53 As this and the following chapter will show, one of these areas is precisely the presence of Turkish-German artists and their artistic products on Germany s stages and the assumptions of authenticity which often accompany them. 54 In recent years, a concern with migration as a subject has often been combined with the choice of the documentary or semi-documentary as a form on German stages, creating a particular Verquickung von Migration und Doku in the German theatrical sphere. 55 Katrin Sieg problematises this Verquickung when she links the contemporary turn to documentary theatre with assertions of authenticity and sociological notions of the real often used in public discourse to present postmigrant citizens of Germany as Other. 56 At the same time, she highlights the semi-documentary theatre performed at the Ballhaus Naunynstraße in general as a renewed attempt to claim inclusion and participation through personal narratives that oppose the intensification of exclusion following 9/11 and its European imitations. 57 An examination of the power relationships at work between dramatist, director, and the supposed original interviewees of the play, must also therefore be accompanied by a consideration of the relationships between the postmigrant theatre practitioners involved in the premiere s commission and production and the broader theatrical establishment in Germany. I. A. Çelik makes some move towards this in her discussion of the potentially problematic role of the audience in the power dynamics of the play. In doing so she positions Zaimoglu in a similar way to Ruth Mandel. Directly after mentioning Zaimoglu, Mandel argues: 53 Zaimoglu, personal interview. 54 See also Nurkan Erpulat s comments in Chapter One. 55 Mark Terkessidis, Die Heimsuchung der Migration. Die Frage der interkulturellen Öffnung des Theaters, Neue Spieler, alte Städte: Favoriten 2010, ed. by Aenne Quiñones und Tom Mustroph (Dortmund: Theater der Zeit/Theaterfestival Favoriten: 2010), 5-10 (p. 7). Also quoted in Sandra Czerwonka, Nicht Mangel, sondern Besonderheit: Die Spiegelung des Migrationsbegriffs auf deutschen Bühnen, in Theater und Migration: Herausforderungen für Kulturpolitik und Theaterpraxis, ed. by Wolfgang Schneider (Bielefeld: transcript, 2011), pp (p. 78). Examples include homestories by Nuran David Calis (Schauspiel Essen, 2006) and Jenseits: Bist du Türke oder bist du schwul? by Nurkan Erpulat and Tunçay Kulaougly (HAU Berlin, 2008). 56 Sieg, Class, p Ibid., p

161 mimetic processes are at work in the act of ethnicization, in the production of cultural brokers whom I call ethnic professionals and professional ethnics. In a sense their work is doubly mimetic, in that at once they stage a representation of the collectivity of Turkish migrants, just as they model themselves on native German elites. This renders them complicit in ethnic stereotyping, a kind of mimetic staging in order to target specific audiences and cater to explicit tastes. 58 However, I. A. Çelik s discussion of Zaimoglu s target audience remains determinedly abstract. 59 Although the premiere and many subsequent productions may indeed have attracted largely German-German audiences, as can be seen through the closer look at the commissioning context provided above, this was not the primary aim of the commission. Katharina Keim also raises the question of the audience of the Schwarze Jungfrauen premiere in her article on religious fundamentalism in contemporary German theatre but does so in a more concrete manner. Keim refers us to Neco Çelik s comment in a 2006 interview with Theater heute that he was disappointed that the audience was 95 percent German; a fact which would seem to support I. A. Çelik s reading. 60 It is important to stress, though, that Neco Çelik s comment was made during the initial run of the premiere production at the HAU and should be understood as relevant to that particular context. Indeed, comments by the artistic director of the HAU, Matthias Lilienthal, in 2008 can be used to contextualise and add to this information: Wenn wir bei den Migrationsfestivals vielleicht 50% migrantische Besucher haben, bin ich total stolz, wenn es beim Restprogramm mal 3% sind. 61 Looking at Schwarze Jungfrauen in the light of its subsequent impact, it is important to be aware of how significant this change in the audience at the HAU was. Rather 58 Mandel, p I. A. Çelik, p Neco Çelik quoted in Eva Behrendt and Franz Wille, Mal sehen was Gott sagt, Theater heute, 47.5 (2006), 43-45, (p. 45); Keim, Transkultureller Fundamentalismus, p. 82. The Çelik interview is also referred to as evidence for a mainly native German audience in Matthes, Authentic, p In the German context until recently relatively little market research has been done into audience members background, and, unfortunately, I have not been able to access any such data from the theatres themselves thus far. For more information see Zentrum für Audience Development, Besucherforschung in öffentlichen deutschen Kulturinstitutionen, vol.1 (Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin, 2007), < > [last accessed 12/06/2011], p Matthias Lilenthal, quoted in Raddatz, HAU, p

162 than a purely exoticist dynamic in which Muslim ideas and Turkish bodies are staged for German eyes, in Berlin, as in many other places, the subject matter of the play also seems to have been a draw in both creating new audiences for this theatre and opening the theatre to a broader section of the Berlin population. 62 In this chapter I will focus on the power relationships at work between the postmigrant theatre practitioners involved in the premiere s commission and production, and the broader theatrical establishment in Germany. I will return to the world premiere in this chapter with a more historicist approach, as well as bringing in discussion of the multiple subsequent productions of Schwarze Jungfrauen in my examination of the play. Building on the work by Sieg, El Hissy, and I. A. Çelik, all of whom make reference not only to the dramatic text but also to the aesthetics of the world premiere of the play, for each production examined here I will draw on sources ranging from the published monologues, to video recordings, Strichfassungen, reviews, programmes, and marketing materials in my analysis of productions of Schwarze Jungfrauen as well as on interviews conducted with the directors involved. The sources consulted in this chapter were accessed in the archives of Rowohlt Theater Verlag in Reinbek, at the Hannover Theatermuseum, in the archives of the individual theatres, or were kindly supplied by the dramaturges, directors, and publicists of the respective theatres. 4.3 Mimeticism, Subalternity, and an Unheimliche Emanzipation As already noted, the form of the dramatic text of Schwarze Jungfrauen is very similar to that of Zaimoglu s early prose works, Kanak Sprak (1995) and Koppstoff (1998). Viewing the piece within the terms of its commission, however, arguably means that for Zaimoglu this piece can be seen as a step away from the pose of Vertretung (political representation) perhaps imposed by a mimeticist reception and towards that of Darstellung (artistic representation). 63 Warner in particular stresses that Zaimoglu 62 Each of the other productions I have highlighted so far in took place in theatres with very different profiles to that of the HAU. Multiple and perhaps changing audiences must therefore be taken into account if the power dynamics inherent in the play s broader success and reception are to be considered. 63 Cf, Spivak. For a discussion of this in relation to Chow, see Mani, Cosmopolitical Claims, p

163 has in recent years emphasised his role as writer rather than voice. 64 As Matthes also indicates, at the time of Schwarze Jungfrauen, this shift can clearly be seen in interviews which Zaimoglu gave about his desire to give up his place in the annual Deutsche Islamkonferenz for a Neo-Muslima. 65 In one interview, he explained: wenn man davon spricht, dass die Teilnehmer des Islamgipfels stellvertretend für andere Muslime und Muslima sprechen sollen, dann bitte ich darum, auch eine junge Neo-Muslima auszuwählen [...]. Ich fühlte mich geschmeichelt, als man mich zum Teilnehmer der Islamkonferenz ernannte. Ich fand mich aber in den Zuschreibungen nicht wieder. Ich bin kein säkularer Muslim und natürlich auch kein Orthodoxer. Ich bin ein Schriftsteller. 66 The invitation to speak at the Islamkonferenz was closely tied to the impact of Schwarze Jungfrauen and Matthes suggests that Zaimoglu s path from radical to serious writer and his public avowal of his faith have given him the credibility of the postmigrant intellectual with Islamic expertise. 67 For Zaimoglu, if not for those receiving his work, however, there is clearly a significant difference between the presentation of the Neo-Muslimas views in the form of a play in an aesthetic sphere, and in the form of statements in a political forum. At the same time, Zaimoglu does seem to emphasise a link to reality in the interviews which have often accompanied productions of Schwarze Jungfrauen in programmes or preview articles. 68 His narratives of the play s origins in interview material often emphasise the terms of engagement he sets with the women in the play s title using Authentisierungsstrategien similar to those which Julia Abel identifies in the forewords of Kanak Sprak and Koppstoff. 69 A good example is the following 64 Warner, p Mani discusses darstellen vs vertreten: Cosmopolitical Claims, p Matthes, Authentic, pp Feridun Zaimoglu, quoted in Feridun Zaimoglu and Anna Reimann, Die Idee eines deutschen Islams begeistert mich, Spiegel Online, 24/04/2007, < [last accessed 26/08/2014]. Zaimoglu s participation in the Islamkonferenz is also discussed by I. A. Çelik and the final two sentences of this quotation are also quoted there: p Matthes, p Here I am quoting Reinelt, p Julia Abel speaks of Authentisierungsstrategien, such as the story of how the text developed, the orality of the language used in the texts, and the authenticating gesture of Zaimoglu signing and dating 161

164 quotation from the programme of the 2007 Austrian premiere (directed by Lars-Ole Walburg) in which Zaimoglu explains the interview situation with the play s subjects as follows: Sie wussten um mich, sie wussten um meine Publikationen und sie kannten mein Verfahren. Sie wussten, ihre Worte werden transkribiert, dann in meine Kunstsprache übertragen und schließlich als Teil eines Theaterstückes in einen bestimmten Kontext gestellt. [...] Das war ihnen natürlich auch ein wenig suspekt. Aber sie haben sich damit einverstanden erklärt, da sie so die Gelegenheit hatten, zu sagen, wer sie sind, was sie denken, wo sie stehen. 70 This emphasis on transcription, setting the terms of the interview and permission certainly seems to suggest that a concern with truthful representation and perhaps knowledge production stands at the centre of Schwarze Jungfrauen. 71 Indeed, as Matthes points out, despite what she herself sees as the playful interference of the playwright in the mediation of the women s words, the play was largely received as an authentic portrayal of Muslim women in Germany. 72 This is an understanding which Matthes sees as being key to the play s enthusiastic reception and, I would add, to its frequent production. 73 The use of the interview as document in theatre is worth examining further, though. Keim, in a separate article to that which addresses Schwarze Jungfrauen, points out that our conception of the document has changed since Erwin Piscator s first experiments with documentary theatre in early twentieth-century Germany, a fact the foreword, which created a sense of legitimacy within Kanak Sprak. Julia Abel, Konstruktion authentischer Stimmen: Zum Verhältnis von Stimme und Identität in Feridun Zaimoglus Kanak Sprak, in Stimme(n) im Text: Narratologische Positionsbestimmungen, ed. by Andreas Blödorn et al. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006), pp (pp , n. 37). Similarly for Warner, authenticity is related to authorization, officialization, and legitimization : it appears as an effect of relation between source and author rather than relying on a conflation of the two: Warner, pp Burgtheater, programme. 71 Cf. the discussion of Zaimoglu s prose work in Warner, pp ; Abel, pp Notably this knowledge production was not just for German-Germans but also for postmigrant Germans such as Zaimoglu himself, who although self-identifying as a Muslim, does not share the extreme beliefs of the characters of Schwarze Jungfrauen. 72 Matthes, p. 209; p This is also suggested by Halle s reading of the play s reviews: Randall Halle, Experiments in Turkish-German Film-Making: Ayşe Polat, Kutluğ Ataman, Neco Çelik, Aysun Bademsoy and Kanak Attak, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 7.1 (2009), (p. 44). 73 Matthes, Authentic, pp

165 reflected in the growth of contemporary semi-documentary or postdramatic documentary theatre there. 74 In particular Keim points to the frequent usage of the egodocument or Selbstzeugnisse in the German and broader European context: Darunter sind freiwillige Aussagen einer Person zu sich zu verstehen, ohne Hinzunahme administrativ-juristischer Datensammlungen zu eben dieser Person. 75 The somewhat absurd assumption implicit in this development is that such egodocuments are not in themselves mediated through selective self-narration. However, this relates to what Charles Taylor has identified as the predominant ethic of our age: being authentic in the sense of being true to oneself. 76 For Taylor, authenticity is largely associated with an emancipatory freeing of the self from rules imposed by restrictive power structures, traditions or religions. 77 In this concept of authenticity, self-articulation becomes linked to emancipation and empowerment; the outer move from being spoken for to speaking is perceived to mirror an inner rejection of submission to outside authority. 78 Curiously, Zaimoglu himself claims that although the texts of Schwarze Jungfrauen themselves are not authentic in the sense of unmediated, die Figuren [sind] extrem authentisch [ ], weil sie sich ausschließlich auf ihre eigene Biografie beziehen. Sie sind in ihrem radikalen Glauben immer sich selbst. 79 As Matthes highlights in her own discussion of dissident Islam as one way of thinking through Muslim authenticity in the play, the monologues certainly present women who perceive themselves as assertive individuals and [t]his individuality is something they repeatedly reinforce verbally through continued references to the self. 80 This, it would seem, is authenticity in Taylor s sense of the word and, although she does not refer to Taylor, it is the presence of this ethic within the monologues which I. A. Çelik seems to find so disturbing. As noted in 4.2, I. A. Çelik s critique in particular rests on Zaimoglu s phrasing of the women s choices in terms which make them 74 Keim argues that these two terms are generally used synonymously: Keim, Einbruch, p Ibid., p Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), passim. 77 Ibid. 78 See Charles Taylor, The Politics of Recognition, in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp (p. 25). 79 Zaimoglu, quoted in Burgtheater, programme, n. pag. 80 Matthes, pp

166 comprehensible to the Western audience with a liberal tradition and so meeting a demand for seeing Muslim women speak and in a comprehensible manner as liberal subjects whose emancipation can be assessed and evaluated according to Western standards. 81 I. A. Çelik thus highlights the use of Christianised and sexual vocabulary to suggest that the Muslim woman is repackaged or retranslated to fit a more readily comprehensible, and marketable, model of what an emancipated woman might be. The high political stakes involved in this discussion become clearer if we relate the question of the extent to which the Muslim woman speaks here to the potential overlap of this figure with that of the third world woman in Germany; or subaltern. 82 The silencing of the subaltern is a process which Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak vividly describes as follows: Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the third-world woman caught between tradition and modernization. 83 Notably rather than simply being an issue of self-articulation, however, in Spivak s description of subalternity above, it is precisely the inability of a figure to fit comfortably into the category of authentic native or authentic modern which excludes her from public discourse; that is, from speaking and being heard. While Rey Chow s concept of coercive mimeticism focuses on the effects of the pressure put on the ethnicised self to perform towards one model or another, here we can see that mimeticism also relates to the way in which that self is received, or edited for reception. Zaimoglu is a very self-aware writer, however, and seldom invokes a particular discourse uncritically, whether it be liberal multiculturalism, militant Islamism, neoliberal humanism, or Christianised understandings of Muslim practice. This self- 81 I. A. Çelik, p El Hissy, for example, discusses the play as one in which an Inversion des Verstummens (muslimischer) Frauen takes place: p I find her subsequent reading of the mise-en-scène as an allusion to the call to prayer in which the women take on the role of public voice of Islam traditionally reserved for the male Muezzin somewhat forced, however. 83 Spivak, p

167 awareness was an important factor for Dickinson et al. in their reflections on translating Koppstoff: they speak of attempting to reflect the text s own selfawareness of the very clichés it criticises, and also the risk it runs of simply becoming another cliché. 84 Similarly, as El Hissy points out, Schwarze Jungfrauen certainly offers not only a picture but also a critique of the commercialisation of Islam, a factor which I would suggest is related to I. A. Çelik s criticism of the play as selling out the Muslim woman. El Hissy argues that: Mit ihrer Sprache und ihrem Lebensstil werben die Jungfrauen für eine moderne Modeware, den Lifestyle-Islam. 85 However, the neo-liberal appropriation or consumption of Islam is simultaneously criticised in specific instances of the women s texts. El Hissy draws attention, for example, to the criticism of the fashion industry s profit from the headscarf as accessory by the woman in monologue four, and to anger expressed by the woman in monologue five at the role of the broader culture industry in profiting from the dangerous glamour currently surrounding Islam. 86 Like Matthes, she also highlights the woman of monologue three s awareness of her Marktwert as a Muslim woman in the German sexual economy. 87 The consumption of Islam by neo-liberalism can thus also be read as part of the critique which not only the characters, but the play as a whole offers. 88 Equally, the presence of a Christianised language of confession in the play might have multiple functions. While I. A. Çelik uses the presence of the term beichten in the Muslim mouths of the Schwarze Jungfrauen as inspiration for a Foucauldian critique of the play, El Hissy identifies this as an example of religious syncretism, present in contemporary Germany. 89 The blending of religious languages within the play could thus be understood as a way of critiquing the idea that Islam and 84 Dickinson et al., p El Hissy, p Ibid., p Ibid., pp Matthes also makes reference to the Marktwert comment, suggesting that the woman of monologue three sees women as goods and not as individuals : Authentic, p Such a reading would be further supported by Karin Yeşilada s analysis of the merging of Marxist critique and religious perspective in Zaimoglu s Gottes Krieger (2004): Karin Yeşilada, Gotteskrieger-Konfigurationen des radikalen Islam in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsprosa, in Türkisch-deutscher Kulturkontakt und Kulturtransfer: Kontroversen und Lernprozesse, ed. by Şeyda Özil et al., Türkisch-deutsche Studien, 1 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010) pp (p. 200). Keim also highlights that Islam itself is posited as an alternative to, and critique of, Western consumerism and its effects on female representation in several monologues: Transkultureller, p El Hissy, pp While I. A. Çelik uses the presence of the term beichten in Schwarze Jungfrauen as inspiration for a Foucauldian critique of the play, a further possibility would be that it actively clues us in to one already present in the text. 165

168 the West form two impermeable blocs. This bloc-thinking is, as authors and political or religious commentators such as Navid Kermani point out, absurd when one looks at the situation of Germany itself, where Muslims are not only products of their religious belief but also of the German schooling system and state socialisation. 90 Indeed, the adoption of Christian beliefs and language is the focus of the wrath of one of the monologues not included in the world premiere: in monologue eight, a radical young woman accuses her sister, who is also a practising Muslim, of Christian Blödsinn : 91 Meine Schwester ist eine naïve, großärschige Nonnenmuslima. [...] Sie hält sich an den Buchstaben des Gesetzes, doch das Gesetz kommt von Gott, und es lässt sich nicht zum Leitfaden für Schöner Leben herabwürdigen. 92 While this could be seen as purist separatism, on closer reflection it appears to be the transference of a Christian-style reliance on the holy book for instruction (and an overindulgence in chocolate) which disgusts the speaker in this monologue. Coming back to the aims of the festival for which the play was commissioned, creating a public space for intra-islamic contestation is thus arguably as much of an aim of the play as presenting the complexities of Islam to that public might be. 93 Indeed, the more the women s Islamic practice is translated into Christianised terms, arguably the less comprehensible it becomes. Using the example of the term orthodoxy, Robert Langer and Udo Simon discuss some of the issues created by attempting to understand Islamic theology and practice via Christian terminology: 90 See, for example, the anecdote on the disparity between what Kermani was taught at school in Germany about Islam and the Islamic practice he knew from his homelife: Navid Kermani, Wer ist Wir? Deutschland und seine Muslime (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2009), pp Zaimoglu/Senkel, Schwarze Jungfrauen, p Ibid., p In her reading of the play in relation to Muslim women s autobiographical narratives prevalent in the literary market at the time, Sieg suggests that the play refers to and contests the self-representations of Muslims in the European public sphere : Black Virgins, p See also Matthes reading of Zaimoglu s artistic interpretation of the original interviews as one which allows him to position himself as a practising Muslim writer who is also a critical observer of Islam and Muslims : Authentic, p Matthes also highlights the fact that the monologues show a range of Islamic practices, and the women s own issues with their religion: ibid., p

169 There are [sic] no generally accepted religious authority, no hierarchy, or ecclesiastical office that would decide for all Muslims what is the right belief. Decision-making is quite different from what one finds in Eastern Christendom, from whence the notion is borrowed. [...] Moreover, the orthodoxy versus heresy scheme is denounced as a dichotomy of Eurocentric interpretive categories that fails to grasp the pluralism and complexity characteristic of Muslim religious life. Instead, it is argued, one should let Islamic tradition speak for itself. 94 Although as I. A. Çelik points out theatre critics were overwhelmingly positive about the world premiere, my own research into anecdotes of audience reactions and the content of many of the reviews suggest that the play presented figures which many were excited by but did not in actual fact find easy to comprehend. 95 For example, in his review of the premiere production, Reinhard Wengierek refers to the play as an offenherzigen Blick in die unsäglichen Abgründe einer unheimlichen Emanzipation, die das Moderne mit dem Archaischen, das Liberale mit dem fundamentalistischen Religiösen verquickt. 96 While attempting to fit the world views articulated in the monologues into his own, each familiar concept appears distorted to Wengierek, in a way which he registers as unheimlich. Similarly Kirsten Riesselmann of the tageszeitung reports, [w]as sie sagen, hat für alle, die unter dem Kopftuch ein unterdrücktes Duckmäuschen vermuten, die Qualität eines halben Kulturschocks. 97 As Matthes argues in her close reading of the dramatic text as printed in Theater heute, [i]t is precisely this [kind of] contradiction which encourages audiences to reassess their own perceptions of, and opinions on, Islam. 98 Zaimoglu s semi-translation of, or play with, Christianised language could be seen as the linguistic variant of what Meyda Yeğenoğlu calls Barthes strip-tease metaphor, in which the dress and all other obstacles that prevent the colonial gaze 94 Robert Langer and Udo Simon, The Dynamics of Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy. Dealing with divergence in Muslim Discourses and Islamic Studies, Die Welt des Islams, 48 (2007), (p. 273). For a more detailed discussion of conservative and progressive forms of Islam present in the monologues, see Matthes, Authentic, pp I. A. Çelik, p Reinhard Wengierek, Schwarze Messe des realen Irrsinns, Theater heute, 48.5 (2007), (p. 24). 97 Kirsten Riesselmann, Radikaler Glauben, die tageszeitung, 20/03/ Matthes, Authentic, p On tradition and modernity in the play see also El Hissy, p

170 from obtaining knowledge about these women need to be removed. 99 However, the inadequate translation of Muslim religious practices created by the use of Christianised language arguably works more to flag up the knowledge left unobtained by the mere watching of the play. Rather than the use of terms such as beichten and the discussion of sexuality making the women comprehensible, it is arguably the liberal vocabulary of emancipation and the emphasis which the Schwarze Jungfrauen lay on individualisation which the reviewers struggle to comprehend as compatible with a view of Islam dominant at the time. 100 Certainly, as Katrin Sieg highlights, the emphasis in Schwarze Jungfrauen on Islam as a means of emancipation and path to self-expression stands in opposition to a discourse already prevalent in 2006 which presents Islam as inherently antithetical to supposedly European values such as women s and gay rights. 101 However, it also interrupts a related narrative which, following the Danish cartoon controversy of late 2005 and early 2006, set freedom of (artistic) expression against Muslim rage. 102 That this was prevalent in the theatrical sphere in Germany as much as in the mainstream media at the time is illustrated by the fact that the focus of Christopher Balme s analysis of this discourse is the discussions surrounding the revival of Hans 99 Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p I. A. Çelik explicitly draws on this work in her analysis: p In the post-christian secular context the individual is seen as a product of the modern, that is, of a break with religious tradition as authority. This is Foucault s position as drawn on in I. A. Çelik, p Islam is structured very differently from Christianity, however, and has always emphasised a direct relationship between worshipper and Allah, in which believers must decide which leaders and teachings to use as models for their own lives, rather than being dependant on a church-like structure mediating this (Langer and Simon, p. 273). Neco Çelik, as well as academic commentators, highlight the fact that [i]m Islam ist das Individuum ein sehr wichtiger Faktor : Neco Celik, quoted in Behrendt and Wille, Mal sehen, p. 44. See also Kermani, pp for a discussion of individualism and Islam. 101 Sieg, Black Virgins, pp ; Sieg, Class, p This is a discourse referred to by other scholars as sexual nationalism: see Sarah Bracke, From Saving Women to Saving Gays : Rescue Narratives and Their Dis/Continuities, European Journal of Women s Studies, 19.2 (2012), El Hissy also compares the prevalent portrayal of Islam as a religion which oppresses women to that of Schwarze Jungfrauen, albeit rather more negatively: p Her main argument with regards to the women s assertions of individuality is that this is a rejection of male power: ibid., p Christopher Balme discusses the after-effects of this controversy in Germany and their impact on the theatrical sphere there in: Gefährliche Bilder: Theater und Öffentlichkeit in einer multireligiösen Gesellschaft, in Irritation und Vermittlung: Theater in einer interkulturellen und multireligiösen Gesellschaft, ed. by Wolfgang Sting et al. (Berlin: LIT Verlag Dr. W. Hopf, 2010), pp Muslim Rage was a Newsweek front page headline from September 2012 which epitomised the anti-islamic sentiment growing in this period. For examples of the creative and parodic online responses to this headline, see: Alexander Hotz, Newsweek Muslim Rage Cover Invokes a Rage of its Own, US News Blog, The Guardian, 17/09/2012 < [last accessed 27/06/2014]. 168

171 Neuenfels production of the Mozart Opera Idomeneo at the Deutsche Oper, Berlin, which took place a few months after the Schwarze Jungfrauen premiere in September This production, which had been first performed in 2003, included a scene in which the Prophet Mohammed s severed head appears along with those of Christ, Buddha, and Neptune. As Balme explains, in 2006 the planned revival was abruptly called off following advice from the police and reported suggestions of an anonymous Islamic threat to the opera house. 104 This triggered a storm of protest in the German media in which, as Balme succinctly explains, the need to defend künstlerische Freiheit was pitched against capitulation to islamischen Fanatismus, adding to a situation in which das Prinzip der künstlerischen Freiheit dient einer antimultikulturellen Agenda. 105 The jarring effect of the language of Schwarze Jungfrauen, while indeed overwriting the original women s voices, thus arguably presents a forceful interruption to the violent shuttling which creates the subaltern state of the third world woman and so disrupts the categories through which mimeticism operates. The extent to which the Beyond Belonging Festival s intention of creating space for postmigrant artists to be heard was over-ridden in the process remains to be explored, however. With this in mind, I turn now to the premiere production. 4.4 Sci-Fi and the Semi-Documentary: Spielberg meets Kreuzberg. Neco Çelik, who was an up-and-coming film director at the time, was approached to direct the world premiere of Schwarze Jungfrauen by Shermin Langhoff. Knowing Zaimoglu s work from earlier encounters with him at book readings, he agreed to the project blind. On reading Schwarze Jungfrauen he claims his first reaction was laughter a far cry from the serious tone of several reviewers reactions to the 103 Balme, Gefährliche Bilder, pp The presence of this discourse within the theatrical sphere on a transnational European level is discussed in Milija Gluhovic s current work: Milija Gluhovic, unpublished keynote address, given at Pushing Form: Innovation and Interconnection in Contemporary European Performance, NUI Galway, 24/04/2014. In this lecture Gluhovic also discussed the Idomeneo controversy. 104 Balme, Gefährliche Bilder, p Ibid., p

