Performances of Border: Theatre and the borders of Germany, 1980-2015
A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY
Misha Hadar
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIERMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Adviser: Professor Margaret Werry
November 2020
COPYRIGHT © 2020
MISHA HADAR
Acknowledgements I could not have written this dissertation without my advisor Margaret Werry, whose support and challenge throughout this process, the space and confidence she offered, made this possible. I want to thank my committee members: Michal Kobialka, Sonja Kuftinec, Hoon Song and Matthias Rothe. You have been wonderful teachers to me, people to think with, models to imagine a life of scholarship, and friends through a complicated process. I want to thank the rest of the Theatre Arts and Dance department at the University of Minnesota, who were a wonderful intellectual community to me. And then all of my graduate student friends, from the department and beyond, who were there to think this project with me, to listen, to question, and to encourage. Special thanks in this to my cohort, Sarah Sadler, my first base in Minneapolis Bryan Schmidt, and Baruch Malewich. I want to thank family, near and further away, who were important and kind support. And finally, to my wonderful partner Elif Kalaycioglu, with whom this whole rollercoaster has been shared, and who was always there to push and pull us along.
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Table of Contents
Introduction ...... 1 CHAPTER I: The Turkish Ensemble and the Cultural Border ...... 21 CHAPTER II: Transit Europa and the Historiographic Border ...... 104 CHAPTER III: The First Fall of the European Wall, Compassion, and the Humanitarian Border ...... 177 Conclusion ...... 253 Biobibliography ...... 265
ii Introduction
The art installation of “White Crosses” collectively left the city’s government quarters to escape the commemoration festivities for the fall of the Berlin wall’s 25th anniversary. In an act of solidarity, the victims fled to their brothers and sisters across the European Union’s external borders, more precisely, to the future victims of the wall. Since the fall of the iron curtain, the EU’s border has taken 30,000 lives. This was the announcement that the Center for Political Beauty (CfPB) made on November
6th, 2014, about their protest-performance. The Center had removed the White Crosses
memorial, a series of seven crosses bearing the names of victims of the Berlin Wall, from
the banks of the Spree by the Reichstag. It was a controversial and polarizing action, which
many took to be disrespectful to the memory and families of those who died trying to cross the Wall. But what was this action doing? It contrasted the way that Germany related to its borders in two different moments. The first moment was the time of the Cold War, when
the memorial was erected (1971) as a reminder of the brutality and deadliness of the border
that split Berlin in two and Germany into East and West. At that moment (1971), the White
Crosses were a condemnation of the violation of rights and humanitarian values. The
memorial served as the place at which to decry what the West saw as the brutality and
inhumanity of the socialist regime. As regular life in West Berlin continued, one could remember the militarized border as a ruthless and deadly injustice through the memorial.
The second moment was the contemporary (2014) celebration of Germany, unified, with the problem of the border, literally, removed. The memorial now stood as testament to this new Germany, a political space where no such deadly border remained. This new
Germany was part of a new Europe that had freed itself from the specter of borders through the Schengen agreement for the removal of borders within the European Union (EU). The official commemoration of the fall of the Wall identified and celebrated this new
1 imagination of an all-but-borderless open and free Germany, now a leading force in the
EU.
The Center’s performance highlighted two different concepts of border, as the two
different ways in which the border was publicly imagined by politicians and the media.
One was the deadly border, that is, the border as a space of death, a mark of shame, and a
symbol of the ethical deprivation of the socialist regime. The second was quite the opposite:
the border as the non-border, an image of a new political space demarcated by its almost- borderless-ness. Through this contrast, the Center pointed to a third concept of border, marginalized to the periphery by the imagination of new Germany. This is the EU border on its fringe, constituting fortress Europe that is the condition of borderless Europe.
Symbolically sending the victims of the Berlin Wall in solidarity to their brethren, who were dying in the Mediterranean while trying to make it across the increasingly militarized and securitized external borders of the EU, the Center’s action laid bare the forgetting that
is necessary to imagine the new political space. Implicit in this action is a fourth concept
of border as the humanitarian border. At this border, the European public and EU policy had to attend to the death and suffering of the migrants trying to make it into Europe.
What I describe as a concept of border is the scaffold of ideas that undergirds any
specific mobilization of border practices or literal, physical border. It often functions as an important anchor of identity, helping to constitute the “we” of a given political body (which can be a state, but also a region, like the EU). Most basically, it defines and justifies terms of separation, determining the boundaries of that political body by bringing together and organizing a constellation of images, ideas, and historical narratives that relate to how the political body distinguishes itself, what it is separate from, and how this separation has
2 been and should be achieved and maintained. These constellations of images, ideas, and narratives can relate to the border positively, identifying what is within the border: what history, interests, experiences, responsibilities, or culture is shared by those it defines? Or
they can relate to the border negatively, defining that which is outside the border, what
separates the interior from the exterior. It is through the concept of border that the physical
border takes on meaning beyond the literal mechanism that separates between political
territories and their populations. Through the concept of border, the border becomes constitutive of a social and political imaginary.
Consisting of ideas, narratives, and images, the concept of border forms through expression and repetition in discursive and non-discursive practices. Politicians’ speeches, interviews, and policy express it, but also other bodies such as NGOs or media outlets, that express and contest it in the public sphere. Cultural practices, from film through art and theatre, are also important agents in the formation of concepts of border, functioning often as less direct means of communication of these ideas than the linguistic expression of politicians, but no less important in that they provide concrete images and quotidian manifestations of ideas. Cultural practices can act to normalize a concept of border, repeating its tropes and figures.
Importantly, public discourse, or cultural production do not merely express the concept of border, with different media simply reflecting a stable and unchanging concept; instead, they produce it. The concept of border comes into being through these manifold expressions, it is performatively produced and reproduced. Cultural practices can also function as sites of contestation, challenging elements of a dominant concept of border, or taking part in the emergence of a new concept.
3 In this dissertation I approach theatre and performance as cultural agents that take part in the performative activity that produces and challenges the concept of border.
Through adding new material, new images, scenarios, new expressions of narrative and history, theatre and performance take part in shaping concepts of border, as well as function as sites of dissemination and exposure. In this approach, I am trying to show neither the complicity of theatre and performance with existing borders and their concepts, nor their resistant potential. If the concept of border frames discourse about the border, it therefore necessitates that cultural producers engage within its terms. Instead, I hope my analysis can illuminate the conceptual terms within which cultural production happens, the links of those conceptual terms to wider political questions, and the active role they have in shaping these concepts of border.
My dissertation examines the concepts of border in Germany, through their manifestation in theatre and performance at three historical conjunctures since the 1980s.
I focus on Germany on account of its historical and ongoing struggle with a diversity of issues directly related to its borders: labor migration, an internal divide, the opening of the internal EU borders and the corresponding formation of shared external borders. Borders and boundaries have an especially strong metaphorical and symbolic meaning in German society and politics, including the East-West “wall in the head”, internalized divisions still separating Ossies and Wessies, but also the historical articulation of cultural and racial divides between the Germanic and Aryan self and different Others. The wide-ranging conditions and contexts that Germany has experienced throughout this period allows me to explore how important concepts of border are to manifold ways in which societies make meaning of their world: classify and categorize it in terms of cultural identity, delineate
4 their political horizons and expectations, and affirm their shared commitment to moral and emotional values.
The first conjuncture I explore is West Germany in the 1980s, a period when the emergence of the foreigner, particularly the Turkish guest worker, constituted a key political problem. In this period, cultural difference appeared as the central idea that formulated the concept of border. Cultural difference defined the foreigners and their ability or inability to integrate successfully into German society. I explore the ethno- national representation that developed in correlation to this interest in cultural difference in this period through the work of the Turkish Ensemble, a Turkish language theatre, which targeted German and Turkish audiences, and that was active as part of the famous Berlin
Schaubühne theater between 1978-1984.
The second conjuncture is the Berlin Wall and its conception as a border as an Anti- fascist Defense Rampart by the East German state, which was refuted and challenged in the 1980s by the growing dissident movements in the GDR. I discuss the role that the Wall played in articulating the identity of the socialist state as anti-fascist, a concrete embodiment of East German state historiography. I focus on Transit Europa, a play written by Volker Braun in 1984 and produced in December 1989, a month after the fall of the
Wall, at the Gorki Theater in East Berlin.
The third conjuncture is the recent, and ongoing, refugee crisis enveloping Europe and Germany. In the midst of the crisis of legitimation of liberal-democracy in Europe, and the harrowing and deadly experience of millions of migrants attempting to make their way to Europe, I examine the concept of the border as a site of humanitarian intervention: a site that demands policy and action for the alleviation of death and suffering. I develop the
5 analysis of CfPB’s action, with which I begun this introduction, and contrast it with
Compassion, a production by director Milo Rau and the Berlin Schaubühne.
My dissertation proposes a shift away from an understanding of borders focused on their physical-geographical extension, simply the thin line delineating states, but also from understanding them as zones of hybridity in relation to the heartlands they separate. My
analysis instead attends to the concepts that imbue borders with meaning, without turning
the border into a metaphor, or turning away from borders’ function in framing polities.
This approach allows a robust focus on how culture and cultural production bears on this
critical issue in our politics. The concept of border is not simply defined by the state in
accordance and struggle with other states. It is rather the product of manifold agents that
take part in its articulation. Theatre, as an embodied practice that materializes thought and
ideas in the public sphere, can have an important role in both reproducing a concept of
border or in challenging existing concepts. My dissertation shows the unstable and
contingent realities in which concepts of border emerge and change in Germany in the past
forty years. It also shows the potential role of theatre research in investigating and
illuminating the border, a project of immense importance at times when migration flows
and intensifying Western nationalisms are making borders one of the most urgent political
problems.
But why borders? Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the triumph of
the Western-liberal-capitalist vision of political and economic organization as the all but
global political imaginary, the death of borders was prematurely announced.1 The vision
1 (O’Dowd 2010)
6 of the borderless world went hand-in-hand with the new discourse of globalization: the
transformation of the globe into an open network of flows and integrated markets through
a condensing of time and space.2 However, far from moving towards an imagined free and
borderless world, new and different forms of boundaries and stratifications have appeared.
Furthermore, state borders that define and impose sovereignty are still points of dispute,
fierce contestation, violence, and militarization.3 In response to these changes the interdisciplinary field of border studies has developed new tools to think about the multiplying borders and segregations.
My work’s focus on borders beyond the sketching of the geographical periphery of
the state is indebted to challenges in border studies. Inquiries in this emerging field have
rejected the realist geo-political conceptions of borders that saw them as lines on a map,
empty in themselves beyond the illumination of the relatio between the states that they
demarcate. Instead, research has focused on borders as processes of bordering and
delineation.4 This new perspective calls attention to the practices happening at the border
rather than its transparent existence, asking how the border delineates. Researches have shown the importance of changing technological capabilities, policies, and activities of
both state and non-state actors at and around the seams between political bodies: the border
doesn’t simply exist, it is done, an activity rather than an object. This shift focused
2 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Columbia University Press, 1998); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard University Press, 2001); Edward W. Soja, “Borders Unbound: Globalization, Regionalism, and the Postmetropolitan Transition,” B/Ordering Space, 2005, 33–46. 3 Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Mit Press, 2010). 4 Chris Rumford, Citizens and Borderwork in Contemporary Europe (Routledge, 2013); James Wesley Scott, “European Politics of Borders, Border Symbolism and Cross-Border Cooperation,” in A Companion to Border Studies (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), 83–99; David Newman, “The Lines That Continue to Separate Us: Borders in Our ‘borderless’ World,” in Border Poetics De-Limited (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2007), 27–58.
7 primarily on the sites and path of the border (although extending it to sites like airports,
and sometimes even supermarkets, where practices of identification and enforcement of
migration policy happen) at which the differential practices of regulating the movement of
human and non-human stuff between the delineated spaces takes place. This research
opened the space to inquire into the formation of the border, rather than assuming its
geopolitical existence. However, although this literature has investigated how ideational
elements related to the border are made manifest through border practices, it has yet to
analyze more deeply the different practices that formulate the ideas themselves: what I
have called the concept of border. Through investigation of cultural material and
performance as the practices through which the border is performatively produced my
research similarly shifts away from the physical extension of the border to its existence as
an idea is crucial to our understanding of its function in contemporary politics.
Border studies’ focus on border practices has gone hand-in-hand with its growing
attentiveness to the physical and social geography in proximity of the border. This interest follows the path charted in the late 1980s by the seminal work of Gloria Anzaldúa and
Renato Rosaldo, fore parents of contemporary critical perspectives in border studies. Their assertion of the rawness of identity thought through the space of the border, and of the perspective of the border as a powerful reflection on the state, are critical methodological turns that have been influential on the critical development of borderlands and borderscapes as central concepts within border studies.5 We see here again a challenge to
5 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: La Frontera, vol. 3 (Aunt Lute San Francisco, 1987); Dieter Haller and others, Borders and Borderlands: An Anthropological Perspective, vol. 30 (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000); Anke Strüver, “Significant Insignificance–Boundaries in a Borderless European Union: Deconstructing the Dutch-German Transnational Labor Market,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 17, no. 1 (2002): 21–36.
8 the minimal definition of the border as a separation line: the border does not simply mark
where one state ends and the other begins, but is a defining feature of a whole region that
it runs through. For example, looking specifically at the contemporary borders of Germany,
Jane Wilkinson and Anke Strüver have investigated how being on the periphery, in proximity of the neighboring Other and engagement with those across the border, structures quotidian experience in the borderzone, from the identities of those living there to the economies they rely on.6 And perhaps most importantly, research into the borderzone has highlighted this space as holding a resistive potential to the normative and singular body of the nation-state, a space of hybridity and liminality.
While this work from border studies is important to my project in its understanding of the impact of the border on the quotidian, I differ significantly in asserting that this impact is not localized to the immediate geographical proximity of the border. Rather, I am closer to Balibar’s proposal of the “vacillation of borders,”7 how bordering as practice of
definition and delineation has moved into and through our political space, to become a
central experience of the political space writ large. Furthermore, my project is less
committed to the celebration of resistive identities, and more to understanding the ways in
which we think about the border: what are the more common, and nation-state driven, concepts of border? How are they produced? And what is the role of theatre as a cultural process in this production?
The concept of border we derive from world maps, of thin lines marking bodies of single color, or cutting across topographic maps, underpin clean and simple dichotomies
6 (Strüver 2004; Wilkinson 2009) 7 (Balibar 1998)
9 of us/them and inside/outside. As I have noted, this line-in-the-sand imagination of the
border has been criticized in border studies. Instead, Mark Salter’s has proposed the
suture,8 emphasizing the border as both cut and process of connecting and putting together; and Gloria Anzaldúa famously described the border as “where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.”9 Such research, and others in its vein, focus on new metaphors
to conceptualize what the border does, recognizing the materiality of its function and its
effect on people who encounter it. This search for new metaphors highlights the importance
of imagery and imagination in the way we think about the border, which is central to my
project. These investigations are committed to proposing alternative metaphors, to replace
the existing theory of border with a more robust one, that puts at its center the relations that the border manifests and structures. Similarly, historicizing the border, the different words used to describe it,10 or showing the different forms the periphery of political bodies have
taken, challenges the “transparent” theory of border. Researchers such Fatima Ben
Salimane, Rafaella Del Sarto, and Sarah Green have put forward historical-political
analyses of border terms and their link to practice, charting how developed and changed in
response to local conditions and political projects.11 For example, imperial borders, where
un-integrated groups were brought together through different levels of coercion, are
completely different from the concept of the nation-state border, or from the borders of
Christendom (as well as give us different insight into the borders of a project like the EU).
These two avenues of investigation, outlining the changing conceptual framing through the
8 Henk Van Houtum, Olivier Thomas Kramsch, and Wolfgang Zierhofer, B/Ordering Space (Ashgate Aldershot, 2005); Ákos Kopper, “The Imaginary of Borders: From a Coloring Book to Cézanne’s Paintings,” International Political Sociology 6, no. 3 (2012): 277–293; Mark B. Salter, “Theory of the \ the Suture and Critical Border Studies,” Geopolitics 17, no. 4 (2012): 734–755. 9 (Anzaldúa 1987) P. 25 10 (Febvre and Burke 1973) P. 210 11 (Ben Slimane 2010; Del Sarto 2017; Green 2012; 2018)
10 linguistic register, and the particularity of border formations in relation to different political
projects, are closely related to my project investigating the concept of border: the relation
between how we think about the limits of our political spaces and the practices associated
with them. The work of Walters and Balibar has been particularly significant to me.
William Walters theorizes a (recent) conceptual change from geopolitical borders (the
control and protection from external powers of borders concerned primarily with marking
sovereignty in relation to other nation-states), to biopolitical borders, which are borders
primarily concerned with the management of people, their travel and movement.12 Etienne
Balibar theorizes the relation between particular borders and a system of borders, arguing that the borders of political entities only get their meaning from the wider network of relations between political bodies that they are part of.13 Both Walters and Balibar link between the concrete practices of bordering that make political spaces, and the wider frameworks of international politics that give these borders meaning, the dividing lines on ideational level that they represent and uphold. These are precisely the ways in which I
investigate concepts of borders.
These theories and concept of border do not miraculously appear. They are formed
and disseminated through society, when different practice make them dominant within a
political space. Researchers such as Adrian Little and Nick Vaughan-Williams show how
this happens, the discursive formation of ideas undergirding the border practices (in their
cases, of the EU and Australia). They show how the discourse in the media, articulations
of politicians, and other political agents (NGOs and regional agencies) takes part in
12 (Walters 2002) 13 (Balibar 1998)
11 defining the terms of border practices and policy.14 In a way, we can see a family
resemblance between such inquiries and Benedict Anderson’s discussion of the construction of the nation as an imagined community through various discursive and institutional practices, which create a feeling of unison and shared reality.15 Scholars such
as Anssi Paasi, Mark Salter and Geneviève Piché, show how borders are constructed
through everyday political discourse, performative iterations through which the importance
of borders, and border-related issues, are defined and made known.16 This is the space into
which my research into the representation of borders fits, within constructivist enquiry of
production of the concept of border. What is the role that theatre and performance, as
cultural production, play in the discursive formation of borders?
A few scholars have made excursions beyond classic social science material (mass
media, political rhetoric, NGOs) to cultural material to illuminate bordering as the
reproduction and dissemination of ideas and feeling about the border. Such research, done
by otherwise more traditional social scientists, investigates other forms of dissemination of
ideas about borders (such as in TV series or monuments and popular protest).17 In the humanities, an influential programmatic paper on cultural production and borders by
Schimanski and Wolfe called for an examination of how borders are products of cultural factors, thereby bridging the “cultural turn” of critical social studies and the spatial turn in
the humanities.18 Although this programmatic article discusses borders as “cultural
constructs generated, circulated, and interpreted within various forms of discourse” the
14 (Little and Vaughan-Williams 2017; Walters 2010a; Kolossov and Scott 2013) 15 (Anderson 2006) 16 (Paasi 1999; Salter and Piché 2011) See also: (Scott 2012; Newman 2007) 17 Michael J. Shapiro, “HBO’s Two Frontiers: Deadwood and The Wire,” Geopolitics 20, no. 1 (2015): 193–213; (Kaiser 2012) 18 (Schimanski and Wolfe 2010)
12 majority of articles in the special edition interrogate cultural production in the borderlands,
and especially cultural production shown as subversive and resistive to state borders and
cohesive articulations of national-identity.
Focusing on borders in order to challenge ideas about the uniformity of identity is not new. Since the late 1980s cultural studies scholars (including performance studies researchers) have analyzed borders to complicate notions of group identity formation, seeing them as zones of cultural production that expose the shortcomings and violence of communitarian articulations of identity.19 Along this line of investigation, theatre and
performance studies are particularly generative to the interrogation of borders, as they
focus analysis on spaces/times of coming together in the public sphere in embodied
thought, where concepts and ideas are produced and contested. In Germany, theatre is a
cultural institution with an especially important history within the public sphere: from
Piscator and the birth of agitation propaganda in the early 20th century through Brecht,
theatre (alongside literature) within German culture has been a site of contestation and debate. The role of performance as a space of reflection and public thought goes beyond institutionalized theatre to street action and conceptual art, perhaps most famously in
Joseph Beuys and his concept of the Social Sculpture (who is often brought up in relation to the art-actions of the CfPB).
Theatre studies has seen two important edited volumes focused on borders: Of borders and thresholds: theatre history, practice, and theory (1999) and Performance in
19 (Weber 1995)
13 the Borderlands (2011).20 Both anthologies explore the borderland as the space created by the border. They bring together research that thinks from and through the border, and shed
light on how borders are fragmenting and multiplying, without “erasing its ideological and
historical specificity by producing the images of borders everywhere”.21 They pay
particular attention to the centrality of movement and crossing to the border, “not only as
a geographical setting but also as an active agent in the enabling of crossing and
exchange.”22 Although the chapters collected in these volumes offer a wide variety of
perspectives, the discussion of performance from the borderlands and materials produced
by those crossing borders (and complicating notions of identity) is particularly prominent
across the contributions. Similarly to the work collected by Schimanski and Wolfe, the
focus often turns to the hydridic potentiality of the border, and the ways in which
performance functions in the borderlands as a space of resistance. My research takes a very different path, focusing on the conceptualization of borders rather than on performance reflective of the experience of border crossing (real or metaphorical), and working through the way performances open a way for us to reflect on dominant modes of thought about the border rather than undermine an imagined uniformity.
Each of the chapters in this dissertation looks at a different moment in recent
German history and examines the concept of border specific to it. The chapters start with an in-depth discussion of the context of political changes and struggles relating to an emergent concept of border. I show how in these moments of crisis politicians, pundits,
20 Michal Kobialka, Of Borders and Thresholds: Theatre History, Practice, and Theory (U of Minnesota Press, 1999); Ramón H. Rivera-Servera and Harvey Young, Performance in the Borderlands (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 21 (Kobialka 1999) P. 4 22 (Rivera-Servera and Young 2011) P. 2
14 critics, and cultural agents help bring forth a new concept of border; I discuss what these new concepts of border responded to; and I analyze how they functioned as an ideational
underpinning to practices of bordering. These historical contexts are intended to help
understand what the performances do, and discuss the different ways in which the concept of border necessitated a performative dissemination of key elements and ideas (that is, how
performance is a space of constitution and materialization of ideas, cultural expression
that is constitutive of how these ideas come into being). I analyze primary sources from
political discourse, parliamentary discussion, political speeches, as well as public sphere
discourse, primarily newspaper articles. I then embed this snapshot in secondary research
to formulate what about the existing concept of border was changing, and what new
concept was forming.
I supplement this historical contextualization with theoretical framing that helps
make sense of the constellation of elements as a concept of border. I bring together cultural
and social theory that is relevant to the context and in relation to which I will be developing the performance analysis. I pay particularly close attention to questions of historiography:
what kinds of ideas of history writing and understanding are part and parcel of the concepts of border, and how are these integral to the content and aesthetic developed in the performance I analyze?
Most of the performance I discuss in this dissertation is traditional theatre: professionally produced, text-based, productions in important Berlin theaters. The protest- performance I open this introduction with is an outlier. However, because the CfPB develop this elaborate performance almost as a theatrical piece, I find it meaningful to investigate it in the same way I analyze the rest. An important difference is the medium
15 through which the performance is encountered, online and in the street as opposed to in the theater—a difference I address directly in the chapter. Importantly however, I discuss all the performances as performances: not merely as playtext, or even embodied playtext, but as happening in relation to an audience, interacting with the audience in different ways.
Apart from playtext, I analyze the materials that orientate this embodied experience to an audience, materials such as programs, advertising materials, invitations to educators; videos, production pictures, and production notes (such as synopses); and the echoes of the performances in the public sphere, how they were reviewed and commented on. I also use interviews conducted with key participants to gain their perspective on the work they were part of, and sometimes information not evident in the archival materials.
I focus on performance as a space in which border concepts are developed through embodiment, highlighting the ways in which performance is not merely a vector of dissemination, but functions as an integral part of the cultural-political construction of the concept. This is not to argue that performance is straightforwardly transformative of the concept of border, but to focus on performance’s participation in the process of production of the concept alongside other cultural and political agents. I also do not mean to judge the influence these productions have—it is hard to quantitatively argue about the causal role of cultural products in the struggles around political ideas. What I do show is how they participated in the changing discourse around borders at the moment of their production, and how their particular inflection and development of that discourse was reflected in discourse about them in the broader public sphere. This analysis gives texture to the general role of “reproduction” in constructivist thought: what about these performances (the themes they develop, their aesthetic, how they engage their audiences) formulates the concept of
16 border in a particular way, or what are they particularly well equipped to do in contesting the existing concept? This entails looking at both the content of the performance (its text, themes, and its aesthetics) and the ways in which these elements are put to work in the world, how they are crafted for audiences, and what is done to frame their reception.
