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Racialisation and Contemporary German Theatre

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Abstract

In the second half of the twentieth century, plays and directing practices in East and West Germany expressed the desire to break with the legacy of the thoroughly racialized National Socialist past. Curiously, at the same time, the very word ‘race’ tended to be absent from the German stage only to reappear in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, which have been marked by questions of race and casting. By examining Dea Loher’s Innocence, Roland Schimmelpfennig’s The Golden Dragon and Wolfram Lotz’s The Ridiculous Darkness, this chapter examines recent German theatrical history by placing questions of race, representation and racialized structures at the centre rather than the margin of the perspective. The chapter will also discuss the work of theatre practitioners of Colour, including Nurkan Erpulat and Jens Hillje’s Crazy Blood in relation to the legacy of the Verfremdungseffekt, and Olivia Wenzel’s work in relation to Afrofuturist performance techniques.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The term ‘racialisation’ acknowledges the fact that race is not a real, biological category; however, racialised groups are constructed in a society to fulfil certain ends. As Fatima El-Tayeb writes about the situation in Europe, ‘though racializations always pretend to name natural, unchanging, obvious facts, they are always ambiguous, shifting and unstable…Racialized populations are thus externalized from contemporary Europe, and as a result, their long-standing presence within the continent is absent from most historical accounts’ (El-Tayeb 2011: xiii; xxi).

  2. 2.

    On the position of the Ballhaus Naunynstraße in the German theatrical landscape and particularly the role of funding here see Nobrega 2011. For a brief historical overview of the relationship between theatre and migration in Germany see Sharifi 2017.

  3. 3.

    Ulrich Khoun, one of the directors at heart of the blackfacing scandal in 2012, having learnt the term still notes, ‘I find it a bit problematic because I do think it [the term] won’t be understood by everyone straight away. […] I didn’t understand it straight away either. Then I just learnt it’ (our translation of Khoun, as cited in Voss 2014, 94). In Wie Rassismus aus Wörtern spricht (How Racism Speaks out of Words), Jasmin Dean describes People of Colour in the German context ‘as a political concept which functions without reference to culture and “ethnic” belonging […] a “People of Colour” politics is well-placed to fill a discursive gap into which many of those who felt themselves to belong neither to Black organisations nor to migrant communities had fallen up til now’ (our translation of Dean 2015, 606).

  4. 4.

    Plays which bear Brecht’s name as playwright tend to be the results of more complex processes of collaboration than the traditional European model of the author as lone genius and, today, as lone copyright holder, tend to allow for.

  5. 5.

    Between 1941 and 1942 he actively supported African American theatre practitioner Clarence Muse in his attempt to stage an adaptation of The Threepenny Opera with a black cast. This attempt ultimately failed on contractual grounds (see Calico 2008, 81–83).

  6. 6.

    For further development of this tendency see also the plays under discussion in the chapter titled ‘Rightwing Radicalism in Germany After Reunification’ in Haas 2003. For a discussion focused on white German and Austrian female playwrights’ engagements with race see Kallin 2007.

  7. 7.

    For further discussion of Blackness in Fassbinder’s films, see (O’Sickey 2001), (Laws 2010), (Layne 2012), and (Nagl and Blankenship 2012). On Kaufmann see Gaines 2017, 95–134.

  8. 8.

    The research project, ‘Populäre Theaterkultur’ (Popular Theater Culture), founded in 1983 by Manfred Brauneck included study of these diverse groups (see Sappelt 2000, 276).

  9. 9.

    For detailed analyses of this play see Landry (2012); Layne (2014); Moslund et al. (2019); Stewart (2017, 56–68); Voss (2014, 171–208).

  10. 10.

    In addition to Waktins’ scholarship, scholars including Vanessa Plumly, Olivia Landry and Azadeh Sharifi have also published on black German theatre.

  11. 11.

    On this, see amongst others: Otoo and Sharon (2012) Sieg (2015); Sharifi (2016).

  12. 12.

    For more on this play see Sharifi (2018, 2020).

  13. 13.

    For a discussion of Black feminist thought in Black German theatre see Sharifi, ‘Women of Colour Feminism’ (2020, forthcoming). For an analysis of Heimat, bittersüsse Heimat see Watkins (2016b).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Priscilla Layne

  2. King’s College London, London, UK

    Lizzie Stewart

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  1. Priscilla Layne
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  2. Lizzie Stewart
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Correspondence to Lizzie Stewart .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Theatre and Performance, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK

    Tiziana Morosetti

  2. Department of Theatre and Performance, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK

    Osita Okagbue

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Layne, P., Stewart, L. (2021). Racialisation and Contemporary German Theatre. In: Morosetti, T., Okagbue, O. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Race. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43957-6_3

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