172 premiere. 106 When I interviewed him in 2012, Neco Çelik elaborated on his own reaction and its relationship to the supposed sources of the play: Ich lache immer über Feriduns Bücher, weil [ ] es für mich schwarzer Humor [ist]. Es ist natürlich viel Wahrheit, viel Tragisches dabei, aber schwarzer Humor lebt davon. 107 He suggests that Zaimoglu could have spoken with one woman and the rest could be fantasy: Wir wissen es nicht [...] es ist entweder seine Fantasie oder es stimmt, also das können wir ihm nicht beweisen. 108 While, as discussed in 4.2, some critics problematize the unclear delineation between original speech and authorial intervention present in the play, for Neco Çelik this was part of what he describes as the black humour (or gallows humour) of Zaimoglu s writing. 109 This rather more ambiguous relationship is reflected in the programme for the world premiere under Çelik at the HAU. Here the emphasis is set by the inclusion of a quotation from monologue seven: Was treibe ich hier für ein billiges Spiel? Ich weiss [sic] doch, dass ich Zumutung gegen Vermutung setze. Ihr glaubt zu wissen, wie ich bin[,] und ich rede dagegen an um einen richtig vulgären Eindruck zu hinterlassen. Aber ich bin tatsächlich so und alles ist wahr. Fast alles ist wahr. 110 The first line of this quotation is in fact cut from the HAU Strichfassung, but appears in full in the programme, suggesting that its placement there is programmatic for the play s approach, rather than a mere example of the text. The authenticity of the source material is purposefully destabilised in this quotation as the truth claim is invoked and immediately, playfully, revoked. Presented on the same page as information on the 106 Neco Çelik, personal interview, Berlin, 23/05/2012. Çelik also mentions this in several interviews at the time of the premiere, see for example Behrendt and Wille, Mal sehen, p Çelik, personal interview. 108 Ibid. 109 Such a reading would fit with Matthes view of the play as a ludic text designed to provoke an audience with its conflicting suggestions of authenticity: Authenticity, pp El Hissy, on the other hand, emphasises the humorous tone of representations of Muslim women in TV programmes such as Türkisch für Anfänger but places this in contrast to einen gewaltsamen, hasserfüllten Ton she identifies as characteristic of Schwarze Jungfrauen: p HAU, Schwarze Jungfrauen, programme (Berlin: HAU, 2006), [1-4] ([p. 3]). Accessed in the holdings of Rowohlt Theater Verlag, Reinbek. File Zaimoglu: Schwarze Jungfrauen Berlin U 06. The quotation is taken from monologue seven, p. 37 of the uncut dramatic text as distributed by the Rowohlt Theater Verlag (Zaimoglu/Senkel, 2006). 170

173 mediating director and author, this quotation thus functions in its turn to playfully undermine the documentary claim of Zaimoglu. 111 Figure 14. Publicity Photograph showing the mise-en-scène of the premiere production of Schwarze Jungfrauen. The stage is fully lit here unlike in the recorded performance. Image Maifoto/Ute Langkafel, jungfrauen 0094, publicity photograph, 15/03/2006, < 211/> [last accessed 26/08/2014]. As Claudia Breger has also highlighted, the deliberately abstract mise-en-scène certainly did not attempt to create an aura of documentary facticity. 112 The stage began in darkness, the only sound a low-level ominous tone, similar to static on a wire. Then, as the curtain slowly drew back across the stage to reveal a grid of six equally sized and identical performance spaces (see Figure 14), squares of bright neon red, green and yellow light, followed occasionally by a searing white, began to flash out from the stage. This was accompaniment by a low, ominous growl which then built to a series of tones. Both light and tone patterns increased in speed and it was only during this faster strobing sequence that the boxes were revealed to contain women dressed in black raincoats and headscarves which covered wigs of long hair. To the 111 Ibid. 112 Breger, Aesthetics, pp

174 accompaniment of these tones and lights the women stripped down to an androgynous alien-like base costume of flesh-coloured long-johns, long-sleeved t-shirts and bald caps, before disappearing again into darkness, leaving one box lit, in which the first actress began her monologue (Figure 15 Figure 17). 113 Figure 15. Screen shot of opening sequence. Taken from Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel, Schwarze Jungfrauen, dir. by Neco Çelik, audiovisual recording, HAU Berlin, Accessed thanks to Nermin and Neco Çelik Figure 16. Screen shot of opening sequence. Taken from Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel, Schwarze Jungfrauen, dir. by Neco Çelik, audiovisual recording. 113 Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel, Schwarze Jungfrauen, dir. by Neco Çelik, unpublished audiovisual recording, HAU Berlin, Berlin, Accessed thanks to Nermin and Neco Çelik. The mise-en-scène and staging of the premiere production is also described in detail in: Sieg, Black Virgins, pp ; I. A. Çelik, p. 119; El Hissy, pp This use of light and sound was also repeated in the production s closing sequence: Neco Çelik, Schwarze Jungfrauen. Elements of the opening and closing sequences can also be seen in: Gorki Theater, Schwarze Jungfrauen, promotional video, Berlin, 2014 < [last accessed 26/08/2014]. 172

175 Figure 17. Screen shot of opening sequence. Taken from Zaimoglu and Senkel, Schwarze Jungfrauen, dir. by Neco Çelik, audiovisual recording. Katrin Sieg, who examines the representation of sexuality within the play, summarises the effects of the audiovisual elements of the opening scene as follows: The repetitive, computer-generated melody emanating from the loudspeakers recalls the soundtrack to Steven Spielberg s 1977 science fiction movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and heralds, tongue in cheek, the arrival of aliens. 114 Sieg immediately moves on from this observation to focus on the costuming as a critical comment on European discourses which problematically link nudity with emancipation. 115 This intervention is extremely important given a context in which the supposed oppression symbolised by the headscarf has been used to suggest that Islam, and by extension many postmigrants, are incompatible with what are seen as European post-enlightenment values. 116 As interviews with Neco Çelik reveal, however, this striking opening sequence does more than just recall Spielberg s film, it explicitly references it (compare the use of light, shape, and costume in Figure 14 and Figure 21). 117 Indeed, in our Sieg, Black Virgins, p Ibid. 116 Ibid. See also Bracke, passim. 117 Neco Çelik, personal interview; Neco Çelik, quoted in Behrendt and Wille, Mal sehen, p. 44. Breger also notes Çelik s references to aliens in this interview and in some responses to the play, Aesthetics, pp In the conclusion to her chapter on a New Aesthetics of Proximity, Breger further suggests 173

176 interview, Neco Çelik emphasised how important Spielberg s film was for his conception of the premiere of Schwarze Jungfrauen: So kam ich dann auf die Idee, in Verbindung mit dem Film Unheimliche Begegnung der dritten Art von Spielberg [ ]. Die Geschichte ist sehr wichtig, weil die Leute haben eine Vision und wissen nicht, woher diese Vision kommt. Sie folgen dieser Vision und dann begegnen sie diesem UFO [ ]. Die Leute, die die Vision haben, sind eingeladen von den Außerirdischen, dahinzukommen. Erst dann begreifen sie das und sie versuchen die ganze Zeit, miteinander zu kommunizieren. Das war sozusagen entscheidend für mich: Dieses Bühnenbild so zu machen, dass eben, ohne dass die andere Seite antworten kann, ich die Information rübergebe. 118 Neither Sieg, nor the other commentators on Schwarze Jungfrauen thus far, consider the implications of this intertextual, indeed intermedial, reference. Instead as already noted, Sieg goes on to focus on the strip-tease sequence, which this audiovisual reference frames, as a separate subject of inquiry. 119 The strip-tease sequence is undoubtedly a striking aspect of the premiere production, in which there is otherwise little movement on stage. As Sieg, I. A. Çelik, and El Hissy have highlighted, this scene parodies a particular trope of European engagements with Muslim women: the desire to unveil the female Muslim subject and so make her visible, knowable, and disciplined. 120 I would argue though, that engaging with the fact that the striptease and reference to Close Encounters occur simultaneously, is revealing in terms of the framing of the production as a whole. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), the story of a mass encounter engineered by mysterious alien beings, is perhaps best known for the light-and-sound spectacular which forms the lengthy encounter scene at that his production produces an uncomfortably close encounter with the radical voices presented on stage : Breger, Aesthetics, p Hentschel also subtitles the section in which she also discusses Andres Veil s Der Kick together with Schwarze Jungfrauen Begegnung und Dokument Realität auf der Bühne, p Both of these may also be passing references to the Spielberg film. However, neither piece addresses Spielberg s film any more explicitly. 118 Neco Çelik, personal interview. 119 Sieg, Black Virgins, pp , p Sieg, Black Virgins, pp ; I. A. Çelik, pp ; El Hissy, pp

177 the climax of the film (see Figure 18 Figure 20). 121 In the central section of this sequence, a series of tones is played back and forth in order to establish contact between the US military and alien spacecraft which arrive at the base of a mountain named Devil s Tower. Each tone corresponds to a different light and, as the aliens play ever more complex variations for the humans to respond to, an epic sequence of light and tone emerges. 122 As the audiovisual recording of the 2006 production shows, this sequence is echoed by the neon-lit boxes and repeated tonal patterns of the opening and closing movements of Neco Çelik s production of Black Virgins (compare Figure 15 Figure 17 to Figure 18 Figure 20). 123 The eerie blue lighting and costuming of the actresses in Figure 14 is also strongly suggestive of Spielberg s particular representation of blue-lit, bald, humanoid aliens (see Figure 21). Figure 18. Screen Shot of the encounter scene taken from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, dir. by Steven Spielberg (Columbia Pictures, 1977). 121 Steven Spielberg, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (US: Columbia Pictures, 1977), 01:40:35-02:09: Ibid., 01:54:13-01:57: Zaimoglu and Senkel, Schwarze Jungfrauen, dir. by Neco Çelik, audiovisual recording. This can also be seen in the 2014 promotional video: Gorki Theater. 175

178 Figure 19. Screen Shot of the encounter scene taken from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, dir. by Steven Spielberg (Columbia Pictures, 1977). Figure 20. Screen Shot of the encounter scene taken from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, dir. by Steven Spielberg (Columbia Pictures, 1977). Figure 21. Screen Shot of the aliens leaving their spacecraft taken from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, dir. by Steven Spielberg (Columbia Pictures, 1977). 176

179 As Charlene Engel explains: the purpose of the meeting at Devil s Tower is not for the aliens to communicate in Terran languages. It seems from the aliens point of view to be an experiment to see if humans are capable of rapidly learning to communicate in an abstract language of light and sound. Their demonstration of that capacity makes them worth communicating with. 124 It is clear from the alien-like features of the costuming in Schwarze Jungfrauen that Neco Çelik places the play s female protagonists in the position of the aliens in this encounter (Figure 14). While this costuming indicates difference, it does not simply code the Muslim woman as radically other. Instead, the Close Encounters audiovisual cue suggests that this is difference which cannot be dismissed as either fundamentally incomprehensible or as a sign of underdevelopment and so unworthy of attention. This is significant as visual markers of Islam, such as the headscarf, are often perceived as signalling oppression and immaturity in the German context. 125 Tony Williams famously read Close Encounters as an authoritarian film, in which the longing for and complete submission to the aesthetically pleasing yet largely unknown higher being has fascist overtones. The sense of manifest destiny suggested by the combination of the American military with the American average Joe as the choice of first meaningful contact by the aliens has also helped cement the film s conservative reputation. 126 From one point of view then, the use of this film might seem to correspond dangerously to the anti-jewish and homophobic utterances of many of the black virgins. 127 Indeed, Sieg acknowledges that aspects of the 124 Charlene Engel, Language and The Music of the Spheres: Steven Spielberg s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Literature Film Quarterly, 24.4 (1996), (p. 381). 125 Rita Chin, Turkish Women, West German Feminists, and the Gendered Discourse on Muslim Cultural Difference, Public Culture, 22.3 (2010), (pp ). 126 Tony Williams, Close Encounters of the Authoritarian Kind, Wide Angle, 4.5 (1983), See also Peter Wright, Film and Television, , in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. by Mark Bould et al. (London: Routledge, 2009), pp (p. 92). 127 These are both highly problematic, however, the distance between dramatist and subject matter, as well as between director and subject matter should be stressed here. Some of the hate speech was cut in the HAU Strichfassung. The anti-jewish aspects of monologue three, for example, do not appear in the sections of monologue three used in the HAU Strichfassung (compare Popken and Kulaoğlu with Zaimoglu/Senkel, 2006, p. 14 and p. 16). On the problematic presence of homophobic hate speech in Zaimoglu s work, see Schmidt, p

180 monologues skim dangerously close to recent accusations of Islamo-fascism, although in the world premiere a German tradition of liberated sexuality as the radical antidote to fascism, which contributes to the construction of a post-fascist Europe, is equally played with. 128 However conservative the film may be, as Engel s words highlight, in Close Encounters it is the aliens who are superior in terms of technology and, as the music of the spheres which they use to communicate suggests, in terms of spirituality or evolution. This stands in contrast to the strand of Science Fiction which encodes the alien other as inferior and, as scholars of post-colonialism and science fiction such as Reid point out, often does so in racialised terms. 129 In Close Encounters then it is the aliens who set the terms of the engagement. By extension, in Black Virgins it is the Muslim women who agreed to be interviewed initially by Zaimoglu, together with the postmigrant artistic producers of the theatrical production, who set the terms of the theatrical encounter. In our 2012 interview, Neco Çelik commented further on the relationship with the audience he intended to create with Schwarze Jungfrauen. He outlined his thoughts on the presentation of the play as follows: Also war das sehr schnell klar, das muss statisch sein. Es muss ausgestellt werden. Es muss dem Zuschauer den Eindruck geben, [er] möchte was sagen, also [er] soll was sagen, aber [er] kann es nicht. Weil die Regeln des Theaters so sind, dass die Verabredung da ist. Und du sitzt und ich spiele dir was vor. 130 In this description, the audience does not subject the actresses on stage to a disciplining gaze, and nor does the text subject the Muslim women to a linguistic strip. 131 Rather, 128 Sieg, Black Virgins, p. 172; p In Sieg s reading of the world premiere Schwarze Jungfrauen ultimately reignites a postnational antifascism that demands an examination of European democracies internal contradictions : Black Virgins, p Reid, p El Hissy highlights the construction of the colonial world as female virgin body to be discovered and subjugated in colonialism in her exploration of what virginity might mean in Schwarze Jungfrauen: p N. Çelik, personal interview. 131 Sieg also notes that the play s presentation does not allow the audience to assume the comfortable position of those who already know better, who oversee the disciplining of an undemocratic other but are not themselves implicated in self-transformation : Black Virgins, p

181 the audience itself is disciplined by the conventions of the German theatrical event into a pose of attentive and silenced listening. Performance scholar Sue-Ellen Case points out that a performative and playful turn to science fiction occurs in afro-futurist music such as that of US-musician Sun Ra. There it functions as a means to imagine racialized people as powerful, in-control citizens of a different order of things and invest social relations with fictional rather than factual powers as instruments of change. 132 In the area of literary fiction and film John Rieder has also drawn attention to the generic and historical connection of science fiction to colonialism. 133 This connection has made science fiction a ready means for cementing, contesting or working through concepts of race, power, and alterity. 134 While operating in a different context and discourse of othering, in choosing what Case has called alien over alienation, Neco Çelik also pointedly embraces the fictional rather than the factual in his presentation of female Muslim subjectivities. 135 Rather than the 2006 production presenting itself as a true or real expression of Muslim women s voices (as Breger suggests a more typically documentary or naturalistic aesthetic might indicate), the staging thus highlights its own status as fantasy and artistic experimentation. 136 At the same time, as Neco Çelik s comments in our 2012 interview suggest, focusing on this playful reference becomes a highly productive way of reading the more serious questions of the power relationships surrounding the play and of reflecting on the presence of these power relationships in the real world. This reframes a seemingly documentary discourse on Islam as always constructed, but as therefore also open to reconstruction and so change. 137 Reading the premiere production of Schwarze Jungfrauen through the references to Close Encounters also highlights the role of invitation in the encounters which took place around the premiere. In Close Encounters, the hero Roy Neary feels a compulsion to travel to the place where the alien encounter will take place, after the 132 Sue-Ellen Case, Performing Science and the Virtual (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp Michelle Reid, Postcolonialism, in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. by Mark Bould et al. (London: Routledge, 2009), pp (p. 257). 134 Reid, p Case, p While Neco Çelik also mentions information in the interview quoted above, the mode in which this information is delivered is clearly important in terms of the power relations inherent in the play. 137 My analysis here provides one possible answer to questions raised by Breger who asks in which ways and for whom exactly the women are positioned as strangers and how exactly does a theatricalizing, (post-) Brechtian aesthetics of distanciation work here? : Breger, Aesthetics, p

182 aliens implant an image of the meeting place in his mind. He then becomes the first man to enter the alien spaceship because, as the other key figure of identification within the film, Lancombe, emphasises, Neary has been explicitly invited to the point of encounter by the aliens themselves. 138 Similarly, while it is extremely important to address questions of representation, potential voyeurism, and manipulation surrounding the subjects of Schwarze Jungfrauen, attention to the most explicit intertextual reference of the mise-en-scène suggests that we should also recognise the premiere production as an invitation. This invitation was extended not only by the HAU theatre to postmigrant artists to share their artistic concerns and views of the world, but also by those artists themselves, who in turn invited both German-German and postmigrant audiences to listen to and engage with their work. Mimesis rather than mimeticism is thus privileged, and however much a spectator may want to act as a voyeur, this becomes very difficult once s/he has been actively invited to look and listen. 4.5 Schwarze Jungfrauen as event sociologique. In Berlin the appearance of the actresses after the play seems to have had a cathartic effect, allowing the silenced audience to regain its voice. Neco Çelik describes this moment as follows: Die Leute waren so irritiert, dass sie, auch wenn es kein Publikumsgespräch gab, nicht nach Hause gegangen sind. Sie haben im Foyer gewartet und haben ein Gespräch erzwungen. [ ] Sie waren dann völlig durcheinander und haben eine Hoffnung, eine Art von Lichtblick, gebraucht. [ ] Der Lichtblick war immer besonders [präsent], wenn die Schauspielerinnen in ihren privaten Sachen in das Foyer gekommen sind und sie dann normale Frauen waren. Keine hat Kopftuch getragen und es ging immer so ein Raunen durch den Raum. Dass man diese Frauen nicht mal als Schauspielerinnen wahrgenommen hat, das war für mich [das Verrückte] Engel, p N. Çelik, personal interview. Breger highlights the overt theatricality of the premiere production as aiding the positive responses to the world premiere: Aesthetics, p. 236; p However, Sieg suggests 180

183 Çelik s description here returns us to the question in Chapter Two of this thesis of how audience members see the postmigrant actor. Rather than continuing a focus on the ethics and power relations at work when the women s voices or documentary object is mediated, it also shifts the focus to how the postmigrant professional as artistic mediator is received. This is an important issue which relates back to I. A. Çelik s and Matthes concern with the role Zaimoglu, as postmigrant artist, is assigned by the play. In order to give it ample space for discussion and highlight it as a question of the politics of professional practice rather than artistic representation I will make it the subject of Chapter Five, in which I examine Zaimoglu/Senkel s second documentary play Schattenstimmen. What I want to highlight here, though, is that viewing the premiere production as both aesthetic intervention and social event also reveals that post-show discussions, whether planned or impromptu, enabled encounters to take place not only between practitioners and audience members, but also between the various audience members gathered to see the production. Lars-Ole Walburg, for example, who later directed the Austrian premiere of Schwarze Jungfrauen related his experience of a HAU post-show discussion in which a Turkish audience member announced his daughter would never speak as the women in the play had, only to be corrected for his ignorance by his own wife. 140 As Walburg s anecdotal evidence suggests, these encounters took place not only between Germans and Turks, Christians, secularists, and Muslims, but also within supposed groups and even within families. Rather than simply informing Germans about postmigrants, the play can thus also be understood as a catalyst for reevaluation of assumptions amongst a variety of sectors of the audiences present. Such encounters were not limited to the performances of the premiere production. Christian Scholze of the Westfälisches Landestheater provides anecdotal evidence of ein sehr starkes Bedürfnis für ein Gespräch following performances of that the immediacy of the direct address created by the blocking in the world premiere encourages spectators to view actors as stand-ins for actual women, obscuring the activity of producer, writer and director as cultural mediators : Black Virgins, p I would suggest that the sci-fi framing of the play is designed precisely to avoid such a mode of viewing; however, it appears to be over-ridden by the use of so-called Ready-Mades or real people in other semi-documentary plays which address migration in Germany. 140 Walburg, personal interview. 181

184 Schwarze Jungfrauen by his theatre in the Ruhr area, which he met by ensuring, dass das Nachgespräch Teil der Inszenierung ist. 141 The importance of these discussions for the overall experience is reflected in their inclusion in the majority of reviews. 142 While this Inszenierung of the audience might suggest productions of the play as a space for an audience reaffirming their own middle-class, majority German identities, the pre-existing links between the Westfälisches Landestheater and local schools, as well as its remit for touring, ensured that in a region with such a high postmigrant population the audience was far from exclusively German-German. 143 The performances thus became events which literally offered a space for dialogue between individuals of Muslim and non-muslim faith as well as an opportunity for Muslims to reflect on their own identities. 144 The Close Encounters reference is thus productive in ways which Neco Çelek, Zaimoglu/Senkel and the Beyond Belonging Team could not have anticipated while developing the premiere production. B. H. Fairchild draws attention to Lancombe s interpretation of the alien encounter in Close Encounters as an event sociologique in order to move the focus from the UFO landing within the film to the phenomenon which the film became on distribution: Close Encounters is about a sociological rather than a scientific event, but the film is also a sociological event in itself. We, the 141 Christian Scholze, personal interview, Castrop-Rauxel, 13/05/2011. Similarly Lars-Ole Walburg recounts that at performances of his production of Schwarze Jungfrauen in Austria, wir haben jedes Mal ein Publikumsgespräch gemacht, es war auch jedes Mal nötig [...] Das Vestibül war immer voll irgendwie und die Leute haben sich heiß geredet : Walburg, personal interview. 142 In, for example, the anonymous review Schwarze Jungfrauen im Mumientuch, Der Westen, 16/02/2009, the centrality of the post-show discussion is reflected in the replacement of a photograph of the production with one of the discussion. This review was accessed in the holdings of the Regieassistenz, Westfälisches Landestheater. 143 The quotation here is from Breger, Aesthetics, p Breger raises this issue with respect to the world premiere; however, she also concludes that the visual aesthetics and mode of encounter there force a renegotiation rather than reassertion of identity on the part of the spectator. Information on the Westfälisches Landestheater is from Scholze, personal interview. 144 In fact, Gazelle: Das multikulturelle Frauenmagazin encourages its readers to attend the play for precisely this reason: Auch mehr Muslime sollten das Stück sehen, das sich schließlich auch mit ihnen befasst. Sie sollten sich nicht angegriffen oder in den Dreck gezogen fühlen. Denn dies ist sicherlich nicht beabsichtigt. Dafür weiß man als Muslim selbst nur zu gut, dass diese Figuren im realen Leben existieren. Die anschließende Diskussionsrunde gibt hier die Chance mit Muslimen und Nichtmuslimen in Kontakt zu treten und sich auszutauschen. Was heute, wo alle sich aus dem Weg gehen, eine wunderbare Chance ist. Anon., Schwarze Jungfrauen Ein Theaterstück das zum Nachdenken anregt, Gazelle: Das multikuturelle Frauenmagazin ([February] 2007). This review was accessed in the holdings of the Regieassistenz, Westfälisches Landestheater. 182

185 audience, become the content of the film. We swarm to the theater to witness a close encounter. 145 Drawing in turn on Fairchild s interpretation of Lancombe s comment within the film, an event sociologique may be a very good way to describe the post-show discussions described above, and the play s subsequent spread in multiple and aesthetically divergent productions across Germany. The emphasis on post-show discussions, that is, on theatre as a place of real interaction between people of a particular locality, is also interesting in terms of mimesis and mimeticism as it allows theatres to position themselves as a more authentic form of encounter than other media. Lars-Ole Walburg, the director of the 2007 Austrian premiere, which then later moved with him into the repertoire of the Schauspielhaus Hamburg, explained his own ambivalent feelings about the play in our interview in Referring to the potential of Schwarze Jungfrauen to explore post 9/11 fears of Islam within the German population as a reason for its popularity, Walburg said: Ich bin mir da auch nicht ganz sicher, ob das gut ist oder nicht, ob man das machen sollte auf dem Theater [...]. Ich musste mich so oft dafür rechtfertigen [...] Am Anfang zu den Schauspielerinnen in Wien, durchaus [...]. Und ich habe immer gemerkt in der etwas schwammigen Formulierung, alles, was das Nachdenken in anderen befördert, alles, was dann auch zu einem zweiten Schritt in der Kommunikation führt, kann nur gut sein. 146 Notably, what Walburg highlighted here was not the authenticity of the texts and their representation in his production, but rather the authenticity of the audience encounters provoked by the production as event. In a time of mass media and high technology, theatre, and particularly well-funded theatre, is frequently in the position of having to justify its own existence or necessity. In doing so the live nature of performance and 145 B. H. Fairchild, An Event Sociologique: Close Encounters, Journal of Popular Film, 6.4 (1978), (p. 343). 146 Walburg, personal interview. 183

186 the real presence and community-building potential of the theatrical audience is often highlighted. 147 Indeed, a determined direction towards what has begun to be called interkulturelles Mainstreaming, or efforts to normalise inclusive theatre practice, can certainly be seen at Schauspiel Hannover under Walburg s leadership. Since he moved there in 2009, Walburg has been instrumental not just in staging plays about migration, but also in engaging postmigrant directors and dramaturges such as Nuran David Calis. 148 Similarly, following the success of the Westfälisches Landestheater s initial production of Schwarze Jungfrauen, this theatre has not only produced a second production with the remaining monologues but also has increasingly used these plays to position itself as an intercultural facilitator; a position in high demand in an area where one in four people have a background of migration. 149 A further factor in this shift, which a broad view of the multiple productions of Schwarze Jungfrauen reveals, is therefore the question of which audiences statefunded theatres in particular should be aiming to attract. In our conversation, Walburg highlighted that if one wants to democratise theatre, it is important to respond to the needs of the changing population of Germany. This has become an increasingly common point of view since the premiere of Schwarze Jungfrauen. Mark Terkessidis, for example, writes of the need for public institutions, including the theatres, to shift to serve the diverse population of Germany today. 150 At the same time, as Terkessidis himself has suggested, the recognition of postmigrants as not just citizens but above all as consumers needed by a model in decline is somewhat problematic, following as it does a neoliberal, market logic. 151 In a case of life mirroring art, in the dramatic text of Schwarze Jungfrauen, the black virgin of monologue five identifies herself and her sisters as [d]er künftige Markt und die heutige Wirklichkeit. 152 While scholars such as I. A. Çelik have questioned the political legitimacy of Schwarze Jungfrauen, 147 For a useful summary of discourses on liveness in theatre see Case, p Stefan Keim, Migration ist selbstverständlich: Das Schauspiel Köln beleuchtet die multikulturelle Gesellschaft, in Theater und Migration: Herausforderungen für Kulturpolitik und Theaterpraxis, ed. by Wolfgang Schneider (Bielefeld: transcript, 2011), pp Ministerium für Arbeit, Integration und Soziales des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, Sozialindikatoren NRW < indikatoren/2_demografie/indikator2_3/index.php.> [last accessed 07/08/2014]. 150 Terkessidis, Interkultur, p. 108; pp Terkessidis, Die Heimsuchung, p Zaimoglu/Senkel, Schwarze Jungfrauen, p

187 positioning it as a play in which a male playwright creates or lays bare a confessing Muslim woman for the desiring gaze of a mainly German-German audience, this knowing nod to the market also highlights the role which this gaze, however problematic, might have to play in a pragmatic politics of recognition for postmigrant artists who want their work to be seen. Whether initially successful or not, the inclusion of Schwarze Jungfrauen in a theatre s repertoire often seems to have either triggered or been the first step in an active policy of inclusion which had previously been largely absent. As a result both of its potential to create new points of community interaction and of the resultant audience it could win for German theatres, following Schwarze Jungfrauen postmigrant theatre began to contribute to a broader drive to legitimate theatre as a place of authentic encounter. The impact this has begun to have with theatrical institutions remains to be examined in the following chapter. 185

188 CHAPTER FIVE. (Semi-)Documentary Theatre and the Postmigrant Ensemble: Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel s Schattenstimmen 5.1 Migration and Documentary Schattenstimmen (2008), the second play which Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel were commissioned to write in the documentary or semi-documentary mode in the wake of Schwarze Jungfrauen, reflects the success and impact of that earlier play in a number of ways. Schattenstimmen consists of nine monologues based on interviews with illegal immigrants to Germany. As migration scholar Heide Castañeda explains, there are multiple categories of illegality illegal exit, entry, residency and employment, and these are reflected in the range of experiences represented in Schattenstimmen. 1 The nine monologues thus include figures as diverse as a homophobic African male prostitute, a Russian widow who cares for the old ladies of a German village, a Moroccan kitchen porter who initially came to Germany to study and dreams of marrying a German woman, and a Ukrainian ex-au-pair who lives a party lifestyle in Berlin. They are joined by a migrant who longs to return to his illegal life in Rome, an Eastern European Edelnutte, a Kurdish honour-murderer who idealises the lives of other illegal immigrants, an African drug dealer, and a vengeful gypsy woman. 2 Themes which cut across many of the monologues include the entanglement of normal German life with the illegal economy, the role of the EU, and the impact of illegal status on interpersonal and particularly sexual relationships. Furthermore, the more precarious the situation, the more precarious the mental state of the narrator appears to become. There is thus a stark contrast between the state of mind expressed by the measured and reflective language of the Russian carer of 1 Heide Castañeda, Illegal Migration, Gender and Health Care: Perspectives from Germany and the United States, in Illegal Migration and Gender in a Global and Historical Perspective, ed. by Marlou Schrover et al. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), pp (p. 174). 2 The monologues do not differentiate between countries of origin within Africa in monologues one, two, and eight. Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel, Schattenstimmen (Reinbek: Rowohlt Theater Verlag, 2006).