In the first chapter, I examine the work of the Turkish Ensemble and show how it developed practices that focused on the representation of Turkish cultural difference. I begin with an examination of the political context of the late 1970s and early 1980s, after the termination of the Turkish guest worker agreements. This was a time of the discovery that despite West Germany’s expectation that the migrants would return to their
“homelands”, they were remaining in the FRG. The political discourse around immigrants pointed increasingly to cultural difference as the central lens through which to understand integration and formulate migration policy: conservative politicians formed it as an impediment to integration, while leftists and progressives described the importance of cultural preservation and the need for the state to support engagement with the culture of the Other—multiculturalism. This was the newly forming concept of border. I argue that in response to this shift, and to pressure from a public sphere increasingly interested in
Turkish culture, the Ensemble shifted from its early attempts of engaging the complex reality of migration to sharing Turkish cultural material. This sharing took the form of a public pedagogy that taught Turkish audiences about their own cultural heritage, and
German audiences about the culture of the Turkish Other. It included the staging of Turkish cultural material (plays, folk stories, song and dance) as well as an encounter with Turkish language, custom, and norms. In staging such performances, the Ensemble took part in the production of Turkish cultural difference. It offered material and substance to cultural
17 difference as a “theory of knowledge” around which the demarcation of the limits of
belonging and social participation were articulated.
In the second chapter I discuss Transit Europa, a play by Volker Braun about refugees trying to escape Europe in 1941. My argument in this chapter has three parts. In the first part, I discuss the East German consolidation of national identity around the history
of anti-fascism. The appropriation of the history of German anti-fascist groups as the
undergirding historiography of East Germany, extended as a concept of border: a barrier
between the anti-fascist GDR and the capitalist-Fascist West. I show how Braun developed a dramaturgy based on Walter Benjamin’s critique of progress and statist (Rankean) historiography to challenge the myth of anti-fascism as an ideological tool that legitimized
the existing socialist regime. In the second part I turn to the early 1980s, when Braun was
writing the play, to argue that his articulation of the need to resist and stop the
MEGAMACHINE, the logic of industrialization and militarization found in East and West,
an idea that reflected the growing dissident movement. This shift disregarded the state
concept of the anti-fascist border, proposing an alternative concept of border associated
with a revitalized socialism. At the same time, however, Braun’s engagement with the themes of border crossing, of leaving in search of refuge or remaining in resistance, was
an attempt to grapple with the exodus of socialist intelligentsia across the Berlin Wall. It
was an articulation of the need to remain and fight for reform of the East German socialist
project. In the final part, I turn to 1989 and the dynamic between leavers and reformers in
the growing crisis. I examine the performance of Transit Europa at the Gorki Theatre in
December 1989, a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall and almost a year before
unification, as another way of calling for reform of the socialist project rather than its
18 abandonment. As such, the performance is an urgent cry for critical reflection on the direction of the dramatic changes that were unfolding.
In the final chapter, I discuss more recent productions that deal with the death of migrants attempting to cross the border into the EU. I argue that in CfPB’s protest performance and Milo Rau’s Compassion, we find different engagements with the border as a site of humanitarian intervention. This is a conception of border, which entails border practices that are justified and rationalized as actions taken to mitigate death and suffering at the border. I begin the chapter with an examination of shifts in contemporary politics towards humanitarian reason: how the object and rhetoric of politics have become the alleviation of different forms of suffering. I discuss how borders have become a site of such humanitarian concern, and how discourse of companionate and empathetic response to refugees is a central theme in the German coverage of the refugee crisis. In this context, I analyze CfPB’s performance as an attempt to channel the affective resonance of the Berlin
Wall, that is, the shame and anger about those who were killed trying to cross the border, to foster sympathy and compassion towards migrants suffering in their attempts to cross the militarized borders of Europe today. to discuss the limits of this rhetoric, I turn to
Compassion, a play that puts the responses to the refugee crisis in conversation with a haunting representation of Western humanitarian practices in Central Africa. The play challenges German and European audiences to see the cynical other side of humanitarianism, and its close relation to practices of exploitation. I explore how Rau’s play attempted to show the function of political theatre in Europe as part of practices of superficial moral posturing, which build an identity around self-recognition as righteous
19 (taking all the right positions and causes), while enjoying the benefits of wealth based on extreme inequality and exploitation by the West.
20 CHAPTER I: The Turkish Ensemble and the Cultural Border
Introduction
On May 2nd 1983, the Berlin daily Die Tageszeitung published a long interview with three of the Turkish Ensemble artists.1 The first major Turkish language theatre in
West Germany, the Ensemble, under the auspices of the Berlin Schaubühne, was
performing a varied program, including a number of original children’s plays, intended for
both German and Turkish audiences. Towards the end of the article, the interviewer asks
what makes the project worthwhile, despite the struggles that the artists had described. The
answer given by Serpil Şimşek, one of the main actors of the Ensemble, is illuminating.
She contrasts the Ensemble with her experience with the Grips Theatre, a famous German
language West Berlin Children’s theatre which she was part of before. In her experience
there, she explained, the Turkish children coming with their (mostly German) classes were
shy and would ask her for help to understand the text. With the Turkish Ensemble on the
other hand, “we really want the Turkish and German kids to watch a play together […] it's
the other way around [from the Grips experience], and that is good because here [at the
Ensemble] they [the Turkish children] get courage, they are here in their theater and the
German children are guests.”
Şimşek’s description of the Turkish Ensemble expresses the good intentions of an
Ensemble communicating across cultures in the context of a de-facto multicultural
society,2 in which one group holds absolute cultural hegemony. She describes how the
1 Neuer angefang des Türkischen Ensembles an der Schaubühne, Die Tageszeitung, May 2, 1983; AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 1311 2 I mean multicultural as a description here, a society in which it is recognized that more than one cultural group
21 theatre gives children of the Turkish migrant minority a sense of ownership; it, momentarily, reverses the hierarchy of space in which they were regularly secondary, shy, and with limited comprehension. As opposed to the dominant cultural space that
persistently rejects Turks as merely guests, and workers who overstayed their welcome,
here, Turkish kids were at home with the German kids as their guests.
Şimşek continues: “You see in the intermission, when two strangers, Turkish and
German children, clarify [erklären] a bit together.” At first glance, this statement seems to
describe a scene of translation, with a Turkish child getting to explain something in the play to a German child, thereby becoming a cultural authority. But the encounter Şimşek describes is, in fact, more complex. It is a moment when, two strangers, through their encounter in the theatre, have the opportunity to clarify something together.3 The act of translation not only helps share information, but it also makes the relationship more mutual.
This is the hope of multicultural public pedagogy: realizing and giving space to autonomous cultures and using the cultural encounter between groups’ to create something shared, mutually understood but also substantially different because of the encounter.
Theatre, as a practice of public pedagogy, according to Şimşek educates both
Turkish and German audiences on the culture of the Turkish Other. It teaches Turkish children about their own cultural material. It gives them something of themselves to celebrate, as Şimşek explains: “[they see] beautiful music that they also like to hear and so the pride is back.” It upholds Turks as not merely lacking German culture, but rather as having culture of their own. Discrete and different, this is a culture that both Turkish and
3 Şimşek used the phrase “miteinander ein bißchen erklären“; AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 1311
22 German children need to learn about and share. This was particularly important in a West
German context where the Turk was made foreign as labor, socially reduced to their
productive function and invisible to local-Germans as anything but a social problem (a
burden on welfare, lacking education, and violent). In response, this theatre was an
opportunity for Turks, cut off from their roots and origins through migration, to reconnect
with their cultural identity and heritage.
This practice of public pedagogy was a response to a discourse that was
increasingly centered on the cultural difference of Turks. While conservative Germans
were articulating how Turkish difference was an essential impediment to Turks’ integration
German society, progressive voices were demanding that the culture of Turks be given space, and that Turks be supported in preserving their culture. Both of these differently
functioned as an incitement of Turks to perform their culture, to display themselves so that
they might be known (to themselves and to Germans). Showing and sharing cultural
difference, those parts of culture that are unique and somehow central to being Turkish,
multicultural pedagogy took part in the definition of boundaries in German society along
the fault-lines of culture. From a conservative perspective this boundary meant what
needed to be kept outside of West Germany; from a progressive perspective this meant an
internal boundary allowing liberal autonomy.
Such performances of Turkish cultural difference took part in marking Turks
through their cultural difference. Central to this performance of difference was the
negotiation of Turkish non-modernity. Modernity, understood as the condition of knowing
one’s self in ways that are conducive to productive participation as a citizen in a capitalist-
democratic state, demanded the ability to reflect on history, tradition, heritage as sources
23 of the self, which do not determine or delimit it, and importantly, do not interfere in “good”
public participation. Theatrical public pedagogy, which displayed Turkish folk traditions,
customs, and artistic practices, could potentially do precisely this work by showing the
correct disposition towards cultural material (including, at least partially, the ability to
commodify it). But this attempt was always going to fail. If Turks needed to be educated
into such a relation to their own culture, this confirmed what Germans already knew about
them: their non-modernity. This double-edged sword manifested in two key ways:
responding to the incitement of different public agents to show folk culture only confirmed
that Turkish culture was folk culture, and thus, low and non-modern; conversely,
performing high culture meant performing material that conformed to European
expectations, and producing Turkish versions of European modern culture. Such
performance would, then, mark itself as imitative and inauthentic.
Despite its best intentions, such multicultural practice in a monocultural space takes
part in the articulation of the boundaries of society through cultural difference. This happens on a number of levels, from informing the public about the specific differences between the cultures in question, to confirming the non-modernity of Turkish gender relations. Tellingly, although the Turkish Ensemble did not start out as a project of ethno- national representation, soon after its inception it turned to “original” Turkish work, that
is, Turkish culture created by Turks in Turkey, and to educational children’s theatre that
taught audiences about Turkish habits, folklore, and aesthetic traditions.
In this chapter I analyze how the Turkish Ensemble responded to German
incitement to perform cultural difference, and the complex way in which it grappled with
what it meant to make Turkish theatre in West Berlin. By incitement, I mean the way that
24 different actors, including state and city politicians, collaborators at the Berlin Schaubühne
and theatre reviewers, and teachers bringing their classes to see Turkish Ensemble
performances, communicated their primary interest in the Ensemble’s work as being its
representation of Turkish culture. In this way, the contemporary discourse about migrants
turned into a demand to see a certain kind of representation which followed the logic of
ethno-national distinction, and displayed the culture of Turks as an ethno-national group.
In putting forth this analysis, first, I introduce the changes in political discourse around migration, which turned to culture as the primary demarcation of Turkish migrants.
Then, I focus on the Turkenprojekt, the first attempt to make Turkish theatre at the Berlin
Schaubühne. I show how, at this point, the ensemble was attempting to create a theatre of migration: an innovative aesthetic practice that dealt with the processes of migration, the realities of the encounter between local and foreign, and the complex relations between different migrants and between generations of migrants. The Turkenprojekt sets up an important contrast with a theatre of ethno-national representation and illustrates alternative directions that the Ensemble could have taken.
When the Turkenprojekt’s high aspirations proved too difficult to realize without a dedicated ensemble used to working together and creating such elaborate aesthetic experiences. Giden Tez Geri Dönmez, the first production of the Ensemble, put together the material from the Turkenprojekt exploration with lengthy displays of Turkish folk dance and costume. This turn towards performing “authentic” Turkish material offered a significantly simplified account of migration and relied instead on the prowess of one of its main actors, a folk singer, to attract Turkish and German audiences.
25 By “performing authenticity” I mean the mode of value formation that marks
elements of the performance as representative of the intangible uniqueness of Turkey.4 The
performing company or other public agents (such as newspaper reviews) might do this
marking, primarily by linking the work to ancient roots and origins (as unspoiled by
Western influence). This chapter charts the growing interest in that which is unique to
Turkish culture, as communicated or taught through theatre. I follow how the ensemble
articulated what this authentic material does and shows (as seen in the example of , and the
struggle over what can be seen as authentically Turkish. In The Turkish turn in
contemporary German literature Leslie Adelson argued against a reading Turkish-German
literature through a lens of cultural relations between discrete entities, utterly distinct and
different, being “bridged” by the mediation of cultural representation. She contrasts an
image of “whole” and discrete cultural entities with a model of cultural and historical
“entanglements,”5 critiquing the “strong multiculturalism” that distinguishes and
celebrates the authentically distinct culture of the Turkish Other. In this chapter I
investigate the moments in which this perspective emerged in West Germany.
The ethno-cultural direction taken by Giden continued in its next productions, first
The Ballad of Ali from Keshan, a modern-Brechtian Turkish play, followed by two literary evenings. These productions attempted to show different examples of Turkish culture originating in Turkey. But this turn to ethno-cultural representations did not go without its challenges, and gave rise to the disappointment of Turkish-German artists in Berlin at the
4 (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005) Boltanski & Chiapello focus on the contradictions of capitalist absorption of the ‘authenticity’ critique of mass-manufacturing. For my purposes, their description of the commodification of unique and essentially different is particularly relevant. For a discussion of the importance of association with ideas of roots, origins, and evolutionary concept of cultural authenticity in dance see: (Buckland 2001) 5 (Adelson 2005)
26 abandonment of a theatre that dealt with the lived realities of migrants. Nevertheless, the
Ensemble attempted to showcase the modernity of Turkish culture, with a Brechtian play focused on the pauperization happening in major cities due to mass urbanization. They following productions showcased the unique origins of Turkish culture in Sufi mysticism, and more recent Western influenced modern literature respectively. These efforts to stage
an expanded image of culture produced in Turkey aimed to educate and take pride in the quality (and pedigree) of Turkish culture.
Next, I analyze the children’s theatre produced by the Turkish Ensemble. Attracting by far the largest audiences, these plays were in some ways the centerpiece of the Turkish
Ensemble’s work. Creating original work that combined traditional stock characters and fables with classic Turkish performance traditions, the Ensemble designed and promoted these plays as vehicles for Turkish and German children to learn about Turkish artistry and traditions. Through these plays, I trace the solidification of the Ensemble’s performances as multicultural public pedagogy.
Finally, I end the chapter with an analysis of two productions of Kurban, a Turkish adaptation of Medea. The two productions of Kurban demonstrate most poignantly the double bind of multicultural cultural production: examples of modernist attempts to criticize the perseverance of traditional forms of patriarchy in Turkish culture, the productions succeeded because they confirmed to German audiences what they always knew about Turkish culture. The Ensemble’s turn to contemporary attempts to use modern
(and European influenced) dramaturgy in the service of self-criticism, the epitome of
modern behavior, was consumed by German audiences as evidence of the plight of Turkish
women, and the non-modernity of Turkish gender relations.
27 Throughout this investigation, I highlight the complexity of what “representing
culture” might mean. What of the different registers of culture, from language and
socialization practices, to customs, traditions, and artistic production do we aim to
represent? What are the expectations in West Germany of what Turkish culture is? How to
engage with this expectation when trying to make theatre intended for a mixed audience?
These were particularly thorny questions in a context in which a monocultural society was
judging the ability of migrants to integrate as reflection of cultural difference; even more so as the understanding of culture in West German politics was kept strategically ambivalent. At every turn, German cultural authority found Turkish culture lacking: it read
Turkish culture as folk culture and therefore as low culture, deficient, unrefined, and simple; when the ensemble produced contemporary-modern culture in conversation with
Western aesthetics, German cultural authority deemed it representative of authentic
Turkishness not artistic innovation; Turkish actors’ German language was thought not
German enough, but also not Turkish enough to capture immigrants’ broken speech. I try to follow the shifting ground of what critics deemed adequate as representing Turkishness, and what the German public was told this meant about Turks.
The Ausländerproblem and the Cultural Turn
Future policy towards foreign employees and their families living in the Federal Republic must be based on the assumption that a development has taken place which can no longer be reversed and that the majority of those concerned are no longer guest workers but immigrants, for whom return to their countries of origin is for various reasons no longer a viable option. (Kühn Memorandum, 1979)6 The Turkish people were not influenced by Christianity but by Islam, a different high culture - I emphasize: high culture. […] The cultural impulses of the Christian and the Islamic high cultures also affect our peoples in secularized form. This contributes, in addition to a strong nationalist style of the Turks, to the fact that they are not to be
6 Translation form: Rita Chin, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2007). P. 105
28 assimilated - apart from exceptions. They want to remain what they are, Turks. And we should respect that. (Dregger, comments in Bundestag, 1982)7 In 1979, a remarkable document appeared in West Germany. Known as the Kühn
Memorandum, the report on the “Status and Development of the Integration of Foreign
Workers and their Families in the Federal Republic of Germany” was the first official recognition that the FRG was the de facto home of millions of immigrants. The
Memorandum functions as a touchstone for the two main threads I follow in this section:
1) how migration became a central issue in West German politics in the 1970s and 80s, in discourse centered on social-cultural conditions of migrants; and 2) the place of culture in articulating government policy towards migrants. I argue that the appearance of culture as a primary means to understand Turkish difference both in conservative and leftist circles took part in the formation of the idea of cultural difference around hard ethno-national lines. Understood this way, cultural difference was central to the definition of the boundary of West German belonging.
At the start of labor migration to West Germany in the 1950s, the question of the guest workers was bracketed within the framework of the labor market. All matters concerning labor migration were, consequently, delegated to the German Federal Labor
Office.8 Until 1965, when the Ausländergesetz (Foreigner Law) was signed, guest workers were still governed under the Third Reich’s law on foreign labor. The Ausländergesetz
maintained the singular importance of the economy in relation to migration, tying the
7 FRG, Deutscher Bundestag, Stenographischer Bericht, 83. Sitzung, 4893. 8 Administratively, migration was managed through the German Federal Labor Office (Bundesanstalt für Arbeit) which was set up for this purpose. The office mediated between employers and employees through recruitment offices it set up in sending countries. There the Labor Office screened applying workers, conducting medical inspections and testing for required work skills. Potential workers would also be screened for police records and political activism. The German Federal Labor Office only engaged guest workers on the level of employers’ requests for workers, and therefore this was the only level of engagement for any significant political (governmental) involvement.
29 provision of residence and work rights to the “interest of the Federal Republic.” These laws
bound guest workers’ rights to an abstract “interest” of West Germany, which is to say, the needs of its labor market. It is in reference to this political reality that the Swiss writer Max
Frisch famously said: “we called for workers, and human beings came.”
The 1970s witnessed significant change in the discourse surrounding migration,
from economy and labor to social and cultural concerns. The 1973 energy crisis led to
financial slowdown and unemployment, giving the government an official excuse to end
the guest worker programs. It was a time of fomenting fear and resentment of foreign
workers. Conservatives were warning the public about the strains that poor and uneducated
migrants were putting on welfare and state budgets. On the other hand, following
journalistic exposés condemning the abject housing and employment conditions of the
millions of foreigners living in West Germany, progressive voices were demanding that
the state take more responsibility for migrants. As the Kühn memorandum asserted,
migrants could no longer be engaged with merely as a “variable of the market.” The state
had to consider the social implications of their life in West Germany, whether this was
understood negatively as undeserved demands on the state or as unacceptable conditions
for which the state was responsible.
These trends continued into the next decade. In the early 1980s, the
Ausländerproblem (literally, the foreigner problem) was gaining even more attention, and
the public opinion started to consolidate against migration. The shift of perspective from
the economic to the social had occurred. However, the public response was one of anxiety
and rejection rather than responsibility and acceptance. By 1982, two thirds of the West
30 German population thought that guest workers should return to their “homes” – in 1978 this figure was only 39 percent.9
The political recommendations of the Kühn memorandum (1979) had been groundbreaking. Not only did the memorandum call for the recognition of West Germany as a “country of migration,” it also demanded a complete overhaul of its outdated immigration laws and the removal of housing and work restrictions for foreigners.
Although Helmut Schmidt’s Social Democratic (SPD) government nominally accepted the recommendations of the memorandum, most of them were never translated into policy. In
1981, Schmidt “admitted” that it had been a mistake to bring “so many foreigners,” although he still argued that it was West Germany’s responsibility and that foreigners would not pay for this mistake. Thus, alongside implementing policy measures to curb further migration, the SPD government resisted Christian Democrat (CDU) demands to deport unemployed foreigners.10 The backlash against the SPD “softness” on migration won the CDU the election in 1982.
9 Karen Schönwälder, “Migration, Refugees and Ethnic Plurality as Issues of Public and Political Debates in (West) Germany.,” Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe, 1996: 166. 10 It is important not to overstate SPD defense of migrant rights. In 1971, with early concerns over the number of foreigners building since 1968, the SPD government tried to deter employers through doubling the application fee per-worker. However, this did nothing to slow the rate of application. They also reintroduced legislation that could function as a boundary: to stop renewing contacts, as well as withdrawing residency permits if a job was lost. These methods were rarely used, but they were meant to encourage migrants to leave voluntarily. When the energy crisis hit in October 1973, it was a convenient reason for the government to unilaterally end the guest worker programs without too much industry push- back. Over the following years government tried different approaches to lowering the number of foreigners in West Germany, encourage return to home countries, and discourage unification of families, from denial of child benefits to children living abroad, to giving no labor and residency rights to second generation migrants, and threatening deportation in the case of criminal conviction. None of these attempts managed to slow the steady growth of foreigners in West Germany, which reached a peak at 4.1 million in 1974. This was up from around 3 million in 1970, and the number of Turkish migrants had more than doubled. In 1975 local government pushed provisions which prohibited foreign nationals from moving to towns and cities where they already made up twelve per cent or more of the population. This both shows the prevalence of ideas tying foreigners with social malady, and a willingness to curtail right of movement.
31 Shortly after his becoming chancellor, Helmut Kohl remarked in a conversation with Margaret Thatcher that “over the next four years, it will be necessary to reduce the number of Turks by 50 percent. Germany has no problem with the Portuguese, the Italians, even the Southeast Asians, because these communities are well integrated, but the Turks come from a very different culture.”11 We see in Kohl’s remarks how culture and integration had become linked in West German political discourse. Culture became the boundary of society, where some cultures allowed participation while other cultures were denied a place.
In fact, the Kühn Memorandum pioneered this link. In arguing that the wellbeing of migrants was the responsibility of the West German state, Kühn focused on recognizably
“cultural” questions. The memorandum stressed that German language education was central to integration policy and protested “national classes” given to foreign pupils by teachers trained by their country of origin, arguing that these classes caused
“ghettoization”. The memorandum outlined a plan for the training of over 5000 teachers, who would be able to “incorporate [into the classroom] the range of customs and traditions practiced by the Federal Republic’s migrant groups”.12 The memorandum was a clear demonstration of the translation of social concerns into cultural frameworks of meaning, highlighting an educational approach which affirms but does not hierarchize cultural difference.
In conservative politics too, there was a distinct change in the understanding of culture’s role in questions of migration. In 1977, the CDU was supporting an “integrationist
11 Kohls "Türken-Raus"-Pläne trafen einen Nerv der Deutschen Der Tagessppiegel, August 5, 2013 12 Chin, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany, 105.
32 policy,” which would maintain migrants’ cultural autonomy to “preserve and support” their
potential “re-integration”, meaning the return of migrants to their countries of origin.13 This
“integration policy” entailed allowing migrants to maintain their language and social connections to their home countries. In contrast, the remarks of Dragger and Kohl in 1982
(which opened this section) show that, by then, the CDU had adopted an assimilation policy which demanded that migrants adopt German language, live in German communities, and sever ties with their countries of origin. As the remarks demonstrate, this policy demanded that foreigners change their “cultural” habits to fit into German culture. Notice: this demand did not involve a set of policies to support (or force) assimilation, but it framed assimilation as the condition of being allowed to stay in West Germany.
The hardening understanding of the meaning and significance of culture is at the
center of the distinct change in the way CDU politicians used assimilation and integration.
