Abstract
The response to the so-called migration crisis in Germany has led to plethora of new theatrical work. With this has come, quite suddenly, intensive scholarly attention to theatre making and migration in Germany. In the conclusion to this book I suggest that rather than this new context being reason to “move on”, it is important to dwell with Turkish-German theatrical production at precisely this point. Here I point toward the ways in which rewriting scripts of postmigration has also created space for the scripts of more recent migrants to Germany today by briefly addressing the relationship between work carried out by theatre practitioners around Turkish-German access to the stage and the response to the so-called refugee crisis on the part of theatres.
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Notes
- 1.
This is the term used by Yurdakul et al. (2018).
- 2.
For a detailed engagement with “Willkommenskultur” see Bock and Macdonald (2019).
- 3.
This study is therefore intended as one of several beginnings in the exploration of this theatrical work rather than an authoritative or in any way complete history, and should be read in combination with recently and soon to-be published book-length studies by scholars such as Ela Gezen, Nora Haakh, Onur Suzan Nobrega, Priscilla Layne, Damani Partridge, Azadeh Sharifi, Jonas Tinius and Jamele Watkins to name a few.
- 4.
These plays are titled Siegfrieds Heldentaten (Siegfried’s Heroic Deeds, 2015) and Siegfrieds Erben (Siegfried’s Heirs, 2018) These were followed by another play titled Siegfried which premiered in 2019, but which took Siegfried Wagner, the son of Richard Wagner, famous for his operatic engagement with the Nibelungenlied, as its focus. Zaimoglu/Senkel have also experimented with writing for the opera, providing the text for Aufstand (Uprising , 2012), a new opera about the Elberfeld uprising of 1849 with music by composer Enver Yalçın Özdiker, for Discount Diaspora (2011), a Berlin-based production created for the Neuköllner Oper , and for a new production of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Abduction from the Seraglio , 2019).
- 5.
The need to acknowledge and archive the achievements of the first generation of Turkish-German labour migrants in particular was emphasised by Karin Yeşilada amongst others at a workshop on Transnational German Studies which took place in Warwick and Berlin, 19-26/05/2013.
- 6.
The fact that many of Özdamar’s prose texts began life as dramatic monologues suggests that a practical archival approach could also productively be brought to bear on a new study of Turkish-German literature.
- 7.
This is far from the only way in which such work extends into scripts of coalition with other practitioners engaging with or against experiences of discrimination, exclusion and migrantization in Germany today. The Ballhaus Naunynstraße has since become a key venue for Black German performance, for example, while the Gorki theatre engages extensively with Jewish-German experience, Eastern European and Balkan contexts and migration experiences. Such work increasingly also unfolds beyond these theatres (at venues such as the Sophiensaele), and beyond Berlin, however for many theatres there remains a tendency to ‘trend-following’ in terms of which postmigrant perspectives are deemed most relevant, which can rapidly turn coalition to competition.
- 8.
“GLANZ MUSTAFA An diesem Meer hört der Tod nicht auf. Heute Delfine, morgen Afrikaner. […] Eine Möwe kommt und hält bei der kranken Möwe Wache. / SEVGI Schau her, eine Möwe ist gekommen, sie bleibt bei der kranken Möwe stehen. / VAHAP Vor einem Monat haben sie hier 25 Leichen eingesammelt. Alle waren aufgeblasen, alle dick vom Tod. Darunter vier Kinder und Frauen. Was für eine Einsamkeit ist das. / GLANZ MUSTAFA Wenn der Tote eine Zunge hätte, würde er dann nicht sagen: / Dichtet. Hier stehe ich /mit tiefen, ernsten Falten, /blassen Wangen, dunklen Worten / mit nächtlichem Mantel aus Schatten / das Herz durchtränkt von Ohnmachten / es treibt mich von Ort zu Ort / es treibt mich hin, es treibt mich her / bin ein heimatloser Stern / beim Klang vor sich hin spielender Zigeunermusik / ging ich stadtaufwärts, stadtauswärts die Kalender zu sammeln vom / sich zuschlagenden Leben. / Sevgi hanim, weine nicht, verzeihe mir, dass ich vor euch hier von der schwarzen, wehmütigen Sonne gesagte Worte, schiffsbrüchige Sätze als schwarze Blumen blühen lasse. Schau, Sevgi hanim, schau auf diese sterbende Möwe: Sie stirbt. Die andere Möwe wird, bis sie gestorben ist, bei ihr bleiben. Sie begleitet sie. Sie lässt sie auf dem Totenkorridor nicht allein.”