189 monologue six, who lives with her naturalised German family, speaks fluent German and has a clear role to play in local village life, and the African drug dealer of monologue eight, whose highly political criticism of the expectations placed on him as a representative of black culture by well-meaning left-leaning Germans is interspersed with paranoid conspiracy theories concerning the introduction of Aids into Africa. 3 Like Schwarze Jungfrauen, Schattenstimmen was printed in Theater heute. It is generally considered a less successful piece as it was staged in only four productions, none of which were particularly celebrated. 4 To the extent that Schwarze Jungfrauen and Schattenstimmen share a semi-documentary form and a focus on issues raised by contemporary migration, though, they can be said to form a conceptual pair. They can also both be situated at the forefront of a wave of new interview-based, or documentary, theatre which has explicitly taken migration to Germany as its subject matter. 5 This development marks a stark change to a previous reluctance to stage stories of migration by, with, or about postmigrant artists, but it may also relegate the migrant experience to the realm of fact rather than fiction. As this chapter will show, the demand for a repeat performance from Zaimoglu/Senkel also has its issues. Tom Cheesman and Karin Yeşilada suggest that Zaimoglu s unusal monologues are a gift for performers in the currently dominant idiom of shouty theatre, but also suggest that calls upon him and Senkel to vary Kanak Sprak for new occasions cannot be very productive for his development as a writer. 6 While Chapter Four looked at the dynamics of documentary and authenticity at work within the semi-documentary postmigrant play, this chapter will examine the ways in which concerns with authenticity, self-representation, and postmigrant theatre also play into the institutional dynamics at work within the theatre industry. 3 Ibid. 4 Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel, Schattenstimmen, Theater heute, 49.7 (2008), Stückabdruck Beilage, In 2011 reviewer Stefam Keim commented: emotional wirken diese Geschichten kaum, und einige Jahre später sind sie schon weitgehend vergessen und man muss nachlesen, um sich an die Aufführung noch zu erinnern : Stefan Keim, Migration ist selbstverständlich: Das Schauspiel Köln beleuchtet die multikulturelle Gesellschaft, in Theater und Migration: Herausforderungen für Kulturpolitik und Theaterpraxis, ed. by Wolfgang Schneider (Bielefeld: transcript, 2011), pp (p. 93). 5 Other examples of this genre include Robert Thalheim and Kolja Mensing s Moschee.de, dir. by Robert Thalheim (Schauspiel Hannover, 2010) and Nurkan Erpulat and Tunçay Kulaoğlu, Jenseits: Bist du schwul oder bist du Türke?, dir. by Nurkan Erpulat (Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, 2008). 6 Cheesman and Yeşilada, pp

190 Two of the productions of Schattentimmen thus become of particular interest as they both took place in the context of pioneering, but very different, attempts to alter the ethnicised structures of German theatre companies themselves. The first of these is the 2008 premiere at Schauspiel Köln, where the play was commissioned as part of Karin Beier s attempt to reform the ensemble there in a way which would allow the bodies on stage to reflect those present in the Federal Republic of Germany as a country of immigration. The second of these is Nurkan Erpulat s production (also 2008), which was performed as part of Dogland, the opening festival of the Ballhaus Naunynstraße as an artistic forum for postmigrant theatre work. This chapter will focus mainly on the premiere production; however, the Ballhaus production will also be examined as a point of comparison in the final section. 7 The significance of these experiments with institutional change is highlighted by a 2008 interview in which Matthias Lilienthal, the artistic director of the HAU theatre in which Schwarze Jungfrauen had premiered, commented on the lack of prospects for young actors with Turkish-German and other migrant backgrounds: Die Situation ist insofern schizophren, als es junge Migranten gibt, die an den Schaupielschulen ausgebildet werden. Aber nur wenige von ihnen kommen wirklich in die Ensembles der Theater hinein. Das muss sich ändern. 8 Rather than simply lamenting this lack of opportunity, Lilienthal also made reference to the theatre as an opportunity for Soziale-Plastiken-Schaffen, a term which alludes to Joseph Beuys concept of the role of the individual as artist with the potential to be involved in consciously shaping social structures. 9 As outlined in Chapter Four, this opportunity was taken up by Shermin Langhoff, who went on to found the Ballhaus Naunynstraße as a permanent home for the avant-garde, postmigrant theatre produced by the initial Beyond Belonging Festivals. It has also been made use of by many of the theatres where Schwarze 7 Schattenstimmen has also been directed by Thomas Bischoff (Kassel: Staatstheater Kassel, 2008) and by Judith Ittner (Bochum: Schauspiel Bochum, 2009). 8 Lilienthal quoted in Frank Raddatz, HAU, p Ibid. On Beuys, see Volker Harlan et al., Soziale Plastik Materialien zu Joseph Beuys (Achberg: Achberger Verlagsanstalt, 1976). 188

191 Jungfrauen was subsequently performed. This suggests a broader development which is significant for situating an examination of Schattenstimmen. For example, the Westfälisches Landestheater was the second theatre to stage Schwarze Jungfrauen after the HAU premiere. The director Christian Scholze was familiar with Zaimoglu s work from having previously directed Almanya, a dramatised version of Zaimoglu s Koppstoff (1999), which Scholze produced together with actress Günfer Cölgecen in Almanya is significant as it not only began a working relationship between Zaimoglu and Scholze, but also originated in Cölgecen s dissatisfaction with her role as a clichéd Turk in an adaptation of Koppstoff for the Maxim Gorki Theater prior to Almanya. 11 Not only does this highlight the extent to which a director can shape the interpretation of the base-texts, it also points to the various ways in which Turkish- German actors negotiate their paths through the German theatrical system. 12 Almanya was also very timely as from 2002 onwards the state of North Rhein- Westphalia had adopted an emphasis on intercultural work, which in 2004 became the highly influential Handlungskonzept Interkultur. 13 This change in cultural policy provided funding specifically for developing intercultural competencies and work within institutions in North Rhein-Westphalia, the region within which the premiere of Schattenstimmen then took place in As a touring theatre, the Westfälisches Landestheater already had close links with schools in the area and so, following the success of Almanya, was in a good position to bid for funding for further projects under the umbrella of interkulturelle Kulturarbeit. 14 When I interviewed him in 2011, Scholze emphasised the advantage of having this extra money available in terms of making theatre relevant to contemporary debates. Generally the theatre had to set its programme a year and a half in advance, resulting in a relatively apolitical set of productions. However, as a result of this extra funding, when Schwarze Jungfrauen 10 Images from the production and a selection of reviews are available at < a website dedicated to the production [last accessed 11/03/2013]. 11 Scholze, personal interview. 12 It is interesting to note as a point of comparison that Fatih Akin also cites dissatisfaction with the roles available to him as an actor as one of the factors which led him to begin directing films himself: Fatih Akin, quoted in Rob Burns, Turkish-German Cinema: From Cultural Resistance to Transnational Cinema?, in German Cinema After Unification, ed. by David Clarke (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), pp (p. 142). A similar level of dissatisfaction within the theatrical sphere also led Turkish-German actor and doctor Tuğsal Moğul to found theatre company Theater Operation < [last accessed 11/03/2013]. 13 Scholze, personal interview. 14 Ibid. 189

192 was published Scholze was able to mobilise these resources to address a current theme. 15 The success of Schwarze Jungfrauen in turn helped the Westfälisches Landestheater consolidate its new role as intercultural facilitator, and following such localised trials, North Rhein-Westphalia as a whole has begun to increasingly sell itself this way, a factor which, as section 5.2 will outline in more detail, frames the commission of Schattenstimmen. While Zaimoglu/Senkel s semi-documentary theatre helped set a new direction for the Westfälisches Landestheater, the production of Schwarze Jungfrauen for the off-scene theatre group Junges Theater Bremen in 2009 functioned more to continue an established interest in postmigrant theatre. This interest dated back to the commission of Zaimoglu/Senkel s Ja. Tu es. Jetzt by the Junges Theater as the opening production for their permanent home the Schwankhalle, Bremen (2003) and to their 1998 production of Kanak Sprak. 16 According to director Anja Wedig, the continued interest in Zaimoglu s work stemmed from two impulses: firstly, from the young theatre group s interest in contemporary themes and language as well as the related theme of wie das Ich mit seiner Umgebung klarkommt, and secondly from the fact that members of the group themselves were postmigrants. 17 In her chapter on postmigrant theatre in Berlin, Nina Peters describes die freie Szene als Vorreiter in terms of addressing postmigrant reality. 18 That this is to a degree the case throughout Germany is suggested by Wedig s attitude to her production what in 2008 was a striking novelty in the slower moving state-sponsored theatres, was already normal in the free scene. As can be seen from the examples briefly given above with regard to Schwarze Jungfrauen, the role of the actor becomes particularly important to highlight when examining the Verquickung von Migration und Doku which as we saw in Chapter Four has occurred in recent years. 19 In an article which also briefly addresses 15 Ibid. 16 This is the production which is featured in the infamous encounter between Feridun Zaimoglu and Heide Simonis on the 3 nach 9 chatshow, the transcript of which was reproduced in English as the prelude to Tom Cheesman s monograph, Novels, pp. 1-11; Feridun Zaimoğlu vs. Heide Simonis. 17 Anja Wedig, personal interview, Bremen, 03/07/ Peters, p Terkessidis, Heimsuchung, p. 7. Also quoted in Czerwonka, p

193 Schattenstimmen in its production by Nurkan Erpulat at the Ballhaus, Katrin Sieg claims that: [t]he documentary theater s appeal to sociological notions of the real, coupled with the conflation of actor and character in some documentary performances, risks laminating social behaviour to a particular national psychology or even a racialized anatomy. 20 This conflation of actor and character is certainly to be seen in the inclusion of a recent discussion of the politics of casting in a symposium titled Authentizitätsterror at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin in The aim of the symposium was to explore ways in which theatre could challenge the neo-liberal injunction for authentic selfrealisation, Sei Du selbst!. 22 However, the symposium also included a discussion of a recent scandal at the Deutsches Theater concerning a production in which blackfacing and monkey-like movements were used to portray black characters. 23 The inclusion of what should have been a discussion of the politics of racial representation within this symposium seemed to bracket legitimate concerns over whose voices and feelings were respected within German theatre as a backwards call for one-to-one casting or authenticity. 24 This bracketing simultaneously seemed to suggest that while a white actor on stage could legitimately play any character, an actor of colour must necessarily only be playing him- or herself. In linking the discussion of authenticity in the previous chapter to the focus on changing practices of casting and 20 Sieg, Class, pp The symposium Authentizitätsterror was organised in cooperation with the Insitut für Theaterwissenschaft of the Freie Universität, Berlin as part of the Autorentheatertage It took place on 10 th June 2012 in the Deutsches Theater, Berlin. The programme for the symposium can be accessed at < [last accessed 03/03/2013]. 22 Ibid. 23 In response to this, members of an anti-racist activist group named Bühnenwatch had staged a walkout. A detailed documentation of the Bühnenwatch protest and the subsequent discussion of blackfacing in the German theatrical establishment is available in Voss, pp As Azadeh Sharifi points out, the key political question here thus became Wer darf Kunst kritisieren and die ästhetische Kritik erhält damit eine politische Dimension, nicht nur, weil es um die Kunstfreiheit der weißen Theatermacher_innen geht, sondern weil eine Exklusion anderer Position stattfindet. [...] Die Kritiker_innen sind nicht mehr kritikberechtigt, weil es nur um die Verletzung von Gefühlen geht, und nicht um eine strukturelle Diskriminierung. Sharifi also mentions the Authentizitätsterror symposium and uses the blackfacing discussion to introduce a summary of her research into postmigrant audience participation at Schauspiel Köln; however, her criticism is of the symposium s failure to invite the original critics from Bühnenwatch: Sharifi, Blackfacing, n. pag. 191

194 ensemble construction in an examination of Schattenstimmen I intend to trace the implications of such false logic rather than to reinforce it. 25 The risk of actor-character conflation highlighted by Sieg seems to be one of many conflations potentially involved in the commission of Schattenstimmen. According to Helga Kraft, who examines Schattenstimmen along with Schwarze Jungfrauen, [d]as Moralische dieses Theaters liegt eigentlich hauptsächlich in der Darstellung der geringen Chancen in Deutschland für Zugewanderte. 26 What I find problematic here is the conflation of postmigrants and illegal immigrants under the title Zugewanderte. 27 Illegal immigrants occupy a very different legal position to that of postmigrant citizens in Germany, a position which had been under renewed discussion in Germany in the year of the premiere. 28 This conflation of illegal migrant with Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund is worth highlighting, as it also seems to be at work in the slippage from a commission in which Zaimoglu, a practising Muslim, was engaging with a topic closely related to his own life-world, to a commission in which Zaimoglu as postmigrant playwright is seen as the ideal person to write about the experiences of illegal immigrants. Various others thus appear to be collapsed onto one another, despite the very different experiences and legal statuses involved. 29 Zaimoglu s own account of his work on the Schattenstimmen monologues in his Tübinger Poetikvorlesung from 2007 highlights the particular peculiarity of writing a play about the illegal experience: mir fällt wieder ein, was die Regieassistentin am Ende einer langen Erklärung ausgerufen hat: wir wollen wissen[,] womit wir es hier zu 25 My thanks to Christel Weiler for taking the time to discuss this particular point with me. 26 Kraft, Das Theater, p Kraft also appears to be under the impression that Schwarze Jungfrauen and Schattenstimmen are Zaimoglu s only two plays, a factor which unfortunately impacts on her interpretation considerably: ibid., p saw several changes to policies relating to illegal immigrants within the EU. In June 2008, for example, new EU-wide rules on the deportation of illegal immigrants were agreed and a further immigration and asylum pact was agreed in September of the same year: Deniz Göktürk et al., Transit Deutschland: Debatten zu Nation und Migration (Constance: Konstanz University Press, 2011), p Of perhaps more significance to the premiere production is the fact that in 2007 the Schengen agreement, allowing passport-free movement between most member states of the EU, expanded to include nine further countries including two that border on Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic. Several of the texts of Schattenstimmen reflect this change: the prostitute refers to herself as an EUerweiterte Puderdöschen, for example, and relates this to her role as competition for German women: Zaimoglu/Senkel, Schattenstimmen, monologue four, p As Castañeda and others explain, the boundaries between legal and illegal migration shift as laws change, and migrants often move between the two categories. Citizenship functions differently. 192

195 tun haben. Schön gesagt, denke ich, womit haben wir es also bei diesem Stück zu tun? Mit Gestalten, die im Verborgenen leben, mit Männern und Frauen, die nicht auffallen dürfen, weil sie über einen illegalen Aufenthaltsstatus verfügen, mit Menschen also, deren Geschichten ich in eine Kunstsprache übersetze, und dann werden Schauspieler in Rollen schlüpfen und das Publikum beeindrucken. 30 As Zaimoglu s comments suggest, Schattenstimmen returns us to the idea of the shadow and mimeticism in two ways. Firstly, Schattenstimmen was commissioned in the shadow of the success of Schwarze Jungfrauen and seemed almost to request a repeat, rather than a fresh piece of work. Secondly, as the title suggests, the work was supposed to cast light on lives based in shadow for the eyes of the German theatregoing public a paradoxical intention, as to illuminate a shadow is only to destroy or alter it. In continuing to work with a broader definition of mimesis than Sieg, I am therefore particularly interested in exploring whose reality the productions of Schattenstimmen end up imitating or representing, and how processes of mimeticism function in the casting decisions surrounding these productions. Terkessidis has suggested that a thematic Reduktion auf Authentizität und Pädagogik färbt dabei gewissermaßen ab auf die Künstler mit Migrationshintergrund. 31 While Chapter Four focused on the question of who speaks within Zaimoglu s semi-documentary theatre, this chapter will focus on whether the documentary turn risks laminating particular aesthetic expectations onto postmigrant theatre practitioners. This chapter thus provides a point of comparison to the chapter on Karagöz in Alamania, both with reference to shadows and the development of the multicultural ensemble more than twenty years later. 30 Feridun Zaimoglu and Ilija Trojanow, Ferne Nähe: Tübinger Poetik Dozentur 2007 (Künzelsau: Swiridoff, 2008), p Terkessidis, Heimsuchung, p

196 5.2 Intercultural Mainstreaming : Situating Schattenstimmen Schattenstimmen has not been the exclusive subject of any scholarly article or chapter thus far. 32 Instead it is briefly summarised or mentioned in passing in several pieces on Zaimoglu/Senkel s more prominent theatrical work, such as Katrin Sieg s article on postmigrant documentary theatre, El Hissy s chapter on the carnivalesque in Schwarze Jungfrauen and Tom Cheesman s scholarship on Zaimoglu/Senkel s Nathan Messias and Othello. 33 Only in Helga Kraft s chapter on die Migrantenfrage and das Theater als moralische Anstalt is this play accorded more attention as a play in its own right, where it is briefly examined along with Schwarze Jungfrauen as a prominent example of work by Kreativen mit Migrationshintergrund. 34 A certain lack of interest in the play in production is understandable to a degree: as noted in section 4.1, although Schattenstimmen received a relatively high amount of exposure for a new play, it has had far less impact than its predecessor Schwarze Jungfrauen both in terms of critical acclaim and the broader impact suggested in the final section of my previous chapter. The use of hate speech in the texts is particularly unrelenting, even for Zaimoglu/Senkel s work, and one reviewer of the later Ballhaus production states [dass der dramatische Text] sich auch dem wohlwollenden Rezipienten heftig entgegenstimmt. 35 A discussion of the perceived weakness of the Schattenstimmen texts will form the basis for section 5.3; however, when approaching the play in production, I would suggest that the placement of Schattenstimmen in the slipstream of Schwarze Jungfrauen in Kraft s, Sieg s, and El Hissy s work in fact means that questions raised with reference to Schwarze Jungfrauen can productively be brought into a consideration of Schattenstimmen and extended in new directions. Rather than 32 The most detailed examination of the play I have come across is Jane Wilkinson s as yet unpublished paper: Representing (Post-)Migrant Experiences in Recent German-Language Drama: The Semi- Documentary Monologues Shadow Voices and Illegal, unpublished paper presented at Crossroads: Europe, Migration, and Culture, University of Copenhagen (24/10/2013), pp Sieg, Class, pp. 174, 179; Kraft, Theater, pp ; El Hissy, p. 116, p. 130; Cheesman, Nathan, p Kraft, p Katharina Granzin, Illegale Schmetterlinge, die tageszeitung, 24/11/2008. For further discussion of ambiguities and problematic aspects of the use of hate speech in Zaimoglu s other work, see Schmidt, pp ; Manuela Günter, pp

197 focusing on form to the same extent with respect to Schattenstimmen and so repeating the arguments on how authenticity and the documentary are conceived, as I have explained above, I will use Schattenstimmen to build on a related but separate concern identified in Chapter Four, that is, the impact which assumptions about authenticity and documentary theatre potentially have for the role of the postmigrant theatre practitioner. Sieg, who uses the term mimesis to refer to what I find can more usefully be termed naturalism, is worth quoting at length here as the position she sets out links documentary theatre, migrant bodies, and the national imaginary in complex ways which clearly point to a concern with mimeticism: mimetic representations of social identity have historically served to dramatize and naturalize essentialist notions of nation, race, and gender in Germany. [...] Are Turkish Germans, now eligible for naturalization (German citizenship), co-opted into the logic of mimesis, reproducing therefore the exclusions and hierarchies of the cosmopolitan, European transnation [...]? [Or] does it [semidocumentary theatre] make a case for a poetics that insists on the minoritarian, modern subject as a sociological referent, without at the same time reproducing either the racist and sexist ontologies of mimesis or the expunging in realist drama of the nation s internal contradictions? 36 While for Sieg an association with naturalism appears to be inherently problematic, Azadeh Sharifi has highlighted British theatre, known for its use of naturalist acting, as being far ahead of Germany in terms of its engagement with minority theatre practitioners. 37 In the UK, a diversification of the subject matter of plays has thus led to opportunities for actors of colour. 38 At the same time, the distinct history of state responses to migration as well as the unique funding logic of theatre in Germany suggest that it would be a mistake to see current developments in postmigrant theatre as a mere delayed repetition of developments in other contexts. 36 Sieg, Class, pp Sieg does not capitalise real as she is not using it in the Lacanian sense but in a more generalised manner. 37 Sharifi, Theater für alle?, pp ; pp Ibid. 195

198 In focusing more on how Turkish-German playwrights and productions of their plays frame mimesis, rather than proceeding from an assumption that they are used by it, I intend to use the case of Schattenstimmen to explore the potential sociological laminations or conflations at work in the frequent concurrence between migration as theme and the documentary or semi-documentary text in contemporary theatre. In doing so I move beyond the image of Zaimoglu as sole instigator of provocation subscribed to by Kraft and locate Schattenstimmen as one in a series of commissions framed by changing funding patterns and cultural policies in Germany and in which a variety of relationships as well as Zaimoglu s own professional development have played a role. Both the Schauspiel Köln and the Ballhaus Naunynstraße are the subject of substantial recent and forthcoming studies which approach the question of Turkish- German and more broadly postmigrant theatre from the perspective of cultural policy. 39 As this work casts valuable light on the institutional frameworks and developments within which the recent surge in postmigrant theatre takes place, in this section I will outline it briefly and use it to sketch the context within which Schattenstimmen was commissioned. Cultural policy researcher Azadeh Sharifi takes the idea of Kultur für alle a key aim in German cultural policy since the 1990s as the starting point for her study of the participation of postmigrants as audience members in theatres in Cologne. 40 This focus on culture as a right for all citizens in the FRG highlights a factor which has clearly had a role to play in the adoption of an intercultural framework in areas such as North Rhein-Westphalia following the change in citizenship law in This is also referred to in debates as interkulturelles Mainstreaming, i.e. as an active move to normalise diversity. Onur Suzan Kömürcü Nobrega explains that this term, and the thinking behind it, follows the debates about gender mainstreaming [the systematic inclusion of women] and addresses the issue of discrimination and racialised labour divisions in public institutions I am referring here to Sharifi s monograph, and the ongoing work of Onur Suzan Kömürcü Nobrega, a doctoral student based at Goldsmiths, London. 40 Sharifi, Theater für alle?, pp Sharifi s examination of the participation of postmigrant artistic practitioners is pursued less systematically than the analysis of audience participation: p Ibid., p Kömürcü Nobrega, We Bark, p. 92 n

199 As migration scholar Mark Terkessidis has emphasised, to a degree the new enthusiasm for migration in theatre follows a neoliberal logic in which demographic change in Germany has led to the recognition of the postmigrant as an increasingly important consumer as well as citizen. However, it also offers an opportunity in which gerade die allgegenwärtige Frage nach der Migration auch mit einer Erneuerung des [Theater-]Betriebs verbunden sein [könnte]. 43 At the same time Terkessidis raises the issue of to what extent superficial engagements with migration result in a situation in which the migrant or postmigrant life serve als Rohstoff zur Belebung des Theaters. 44 As I have argued in Chapter Four, I. A. Çelik s analysis of Zaimoglu s Schwarze Jungfrauen as a cynical usage of Muslim women as marketable commodities with which a minority author creates a niche for himself in the neoliberal market can be disputed in terms of the use of language in the play, not to mention the relatively unlucrative reality of the playwrighting profession. 45 Terkessidis comments suggest to me, however, that, I. A. Çelik s concerns might be more productively addressed on an institutional level, i.e. by bringing in a consideration of the other agents involved in the theatre market such as artistic directors and producers, directors, actors, dramaturges, and critics. In situating an examination of the commission and subsequent productions of Schattenstimmen in relation to this broader context, I draw on archival materials relating to the Cologne and Berlin productions such as the directors cut of the scripts, DVD recordings of the productions, programmes, and reviews. These materials were made available to me by director Nora Bussenius, the late Fereidoun Ettehad of the Ballhaus, or were accessed in the archive of Zaimoglu s theatre publishers. In addition to my own personal interviews with Bussenius and Zaimoglu, I will draw extensively on the numerous published interviews with key figures at the head of each of the theatres I focus on, as well as on extracts from interviews with actors, dramaturges, and members of the postmigrant public included in several of the cultural policy studies mentioned above. Both Sharifi s monograph and a Diplomarbeit on Der deutsche Schauspieler mit Migrationshintergrund by actor Omar El-Saeidi draw 43 Terkessidis, Heimsuchung, p Terkessidis, Interkultur, p Also quoted in Mariam Soufi Siavash, Wer ist wir? Theaterarbeit in der interkulturellen Gesellschaft, in Theater und Migration: Herausforderungen für Kulturpolitik und Theaterpraxis, ed. by Wolfgang Schneider (Bielefeld: transcript, 2011), pp (p. 84). 45 I. A. Çelik, p

200 heavily on interviews, making these studies an excellent resource. Four of El-Saeidi s seven interviewees as well as El-Saeidi himself were engaged at Schauspiel Köln at the time, for example, with two of the interviewees (Schauspieler A and B) making reference to their own involvement in Schattenstimmen. 46 There are several methodological issues with both studies, however, which need to be taken into account when using them as resources. As El-Saeidi himself highlights, the scope of the Diplomarbeit is necessarily limited and his own involvement at Schauspiel Köln during the time of writing may have impacted on the conclusions he draws: Eine objektive Betrachtung des Schauspiel Köln ist aufgrund bestehender Arbeitsverhältnisse und interner Spannungen zwischen dem Autor dieser Arbeit und dem Schauspiel Köln leider nicht ganz möglich. 47 While Sharifi uses a sociologically informed methodology of qualitative analysis in her work with the interviews, for my own purposes I prefer to highlight the anecdotal and highly subjective nature of the accounts presented in the interviews quoted and transcribed in both works. 48 This makes them of particular value in contextualising the archival remains of the production, and my focus will remain on using them together with the archival sources to situate an examination of the play in production. 46 Omar El-Saeidi, Der deutsche Schauspieler mit Migrationshintergrund: Das Spannungsgeflecht zwischen gesellschaftlicher Realität und Umsetzung in der deutschen Theater- und Medienlandschaft (unpublished Diplomarbeit, Hochschule für Musik und Theater Rostock, 2009). The interview with Schauspieler A is given in full in the appendix to El-Saeidi s work (pp ), as is the interview with Schauspieler B (pp ). A summary of the interviewees is given on p. 39. I am grateful to Nora Bussenius for putting me in contact with El-Saeidi regarding his Diplomarbeit and to Omar El- Saeidi for kindly providing me with a copy. 47 Ibid., p. 99. From an academic perspective a strong theoretical framework for the discussion of the interviews is largely missing as is a thorough analysis of the content. As El-Saeidi himself highlights, however, the aim of this piece was to gain his qualification as an actor, rather than as a Germanist or Philosophy student, and to explore his own curiosity regarding Was erwartet mich, Omar, deutscher Schauspieler mit arabischen [sic] Hintergrund, wenn ich nun hinaus gehe und mich bei Castern, Regisseuren, [...usw.] bewerbe? : El-Saeidi quoted in Tina Thiele, Der deutsche Schauspieler mit Migrationshintergrund, casting-network: Das Branchenportal, 08/06/2009, < grund.html> [last accessed 26/08/2014]. In any case irrespective of the methodological and theoretical limitations of this piece, it is important to highlight the fact that El-Saeidi raises a question largely overlooked by professional academics both within and beyond Germany. 48 The selection of interviewees proceeded from advertisements on theatre-specific websites and via word of mouth from theatre organisers in Cologne and so contain a certain selective bias which Sharifi does not address. Only fifteen interviews were conducted in total: Sharifi, Theater für alle?, pp While I concur with Sharifi s broader recommendations for intercultural best practice within German theatres, given this methodology I would question how representative some of the conclusions concerning postmigrant audience types drawn from these sources can be. 198