In 1977, integration meant “permission” for maintaining cultural distinction; in 1982
integration connoted a measure of assimilation, signs of successful adaptation to the host
society. In 1977, assimilation referred to policies mandating changes to cultural habits and
absorption into properly “German” culture; in 1982 assimilation presented a demand to
migrants that they prove their ability to enter into West German society. In 1977, culture
was understood as habits and behaviors that might change; in 1982 culture was the essential
and fixed nature of the foreigner group, determining the extent to which they could
successfully take part in German society.
13 Ibid.
33 The 1981 Heidelberg Manifesto, written and signed by conservative academics is
a more extreme, and as such illustrative, example of the anxiety in this conservative
position on cultural difference. The very first line of the manifesto reads: “we observe the
infiltration of the German Volk [people] through an influx of millions of foreigners and
their families, the infiltration of our language, our culture, and our national traditions by
foreign influences.”14 The presence of foreigners, and the proximity of foreign culture is
described as a threat that, similar to war, has the potential of taking over, eliminating the
local culture. Although speaking about foreigners in general, the text names only Turks, the primary objects of anxiety. It also repeatedly affirms the essentially Christian character
of German-European culture, including the appeal for the creation of a committee “whose
task is to preserve the German Volk and its spiritual identity on the basis of our occidental
Christian heritage.”15
Ambivalence and ambiguity about culture are key to the CDU’s shifting positions
on integration-assimilation and to the more extreme articulation of the Heidelberg
Manifesto. Both cases demonstrate the fluctuation regarding the ontology of culture: on the one hand it is natural, essential, immutable; and on the other hand, it is contingent, socially produced and acquired. The outcome is an anxious slippage from one register to another.
Culture is too malleable: the foreigner might change and become part of German society, unable to return, or worse, Turks might destroy German culture by influence (much like the flu, or influenza – literally, influence—understood as a dangerous disease). But culture is also too rigid: the difference of the Other is irreconcilable and intransigent. Seemingly
14 http://ghdi.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=857 15 Ibid.
34 interchangeably, arguments based on different ontologies of culture form within this
discursive field. My aim is not to charge conservative thought with inconsistency, but
rather to highlight the complicated topography of conceptual relations associated with
“culture”. In fact, conservative politics frequently deploy this topography to place the
emigrant, and particularly the Turkish Other, on the other side of the cultural border.
Fascination with the cultural difference of migrants was not limited to conservative
thought. Multiculturalism was making its appearance on the leftist-progressive side of
West German politics. In 1980, the opening statement of the church-led Tag des
Ausländischen Mitbürgers, the Day of Foreign Fellow-Citizens, was “we live in the Federal
Republic in a multicultural society.”16 This is the first documented use of “multicultural”
in West Germany. It asserted the existence of a multicultural society and reflected a
political commitment to seeing the migrant as a member of the German society. The
organizers of the event felt that media attention to the problems of migrants, “though
mostly sympathetic to the plight of the foreign workers, represented a mode of
stigmatization and fostered misconceptions about the foreign residents.”17 They proposed
to rectify this through focusing on foreigners “as an enrichment of German culture.”18
With its attentiveness to “different cultures,” the Tag’s multiculturalism constitutes
what Adelson describes as “strong multiculturalism.” Strong multiculturalism understands cultures as “seamless wholes,” in direct relation to a singular ethnicity. It proposes to
manage diversification through representation: seeing and learning about the culture of the
16 Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling, and Anton Kaes, Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration, 1955-2005 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 249. 17 Sabine Von Dirke, “Multikulti: The German Debate on Multiculturalism,” German Studies Review 17, no. 3 (1994): 513-536, citation on 516 18 Ibid.
35 Other. In that, strong multiculturalism resembles the Kühn Memorandum’s proposal to teach about different cultures in schools. The Tag’s multiculturalism advocated for political inclusion based on an accumulative logic (“enrichment of German culture”). In contradistinction to a threat of influence, in this accumulative logic, other cultures add to existing German culture.
A different attitude towards cultural policy can be seen in the work of Turkish cultural associations of the 1970s and early 1980s. Ela Gezen describes how these associations were invested in culture as a medium to foster understanding between Turks and Germans, while promoting the “integration of the foreign population by maintaining their cultural identity.”19 Although this sounds a lot like the kind of strong multiculturalism the Tag organizers had in mind, Gezen’s work highlights voices in the Turkish-German community which criticized the Berlin Senate initiatives that were “politically harmless,” and where “exotic folklore culture was permitted to represent ‘Ausländerkultur’.”20 These
Turkish cultural associations asked for support for cultural-self-representation, that is,
Turks living in West Germany representing their lived experiences, culture, and conditions.
They were especially insistent on the need to not offer only a folkloric image of Turks.
Finally, and particularly interestingly, they repeatedly expressed “the desire to counter juxtapositions of Turkish with German culture as diametrically opposed, homogenous, static entities.”21 Taken together, these comments demonstrate the interplay between a
19 (Gezen 2018b) P. 303 20 Ibid. p. 306 21 Ibid. p. 306. Gezen describes these comments that were expressed as part of a research on Turkish Public work in 1983.
36 desire for Turkish culture to be visible in the German public sphere and a dissatisfaction with the image of cultural difference pushed by West German institutions.
This shift in the discourse on migration transformed the fundamental border questions. Whereas this border question used to be one of the economy (i.e. does allowing this body to cross the border further the economic interest of West Germany?) it pivoted to culture. The conservative articulation of the new set of question might be put as: how different is this group’s culture, and does it allow them to adequately adopt German culture? Conversely, what is the limit of exposure to a foreign culture beyond which local culture is put at risk of changing and losing its culture? The leftist and progressive articulations of these questions were: given the pressures of living as a minority group in
West Germany, what room must be given for the preservation of minority culture? What kind of visibility is needed for the different elements of the minority culture in order to allow positive relations (coexistence) between minority and majority groups?
What we see, then, is a critical difference between positing of internal and external boundaries. While conservative voices were inclined towards articulating the need for the exclusion of the cultural Other and the maintenance of external boundaries, left progressive voices asserted the need to stabilize internal cultural boundaries (minority rights for preservation) and practices to regulate activity across this boundary to foster positive relations.
Early experimentation and The Turkenprojekt
The Turkish Ensemble started as a Turkish-Project at the Berlin Schaubühne in
1978. Peter Stein, the famous director of the Schaubühne invited Beklan Algan and his
37 wife, Ayla Algan, who he had met on holiday in Turkey, to come to Berlin with some of their collaborators to make Turkish theatre. The work of the group was funded by the
Schaubühne and the Berlin Senate Ministry of Culture (which contributed around 60,000
German Marks22). The Ensemble had complete artistic control, and the Schaubühne provided for all the technical needs, from stage design through costume, including furnishing a space for the productions. Most of the productions were staged at the Hebbel-
Theater, the Schaubühne’s old home in Kreuzberg, which is the neighborhood most associated with Turkish migration in Berlin (and an old leftist stronghold). Throughout its existence, the Ensemble toured within West Germany and to other European countries, and their children’s productions travelled to schools. The 1982 production of Kurban was the only performance staged at the newly built Schaubühne theatre in Charlottenburg
KuDamm, a middle-class neighborhood of West Berlin.
When the Ensemble came together in 1978, Beklan and Ayla Algan were already two of the most famous theatre artists in Turkey. Central figures in the independent and experimental theatre scene, they were identified with the leftist orientation that dominated much of Turkish theatre in the 1960s and 1970s.23 For example, Ayla Algan played Shen
Te/Shui in the 1964 production of The Good Person of Szechwan, a production that became well-known because it sparked the “Brecht Incident” after Islamist protestors destroyed the scene and threatened actors at the end of the premier.24 The rest of the group was as illustrious. Şener Şen is one of Turkey’s most famous comic actors, and Tuncel Kurtiz was a famous film, TV actor and theatre director. Macit Koper joined the group when his
22 (Brauneck 1983) This figure seems very close to the entirety of the budget allocated by the Berlin Senate for foreigners’ cultural work to the Kreuzberg neighborhood in 1981 (65,000DM). (Gezen 2018b) 23 See: (Arslan 2008; Adak and Altınay 2018) 24 (Gezen 2018a) P. 22.
38 contract at the Istanbul Municipal Theatre was terminated after the 1980 coup. Şimşek
Şimşek, on the other hand, was a recently graduated theatre student who had studied in
France and Berlin before working at the Grips Theater, and later joining the Ensemble.
This cast was joined by local Turkish theatre artists in Berlin. An important addition here was Meray Ülgen, the founder of Berlin Oyuncuları, the Berlin Players, who knew Peter
Stein through playing a role in his famous 1978 Botho Strauss production Gross und Klein
(Big and Small).
All the productions of the Ensemble were in Turkish, although there was an attempt to translate one of the children’s plays into German. Between 1980 and 1984, the Ensemble produced eleven plays. In 1983, three more were staged together with another visiting
Turkish theater (the Stockholm-based Halk Oyuncuları25). Altogether, the Ensemble productions included three original children’s plays, two adaptations of children’s books, three productions of plays written in Turkey, two literary evenings, and one original piece for adults (the first performance of the Ensemble). Although staged in Turkish, all the productions were intended and advertised for a mixed German and Turkish audience. And while the original plan seems to have been for more collaboration between the Ensemble and the Schaubühne, in terms of German actors participating in the Ensemble’s productions, this only happened in one of the literary evenings, which included poetry in translation. One of the Schaubühne actors, Miriam Goldschmidt, directed the final production attributed to the Ensemble (an adaptation of a children’s book by Nâzım
Hikmet).
25 The director of the Halk Oyunculari was Tuncel Kurtiz, who was part of the Turkish Ensemble during its first two production (as actor and director).
39 The 1970s and early 1980s were important years for the burgeoning Turkish-
German cultural community. Numerous Turkish cultural associations appeared throughout
West Germany, and Turkish arts became more visible in the German public sphere, including arts exhibitions, publications by Turkish-German authors, and film productions.
Theatre was a particularly active scene: a 1983 report on it was based on a study of over
50 ensembles.(Brauneck 1983) Most of these were small amateur groups. According to Erol
Boran, whose dissertation includes the only overview of Turkish performance in West
Germany in the 1970s, the Berlin Oyuncuları, Berlin Players, founded in 1976 by Meray
Ülgen, was one of three important Turkish theatres in West Germany that preceded the
Turkish Ensemble.26 The Berlin Players was formed by artists and intellectuals, and staged traditional and contemporary Turkish plays. Its founders saw theatre as in the “service of understanding between cultures and understood plays as a contribution to integration”.27
In this, the Berlin Players is a predecessor of some the ways that the Turkish Ensemble developed. Preceding that, the first and more important company, Halkevi İşçi Tiyatrosu, the Community Center Worker’s Theatre, was founded in 1974. It successfully staged (and toured) plays on the working conditions of migrants. It was into this emerging scene of
Turkish cultural production and Turkish theatre in West Germany that the ensemble entered in 1978.
The first production of what would become the Turkish Ensemble was never staged.
The Turkenprojekt started in 1978 in the Schaubühne. It remained in rehearsal and devising for around two years before it was abandoned. Giden Tez Geri Dönmez, the subject of the
26 (Boran 2004) P. 98 27 (Boran 2004) P. 99
40 next section, was created from parts of the Turkenprojekt’s materials and staged in 1980. I
start my discussion with this “failed” project because close attention to the fragments left
of it sheds light on the initial orientation of the project, its hopes and ambitions. Even more
important for the analysis put forth in this chapter is the question of how these fragmented
images of the material can be seen as Turkish culture. Overwhelmingly, I find that the
project never intended to represent Turkish culture. Effectively, the Turkenprojekt offers a
contrast that illuminates how the Ensemble developed, and how it leaned into the
representation of Turkish difference.
As opposed to the theatre of ethno-national representation that the Turkish
Ensemble developed over the next four seasons, the Turkenprojekt was an ambitious attempt to create a theatre of migration, by which I mean an innovative aesthetic practice that dealt with the processes of migration, the realities of the encounter between local and foreign, and the complex relations between different migrants and between generations of migrants. The early documents of the Turkenprojekt show that the Ensemble had grand hopes for experimental practices of audience engagement. These documents show, I will argue, that the project was not envisioned as an act of pedagogy. Instead, it hoped to form an aesthetic space in which to engage the Turkish community in Berlin, and an aesthetic practice foregrounding the difficulties of the encounter between local and migrant.
To clarify, I am not suggesting that Turkish culture did not appear in the material left behind from the work done between 1978-80. Turkish history and mythology appeared in the fragments. For the most part, however, they did not display Turkish cultural distinction, but rather developed an analogy to the relations of dependency and exploitation between Turkey and Europe. Alternatively, cultural differences appeared in the scenes
41 focused on intergenerational tensions between migrants and the difficulties and humiliation of the journey to become a guest worker. Theatre of migration does show culture, and the role of culture in the interactions between migrants and between migrants and locals, but it does not focus on showing culture with the aim of understanding culture itself better.
Before moving into the analysis of the Turkenprojekt, it is necessary to explain what is known about the project, and specifically the materials left behind from the explorations conducted between 1978-80. In interviews I conducted with Ayla Algan and Fred Berndt, a director and producer that worked with the TE between 1979-81, they explained that
Beklan Algan and Ayla Algan arrived in Berlin in 1978 at the invitation of Peter Stein to start working on a Turkish project at the Schaubühne. During the two years of rehearsals some of their key collaborators, famous Turkish actors and directors, joined the project.
They worked together, collaborating on writing scenes and devising frameworks for the production. The ensemble reported their progress and ideas about the project to the
Schaubühne, which needed to approve the funding for it.28
The Berlin Schaubühne archive holds two kinds of materials from the two years that the artists were devising and creating materials. First, there are three general descriptions of the project from 1978, based on the early discussions regarding the shape of the project, and produced as summaries or proposals to the Schaubühne.29 The second kind are partial “scripts,”30 all in German, with one exception in English. Most of these
28 The Schaubühne was famously a democratic and non-hierarchical organization, in which, ostensibly, all decisions were made in an assembly of all permanent workers. This however elides the central role of Peter Stein in all major decision making. 29 Throughout this part I call these texts “proposals” 30 Throughout this part I call these assortments of scenes “scripts,” but do not mean anything beyond a grouping together of scene descriptions.
42 offer short descriptions of the scenes rather than fully fleshed out dialogues. They are
fragmentary and partial—none seem to have arrived at a whole piece. They point to a production built of episodes, with certain recurring characters (although not necessarily shared between scripts) and suggest that the direction taken was towards an assortment of
episodes.
In its earliest engagement with the question of culture, the Turkenprojekt imagined
using different items symbolic of Turkish and German culture in a moment when two girls,
Turkish and German, attempted reconciliation. The scene is part of a document called
“Proposal for a Turkish-project,” and it is the second of the three early descriptions of the
project. The document describes point-by-point the different stages of the imagined
performance, in descriptions as short as a sentence and as long as two paragraphs. This
scene follows a long exploration of the theme of Turkish migration through physical
theatre, when “suddenly – without a clear cause – a violent street fight erupts between the
Germans and the recently welcomed Turks.”31 The scene imagines the police intervening
and managing to separate the two groups using a demonstration barrier
[Demonstrationsgitter], pushing each group back in opposite directions until the groups
dissolve and run off as the hall turns dark. Two girls remain on stage: a Turk (Hatice) and
a German (Inge). They begin collecting discarded objects, until they notice one another.
“They want to explain to each other their found objects, very Turkish and very German objects. But the barrier separates them.”32 The two try to establish understanding using
culturally representative objects. For Hatice the objects include “the eye against the evil
31 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 3332 32 Idid.
43 eye, the Islamic prayer wreath, a Turkish headscarf.”33 For Inge, the description proposes
industrial consumer goods: a quartz clock, toupee, and polaroid camera. It then adds that
these are just suggestions: “You will surely find more suitable objects with some effort.”34
This tentativeness indicates that the document was written by the Turkish participants and
translated as a suggestion to the Schaubühne, as collaborators who will contribute to the
Turkenprojekt in the future.
Returning to the beginning of the scene, the violence between the two groups comes out of nowhere; a surprise. The police place the barrier in response to the violence that had already erupted. The role of authority and the function of the barrier are to quell violence.
This is surprising given other elements of the Turkenprojekt documentation, which are significantly critical of institutional power relations and German racism (for example, a scene described in one of the unattributed scripts happens in a bus-stop where a fight begins after Germans tell Turks that “Germany is for Germans” and “out with the Turks”35). If
there was any doubt about the function of the barrier and its symbolic representation of the
social separation and differentiation between Germans and migrants, the scene between the
two girls solidifies this symbolism of the boundary.
In the scene, culture functions in the leftist-multiculturalist mode: the proposition is
that objects representative of the cultures of different groups can help achieve
understanding between them. The description of the objects as “very Turkish” and “very
German” reflects the rigid understanding of distinct and well-defined cultures. In cliché choices, the “Turkish” objects foreground tradition, religious conservatism, and
33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 3330
44 superstition. The objects chosen presumably reflect how the ensemble imagined Germans
see Turkish culture, and thus aim to make the scene clear to a German audience. However,
given that many of the artists were part of the secular elite of Turkish society, I would argue
that the choice of objects is also reflective of the class dynamics between Turks,
manifesting how the Ensemble members perceived the majority of Turkish work migration.
Although tentative suggestions, the Polaroid camera, toupee and quartz clock are also telling. The camera and clock both highlight a particular understanding of German-ness, as focused on consumer culture, technology, and temporality—seemingly an image of
Western democratic modernity. The unsuccessful attempt at cultural bridging points to a gap between the modern and the non-modern. The scene shows that the artists were aware
of (and very possibly themselves committed to) the growing progressive interest in
multicultural mediation between the groups, as well as the dominant imaginations of what
separates the two cultures. As the scene only describes how the barrier separates the two,
and the small failure of communication between the girls, we can only speculate if the
scene was critical of multicultural pedagogy or not—and if the ensemble saw the
Turkenprojekt as a similar attempt.
Intergenerational tensions and relations between the plurality of migrant groups
were the focus of another scene that seemed to deal with cultural difference. This scene
appears in a “script” written or translated by Peter Greiner.36 In the scene, two young
second-generation women (Turkish and Yugoslav) discuss their differing attitudes toward
men at a party. Fatma, the Turkish woman, is amazed at Inge’s willingness to dance with
any man, even if he is a Turk or a German. The scene concludes with the unhappiness of
36 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 3334
45 Ali, Fatma’s father, with her state when she returns home. As with many of the fragments,
the scene is very underdeveloped. It provides only a few lines of dialogue and a one-line description of the follow-up with Ali. Nevertheless, the fragment makes it clear that the
Ensemble was experimenting with complicated social relations, through Fatma’s struggle with different cultural expectations on the one hand, and her father’s conservative attitude towards her on the other.
Addressed as a question of cultural difference, the scene focuses on the trope of
Turkish-Muslim difference with respect to gender norms. The “obvious” interpretation of the scene is that Fatma’s incredulousness at Inge’s ease in relating to men shows Fatma’s
(cultural) expectation for ethnic exclusivity in partner selection. However, this interpretation already falls into assumptions about what Muslim and Middle-Eastern sexual and gender norms would incline Fatma to respond to. In another plausible reading of the scene, it reflects Fatma’s worries about different cultural expectations that might be
attached to willingness of a woman to dance in a party. Either potential emphasis highlights
the complexity of cultural interaction, of adaptation, rather than simply clashing cultural norms. Ali’s response presumably demonstrates patriarchal control. This patriarchal
tension between Ali and a daughter (in that scene called Hanife) is the focus of another
scene in another “script”, in which the two argue after Ali finds money that Hanife had
been earning and hiding from him.37 Importantly, both scenes focus on the changes that cultural norms undergo between generations, and the complex negotiations of the second
37 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 3330
46 generation. This complicates ethno-national culture as a single unchanging monolith,
highlighting the complexity of the relations to heritage and convention after migration.
Heritage, in the form of mythology, is in fact the subject of a number of scenes. In a
few of the “scripts” and in two of the early “proposals” there are direct references to the
mythology of the Mediterranean basin, Islam, and Turkish/Anatolian cultural practices, art, ritual and ceremony. These could easily function as representations of authentic Turkish
cultural material and heritage. However, their descriptions imply, for the most part, that the
ensemble envisioned using them as analogy for relations between East and West.
Furthermore, the examples consistently highlight similarities, connections, and shared
mythology rather than displaying the distinctiveness and separateness of Turkish culture.
We see this use of history and mythology in the aforementioned “Proposal for a Turkish-
project”. Immediately following the scene between the two girls, Hatice and Inge, the
proposal describes broken up images happening in different parts of the space as “early
images of the confrontation between Orient and Occident in Asia Minor [Turkey]”. The
images themselves have very minimal description: “a dialog between Helena and
Kasandra” or “early [Hittite] form of a fertility goddess in Oriental soil.” Another image
describes an archeologist recounting the birth of Muhammad, the destruction of
polytheistic totems, and his call for the unity of all monotheistic religions.
Evoking the lesser known Anatolian (Hittite) origin in “Oriental soil” of a Western
symbol38 highlights the limits to the claims of difference of the kind that Dregger made
regarding about the essential difference of cultures rooted in Christianity and Islam. The
38 This is reference to Cybele, which is made explicit in a one of the scripts (see the next paragraph).
47 archeologist’s description of the history of Islam’s break with idol worshipping in the region similarly reminds us of the connections and similarities between the three monotheistic religions. Pointing to such similarity, in turn, undermines arguments of insurmountable cultural difference that focus on religious differences. The images work together to invoke a shared heritage of the Mediterranean basin as the cradle of “Western” civilization.
At the same time, this is a striking example of an attempt to stage historic entanglements at the very roots that West traditionally posits as its founding myths.
Utilizing myth-history in this dramaturgy of entangled histories challenges the use origin- myths in separatist ethno-national identities. Thus, one gets the impression of a performance conveying an overwhelming historical and mythological richness, shared and separate, undergirding the relations between the West and the near East. Presenting this array of scenes away from the main stage area, and as a break from the sequence preceding it, the proposal is a deliberate attempt to challenge narrative formation. If in the preceding moment, when the two young women were trying to communicate simplified versions of their respective cultures, a unified narrative of cultural difference threatened to appear, these diffuse and fragmented images undermine any sense of singular authentic cultures.
Focusing on the entanglements, the “Proposal for a Turkish-project” does not elaborate how the images reflect the “confrontation” between Orient and Occident. The
Algans returned to this question in a “script” that further develops the idea of confrontation in a sequence of references to Greek mythology. The sequence sets the Greek conquest and colonization of Asia Minor (today Turkey) as a metaphor for the exploitation of the East by the West. Similar to the “proposal” description, the script focuses on elements bridging
48 the historic-cultural divide between the West and Near-East. They return to the proposal’s interest in Cybele (Kybele), the Anatolian mother-goddess later worshipped in Greece and
Rome. They specify, however, that she functions as a “symbol of Anatolian riches.”39 The description insinuates the adoption and appropriation of Anatolian religious symbols as an analogy to the modern appropriation of labor power. The “shared” myth is both a connection between the cultures and a reminder that sharing involves power imbalance and force.
The next image makes the power imbalance and history of violent conquest in Asia
Minor even clearer: it turns to the Trojan wars to highlight “the economic interests of the
West; Anatolia is occupied for the sake of its riches.”40 This is particularly poignant as it demands critical questioning of what the myth of the heroic saving of Helen legitimated: the sacking of the city of Troy and colonization by Greek forces. The scene suggests the importance of histories of material domination and economic inequality for the understanding of contemporary migration. It also, potentially, highlights the relation between material and cultural domination: Western (enlightened-modern) cultural superiority reflects a history of empire and colony. It also rejects a functional historiography that grounds the nation and the individuals belonging to it in insular pre- history, inserting it instead as allegory for the long histories of relations within which contemporary Turkish work-migration to West Germany is embedded.
These images present elements of history and heritage. However, they do not display these as having any special value derived from their difference. Thus, the images
39 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 3334 40 Ibid.
49 do not take part in an economy of import-export, staging the cultural heritage of Turkey or
Anatolia for consumption in Berlin. Made functional as allegories of the contemporary, these elements cannot fulfill the requirement of authenticity on which the economy of ethno-national representation relies. On the contrary, rather than a rarified, objectified, and well-differentiated culture-of-the-Other, the scenes point to how history and culture are
mixed and entwined.