- 9.
The evening is advertised at http://www.ballhausnaunynstrasse.de/veranstaltung/refugee_strike__beyond_21.06.2014 [last accessed 08/07/2014].
- 10.
For an introductory overview of theatrical engagement in response to increased numbers of refugee arri vals in Germany, see Wilmer (2018, 189–208).
- 11.
A three-day event dedicated to refugee strategies of resistance titled Berlin Calling Lampedusa took place in January 2014, for example, while 2015 saw the inclusion of Refugees’ Library, a “[p]lay reading of court reports of asylum hearings in administration court Tiergarten” which as part if a broader project aimed “to make the archive library available to refugees as a resource of information to prepare for their own hearings” (https://gorki.de/index.php/en/berlin-calling-lampedusa-refugee-protest-and-other-strategies-of-resistance; https://gorki.de/index.php/en/refugees-library; for more on the Refugees' Library project see https://refugeeslibrary.wordpress.com/). The same theatre under Langhoff’s leadership has also played host to projects which take an actionist approach to intervening in the public sphere. These include the Erste Europäischen Mauerfall (First European Fall of the Wall 2014) project by the controversial Zentrum für politische Schönheit (Centre for Political Beauty), in which the white crosses which commemorate those who died crossing the Berlin Wall were taken to border fences in Greece, Bulgaria and Spanish Melilla, which mark the edges of the EU. This was followed by an “audience” who had signed up via the Gorki theatre travelling on buses from the theatre to Bulgaria, ostensibly to cut down sections of the fence raised there to keep refugees from entering from Turkey. A connective relationship between German histories and contemporary experiences of war, unjust division and flight, which provokes objects of German memory culture into new activation can also be seen in Manaf Halbouni’s Monument, the Berlin iteration of which was commissioned as part of the Gorki’s programme Herbstsalon (Autumn Salon) in 2017. This sculpture consisting of three upturned busses, inspired by a barricade built on the streets in Aleppo in 2015, was placed in front of the Brandenburg Gate in central Berlin.
- 12.
“Ich bin hier seit ungefähr fünf Jahren, und bin trotzdem sofort in der Schublade postmigrantisches Theater gelandet […] Wenn ich mit einem Theater spreche, sagt man mir oft: Du kannst ja zum Gorki gehen.”
- 13.
On dynamics of “contestation and solidarity” between Turkish and Turkish-origin residents of Berlin and newly arriving inhabitants from Syria see Togral Koca (2019).
- 14.
“Postmigrantisches Theater […]. Wenn das Wort etwas taugen soll, dann funktioniert es nur als Fusion künstlerischer Energien von Menschen, die bereit sind, sich aus alten Narrative zu desintegrieren, um einen Raum für neue, gemeinsame Narrative zu schaffen. […] Deshalb ist mir das Wort ‘Postmigrantisch’ so kostbar: Es erzählt mir von der Möglichkeit, die Welt weiterzudenken und zu entwerfen.”
- 15.
“der Begriff postmigrantisch [war] auch ein Versuch, mit Konzepten wissenschaftlich und politisch in gesellschaftliche Wahrnehmungen von Wirklichkeit zu intervenieren. Das kommt dem nahe, was J. L. Austin […] eine performative Aüßerung genannt hat – eine Aüßerung, mit der eine Handlung verbunden ist, die gelingen aber auch misslingen kann (Austin 1975).”
- 16.
This in itself is not a new idea. John Berger similarly identified the migrant worker in twentieth-century Europe as “not on the margin” but rather as “central to understanding modern experience” (Berger and Mohr 1975, cover copy). Activists in Germany in the early 1990s drew on Italian operaismo (workerism) to shape a political movement which viewed the perspective of migration as central (Heidenreich 2013, 359).
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Stewart, L. (2021). Conclusion: Scripting New Realities. In: Performing New German Realities. Contemporary Performance InterActions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69848-5_8
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