201 As the initial commission of Schattenstimmen and its relation to mimesis and mimeticism are closely bound up with Karin Beier s arrival as artistic director of Schauspiel Köln in 2007, these sources also have an important role to play in creating a clear picture of Beier s time as artistic director there. Beier was already known for intercultural theatre as a result of her multi-lingual productions of Shakespeare s A Midsummer Night s Dream in 1995 and The Tempest in The 1995 production was very positively received in Germany where it was selected for the prestigious Berliner Theatertreffen in 1996, although it was viewed more critically when it toured internationally. Christopher Balme, for example suggests that, [i]f we were particularly ungenerous we could say that it combines the culinary-cynical with the essentialistic tendencies of multiculturalism, although he qualifies this critique with the suggestion that this is the best that mainstream German theatre can do, at present, when it comes to representing cultural difference on-stage. 50 As a young dynamic director with an interest in multinational theatre productions, however, Beier must have been an appealing candidate for a cultural senate looking to revive the flagging Schauspielhaus in Cologne and develop its own intercultural profile. Beier s much-publicised project at Schauspiel Köln therefore was to reflect die soziale Wirklichkeit of Cologne as a city in which one in three people are considered Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund. 51 For Beier this meant the imitation or representation of reality not only with respect to the content of the plays performed but also within the ensemble itself. Accordingly Beier recruited new members for the Cologne ensemble so that thirty per cent of the actors themselves had a Migrationshintergrund ; she thus attempted to mirror the ethnic make-up of Cologne. In multiple interviews given at the time and since both she and her chief dramaturge Rita Thiele have suggested that normalising the place of actors mit Migrationshintergrund within the ensemble was necessary in order to ensure that the 49 William Shakespeare, Ein Sommernachtstraum, dir. by Karin Beier (Düsseldorf: Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, 1995); William Shakespeare, Der Sturm, dir. by Karin Beier (Cologne: Schauspiel Köln, 1997). 50 Christopher Balme, Mediating Multiculturality in Germany, in Multicultureel Drama?, ed. by Maaike Bleeker et al. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), pp (p. 20). This tendency toward essentialism is important to be aware of as one of the interviews included in El-Saeidi s work suggests it may also have fed into Beier s work in Cologne: El-Saeidi, interview with Schauspielerin A, see especially pp Karin Beier, quoted in Sharifi, Theater für alle?, p

202 placement of an actor of colour in a German role would not be understood as symbolic by the audience: Es muss selbstverständlich werden, auch in zentralen Rollen Schauspieler mit Migrationshintergründen zu besetzen, ohne dass die Zugehörigkeit zu ihren kulturellen Mileus für das Regiekonzept Bedeutung hat. 52 The rationale for introducing a kind of quota into the ensemble clearly aimed at moving beyond a mimetic and mimeticist casting practice, in which postmigrant actors are frequently cast only in Klischee-Rollen or as representatives of das Fremde. 53 As the work of Kömürcü Nobrega highlights, such casting practices render postmigrant acting in Germany racialised and precarious labour, a phenomenon she explores in her doctoral thesis on Race, Precarity and Artistic Labour in Berlin. 54 Kömürcü Nobrega s work in Berlin will thus also not only complement that of Sharifi by providing a deeper understanding of the implications of the funding framework within which the Ballhaus Naunynstraße operates. Her identification of precarious artistic labour also provides an important impetus for my examination of the ways in which the aesthetic approaches to the precarious lives represented within Schattenstimmen shed light on institutional engagements with postmigrant theatre practitioners. 5.3 (Semi-)Documentary Commissions and the Professional Ethnic I have briefly outlined the 2007/08 season at Schauspiel Köln as a number of issues arising from this context can be seen in the processes surrounding the commission of 52 Karin Beier, quoted in Detlev Baur, Wir machen Köln-Theater, Die deutsche Bühne, 78.5 (2007), (p. 27). 53 Such a casting practice is critiqued by Mark Terkessidis amongst many others. See, for example, his comments in Monika Gintersdorfer, Viola Hasselberg, Mark Terkessidis, and Rita Thiele, Migration, Identitätspolitik und Theater, audio recording, Heimspiel 2011, Cologne, 01/04/2011, < [last accessed 26/08/2014]. 54 Kömürcü Nobrega s doctoral research project, The Lure of Diversity: Race, Precarity and Artistic Labour in Berlin is still in process: Kömürcü Nobrega, Alienation, n. pag. 200

203 Schattenstimmen and were clearly picked up in several of the reviews of the premiere. The director originally intended for the piece is identified in several of the reviews as Jette Stechel, a young director voted Nachwuchsregisseurin des Jahres in However, Stechel was apparently unable to work with the texts and withdrew from the production: she is quoted in a later article in the tageszeitung as saying that continuing to direct a text which was not working for her wird weder dem Text gerecht, noch dem Regisseur, noch dem Autor. 56 This is quite an unusual decision: a world premiere tends to have a high market value and the commission appears to be alluded to as a prominent aspect of the opening season s programme in several interviews given around the beginning of Karin Beier s time as artistic director. In her programmatic interview with Die deutsche Bühne from May 2007 Beier alludes to her wish for die Integration ausländischer Künstler in unsere Arbeit and highlights the inclusion of theatre halbdokumentarischer und halbfiktionaler Form as a means of further addressing die soziale Wirklichkeit in the 2007/08 season. 57 In order to keep the premiere at Schauspiel Köln therefore, the production was taken on by the director Nora Bussenius, who at that time was qualified as a director but employed by the theatre as a director s assistant. 58 Even before rehearsals began then, the Schattenstimmen texts seem to have met with a certain level of resistance. Feridun Zaimoglu also appears to have had reservations about the commission, both in terms of the subject matter and the form involved. In a personal interview he recounted: es war gleich klar, von Seiten des Hauses, dass sie etwas Dokumentarisches haben wollten. Und das haben wir ihnen dann vorgeschlagen und sie waren dann Feuer und Flamme. Und ich war, muss ich ehrlich gestehen, in der Zeit mittlerweile so weit, dass ich sagte Oh Gott, nicht schon wieder so, nicht schon wieder 55 See, for example, Günther Hennecke, Willkommen in der Spießerhölle, Kölnische Rundschau, 22/04/ Jette Stechel quoted in Johanna Schmeller, German Ernst, die tageszeitung (30/04/2008) < &chash=9f9ef6a0b0> [last accessed 26/08/2014]. The subsequent director Nora Bussenius also mentions having to carry out Überzeugungsarbeit with sceptical actors: Nora Bussenius, personal interview, Cologne, 14/05/ Karin Beier, quoted in Baur, p Bussenius, personal interview. 201

204 Monologe. Himmel, kann es vielleicht mal anders gehen! Aber [...] nein, sie wollten Monologe. 59 As head dramaturge Rita Thiele has stressed both in her interviews with Sharifi and in pieces published in Dramaturgie, part of the intention of the commission was for the theatre to distance itself from Multi-Kulti-Kitsch and other potentially problematic approaches to the theme of Migration which it had adopted for that season. 60 This was reflected in the choice of commissions: Da gibt es sehr konkrete Stückfindung wie den Zaimoglu bei uns im Spielplan oder den Nuran Calis, die sich explizit mit der Situation von Migranten in ihren Stücken beschäftigen. [...] Aber wie gesagt, immer verstanden nicht als Artenschutzprogramm von uns, sondern eher als ein möglichst selbstverständlich zu nehmender Beitrag zu unserer städtischen Hybridkultur. 61 While the theatre rejects the idea of a conservation programme and talks the talk of hybridity, it is interesting to note that both the Turkish-German dramatists Zaimoglu/Senkel and Nuran David Calis were commissioned to provide semidocumentary, rather than fictional, plays. The turn to documentary and semidocumentary theatre when it comes to themes of migration is often justified by directors as a response to the lack of plays which tell migrant and postmigrant stories. 62 As the commissioning of Schattenstimmen suggests, however, the theatre s own expectations may also play a role in creating this self-perpetuating situation. The recent upsurge in documentary or semi-documentary theatre which takes migration to Germany as its focus has drawn the attention of several critics. Examples of this genre in addition to Zaimoglu/Senkel s Schwarze Jungfrauen and Schattenstimmen include Nuran David Calis Homestories (Schauspiel Essen, 2006), Robert Thalheim and Kolja Mensing s Moschee.de, directed by Robert Thalheim 59 Zaimoglu, personal interview. 60 Rita Thiele, quoted in Sharifi, Theater für alle?, p. 99. See also Rita Thiele, Wie migrantisch kann ein deutsches Stadttheaterensemble sein?, Dramaturgie: Zeitschrift für die dramaturgische Gesellschaft (02/2009), Thiele, quoted in Sharifi, Theater für alle?, p This is a sentiment repeated in a number of the personal interviews I conducted. 202

205 (Schauspiel Hannover, 2010) and Nurkan Erpulat and Tunçay Kulaoğlu, Jenseits: Bist du schwul oder bist du Türke?, directed by Nurkan Erpulat (Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, 2008). Mark Terkessidis critically summarises his view of German theatre s recent discovery of postmigrant youth and the subsequent inclusion of these youths as themselves on the stage as follows: Zu einer echten künstlerischen Bearbeitung ihrer Erlebnisse scheinen diese Jugendlichen nicht in der Lage zu sein; sie können nichts darstellen stets erzählen sie die Geschichte ihres eigenen Lebens. 63 The terms Terkessidis uses here are strongly reminiscent of Edward Said s summary of the action of Orientalism, in which the Orient cannot represent itself. 64 By invoking Said in this way, Terkessidis identifies this conflation of the postmigrant body in theatre with a real-life person to be displayed onstage, rather than with an actor or artistic practitioner, as highly problematic and places it within a larger discourse of othering which has its roots in the European colonial project. In Germany this othering often manifests itself in a demand that postmigrants simply be themselves onstage; a demand for cultural authenticity which, as I will outline briefly here, intersects with a particular conception of authenticity in contemporary, postdramatic German theatre. This second, postdramatic conception of authenticity is outlined by Frank Raddatz as follows: Geopfert wird die Authentizität des künstlerischen Ausdrucks, also das, um [sic] was der Künstler traditionell ringt, zugunsten eines Unbearbeiteten, Rohen, das weder durchdrungen, noch formal bewältigt werden muss. [...] Um gegenüber der Übermacht des Virtuellen Eigenes zu behaupten, greift die postdramatisch eingerichtete Performativität zum Authentischen, also zu Elementen aus der Realität. Realität wird nicht repräsentiert, sondern zeigt sich in ihrem Vorhandensein. Der Mensch als Readymade Terkessidis, Interkultur, p Said, passim. 65 Frank Raddatz, Authentische Rezepte für ein unvergessliches Morgen: Der Wunsch nach dem Echten in Zeiten globalen Wandels, in Reality Strikes Back II: Tod der Repräsentation: Die Zukunft 203

206 This privileging of the authentic, then becomes the inclusion of the Real on stage in much postdramatic documentary theatre. In particular this takes the form of the inclusion of what are commonly known in contemporary theatre criticism in Germany as Ready-Mades : that is, real people being themselves on stage. 66 This inclusion of the Real on stage is often posed as the antithesis of mimesis, which is seen as bound to the theatre of representation preceding the postdramatic. 67 However, Janelle Reinelt has argued that the document is never the Real but has what she calls a link to reality which sets up a realist epistemology where knowledge is available through sense perception and cognition linked to objects/documents. 68 By simply equating the postmigrant body with the Real, the association of migration and documentary within German theatre could be seen to posit the postmigrant as outside of representation and therefore beyond the symbolic order in a Lacanian sense. 69 This state of affairs resonates in particularly interesting ways with Rey Chow s discussion of mimeticism and self-referentiality: Presumed to be direct and unmediated, the act of referring to oneself has taken on the aura of a type of representation that can miraculously transcend the limits of representation, a type of representation that, however trivial and self-aggrandizing it might be, is morally justifiable because it is (thought to be) nonrepresentational. Such self-representation is now equated with the expression of truth. 70 der Vorstellungskraft in einer globalisierten Welt, ed. by Kathrin Tiedemann and Frank Raddatz (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2010), pp (p. 141). 66 Ibid. The Ready-Made terminology situates this practice in the lineage of work by Marcel Duchamp, whose signed urinal, Fountain (1917), is a major piece in twentieth century art. 67 Carroll et al., p. 16. See the discussion in section 1.1 of this thesis. 68 Reinelt, The Promise of Documentary, p Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (London: Routledge, 1989). Amanda Loos summarises the Real as follows: very unlike our conventional conception of objective/collective experience, in Lacanian theory the Real becomes that which resists representation, what is pre-mirror, pre-imaginary, presymbolic what cannot be symbolized what loses its reality once it is symbolized (made conscious) through language : Amanda Loos, symbolic, real, imaginary, University of Chicago Theories of Media Keywords Glossary, ed. by W. J. T. Mitchell et al., (2002) < 2004/symbolicrealimaginary.htm> [last accessed 26/08/2014]. 70 Chow, p

207 Chow s suggestion in her discussion of mimeticism and literary production is that coercion into the self-referential is a way of keeping them [ethnic minorities] in their place, a suggestion which poses discomforting questions about the real function of autobiographical writing by those whose very acts and utterances are considered in an a priori manner autobiographical or representative of their group. 71 Discreditation of the professional ethnic is thus identified as a mechanism which discredits his or her (contentious) representation of the ethnic culture in question and reinforces the status quo and the fantasy of the proper that it seeks to maintain. 72 As discussed in section 5.2, Katrin Sieg highlights the potential for documentary theatre to normalise rather than disrupt certain discourses in a way which risks laminating social behaviour to a particular national psychology or even a racialized anatomy. 73 However, it is the potential for the lamination of a perceived inability to represent onto postmigrant theatre practitioners via the recourse to documentary forms which interests me here. This lamination, a term which is productive for a discussion of mimeticism in that it suggests the fixing of an abject in unalterable form as well as a false transparency and correspondence between object and an artificially attached layer of additional material, may be at work not only in the preference for documentary theatre in which those documented themselves appear onstage, but also in the demand for documentary theatre from postmigrant authors such as Zaimoglu. These tensions could also be seen to inscribe themselves within the texts produced for Schattenstimmen. The inclusion of some of Zaimoglu s most provocatively homophobic language and least sympathetic characters might thus be seen to mark a certain resistance to the ascriptions and paradoxes at work in the commission of the play. 74 Comparing these texts to Chow s discussion, the trivial and self-aggrandizing nature of several of the characters is certainly very notable. The Minusmaroc of monologue two asserts his sense of self via his narrative of success and expertise in the Tanzpalast, for example: 71 Ibid., p Ibid., p Sieg, Class, p Homophobia in Zaimoglu s writing is discussed in detail in Schmidt, pp

208 N Araber ist kein Araber, er ist n Feind mit dem jede Arschfotze hier Krieg führen will [...] Solang ich hier spülen kann, ist mir der andere Scheiß völlig egal, menschliche Beziehungen krieg ich woanders. Nämlich im Tanzpalast. [...] Ich komme rein in den Tanzpalast und weiß, wie das Spiel geht. 75 The tone of the monologue is outwardly defiant and uses sexualised and often racialised language throughout to gain further power via the infliction of symbolic violence on other vulnerable groups. However, there is a distinct suggestion that this can be seen as a response to the situation of exclusion in which the figure s racialised and illegal status leaves him. According to Senkel, the voices in Schattenstimmen are less cohesive as [d]as einzige, was die Illegalen miteinander verbindet, ist der Status im Aufenthaltsrecht. 76 Similarly, Zaimoglu states: da gibt es keine Solidarität. Viele der Schattenstimmen würden aufeinander spucken. Das einzig verbindende Moment ist die harte Grenze zur Legalität. 77 The illegal immigrant thus becomes the contemporary equivalent of the Lumpenproletariat in Zaimoglu s portrayal, the lowest class in society characterised by a shared situation but unable to create a basis of solidarity from which to articulate a form of class consciousness. 78 Asked in an interview with Theater heute about the Selbstbewusstsein and Selbstbehauptung of the characters in Schattenstimmen, Zaimoglu emphasises the difference between their own self-image and the image they are held to by others. He argues [dass] sie in vielen Situationen als Illegale ramponiert und deformiert werden. 79 At the same time, he suggests their hatred of bourgeois life has more to do with envy and exclusion than ideological rejection. 80 The expertise which the Minusmaroc boasts of in the club thus functions to prop up his damaged 75 Zaimoglu and Senkel, Schattenstimmen, monologue two, pp Senkel in Eva Behrendt and Franz Wille, Wir haben mit unseren Mündern ihre Melodien gepfiffen, Theater heute, 49.7 (2008), 46 49, (p. 47). 77 Zaimoglu quoted in: ibid, p Lumpenproletariat, das, duden.de < [last accessed 26/08/2014]. The term Lumpenproletariat was used by the interlocutors of Zaimoglu s early work Kanak Sprak and highlights a continued concern on the part of the author with the ways in which racialisation and class overlap in the German context. On the characterisation of the figures in Kanak Sprak as Lumpenethnier, see Matthes, Writing, pp On racialisation and class as a concern for Zaimoglu, see, Yeşilada, Gotteskrieger, p. 200; Cheesman and Yeşilada, pp Zaimoglu in Behrendt and Wille, Wir haben, p Ibid. 206

209 sense of self, and at the same time is presented as an absurd source of pride, precluding identification or full sympathy with the figure. 81 In Schwarze Jungfrauen, the relationship between the voice of the author and that of the original women has been both praised and problematised on the basis of to what extent elements of shared religious and gender identity exist within this relationship. 82 In contrast, the lack of critical reception of Schattenstimmen means that the question of shared identity between source voice and author remains largely uncommented on. 83 This is particularly notable as this relationship is arguably yet more tenuous and problematic in Schattenstimmen. Zaimoglu and Senkel are themselves not illegal immigrants; however, as outlined in section 5.1, the label Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund seems to be used to place Zaimoglu as a representative figure despite his own remonstrances against this and the difference in terms of citizenship between a German citizen such as himself and an illegal worker in Europe. 84 Arguably, the banality and diversity of the monologues also reflects an important element of the reality of the subjects which the monologues purport to depict. However, the weakness of Schattenstimmen as a whole, compared to Schwarze Jungfrauen, may reflect a certain resistance on Zaimoglu s part to the commission and the role assigned to him through it. Karen Jürs-Munby has raised the idea of resistant texts with respect to the postdramatic work of Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek. Jürs-Munby characterises Jelinek s self-titled Sprachflächen as montages of playfully and deconstructively manipulated quotes from a wide variety of spheres and genres, including popular culture, the media, philosophy, poetry as well as classical dramatic literature, intermixed with what reads like the author s own voice. 85 The inclusion of various 81 A similar ambiguity is associated with many of the figures in Kanak Sprak. See Abel, pp See Sieg, Black Virgins, pp ; Matthes, Authentic, pp ; I. A. Çelik, pp Wilkinson forms the exception here. She explores both Schattenstimmen and Bjorn Bicker s play illegal, wir sind viele, wir sind da (also 2008) as pieces which arguably give voice to them [the dramatists] as much as to those they claim to represent : p. 2. Wilkinson draws out the uneasy line between the monologue as a form which mirrors the systematic exclusion of these shadow voices from dialogue and as what Jon Erickson calls an effective means of getting to the table : Wilkinson, p Senkel for example states that in writing Schattenstimmen, Der Horizont hat sich sehr erweitert. Ich bin in der Hinsicht wie die meisten anderen auch: Ich gehe vorbei und sehe die Dinge nicht oder registriere sie nur am Rande. Und in diese Lebensverhältnisse einzutauchen, war eine echte Erfahrung : Behrendt and Wille, Wir haben, p Karen Jürs-Munby, The Resistant Text in Postdramatic Theatre: Performing Elfriede Jelinek s Sprachflächen, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 14.1 (2009), (p. 46). 207

210 languages or voices might seem to suggest some similarity to what has been considered the polyphony of Zaimoglu s literary protocol literature and semidocumentary texts for the theatre. 86 In bringing the term resistant texts into play here, it is important, however, to note certain key differences between Zaimoglu and Jelinek s writing. The refusal of character in Jelinek s texts forms a point of significant contrast to Zaimoglu s texts, in which the author encourages the reader (and by extension the director and dramaturge) to see each monologue as belonging to an individual figure both by the presentation of the individual numbered monologues en bloc and by the narrative Zaimoglu weaves around the text in interviews, which function as a kind of paratext. 87 Furthermore, Jelinek s hyper-brechtian aesthetic model is far more engaged with theatre as a medium and current debates within the theatrical community than Zaimoglu s working practice in which he sees himself more as a deliverer of texts. 88 However, in discussing Jelinek s texts and essays on the theatre and in particular her programmatic piece Ich möchte seicht sein (1983), Jürs- Munby suggests that Jelinek s writing for the theatre is resistant in that it: dismantles the organically unifying relationship between text, voice and embodied character. [...] Shallowness or superficiality is thus envisaged as the aesthetic weapon against the pretence of psychological depth and a liberal humanist theatre based on a Naturalist (Stanislavskian) system of actor training. 89 In the case of Schattenstimmen the perceived shallowness of the texts may also productively be read as dismantling perceived relationships between the author, subject, and actor and thus as a form of resistance against the identifications and expectations of both the migrant subjects and the postmigrant author involved in the commission of the play. 86 The use of various sociolects in Zaimoglu s texts is considered in detail in, amongst others: Yildiz, Critically, pp For a discussion of this as polyphony in the Bakhtinian sense of the term see, for example, Abel, pp Schmidt, p Jürs-Munby, p Ibid. 208

211 5.4 Mimesis, Mimeticism, and Cologne s Multicultural Ensemble The conflation of migration and documentary in the commission of Schattenstimmen for Schauspiel Köln was further complicated by the institution s attempt to redress the position of postmigrant actors. Several of the actors recruited for the ensemble of Schauspiel Köln as part of Beier s new approach were given main roles in the premiere production of Zaimoglu/Senkel s Schattenstimmen. 90 In interviews with El-Saeidi, Schauspieler B highlights his frustration in general with being asked to play roles in which the reality of multicultural life in Germany is not shown: Das sind so Rollen...Leider oft eben so Randfiguren, [...] Außenseiterfiguren der Gesellschaft eben. Eben keine Integrierten, sondern eben Kriminelle, Illegale, ja so was halt 91 Schauspieler B does suggest that Schattenstimmen is different in this respect as the illegal immigrants in this piece are not minor roles but instead are the main protagonists, and he also stresses the opportunities which the permanent engagement at Schauspiel Köln has given him. 92 Yet, as El-Saeidi explains, this actor and other actors also interviewed by El-Saeidi expressed reserve about the minor or sometimes clichéd roles in which they felt they had been cast over the initial year. 93 El-Saeidi himself describes the results of Beier s attempt to change ensemble structures as ernüchternd even by the end of 2008: Betrachtet man die 21 angelaufenen Produktionen der Spielzeit 2007/2008 einmal genauer, kann man erkennen, dass auch bei Frau Beier die Ensemblemitglieder, bei denen die nicht-deutsche Herkunft erkennbar ist, nicht unbedingt protagonistisch besetzt werden Schauspiel Köln, Schattenstimmen, programme (Cologne: Schauspiel Köln, 2008). Accessed thanks to Nora Bussenius/Schauspiel Köln; El-Saeidi, pp Schauspieler B, in El-Saeidi, p Ibid. 93 Ibid., p Schauspielerin A is particularly critical in this regard: ibid., pp Ibid., p The exceptions to this rule, are, as El-Saeidi points out, those plays where the themes are to do with migration, as in Schattenstimmen. 209

212 Speaking in 2011, the theatre s head dramaturge Rita Thiele both confirmed and lamented this assessment as the natural outcome of a situation in which quota is supposedly always in opposition to quality : Ich würde das heute auch, wenn ich [ ] ein [neues] Ensemble zusammenstellen würde, anders angehen als damals. Wir haben damals sehr viele Anfänger engagiert; also hauptsächlich Anfängerpositionen mit [...] Schauspielern und Schauspielerinnen besetzt, die aus solchen Familien kommen, also internationale Wurzeln haben [...].[Schauspiel Köln hat] einen Riesensaal, also um da auf der Bühne zu überleben, müssen sie in der Regel einige Berufserfahrung haben und sie müssen eine sehr große Präsenz haben. Und man landete dann bei vielen Anfängern dabei, dass die ausschließlich in kleineren, um nicht zu sagen dienenden Funktionen auf der Bühne zu sehen waren. 95 Mark Terkessidis, who was part of the discussion panel during which the above statement was voiced, refers directly to Thiele s statement in a subsequent interview when he states critically: Mich erstaunt allerdings die Naivität, mit der das dann umgesetzt wird: so, jetzt machen wir mal ne Quote und setzen lauter Anfänger rein, und dann merken wir, dass sie am Ende nur den Diener spielen dürfen. 96 Further criticisms of the project at Schauspiel Köln also come from Sharifi, who notes the failure to alter the higher and administrative levels of the organisation along with the ensemble. 97 Sharifi also criticises the decision not to actively attempt to engage with postmigrant audience members via the routes already tried and proved successful at the Cologne-based Arkadaş theatre; an organisation originally founded as a forum for Turkish theatre in 1986 and which today characterises itself as a Bühne der 95 Thiele, in Gintersdorfer et al. My transcription. 96 Terkessidis, in Dorothea Marcus, Was ist eigentlich aus der Kölner Akademie der Künste geworden? Ein Interview mit dem Migrationsforscher Mark Terkessidis, der sie mitentwickelt hat, Akt: Die Kölner Theaterzeitung, 23 (May 2011) < [last accessed 26/08/2014]. 97 Sharifi, Theater für alle?, p. 102; pp ; p Terkessidis also mentions the need to change institutional culture in Marcus, Was ist, and this is his broader point in his book Interkultur. 210

213 Kulturen, focusing on providing an intercultural programme for the diverse area of Cologne in which it is situated. 98 The casting of actors with a migration background primarily in main roles in explicitly migration-themed plays thus forms one of several tensions running through the broader project at Schauspiel Köln, tensions which are arguably then also inscribed not only in the dramatic text but also in the premiere production of Schattenstimmen. Figure 22. Publicity photograph of Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel, Schattenstimmen, dir. by Nora Bussenius (Cologne: Schauspiel Köln, 2008). Sandra Then < [accessed 24/03/2013]. Director Nora Bussenius was certainly aware of these tensions and in discussing the aesthetic of the premiere production mentioned: Ich wollte auch die Schauspieler schützen. Das waren große Debatten also [der] schwarze Schauspieler, der immer besetzt wird als [der] schwarze Illegale [...]. [In der Inszenierung geht] es auch eigentlich darum [ ], das zu thematisieren On the Arkadas theatre see Sharifi, Theater für alle?, pp ; p Bussenius, personal interview. 211

214 This explains the choice of an overtly theatrical aesthetic, which allowed no possibility of conflation of actor and role and instead emphasised performance. The production opened with the actors dressed in grey colours and seated on-stage on a bank of seats which self-reflexively mirrored the raked seating of the auditorium (Figure 22). In a series of black-outs the actors simultaneously spoke their own monologues forming a disjointed chorus, only to halt abruptly as the light returned. This highlighted their role as channels for others voices and the paradox of attempting to represent subjects whose survival as illegal immigrants rests on anonymity. The first monologue delivered, that of the Römer of monologue three, then issued forth out of the on-stage darkness before a harsh spotlight was turned first on the audience, then on the stage itself. Figure 23. Publicity photograph of Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel, Schattenstimmen, dir. by Nora Bussenius. Sandra Then. The issue of visibility continued to be played with throughout, as the actors moved in and out of shadow and sight, sometimes speaking their monologues from the on-stage 212