This is not to claim that the planning for the Turkenprojekt did not have any
elements of ethno-national representation. The English “script” describes that the whole
first part of the performance would stage Turkish-Anatolian ceremonies and ritual through
a narrative moving from a wedding in an Anatolian village to the family’s migration to the
city (unspecified in this script) and onto Germany. The script states that “the whole
conception of the first part is fundamentally based in the idea of Ottoman spectacles which
has its origins in Anatolian rituals and ceremonies. The whole [first part] will be
presentational”.41 This description is emblematic of multicultural performance. It discusses
a unique cultural practice (“Ottoman spectacle”) with origins in pre-modern practices:
ritual and ceremony. Furthermore, it is worth noticing what the proposal of presentational
performance does to this ethno-national representation. The document describes plans for presentations to have a parodic-comic quality in the style of Orta Oyunu,42 “performed
with as much audience participation as possible.”43 The representation of Turkey is broken
41 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 3330 42 Orta Oyunu is one of the traditional Turkish-Ottoman dramatic forms. Although it is no longer practiced, it has left significant marks on comic Turkish theatre. It was performed by two actors, performing to audiences gathering around them in a circle (the meaning of Orta Oyunu is performance in the middle). It included physical comedy (slapstick), stock characters, and was improvisational and performed in regional dialects. 43 Ibid.
50 down into multiple “presentations,” or staged experiences, a practice reminiscent of contemporary tourist industry and its trade in authentic-local experience.(Desmond 1999;
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998) The script proposes the transformation of authentic culture into representation, making the “local” traditions of the foreigner into material for consumption as performance. This transformation follows the logic of commodification: it expresses the value of cultural material in what can be shared with another group or culture for their use
(as entertainment or education). In this, it replicates the traditional formation of the consumer appropriation, turning human practice into transferrable use value. Producing this kind of spectacle, multiculturalism adheres to a logic of cross-border commerce, a logic of import-export, and functions as capital extracting practice regardless of the monetary interest of those trading in cultural value of this kind. Allowing the audience members to participate allows them to overcome the “inauthenticity” of the situation of representation, as they are no longer simply witnessing fake tradition and behavior, but participating and experiencing it while bracketing the process of its commodification. In the context of the heterogeneous space of migration, such practice offers the illusion of more meaningful engagement with the culture of the Other.
This last example brings us back to the question of multicultural pedagogy. The
Ensemble self-consciously described its proposal as an educational practice, informing on traditional Turkish theatre practice and on the Ottoman roots of marriage ceremonies in
Turkey, even to the potential reader of the document. However, based on the evidence found in the documents, this was not generally the function intended for the project. In particular, the early “proposals” of the project describe an attempt to create a Turkish-
German audience, and a theatrical experiences that challenged segregation between
51 Germans and Turks in West Germany, not only in content but in the form of the
performance. This is important to remember as we see the growing orientation of the
Ensemble towards ethno-cultural representation and their emphasis on multicultural public
pedagogy, as it shows how the ensemble originally intended a very different direction for
its work.
The description in a document called “Keywords from the first meeting about the
Turkish project” imagines a complex aesthetic-experience particular to the immigrant- space of Berlin. It recognizes the conditions of migrant communities as well as the segregated existence of its two intended audiences and proposes intervening in this reality through the formation of a unique theatrical space. This highlights the importance of artistic experimentation and social criticism in the Ensemble’s work on the project. This was done on two levels. The first stressed the need to actively attract Turks to the theater, to function as a theatre for the migrant audience. The second addressed the role of migration in wider
West German society, and was an attempt to give the act of migration and the interaction between local and foreign aesthetic shape.
On the level of interaction with the migrant community the Keywords document proposes to pick Turks up from their homes in cars playing loud music. It also outlines a plan to encourage Turks to come to the theatre throughout the rehearsal period, where the rehearsal (and rehearsal space) transforms into a public space of participation for the
Kreuzberg Turkish minority. The plan, therefore, recognized that if the theatre is to have meaning for the local community, it needs to interact with it beyond the performance times, and that the local community needs to be part of the process. Importantly, by making it a regular place of interaction, Turks will not feel like “guests” there, “like everywhere else
52 in Berlin”. This attempt to cultivate a Turkish theatre audience, where no such tradition existed, did not reflect an ethnic-cultural problem, i.e. the Turks lack of theatre culture. It was rather a class-culture problem: the document points out that the Schaubühne had limited experience of creating theatre for the working-class. Alongside the need to take direct action to support Turks coming to the theatre, the document adds that “no free tickets would be handed out”: since Turks pay for other popular entertainment, theatre should also be a paid activity. This reveals the class dynamic between the forming Ensemble and its imagined Turkish audience, which could also be seen in the idea to attract audience with cars playing loud music. The artists brought to make Turkish theatre were of the Turkish secular intellectual elite, and its audience was expected to be labor migrants of lower education. The insistence on payment is a slightly patronizing tone, signaling theatre’s superiority to “low” culture, such as boxing (for which Turks are willing to pay). It also demonstrates a pedagogic inclination: the demand for pay implies that through material investment audiences will learn to respect and value the theatre.
On the level of representing migration in West German society, the proposal imagined a spatial engagement with the segregation between Turks and Germans in Berlin.
The same “Keywords” document pictures a play that uses separate entrances for German and Turkish audiences, leading to opposite stands, where the Turkish audience and the
German audience are seated separately. The “Proposal for a Turkish Project” further develops this idea, describing mobile bleachers, dynamic seating that with minimal effort would allow them to open a stage between the bleachers, or for extreme proximity so that the “knees of the first row of the Turkish audience and the first German row touch each
53 other, and the viewers of different nationalities see each other directly in the eyes.”44
Introducing the reality of the segregated conditions in Berlin into an experience in the
theatre, where such ethnic separation is not expected by contemporary audiences, would
force reflection on the mixing and non-mixing of the ethnic groups beyond the theatre.
Thus, the spatial-practice would have raised the question of what powers maintain this
separation outside the theatre. This separation of the audiences would break only in
moments described as “utopian”, where it would not be clear if a scene was fictional or
real, blurring the boundary between theatre and life. Although the proposal gives very little
detail on this, what is clear is that through participation that straddled between reality and
representation the project hoped to push its mixed audience towards reflection on the
realities and possibilities of West Germany as a space of migration.
Part of this engagement with a theatre of migration was the project’s interest in
opening space for the critique of power relations that arise in the context of work migration
run throughout the materials. This interest is reflective of the Marxist orientation of the
Ensemble’s politics. Such orientation is not surprising in the context of a collaboration in
the Schaubühne, which had itself grown out of Marxist political origins.(Carlson 2009) The
strongest example of this is in the shortest “script”, written by Macit Koper and Beklan
Algan and translated by Taner Tuncay.45 This “script” includes a collection of scenes
concerning “the illegal,” described as so traumatized by being incessantly hounded by
police throughout Europe that he can only communicate with objects. Fearing any human
interaction (including with Turks) the illegal addresses monologues at objects like “the
44 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 3332 45
54 Wall” expressing their fear of it, or to the beer can as “his refuge,” repeating “Why do you
not let me work?” A short description depicts these scenes as condemnation of the
hypocrisy of powers that celebrate their democracy and commitment to human rights but
deny them to the rights-less nomad. These scenes, that appear in none of the other “scripts,”
are acerbic in their criticism of European guest worker schemes for this hypocrisy, and also
exhibited the dire reality of illegal migrants, persecuted and exploited, and the internal-
psychological impact of such life.
The Turkenprojekt fragments show that the imagined project, for the most part, avoided the staging of “strong” cultural difference. This is striking given the context in which these rehearsals and explorations were taking place: having “brought” such major artists from Turkey, the Schaubühne gave them remarkable time and resources to create new materials. It would have been a lot easier to present them as leading Turkish artists and encourage them to stage already written Turkish work. Far from it, the archived scripts show how the Algans’ and their collaborators were deeply engaged in and committed to the formation of a theatrical aesthetic of migration and the historical and social-political conditions surrounding it.
In the end, after two years of work, Beklan Algan returned to Turkey quite suddenly. In my interview with him, Berndt described a director committed to creating a new aesthetics at the expense of making a piece of theatre that could work with the newly founded Ensemble. Without the Ensemble sharing a clear artistic vision and experienced in productive collaboration, the attempts to create an aesthetically experimental theatre experience appropriate to the conditions of migrant workers proved unsuccessful.
Giden Tez Geri Dönmez and the Performance of Ethno-National Representation
55 And so, in 1980, after two years of work on the Turkenprojekt, with many fragments
but no finished play, the TE found itself without a director. Rather than giving up on the
project altogether, Ayla Algan and Macit Koper took over as co-directors and put together
a musical piece from the fragments of the Turkenprojekt materials that could form a loose
narrative. They named the production Giden Tez Geri Dönmez (hereafter “Giden”), Those
Who Leave Do Not Easily Return. It was sub-titled Songs of Migration [Wanderung].
Giden premiered on June 16, 1980, at the Schaubühne’s older Hebbel-Theater in
Kreuzberg. Structurally, the production resembled the English script discussed in the previous section.46 It was an episodic play that followed the narrative of Ayşe and Ali. The
first act focused on their wedding in rural Anatolia and Ali’s migration to Istanbul for work,
and the second act followed Ali’s migration to Berlin.
The production took Turkenprojekt’s fragment’s limited engagement with the
representation of Turkish culture and expanded it, turning Turkish ceremony, costume, and
traditions into the central elements of the first half of the production. The production gave
no historical or political reasons for the character’s migration, but presented stereotypical
and reductive narrative. In charting a narrative of double migration with very little specific
detail or analysis of its conditions, Giden turned this narrative (which was indeed shared
by many of the Turkish workers arriving to Germany) into a form of origin myth for
Turkish migrants. Coupled with the highly traditional and ethnicized image of village life
and wedding of Ali and Ayşe, the production solidified an image of the Turkish migrant
worker that has arrived with a single migratory narrative, heritage and tradition. The critical
reception of the piece echoed the central role of cultural representation and focused on the
46 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 3330
56 piece as an opportunity for German audiences to learn about Turkish culture: for critics the performance was evidence of the distinct culture of Turks and the attachment migrants have to this culture.
What I have called the representation of Turkish culture took place primarily in the first part of the production, which included the wedding of Ali and Ayşe prior to Ali’s decision to migrate from the village to the city. In the video documentation of the production,47 this part of the performance ran for around fifty minutes—almost half the show length, despite being only one part of the show and only a prologue to the experiences of migration. For the wedding scenes, the production relied heavily on joining together pieces of cultural heritage, from costume to song and dance. A few of the songs and movements are recognizably Alevi, a Muslim minority following Shi’ite rather than Sunni
Islam. In addition to this mixed bag of “local” elements of culture, the production also made use of more cliché and recognizable elements of Turkish culture. The man who performed the wedding ceremony was evocative of a Sufi mystic: an older man with a white beard and white robe singing a song of love, a classic theme of Sufi poetry. Similarly, the song and movements of the wedding ceremony mixed-and-matched fragments of whirling dervishes with other (more local) folk dances. The wedding ceremony was broken into short scenes in costumes from different regions of Turkey. This combination of costume, song, and dance created an amalgam of the traditions of mid-Anatolia and eastern
Turkey.
47 Received from the Schaubühne.
57 As a performance of Turkey, this repertoire was an ethno-national performance par
excellence. In these scenes, Turkish bodies offered the cultural heritage of Turkey, from
customs (the wedding ceremony and dances) to song and costume. The fact that many in
the Ensemble were Turkish artists brought to West Germany for the project, and not
Turkish labor migrants, who had started making theatre in West Germany, added to the
sense of authenticity of the performance. In fact, much of the advertising focused on Ayla
Algan and her mastery of folk singing.
The fluid movement between different local practices followed the logic of the
modern state project, which disconnects practices from their particular bodies and local
contexts and transforms them into “national heritage,” maintained as shared pre-modern
history and roots.(Öztürkmen 2001) “National heritage” is important for the argument I am
developing here because of its claim to representation and unification. The function of such
performance within the nation-state is to create a sense of national unity, shared custom
and material with which the body politic can identify, partaking in what Anderson
famously described as the making of “Imaginary Communities”.48 Folk dance, music, and
costume take part in the reinvention of the pre-national into a visual national image, claiming roots for a national unity.49 However this form of cultural heritage works very differently when exported for consumption abroad: here it created a commodified version of an idea of authentic Turkishness.50 Performing this national hybrid of traditions and practices, the Ensemble produced a spectacle that allowed access to a generalized
48 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso Books, 2006). 49 Ibid. P. 140 50 See: (Larasati 2013; Copel and Prevots 1999; Connell and Gibson 2004)
58 Turkishness, fusing pre-modern tradition and contemporary Turkish culture. This was in
fact how these elements of the productions were received by reviewers (discussed below).
After the wedding scenes, disembodied voices over loudspeakers called the men of
the village to Istanbul. The men headed for the metropolis, leaving their wives and children behind. In this scene, two groups (the migrating men and the women left behind) sang songs of the pain of separation and migration. The play did not offer either causes or a
social-political narrative: rural poverty and the forces of modernization and urbanization
were invisible. Upon arrival to Istanbul, the men discovered that there were few to no jobs,
forcing the internal migrants into poverty and unemployment. In the scenes depicting life
in the city the production showed anecdotes of the encounter of the villagers with city life,
but nothing that could help make sense of the economic conditions they faced. Again,
unemployment in the metropolis was staged as fact without its causes elucidated. This
forced the men into a second migration to West Germany. Such a representation of double
migration, through a narrative of human suffering under forces beyond their control or
understanding, turned it into a myth.
Keeping only the general outline of narrative, with almost no specific or personal
detail, and removing historical and political reasons produced what I call a mythologized
narrative. Putting together this mythologized double migration with the performance of
heritage in the wedding scenes, the play created an aesthetic of ethno-national
representation as the migrant’s myth of origin. Like the heritage that the worker carries
along through the migrations, which is a version of culture that has been produced to
imagine a unified social body, this mythologized version of migration similarly “stands in”
as the singular truth of Turkish migration. Whereas Turkenprojekt had intended to use
59 entangled mythology to interrogate the power relations between Europe and the near East,
with these scenes, Giden staged a de-historicized myth of ethno-national Turkish origins.
Not only did such staging do away with an important critique of guest worker schemes, it
also articulated the history of work migration as wholly Turkish, originating in
unemployment that Turkey seemed to suffer from for no reason—West Germany had no
role in this socio-political myth. Consequently, this narrative disguised the geopolitical
history of exploitation on the one hand and reinforced the “seamless whole” image of
national history and culture on the other. As a result, it contributed to the demarcation of
absolute difference of West Germany and Turkey and staged the question of migration in
exclusively cultural terms, occluding the political and power dynamics in which this migration took place.
I am not suggesting that the production did not have more complicated articulations of migration. It did, and these moments challenged the image of a distinct and seamless culture and mythologized migratory narrative. For example, the song sung for the migration from Istanbul to Berlin included the verse: “Did I cross your border // or did you cross mine,” articulating migration in ambivalent and unsettling terms, where the crossing of borders threatens the stability of identity. Bringing the borders of self and the nation into
proximity threatens to undermine ethno-cultural belonging and exposes the fragility of the
“in/out” binary that it relies on. This moment in Giden exposed the threat that migration
poses to traditional or conservative ideas of nation and culture. At the same time, the verse clarified the stakes of the different aesthetics of multiculturalism, where it can reinforce traditional ideas of national identity through culture, and where it can destabilize them. The
verse also showed the fragility and precarity of migrant minorities in a space where they
60 rarely had much power, and in which the demand for cultural assimilation constituted a
real threat to identity. Seen from both perspectives, the verse shows the potential of
performing a cosmopolitan multiculturalism that engages how migration challenges what
Adelson calls “whole” cultures and identities.
The most remarkable break with the mythologized narrative of migration happened in a series of monologues directly addressed to the audience. These monologues showed very short snippets of, primarily, Turkish migrants from different migration backgrounds, and highlighted issues such as work and housing permits, and the difficulty of dealing with
West German bureaucracy. For instance, a single image showed a Spanish worker seemingly driven insane by the separation from his wife and children. Moving between different levels of German language competence, from Turkish peppered with German to highly articulate German, the array of characters and stories stood in stark contrast with the single-narrative of characters seen in the first part of the performance. This contrast was even more evident because Ayşe (played by Ayla Algan) was on stage as well, still in traditional Turkish costume, and singing in Turkish between the monologues. Through characters such as a Turkish student, who is more organized and extremely angry at inefficient bureaucracy, a female worker denied unification permits for her husband and child because her house is too small, and a small business owner accused of growing drugs, the scenes displayed a variety of Turkish migrant experiences in West Germany. Although the short scene lasted for under ten minutes, the recording makes clear that the audience was engaged, laughing and applauding heartily at the images.
After its premiere Giden received significant media coverage, including many reviews and a television special on ZDF’s program Spielraum. Many of these reviews
61 frame the play as a communication of Turkish culture to German audiences. A review in
Der Abend, for example, argued that, through the folk dances, songs, and costumes, the
play leaves “an impression of Turkish traditions, conveying the tension between different
cultures perhaps more powerfully [lastingly] than a documentary film could.” 51 We see here how the performance of ethno-cultural representation in the first half of the production was interpreted as a powerful mode of communicating cultural difference, and as a transmission of knowledge about the Other akin to, but more powerful than, a documentary film.
Reviews lent their support to the production by highlighting the accessibility of the
Turkish language piece to German audiences, repeatedly noting the ease of understanding the scenes and the songs with the aid of translations in the program. For example, a review in the Morgenpost52 explains that “the German audience fears (unjustly) communication
difficulties [Verständigungsschwierigkeiten].” In contrast to this unjust fear, it highlights
the production as an otherwise scarce “opportunity to get to know each other.” Similarly
focused on German attendance of the performance a Der Spiegel53 review specifically notes that the audience at the premiere was half German and half Turkish. Bringing together the focus on the communication of cultural difference with the accessibility of the production to German audiences, these articles framed the production as a successful piece of public pedagogy for German audiences.
51 Klaus Ramm, “Trauer mussen//Türken tragen: Heimat-los: Türkische Szenen in der Schaubühne,“ Der Abend, June 16, 1980; AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 604 52 “Die Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer bietet ein Türkisches Stück in Berlin,“ Beliner Morgenpost, June 22, 1980; AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 604 53 “Kroyzberg Geceleri,” Der Spiegel, July 7, 1980; http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-14330625.html
62 These reviews framed Giden as a form of multicultural education, sharing tradition through spectacle and structuring cross-cultural communication. Such theatre functions as
the manifestation of difference, recognizable to the critic because it correlates with the
wider frameworks of intelligibility at the time—in this case, seeing the Turkish migrant as
a cultural being, whether this culture is something to cherish and share or an obstacle to
integration. This is perhaps best articulated in a review in the Pertublatt, which hoped that
with the help of the production Germans would understand that “these are people who have
their own, ancient culture, who have come to us, and whose hearts depend on this
culture.”54 A heartfelt call for understanding and recognition, this articulation gestures to the unchanging cultural heritage on which individual identity relies. In doing so, it draws on an essentialized idea of culture that sees in cultural difference the boundary between the nations.
This perspective, which saw the production as an exemplar of Turkish culture, was noted by Wolfgang Hammer in the first article on Turkish theater in West Germany in the prestigious Theater Heute.55 In it, Hammer discusses the expectations and preconceived
notions of the Turk and Turkish theatre, writing that “if one calls the performance ‘naïve,’
as most of the reviews have done so far with the best of intentions, this has more to do with
their expectations and prejudices relating to ‘guest workers’ and ‘Turkish Theater’ [than
with the play itself].” Naïve, then, seems to be a coded articulation, in the reviews Hammer
analyzes, of the perceived primitivism of the piece as artistic work that relies on simplicity and folk tradition. Hammer recognized that a prevailing “structure of knowing” was at
54 The article title, translates as “The Turks Show Us Their Ways.” Petrusblatt, July 4, 1980; AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 604; 55 Wolfgang Hammer, “Großes Klagelied vom Arbeits-Emigranten,“ Theater Heute, September, 1980
63 work in these expectations. He focused instead on the direct address scene, and approached the performance as showing the realities faced by Turks. Likewise, the review in the leftist newspaper Die Wahrheit56 focused on the play’s representation of the conditions of
migrants in West Germany, arguing that it placated the Turkish community, functioning as
a “letting off of steam” (dampf ablassen).
Most of the reviews focused on the first act of the play, framing the production as
cultural representation intended to translate cultural difference for the sake of multicultural
education. By contrast, reviews like Hammer’s and Die Wahrheit’s highlighted the second
act, the depiction of the life of migrants, and the function of the production as a theatre of
migration, even if the two disagreed on the political function served by such theatre.
Sometimes the two approaches were mixed, as in a review in Petrusblatt, where the author
ruminated on “the many children [who know German from school] who accompany their
parents [in daily life] as 'interpreters,' and the concern of their parents that with the loss of
their native language, their children will lose their homeland, their 'identity,' between the
cultures.” This review ruminated on one of the moments in the play, in which Ali was
struggling to communicate with a German-Turkish child. The review used this moment to
discuss both the social difficulty of migrants struggling to learn German and the dynamic
this created between them and their children, who were enrolled in German-speaking schools. The review connected the “social” perspective to the fear of loss of culture, an early indicator of the function the Ensemble, which would become increasingly
56 Manfred Nillius, “Gute Absichten–wer aber sind die Adressaten?“ Die Wahrheit, June 21, 1980; AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 604
64 pronounced: not only to communicate Turkish culture to Germans but also to Turks, and
especially to Turkish children growing up in West Germany.
Performing Turkish material in West Germany: Keşanlı and literary evenings
Following the positive reception of Giden and the interest it generated in the life of migrants in Berlin, the Ensemble could have continued working on original materials that dealt with the life of migrants. However, the TE project decided to go in a different direction and stage Haldun Taner’s Keşanlı Ali Destanı (The Ballad of Ali from Keshan); a Turkish play from 1964. This decision might have reflected the hope that staging a famous Turkish play would help bring larger Turkish audiences to the theatre. This was the reason that Jurgen Schitthelm, then Intendant, that is artistic director, of the
Schaubühne, gave me in an email interview when I asked why the project brought Turkish
“stars”. It might also have been a result of the difficulties encountered in creating original work with Turkenprojekt and Giden. Or, it could simply reflect an interest in staging
Turkish culture, which Berndt highlighted in our interview as the original motivation for the project.57 Whatever the reason may be, this production is indicative of the TE’s new
orientation toward a theatre of ethno-national representation, heralded by the first act of
Giden.
This direction was met with significant resistance from other local Turkish-German theatre artists, echoed in multiple reviews of the play. They focused on the question of relevance: why stage a play written in 1964 Turkey in 1980s West Germany? Despite these protestations, the Ensemble proceeded with the play. Furthermore, its orientation towards
57 interview
65 the representation of Turkish culture solidified in subsequent projects, specifically, two
literary evenings that staged classical and modern Turkish literature. The Ensemble turned
away from its engagement with migration focusing instead on exploring different formulations of Turkish culture, and tensions between its representation as modern and traditional.
The Ballad of Ali from Keshan is a Brechtian play (including song and music) that
takes place in a slum/squatter neighborhood of a big Turkish city. The play’s protagonist,
Ali, had been imprisoned for the false accusation that he killed a local criminal, who had
exploited the residents of the neighborhood. This made Ali a local hero and brought him
political power. But it also estranged him from his ex-fiancé, Zilha, who was a relative of the man Ali was accused of killing. In a reversal of fortunes, Ali ended up killing a rival criminal, the new boyfriend of Zilha, and became an actual murderer. The story is one of the most famous pieces of modern Turkish theatre, often described as the Turkish
“Threepenny Opera.” And this was not its first time on the German stage: after a very successful premier with the Dostlar Tiyatrosu in Istanbul, the play was invited to tour in
West Germany in 1966.58 The Turkish Ensemble production, nearly two decades later, was directed by Tuncel Kurtiz.
Resistance to the play emerged at the premier of the production, with a protest outside the theatre. The protest was organized by Ali Haydar Cilasun, an actor in Giden
who quit the Turkish Ensemble during the rehearsals for Keşanlı. In a press release Cilasun
argued that the Schaubühne “does not make relevant pieces for people from Turkey and
disguises the current developments and processes in Turkey. ‘She dances while it burns’
58 (Gezen 2018a) P. 27
66 (Turkish proverb [this explanation is in the German]).”59 Cilasun’s criticism was two-fold:
first, that the piece has nothing to do with the life of Turkish migrants in West Germany;
second, that choosing this material in the aftermath of the 1980 military coup in Turkey
ignored the political reality there. Cilasun clarified that his critique was directed more
generally at the direction taken by the Turkish Ensemble when he argued that the Ensemble
staged productions “which bore no relation to the real situation of the 135,000 Turkish
people here in Berlin and thus did not contribute to integration. Instead they chose, for
example, Dervish music with conservative content so that our people sleep quietly.”60 The
reference here is to Giden and particularly the first act, as emblematic of the Ensemble’s choice to stage a romantic image of a cultural community.