215 bank of chairs, sometimes from the wings, at one point even from the ladies toilets. 100 Of the nine monologues, all except monologue nine were used in a slightly cut form and each of the five actors became the main spokesperson for one or two monologues, as well as sharing elements of particular monologues between them. 101 The final scene brought all the actors together in a parody of the shrine of the three kings a reference to Cologne s famous cathedral over which the angriest and least coherent of the monologues, that of the gypsy woman of monologue nine, was recited by the two actresses (Figure 23). 102 The aesthetic employed attracted serious criticism from several reviewers. In the Kölnische Rundschau, for example, Günter Hennecke sighs wenn sie uns doch wirklich was erzählten, die illegalen Menschen. 103 On Deutschlandradio Ulrike Gondorf criticised Bussenius for not trusting the supposedly unquestionable quality of the monologues, but instead burying them under ziemlich kramphaften theatralischen Kunstanstrengungen. 104 For Bussenius herself, however, there was a clear distinction between more conventional documentary theatre and Zaimoglu s semi-documentary brand, weil eine Überhöhung da ist, aber ziemlich interessant, was diese Überhöhung hat so. 105 It is this artificiality and exaggeration which then became the key for Bussenius approach to the play, an approach which in turn stressed the performative, rather than confessional, nature of the monologues themselves: nicht Wer ist Germanys Next Topmodel, sondern Wer ist Germanys Next Topillegaler, dass sie auch versuchen mit ihren Geschichten sich zu profilieren, also vor den Zuschauern. 106 While each monologue took prominence at different points, the actors frequently interrupted one another s monologues with lines from their own. The competing and distanced relationships were further emphasised by the blocking in which the figures onstage alternately watched one another with a kind of detached curiosity, ignored one 100 Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel, Schattenstimmen, dir. by Nora Bussenius, unpublished audiovisual recording of Generalprobe, Schauspiel Köln, Cologne, 19/04/2008. Accessed thanks to Nora Bussenius/Schauspiel Köln. 101 SCHATTENSTIMMEN: Günter Senkel/Feridun Zaimoglu, Fassung vom 10/04/08, unpublished cut of the dramatic text used for Schattenstimmen, dir. by Nora Bussenius (Cologne: Schauspiel Köln, 2008), pp Accessed thanks to Nora Bussenius/Schauspiel Köln. 102 Zaimoglu and Senkel, audovisual recording of the Generalprobe. 103 Hennecke, n. pag. 104 Ulrike Gondorf, Fazit: Kultur vom Tage, [summary of live review] Deutschlandradio Kultur, 20/04/ Bussenius, personal interview. 106 Ibid. 213

216 another or actively tried to interrupt. 107 The association of the characters Selbstbehauptung with the kind of profiling present in reality television shows arguably functioned to draw parallels between the inclusion of the Schattenstimmen monologues in the programme of a bastion of high culture such as Schauspiel Köln and the desires of a bourgeois audience to be both entertained by and to distance themselves from more precarious lives and senses of self. Indeed, Bussenius explained in our interview that when presented with the paradoxical challenge to display lives lived in illegality on stage, her prime concern was with what the purpose of the production was: Was ist sozusagen der Einsatzpunkt bei Migration? [ ] Es wird halt schnell so zum Modethema [...] und wird oft nicht hinterfragt aber was ist denn der Punkt daran? [...] [Es ging] bei uns in der Arbeit, in der Inszenierung, [...] um diese Unmöglichkeit, diese Absurdität, dass wir das bürgerliche Publikum ins Theater gehen und die armen Illegalen angucken, und was ist dann sozusagen das Resultat, dass wir unser eigenes schlechtes Gewissen beruhigen, oder was ist das? [...] [E]s [ist] eine Art Kampf [ ] zwischen Bühne und Zuschauer. 108 The meta-theatrical focus in the premiere production thus also suggests that the reality to be imitated or repeated was far more that of the interaction at work when a bourgeois theatre audience spends an evening at the theatre in order to learn about illegal immigrants, than that of the immigrants themselves. While the performances of Schwarze Jungfrauen at the HAU theatre and in other areas where an effort was made to attract postmigrant audience members to the theatre had the potential to become places of real encounter amongst audience members and Muslim theatre practitioners, the same cannot be said with regard to illegal immigrants Zaimoglu and Senkel, audovisual recording of the Generalprobe. 108 Bussenius, personal interview. The concerns Bussenius noted in our interview are also reflected in Zaimoglu s account of his own work on the Schattenstimmen monologues in section Wille, p. 30. In comparison, on 21 st June 2014, the akademie der autodidakten (sic) based at the Ballhaus held an evening dedicated to the refugee protest camp established between 2010 and 2014 at Oranienplatz, Berlin by asylum seekers. A central message of the protest camp is that kein Mensch ist illegal. The evening at the Ballhaus was titled Refugee Strike & Beyond. It consisted of a film created by inhabitants of the protest camp, followed by a discussion with the participants of the film. The theatre 214

217 Furthermore, the experience of illegal immigration is arguably on the fringes rather than central to the experience of the postmigrant reality the theatre was purporting to reflect. 110 The desire for a real experience within the safe boundaries of an evening at the theatre thus seems to be exactly what Bussenius was keen to undermine in this particular instance. 111 Helga Kraft suggests that in the case of the Cologne production in particular: Es hat sicher dem androzentrischen Effekt des Stücks nicht abgeholfen, dass die Regisseurin einige Texte der Frauen von männlichen Schauspielern vortragen ließ und umgekehrt. Diese Art von Geschlechtertausch konnte die aufgesetzte Macho-Sprache nicht übertünchen oder Genderdifferenzen sichtbar machen. 112 While Kraft sees the director s choices as a failed dramaturgy, I would suggest that they can be understood as reactions to precisely the problematic aspects of the playtexts and the circumstances of its commissioning which maintain and thematise those frictions, rather than resolving them for the audience. The production s engagement with the use of race and racial hate-speak within the monologues can perhaps also be understood in this context. Colour was played with throughout the premiere production, with actors not only smearing themselves in a number of colours, but also throwing the paint used over their heads and across the stage. Jamaican-Swiss actor Patrick Gusset, who was cast in two of the African roles, that of the Rome-based immigrant of monologue three and the conspiracy theorist and drug dealer of monologue eight, began the performance with his face already smeared in black paint. As he moved from the role of the Römer into that of a Dealer trying thus became part of a show of solidarity with those making themselves vulnerable by participating in the camp and associated protests. The evening is advertised at veranstaltung/refugee_strike beyond_ [last accessed 08/07/2014]. 110 Schauspiel Köln preferred the term mit internationalen Wurzeln or mit Migrationshintergrund. The term postmigrant is very much tied to the Ballhaus. 111 In our interview, Bussenius differentiated the task she felt the Schattenstimmen production was engaged in from participatory forms of theatre such as that of a project at the HAU during which exchange between postmigrant artists, German-German artists, and a diverse audience took place. 112 Kraft, Das Theater, p

218 to forge his own identity among the various ascriptions he is confronted with, he then also applied thick white paint over half of his face (Figure 24). 113 Figure 24. Patrick Gussett as The Dealer. Screenshot taken from Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel, Schattenstimmen, dir. by Nora Bussenius, audiovisual recording of part of premiere [uploaded 28/11/2012] < [last accessed 26/08/2014]. Figure 25. Andreas Grötzinger, playing the Minus-Maroc. Publicity photograph of Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel, Schattenstimmen, dir. by Nora Bussenius. Sandra Then. 113 Zaimoglu and Senkel, Schattensstimmen, monologue eight, p

219 Similarly Swedish-born actor Andreas Grötzinger tipped a tub of yellow paint over himself as he declaimed in the role of the Moroccan Ich bin n Araber, der Minusmarok [...] das macht mich noch lange nicht zum Mumbamumba (Figure 25). 114 Grötzinger then later donned a comically starched skirt in order to perform the monologue of the female Ukrainian ex-au pair. A highly performative and continual process of racially-coded colour usage thus took place throughout the premiere production. As the reviewer for the Süddeutsche Zeitung remarked, this play with paint gave the evening an aesthetic that was aktionistisch or even akin to that of performance art. The reviewer commented that this marked the actors as frei von ihrer eigenen, teils dunklen Hautfarbe als Theaterfiguren. 115 This pointed Verfremdung of the actor s body appears to have been designed both to prevent the audience from perceiving the actors as authentic illegals, and to comment on the ways in which colour is used to establish borders between other illegals within many of the Schattenstimmen monologues. As El-Saeidi s interviews with several of the actors involved show, however, this was not unproblematic: Mit der ersten Rolle, dem Römer, das war schon schwierig, super Klischee [...]. Bei der zweiten Rolle, das war eine Klischeebesetzung, die funktionierte, die halt... die mit dem Klischee so umgegangen ist, dass sie es benutzte und bestätigte, aber auch brach. Die Figur weiß um ihr Klischee und ihren Stand [...] Und dann geht das. 116 In response to the question whether he had ever felt reduced to the exotic rather than treated as an actor, the actor also made reference to his experience of Schattenstimmen: 114 Ibid., monologue three, p Vasco Boenisch, Denn die einen stehn im Dunkeln, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 23/04/2008. The title of this review is drawn from Brecht s Dreigroschenoper. The use of Brecht quotations can also be found on the programme for the premiere and Boenisch amongst others also made reference to Brecht s wellknown line, der Pass ist der edelste Teil von einem Menschen. This reference to a now canonical figure of early twentieth century political theatre perhaps helps contextualise the reviewers disappointment in the aesthetic choices made here. In our interview Bussenius also highlighted that space for improvisation was left for the actors in terms of where and when they disturbed one anothers monologues in order to further the performance character of the piece and so that dieses Freakige, Dreckige bleibt (personal interview). 116 Schauspieler A, El-Saeidi, p

220 Bei der Produktion Schattenstimmen, da hat jeder vier Stunden von seinem Leben erzählt und da hat Nora im Bezug zu meinem Monolog [...] gesagt: Das bist doch du, das ist doch deine Geschichte, dein Konflikt[ ], also...aber immer im Zusammenhang mit meinem Migrationshintergrund. 117 A reduction of the professional to the biographical is thus potentially at work here even in attempts to move beyond it via a Brechtian Verfremdung. Speaking in general about the relationship between migration and documentary theatre today, Mark Terkessidis stresses that: Man kann diese Öffnung der Hochkulturinstitutionen gar nicht genug würdigen, doch auch hier bleibt das Problem, dass die Jugendlichen mit Migrationshintergrund meist auf die Straße reduziert werden [...]. Sie selbst haben wenig davon. Irgendwann endet das Projekt, und kaum einer von den Mitwirkenden bleibt als Schauspieler am Theater. Zudem geht es weiterhin um die ästhetischen Bedürfnisse eines bildungsbürgerlichen Publikums, denn es gelingt mit solchen Stücken nur sehr begrenzt, die sogenannten bildungsfernen Schichten ins Theater zu locken. 118 Terkessidis is referring here to the fashion for engaging with migration via plays in which postmigrant youths should present themselves on stage, such as in the Homestories project which took place across Germany in His comments about the limited after-effects for those involved also resonate with El-Saeidi and Sharifi s critiques of the situation at Schauspiel Köln, where audience structures did not appear to change significantly at first and several of the actors engaged with such publicity soon quietly left the ensemble Ibid., p Terkessidis, Interkultur, p A more detailed examination of the dynamics at work in these productions should be undertaken in order to be fair to the participants and organisers in various projects which will have worked in particular ways, in response to particular circumstances. See, for example, the very nuanced discussion of the ways in which such plays can be both empowering and reductive in Siavash, p , p. 88. See also Norma Köhler, Neugier-Ich: Subjektorientierte Biografiearbeit als interkulturelles Theater, in Irritation und Vermittlung: Theater in einer interkulturellen und multireligiösen Gesellschaft, ed. by Wolfgang Sting et al. (Berlin: Dr W. Hopf, 2010), pp Sharifi, Blackfacing, n. pag. 218

221 Despite the cleft between the Schauspiel Köln s proclaimed aims and its actual manner of engagement with postmigrant actors, the attempt to mirror the ethnic diversity of the reality of Einwanderungsland Deutschland has nonetheless created space for further debate on casting practices and the very ethnically homogenous institutional cultures of many of Germany s state-funded theatres. As El-Saeidi and the actors he interviews point out, [k]einer möchte für eine Corporate Identity benutzt werden, auch ein deutscher Migrant nicht. 121 However, whatever the original motivation, the action of creating this ensemble has had useful repercussions: Auch wenn das Konzept des Schauspiel Köln noch nicht wirklich erkennbar ist, hat es trotzdem was Positives: Die führenden Persönlichkeiten der Theaterwelt haben erkannt, dass es hier eine Diskrepanz gibt, die es auszugleichen gilt. 122 I would refer to this as the performative effect of the experiment: performing the role of an engaged theatre itself created some change and, perhaps, more awareness of the limitations of the theatre s initial attempts to become inclusive. As Sarah Ahmed explains in her examination of diversity policies in universities, there is often a paradox between, on the one hand [ ] diversity as an official language used by institutions and, on the other, how practitioners experience those institutions as resistant to their work. 123 This would certainly seem to correspond to the situation outlined by El-Saeidi above. However, Ahmed argues that, [i]f organizations invest in diversity or equality, even as shiny veneers, we can do things with their investments. 124 This performative effect is also particularly interesting with respect to I. A. Çelik s assessment of Zaimoglu s documentary theatre as a form of selling out, as it situates his theatre within a broader context of institutional change. The combination of documentary theatre and migration within this context creates a 121 El-Saeidi, p Ibid., p Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 17. Ahmed also uses the language of performativity and raises the manner in which documents which do not translate into action can be considered non-performatives. See p. 11; pp ; pp Ibid., pp

222 preference for pieces in which keine Berufsschauspieler, sondern talentierte Immigranten verschiedener Länder are engaged in performing elements of Germany s hitherto overlooked reality. 125 However, even Zaimoglu s more problematic semidocumentary plays arguably offer more purchase for professional postmigrant actors to perform the professional roles for which they have trained, compared to the documentary or Ready-Made approach which relies on migrant bodies on stage to perform themselves. 5.5 Schattenstimmen in Dogland: Shaping Institutional Realities As Kömürcü Nobrega argues, doing diversity work requires taking into account the fact that people speak from different positions of power. 126 Returning briefly to the relationship between authenticity and the documentary with a view to the institutional context in which representations of migration take place, it is perhaps useful to refer to migration researcher Umut Erel s comments on self-representation and female postmigrant participation in academic studies on migration. Erel argues: [Die] Forderung, dass Migrantinnen über Migrantinnen forschen und schreiben sollen, ist eine politische Stellungnahme, die Anerkennung dafür fordert, dass Migrantinnen nicht nur Objekte, sondern auch Produzentinnen von Wissen sind. [...] Allerdings wird die Frage Wer spricht für wen? oft auf einer anderen Ebene gelesen als eine Frage der Authentizität und Identität der Sprecherinnen. 127 With this in mind I would like to conclude this chapter by turning briefly to the production of Schattenstimmen which took place as part of the opening festival of the Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Dogland, in order to create a point of comparison to the premiere at Cologne. 125 Kraft, Das Theater, p Kömürcü Nobrega, We Bark, p Umut Erel, Auto/biografische Wissensproduktionen von Migrantinnen, in re/visionen: Postkoloniale Perspektiven von People of Colour auf Rassismus, Kulturpolitik und Widerstand in Deutschland, ed. by Kien Nghi Ha (Münster: Unrast, 2007) pp (p. 158). 220

223 At first glance the presentation of the Ballhaus Naunynstraße project may seem similar to that of Schauspiel Köln. In a 2008 interview Tunçay Kulaoğlu, co-leader of the theatre, explained: es geht darum, dass sich gesellschaftliche Realitäten, die im Zusammenhang mit Migration stehen[,] in den Inszenierungen wiederfinden. Das ist unsere Leitlinie. So beziehen sich programmatisch die Produktionen des Eröffnungsfestivals Dogland auf die Ära nach der ersten Migrationsphase. [...] Es geht sowohl um gesellschaftliche Realität als auch um individuelle Geschichten, die so bisher nicht dargestellt wurden, oder eben nur aus der Perspektive der Mehrheitsgesellschaft. Bauchschmerzen haben wir, wenn die Geschichten und die Protagonisten auf bestimmte Aspekte reduziert werden. Und wir sind ein Netzwerk, das jünge Künstler entdeckt und fördert. 128 However, there are many key differences between the projects. While at Schauspiel Köln the focus was on presenting a representative Ensemble, the drive to open the Ballhaus appears to have recognised the particular support mechanisms necessary for fostering and enabling postmigrant artistic participation. 129 Rather than a fixed ensemble, a more flexible, project-based way of working taken from Langhoff and Kulaoğlu s experience in film was also developed. 130 In comparison to the Schauspiel Köln production of Schattenstimmen, the Ballhaus production directed by Nurkan Erpulat took only the four most extreme monologues those of the Eastern European prostitute, African male prostitute, Minusmaroc, and African drug dealer and cut each to create four texts of approximately equal length. 131 Liberian-born actor Aloysius Itoka played the anti- African Minusmaroc, Yugoslavian actress Vernesa Berbo took the role of the African 128 Tunçay Kulaoğlu and Birgit Lengers, Ballhaus Naunynstraße: Bühne für postmigrantische Geschichten, Dramaturgie: Zeitschrift für die dramaturgische Gesellschaft (2009), (p. 18). 129 See also Shermin Langhoff and Kristina Ohr, Theater kann eine Identitätsmaschine sein : Interview mit Shermin Langhoff, nah & fern: Das Kulturmagazin für Migration und Partizipation, 43 (2010), Kulaoğlu, in Kulaoğlu and Lengers, p Strichfassung Monologue1 stand , pp. 1 5; Strichfassung_Monologue2_- Stand_21_11_2008, pp. 1 6; Strichfassung_Monologue4_-Stand_13_11, pp. 1 6; Strichfassung_Monologue8_-Stand_13_11, pp. 1-6: unpublished cuts of the dramatic text used for Schattenstimmen, dir. by Nurkan Erpulat (Berlin: Ballhaus Naunynstraße, 2008), Accessed thanks to Fereidoun Ettehad/Ballhaus Naunynstraße. 221

224 drug dealer, while Murat Seven appeared as the female prostitute and Michael Wenzlaff was cast as the black male prostitute. The casting of Schattenstimmen makes it clear that for the Ballhaus a postmigrant ensemble is not a move towards selfrepresentation in the sense of one-to-one casting, but rather is to do with postmigrant artists being involved in the act of representation rather than being subject to representation. That such a stance is necessary is reflected in the conflation of actor and character in the assessment of Erpulat s casting choices by the anonymous reviewer for the Berliner Zeitung: Erpulat hat sich vier Schauspieler ausgesucht, die zu den jeweiligen Monologen passen. Aber sie haben untereinander die Rollen getauscht, was die Ressentiments, von denen sie zehren, etwas aufweicht. 132 The biographies of, for example, Aloysius Itoka, an actor who was born in Liberia, trained in New York, and is now resident in Berlin, and the African drug dealer of Schattenstimmen could hardly be more different. However, the shared skin colour between the actor and the figure for a role in which he was not even cast is deemed to naturally affect the energy bought to the performances in this review. The Ballhaus production also seems more engaged with the precariousness of the lives of illegal immigrants expressed within the dramatic texts of Schattenstimmen. Rather than being performed on the main stage of the theatre, each of the monologues was lodged in its own space in the cellar, attic or spare nooks of the building. Audience members were divided into four groups and the groups took turns to watch the different monologues under the guidance of Guides and Betreuer dressed prosaically in uniforms identifying them as employees of the theatre (Figure 26). 133 The mise-enscène of each monologue not only meant that ihre abseitige Lage [funktionierte als] 132 Anon., Die illegal Nachbarn, Berliner Zeitung (24/11/2008) < [last accessed 24/11/2008]. 133 This would not be clear from the Strichfassungen alone; however, the audience movement and guides can be seen in the audiovisual recording and is confirmed by the mention of Guides and Betreuer in the programme as well as references to the division into groups in a number of reviews: Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel, Schattenstimmen, dir. by Nurkan Erpulat, unpublished audiovisual recording, Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Berlin, Accessed thanks to Fereidoun Ettehad/Ballhaus Naunynstraße; Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Schattenstimmen, programme (Berlin: Ballhaus Naunynstraße, 2008). 222

225 Bild für die unsichtbare Existenz am Rand der Gesellschaft, 134 but also engaged with the precariousness of this existence in particular ways. Figure 26. One of the guides leads a group into their next monologue. Screenshot taken from Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel, Schattenstimmen, dir. by Nurkan Erpulat, unpublished audiovisual recording, Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Berlin, Accessed thanks to Fereidoun Ettehad/Ballhaus Naunynstraße. The monologue of the drug dealer was delivered in a small room lit only by a lamp driven by the pedal power of the actress on an adapted exercise bike (Figure 27). Her performance thus referenced the continual effort necessary for the illegal figure s survival as well as playing with the idea of in/visibility. 135 The monologue of the Eastern European prostitute on the other hand took place in a room filled with living butterflies emphasising the vulnerability of her position and potentially creating a subtle reference to the opera Madame Butterfly. 136 While the Ballhaus production of Schattenstimmen was less overtly meta-theatrical than the premiere at Cologne, any simple identification of actor with figure was broken not only by the purposeful crosscasting but also by the prosaic figures of the guides marshalling the four audience groups through the experience (Figure 26). At the same time the play became a way for audiences to literally explore the new theatre and the delivery of the monologues 134 Granzin, n. pag. 135 Zaimoglu and Senkel, audiovisual recording, Berlin. 136 Ibid. Katrin Sieg discusses Madame Butterfly as coding for the tragic feminized colonial in the European theatrical sphere: Ethnic Drag, p

226 four times in a row by each actor highlighted the cast members professional Leistung. 137 Figure 27. Vernesa Berbo as the African Drug Dealer. Screenshot taken from Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel, Schattenstimmen, dir. by Nurkan Erpulat. For the final scene of the Ballhaus production, the audience was reunited and gathered on the theatre s main stage while the actors moved between the auditorium seats in a way which closely echoed but also reversed the mise-en-scène of the premiere production (Figure 28). As Tunçay Kulaoğlu has highlighted, the aim of the Ballhaus project is not to simply give denen, über die immer gesprochen [...] wird, die Chance [ ], selbst über sich zu sprechen, but rather to allow a postmigrant artistic perspective space to emerge. 138 Rather than mirroring the tensions at work in performing a semi-documentary piece on illegal migration as an evening s entertainment for an educated middle-class audience, the staging at the Ballhaus chose to shape the interaction in ways designed to make that audience attentive to the stories being told and to their own involvement in the process. 137 Granzin, n. pag. 138 Kulaoğlu, in Kulaoğlu and Lengers, p

227 Figure 28. This image shows the final scene in which the actors have taken over the seats the in which the spectators were sitting before being divided into groups. The camera is positioned amongst the audience members who stand grouped onstage below the actors for this final short scene. Screenshot taken from Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel, Schattenstimmen, dir. by Nurkan Erpulat. In her examination of the turn to documentary theatre at the Ballhaus in particular, Katrin Sieg has drawn attention to the simultaneous occurrence of the long overdue inclusion of postmigrant theater in the funding logic of German national culture and the trend for postmigrant documentary theatre. In doing so she suggests that the national nature of this funding for such documentary theatre has, in this initial phase of production, contributed to its succumbing to the country s (and the continent s) most cherished myth [European cosmopolitanism]. 139 As a point of comparison Sieg turns to the Vienna Burgtheater s productions of Elfriede Jelinek which have, she argues, channelled state funds into profound and powerful critiques of European selective cosmopolitanism. 140 Sieg s comparison suggests that this is the route which postmigrant theatre should take and places extraordinarily heavy expectations on emerging artists and a new house with little regard for the material differences in the funding and sustainability of the Burgtheater as compared to the Ballhaus Sieg, Class p Ibid. 141 As Shermin Langhoff states in an interview with Kömürcü Nobrega: You can t drive Formula 1 with a Trabi : Kömürcü Nobrega, We Bark, p. 94. The initial funding the Ballhaus was allotted was 223,000 Euros per year for the period and additional project-based funding has also been 225

228 However, if we return to the idea of Schattenstimmen as a resistant text, the Jelinek-Zaimoglu comparison can be productively read somewhat differently. As Karen Jürs-Munby argues, while productions of Jelineck s texts tend to highlight the shift from the dominance of the dramatic plot to the performativity of the performance text, [...] at the same time [this] thematizes the lack of performativity (understood [differently] in the sense of J. L. Austin s speech act theory as the transformation of reality through acts of speech). 142 While Jürs-Munby sees Jelinek s plays as having little effect beyond the symbolic, the opposite may be said for Zaimoglu and Senkel s work. In an institution which sees itself as a motor for change, such as the Ballhaus, Zaimoglu and Senkel s dramatic texts might well be understood to play a part in transforming reality for postmigrant actors, even if not for the illegal immigrants whose aestheticised narratives the actors in this case perform. 143 allotted from the intercultural project funding of the Senate Chancellery for Cultural Affairs: ibid., pp Jürs-Munby, pp Emphasis in original. 143 Langhoff, p

229 CHAPTER SIX. Performing Diversity: Emine Sevgi Özdamar s Perikızı 6.1 Migration as Odyssey: Myth and Mobility In 2010, in celebration of its year as European Capital of Culture, Essen and the Ruhr area staged a theatrical project named Odyssee Europa. This project took place over a series of weekends during which audience members signed up to participate in an odyssey of their own through North Rhine-Westphalia, an area rebranded as the Ruhr Metropole in Essen s bid to become 2010 European Capital of Culture. 1 Each odyssey consisted of a weekend-long journey, both theatrical and physical, in which the audience moved from town to town, theatre to theatre, creating die Inszenierung einer ganzen Region through a conscious act of displacement. 2 The project commissioned plays from various international playwrights, among them, Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Despite being resident in Germany for several decades, having been active in the German theatrical establishment in the 1970s and 1980s and having won prestigious prizes for her German-language prose work, Özdamar was presented as a Turkish playwright; displaced in, and exoticising, the German theatrical landscape. 3 Her dream-play, Perikızı, tells the story of a young Turkish woman similarly displaced, whose dream-like odyssey departs from Turkey and takes her into a strange and mythologized Europe. This premiere production of Perikızı under the direction of Ulrich Greb of the Schlosstheater Moers was singled out as one of the most successful Odyssee Europa plays by a number of critics. Its popularity was also reflected in anecdotal reports of audience comments, the Moers production s invitation to the 1 For a critical analysis of this re-branding see Thomas Ernst, Das Ruhrgebiet als Rhizom: Die Netzstadt und die Nicht-Metropole Ruhr in den Erzählwerken von Jürgen Link und Wolfgang Welt, in Literaturwunder Ruhr, ed. by Hanneliese Palm et al. (Essen: Klartext, 2010), pp Ulf Pape, Die Helden des Potts, Spiegel Online 02/03/2010, < [last accessed 26/08/2014]. The reviews consulted in this chapter were kindly made available to me by Schlosstheater Moers, accessed in File O, Archive of Verlag der Autoren (Frankfurt am Main), or accessed online. 3 Schauspielhaus Bochum et al., Odyssee Europa: Sechs Schauspiele und eine Irrfahrt durch die Zwischenwelt, programme (Bochum: Schauspiel Bochum, 2010). Accessed thanks to Schlosstheater Moers.