In our interview, Brendt explained that this episode represented the explosion of internal tensions regarding leadership within the Ensemble,61 tensions between local artists and those coming from Turkey, and possibly also ethnic tensions (Ali Haydar is a recognizably Alawite name). These tensions are similar to the demands of the Turkish associations that Gezen describes that the Berlin Senate not only support “politically harmless” folklore material. Manifesting through personal struggles over leadership, these broader tensions were simmering within the Ensemble as well. Cilasun’s criticism highlighted the stakes of the company’s choices and the importance of the aesthetic practices that it developed.
Cilasun was not alone in this criticism. The protest became a central issue in reviews of the play, with a focus on the disconnect between the play and the lived reality
59 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 696. 60 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 696. 61 Berndt also talks about a big fight between Ayla Algan and Tuncel Kurtiz at this time, resulting in Kurtiz removal from the Turkish Ensemble. He would return together with the Halk Oyunculari in 1983.
67 of Turks in West Germany. Der Abend published a review of the play under the headline
“Fight with the Schaubühne: Turks protest against guest worker ensemble”, which focused
on the difficulties of creating “Turkish Theatre” in Berlin, and discussed Cilasun’s
criticism.62 An article in the Stuttgarter Zeitung described Keşanlı as “harmless caricature,” asserting that “the most important criticism against the play is on the following grounds:
Why would you make a show that is not about the social reality of work migrants?”63
These reviews emphasize the production’s lack of relevance to the local Turkish
population. This is a significant change from the reviews of Giden, which had highlighted the play’s communication of Turkish culture much more than its social relevance. Where these reviews were unable to find the kind of cultural representation they expected, they highlighted the controversy around the play. Strikingly, although Keşanlı is widely
acknowledged as Brechtian, none of the reviews discussed the social-political criticism that
it was staging, even if it was one originally written in 1962. The play dealt with the
problems of slums (gecekondu) that grew rapidly in Turkey after the Second World War
as a result of rapid urbanization. In conditions of extreme state neglect, lack of water,
electricity and basic services, the local Kabadayıs, criminals who organized gambling, sold
drugs, and extorted money from local business, enjoyed significant local support for
organizing basic social services.(Dolek 2019) Thus, the play investigates the reality of urban poverty and alternative structures of authority that fill the void left by the state in such
62 “Streit mit Schaubühne: Türken protestieren gegen Gastarbeiter-Ensemble,” Der Abend, June 12, 1980; AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 693. 63 “Ein Held von und über Türken in der Berliner Schaubühne,” Stuttgarter Zeitung, December 12, 1980; AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 695.
68 places. Furthermore, as the name Ali of Keshan signals, this reality was also that of the
new migrants to the city, showing:
the heterogeneity of the Anatolian peoples, a socio-historical phenomenon that was fundamentally at odds with the monolithic project of identity-making that determined the trajectory of the Turkish nation-state building since the early twentieth century.64 This social-political context of the play undergirds its “relevance” as the critical history of
urbanization that I argued was left out of Giden’s narrative of double migration.65
In fact, not all critics took the non-relevance position. Friedrich Luft, perhaps the
leading theatre critic in West Germany at the time, had nothing but praise for the production
and its social and political import, although he did not describe this political import. He
also praised the “folkish” and “exciting” elements of the production. He was doubly
dismissive of the protest, describing how a small Turkish group was protesting for a “more
bitter and ‘relevant’ dish”, however, managing only to make “a colorful evening more
colorful.”66 Luft’s cutting dismissal of the question relevance seems peculiar given that the
Schaubühne was famous for making political avant-garde theatre. But as a prominent
cultural figure and an authoritative voice on theatre, Luft was signaling both an interest in
the representation of Turkish culture, as well as keys to how to understand it—as
representative of ethnic-culture (folkish) and novel in its difference (exciting and colorful).
The production’s importance for Luft lay in this cultural formation, while he diminished
the importance of the political question by leaving it unspecified.
64 Ibid., p. 5. 65 Dolek’s comment is also closely connected to the imagination of the singular Turkish nation through an amalgam of heritage discussed earlier (p. 59). 66 Friedrich Luft, “Aus sämtlichen Winkeln dampft Volkstümlichkeit,” Berlin Morgenpost, December 2, 1980; AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 695.
69 Almost diametrically opposed to Luft’s position, Hammer, in a second article on
the Ensemble in Theater Heute, highlighted the tension within the company and the
protest’s critique of irrelevance of the material.67 Comparing the piece to Porgy and Bess, he warned that there were many just waiting “for the Turks to be portrayed as our poor but cheerful, sometimes melancholic” guest workers. As an image of Turkey and Turks, he argued, the play was in danger of authorizing views that would undermine Turkish migrants’ demands for recognition and the political redress of their social concerns by presenting an ethno-cultural representation that made Turkish migrants known as cultural
Others.
The question of relevance was not only a question of the political content of the material, but about its move away from the experiences of Turks living in West Germany.
The difficulty in developing a project based on immigrant experiences was not simply a tension between local artists and imported-Turks wanting to stage Turkish material. The
Ensemble’s “Importees” were clearly interested in creating a theatre of migration (as seen in the Turkenprojekt); and other local Turkish theatre artists were also staging material from Turkey – for example, the abovementioned Berlin Oyuncuları. In an article published in 1981 on the state of Turkish theatre in West Germany, Aras Ören68 made the following
remark on the production of Keşanlı:
The staging of this work showed, at least in my opinion, the tendency to retreat into the reality of Turkey without touching the new reality in Germany. With this production, bringing the everyday situation of the ‘German’ or ‘Berliner’ Turks
67 Wolfgang Hammer, “Der fröhliche Fliegenberg,” Theater Heute, January 1981. 68 Aras Ören is one of the most important Turkish-German literary figures in West Germany. Arriving as a worker, he published award winning poetry and prose in both German and Turkish. He was the editor of the first Turkish language radio show on Radio Free Berlin, and active participant in West Berlin Turkish German theatre scene. See: (Chin 2002; Stewart 2013)
70 onto the stage was once again avoided, and with it [the possibility] to reflect their new consciousness dramatically.69 Ören saw in the production of Keşanlı “the tendency” whereby multicultural representational practice “retreats” into the safety of the image of national-culture, in this case, resulting in the presentation of Turkish theatre in the shape of theatre from Turkey.
In doing so, it “retreats” from engagement with the complexity of the multicultural reality of thirty years of migration. Producing theatre that deals with the “new consciousness” of
Turks living in West Germany is challenging because it threatens the identity still held on to by many migrants, and because it deals directly with the “new reality in Germany,” how migration is changing the space. The importance of this insight is that it illuminates the multiple pressures that the Ensemble was under pushing it towards this kind of work, from the multicultural discourse inciting the performance of difference, to the complicated internal dynamics of migrant communities.
This criticism contrasts with Ören’s strong appreciation of the Ensemble’s importance: “This experiment [Giden] in the Schaubühne will one day become
recognizable as a landmark of Turkish cultural life in Berlin.” Ören saw in Giden a
production in which characters of migrants were explored for the first time on the
professional German stage. On this, Ören disagreed with Turkish theatre artist such as
Cilasun, who found the piece “conservative”, and a member of the People’s Worker
69 Aras Ören, “Auf der Suche nach Synthese und Eigenwert. Türkisches Theaterleben in Berlin oder: Von der Notwendigkeit sozialer und kultureller Gleichberechtigung,” Zeitschrift Für Kulturaustausch 3 (1981): 311–14.
71 Theatre [Halkevi İşçi Tiyatrosu] quoted in the Der Abend article who described Giden as
“folklore for Germans.”70
This returns us to the question of Turkish Ensemble’s performance of Turkish culture in Keşanlı. Despite the fact that this production was clearly not of the folklore expected from Turkish theatre, reviews still found a way to articulate what what Turkish culture was to them. The Berlin’s weekly Zitty’s review of the production compared the
Schaubühne, which stands for “good, slightly elitist but experimental, expectation- breaking and contemporary theatre”, with “Turkish Theatre”, which stands for “tradition, folk-theatre [Volkstheater], shadow-theatre, stock-characters, but also timeliness and criticism.” Similarly, Luft’s review highlighted traditionality and folk practices.
Importantly, the melding of folk practices and political criticism was true about Keşanlı, in which Taner had used traditional theatre forms such as shadow puppetry (Karagöz), and
Orta Oyunu as “anti-illusionistic elements rooted in the Turkish folk traditions”.71
However, the consistent recognition and identification of Turkish theatre with folk practices, to which any other classification is subordinated, reveals the expectation and prejudice of the German public’s imagination.
The comments of Cilasun and the member of the People’s Worker Theatre highlight how, for the local Turkish artists, the tension was between was between staging relevant material and folklore, or similar display of ethnic authenticity. Although Cilasun’s comments point to lack of relevance to contemporary Turkish politics (in a play from 1964)
70 See note 65. Founded in 1974, the non-professional Halkevi İşçi Tiyatrosu staged political plays on migrant worker conditions, generally discussed as agitation-propaganda. The group saw remarkable success and toured West Germany. See: (Boran 2004) P. 97 71 (Gezen 2018a) P. 28
72 as well as lack of relevance to the lives of migrants, Ören’s comments demonstrate how the ensemble was not alone in recoiling from engaging with the realities in West Germany.
There was significant struggle over resources and directions in these formative years of
German-Turkish theatre. For German press the question of relevance came up only when they were denied their expectation of folk-theatre. The repeated comparisons to
Threepenny Opera and Porgy and Bess highlight how Keşanlı was too reminiscent of
Western theatre to classify as “Turkish culture”. Since the performance could not satisfy that expectation, it was asked to fill the demand of relevance. Pressed to see it as Turkish,
Luft highlighted Keşanlı as “folkish” and “exotic”, which seems to be the only kind of
Turkish culture recognizable to the German public.
In this context, where the relevance of Keşanlı for the local Turkish community as well as its importance as an object of Turkish culture were challenged, Berndt’s letter to school teachers inviting them to bring their classes to see the production shows how the ensemble attempted to position its work:
For Turkish students the visit to this theater is one of the few ways to experience the theatrical products of their home country, to actively participate in the Turkish art of acting, and perhaps to ensure their cultural identity. Perhaps, the German students, when attending this performance together with their foreign fellow- students, seeing a piece of foreign cultural creativity, will learn in an “unsynchronized” way, immediate impressions and precise ideas about cultural similarities, existing fundamental differences, and necessary autonomy [of Turkish culture].72
Berndt’s description of the pedagogic function of multicultural performance for Germans is telling. Through exposure to authentic Turkish culture (“foreign cultural creativity”), students would generate knowledge about cultural difference without the need for direct educational intervention. Although such knowledge would include similarities, Berndt’s
72 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 698
73 emphasis is on difference, both “fundamental” and demanding “autonomy”. The note
shows how different aspects of culture are mixed, where cultural creativity, artistic
production, is tied up with a concept of “cultural identity”. Although what is shared is only
the expression of culture through its products, what is communicated is identity and
something “fundamental” about it. The articulation of “ensuring cultural identity” gestures
towards ideas of cultural preservation, the right of minority groups to maintain cultural sovereignty in the face of demands for assimilation. Implicit in this invitation is that
Keşanlı, even as a piece of modern cultural creativity, was no less culturally representative
than folk-theatre.
This struggle over what could be recognized as Turkish culture continued in two
literary evening staged by the Ensemble.73 These productions took further the pedagogical
inclination of Berndt’s letter to teachers, curating evenings much more directly oriented
towards the education of the public in Turkish cultural creativity. The evenings attempted
to extend the scope of visibility of Turkish culture in two different directions. The first
evening was dedicated to two early 20th century Turkish novelists, Sait Faik and Orhan
Veli. The authors were described as “innovators of Turkish literature,” and their works
were presented as important landmarks in Turkish cultural production. The second evening,
called Mit Bergen mit Steinen (With Mountains, with Stones), focused on the works of two
classical poets, 13th century Yunus Emre and 16th century Pir Sultan Abdal. While the first
evening aimed to educate audiences on the modernity and contemporary status of Turkish
culture by showing a selection of modern Turkish literature, the second evening aimed to
73 Between the two evenings the ensemble also premiered their first children’s play, play Keloğlan, written by Ayla Algan and Meray Ülgen and starring Şener Şen in the titular role. I will discuss this production and the other children’s plays of the ensemble in the next section.
74 expand how “traditional” artistry could be seen. Rather than limited to popular folk tradition, primitive and naïve, here classical Turkish was shown to be refined and ascetic, much like classical European music and poetry.
The first evening, focusing on modern authors of the Republican era, highlighted
Turkey as a modern state, aesthetically innovative and breaking with the traditions of
Ottoman artistry, showcasing a secular and, most importantly, Western influenced aesthetics. Sait Faik was known for humanistically inclined short stories dealing with ordinary characters, and for his realist depictions of Turkish scenes through people from different walks of life. Orhan Veli, on the other hand, was famous for breaking with traditions of poetic verse: in his ‘Garip Manifesto’ (Strange Manifesto, 1941) he offered a typically modernist denunciation of artificial conventions, similar to that found in Western modernist poetics.
The program for the first evening included translations of some of the materials that were read, but no other effort was made to help Germans understand (such as context given in German or staging devices). Described as a “reading evening [Leseabend] in Turkish”, this evening was insular and oriented towards a Turkish audience. In this sense, the evening was an event of cultural learning, but not in the vein of multicultural education that shares cultural difference across different ethno-national groups, from Turks to Germans. Instead, it developed the ideas in Berndt’s letter about the need to ensure cultural identity, educating
Turkish audiences on modern Turkish literature. It offered Turkish migrants and their families, whom the Ensemble members might have assumed to be mostly of rural and less well-educated backgrounds, access to these highbrow parts of Turkish culture.
75 The choice of material reflects the modernization of the early Republican years of
the state (1923-1938), which included the radical transformation of language and culture away from religious and Persian influences and towards the consolidation of a homogenous modern-Western nation-state.(Yılmaz 2013) Theatre functioned in those years as a “crucial
venue for promoting the Republic’s ideals,”74 in both the content of the productions and as
a space in which body comportment and civic behavior could be learnt. Well into the 1960s
theatre maintained its role as a state apparatus, following the discourses of modernization
and Europeanization, and “most theatre practitioners and critics continued to invest in the
Kemalist paradigm of secular modernization and Turkish nationalism.”75 The reading
evening replicated these modes of elitist relation to performance as a space of education,
educating lower-class worker audiences by exposing them to the literary achievements of
Turkish modernism. The evening offered to this audience an elitist image of secular,
modern, and Western-oriented Turkish culture, an extension of the idea of cultural identity
from ethno-national tradition to contemporary-modern Turkey.
The second evening, on the other hand, offered a very different image of Turkish
culture, harking back to its pre-(modern)-history, through Alawite and Sufi mystical
poets.76 This seems to have been Fred Berndt’s pet-project,77 and included poems in
translation, read by Edith Clever and Elke Petri, two of the Schaubühne’s most famous
74 (Adak and Altınay 2018) P. 194 75 Ibid. 76 See: Koerbin, Paul. "Pir Sultan Abdal: Encounters with Persona in Alevi Lyric Song." Oral Tradition, vol. 26 no. 1, 2011; Koprulu, Mehmed Fuad. Early Mystics in Turkish Literature. Routledge, 2006. 77 In his unpublished autobiography, Berndt insists that he generally took a service role in relation to the Turkish Ensemble, recognizing “I had a mantra ‘Beware of overbearing cultural-imperialistic influence” [“Dabei gab ich mir selbst einen bestimmten Kodex: ‘Hüte dich vor kultur imperialistischer Einflussnahme!’”]. he also describes how he was inspired by Gisela Kraft, the translator the Turkish Ensemble worked with, to create this evening.
76 actors, and sung by Ayla Algan, accompanied by traditional instruments. The literary
evening was one of the only Turkish Ensemble productions to take place on the main
Schaubühne stage, and it was accompanied by an elaborate program booklet, which
resembled a poetry book with Sufi calligraphy on its double fold front. The booklet
included the poems in both Turkish78 and translated to German by Gisela Kraft, a
prominent poet and scholar of Islamic poetry. The production went to lengths in order to
appeal to a German audience with interests in classical, religious-mystic “Turkish” culture
by involving famous actors from the Schaubühne, who recited the poems in German, and
offering the Turkish poems in sung form, accompanied by musicians. The evening, which
also included a discussion of the poetry (and of contemporary Turkish politics79), had the
aura of a high-end cultural event, oriented primarily towards middle-class German
audiences. As opposed to the first evening, which had only four performances, the second
event was performed fifteen times.80
The German press also showed significantly more interest in this second evening.
An article in the Berlin Morgenpost described it as a production “in which the foreigner is suddenly no longer alien because as art they cross the boundaries [die Grenzen]” and
commented on how Turkish culture “is brought to us by the lecture, and through the sounds
of old folk instruments.”81 The evening aroused fascination with the exotic qualities of the
78 The Turkish itself was not the original, since Turkish was modernaized and chaged scrip in the early 1920s.
79 In an article in the Tagespiegel (19.5.81) they explain that the references to Turkey “have little to do with poetry and longing, but rather with social unrest, which was also discussed in the Schaubühne that evening”. AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 783 ; Given this description of discussion of social unrest, and the leftist background of the Turkish Ensemble participants the conversation most probably centered on the turbulent politics of the late 1970s in Turkey, as well as the 1980 military coup and its aftermath. 80 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 780 81 Berliner Morgenpost, 19.5.81; AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 783
77 ethnic performance, its lyrics “burning from within.” In a Tagesspiegel article, Ayla Algan
was described as “the sensual-vital [sinnlich-vitale] Turk” with red hair. The reviews found
that she gave a strong performance, but that accompanied by the traditional instruments it
all sounded “a bit exotic.”
These comments illustrate how this kind of event functioned as an opportunity to
imagine the boundary-crossing possibilities of ethno-national performance, the ability of
culture and art to educate across difference. However, it was exactly this kind of
representation of the cultural Other, already known as the exotic other, archaic and foreign
(and mixed in with the contemporary), that helped to produce culture as the newly
formulated border between German and foreign. This performance of ethno-cultural
representation was exactly the kind that those Turkish-German theatre artists criticizing
and protesting the staging of Keşanlı were trying to prevent, because it affirmed a romantic
image, both to the local Turkish community and to the German public.
Keloğlan and the children’s performances of the Turkish Ensemble
With the performance of Keşanlı and the two literary evenings, the Turkish Ensemble shifted its attention from the creation of original material written and devised specifically for a Turkish and German audience in Berlin, towards the performance materials of Turkish origin. At the same time, they were working on new original material, this time in the form of a children’s play. Between the two literary evenings, Keloğlan premiered on May 7th
1981. Following it, the Ensemble staged four more children’s plays, two original plays and
two direct adaptations of children’s books. All three original children’s plays were written
(or co-written) and directed by Meray Ülgen. The most prominent local Turkish-German
participant in the Ensemble, it is remarkable how he became the driving force behind its
78 original work, and how little media (and scholarly) attention was given to this fact in
comparison to the attention enjoyed by some of the famous Turkish members. Out of the
57,344 tickets sold for Turkish Ensemble productions by 1983, 38,402 were for the three
original children’s plays, that is, around sixty five percent of its audience.82
Keloğlan was an original piece that intertwined the plots of folktales involving a
stock character, Keloğlan, an eternally bald, romantic, drifty, kind-natured and happy-go-
lucky, poor young man. The program was hand drawn and opened like a folding screen (a
prop featuring in the play as well), and described with illustrations the fortunes and
misfortunes that befell Keloğlan in the play.83
Like all Turkish Ensemble productions, the play was offered to schools and
organizations in order to get an interested and involved audience. A letter from the
production team to teachers described Keloğlan as a classic Turkish folk figure, and the
play’s plot as bringing together themes from Grimm fairytales such as The Wishing-Table
[Tischlein-deck-dich] and Hans in Luck. The letter highlighted how the play, and these stories, were rooted in both cultures. It described how the play “seeks to integrate traditional forms of Turkish theater, such as ‘Meddah’ (Turkish one-man theater) and ‘Orta
Oyunu’ (folk-play with stock characters), to entertain the children of the so-called third generation living in West Germany, to raise awareness [bewußtzumachen] and to revive the rich and separate/independent [eigenständige] tradition of their homeland.”84
82 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 780 83 The program opens with a question: “Is Keloğlan a good-for-nothing, as his mother always tells him? Who can blame him for not thinking about work? Instead, he prefers to fish for trout in the creek and follow the birds.” It is interesting to note the image of a reluctant worker tossed about by fortune, given the situation of most Turks in West Germany as laborers. AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 776 84 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 779
79 The description of Turkish culture as separate/independent foregrounds ideas of cultural wholeness I have noted several times throughout this chapter. The letter repeats
Berndt’s articulation of the importance of exposure to the “tradition of their homeland” as an act of cultural revival, maintaining cultural knowledge and connection to Turkey for the generations born in West Germany. Although meant differently, the similarity of this description to the early integrationist position of the CDU, with its insistence on maintaining a connection to the homeland, is remarkable. For German students the play tried to encourage recognition and interest by mixing Turkish folklore with recognizable
German materials. At the same time, by bringing in themes from German folklore, the play gave German students elements that they could more easily recognize (even in a foreign language) and subtly alluded to similarities in folk traditions, characters and narratives.
The letter also highlights the traditional artistic practices that the production used, which are similar to the early proposals of the Turkenprojekt. This would become a signature part of the Turkish Ensemble’s children’s productions, showcasing Turkey as having its own theatre history.
Another letter from the production team informed teachers that the play proved so interesting to “children and adults – Turkish and German” that the production was extended.85 Such was its success. There was even an attempt to produce the play in
German, however a letter sent by one of the producers to Peter Stein in October 198186 highlights the various difficulties with this attempt. For example, Şimşek Şişmek, who was being tried as Keloğlan, “speaks German too well and too badly! In order to express the
85 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 779 86 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 775
80 lyrical language, including the poetic and more difficult grammar, her German is too bad.
To mimic [or reproduce] Şener’s [Şener Şen’s] foreigner-German [Ausländerdeutsch] with
charm, she speaks German too well!” Other actors, the producer explained, speak and think
in Turkish and therefore struggle to make “breakthroughs” in German. The producer
recommended against staging the play in German, stressing that “1) Turkish theater is also
understandable for German children. 2) Turkish theater should also be shown to German
children in its original form so that they hear Turkish as well as learn Turkish content and
forms of expression.”
The discussion of the language difficulties of the Turkish actors in the letter
demonstrates the deep-seated prejudice even of Germans involved in the project, and more
widely, supportive of migration and budding multiculturalism. Combined with the implied
cultural superiority of German, such an attitude maintains the classicist and reverent
attitude to language and theatre altogether foreign to the kinds of work the Schaubühne
was producing, as manifested in the conveyance of Şimşek’s inability to capture the
“lyrical language, including the poetic and more difficult grammar.” In addition to
belittling her ability as an actor, the contention that Şimşek would be unable to create Şen’s
“foreigner-German” competently indicates an idea of authenticity of non-integration.
Translated into theatre terms of good and bad acting, the comment highlights the formation
of notions of legitimate identities, how Şimşek lost her “authentic (Turkish) identity”
without yet forming a new German identity. As the Ensemble had already translated and
performed Turkish cultural material in the second literary evening, the decision not to
translate Keloğlan does not reflect a general sense that Turkish cultural material was
“unworthy” for translation. It does show where the ethnic boundaries and the distinction of
81 high-low cultural intersected: while high/classical culture was translated and read by
German actors, a children’s play to be performed by Turkish actors was not.
A letter kept by the AdK archive87 and written by a teacher to the Schaubühne after
taking her third-grade class (“including seven Turks, three Yugoslavians, one Moroccan
and sixteen German children”) to see Keloğlan and Turkish Ensemble’s next children’s
play, Kurnaz Eşek (Cunning Donkey) reveals more both about the plays’ function as
educational practices and how they were experienced by the children. The teacher describes
how the non-Turkish children’s (and possibly her own) skepticism about going to Keloğlan
turned into enthusiasm. She continues that “the experience of how lost they felt […] and how dependent they were on the support of their Turkish classmates has remained very much in the minds of the children. Through your style of presentation, the combination of play [Spiel], language, song and dance, they felt very touched. After the show we learned to sing and dance the song ‘Dere Geliyor Dere’ [The River is Coming] you sang at that time, and even children who might have previously rejected it now dance with enthusiasm.”
The teacher wrote that the second play felt more accessible, and the children were happy to write back to the Ensemble in response. “A Yugoslavian girl (Aida) even expressed her
‘thank you’ to you in Turkish with the help of her Turkish friends.” They also requested the lyrics and score to the “Donkey-Song” to teach it in class.
This account is particularly instructive because it highlights the function of the theatre in the eyes of an educator congruent with the form of multicultural pedagogy that
the Ensemble was pioneering. The teacher describes the play and theatre as a space where
Turkish pupils can contribute to their fellow students’ understanding and enjoyment. The
87 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 868
82 teacher’s description resonates strongly with the interview with Şimşek with which this
chapter began. We see in both the expectation that multiculturalism can offer a meeting
point of difference, where cultures can be (non-hierarchically) shared. The letter also
exemplifies the ways in which working with schools and teachers allowed the creation of
an audience for the Turkish Ensemble, and also turned their initial skepticism into
excitement about seeing theatre in Turkish, based on Turkish folk-tales. The plays were
successful at offering German children material they could easily understand, and teachers
materials that could later be used in the classroom to give space for Turkish language and
culture. The letter shows that the Ensemble correctly recognized the kind of multicultural education that was being experimented with at schools, attended by the children of migrants (and not only Turkish migrants).
It is fitting to end this section with a discussion of Sünnet Düğünü (Circumcision
Party), the last of the original children’s productions staged in September, 1982, by the
Turkish Ensemble. It is the Ensemble’s first children’s play based on Turkish experiences in Germany, built around the circumcision party of Ali, a child growing up in Kreuzberg,
Berlin. In another important innovation, the Turkish Ensemble introduced a German character, a first in their children’s productions. Invited to join to the party, a German neighbor of Ali’s family gave an opportunity for translation (of the Turkish play for the neighbor), and a stand-in for German engagement with Turkish tradition. Similarly to other
examples examined already, the play made use of traditional Turkish performance, in this
case of shadow-puppetry: Ali was the son of Karagöz, the classic shadow puppet.
The play was thus a representation of the local German invitee’s encounter with
Turkish traditions. It served as an introduction to the traditions of the circumcision party
83 and more broadly, as an investigation of the meeting between the two cultures. Religious- cultural tradition functioned as the cultural boundary, both separating and initiating the local German visitor into the habits of the foreigners who were now his neighbors. The invitation sent to teachers highlights this element: “with our play we, who live in a society with very different traditions and customs, want to introduce a custom that is little or not known.”88 It drew attention to the negotiation of cultural ignorance, and offered to a willing audience a look into an unknown tradition. The performance recognized how as tradition and custom, cultural differences, functioned as a boundary in what amounted to a segregated society.
The choice of the custom that was explored is also revealing. Firstly, focused on a
Muslim rite as a national (Turkish) tradition, the reproduced the Turk-as-Muslim, perhaps the most fundamental way in which the Turk was understood as Other. Secondly, circumcision is arguably one of the most known and identifiable of Muslim traditions.89 At the same time, it was precisely through the difference between the generic knowing of
Muslims-as-circumcised and the specificity of the Turkish traditions celebrated at the circumcision party that the gap of ignorance was addressed. The aim was to move the common generic reductive knowledge the Other in their difference to an intimate knowledge (through the party and its customs) that can be part of recognizing the Other as subject.
88 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 1006 89 Focusing on this particular religious rite has its own contested aspect, leaving out of the “Turkish” fold the minority population of Armenians (and other non-Jewish minorities) who are not circumcised. This is especially significant since the non-circumcision of these groups is regarded in Turkey as one of the defining, and most recognizable, of the traits of these ‘foreign’ elements to society.
84 As customary by then, in the invitations sent to teachers, the Ensemble highlighted
how the play exhibited artistic traditions, “to show examples of our traditional theater: like
Karagöz, Meddah, Hokkabaz, Kanto and Orta Oyunu.”90 The letter added that “in the past,
these examples of traditional theater were among the pleasures that rich families in the big
cities would not do without at their circumcision parties. Unfortunately, these parts of our
traditional theater are increasingly forgotten nowadays.” This description highlighted the
historical roots of ethno-national culture, and suggested that ethno-national origins needed
to be reproduced. Through theatrical representation of the practices, the Ensemble hoped
to share some common contemporary practices and to preserve or revive others that were
being forgotten. Germans needed to learn about Turkish culture, and Turks needed to learn
more deeply about their own culture. Described as practices associated with upper-class
city dwellers, the demonstration of traditional artistic practices by the Turkish artists from
elite urban circles had an educational function in relation to the migrant Turkish audience
assumed to be rural and lower class. Thus, the production took the perspective of the
modern state in its definition of what cultural practices were deemed national heritage, and
in educating lower class citizens in the traditions recognized as significant national culture.
The archive also holds a request from the Catholic German Student Organization91
submitted to the Ensemble to see the production. The request demonstrates how the
German public was learning to see in the Ensemble’s children’s plays a mode of getting to know the Other that was meaningful not only for children. After a brief introduction, the letter posed a question: “In the absence of knowledge of Turkish, does it make sense to attend this performance, or rather, is the staging comprehensible without verbal
90 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 1006 91 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 1006
85 understanding?” The question conveys how children’s theatre was coming to be seen as an
opening to German audiences, who would be able to enjoy the production through the help
of additional materials, such as the program booklet, and via the more widely accessible
vocabulary of images and movement of children’s theatre, possibly less reliant on complex
dialogue. We can observe, even if in the form of a question to the company, the success of
the Turkish Ensemble at marketing its children’s work as making Turkish culture in
Turkish accessible to non-Turkish audiences. The letter continued as follows: “If your
answer is in the affirmative, I would like ask you or other co-workers for an introduction
to the play and the particular social-cultural situation of the Turks in Berlin [sozialkülturelle
Situation der Türken in Berlin].” The theatre company was being asked to function as a
medium through which Turks might become known, by expanding on the (limited)
perspective of the play itself through additional material. Notably, the “situation of the
Turk,” completely separate from that of the local, was explicitly described as a social-
cultural world, not, for example, a socioeconomic world.
Reviews of the play echoed, if not outright copied, the Ensemble’s line in their
invitation. The Volksblatt Berlin repeated the company’s line that “The troupe performs a
lot of music and magic tricks, a play of shadows and puppets in the classical forms of
Turkish theater”,92 forms that were being lost, “forgotten in Turkey as well.” It added that
“in a foreign land [der Fremde], this is not only a substantial [anschauliche] [image of] homeland-knowledge [Heimatkunde] for the Turkish children; their German play-and-
school friends, too, learn in this pleasurable way about Turkish traditions and customs.”
The author asserts that reconnection to an appropriate ethno-national heritage maintains
92 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 996
86 the connection to the homeland. In doing so it emphasizes who is in their place (Germans
in West Germany), and to whom this space is foreign. Under the veil of promoting cultural
preservation, the author denied belonging to Turkish children, many of whom were already
born and raised in West Germany.
A review in the Berlin Zitty shows how the play could function as a way to make
the unsettling transformation of German space by migration less foreign, and more
intimately known. It offered the readers an introductory image: “When, in the courtyards
of Kreuzberg, the saz music does not want to stop, and singing and laughter are heard well
into the night, it is often a circumcision that is the occasion for the festivity.”93 Clarifying
an otherwise puzzling circumstance for the German city dweller, the review highlighted how the performance made the changed Kreuzberg less alien, and therefore less irritating.
The article attempted to transform the unpleasant intrusion of Turkish migration that still lingered in the description (does not want to stop; well into the night), into a recognizable and celebratory occurrence. The invitation to participation did not stop at the shift from ignorance to knowing, as the review mentioned how in the play a “German [person] from the neighborhood comes to visit and also participates in the party.” This highlights how the play did not merely show the possibility of knowing the Other, but actually how intimate knowing could lead to interaction as well.
However, the review also referred to the need to clarify the limits of understanding,
and the pedagogic significance of the project. It thus revealed an emergent expectation of
multicultural pedagogy. It is worth quoting at length:
Of course, for most German spectators, the word-jokes [puns] are incomprehensible, the punch lines do not land, the heckling of the Turkish public
93 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 996
87 also remains meaningless,94 but the idea of incorporating a German figure helps a lot. In this direction, even more can be achieved. For the Turkish children, who are growing up bilingually anyway, this is nothing unusual. Of course, the [German] text should not exist [only] for presentation and translation [that is, as aid to the German audience], but also use the peculiarities of the German language. If this were to succeed, it would be possible to work on previously unapproached [brachliegende] topics and to practice integration in a specific piece/play [Stück]. The performance of the Schaubühne offers an (albeit modest) idea/perspective [Anschauung] on this.
A lot is going on here. First, there was recognition of the limitations of understanding for a German audience member attending a play in Turkish. But the real interest is in the function of the German character as a mediator/translator, which the review appreciated and even proposed for more extensive use to help anchor the German audience. But the review went further, proposing that this German character does not have to function merely as an opportunity for clarification and translation. Instead, future plays should use “the peculiarities of German language.” The implication was that, beyond clarification for the
Germans, giving the German character complicated lines in German can help with language learning for the Turkish audience. This would allow the play to “practice integration,” both in the topics it approached and in the cultivation of cultural-linguistic skills. This was the promise that the review saw in the performance, as going beyond sharing of cultural material. The potential was in the formation of an aesthetic that both engaged the audience and constituted an exercise in cultural-linguistic adaptation, that is: the work of integration.
Kurban, Representing Turkish Women, and Western Belonging
The three original children’s plays were the high point of the Ensemble’s attempts to create theatre that provided multicultural public pedagogy, introduced German
94 This seems to be in reference to the internal jokes between party participants in the play.
88 audiences to Turkish culture, and attempted to preserve the “homeland culture” of Turkish
children growing up in West Germany. The plays offered different elements of culture: an
introduction to the language, custom and tradition (such as the circumcision party), popular
folk narratives (from Keloğlan to Karagöz) and traditional artistic practices. The next and last set of productions I analyze were, like Keşanlı, productions of a canonical Turkish play, Kurban by Güngör Dilmen. A social critique of patriarchal tradition in Turkey, the play was especially successful in West Germany because it confirmed what was already one of the central ways in which Turkish cultural difference was understood: as marked by patriarchal and violent gender relations. Despite the fact that the play displayed how
Turkish cultural production was interrogating and challenging oppressive gender relations, the productions functioned (for Germans) as proof of the Turks’ failure to adjust to German modernity.
Kurban was not the first time that the Turkish Ensemble addressed gender relations.
Already in the early productions Turkenprojekt and Giden, women and their place in society and in relation to migration were themes of interest. I have already discussed the scene from the unused scripts of the Turkenprojekt, where two young second generation women, Turkish and Yugoslav, debate interaction with men at a party. The scene pointed to changes in family authority structures, and adjustment to different norms of casual interaction between the sexes. Another example from the Turkenprojekt was the argument between Hanife and her father (Giden’s Ali), after he found evidence that she has been hiding part of her income from him. In the scene, the hiding of the money was a sign of independence generally and the breaking of her dependence on the father specifically.
When Ali accused Hanife of defiance she did not back down but reproached her father:
89 “Enough now, it’s my right.”95 Pointing out that she is working and earning more than her father further undermines his authority, challenging his ability to function as the primary
provider. The scene highlights how changes in employment relations, the change from economies that are based in familial structures (particularly in the village and agrarian production) to systems that are not (in the city and industrial production) are the catalyst of changes in gender relations and hierarchy.
On May 5th, 1982, Kurban – Das Opfer, which translates as both sacrifice and victim in Turkish and in German, premiered at the Berlin Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz,
the new Schaubühne theatre in Charlottenburg rather than Kreuzberg venue used by the
other Ensemble productions. Written in 1967, Kurban is a tragedy centered on the practice
of polygamy in an Anatolian village, using themes from Medea as the backbone of the
narrative, anchoring the critique of patriarchy and traditional family relations in rural
Turkey. The play is divided into three acts. In the first we are introduced to the main
characters Mahmut, a caring husband and father, and his wife Zehra, who is unable to fulfill
the needs of her husband due to illness. As a result, Mahmut falls in love with 15 year-old
Gülsüm, and decides to take her as his second wife. Zehra pleads with Mahmut not to bring
home a second wife, but he remains steadfast in his decision and demands that Zehra
prepare the house for Gülsüm’s arrival. In the second act, Zehra continues her attempts at
preventing the marriage, trying to ignore the effects of her illness and regain her husband’s
favors. Zehra’s efforts to change her husband’s mind initially succeed, but Mahmut has
another change of heart, and the act ends with the villagers and the husband turning on
Zehra for her refusal to accept the social convention, the right of the husband to take a
95 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 3330
90 second wife. The third act sees the culmination of the tragedy, when Zehra, in an act of
rebellion and refusal, murders her children and commits suicide. Mahmut, returning home
after the wedding, arrives too late to prevent the Medean horror.
The May 1982 production of the play at the Schaubühne saw the return of Beklan
Algan to Berlin after the failure of the Turkenprojekt. Ayla Algan played the main role of
Zehra. The production involved minimalistic stage design, using symbolic objects to
indicate the space. Taking on the tragic and Greek allusions, it used masks and dramatic costume to heighten visual effects throughout the play. Among the adult productions staged by the ensemble, Kurban’s 24-show run was its second longest, after the success of Giden in 1980, which had run for 36 shows.96 It must have come as a surprise to the Ensemble
when, in February 1983, the Stockholm-based Halk Oyuncuları (People’s Players) performed another production of Kurban as part of their six-month residency at the
Schaubühne. Halk was a Turkish political theatre ensemble composed primarily of political exiles, and its production of Kurban was directed by Tuncel Kurtiz, who had previously directed the Turkish ensemble production of Keşanlı. In their production Ayşe Emel
Mesci97 played Zehra. This quick succession of two productions of the same play begs the
question of what compelled the three institutions – the Turkish Ensemble, the Halk
Oyuncuları, and finally the Schaubühne – to perform it: what was the source of its attraction to them at this time?
Since the late 1970s, there had been a growing interest in questions of gender and the new migrants: what were the migrants’ gender and sexual norms, how were they
96 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 780 97 Mesci was also a famous theatre artist in Turkey. She went on to direct a production of Kurban herself that went to Avignon in 1992, and again to Ankara in 2008, a production that also toured Germany.
91 behaving in West Germany, and what was the place of women in the migration?
Progressive and leftist organizations shifted their attention towards the experiences of
women in migration.98 These were nuanced attempts, encouraging recognition of norms
and social structures in relation to women in Turkey and the change these undergo in the
process of migration. In the early 1980s, however, the discourse surrounding Turks and gender relations underwent significant changes, “as conservative critics raised doubts about the viability of integration, public debate about migrant gender relations took on a new centrality and form.”99 Instead of nuanced investigation, the new discourse focused on
“the ‘oppression’ and ‘victimization’ of migrant women [that] now served as evidence for
an unbridgeable chasm separating guest workers and Germans.”100
As evidenced in the critical analyses of Sieg, Chin, and Mandel, Kurban was staged
in a context of gender relations functioning as the litmus test, as Chin described it,101 of foreigner integration in West Germany and as the key to defining Turkish cultural difference—then as today. Sieg discusses the portrayal of violent norms of young migrant men’s engagement with women in Germany,(Sieg 2011) while Chin focuses on the
representation of Turkish familial relations in West Germany, what elements of oppression
and subjugation of women persist, and which change in the new space. Lastly, Mandel shows how the debates surrounding headscarf wearing and public modesty are the
symbolic issues through which German, and more broadly European, politics index the
Turkish-Muslim failure of assimilation.(Mandel 1989) All three scholars show how theatre,
film, and other cultural products reproduce these as issues of incommensurability,
98 Chin, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany, p. 162. 99 Ibid. 142. 100 Ibid. 143. 101 Ibid. 162.
92 functioning as social mechanisms that make cultural difference visible and recognizable.
Chin notes that even if the media representation itself is complex and non-essentializing, within the broader discursive context that has developed since the late 1970, these representations also contribute to the perception of Turks as absolutely foreign.102
Particularly important to my argument here, by linking Turkish gender norms to traditional,
conservative, and more specifically, Muslim practices “prevalent” in Turkey, such cultural
products reinforce perceptions of Turkish gender relations as non-modern and temporally
behind enlightened Western culture.
In this critical context, Kurban garnered such special interest because it articulated
the Turkish heritage roots of customs that are deemed archaic and repressive towards women. It pointed to Turkey as the origin of the practices under the spotlight in West
Germany. Although mainstream conservative voices (mostly) avoid explicitly essentialist grounding of the argument of Turkish-Muslim failure to assimilate into German and
European society, they nevertheless rely on an image of an origin of Turkish-Muslim otherness, an image of immutable ‘cultural origin’ determining the possibility of integration and change in Germany. They rely on the ability to communicate ideas regarding the gender norms in Turkey, and Kurban proves a particularly fitting play to do exactly that.
This confirmatory function of the representation of patriarchy in Turkey is made all the more powerful because the production was staged by Turkish actors and directors. In her chapter on documentary theatre practices of Turkish migrant performances in Berlin,
102 (Chin 2007) P. 143
93 Sieg articulates how gender relations are especially useful as “scenarios of differences
between self and Other [that] have historically typified ethnonationalist constructions of
German identity”.103 Although this is not the argument that Sieg makes, the examples she
gives use Turkish actors in the performance of violent, Muslim, immigrant masculinity.
The use of real Turks functions as an aesthetic of ‘transparent representation,’ a key
strategy in normalizing, popularizing, and legitimizing scenarios of difference, whereby
the use of real Turkish actors lends rhetorical strength to the scene of difference. The
aesthetic becomes all the more powerful when the representation is not only performed by
Turks, but it is in fact a Turkish play, a double authentication of its representative truth.
Thus, Kurban lent its authenticity as a Turkish piece performed by Turkish theatre troupe, to legitimate the key scenario of Turkish difference premised on violent Turkish patriarchy.
Although focused on a critique of polygamy, as a specific and limited social practice, the play seems to encourage wider interpretation, as the practice comes to stand in for Turkish gender relations. This is achieved through repeatedly referring to the expanded spatial scope and temporal scope of the practice. For example, towards the end of the second act, after Mahmut returned to his decision to marry Gülsüm, Zehra is asked by a member of the chorus of village women, “in thousands of Karacäorens, thousands of women have this written on their foreheads. Are you going to change it?”104 Karacäoren is
the name of the village in which the events take place, but it also functions as a general
form in two ways. First, the name is not distinctive, and there is more than one village in
103 (Sieg 2011) P. 168; A similar quote is found in Chin as well, who states how “a revived national identity needed historical narratives capable of inspiring pride, but also required a reassertion of borders and clear definitions of cultural membership.” [my emphasis - MH] (Chin 2007) P. 157 104 All citations from the text are from: Robson, Bruce (1970) The development of the Turkish drama as a vehicle for social and political comment in the post-revolutionary period, 1924 to the present, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/10239/: 87
94 Turkey with this name. Second, and importantly, the usage “thousands of Karacäorens”,
suggests the non-specificity of the locale to the practice of polygamy. This is not a private
matter, nor a singular event, but the fate of Turkish women, and a defining and damning
one at that. The use of the idiom “written on their forehead,” which mean their fate in
Turkish, emphasizes this. This spatial expansion of the particular is repeated, and
supplemented with temporal expansion, when Halime, a village woman, sympathizes with
Zehra and her pain, telling the rest of the village condemning Zehra that “the scream, which
has for thousands of years choked up the heart of the Anatolian woman might ring forth
out of your heart.”105 The village has become Anatolia, and the event has become a tragedy with no beginning, stretching back into history.
Furthermore, in the play, polygamy functions as a vehicle to discuss wider questions of Turkish patriarchy and the subjugation of women in the family. In his analysis of the play, Robson (1970) highlights how Mahmut’s erratic reversals reveal Zehra’s powerlessness, her precarity as a woman delivered to the whims of her husband. It is not the personal betrayal that is at stake for Zehra: the second marriage is a threat to her and her children’s place, and their right to the family land. The patriarchal social relation, in which Zehra is subject to the fleeting will of her husband, challenges her (and her children’s) place in the household, and no less importantly beyond the family, their place in the village. This is a major break from Medea, where the main issue is that of personal betrayal, and the loss of love. This, Dilmen transformed into a question of social standing in Kurban.
105 Ibid. 88
95 The temporal and spatial expansion of the problem, and the way in which the play
touches not only on the practice of polygamy but also on broader frameworks of gender
relations in Turkey, within and beyond the family, transform it into a challenge to Turkish
modernity. The play sets up a contrast with Western enlightenment and modernity, where
women’s liberation is an important symbol of liberal achievement. The slow struggle for women’s liberation, rights, and equality, although still ongoing in important ways, have become defining features of Western democratic identity. The play emphasizes the timelessness of the issues it addresses, the antiquated nature of the social norms, and thus identifies Turkey with non-modernity. When performed in Turkey, the play presents an argument to transform elements of society so that they fit better into the modern state. In
West Germany, however, the depiction of Turkish non-modern gender relations functions
as a mark of difference. Offering the cultural origins of Turkish patriarchy, these feed into
the “recurring trope of the imprisoned, imperiled Turkish woman [in West Germany].”106
This representation posits the Turkish foreigner as alien to the (imagined) reality of
women’s freedom and safety from misogyny and patriarchal institutions, are part and
parcel of the construction of a German identity, defined through the boundary set from the
Turkish Other.
Reviewers saw the productions as evidence of oppressive Turkish gender relations,
showing what the productions made intelligible to the German public. For example, a
review of the Halk production in Die Tageszeitung succinctly describes “Kurban, which deals with the miserable role of women in Turkish society”.107 The review generalizes the
106 (Chin 2007) P. 162 107 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 1311; The children would be there, presumably, for the performance of the Sakara, a children’s play that was the Halk Oyunculari’s second production at the Schaubühne.
96 particular issue of the second wife, which is not explicitly mentioned, to the “miserable
role” of women in Turkey. The choice of Turkish society over Turkey is also indicative of the review’s spatial expansion of the scope of its remarks to “Turkish society” outside of
Turkey as well. A Zitty review similarly highlights that the Turkish Ensemble’s Kurban engages “these questions [Themas] that still determine the attitude of man to woman in many of the regions and cities of Turkey.”108 The article picks up on the double axis of the
play’s critique. Through insistence on the cities and regions, it conveys the spatial spread,
and how the play reveals the truth of Turkey writ large, whereas the use of “still” hints at
the temporal expansion: the play is dealing with a relic of the past that refuses to disappear.
But the article’s reference to both “regions” (read, the non-urban) and cities does more.
There is an important and implicit analytical link of spatial regimes (urban and village) and
temporal ones (modernity and non-modernity). We already saw this in Giden with the first migration from the village to city there. By extending the criticism from the village to the city the review bridges the spatial and the temporal separation regimes. From the German perspective, it would seem, there is no distinction between urban and rural, there is one
Turkish space. Turkey is stuck between two historical periods, haunted by a legacy that stretched into its prehistory.109
The Zitty review also discusses the play as magical realism, with its scenes
“follow[ing] those archaic-matriarchal traces that are still effective in Turkey.” Here, we
see how aesthetic choices, which leave the impression of magical realism, are understood
108 AdK listing: Berlin Schaubühne 967 109 Chin notes how accounts “looked at Turkey, and especially to the social customs of the village, to diagnose the problems migrant women faced in Germany.” (164) This makes sense given the primary hold of the “double migration male guest worker” image of Turkish migration to West Germany. At the same time, we see here how the particularity of the image came to be perceived as much more encompassing, the village becoming a synecdoche for Turkey in general.