230 NRW theatre festival and in audience numbers. 4 More than 25 years after Özdamar first began writing for the stage, the figure of the displaced woman seemed to fit. Indeed, part of the Ruhr area s stated aim as European Capital of Culture was to use the year to create a new understanding of the area as a European metropolis characterised by diversity. 5 Continuing this project, the introduction to the book in which the Odyssee Europa plays were published characterises Odysseus as the Chiffre des modernen Europäers. 6 The conflation of Odysseus not only with the modern European, who is free to move between states, but also, through Özdamar s play, with the economic migrant, might be seen as a welcome acknowledgement of the epic quality of the experiences of Europe and Germany s newer subjects. 7 More problematically, however, redrawing the lines of inclusion in this way also runs the risk of obscuring the EU (and Germany s) role in excluding particular migrant subjects from belonging. 8 Following the questions raised with respect to institutional attempts at diversity work in the previous chapter, a closer examination of the ways in which the commission of Perikızı for Odyssey Europa relates to the programme s view of freedom of movement as a quintessential element of life in contemporary Europe seems particularly relevant here. Only a year later Perikızı was staged again, this time as Germany celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the bilateral recruitment agreements which initiated largescale Turkish labour migration to West Germany. The tone of the events put on to 4 Dietmar Zimmermann notes dass die Moerser Aufführung am häufigsten genannt wurde, wenn man die Zuschauer am Ende der Reise nach ihrem Favoriten unter den sechs Stücken fragte : Dietmar Zimmermann, Migrantensorgen, allegorisch, theater pur (2010), pp In the season fourteen performances of Perikızı took place, attracting a total of 2111 audience members. In comparison, in the same season Der elfte Gesang, Roland Schimmelpfennig s contribution to Odyssee Europa, was performed only six times, attracting 999 viewers: Deutscher Bühnenverein, Wer spielte was? Statistik des deutschen Bühnenvereins 2009/2010 (Cologne: Mykenae, 2010), p. 253, p Rolf Parr explains that die Kombination Essen und Istanbul (mit Urlaubströmen in die eine Richtung und Arbeitsmigration in die andere) made Essen an attractive prospect to the relevant EU committee, während sie [Interkulturalität] in den tatsächlichen Programmen im Ruhrgebiet dann kaum eine Rolle spielte : Rolf Parr, Wen (alles) adressiert eigentlich eine Europäische Kulturhauptstadt? Das Beispiel Essen für das Ruhrgebiet, in Verortungen der Interkulturalität: Die Europäischen Kulturhauptstädte Luxemburg und die Großregion (2007), das Ruhrgebiet (2010) und Istanbul (2010), ed. by Thomas Ernst and Dieter Heimböckel (Bielefeld: transcript, 2012), pp (p. 150). 6 Steven Sloane, Grußwort, in Theater Theater: Odyssee Europa, aktuelle Stuecke 20/10, ed. by RUHR.2010 et al. (Fischer: Frankfurt am Main, 2010), p This would be consistent with Özdamar s earlier declarations that the life of a Gastarbeiter is ein Roman : Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Schwarzauge in Deutschland, 2001, p The association of Odysseus unwilling travels, during which he was subject to the whims of the Gods, is also very different from the more prosaic planned and safe movement of EU citizens from one EU country to another. 228

231 mark this anniversary was overwhelmingly positive: Angela Merkel met with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, for example, and a special train was put on from Istanbul to Munich to commemorate the journey taken by many Gastarbeiter in the 1960s. 9 Repeated references to the success of Turkish migration to Germany suggested an interpretation of this migration as both desired and endorsed by the German state, while at the same time linking the topics of migration and integration. 10 Only the year before, however, a best-selling book by German politician Thilo Sarazzin, Deutschland schafft sich ab, had told a very different story, claiming in language strongly influenced by biological racism that the Turkish population in Germany was causing the nation to decline. 11 Furthermore, the celebrations stood in contrast to the state ambivalence which characterised the first few decades of largescale Turkish migration to Germany. 12 Perhaps in response to this, the Ballhaus Naunynstraße marked this anniversary more critically, with a programme titled Almancı! 50 Jahre Scheinehe and a new production of Perikızı by Berlin-based Israeli director Michael Ronen. Perikızı differs significantly from Özdamar s Alamania plays (addressed in Chapter One), not only in its popularity and relatively rapid succession of productions, but also in that the protagonist is female. 13 It also appears to be more autobiographical, containing references to Özdamar s own reception as a writer and to the accusations that her first novel, Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei (1991) had been plagiarised in Feridun Zaimoglu s 2006 hit novel Leyla. 14 At the same time Perikızı shares certain 9 These events are discussed in, for example, Maximillian Popp, Bittere Heimat: 50 Jahre Gastarbeiter aus der Türkei, Spiegel Online, 01/11/2011, < [last accessed 26/08/2014]; Şeyda Ozil et al., Vorwort, in Fünfzig Jahre türkische Arbeitsmigration in Deutschland, ed. by Şeyda Ozil et al., Türkisch-deutsche Studien, 2 (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2011), pp Ozil et al., p Thilo Sarazzin, Deutschland schafft sich ab. Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2010). 12 Rita Chin, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p In her analysis of Keloglan in Alamania, Katrin Sieg suggests this earlier play is clearly a response to a political crisis, and [ ] acquiesces to an equation of the masculine with the universal, which the author s short stories and novels eschew : Katrin Sieg, Ethnic Drag, p This plagiarism accusation and the way in which it played out in the German press has been the subject of much heated debate. Here I want to focus on the implications of its reappearance in fictional form within this play, however. For a range of views on the plagiarism controversy itself, in no particular order, see Cheesman, Novels, pp ; Dayıoğlu-Yücel, pp ; Gramling, pp ; Warner, pp ; Zafer Şenocak, Authentische Türkinnen, die tageszeitung, 22/06/2006 < [last accessed 07/08/2014]. 229

232 qualities with Özdamar s earlier plays, such as a focus on migration and the inclusion of characters and quotations from German, Turkish, and other European sources. References to Shakespeare s A Midsummer Night s Dream, Friedrich Hölderlin s Hyperion, Heinrich Heine s Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen, Schlager singer Heino, and Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy thus abound. As per the terms of its commission, the play also goes back to one of the foundational European myths and reworks figures and episodes from Homer s Odyssey. 15 Having disobeyed her grandmother s warning not to look in the mirror at nights, the young protagonist, an aspiring actress named Perikızı (or fairy-child), is transported from her Turkish home to a mythologised West Germany/Europe. 16 There she encounters Turkish women transformed into hens and pigs by a Circe-like enchantress, three German Cyclops with a guilt-complex (die Schuldgefühlgiganten) and a wolf who plagiarises her work then proceeds to snort cocaine through a rolled up copy of her manuscript while the German press watches on indulgently. The actions of the wolf identify him as a clear reference to Zaimoglu, while the fact that he is characterised as wolf also functions to align the fictionalised Zaimoglu with the Turkish fascist movement, the Grey Wolves. 17 Immediately following this, Perikızı descends into Hades where she is welcomed by the ghosts who have accompanied her from Turkey those of her grandfather, killed in the First World War, and of two Armenian brides as well as by the ghosts of literary figures such as Hölderlin encountered during her journey. In the final scene of the dramatic text, however, we are returned to a slightly adjusted version of the opening lines of the play, creating a circular framing of the main action A list of the writers quoted is provided on the final page of the dramatic text: Özdamar, Perikızı, p These are also noted as intertexts in: Franziska Schößler, Das Theaterevent Odyssee Europa der Kulturhauptstadt Essen: Prekäre Männlichkeit und Emine Sevgi Özdamars Traumspiel Perikzi [sic], Zeitschrift für Interkulturelle Germanistik, 2.2 (2010), (pp ); Christina Komnacky, Odyssee Inszenierungen (unpublished Diplomarbeit, University of Vienna, 2012), p. 79. A number of Hölderlin s poems and fragments in addition to those found in Hyperion are also quoted. 16 These two areas are conflated in the language of the dramatic text. 17 See also Schößler, Theaterevent, pp The unusually heavy-handed nature of this scene and the self-evident nature of the references for those familiar with the literary scene in Germany is illustrated by the way in which Schößler refers to the characters as simply Wolf/Zaimoglu und Feenkind/Özdamar : ibid.; see also Schößler, Drama, p Reference may also be being made through the character of the wolf to the wolfpack in the prologue to Zaimoglu s Leyla (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2006), pp The penultimate line of the dramatic text is Das Meer hat sich zurückgezogen, wer weiß, warum, suggesting that a certain danger has, albeit arbitrarily, and perhaps only momentarily, receded: 230

233 In addition to drawing on Homer s Odyssey and including many other intertextual links, many scenes in Perikızı are based on and rework the first two chapters of Özdamar s 1998 novel Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn. 19 As suggested by the reference in the plot of Perikızı to the real-life plagiarism affair of 2006, the narrative of migration to Germany presented here is, however, in some respects darker and more traumatic than that presented in the earlier novel. This can be seen, for example, in the alterations to the portrayal of the protagonist s fellow Gastarbeiterinnen in the dramatic text. Franziska Schößler points out that the literal transformation of Turkish Gastarbeiterinnen into hens in the play is an extension of an image used in the earlier novel. 20 In Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn, the Turkish Gastarbeiterinnen are portrayed as a heterogeneous group through the multiple ways in which the women divide themselves into Zuckers, Esels, Kinder, and Huren in Germany; groupings which centre on behavioural and, increasingly, sexual choices. 21 In the dramatic text of Perikızı, however, the heterogeneity of the Turkish population both at home and abroad becomes expressed through attitudes towards nationalism. 22 Thus Hen One attacks Perikızı for being Armenian and cries Esel, du beleidigst mein Türkentum, while two further hens chorus Erspar dir deinen Türkenwahn unter der Erde werden alle gleich sein. 23 This language directly references article 301 of the Turkish penal code, which makes insulting Turkishness punishable by law and which has been a stumbling block in Turkey s application to Özdamar, Perikızı, p The opening line of Perikızı, Das Meer steigt wer weiß warum, is also included in Özdamar s lament for Armenian campaingner Hrant Dink: Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Bitteres Wasser, in Odessa Transfer: Nachrichten vom Schwarzen Meer, ed. by Katharina Raabe and Monika Sznajderman (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009), pp (p. 40). In a footnote there this line is identified as Dilek Dizdar s German translation of a line by Turkish poet Ece Ayhan, the poet who gave Özdamar the name Sevgi. Ece Ayhan is also the subject of her 2007 Turkish-language novel, Kendi kendinin. 19 In part of the opening scene of Perikızı some of the dialogue from pp of Özdamar s second novel reappears, for example: Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2002). Leaving home is a minor scene in Die Brücke though and does not serve as the opening to the novel but is preceded by an account of buying bread in Stresemannstraße, Berlin: ibid., p. 11. In Perikızı this moment is given more prominence and is longer, situating a historically specific Turkey more as initial point of departure: Özdamar, Perikızı, pp Schößler, Theaterevent, p. 86; Drama, p Özdamar, Die Brücke, p. 42. For a discussion of the role of sexuality in the novel see, for example, Shafi, p. 204; Beverly M. Weber, Work, Sex, and Socialism: Reading Beyond Cultural Hybridity in Emine Sevgi Özdamar s Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn, German Life and Letters, 63.1 (2010), See also Schößler, p. 88; Drama, p Özdamar, Perikızı, p

234 join the EU. 24 The effect is to create parallels between the increased restrictions on free speech in Turkey today and the historical fascist violence which took place in Turkey in the 1970s, coterminous with much Turkish migration to the FRG. 25 Article 301 has since frequently been used to silence or punish discussion of controversial elements of Turkish history, such as the Armenian genocide, and has been invoked against both Orhan Pamuk and the Armenian rights campaigner Hrant Dink, whose death Özdamar laments in a recent short piece Bitteres Wasser. 26 Debates over Turkish national identity are thus privileged in the dramatic text of Perikızı over the concern with German history which is often stressed with relation to Özdamar s novels. 27 Furthermore, the suggestion that Perikızı is Armenian aligns the protagonist against the dominant group in the workers hostel and positions her as noncomplicit in the notion of an ethnically pure Turkishness. This concern with questions of Turkish, rather than German nationalism, can be seen as consistent with the author s recent turn to writing in Turkish (in 2007 she published her first Turkish language novel, Kendi kendinin Terzisi Bir Kambur : Ece Ayhan lı anılar, 1974 Zürih günlügü, Ece Ayhan ın mektupları). However, via the presentation of the plagiarism affair it also becomes interwoven with the traumatic experience of being received as a bearer of Turkish culture in Germany, which, as will be seen in section 6.3, thus also forms a key thematic concern within the play. 28 While sexuality is no longer a focus in the dramatic text, as will be seen in sections 6.3 and 6.5, sexual violence against the body of the protagonist becomes a 24 See, Konuk, East West, p On the use of Turkey s humanist past in the country s positioning with regard to the EU: ibid., p Article 301 is typically translated into German using the phrase Beleidigung des Türkentums. 25 Weber suggests that the violence which caused Özdamar to leave Turkey is, in many ways, the founding violence throughout her prose : Gender and Violence: p Ibid. Özdamar, Bitteres Wasser, pp In her discussion of Seltsame Sterne as an interaction of Turkish pasts with German memory culture, Kader Konuk emphasises that Özdamar s work is concerned with quintessentially German questions, while being firmly grounded in both the German literary canon and the specificity of German history : Kader Konuk, Taking on, p Schößler, Theaterevent, p. 90. This configuration may also have autobiographical parallels. In a 2008 interview, Özdamar is reported as saying: Vor dem türkischen Faschismus bin ich in die deutsche Sprache geflohen, und in der deutschen Sprache bin ich glücklich geworden. Doch Feridun Zaimoglus literarische Plünderung meines Buchs Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei hatte mich für eine Zeit der deutschen Sprache entfremdet. [ ] Um dieser Lähmung zu entkommen, bin ich in die türkische Sprache zurück emigriert und habe mein erstes Buch auf Türkisch geschrieben : Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Sieglinde Geisel, Emigration in die deutsche Sprache, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 11/10/2008, < > [last accessed 26/08/2014]. 232

235 central element of both productions of Perikızı. A concern with gender and sexuality is also reflected on the level of the festivals within which the two productions to be examined here took place. As the inclusion of the word Scheinehe in the programme celebrating 50 years of Turkish labour migration to Germany suggests, the production at the Ballhaus Naunynstraße can be seen as embedded within a critique of the power relations at work in the fifty years of Turkish migration to and settlement in Germany. The invocation of marriage genders the parties involved in this migration. In her research into attitudes towards Turkish women in West German feminism, historian Rita Chin highlights that [m]igrant women have been the targets of intense interest and scrutiny in most Western European countries since the 1970s and have often served to measure an immigrant group s level of integration or assimilation. 29 If the figure of the female migrant is often used to draw lines of belonging and exclusion not only within the FRG but also in the broader European context, an examination of mimeticism suggests the need for an exploration of which roles she might assume, or become positioned in, within the Odyssee Europa project and beyond. According to Beverley Weber, Özdamar s writing exists at a complex nexus of resistance not only to the tendencies to write immigrant, especially Turkish women, as victims of cultural oppression but also to write a national history that enables this reduction by imagining Turkish history as outside of Europe. 30 As section 6.4 will show, the commission of Perikızı positions Özdamar (and migration) as central to a Europeanisation of the Ruhr Metropole. This positioning leads me to raise the question of what happens to the nexus of resistance which Weber identifies as typical of Özdamar s work when the boundaries of inclusion shift. In terms of mimesis, this also raises the question of whether the embrace of the female migrant as dramatic figure might indicate a normalisation of migration and an expansion of the reality to which state-subsidised theatre in Germany relates. In this chapter I will therefore explore how representations of migration, and particularly 29 Chin, Turkish Women, p Weber, Violence and Gender, p

236 female migration, within the German theatre relate to performances of diversity and debates over integration on a national or transnational level. 6.2 Approaching Perikızı: Gender and Migration in the Festival Context A key point of reference in positioning my analysis of mimesis and mimeticism with respect to Perikızı is Franziska Schößler s detailed 2010 article: Das Theaterevent Odyssee Europa der Kulturhauptstadt Essen: Prekäre Männlichkeit und Emine Sevgi Özdamars Traumspiel Perikizi [sic]. 31 In the 2010 article, Schößler provides a short summary of the commissioning context, before proceeding to a close analysis of Perikızı based largely on the dramatic text: Der profilierte Bezug zu Homer verfolgt zwei unterschiedliche, durchaus widersprüchliche Ziele: Zum einen geht es um die Rückbesinnung auf eine gemeinsame Ur-Erzählung als Quelle, als Ursprungsgeschichte Europas [...]. Zum anderen wird eine alte Geschichte revitalisiert, die von einer Irrfahrt erzählt [...] und von Heimatlosigkeit bzw. einer verzögerten Heimkehr. Diese Spannung zwischen Identitätsfindung und Pluralisierung wiederholt sich in einer europäischen Kulturpolitik, die kulturelle Einheit und kulturelle Vielfalt gleichzeitig zu fördern versucht. In Artikel 151, Abs. 1 des EG-Vertrags heißt es: Die Gemeinschaft leistet einen Beitrag zur Entfaltung der Kulturen der Mitgliedstaaten unter Wahrung ihrer nationalen und regionalen Vielfalt sowie gleichzeitiger Hervorhebung des gemeinsamen kulturellen Erbes (Zit.n. Quenzel 2005, 22f.) Schößler germanises the spelling of the title of the play throughout her article. Where quoting Schößler therefore the title will appear in this germanised variant. Elsewhere the Turkish letters used in the published version of the play will be used. Christina Komnacky does address Perikızı and Odyssee Europa in her unpublished Diplomarbeit; however, as this work is mainly descriptive rather than analytical it will be referred to only on occasion. 32 Schößler, Theaterevent, p

237 While my thesis focuses on the German national context, the very terms of the commission of Perikızı necessitate a consideration of the Europeanisation of that context, that is to say the integration of Germany itself into a broader European entity, in recent years. 33 Katrin Sieg suggests that the influence of European funding sources on opening up opportunities for postmigrant theatre has been significant. 34 The circumstances of the commission of Perikızı thus make it an ideal case study for examining not only the impact of EU-funded projects for Turkish-German theatre, but also how processes of mimesis and mimeticism are affected when the European dimension of contemporary German identity explicitly comes into play. It also provides an opportunity for exploring the framing at work when the premiere of a new play is tied to a particular festival, programme or event. 35 This is a circumstance which has also been the case with several of the Zaimoglu/Senkel plays performed at the Ballhaus theatre and examined earlier in the thesis (see Chapters Four and Five). However, a close examination of the role of the festival is particularly pressing in the case of Perikızı, as both productions of the play thus far took place within programmes which were actively positioning themselves in relation to national and transnational symbolic frameworks. Although Schößler alludes to the premiere s context, her main focus is on reading the six plays involved in the Odyssee Europa project as dramatic texts in relation to one another. 36 This is a valid and worthwhile approach to take; however, it leaves little room for an analysis of the implications of the broader narrative imposed by the Odyssee Europa festival in its programmes and marketing materials. As will be seen in section 6.4 this narrative and the focus on the 33 The language of integration is frequently used in socio-political studies of the relationship between the EU and its member states. See Dieter Heimböckel, Interkulturalität interdisziplinär denken: Ansätze zur Erweiterung ihrer Komplexität, in Verortungen der Interkulturalität: Die europäischen Kulturhauptstädte Luxemburg und die Großregion (2007), das Ruhrgebiet (2010) und Istanbul (2010), ed. by Thomas Ernst and Dieter Heimböckel (Bielefeld: transcript, 2012), pp (p. 32). 34 Sieg, Class of 1989, p Within the scholarship on RUHR.2010, and in RUHR.2010 s self-descriptions, the year as capital of culture itself has been referred to as a Mega-Event. See, for example, Ronald Hitzler et al., Mega- Event-Macher: Zum Management multipler Divergenzen am Beispiel der Kulturhauptstadt Europas RUHR.2010 (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2013). I will use the term festival for Odyssee Europa throughout to differentiate between this larger Mega-Event and Odyssee Europa as a component part of RUHR Similarly the programme for 50 Jahre Scheinehe refers to itself as a festival: Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Almancı! 50 Jahre Scheinehe, programme (Berlin: Ballhaus Naunynstraße, 2011), < [last accessed 26/08/2014]. 36 Schößler, pp

238 Odyssey provided an image of a European identity both bound to ancient Greece, the supposed origin of Western theatre and democracy, and characterised by a cosmopolitan freedom of movement and thought. 37 The association of this freedom with discussions of interculturalism and migration within the festival needs to be regarded critically. As Thomas Ernst and Dieter Heimböckel highlight in the introduction to their edited collection on Interculturalism and European Cities of Culture: Der Öffnung der inneren europaischen Grenzen steht zugleich der Topos von der Festung Europa nach Außen entgegen, wodurch sowohl innereuropaische Migrationswellen möglich als auch Migranten von anderen Kontinenten in großen Zahlen abgewiesen werden. 38 In positioning Özdamar as a Turkish rather than a German author, Turkey is included within Odyssee Europa s conception of Europe; however, Özdamar herself is located as a representative from outside Germany (the FRG is represented instead by Roland Schimmelpfennig). Furthermore, as a European author, Özdamar is arguably not only presented as exotic; her presence also contributes to the exoticisation of the Ruhrgebiet suggested by its reimagination through Odyssee Europa as Mediterranean archipelago (see Figure 29) The positioning of Ancient Greece as the birthplace of modern Europe functions to obscure the historical distance between these two political entities as well as the current precarious situation of the Greek state within the EU and at the border of the Schengen zone and the non-eu areas of the Mediterranean. 38 Thomas Ernst and Dieter Heimböckel, Verortungen der Interkulturalität und die Perspektiven der vergleichenden Kulturhauptstadtforschung. Einführung und Überblick, in Verortungen der Interkulturalität. Die europäischen Kulturhauptstädte Luxemburg und die Großregion (2007), das Ruhrgebiet (2010) und Istanbul (2010), ed. by Thomas Ernst and Dieter Heimböckel (Bielefeld: transcript, 2012), pp (p. 7). 39 Closer examination of the artistic biographies of each of the European authors commissioned for Odyssee Europa shows that each in fact already had a close connection to the German cultural sphere prior to the festival. The Polish author Grzegorz Jarzyna has worked with the Berlin festival Junges Theater aus Europa and the Burgtheater in Vienna, also winning the Nestroy Prize there. Nádas lived in Berlin in the early 1990s and has won the Kafka Prize. While bi-lingualism and homes in more than one country are common denominators amongst these authors, all have a German connection, suggesting that, despite the rhetoric of Europeanness, it is a familiarised or target-audience friendly version of the diversity of European theatre which is presented here. See the biographies given in: RUHR.2010 et al. (eds), Theater Theater: Odyssee Europa, aktuelle Stuecke 20/10 (Fischer: Frankfurt am Main, 2010), pp ; Komnacky, pp

239 Figure 29. The map of the Ruhrgebiet provided for Odyssee Europa audience members. Image raumlaborberlin. In taking this approach I will also further examine what Schößler identifies as the Spannung zwischen Identitätsfindung und Pluralisierung at the heart of the Odyssee Europa project and RUHR.2010 and will relate this more concretely to the aesthetics of the play in its premiere production. It is also here that my consideration of gender departs significantly from that of Schößler. Schößler concentrates on reading Özdamar as a lone female author within a group of male writers and Perikızı as a gender-inverted Odysseus. This is a reading which quickly succumbs to a simplistic conflation of the feminine with a dynamic of intercultural oppression followed by subversion, and the texts of the male authors with monoculturalism or a verzagte Männlichkeit, die sich nicht interkulturell verortert. 40 While Schößler does focus on gender as a category of analysis, her emphasis is firmly on what can be said about Odysseus and masculinity, as opposed to what Perikızı in particular has to say about female migration and its representation, whether in Germany or in the broader European context Schößler, Das Theaterevent, p. 83. Analysis of these accompanying plays forms a less significant strand of the argument in the section of her monograph which deals with Perikızı: Drama, p Schößler does briefly mention die Versuche, Türkinnen auf einen Opferdiskurs festzulegen in the scenes with Liesel and Gretel in a footnote: Schößler, Das Theaterevent, p. 89, n. 23. For me it is only here that Schößler begins to touch on the real gender questions raised by the dramatic text of Perikızı. 237

240 Özdamar s representation of female migration in Perikızı can be read very productively in relation to analyses of the representation of women and feminist issues in her earlier novels by scholars such as Beverly M. Weber and Leslie A. Adelson. 42 This is particularly the case with the production of Perikızı directed by Michael Ronen for the 50 Jahre Scheinehe festival of the Ballhaus Naunystraße in 2011, which reasserted Özdamar s earlier, novelistic intervention in what Beverly M. Weber refers to as the dominant narrative of Gastarbeit as a male phenomenon. 43 Approximately twenty per cent of Turkish guest workers recruited between 1968 and 1973 were in fact women, employed to fill jobs in the German electronics and service industry as German female workers moved into more upwardly mobile jobs. 44 However, this does not fit with the dominant narrative of gender relations in Turkish migration to Germany, epitomised by the image of the Turkish woman as die geschundene Suleika, a victim-figure in need of rescue from both Turkish men and her own supposed false consciousness. 45 As activists and scholars have repeatedly pointed out, this historical reality is therefore often overlooked both in popular memory and in academic research. This is not to say that masculinity and its representation in events such as Odyssee Europa or the more frequent turn to male over female playwrights are not issues which should be addressed. However, the focus on the female experience of migration in Perikızı, the reworking of material from all three of Özdamar s semiautobiographical novels, and the switch from a male to a female protagonist in Özdamar s dramatic work would seem to be the more pressing areas for exploration in this case. If the female body is often used to represent the nation-state, here the association of the feminine with the intercultural is worth unpacking further. In 6.4 I examine the ways in which contemporary discourses on Interkultur as cultural policy in the theatrical sphere inform the play s commission, production, and presentation. Rather than proceeding methodologically from Schößler s intercultural reading of the 42 See Weber, Work, Sex, passim; Adelson, The Turkish Turn, pp ; pp Adelson also references Rey Chow here: pp Weber, Work, Sex, p These statistics are taken from Weber, Work, Sex, p. 40, n Ibid; Karin Yeşilada, Die geschundene Suleika. Das Eigenbild der Türkin in der deutschsprachigen Literatur türkischer Autorinnen, in Interkulturelle Konfigurationen, ed. by Mary Howard (Munich: Iudicum, 1997), pp For a similar summary of this narrative from a historian s perspective see also Chin, Turkish Women, pp

241 play, however, I draw on approaches developed by Liesbeth Minnaard, Leslie A. Adelson, and Kate Roy with respect to analysing intertextuality in Özdamar s novels. Following the work of these scholars in the literary sphere I will focus on the ways in which situating the dramatic text as a rhizomatic web of Relation, and the positioning of the text created by the very terms of the commission, reveal mimeticism as a key concern. 46 As will be seen, both productions to be examined here make use of the imagery of Little Red Riding Hood, the classic cautionary tale against women straying from their socially prescribed path. 47 The gendered nature of this intervention thus becomes not just one concerned with a more accurate representation or imitation of social reality and recent history, but also seems to take on symbolic dimensions. At the same time, it is important to note that the aims of the playwright and director do not necessarily coincide fully with those of the festival in which they are positioned. As director Michael Ronen suggested when I asked him about the Scheinehe title: you can go [...] creating a symbol of the Turkish society, of the Turkish woman who is struggling with the relationship that she already has a commitment to [...], she didn t marry for real love [...] or whatever, I don t know. Yeah that s just symbolism. 48 Admittedly, within this dismissal of the symbolic overtones of the festival title, Ronen clearly identifies the associations which this title creates. However, he also stressed in our interview that, given his own interest and previous work in theatre and conflict zones, it was the thematisation of subjects related to conflict and the confrontation which the play provides, as well as an earlier workshop he ran with Özdamar in Berlin, 46 Adelson, Turkish Turn, pp , Konuk, Taking on, p. 244.; Minnaard, New Germans, pp [capitalisation as in original]; Roy, Re-membering, pp ; Roy, Mapping, pp Minnaard capitalises the term Relation as she uses it specifically in the sense theorised by Édouard Glissant: see Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. by Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1997). Curiously, the image on the front cover of the English translation of Glissant s work bears a striking resemblance to the later map of the Ruhr Metropolis as archipelago (Figure 30). 47 Jack Zipes, The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, rev. 2 nd edition (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 78. It was particularly with the extremely popular Brothers Grimm version of Rotkäppchen that the tale became an explicit narrative of law and order : Zipes, p Michael Ronen, skype interview. 239