97 by the critic to refer to the play’s presumably “archaic” content, surprisingly described as
matriarchal in this instance. The use of traces seem to be the double bind, how what
practices belonging to another era haunt the contemporary, marking that Turkey is in fact
still entrenched in pre-modern time. The description of the production as ‘magical realism’
is indicative of the suture that the review attempts to make between the play’s
representation and the real Turkey the review imagines. The description of the production
as magical realism does not fit: there are no obvious ‘magical’ elements in the play (apart
from a premonition-like dream). The use of masks, chorus, heightened language, are all
indicative of non-realism dramaturgy. Rather than an morality allegory, the review is bent on the play as a simple reflection of the real Turkey. “Magical realism” is then a rhetorical
device, supporting reading the production as evidence of pre-political reality of Turkey,
rather than a contemporary feminist critique.
The reviews show the power of the aesthetic of transparent representation, and how
the fact of Turks making the performance authorized the imagination of Turkish cultural
difference. The Tageszeitung review describes how “one senses that the concern of the
characters is a personal one, that the author and the performer [of Zehra] form a unit of thought [eine gedankliche Einheit bilden], that they fight with the means at their disposal: the theater.” The strong effect of matching of role and performer is evident here, as it allows, if not encourages, the audience to assume the reflection of the reality of the issue
(Turkish patriarchy) as an object of concern for the (real, Turkish) actor. The insistence on
“the means at their disposal” also gestures at a lack of agency indicative of West-German perceptions of Turkish non-democracy. In the context of the early 1980s and the immediate aftermath of the military coup, when democratic practices were indeed curtailed, this
98 resonated all the more. In the absence of democratic rights of voting, protest, social- political organization, the (activist) performer must engage violent Turkish masculinity through the limited space available to them: the theatre. The need of Turks to use theatre
as a mode of redress (unlike any political or topical theatre European theatre, where it was
another possible engagement with the public sphere) seems like another sign of
fundamental foreignness.
The reviews not only show us how the productions make Turkey intelligible, but
also the way the productions were used to see and understand Turks in West Germany. The
Tageszeitung review offered an image of the “slightly confused hallways” of the KuDamm
hall as Turkish boys in sneakers and girls in “Sunday dresses” run through them. The image
of the Turkish children running through the hallowed halls of the Schaubühne is significant:
While not admonishing the newcomers for ill-behavior, it clearly pointed to how foreign
Turks were in the setting. The Zitty article’s statement is worth quoting at length:
Whether Turkish compatriots [Landsleute][of the performers] attend the staging that is rooted in their attitudes with patriarchal traditions [ihrer Haltung mit den Patriarchalischen Traditionen] may be doubted. For that, the troupe had to go to Kreuzberg. So it is to be feared that the enlightening [aufklarische] value is limited only to the public that has overcome the inhibition threshold of the Schaubühne hall and thus has made an adjustment that is still far off for many Turks. This is perhaps the starkest in proposition of cultural difference as the contemporary border between Germans and Turks. First, it defines the German Turks as compatriots of the performers (who were visiting artists, not migrants) and defines the group as rooted in patriarchal traditions. Second, it displays a spatial definition of difference, as the
congregation/segregation of Turks in “Turkish” neighborhoods and their unwillingness
(“inhibition threshold”) to cross the border. The article then proposes, via negation, that
the production may have enlightened its Turkish audience. By explicitly using the adjective
99 “enlightening” (an unusual form of the German noun Aufklärung) the article points to the
way in which cultural difference is associated with an epochal divide. Un-enlightened
Turks are kept in what Kant (in-)famously described in his discussion of Enlightenment as
“self-imposed nonage” or immaturity.110 The review extends this beyond the Turkish
“regions and cities” to the population of Turks living in West Germany, who are still suffering from the same un-enlightened non-modernity.
This paragraph is dizzying. Working backwards, the ability to “overcome the inhibition threshold” and going to the theatre is presented as a marker of the successful
“adjustment that is still far off for many Turks.” This is a clear invocation of the debates over the failures of integration policy, and the perceived failure of Turks to adjust to the cultural reality of West Germany. In a vicious cycle, it is precisely this maladjustment that
denies Turks their own potential enlightening, that prevents Turks from going to the theatre
to better themselves. This is perhaps the final irony of the logic of multicultural public
pedagogy. The Turkish migrant is expected to, and could, learn about their own deficiency
from exposure to Turkish cultural production, theatre that would educate them about
themselves. But it’s precisely their failure of integration that (those already assuming
incommensurability imagine) keeps them in non-modernity and therefore in incommensurability with German society. This was already known regardless of who was coming to the performance, because within the existing framing of multiculturalism and
Turkish cultural difference, the performance was showing to Germans how Turks were and will remain a foreign Other.
110 Kant, Immanuel, and Allen W. Wood. "An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (1784)." Practical Philosophy. Ed. Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 11-22.
100 It is fitting to end this chapter with the exploration of a different possibility, with a
discussion of how else the performance of Kurban could have been received. If this
discussion has focused on the reception of the performances as examples of ethno-national
difference, reviewers could have alternatively found them to be instances of multicultural
theatre that showed cultural affinities, lines of artistic cross-pollination, and similar
trajectories of the modern struggle for women’s emancipation. Far from being a confession of non-modernity, the play lays claim to Western-ness and to modernity. The play was an
example of the ongoing struggle to uproot archaic traditions, a process of removing from
the modern republic the vestiges of a non-modern past. The play displays the ability to
subject the self to criticism by recognizing the traces of tradition that still need to be
reformed. Returning to Kant, in this, the play is precisely the sign of modern subjectivity.
Rather than casting light on a clear divide between the local-Western and the foreign-
Turkish, the play showcases the (modern) inclination to work-through (in art) problems
that continue to demand social self-criticism.
Such interpretation would focus on the play as an adaptation of Medea, and as an
artistic investigation of links between Western tragedy and Turkish theatrical practices.
Dilmen’s decision to evoke Euripides’s Medea shows the entanglement of the cultural
heritages, as they defy the expectation of insular “wholes.” Such a reading would have
been a particularly strong interpretation given the art historical context, and could easily
put the productions in conversation with the work being done at the Schaubühne. During
the 1970s and 80s Peter Stein staged two of his most acclaimed works, Antikenprojekt I &
II (1974 & 1980) that were adaptations of Greek tragedy. Moreover, he had become known
for his adaptations of classical texts, from Peer Gynt (1971) to As you like it (1977).
101 Addressed through the prism of modern and post-modern claiming and adaptation of the
classics, reviewers would have described to the public the production of Kurban as related
to and connected to the work being done in West Germany: the absolute opposite of the
Zitty review of Keshanli that contrasted between Schaubühne, elitist and experimental, and
Turkish theatre, traditional and folk-theatre.
In a wider Western/European context, these were the early years of what we call today intercultural performance, when Western theatre makers (such as Peter Brook and
Eugenio Barba) were turning to non-Western performance texts and practices as sources
of inspiration (or appropriation). This is particularly evident with the work of the Halk
Oyuncuları. Returning to the interview with Ayşe Emel Mesci, she explained that: “what
we tried to do was to start with the recognition that the West is stuck and to orient ourselves
to the unique existence of the East.” This move, turning to non-Western theatre traditions
in order to overcome an impasse in contemporary Western culture is shared with the
Western avant-garde. Only a few years later, in 1985, Tuncel Kurtiz, the director of the
Halk Oyuncuları production, would participate in Peter Brook’s famous (and infamous)
production of Mahabharata, perhaps the most iconic of the intercultural productions of the
period. Although Eurocentric and privileging association with Western art and
performance, such an articulation would have been a far cry from Othering that actually
took place. It is worth speculating if this orientation towards theatrical innovation in the
West through research and use of Eastern practices was why the Halk Oyuncuları
production was invited to the Schaubühne, namely, because it corresponded to Stein’s
interests and the wider trends in experimental theatre. Regardless, it went by unnoticed by
reviews.
102 Given this background, the absence of any discussion of the productions in these
terms in the reviews is remarkable. This is perhaps the final example of the ways in which
reception in the public sphere was shaped by the frames of reference that were dominant.
Given the social reality and the political tensions around the foreigner-problem that marked
the early 1980s in Germany, critics narrowly approached the productions as evidence of
the violence of Turkish patriarchy, and its stuck-ness in non-modern social relations. They
engaged this theme as endemic to Turkey as a whole and discussed the productions as
showcases of the absolute foreignness of Turkish culture to German norms and society.
Linking this perspective to the idea of Enlightenment, the critical reception highlighted
Turkish culture as not only different but also stagnated in a bygone developmental moment.
This was then linked back as evidence for the failed (or even impossible) integration of
Turks, and to the actual and insurmountable boundary between German and Turkish cultures. In this way, Turkish cultural difference, as seen through the lens of gender relations, was presented as what causes the failure of Turkish ‘adjustment’ or integration: the Turks’ inability to cross the border to Germany.
103 CHAPTER II: Transit Europa and the Historiographic Border
Introduction in Seghers the great decision to stay, the journey into the land instead of the uncertain sea, belonging of the group [mannshcaft] of the continent. That was, in the war, the solid, antifascist agenda of this author, who found her people again in the onset of the resistance of the people. Volker Braun, journal entry, April 11, 1985.
This extract form Volker Braun’s journal was part of the program distributed to audiences
arriving to see the first full production of Braun’s play Transit Europa, at the Gorki Theatre
in East Berlin, in December 1989. Written in 1985, at the same time as he was working on
the play, the extract helps explain Braun’s choice to adapt Anna Seghers’ novel Transit
into a play. The early 1980s was a time of growing disillusionment, in general and for
Braun, with the intransigence of the East German state, the loss of hope and a sense of
abandonment over fellow Marxist intellectuals who were going into exile in the West. In
this context, Braun needed material to articulate the potential still existing in the socialist project. In the above quote I find a compressed form of the central theme that runs through this chapter: Transit Europa as an attempt to appropriate and redeploy a concept of antifascism.
Using antifascism in this way, Braun challenged the central doctrine of East
German identity. Antifascism defined and differentiated East Germany both from its predecessor, the Third Reich, and from its Western Other. The concept of antifascism functioned as a boundary, delineating both the history and the space of the East German state. Braun did not do away with antifascism, but instead used it to demand ongoing criticism and self-reflection of the socialist project. He attempted to rework what the new limits or the new borders of the socialist project should be. This demanded transgressing
104 the current boundaries articulated by state socialism, but not crossing them, that is not
leaving the socialist project. It asked for staying as an act of resistance.
In order to do this, we need to have an idea of what the play Transit Europa is.
Broadly, the narrative revolves around three main characters: Seidel, Sophie, and the
doctor. All three are Germans, who arrived in Marseille in 1941 in hopes of getting onto a
ship to flee Europe. The dramatic action of the play is driven by two forces. The first is
Seidel’s love for Sophie, his need to decide between helping her and the doctor leave together or keeping Sophie to stay with him. The second is Seidel’s misrecognition as
Weiler, Sophie’s dead husband, who has a visa to Mexico. Eventually, Sophie and the doctor board the Montreal, a ship fated to drown along with the refugees on board. Seidel, on the other hand, joins the French resistance, but he is caught after an attack on a cargo train of munitions.
Importantly, however, very little of this is ever made explicit in the play, which is not plot driven, but rather much more expressionistic. The play opens with a prelude, a long piece of unattributed text, which mentions the sinking of the Montreal, but is otherwise made out of a tangle of reflections and intertextual allusions. The play’s dramatic action begins with Seidel arriving at a hotel in Marseille and receiving the room of a man who recently committed suicide, Weiler. The doctor and an unconscious Sophie arrive next, and Seidel helps revive Sophie and allows them to his room. In the second scene, the
Mexican consul appears in Seidel’s room, misrecognizing him as Weiler, who has a visa to Mexico waiting for him—as an antifascist journalist, Weiler’s journey was taken care of by comrades. In the third scene, the doctor returns to the hotel after being denied from boarding a ship to Mexico due to a misrecognition: he shares a name with a man who tried
105 to illegally cross a border. We also learn that Sophie is searching for her husband, Weiler, not knowing that he is dead. She needs to convince him to obtain a visa for her so that she can leave for Mexico with the doctor. Seidel promises that he will help Sophie get the visa from Weiler.
The next scene is an investigation of Seidel by two characters only described as oilskins, the coat worn by sailors to repel water. They also mistake him for Weidler. It is not clear who they are or what their intentions are, but they almost amputate his leg because unspecified “friends” gave them a description of Weiler as having only one leg. They tell
Seidel that there are arrangements to get him on a ship to Oran (a port-town in Algeria).
However, Seidel passes this chance to leave to the doctor, hoping to keep Sophie alone with himself. He has a long conversation with Sophie about Weiler, struggling to convince her that its useless to try to find him. When finally Sophie seems to understand Seidel is staying for her, the moment is lost once more, and she too mistakes him for Weiler. The doctor returns: he was caught hiding on the ship to Oran when someone informed the authorities.
An interlude, one of two in the play, then interrupts the action. Called The
Excursion of the Dead, the interlude is named after Anna Seghers’ short novella of a similar name. The interlude begins with the experiences of the protagonist of Seghers’ novel: from his escape from a German prisoners camp to his arrival in Marseille in hopes of finding a ship leaving Europe. But like the prologue, the interlude turns into fragmented reflection.
Here the main themes are hope, security, and Utopia. It asks for an Operetta of Might between Hitler and Stalin, which the cast is forced to watch by a policeman. The text is
106 full of intertextual allusions, including a long, reformulated, version of an allegory by
Kafka and an unedited excerpt from Peter Weiss’s Aesthetics of Resistance.
Following the interlude, Seidel and the doctor have a conversation that continues themes from Seidel’s conversation with Sophie, about meaning and goals. Wirtin, the hotel owner, unsuccessfully tries to get Seidel arrested. A Jew is brought into the hotel by two dustcoats, seemingly versions of the earlier oilcoats. Seidel tries half-heartedly to convince
Sophie not to go with the doctor, but she is convinced that Weiler will be on the ship, and she is unwilling to listen to the truth that he is dead and that Seidel has been mistaken for him all this time.
The second interlude follows. This one is called The Innermost Africa, which is a reference to the name of a long poem by Volker Braun. The text describes Braun’s image of the political moment of Europe: a bleak picture of a wasteland transformed by mass industrialization. It proclaims a new alliance of the oppressed in the face of the forces of war and industrialization.
In the final section of the play, Seidel describes an attack on a munitions transport.
He is stopped by mudcoats (the third version of the oilskins) and discovers he has lost a leg. The final scene is between Sophie and the doctor, narrating their experiences on the ship Montreal, and about Weiler not coming.
Having attempted, to the best of my ability, to give an idea of the play, I go into it in further depth in different parts of this chapter. The first one is theoretical-historical, and analyzes the myth of antifascism and its embodiment in the Berlin Wall. I show how the dramaturgy Braun used in Transit Europa criticizes this myth of antifascism and offers a
107 new antifascist agenda. In the second part, I turn to the changes East Germany was
undergoing in the late 1970s and early 1980s in order to connect this new antifascist agenda
with Braun’s interest in a novel dealing with refugees trying to flee from Europe in 1941.
In the third part, I look at the history of the Peaceful Revolution of 1989 and the dynamic
between a deepening “Refugee Crisis” and the demands for reform. Proceeding in this
manner, I contextualize and explain the hope that the production embodied for the potential of the socialist project, at a time when East Germany was going through immense political turmoil.
In the first part, I work through the role of the East German myth of antifascism as a state-legitimizing historiography. I show how this idea of antifascism was central to East
German identity, contrasting it to its other: imperialist West Germany. This border articulation was made concrete in what was known in East Germany as the Antifascist
Defense Rampart, which we know as the Berlin Wall. Braun, I argue, undermines this historiography through the dramaturgy of Transit Europa, rejecting the statist articulation of the antifascist myth. To do this, he activates Walter Benjamin’s critique of progress and of Rankean historiography (history as the telling of things “as they were,” in the service of the status-quo). I end this first part with the direction Braun proposed for critical socialist and antifascist action, against the “megamachine” of industrialization and war.
This connection with Benjamin is not random— his echoes are heard throughout
Transit Europa, producing an almost ghostly presence. The whole dramatic setting, of the leftist intellectuals-turned-refugees trying to leave Europe experienced by Seghers, was also Benjamin’s experience. In fact, Benjamin makes an appearance in Seghers’ novel, when her un-named narrator overhears a conversation about a man who shot himself in
108 Portbou upon hearing that he was going to be deported back to France. In the play, the most direct allusion to Benjamin is in Scene III, when the doctor is denied passage on a ship because he is confused with someone else. All the doctor knows is that this person tried to escape from France into Spain across the Pyrenees. This is an almost eulogistic reference to Benjamin’s death, adding to the web of misrecognition in the play.
In the second part, I pick up on where the first part ended, the new horizons of politics that Braun proposes. I turn to the late 1970s and the early 1980s, to discuss the connection between the politics proposed by Braun and the emerging political movements of the time: the environmentalist and peace movements. However, the main question I address in this part is why Braun turned to this novel, about refugees trying to flee Europe, in order to make his intervention? This is the importance of the link between staying and antifascism that Braun found in Seghers’ novel and reported on in his journal entry. Writing at a time of a refugee crisis and Marxist exodus, Seghers’ novel offered Braun a way to convert the problem of border crossing to articulate the pressing need not to leave, to stay, and to imagine a new antifascist hope in a socialist project that might be divorced from the
State’s commitment to destructive industrial progress.
In the final part I turn to 1989, and the production of the play at the Gorki Theater.
At this time of upheaval, the play presented an appeal for reform of the Actually Existing
Socialist State, which had lost sight of the utopian goal of socialism. To do this I contextualize the production by analyzing the Peaceful Revolution of 1989, and the dynamics between reform movements demanding changes in the SED regime, and emigrationists fighting for the right to exit the state. I also show the role taken by the remaining intelligentsia, from Braun to Christa Wolf, when the crisis was coming to a head:
109 they recognized the emerging threat to the socialist project, and appealed to the people of
East Germany to stay with them. In this context, the play becomes another attempt to make
East Germans believe in the potential still existing in the Socialist project; the play exhorts
its audience to take responsibility not only for the removal of existing State socialism, but
for critically imagining what might follow it. I analyze the production and the ways in
which Rolf Winkelgrund, the director, and Sylvia Marquardt, the dramaturg, attempted to
help their audiences understand this call of Braun’s play.
East German State Historiography, and the Antifascist Defense Rampart
Western scholars have often construed the role of the antifascist narrative in the
GDR as mere ideology, empty rhetoric used by a totalitarian state to justify its existence while obfuscating the similarity, continuity or essential sameness of the fascist and socialist
regimes.1 Such historiography sees both Nazi and socialist regimes as deviations from a
German nation-state history, disavowing them as blips in the narrative of development of
a Western, capitalist, liberal-democratic modernity of which the contemporary German state is the culmination. Nazism and socialism illustrate the real danger of stepping out of the narrative— this is what happens when the state drifts away from its route towards liberal-democracy. Perhaps the GDR was not fascist, this narrative states, but in relation to
1 Jarausch argues that “A largely self-inflicted stereotype, prevalent in the West, renders an assessment of the accomplishments of antifascist historiography difficult. The ideological partisanship of East German authors made it appear as if the role of research were confirmatory, illustrating preconceptions rather than challenging them. The public pedagogical stance of GDR colleagues in building socialist consciousness sometimes seemed to produce statements verging on outright propaganda.” Jarausch, Konrad H. "The failure of East German antifascism: some ironies of history as politics." German Studies Review 14.1 (1991): 85-102. For further discussion: Diner, Dan, and Christian Gundermann. "On the ideology of Antifascism." New German Critique 67 (1996): 123-132. McLellan, Josie. Antifascism and Memory in East Germany: Remembering the International Brigades 1945-1989. Oxford University Press on Demand, 2004.
110 liberalism, it shared fascism’s totalitarian tendencies and closely resembled it. The GDR’s
use of antifascism was sinister, in that it served to obfuscate this similarity.
To understand the importance of the antifascist narrative to the GDR, rather than
dismissing it as a public lie, we need to attend to two related and deep-seated concepts in the dominant historiography of national-political development in Germany. These concepts are: the country’s Sonderweg, its special path, and Deutsche Misère, German misery. Both relay the deep ambivalence of Germany’s “coming to modernity,” the perennial non- synchronicity of German history.(Renaud 2016) Germany, the Heimat or homeland of
Enlightenment political philosophy (in Kant and in Hegel), obstinately refused to follow the path of proper historical progress, failing again and again to progress through the stages its idealist thinkers perfected.
Deutsche Misère is shorthand for the “chronic tendency of Germans to side with the reactionary status quo, rather than seek human liberation.”(Vazsonyi 1997) Engels first
used the term in an essay on a book by Karl Grün, articulating the Marxian
conceptualization of Germany’s failure to actualize a bourgeois revolution because it was
mired in parochialism and submissiveness. Germany’s Misère is being stuck in pre-modern social relations. Used by others after Engels, the concept Deutsche Misère maintained a critical function for Marxist thinkers, from Brecht to Georg Lukács.2
The second concept, Sonderweg, first appeared in the 19th century when German-
speaking historians used it to explain the illiberal forms of government (constitutional
monarchies) that still prevailed in German speaking territories. A celebratory term for the
2 See (Hammer 1976; White and White 2010)
111 perseverance of superior German social institutions (such as Kultur, statism, or the Prussian
ethic of service), Sonderweg was effectively the mirror image of Misère. It was the linchpin
of a historiography of nationalistic-exceptionalism that offered different historical reasons for German resistance to parliamentarism and democratic forms of liberal cosmopolitanism.
The Second World War discredited the concept of Sonderweg, as the horror of
Nazism made any celebratory account of German exceptionalism, particularly the superiority of its illiberal traditions, unpalatable. In the 1960s, critical West German historians repurposed Sonderweg to argue that Nazism was not a historical aberration. They argued that the rise of Nazism was the outcome of German historical institutions.
Importantly, this historiographic turn highlights how powerful pre-modern social formations (such elites as the civil service and Junkers, Prussia’s landed nobility) maintained much of their power and influence, creating the conditions for the rejection of the Weimar Republic’s parliamentarianism.3
We see in both the Sonderweg and the Deutsche Misère the themes of contradiction
(between idealist thought and actual developments) and failure (to actuate revolution or to develop liberal state institutions). They highlight the real difficulty in proposing historical roots for any political project in Germany following the Second World War. Consequently, neither West nor East Germany could claim continuation of a historical project. And yet, the two new German states had to integrate their citizenry both ideologically and
3 Kocka, Jürgen. "German history before Hitler: The debate about the German Sonderweg." Journal of Contemporary History 23.1 (1988): 3-16.
112 pragmatically into new political regimes, and to disavow the recent history of Nazism and
the war.
Discussing the role of myth in national history writing, Berger4 explains how in socialist countries revolutions assumed the role “regular” developmental narratives of nation-state building held in West European states. Instead of continuity, revolutionary
national-myth historiography focuses on a break with pre-existing institutions. However, the emerging East German state could not rely on either framework. Not only did the GDR have the Nazi regime as its predecessor, but there had been no socialist revolution when this regime fell: the state emerged as the result of Soviet occupation. Moreover, the emerging socialist state had to face the double destruction of the war: the physical and the ideological. The war and the division of Germany by the Allies5 left in their wake shreds
of a once-industrial-capitalist-society. The socialist state urgently had to rebuild. At the
same time it needed to create a new (proletarian) consciousness and to revolutionize a
society that had never revolted.
This brings us to the crux of the function of the antifascist state myth.6 It was in this quagmire of legitimation and the demands of the post-war rebuilding that East
Germany turned to and claimed German socialist revolutionaries and antifascists for its
4 Berger, Stefan. "On the role of myths and history in the construction of national identity in modern Europe." European History Quarterly 39.3 (2009): 490-502. 5 East Germany was in fact much more disastrously affected. 6 Jarausch (1991), discusses how GDR historians found a difference between early and late antifascism. The early years this was based on personal testimony and its communication in public memorials, and successfully lay the base for popular antifascist sentiments. It formed an “antifascist consensus [that] cut across class divisions and ideological lines and was remarkably successful in changing public rhetoric.” (p. 87) From the 1970s onwards historiography moved from this narrow focus on recent history antifascist resistance to Nazism, into a national-history of German antifascism (establishing continuity from the peasant war onwards). This both allowed the GDR to stake claim in German history and offer a narrative of necessary progress.