242 that provided the main impulse to direct the play in Although I will focus on reading both productions of Perikızı in the context of the festivals and programmes for which they were produced, it is also important to note that, as successful pieces, the productions at both Moers and the Ballhaus also moved into the respective theatres repertoires, making them accessible outwith the festival context which initially framed them. As in my other chapters, close reading and analysis of the dramatic text, the cuts of the script used by each production, and the audiovisual recording of each production (as well as reviews and other marketing materials) will also have a prominent role to play here. 6.3 Assimilationsdiskurs : Mimeticism, Memory and the Premiere Production The organisers of Ruhr.2010, the name given to the year-long Mega-Event within which Odyssee Europa took place, situated this year as purposefully future-orientated and chose to interpret the title of European Capital of Culture nicht als Prämie [ ], sondern als Arbeitsstipendium für eines der größten Identitätsprojekte Europas. 50 This conception of the title as an opportunity for developing a metropolitan Ruhr identity, and of such an identity as unfixed and changeable, is evident throughout the language used in the planning, description, and marketing of RUHR Oliver Scheytt and Nikolaj Bauer, academics who were also heavily involved in the conception of the RUHR.2010 project, have thus characterised the aims and values of the event as follows: 49 Ronen was initially planning to produce Özdamar s Keloglan in Alamania (1991) as an outdoor production with circus elements before becoming drawn to Perikızı instead. 50 Marietta Piekenbrock, Vorwort, in Theater Theater: Odyssee Europa, aktuelle Stücke 20/10, ed. by RUHR.2010 et al. (Fischer: Frankfurt am Main, 2010), pp (p. 8). On RUHR.2010 as Mega-Event see, Ronald Hitzler, Der Wille zum Wir. Events als Evokationen posttraditionaler Zusammengehörigkeit: Das Beispiel der Kulturhauptstadt Europas Ruhr 2010, in Zusammenhalt durch Vielfalt? Bindungskräfte der Vergesellschaftung im 21. Jahrhundert, ed. by Ludger Pries (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2013), pp

243 RUHR.2010 stiftet eine interne Identitätsfindung sowie einen externen Imagewandel und fördert regionale Kooperationen sowie den Aufbau nachhaltig wirkender Kulturstrukturen. Die so neu entwickelte Kulturmetropole Ruhr soll auch über das Jahr 2010 hinaus Modellcharakter für Europa besitzen. Nicht von ungefähr lautet das Motto von RUHR.2010 Wandel durch Kultur, Kultur durch Wandel. [...] Die (Marken-)Werte von RUHR.2010 sind: unfertig, inspirierend, wandlungsfähig. 51 This language, together with the further conceptualisation of the Ruhr Metropole as an europäische Stadt im Werden, bears distinct traces of a Deleuzean approach to culture; an approach which positions culture as always in emergence. 52 The attraction and relevance of Özdamar as a writer for such a project is clear when one looks at Deleuzean readings of Özdamar s texts by scholars such as Margaret Littler and Kate Roy. Roy, for example, suggests: In these texts, difference-in-itself transforms a majoritarian idea of Germany [ ]: they [countries such as Germany] become not entities to be different from (and indeed not entities at all) but assemblages that are transformed through the different repetition of familiar histories, texts and objects. 53 The commission thus initially seems to point to an interest in the epistemology present in Özdamar s texts rather than to a reduction of the writer to representative Turkish- German figure. It also places her alongside more established and internationally renowned playwrights such as Enda Walsh and Roland Schimmelpfennig who were also commissioned to write new plays for the Odyssee Europa project. 51 Oliver Scheytt and Nikolaj Beier, Begreifen, gestalten, bewegen die Kulturhauptstadt Europas RUHR Die Kulturhauptstadtbewerbung von Essen und der Effekt auf die gesamte Region, in Intervention Kultur: Von der Kraft kulturellen Handelns, ed. by Kristina Volke (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaft, 2010), pp (p. 44). 52 Gregor Betz, Das Ruhrgebiet - europäische Stadt im Werden? Strukturwandel und Governance durch die Kulturhauptstadt Europas RUHR.2010, in Die Zukunft der europäischen Stadt. Stadtpolitik, Stadtplanung und Stadtgesellschaft im Wandel, ed. by Oliver Frey and Florian Koch, Florian (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaft, 2011), pp For a discussion of the Ruhr Metropole as Deleuzean rhizome see Ernst, Das Ruhrgebiet als Rhizom. Cf. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1988). 53 Roy, Cartographies, p. 5. For a Deleuzean reading of Özdamar s work see also Littler, Becoming, pp

244 As the brackets in the reference to (Marken-)Werte above indicate, however, the use of Deleuzean language in RUHR.2010 also suggests an uneasy coalition between, on the one hand, an embrace and institutionalisation of concepts of culture and indeed existence linked with the thought of the European intellectual Left and, on the other, the values of market capitalism. 54 While the commission of the play might seem to indicate a point of arrival for Özdamar as dramatist in Germany, it is striking that this play also presents her most scathing literary attack on her own treatment as a Turkish-German author. 55 In exploring the role of mimeticism in both the commission and critique this play presents, it is interesting to note the ways in which this new fictionalised semi-autobiographical work both returns to and disrupts an identification of the author with an idealised image of successful integration in Germany. In the following I will focus on a close reading of the dramatic text in order to suggest that this happens literally, via the prophecies of the character of Perikızı s father, as well as structurally, via a refunctionalisation of textual scenarios which, in their first incarnation in Özdamar s novels, functioned to embed the Turkish author in both the German Alltag, and German history. 56 As already indicated, a fantastical version of the plagiarism affair which clouded the relationship between Özdamar and Zaimoglu occupies a prominent place in the dramatic text, as does a repeated criticism of the reduction of the work of Turkish artists from the existential and aesthetic plane to the sociological. 57 The character of Perikızı s father explicitly links this reductive view to the representative role expected of the Turkish artist in Europe. In the opening scene of the dramatic text, as he warns 54 Simon Günter warns against die Instrumentalisierung von Kultur und Interkultur für eine unternehmerische Stadtpolitik : Simon Günter, Interkulturalität als Standortfaktor: Ambivalenzen einer (inter-)kulturinstrumentalisierenden Stadtpolitik, in Verortungen der Interkulturalität: Die europäischen Kulturhauptstädte Luxemburg und die Großregion (2007), das Ruhrgebiet (2010) und Istanbul (2010), ed. by Thomas Ernst and Dieter Heimböckel (Bielefeld: transcript, 2012), pp (p. 40). 55 As Schößler notes, referring to Sabine Milz s reading of Karagöz in Alamania, the reception of Turkish-German cultural production in Germany also forms a point of critique in Özdamar s earlier work too: Theaterevent, p. 90; Drama, p See the discussion of Karagöz in Alamania (1986) in section 2.3 of this thesis. 56 An emphasis on German history can be found in: Minnaard, New Germans, pp ; Konuk, Taking on, p This is a criticism which has also been made repeatedly in much recent scholarship: Adelson Against Between, p. 38; Minnaard, New Germans, p. 58; Mani, Cosmopolitical Claims, p

245 Perikızı against leaving Turkey for Europe (a space which becomes conflated with Germany in the play), the father declares: Schau, die Frauen unserer Landsleute sind dort Putzfrauen. Und auf einer europäischen Bühne ist eine türkische Frau eine türkische Frau und eine türkische Frau ist eine Putzfrau. Das ist die tägliche Realität und am Theater wird es nächtliche Realität. Du kannst am Theater nur als Putzfrau Karriere machen. 58 When Perikızı rejects the possibility that this will be the case for her, he continues: Du kannst da in Europa vielleicht berühmt werden, [...] aber du wirst keine Ruhe finden. Sie werden dich loben und schreiben, dass du Pionierin der türkischen Künstler bist, dass du Aufklärer der unterdrückten türkischen Mädchen bist, dass du eine Brücke zwischen der Türkei und Europa bist, dass du die einzige emanzipierte Türkin bist, dass du das beste Beispiel für Integration bist, bist, bist, bist. 59 There are clear references to Özdamar s own artistic career here as well as to her reception, which has frequently positioned her as a bridge between the cultures. 60 The excess of dass clauses and repetition of bist, bist, bist, bist within the father s warning highlight the excess of expectation placed on the ethnicised artist and what Rey Chow refers to as a duplication that, explicitly or implicitly, establishes equivalence between a cultural practice and an ethnic label. 61 In this scene Perikızı playfully asks Bist du denn ein Hellseher, Vater? Bist du Teiresias?, addressing him as the blind prophet of Homer s Odyssey. 62 Although Perikızı is clearly poking fun at her father here, her later fate in the play seems to lend her father s prophecies authority. While the Deleuzean language of the framework within which the play was 58 Ibid., p This conflation may be a critique of the way in which Europe frequently positions itself in opposition to Turkey, the country which the terms of the commission position Özdamar as representing, or may simply be in response to the European dimension demanded by the festival. 59 Ibid. 60 The positioning of Turkish-German writers in this way is discussed critically in Adelson, Against Between, pp Chow, p Özdamar, Perikızı, p. 290; this line was cut in the Moers production. 243

246 commissioned might seem to free Özdamar from the expectations associated with the Turkish-German woman writer, the dramatic text of the play highlights the traumatic effects which demands for an easily placeable identity can have within a national context not open to an acknowledgement of itself as also in emergence. 63 The journey from Turkey to Germany taken by the protagonist of Perikızı suggests Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn as the main intra-oeuvre connection for the play. However, key leitmotifs are in fact taken from several of Özdamar s other novels and short stories. In being re-contextualised they also take on new functions. The protagonist s grandmother, dead grandfather, and the ghosts of two Armenian brides will be familiar to readers of Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei and Seltsame Sterne, for example. 64 Schößler notes in passing that a concern with the dead can be traced as a theme throughout Özdamar s oeuvre. 65 This is an element of Özdamar s poetics which Kader Konuk, amongst others, has explored in ways which suggest that this concern manifests itself with different effects in each work. 66 In Seltsame Sterne, references to the death of the narrator s grandmother are linked to the grandmother s memory of the much-debated Armenian genocide, for example. 67 Within Seltsame Sterne this association seems to function both as a way of symbolising what goes missing with the death of the grandmother (a direct connection to or first-hand memory of an unacknowledged piece of history), and as a way of making present the lost grandmother through the narrator s own repetition of the handful of words with which she is left. 68 Du hast so viele Tote gesehen. Auch die Armenier. Manchmal bist du aufgestanden und hast geschrien: Wie sich die armenischen Mädchen von den Brücken gestürzt haben! Du hattest ihren Kindern Essen gebracht. Eine alte Armenierin lebte bei dir [...] 63 Deleuze and Guattari, passim. 64 The short story Der Hof im Spiegel forms another important intertext: the motif of a mirror which has dangerous consequences if looked in at night and which contains the dead is taken from there, for example: Özdamar, Der Hof, p Schößler, Theaterevent, p Konuk, Taking on, p Konuk also refers us to Bird, pp Turkey is yet to officially recognise the deaths of large numbers of Armenians in 1915 as genocide. Historians such as Taner Akçam emphasise the systematic nature of these deaths however: Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006). See also Konuk, East-West, pp ; p. 209 n For a close reading of the role which the grandmother plays throughout Seltsame Sterne see B. Venkat Mani, Cosmopolitical Claims, p

247 Großmutter, du bist tot, ich stehe hier in Ostberlin und denke mit Gabi und Steve an dich. Du bist tot, und übriggeblieben ist eine Handvoll deiner Wörter. 69 In the dramatic text of Perikızı the grandmother s words appear again, however they do so to different effect; here, the grandmother s lament for the Armenian brides becomes a leitmotif which in each repetition throughout the play is accompanied by a nosebleed. This motif is initiated in the opening scene of the play in Turkey when Perikızı asks the grandmother what she has dreamt about: (Zwei junge Frauen, die armenischen Bräute, tauchen auf, mit Schürzen über ihren Kleidern wie um 1910, und gehen ab. Großmutter blutet plötzlich heftig aus der Nase.) Großmutter: Abooo, Aboooo. Wie die armenischen Bräute sich von den Brücken heruntergestürzt haben. Wie die armenischen Bräute sich von den Brücken heruntergestürzt haben. Gesehen haben sie mit ihren jungen Augen, die blind sein wollten, die Hölle und das Feuer auf dieser Erde, die Schürze noch über ihren Kleidern, barfuß, die Augen groß, die Hände groß, die Füße groß vom Totenmarsch, ihre Kinder als Skelette vor ihren Füßen, das Feuer, in dem sie lange liefen, liefen und liefen, war siebenmal heißer als das Höllenfeuer. 70 This motif reappears when an argument over nationalism with the chicken-women of the workers hostel in Germany is interrupted by the grandmother s repetition of the lament and simultaneous nosebleed. 71 It then occurs for a third time at the climax of the plagiarism scene where Perikızı, taking on the voice of the grandmother, also laments the Armenian brides and suffers a nosebleed. 72 The association of the nosebleed with the memory of the Armenian brides as well as its transference from the grandmother to Perikızı herself thus functions to draw lines of traumatic relation between the fate of the Armenians and Perikızı s own treatment in Germany at the 69 Özdamar, Seltsame Sterne, p Özdamar, Perikızı, p Ibid., p The grandmother also suffers a nosebleed during the monologue of the two Armenian brides in the scene Perikızıs Traum : Ibid., p Ibid., p In this scene a nosebleed is also suffered by the character of Käuzchen, an owl, who the stage directions of the dramatic text suggest is linked with the figure of the grandmother. 245

248 hands both of her countrymen, who lapse into fascism, and of the German press, who abuse her and are presented as blind to this foreign fascism. Such an association might seem problematic, or even self-aggrandizing. As Konuk points out in her analysis of Seltsame Sterne, however, such associations do not necessarily draw lines of equivalence, but can also be read as signalling causally and temporally disjunctive, but figurally connected, experiences of empathic suffering. 73 This can also be seen if we follow a reading of the dramatic text which focuses on intertextuality as part of what Liesbeth Minaard has called a search for webs of Relation [...] as a process of changing mentalities and transforming communities in Özdamar s work. 74 Given the significance of this search for Özdamar s politics and aesthetics, it is important to note the ways in which these webs are re-woven in the premiere production of this play. The cut of the script used for the Moers production of Perikızı reduces some of the references to Özdamar s own career, as well as cutting the leitmotif of the nosebleed completely. However, the traumatic effects of multiple demands on the migrant figure are instead played out via the physical performance which accompanies some of the most seemingly banal sections of the text. 75 The moment where the German Schlager singer Heino appears singing his hit version of Muss i den, muss i den Zum Städtele hinaus in the published version of the text, for example, is picked up and extended in the Moers production as a seduction scenario. 76 In the published version of the dramatic text, Heino is unable to see Perikızı, creating the first moment of her invisibility as a person in Germany. 77 In the Moers production, however, Heino is revealed crooning and sprawled pseudo-seductively on a small stage set up in one section of the larger performance area. From his position on this stage he not only sees Perikızı, but also lures her to him with an additional rendition of Komm in meinen 73 Konuk, Taking on, p Minnaard, New Germans, p. 93. Capitalisation Minnaard s. See also Kate Roy, Re-membering ; Roy, Mapping. 75 Connections to the pre-1961 relations between Turkey and Europe are also reduced by cutting the laments for the dead grandfather. 76 Özdamar, Perikızı, pp ; Schlosstheater Moers, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Perikızı: Ein Traumspiel, Strichfassung, Fassung , unpublished cut of the dramatic text used for Perikızı, dir. by Ulrich Greb (Moers: Schlosstheater Moers, 2010), pp Accessed thanks to Schlosstheater Moers, p Ibid. Invisibility is a theme which Schößler identifies in the play, p

249 Wigwam (Regenbogen-Johnny) (Figure 30). 78 The curtains are then closed over them both, the music stops, and animal-like growls as well as thumps to the closed curtain suggest a sexual attack is carried out on Perikızı, who finally emerges with her handbag forced fully over her head. 79 Figure 30. Perikızı (Katja Stockhausen) serenaded by Heino (Frank Wickermann). Publicity photograph Christian Nielinger, nielinger.de, < html> [accessed ]. The addition of the Wigwam song is significant for a discussion of mimeticism. As Katrin Sieg has shown, following the popularity of Karl May and Indian impersonation groups, a fictional Wild West emerged as a theatre for the racial imagination in postwar West Germany, one in which the figure of the native American created a juxtaposition of primitivism and modernity and so served to keep ethnicised Others firmly in their place. 80 The use of this song, which tells the story of an unnamed male seeking out a native American girl, to lure Perikızı thus places her in the role of exoticised and desired Other. However, the negative effects of responding naively to this interpellation are suggested by the sexualised attack on her body. The bag placed roughly over Perikızı s head, obscuring her personhood, will be echoed in the final scene of this production in which the plagiarist grey wolf wraps and then bites her 78 Schlosstheater Moers, p Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Perikızı, dir. by Ulrich Greb, audiovisual recording from (Moers: Schlosstheater Moers, 2010). 80 Sieg, Ethnic Drag, pp. 24 and 28; pp ; pp Although her focus is on West Germany, Sieg also points out that the image of the Native Indian was equally a point of identification in East Germany, pp

250 head, leaving bloody traces on the white binding at the end of the play (Figure 31 and Figure 32). 81 This, together with the suggestion of sexual violence, forms a new visual leitmotif, replacing that of the nosebleed. 82 Figure 31. The grey wolf (Magdalene Artelt) attacks Perikızı and binds her head assisted by a Schuldgefühlgigant in grey. Publicity photograph Christian Nielinger. Figure 32. Perikızı s bound and bloodied head following the wolf attack. Publicity photograph Christian Nielinger. 81 Schlosstheater Moers, p. 32; Özdamar, Perikızı, dir. by Ulrich Greb, audiovisual recording. This also strengthens the association of the Wolf/Zaimoglu with the opening chapter of Leyla (2006). 82 Schößler notes the Heino intertext as a low culture version of the Odyssey and positions it as part of what she sees as the play s programmatic mixing of high and low culture, Theaterevent, p. 89; Drama, p She suggests that, although it does critique the working conditions in which Gastarbeiterinnen found themselves, Heino is portrayed as a rapist due to das klassische Ressentiment der Intellektuellen der Volksmusik gegenüber : Theaterevent, p. 89, n. 24; Drama, p. 196, n

251 Sexualised violence against the body of the protagonist is also used to connect the demand for assimilation and its traumatic effects in the Moers production. Again, this connection is developed out of fleeting references in the text: in this case a piece of dialogue which is relatively innocuous and which strikes a minor rather than a major note in the published version of the play. Gastarbeiter: Du mir sagen wo ist Puffhaus? Der Zeitmann: Du gehen bis zum Rathaus. Gastarbeiter: Nixis Rathaus, Puffhaus. Der Zeitmann: Du gehen bis zum Rathaus. Hinter dem Rathaus is Puffhaus. 83 In the Moers production, the Schuldgefühlgiganten of the dramatic text appear as greysuited bureaucrats on home-made stilts. These Schuldgefühlgiganten deliver the lines attributed to a Gastarbeiter in the dramatic text and, together with the Zeitmann, begin circling Perikızı in a predatory manner, repeating the word Puffhaus aggressively. Continuing to repeat this, the Schuldgefühlgiganten then take Perikızı s hands and force her to accompany them into a telephone booth on stage against her will. As Perikızı struggles to escape from this booth-cum-bordello, the Zeitmann delivers a speech on integration originally taken from the scene titled Assimilationsdiskurs in the dramatic text. Declaring Integration hat ihren Preis, he prevents Perikızı from escaping and provides punctuation to his speech by repeatedly slamming the door to the booth shut. 84 Integration, a process often problematically understood as synonymous with assimilation in the German context, thus becomes associated with violence to the person of the migrant woman Özdamar, Perikızı, pp These lines are also included in the Karagöz texts: Özdamar, Karagoz in Alamania, Schwarzauge in Deutschland, 1982, pp Schlosstheater Moers p. 17; Özdamar, Perikızı, dir. by Ulrich Greb, audiovisual recording; Özdamar, Perikızı, p The cut of the text at this moment thus follows the published version of the dramatic text exactly. However, the performances accompanying the words are in no way based on the stage directions of Perikızı as published and so function to resignify these two episodes. 85 For a detailed discussion of the shifting meanings of integration in the German context prior to unification, see Chin, pp , pp

252 Figure 33. Perikızı (Katja Stockhausen) emerges from the telephone booth/puffhaus wrapped in plastic. Publicity photograph Christian Nielinger. Perikızı eventually emerges from the telephone booth/brothel carrying flowers and a gift basket, and wearing a plastic sash; packaged in a manner suggesting the material rewards of her submission (Figure 33). A visual association with Little Red Riding Hood is also created here through the combination of the actress red dress and the basket of goods she carries. As Jack Zipes detailed study of Little Red Riding Hood shows, this fairytale raises issues about gender identity, sexuality, violence, and the civilizing process in a unique and succinct symbolic form, and can be read as emphasising the physical and moral dangers to women in particular of disobedience and of straying from their allotted path. 86 While Özdamar s dramatic text plays more explicitly with another, perhaps more transnational myth of female transgression through repeated references to the unlocking of a fortieth room, it is the triad of grandmother, young female protagonist, and wolf on which the 2010 production focuses. 87 Although both tales share an emphasis on the dangers of female (sexual) curiosity and disobedience, perhaps ironically given the scene s critique of 86 Zipes, p The emphasis on female sexuality in Little Red Riding Hood is also highlighted in the classic psychoanalytical study of the fairy-tale, Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment (New York: Knopf, 1989) pp In Western Europe this is the tale of Bluebeard; however, stories in which the door to a fortieth room is unlocked by a protagonist also appear to have a place in Turkish fairy tales as told today: Warren S. Walker and Ahmet E. Uysal highlight the link to the forbidden chamber trope familiar from Bluebeard in one of the Turkish fairy tales recorded as in contemporary circulation in Warren S. Walker and Ahmet E. Uysal, More Tales Alive in Turkey (Lubbock, Texas: Texas Tech University Press, 1992), p

253 assimilation, this creates a new, arguably more Germanised point of reference for the audience: literally packaging Özdamar s shifting, transnational reference points in ways which are not only more visually striking but also more easily consumable. Assimilation becomes associated overwhelmingly with a sexualised violence here, drawing parallels between a view of integration which has often been propagated in Germany and a supposedly un-european oppression of the migrant woman. 88 However, resistance to assimilation through a reactionary return to the migrant figure s national or ethnic origins is portrayed as equally impossible. Having recited a poem in Turkish, Perikızı removes the plastic in which she has been wrapped, while traditional Turkish music is played. This music is soon revealed to be played by musicians perched on the back of a small APE car which is driven into the performance space by Perikızı s mother. The mother, car, and musicians were all present in the opening scene of the 2010 production, the only scene to be set in Turkey, and the appearance of this chaotic trio creates strong associations with the portrayal of Perikızı s home at the start of the play. Realising where the music is coming from, Perikızı chases her mother and the musicians as they drive around the performance space, suggesting a desire to return to her roots. The car refuses to stop for her, however, and the music quickly becomes more military as actors wearing chicken masks march into the arena, wielding large red flags and moving in military formations (Figure 34). 89 The plain red flags are on the one hand an allusion to the red flag of Turkey, but on the other, when combined with the military marching and the German performance context also function to conjure up images of Nazi rallies. Perikızı, and the audience, are thus immediately confronted with the problematic side of a turn to national and ethnic identity Despite the relatively recent adoption in European countries of women s rights legislation and the continued contests around this legislation within those countries, women s rights are often positioned as an inherently European value which is under threat from the presence of Muslim migrants. For critiques of this sexual nationalism which focus on the German context and Turkish-German cultural production, see Adelson, Turkish Turn, pp ; Weber, Work, Sex, p. 39; Sieg, Black Virgins, p. 152 and p. 169; Chin, pp As a point of comparison, see Sarah Bracke s article on the Dutch context: Bracke, pp Schlosstheater Moers, p The audience s desire for the folkloric colour of the APE and traditional music can also be read as creating space for Turkish fascist discourses to go unchallenged, a suggestion which is made very clearly in the plagiarism scene of the dramatic text. However, Weber suggests that Özdamar s novels highlight a history of nationalist violence as an aspect of European history shared by Turkey and Germany: Violence and Gender, p

254 Figure 34. The APE driven by the mother drives past carrying two musicians who play music to the tune of which the nationalist Gastarbeiterinnen/Hens put on a marching display with flags in front of the phone booth. Screen capture taken from Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Perikızı, dir. by Ulrich Greb, audiovisual recording from (Moers: Schlosstheater Moers, 2010). Accessed thanks to Schlosstheater Moers. New outlets are thus created for the moments of trauma in the 2010 premiere and, through the counterpoint of words spoken and action taken, the insidious nature of oppression within democratic, humanistic Europe is revealed. 91 While the content of the play is much altered in this production, the logic of Özdamar s dream play is, however, maintained. The dream-play form and turn to mythic material is thus taken not as an opportunity for soothing synthesis, but rather as a means of connecting otherwise disparate signifiers and creating a rich visual texture, charged with points of disruption and unease. At the same time, this re-routing of the dramatic text s imagery perhaps obscures the dramatic text s concerns with historically specific moments of Turkish nationalism and even fascism which remain overlooked in public discourse both in Turkey and in Germany, in favour of discussions of assimilation and integration more familiar to a German-German audience. 91 In an interview published in 2008, Özdamar stated that the plagiarism case with Zaimoglu had the following effect on her: Ich machte die Erfahrung, dass auch in der Demokratie Korruption und Lüge möglich sind, ohne dass man sich dagegen wehren kann : Özdamar and Geisel, n. pag. 252

255 6.4 Odyssee Europa: Interkultur, Mimesis, and Mobility Having focused so far on the web of Relation which the dramatic text and the performance of particular scenes in the Moers production weave, I now want to return to the further lines of affiliation and boundaries drawn not only around the text but also around Özdamar as an author by the framing of the production within Odyssee Europa and RUHR According to a 2008 interview with Aslı Sevindim, one of the artistic directors of RUHR.2010, [d]ie erfolgreiche Bewerbung von RUHR.2010 zur europäischen Kulturhauptstadt basierte ausdrücklich auf den Themen Migration und Interkulturalität. 92 The discourse of interculturalism has a long history in Germany and is frequently associated with a sociological approach which characterises cultures as homogeneous, closed constructs. Within the literary sphere a focus on interculturalism has often contributed to what Leslie A. Adelson and others have critiqued as a narrative which positions Turkish-Germans in particular as between two worlds. 93 More recently, however, Mark Terkessidis has provided a Deleuzean redefinition of Interkultur als Kultur-im-Zwischen, als Struktur im Wandel, als etwas, das nicht ganz ist oder noch nicht. 94 The similarity between his language and the language employed by the organisers of RUHR.2010 discussed earlier in this section, makes his approach of particular interest here. In contrast to the understanding of culture as something tied to the ethnicised or racialised identities of authors mit Migrationshintergründen which is frequently adopted in literary studies which use the intercultural framework, Terkessidis emphasises culture as a product of organisations and institutions, rather than bound to people via ethnicity. 95 Furthermore, 92 Raddatz, Identitätszentrifuge, p This positioning of Turkish-German writers in this way is criticised in, amongst others: Adelson, Turkish Turn, pp. 1-4; Adelson, Against Between, pp ; Jordan, More than, pp Terkessidis, Interkultur, p Terkessidis sets out his thoughts on Interkultur and institutions in detail in Interkultur, pp ; he critiques the restriction of this discourse to people with particular backgrounds on pp German Interkulturelle Literaturwissenschaft has often focused on the social or pedagogical function of the writing and reading of literature by authors with a background of migration. Such readings do not necessarily preclude historical concerns or analytical complexity : Adelson, Turkish Turn, p. 23. However, as noted in Chapter One, they can function to reduce literature from being of artistic to social merit: Lornsen, Transgressive Topographien, p. 12. See also Chin, Guest-Worker, pp and pp for a detailed critical discussion of the history of Interkulturelle Germanistik. 253

256 Terkessidis conception of Interkultur creates a situation in which rather than the migrant being the exception to the rule a category to be dealt with specially and separately the migrant becomes the paradigm for the contemporary subject. 96 This positions Interkultur as an alternative both to the programme of multiculturalism and the rhetoric of assimilation. The inclusion of an extract of Terkessedis work in the programme for Perikızı/Odyssee Europa makes it clear which version of interculturalism the Schlosstheater Moers aligned itself with in the Odyssee Europa project. 97 The language of emergence shared between Terkessedis and the organisers of Odyssee Europa, RUHR.2010, suggests a further point of connection between his approach and the broader aims of the festival. In the aforementioned 2008 interview Sevindim expanded on the reasoning behind the focus on Interkultur and migration in Ruhr.2010 using the language of normalisation and mimesis the representation or imitation of reality: Eine europäische Kulturhauptstadt hat nicht nur die Aufgabe, sich zu präsentieren und sich selbst zu feiern, sondern auch europäische Themen aufzugreifen. Da ist das Thema Migration nun äußerst virulent. Ich freue mich, dass die Migration endlich als gesellschaftliche Realität erkannt wurde. Jedenfalls im Ruhrgebiet. [...] Wenn wir kulturelle Vielfalt als gesellschaftspolitisches Thema begreifen, können Theater, Literatur, Film viel bewegen indem einfach eine Normalität herbeigeführt wird. 98 Sevindim s language here echoes that of Karin Beier the same year in Cologne (see section 5.2), and again the invocation of einfach eine Normalität, or the discourse of normalism raises the question of whose reality is considered normal and how that might affect the identification and acceptance of an artistic representation as mimesis. In terms of mimeticism, it is also important to note that, as in Terkessedis version of Interkultur, in Sevindim s phrasing the migrant or postmigrant subject is not required either to adapt to or remain outside the structures already in place (i.e. a normative or 96 Terkessidis, Interkultur, p Schauspielhaus Bochum et al., programme. 98 Asli Sevindim, quoted in Frank Raddatz, Theater als Identitätszentrifuge, Theater der Zeit, 63.4 (2008),

257 even mimeticist demand is not being placed on particular subjects). Instead, these structures themselves and the bounds of the normal are required to shift. 99 A widening of the view of the reality of contemporary Germany, held both by the theatre establishment and by the theatre-going public, is certainly suggested by the series of lectures which opened Odyssee Europa, which were delivered by figures such as Terkessidis himself. In the description of this lecture programme the Irrfahrt of Odysseus was described as paradigmatic for contemporary experience: Von Heimweh und Zweifeln getrieben, mal mutig, mal feige, wird Odysseus zur Pilotfigur eines in die Freiheit entlassenen, der sein Sein im Ereignis entwickelt. 100 The association of dislocation with existential or ontological freedom has been a common trope of twentieth century thought, and, like the association of migration with the Odyssey created by the commission of Perikızı, arguably functions to add value to or elevate the experience of migration here. 101 The suggestion that identity is developed through experiences and not simply the result of one s ethnic or national origins also highlights the links between this positioning of Odyssee Europa, RUHR.2010 s broader concept of the Ruhrgebiet as a Metropolis im Werden and the explicitly Deleuzean nature of Terkessedis re-definiton of Interkultur as Kultur im Werden. While Terkessedis is careful to distinguish between the position occupied by the economic migrant, the aslyum seeker, and the privileged tourist in his own account of Interkultur, however, in the framing narrative of Odyssee Europa these categories become problematically conflated. The Odyssee Europa programme, for example, introduces the project as follows: 99 This could be seen as an example of what Jürgen Link has referred to as flexible normalism. Link identifies flexible normalism as the form of norm regulation most prevalent in contemporary Western Europe following the data-fication of society, in which statistical data on people s lives is continuously collected and communicated to the public via the media, thus taking on a significant role in the social imaginary. The normal is thus considered to be in a constant state of adjustment in response to changes in societal behaviour rather than as a normative set of qualities which people must either measure up to or be considered to deviate from. Jürgen Link and Mirko M. Hall, From the Power of the Norm to Flexible Normalism : Considerations after Foucault, Cultural Critique, 57 (2004), Marc Oliver Hänig, Vorverkaufstart für die Redenreihe Die Erfindung der Freiheit Exegese eines Epos als Prolog zur Odyssee Europa, (09/10/2009), < rt-fuer-die-redenreihe-die-erfindung-der-freiheit-exegese-eines-epos-als-prolog-z.html> [accessed 24/07/2013]. 101 As Konuk highlights, the condition of exile is often associated with existential distance, an association which wrongly implies that critical thinking is first made possible by the trauma of deracination and, hence, cannot be learned : East West, p

258 Die gemeinsamen Suchbewegungen konzentrierten sich vor allem auf zwei Fragen: Was wird in Zukunft auf unseren Bühnen zur Kunst? Und wie können Theater und Tanz in einer modernen Stadtgesellschaft die traditionellen Trennlinien zwischen Milieus, Generationen, Sprachen und Kulturen überspielen? In Odyssee Europa haben sich die Veränderungen einer Welt, die durch Migration, wechselnde Zugehörigkeiten und wandelnde Bindungen geprägt ist, einen großen Raum geschaffen. Das Motiv der Irrfahrt wird hier zu einer Art Elementarform dieser Erfahrungen. 102 This somewhat romantic positioning of migration as a quintessential experience of life in contemporary Europe was further emphasised by the physical movement which the festival required of its audience members. 103 Audience members who signed up for Odyssee Europa as a whole were issued with transport including bus and boat rides, travel insurance, and a local host with whom they would stay and tour the region, as well as a map of the Ruhrgebiet reworked as a Mediterranean-style island archipelago (Figure 29). 104 The experiences and encounters which took place between performances were thus also framed as central to the project and indeed were subject to their own dramaturgy as created by raumlaborberlin, a network of architects who specialise in urban renewal through experimental interactions with space. 105 This emphasis on mobility was further echoed in the Moers production of Perikızı. Moers Schlosstheater has a capacity of only viewers, and the company 102 Piekenbrock, p Niklas Maak, Schnitt ins Offene: Über raumlaborberlin und die Lust am Verlorensein, in Theater Theater: Odyssee Europa, aktuelle Stuecke 20/10, ed. by RUHR.2010 et al (Fischer: Frankfurt am Main, 2010), pp (p. 434). 104 This process is described in several reviews: Hubert Spiegel, Odysseus kommt nicht nach Oberhausen, faz.net, 02/03/2010. Eva Behrendt, Den Ruhrpott mit der Seele suchen, Theater heute, 51.4 (2010), 24-28; Meike Hinnenberg, Die Reise zu den Lotophagen, Theater der Zeit, 65.4 (2010), Unless noted otherwise all reviews of the world premiere were accessed thanks to Schlosstheater Moers. 105 Maak, p The group s own description of their work is available at [last accessed 08/08/2014]. This element of Odyssee Europa was received enthusiastically by Hubert Spiegel writing for the Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung: Es findet tatsächlich ein kleines Theaterwunder statt aber zwischen den Aufführungen, während der Busfahrten oder zu Hause bei den Gastgebern. Dirk Pilz, amongst others was more critical, however, stating: Das Theater wurde in den Marketingkäfig gesperrt und so zum geschwätzigen Aktionismus verdammt : Dirk Pilz, Odysseus im Pott, NZZ Online, 01/03/

259 has acquired a reputation for working with space both within and beyond these limitations. 106 The Moers production of Perikızı took place not within a traditional black box theatre space but in an ex-tennis hall on the outskirts of the town. The large hangar was divided into three sections for this production, each joined only by small, tunnel-like spaces, which the audience members were expected to negotiate individually at two distinct points in the play. The first of these transitions took place following the opening scene, as Perikızı left her home in Turkey. The opening scene played out in a sparse setting surrounded on two sides by the audience seated on banks of church pews and on the third by a towering wall of cardboard boxes. The identifcation of this space as Turkish was created through dialogue and the arrival of an APE vehicle and band of Turkish musicians. The cardboard box wall then came alive as the ghosts of the Armenian Brides appeared by pushing boxes aside to reveal themselves, literally emanating from the fabric of the space Perikızı occupied. Shortly afterwards the Brides then removed more boxes, this time at ground level, creating a maze-like tunnel through the wall of cardboard. Having declared her wish to leave home, the actress playing Perikızı was lured with the audience through this tunnel into the next space (Figure 35 and Figure 36). 107 Figure 35. The Armenian brides open a passageway from space one into space two. Screen capture taken from Özdamar, Perikızı, dir. by Ulrich Greb, audiovisual recording. 106 For a portrait of the theatre which focuses on its use of space see Sebastian Kirsch, Die Kraft der Ränder, Theater der Zeit 63.3 (2008), On the use of space in Greb s Perikızı, see: Behrendt, Den Ruhrpott, p Özdamar, Perikızı, dir. by Ulrich Greb, audiovisual recording. 257

260 Figure 36. The audience enter space two having gone through the cardboard tunnel. Images and videos will later be projected onto the expanse of cardboard wall in the centre of this image. Screen capture taken from Özdamar, Perikızı, dir. by Ulrich Greb, audiovisual recording. Figure 37. A wide view of space two in the Moers Theaterhalle. Screen capture taken from Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Perikızı, dir. by Ulrich Greb, audiovisual recording. Once within space two, which the director s cut of the script designated Deutschland but could equally be considered a dream-space, the audience members were not directed to traditional seating but instead had to position themselves on military campbeds spread out across the floor (Figure 37). The action of the performance in this space was not confined to solely one area but moved around within the space, focussing on various stations such as trapezes strung from the ceiling (visible in Figure 30), a photo/phone booth positioned relatively centrally which actors could also climb onto (visible in Figure 34), videos and images projected onto the cardboard wall through which the audience had come, and an extremely small stage 258

261 situated directly opposite this cardboard wall (this is the stage visible in Figure 30). Depending on the campbed chosen, the audience member would therefore have to orientate themselves toward the action or at some points decide between various potential points of focus. This activated the audience members as individual viewers and meant that a multiplication of viewpoints on any one point of action (or, perhaps, a rhizomatic viewing effect) would be created rather than a centre-orientated image shared by all viewing the production. So whilst the RUHR.2010 programmers aimed to unify members of the public through the experiences and events created for the Ruhr s year as European Capital of Culture, the audience members of Perikızı were unified only through a shared sense of dislocation. Most of the production took place in this larger, central space and Raum 3: Das 39. Zimmer was used only for the very final scene, Im Hades. Following the plagiarism scene, at the end of which the actress playing Perikızı lay fully naked on the floor, having been stripped violently by the Schuldgefühlgiganten, the actor playing the father appeared. Quoting lines from Hölderlin s poetry, he assisted Perikızı into space three through a small hole in the back of this stage area. 108 The audience was also invited to follow Perikızı into this space by the father/hölderlin, who called Komm! Ins Offene, Freund! (Figure 38). 109 For the very short final scene here no chairs were provided and instead the audience members were pressed together, standing, to create a party atmosphere. Celebratory music played while Perikızı was anointed for a wedding by her family and Turkish tea and Turkish delight were shared with the audience. 108 The reference to Hölderlin is significant as it invokes exile, as well as the historical turn to and appropriation of Ancient Greece in German literary culture. 109 Schlosstheater Moers, p. 33; Özdamar, Perikızı, audiovisual recording; Özdamar, Perikızı, pp The quotations used at this point are taken originally from Hölderlin s Der Gang aufs Land. Other quotations from Hyperion and Brot und Wein also occur in the dramatic text; Özdamar, Perikızı, pp and p Schößler reads the Hölderlin quotation as a further example of the dynamic between high and low culture in the dramatic text, which she sees as disrupting an elitist national culture, but argues that the Moers production activates [das] utopische Potenzial of the Hölderlin quotation in using it to initiate spatial transition and what she suggests may be the protagonist s re-birth: Schößler, Theaterevent, p. 90, n. 25. On high and low culture in the dramatic text, see also Schößler, Drama, p. 190 and p

262 Figure 38. Audience members follow Perikızı through the small door at the back of the small stage from space two into space three. Screen capture taken from Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Perikızı, dir. by Ulrich Greb, audiovisual recording. The interactive nature both of this particular performance and of the festival in which it was embedded seem to function to align the audience with the migrant protagonist Perikızı. 110 Mimetic identification with her is actively created through the audience member s physical imitation of her journey within the theatrical space. 111 While this may have increased the audience s empathy for the migrant protagonist, the alignment of the audience with Perikızı through shared movement arguably also obscures the differences between the privileged tourist and the guest worker stressed precisely by critics such as Terkessedis. 112 Indeed, the price of a ticket for the whole Odyssee Europa experience was 259 and, as reviewer Hubert Spiegel comments, this impacted significantly on the audience demographic, which he characterised as weißhaarig zumeist [...] Bildungsbürger auf Abenteuerfahrt. 113 Similarly, writing in Theater der Zeit, Meike Hinnenberg characterised the festival critically as more Butterfahrt than experimental theatre. 114 The dynamics of Odyssee Europa would 110 Heimböckel discusses the relationship of interculturalism to the spatial turn: Der Zusammenhang lässt sich, insofern Interkulturalität als eine Kategorie des sozialen Raums zu denken ist, unmittelbar herstellen: Denn verändern sich die Koordinaten des Raums, verändern sich auch die Grundlagen und Formen interkultureller Kommunikation und Verständigung : p. 31. This relationship in practice is far from this simple, however. 111 This also corresponds to the characterisation of raumlaborberlin s contribution to the Odyssee Europa festival in Niklas Maak s description of their work as [ein] Experiment, das ebenso ein Theaterstück ist wie eine Befragung der Stadt, ihrer Bewohner, und ein Versuch, die Chance eines Fremdseins zu aktivieren. : Maak, p Terkessedis, pp Spiegel, Odysseus kommt nicht, n. pag. 114 Hinnenberg,

263 thus seem to correspond to Ralf Parr s conclusion in his discussion of Ruhr.2010 as a whole: Tendenziell fand dann im tatsächlich realisierten Programm weder eine Mischung der Akteure noch eine der Publikumsfraktionen statt. 115 In terms of mimesis, it is important to note the ways in which the reception of Perikızı contrasts with the reception of Özdamar s mixture of myth and modern migration in the 1980s, when Karagöz in Alamania was received poorly by critics who claimed not to know wo ist nun wo. 116 In 2010 it was precisely this disorientating aspect which seemed to account for her newer play s success. On the one hand, the dream-play form and the prolific use of mythic and fantastical figures in Perikızı allows a blending of memories, experiences, free inventions, absurdities, and improvisations which might seem to indicate a turn away from the Real and a mythologisation of migration. 117 On the other hand, the acceptance of a particular uprootedness as the defining reality in contemporary life offers another interpretation of the use of the dream-play form. By subtitling the play A Dream Play in what seems a direct reference to Strindberg, Özdamar may be seen to suggest a situation in which the real story is best told through the distorting lens of the dream-world. An examination of the play in its premiere production as part of Odyssee Europa and RUHR.2010 then suggests that the embrace of Özdamar s Dramaturgie der Orientierungslosigkeit might indicate a normalisation of migration for the German theatrical establishment and its more traditional audiences, as well as an expansion of the reality to which German theatre relates. 118 At the same time as we have seen this normalisation is not without its own issues. While the framing of the premiere of Perikızı situates the migrant woman as central to new European values and dynamic ways of life, arguably this not only erases Europe s own role in excluding migrant women from belonging but also fails to provide space for the memories and experiences she carries. 115 Parr, p Jens Friederiksen, Speedy Gonzalez in Alamania, review of Karagöz in Alamania, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Accessed in Archiv zum Städtischen Bühnen, Franfurt am Main. See Chapter Two of this thesis. 117 Thus the mirror in the stage directions of the dramatic text is not used as refection but rather as a gateway through the looking glass, in the style of Alice in Wonderland. 118 Lutz Tantow coins this phrase in his review of Karagöz in Alamania. It is also taken up by Erol M. Boran, p

264 6.5 Perikızı at the Ballhaus: Textuality, Sexuality and 50 Jahre Scheinehe The concept of migration as central to German society is returned to critically in the framing of the second production of Perikızı I will look at briefly in the final part of this chapter: Michael Ronen s 2011 production for the festival Almancı! 50 Jahre Scheinehe at the Ballhaus Naunynstraße. As the programme for the Almancı! 50 Jahre Scheinehe festival puts it, here the migrant or postmigrant figure does not become paradigmatic, but rather stands quer zu den etabilierten Kulturkontexten sowohl Deutschlands als auch der Türkei. 119 Indeed, the Ballhaus has consistently situated itself as a disruptive voice from the margins, claiming to bark from the third row. 120 Shermin Langhoff, the artistic director of the theatre at the time of the Almancı! 50 Jahre Scheinehe festival, has summarised the theatre s ethos as follows: Postmigrantisch heißt für uns, dass wir die bisherige Produktion und Rezeption von Geschichten über Migration und über Migranten kritisch befragen und neu anschauen, neu produzieren und neu zur Rezeption einladen. 121 Rather than situating itself as a future-orientated identity-building project, the Almancı! 50 Jahre Scheinehe festival explicitly looked to the past in a year celebrated widely in the German press as the fiftieth anniversary of the Turkish presence in Germany. While the Odyssee Europa project was embedded in a discourse of Europeanisation and metropolisation, the title Almancı, an implicitly derogatory Turkish word for Turks who migrated to Germany, alerts us to a purposefully alternative positioning at work here Vorwort, in: Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Almancı! 50 Jahre Scheinehe, programme [p. 2]. 120 Sandra Luzina, Aus der dritten Reihe bellen, Der Tagesspiegel, 14/04/2011; quoted in Kömürcü Nobrega, We Bark, pp Şermin Langhoff interviewed in Martin Schacht, 50 Jahre Scheinehe, ARTE.DE 31/10/2011 < [last accessed 15/06/2013]. Transcription my own. 122 Mandel, p. 241 and p

265 The Ballhaus production made use of a circus aesthetic which captured elements of the comic, slapstick turns Özdamar writes into the dramatic text, as well as the performativity for which her writing is known more generally. 123 Elmira Bahrami, the actress playing Perikızı, for example, played the violin within the performance, performed acrobatics with a suspended hoop and together with the other actors participated in the production s comic use of clowning skills. Israeliborn director Michael Ronen explained his reasons for the circus aesthetic as follows: Circus, for me, it stands for a travelling theatre it has no one location. It is also like a travelling man, it is migratory theatre. And circus is the home of the circus artist [...], which is also true for the Ballhaus as a home for people that are heimatlos, displaced. 124 Ronen s words are useful in thinking through the Ballhaus representation of the displaced woman and how it might compare to that of the Odyssee Europa festival. The meta-theatrical nature of the references to circus in this production also draws attention to the positioning of the postmigrant theatre practitioner, a theme which was continued through political statements in the Almancı programme, and the addition of new text included in Ronen s Perikızı. A significant example of this is the plagiarism scene from Özdamar s dramatic text, which in the Ballhaus production was reworked to explicitly suggest, instead, a rape scene. In this scene, perhaps the most prominent one in the Ballhaus production, a newspaper man dressed as a ringmaster replaced the figure of Zaimoglu as (grey) wolf and, hearing Perikızı sing, declared her the Pionierin der türkischen Künstler. 125 He then turned her over to Liesel and Gretel, two German-German feminists who offer to rescue Perikızı from what they assume is her oppressive and abusive family. With their traditional German names, Liesel and Gretel also seem to step out of German 123 The dramatic text includes stage directions such as Chaplin-Nummer an der Wurstbude, for example: Özdamar, Perikızı, p On performativity and theatricality in Özdamar s work, see, for example Shafi, p Ronen, skype interview. This interview was conducted in English. 125 Ibid., p. 26. There are a number of practical reasons which may have made this a desirable alteration at the Ballhaus. The Ballhaus has a good working relationship with Zaimoglu and has staged a number of his plays since it opened in So the decision not to include this section of the scene in the play and to express the trauma of the protagonist s reception in Germany symbolically in this way may simply have been a tactical one. 263

266 fairy tales. The figure of the West German feminist thus becomes merged with emblems of more conservative views present in the German cultural imaginary, highlighting the ways in which a left-wing or feminist political leaning does not prevent otherwise politically engaged groups becoming a mouthpiece for stereotypes about Turkish women in Germany. 126 Blind both to the actual danger to Perikızı and to their own role in enabling this, in the Ballhaus production Liesel and Gretel strip her naked for the ringmaster who, it is suggested, rapes her. 127 This is not shown directly but is suggested in the performance via a knife-throwing performance and the blood which subsequently flows down the legs of the actress playing Perikızı (Figure 39). 128 While in the Moers production, symbolist Red Riding Hood imagery and subtler suggestions of sexual violence were used to explore assimilative demands on the migrant figure, here we see a shift to a more explicitly symbolic rape scene. The image of Perikızı in a red cape with blood pouring down her legs makes these suggestions explicit in the advertising material for the 2010 Ballhaus production (Figure 40), again alluding to Little Red Riding Hood, a fairytale which has been analysed in great detail by Jack Zipes as a rape narrative. 129 Although perhaps somewhat heavy-handed, the Ballhaus production thus retains a critical view of the violence done to the semi-autobiographical protagonist of Özdamar s dramatic text as artistic persona by her reception in 126 This certainly seems to reflect and comment on historical reality. See, for example, Chin s discussion of the shortcomings of German feminist groups engagements with Turkish women in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s: 'Turkish Women, p In the published version of Perikızı the Wolf forces a head-scarf on Perikızı during his attack on her in the plagiarism scene: Özdamar, Perikızı, p In the Ballhaus production, however, Perikızı is not forced to cover her head but rather to strip, shifting the critique to address a European tendency to equate female nudity with sexual and individual freedom. This equation is often used to attempt to discipline postmigrant women in Europe in particular ways and Katrin Sieg discusses it in more detail in her analysis of the premiere production of Feridun Zaimoglu s Schwarze Jungfrauen: see, for example, Black Virgins, pp This is a critique which seems to run through a number of Ballhaus productions in Nurkan Erpulat s Verrücktes Blut the forced unveiling of one of the female characters by a teacher is represented as an attack on the very freedoms the teacher instigating this unveiling purports to demand: Erpulat and Hillje, Verrücktes Blut Strichfassung, pp. 47 and 52. My thanks to the late Fereidoun Ettehad at the Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Berlin for access to this text. 128 Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Perikızı, dir. by Michael Ronen, unpublished audiovisual recording, Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Berlin, Accessed thanks to Monica Marrotta/Ballhaus Naunynstraße. 129 Zipes suggests the young female figure s dallying with the wolf has often been used to suggest that, in disobeying societal codes, she asks to be eaten by him; a sexually loaded image of violence which, tellingly, takes place in the Grandmother s bed : Zipes, p

267 Germany. 130 In altering the figure and actions of the Wolf, however, it articulates this violence via sexual rather than textual violence, an attack on the protagonist s body rather than on her written work. Figure 39. Ballhaus Naunynstraße: Knives are thrown at a stripped Perikızı (Elmira Bahrami) by the ringmaster (Mehmet Yılmaz). Image Maifoto/Ute Langkafel, PERIKIZI_MG_5765, publicity photograph, 25/09/2011 < [last accessed 26/08/2014] Figure 40. Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Programm Oktober 2011, programme < [last accessed 26/08/2014]. Image on front cover of programme by Esra Rotthoff Esra Rotthoff. 130 Weber argues that the racialized regime of gender violence at work in the German sphere constitutes an iteration on the rape narrative [Sharon] Marcus describes. The body of the Muslim man, rather than just the penis, is scripted as a weapon used by Islam against the Muslim woman : Gender and Violence, p. 51. Within Ronen s production this trope is rescripted in a manner which highlights the role of the German cultural sphere in symbolic or discursive violence enacted on Muslim women and postmigrants perceived as Muslim. 265

268 According to Weber, in Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn, a major intertext for Perikızı and a point of inspiration for Ronen: the tendency on the part of the men around the main characters to sexualise women s bodies, then encode that sexuality as value for consumption by men in the name of politics [...] reveals affinities between the left in both Germanies and Turkey and the Turkish right. 131 While sexuality is used both as the structuring principle of intellectual and political growth in Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn and as a means of critiquing sexual values common across the political spectrum and national boundaries, as we have seen in section 6.1, sexuality is replaced by a focus on nationalism and fascism as structuring principle in the dramatic text of Perikızı. 132 In Ronen s production at the Ballhaus, however, it was precisely the sexual elements of the narrative as presented in the earlier novel which were returned to by way of alterations to the script. Here sex again becomes a structuring principle, but this time in a manner which I think is intimately related to the Ballhaus broader critique of representations of labour migration to Germany on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Turkish-German recruitment agreements. While still including purportedly left-wing circles in Germany such as that of the women s movement, represented by Liesel and Gretel, the explicitly symbolic rape of the protagonist by a member of the cultural establishment shifts the main focus of the critique to the role such attitudes play in cultural and literary circles. The main target of criticism thus becomes those who position themselves as the humanist purveyors, gatekeepers, and consumers of high culture, and the role which they play in the circulation of, and violence inherent in, discourses of assimilation and integration in contemporary Germany Weber, Work, Sex, p Ibid., p This can be seen as a continuation of the action of drawing links between Turkish and German, leftwing and right-wing attitudes to women which Weber identifies in Özdamar s novels: Work, Sex, p. 47. It also creates a far more pointed critique of a particular target than is typically the case in Özdamar s writing. See also Shafi, p

269 This criticism is made explicit when, immediately after the suggested rape scene, Elmira Bahrami, in her role as Perikızı, swings above the audience in a hoop, blood streaming down her legs, and exclaims: Ich bin kein Tier! Ich bin kein Tier!! Ich bin kein Tier!!! [...] Sehe ich so aus[,] als wäre ich eine Bedrohung für euch? Nein? Sicher! Warum tut ihr nichts dagegen? Warum seid ihr so kalt? So gleichgültig? Warum schaut ihr nur zu? Ich bin es doch! Perikızı?! [...] Ich will Respekt, ich will Anerkennung, ich will Applaus! Für meine Fähigkeiten! Für das[,] was ich wirklich kann! Schauspielern! [...] Wer schaut hier wen an! [...] Ihr denkt, ihr habt für die Show bezahlt und erwartet eine Leistung? [...] Ich scheisse [sic] auf eure Eintrittskarten, ich ficke eure Vorstellungen in euren verfickten Hirnen, die keine Ahnung von mir haben! 134 (Figure 41) This monologue, which breaks the fourth wall by explicitly addressing the audience and its role in the theatrical event, was written and inserted into the Ballhaus theatre s version of the Perikızı-script by dramaturge Tunçay Kulaoğlu. Rather than creating a means of audience interaction and identification with the protagonist, as was the case with such interactive elements in the Moers production, this confrontational speech functions to draw lines between audience and protagonist. This highlights the differences in their positions and also the tensions present within the symbolic space which the Ballhaus, as self-declared postmigrant theatre, occupies Kulaoğlu, Tunçay and Michael Ronen, Perikızı von Emine Sevgi Özdamar bearbeitet von Tunçay Kulaoğlu und Michael Ronen, Textfassung 16/09/2011, unpublished cut of the dramatic text used for Perikızı, dir. by Michael Ronen (Berlin: Ballhaus Naunynstraße, 2011), pp (p. 28). Accessed thanks to Chantal Kohler/Ballhaus Naunynstraße. 135 For a very critical view of this position, see Ana Hoffner, Hunde, die bellen Keine Geschichten über Migration, Kulturrisse: Zeitschrift für radikaldemokratische Kulturpolitik (April 2008) < [last accessed 03/05/2014]. 267

270 Figure 41. Ballhaus Naunynstraße: Perikızı (Elmira Bahrami) sits in the hoop from which she will deliver her monologue following the rape scene. Image Maifoto/Ute Langkafel, PERIKIZI_MG_4846, publicity photograph, 25/09/2011 < ballhausnaunynstrasse-presse/ /> [last accessed 26/08/2014]. When I interviewed Ronen, he explained Kulaoğlu s reasons for inserting a piece of completely new text here as follows: his fear was that although we are dealing with quite a critical subject, because we are doing it in a circus world it is definitely entertainment. So he wanted to create one place where there is a real intervention. 136 This monologue, with its direct address to the audience and reference to entrance tickets and the spectator, is also markedly metatheatrical. In calling attention to the actress on stage as actress it relates the experience of the protagonist of the play, and Özdamar s critique of the dynamics of her own reception as cultural figure, to recent debates on postmigrant representation in German theatre. While individual postmigrant plays, particularly those staged at the Ballhaus theatre, have been much lauded in recent years, as Chapter Five has shown, debates about casting remain prolific. This is reflected in the inserted monologue s insistence on the actress being taken seriously as an actress; that is, as a cultural practitioner rather than as a representative postmigrant body on stage. A concern with the ways in which postmigrant artists are positioned is also apparent in the broader framing of the play. In the foreword to the Almancı! 50 Jahre Scheinehe programme, following a 136 Michael Ronen, skype interview. 268