113 grounding. Even if no revolution had happened, east Germany still saw itself as the
culmination of the revolutionary tendencies of the German working class, over which, until
now, bourgeois and capitalist elites had ruled. In the wake of defeat in the war, the myth
of antifascism “located the GDR within a grand narrative of struggle and victory, placed
the citizens of East Germany on the side of the winners, and reunited, theoretically at least,
the German communists with their people.”(McLellan 2004) This served two functions: it
reframed the new state’s relation to the Nazi regime and staked a new East German identity.
Historians and the returning exiles (the new leadership of the East Germany’s
Socialist Unity Party, the SED) focused on the role of propaganda and violence in the Nazi
regime’s hold over the population. They focused on the Nazi’s pursuit of the support of
industrial capitalists, offering a picture of a regime that duped and terrorized the population.
Furthermore, the myth of antifascism charted a continuity between the popular socialist
parties and resistance of the first half of the 20th century, and the return of exiled resistance
after the Red Army defeat of Nazi oppression.
This narrative of liberation from Nazi oppression was at odds with much of the
population’s experience and memories of the immediate past.(Fulbrook and Port 2013)
However, its power lay precisely in how it exculpated the majority of (East) Germans from
responsibility for the horrors of the regime and the war. It oriented the population towards
participation in the building of the socialist society as redemption of their social-historical
role. Every citizen became an antifascist resistance warrior, finally able to build a state in
their own image. This tied the new state identity to an emancipatory process, the culmination of a struggle to free the people from a bourgeois regime.
114 The new antifascism found its other in West Germany: the continuation of the
imperialist, capitalist, and fascist Germany.7 But, the delineation of West Germany as the fascist Other was a particularly complicated task. It was essential for East German sovereignty: existence as a national-part broken away from the socialist state was a constant threat to its self-definition and integrity. The new state needed to convince its part of the
nation that their (former) fellow countrymen, families, language and cultural co-members,
were participants in what was in effect the continuation of the fascist-capitalist horror. This
was further complicated by the continuing quotidian, regular interaction between East and
West.
In this context of the need to define West Germany as the Other, it is not surprising that when East Germany erected the barrier in 1961 to “protect” the struggling state, the authorities called it the Antifascist Defense Rampart. This East German state conception of the Berlin Wall was maintained throughout its existence. For example, East German history textbooks in the late 1980s discussed the Antifascist Defense Rampart in the context
of “aggressive actions of Western imperialist circles”, and a plot to “end the German
Question” by taking over East Germany. They argued that the Wall ended the FRG’s
economic exploitation of the GDR.8 Similar sentiments were repeated by Honecker, the
secretary of the SED, during the celebrations of the 25 years of the Wall on August 13,
1986. He claimed that “Imperialism followed its illusory doctrine of rolling back socialism.
7 A fascinating example is the institutionalization of the Lukacsian distinction, opposing antifascist classical culture (humanist, enlightenment) on the one hand and bourgeois high modernism and mass culture (prevalent in West German culture). Ernst Bloch quipped that the state imposed “the dictatorship of petit-bourgeois taste in the name of the proletariat.” (quoted in: (Dale 2005)) 8 Fleming, Dan B., Arnold Schuetz, and William P. Yurochko. "The Berlin Wall in History Textbooks: Three National Perspectives: United States, West and East Germany." Internazionale Schulbuchforschung (1989): 165-181.
115 With NATO maneuvers, the aggression against the GDR was rehearsed, and the aim was
to violently change the status quo in Europe.” In this context, the Wall had taken “control
of the border, which has saved our people, has saved the peoples of Free Europe.”
In both of these examples the wall was presented as the bulwark protecting East
German existence, the central symbol of its triumph, separating it not from another
Germany, but from a pernicious and aggressive imperialist West. The border was the
materialization of the political project of the GDR—the antifascist narrative and myth of
the East German state. Figuring the political project of the GDR in contradistinction to that
of the FRG, the antifascist state vis-a-vis the capitalist-imperialist West, meant the articulation of the border between the two as the antifascist barrier.
This formulates the Wall as a construct of history-in-space. The historical narrative took physical form in the Wall, superimposing the transition from the time of National
Socialism to the time of the socialist state onto the geography of Europe. This relationship was a particular manifestation of the stagist temporality of Marxian historiography, in which historical progress is determinate movement towards the actualization of a future inherent in the reality of social relations. Revolution happens at the saturation point of inherent contradiction within the dominant organization of human relations around the means of production. This solved the evolutionary problem that Engels struggled with in
Misère: that in the absence of a bourgeois revolution, no proletarian revolution could ensue.
The statist historiography resolved the problem through reversal. The existence of a
socialist state in the wake (and alongside) the fascist state was evidence of the historical
change. This theoretical shortcut relied on the ability to maintain a contrast horizontally,
in relation to an existing fascism. Despite there being no popular revolution, the Wall was
116 not only a historical boundary, but a temporal break, the actual historical leap of revolution
made concrete. Historical relations overlaid spatial relations and gave shape to the existing state.
If the border separated different temporalities, each of those followed its own rhythms. GDR, making up for its destroyed industrial infrastructure, was governed by the logic of a constant catching-up. It was also engaged in a continuous process of education and culturalization, inculcating its citizens with socialist ideology and social formation (the state of permanent revolution). On the other side of the border, the FRG was, from the perspective of the GDR, in a state of suspended arrest, “waiting” for the imminent revolutionary moment when the contradictions of capitalism would bring about its collapse.(Marcuse 1985) The border then was a time-barrier, an enforced hiatus to “buy
time”,9 maintaining a space-time in which space could catch up with history. Braun staged his intervention against the logic of industrialization (that dominated all Soviet style socialist states), and demanded continual rapid expansion of industry, at the cost of the environment; and against the insistence on the dictatorship of the proletariat, the existing and atrophied socialist state apparatus, as the final and culminating stage of history. He
enlisted Benjamin’s critique of classic Marxist historiography to do so.
Benjamin’s and the of historiography
The Wall, the Antifascist Defense Rampart, embodied a deterministic
historiographic narrative that was the linchpin of East German identity. This identity focused on the role of resistance and the struggle against imperialism and capitalism, to be
9 Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (MIT Press, 2002).
117 transcended by a new political space: the socialist (antifascist) state. Braun’s Transit
Europa was a critical response to this historiography. On the one hand, the play
problematized history as a practice of narrative construction in the service of state-
stabilization. On the other, it challenged the form of (socialist) progress towards a
determined end, the historical justification of the contemporary as the necessary and
rational end of human emancipation. To stage this intervention, Braun turned to
Benjamin’s concept of jetztzeit as a positive historiographic practice that grew out of the
latter’s critique of progressivism and rejection of Rankean statist historiography. To
understand Braun’s dramaturgy as a critique of the myth of antifascism, this section will
elucidate Benjamin’s critique, and the explicit way in which Braun was inspired by
Benjamin’s materialist historiography.
Benjamin’s critique of the concept of progress targeted its determinism. Progress’s
determinism conflates natural evolution with historical (social, political) progress, marking the family resemblance of theories of progress and theories of social Darwinism. Benjamin asserted that the idea of evolution “popularized the notion that progress was automatic.”10
Although he stressed that this conflation of progress with evolution was specifically an
effect of bourgeois consciousness (a “bourgeois mental habit”11), revolutionary thought
was not safe from its contamination.
Benjamin criticized a Marxist perspective that confused development in the means of production with historical progress:
This vulgar-Marxist conception of the nature of labor scarcely considers the question of how its products could ever benefit the workers when they are beyond
10 (Benjamin 2003b) P. 476, N11a,1 11 Ibid. 460, (N2, 2)
118 the means of those workers. It recognizes only the progress in mastering nature.(Benjamin 2003a) Such Marxism erroneously understood the fact of advancement in technological capability,
in the productivity of industry, as progress in the human condition in toto. Vulgar
economistic Marxism rests on the distinction between the real and the apparent: despite an
appearance of social stagnation, the reality underlying the appearance is continual
progress.12 In other words, there was a lag in the historical process by which social relations come to match the material conditions they manifest. Benjamin pointed us towards the way this distinction between the real and the apparent atrophied in vulgar materialism. Thus, it lost sight of all but the project of mastering nature (materialistic technological progress).
Effectively, it lost the role of class antagonism for social change.
Benjamin understood this notion of progress, Marxist or otherwise, as a form of myth. When its scope became human history in general the notion of progress stopped describing the direction or meaning of particular change and historical events. “Instead [it] was required to measure the span between a legendary inception and a legendary end of history.”13 This is the logic whereby the residue of myth is embedded within the identity
of the modern. The same logic also informed Benjamin’s critique of deterministic (vulgar)
Marxism: Myth was the form of narration of temporality in which the contemporary end
(telos) was eternally prefigured in the moment of origin. Such a narrative reified history,
as the relation between labor (the actual happening, eventful and open) and product
(history) became fetishized.
12 (Marcuse 1985) p.23-24 13 (Benjamin 2003b) P. 478, (N13,1)
119 Benjamin argued for the need to reject a concept of revolutionary progress that
serves a productivist rationality:
Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train - namely, the human race - to activate the emergency brake. (2003, 402) Refuting the ways in which Marxian thought continued to affirm the trajectory of human history, Benjamin rearticulated critique as refusal. This refusal would be the repurposing of force towards halting temporality, thus resisting progress. Benjamin reconceptualized revolution from being the necessary progress of a prefigured history, to constituting a moment of immanent potentiality, precisely as brake on/break in the flow of things. We shall see that both the questioning of the myth of mastery of nature, and the “emergency
brake” as the corrective to a failure of critique in Marx, are at the very heart of Braun’s
Transit Europa.
Benjamin’s second, and related, avenue of criticism is Germany’s statist
historiographic tradition. This kind of historical writing hailed from von Ranke, the 19th
century Prussian court historian. Within Rankean historiography we find an articulation of
historical rigor or objectivism, coupled with a commitment to the affirmation of the state.
In both the Theses on History and Convolute N Benjamin asserted his break with history
as the recording or recapturing of that which was: “Articulating the past historically does
not mean recognizing it ‘the way it really was’.”(Benjamin 2003a) The formulation “the way it really was” points to Ranke’s famous claim to “show what actually happened” [wie es eigentlich gewesen].
120 Further developing his critique, Benjamin wrote: “The history that showed things
‘as they really were’ was the strongest narcotic of the century.”14 Here, “narcotic” functions both as a compulsion and as an anesthetic, as lure and as reifying mechanism. Such revealing of the “actual” is the idealist allure of objectivity. At the same time, it gestures to the inherent lie on which objective positivism builds: the disavowal of the productive activity of history writing. Occluded by the empiricism, this productive activity creates history in its commodity form. It detaches social relations from the processes of their production and naturalizes them. Such naturalization reifies the status quo.
This is the second level on which Benjamin launched his attack on this historiography: With whom does historicism actually sympathize? The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of prior conquerors. Hence, empathizing with the victor invariably benefits the current rulers.15 Underneath the claim of “impartial showing” is the implicit voice this history cements, that of the ruling power. Rankean historiography is highly conservative, resistant to revolutionary tendencies. It is committed to the perseverance of the state under the guise of objective and detached documenting.16 The fact of triumph is the ultimate legitimization:
might as a mark and measure of right.17 This brand of positivism in relation to history, both
as process (natural progress) and as current state (historical necessity), is the form of
rationalized complacency. The narrative it generates is a narcotic, the concrete affirmation
of non-ambivalent identity and the necessity (and truth) of reality.
14 (Benjamin 2003b) P. 463, (N3,4) 15 (Benjamin 2003a) p. 391, thesis VII 16 Berger articulates historians response to this moment of German Nationalism as: “Hence, historians were as keen as other participants in national identity discourses to anchor the present in a viable past, thereby guaranteeing the future of the nation.” (Berger 2009) 17 Ibid. p. 30: Berger notes how such thought might also be implied in Hegel and the belief in the identity of history and reason. Here the idea of cosmic repetition of the divine order as it manifests through the world is replaced with the Enlightenment idea that reason is the inherent logic of world and history.
121 I have shown how historiography of progress is determined by an orientation
towards a telos, and statist historiography by the justification of the status quo. Both rely
on the force of a narrative structure that projects the seeming inevitability of the present
(as the necessary result of the past) as a justified key to the future. Against this narrative
structure, Benjamin proposed a historiography that cut through the concept of progress,
and confronted the dominant idea of history with its denied underbelly: the elements of
myth within it.
Benjamin’s historical materialism exposes the contradiction(s) that positivist
rationality disavows. It turns its attention to what Benjamin describes as “flashes of
lightning”, that is frozen images of the past. These images expose in the past something
that seems foreign to it, at odds with the time—Benjamin famously was interested in the
Parisian Arcades as such an example, an image that captured something not-of-this-time in this epoch. These images show how the “semblance of the new is reflected, like one mirror in another, in the semblance of the ever recurrent.”18 Excavating such elements within the past shows how the rationality of its modernity fails, how within it something mythical remains. Where positivist and rational historiography saw progress and development, historical materialism showed the contradictory.
This exposure of the contradictions of time, which were disavowed as parts of the past because they contradicted its dominant articulation, in turn, destabilizes the contemporary. The flash of lightning of the excavated material puts a “relation between then and now into constellation.” If the pragmatic use of history stabilizes the status quo,
18 Ibid. P. 11
122 the assertion of the limits and contradictions unhinges what this history meant to naturalize: the order of the present. This happens both on the theoretical level (destabilizing the truth claim that rationalism depends on), and on the narrative level (showing the inconsistencies of the argument).
Benjamin’s critique of ideas of history and identity resonates particularly strongly when we return our attention to East Germany – the context of Braun’s writing. As a socialist state in the Soviet (Leninist-Stalinist) model, the proletarian dictatorship of the means of production (albeit by proxy through the vanguard party), regarded itself as the actual sublation (Aufhebung) of class contradiction.19 From the perspective of state theory,
this meant that any contradiction that might be experienced in the reality of the state was
meaningless in terms of Soviet materialism: The dictatorship of the proletariat nullified the
conditions for such contradiction between reality and appearance. Experience of social
antagonism, such as tension between managers and industrial workers, of favoritism and
formation of a new political elite were all nullified through this theoretical gymnastics of
“proletarian rule by proxy.”
The myth of antifascism, in the version that the Wall and secured, bore the marks
of the statist historiography that Benjamin criticized (precisely for its allegiance to power).
What might have been necessary to “buy time” as the Wall was erected, functioned to arrest change; and with it self-criticism. This is the narcotic function Benjamin pointed to. It
redrew the positivist historiographical narrative horizontally: where Rankean history showed things as they necessarily led to the contemporary, the Wall pointed at a
19 (Marcuse 1985)
123 contemporary and explained its necessary historicity. Classical positivism was replaced by
scientific materialism, the institutionalization of the Marxist idea of a science of political
economy.
Benjamin’s historiographic thought in Braun
In the Stalinist East German state we observe a particular manifestation of
Benjamin’s critique of vulgar Marxism, in which the theoretical articulation of progress
obfuscates actual relations and disallows critical engagement. This became increasingly
clear throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, as stagnation in terms of material
conditions and social and political relations grew ever more apparent. As I will go into
detail later, this included growing concern regarding environmental conditions and
political relations between East and West (in the shape of the peace movement).
Already in the VII Writers Congress of 1973, ten years before writing Transit
Europa, Braun used Benjamin to challenge the flattened articulation of history (and
progress) in GDR literature: “Historical consciousness is consciousness of self. The reality
in which we move is a working history [die arbeitende Geschichte]. What we call history
is in reality the object of a construction which is loaded with ‘jetztzeit’”.20 Braun begins with a statement regarding the force of the function of history in grounding a consciousness of identity. However, he contests “history as it was” with the concept of the working history— history put in relation to, and in dialectical tension with, the present. He highlights the constructed nature of history, how it is anticipated by the present from which
it is written. Furthermore, Braun uses the term jetztzeit, a concept Benjamin deployed in
20 Quoted in: (Bathrick 1995) P. 30
124 his theses on history to conceptualize how the contemporary enters into the historical in
order to make it (revolutionarily) significant for the present. This is how the contemporary
orients or turns us to history, which in turn returns to the present in revolutionary
form.(Benjamin 2003a) Given that official East German historiography, and particularly its
instrumental use of a myth of antifascism, were effectively an example of positivist
Rankean history, in highlighting the labor of materialist history and its revolutionary telos
Braun was asking for a critical alternative to official historiography.
In effect, in this talk, Braun offers a condensed version of the relations between
history, identity, and self that form the crux of the complex constellation he wrestles with
in Transit Europa. Braun found in Seghers’ Transit compelling material by means of which
to articulate a criticism of the statist historiography. Seghers’ own engagement with
questions of history showed affinity to a non-positivist understanding of history, viewing
it as critically engaged with the past in relation to the contemporary.(Fehervary 2001) At the
same time, she was an author who had decided to (seemingly) unambivalently attach
herself to actually existing socialism and the form it had taken in the GDR.21 Braun
refunctioned (to use a Brechtian term) Seghers’ material dealing with the Nazi past and the dilemma of flight-or-resistance into a play that challenged the contradictions he found in the East German state. Even more importantly, he could articulate the need to preserve hope in the socialist project despite disillusionment with its form in the GDR.
21 It is especially illuminating to look at the Janka show-trial of 1957. Walter Janka, the prominent editor of the Aufbau publishing house, was tried for colluding in a conspiracy to replace the SED leadership with none other than Georg Lukacs (the attempt was in fact only to get him out of Hungary and into the GDR, a plan for which they were seeking state approval). Seghers (who was close to both Janka and Lukacs), participated in organizing the attempt and was brought in as a prosecution witness; she sat in silence throughout the trial. Thomaneck notes that although she did not speak out against the corruption of state socialism, a posthumously published novella Der gerechte Richter shows her recognition of the injustice and an indictment of the state. See: (Thomaneck 1993)
125 Benjaminian Dramaturgy in Transit Europa
Braun’s interest in Jetztzeit and his critique of the function of statist historiography through a “working history” manifested powerfully in the dramaturgy of Transit Europa.
Astoundingly, this was completely missed by a review of the Gorki production in the Neues
Deutschland, which argued that Braun had failed to give good shape to Seghers’ antifascist narrative, and that he “would probably have done so if he had heeded Seghers' reference to her teachers Balzac and Racine and their sense of simple action.”22 Braun’s Benjaminian dramaturgy had a few pronounced features. First, it continually frustrated “simple action,” frustrated attempts to construct a clear narrative, and consequently caused what I call narrative vertigo. Second, it replaced rational and causal drives to action with confusion, and especially identity confusion. And third, it broke up the play with two lengthy interludes. After showing these dramaturgical practices, I will analyze parts of the play that are explicit critiques of the concept of progress and statist historiography. Finally, I will bring this first part to a close with a discussion of how Braun used these dramaturgical practices to engage directly with the question of borders.
Narrative vertigo brings together different practices, which complicate and undermine the formation of traditional narrative. The vertigo is created when the audience is allowed enough of a proposal of traditional temporality and causality, continuity of character, which Braun then undermines in different ways. The two major ways Braun undermines traditional narrative are temporal instability, and starting with narrative to then break it. Braun creates temporal instability by obfuscating the chronology of events, and
22 “Spiel zwischen Ausweglosigkeit und Neubeginn“, Neues Deutschland, 28. December 1989. Emphasis mine.
126 by putting the temporalities of death and life into counter-logical relations. Textually, for example, this manifests in complicated relation between tenses. Dramatically, even scenes that are not interludes appear as sudden interruptions, . Such interruptions, which insert moments that reflect allegorically on the action but displace that action from the stage, make it hard for the audience to develop a clear timeline of events. Allowing a semblance of narrative to build up, particularly in the early scenes, Braun then changes the rules, so to speak, staging less and less dramatic action around which to form a narrative timeline and more material that is confusing and unrelated to the narrative arch. Effectively, he follows a pseudo-narrative, where the reader/audience encounters some of the effects of actions happening off-stage but cannot be sure of what the narrative is, and is forced to struggle with untangling the meaning of seemingly irrelevant materials – from a discussion of Euripides’s Hippolytus to an account of the plague in Marseille.
The opening address, which is not attributed to any speaker and has no clear audience, sets up Transit Europa’s temporal potentialities:
I do not know if you can bear the truth, you are dead comrade, you cannot help yourself [or protect yourself] against the truth with a lie, you could not help yourself when you were alive.23 Here, there are two temporalities: life and death. In death, you cannot help yourself against the truth, which seems to be taken from the world of the living. In life, you are devoid of agency. What is death if it still needs to bear truth? Quickly the other side of the equation is upended as well: What is life if you could not help yourself? Connecting the two “sides” is the recounting of history, of what was. Moreover, depending on the temporality it
23 (Braun 2014) P. 177. All translations of the playtext are mine. „Ich weiß nicht, ob du die Wahrheit ertragen kannst, du bist tot, Kamarade, du kannst dir nicht helfen gegen die Wahrheit mit einer Lüge, du hast dir im Leben nicht helfen können“
127 addresses, history’s function changes: one cannot bear the truth, nor can one protect oneself
by means of a lie.
If that was not confusing enough, Braun reverses the temporal relations: “One is
not done with life, right [in German nicht wahr, literally: not true], comrade, when one is
dead.”24 This addition narratively connects the death that has happened (the death of the
addressed), to the one that is to come (the sinking of the ship). Both images are partial: The
life (of narrative, of history) is not finalized even after death. The interplay of tenses in
and between the lines is in fact between what has been (death), which ends or closes, and
the opening up of the boundaries which death sets. All this creates temporal instability. We
do not know what has happened, or what will happen, nor can we tell the meaning of what has already been. The future is both closed decisively by death and kept open by the assertion of death’s non-finality.
Over the next few scenes, Braun seemingly begins to build a recognizable narrative, especially for viewers with knowledge of Seghers’ novel, which he then abandons. In the first few scenes, there is a clear main character, an exposition of sorts, and an event that sets a dramatic trajectory in motion: Seidel arrived at the hotel, received Weiler’s room,
met the doctor and Sophie. The Mexican consul mistakenly identified him as Weiler. The
sequence is subsequently interrupted. The dramaturgy abandons any clear narrative. The
scenes become erratic, and it is unclear if they occur in the same space or even in the same
world or time. It is not clear whether they are real or hallucinated. In the absence of
24 Ibid. 177 ; “Man ist nicht fertig mit dem Leben, nicht wahr, Kamarade, wenn man tot ist”
128 identifiable cause and effect, the audience cannot place scenes within a narrative structure.
As the audience nevertheless frantically tries to do so, the effect is one of narrative vertigo.
Problematizing narrative structure in this way undermines the political claims that are made on positivist narrative, namely, traditional statist historiography. As I described earlier, such historiography relies on the power of causality that enforces a narrative structure. Remembering Braun’s comments on history at the 1973 writers’ conference, history here is precisely labor, a work of construction, full of Jetztzeit that forces it to function in relation to the contemporary. With a Brechtian impulse, Braun stages the labor of artistic production to critique the myth of antifascism instrumentalized to stabilize the state.
The second dramaturgical means Braun uses is the deployment of confusion of identity as a driver of the pseudo-narrative. If traditionally we expect causality to drive the drama forwards, here it is instead the breakdown of recognition and understanding that drives it. Although confusions of identity abound throughout the play, the key example is the same scene that had abruptly interrupted the narrative formation discussed above.
The scene of Seidel’s interrogation by the oilskins is central to understanding the interplay of identity, identification, and confusion. First there is an indeterminacy regarding the identity of the interrogators. They identify only as “representatives” [Beauftragte] who are acting under orders. After Seidel inquires further, they reply they are representatives of
“friends […] whom we do not ask about”.25 They also state that they are taking him on a
25 (Braun 2014) P. 187 ; “nach denen wir nicht fragen“; In the novel Weis’s friends had organized a visa for him in Mexico, as well as the travel fare.
129 ship to Oran.26 The scene allowed for two possible interpretations of the identity of the
oilskins: they are either members of the secret service, the menacing friends one does not
ask about, or, the insinuated friends are those who are trying to help Weiler escape Europe,
taking him on a ship to Oran on his way to Mexico. Despite Seidel’s insistence he is not
Weiler, the oilskins are not interested, until they realize that the person they were sent to
look for should only have one leg, and Seidel has both. It is only their inability to decide
which of the legs to remove to make him fit the description, that saves Seidel from physical
mutilation. Although Seidel denies being the person the oilskins were sent for, and even
though there is physical evidence of a mismatch between him and the description, he can
easily be made to fit the description, denying him sovereignty over his identity.
This theme of misrecognition repeats throughout the play again and again. It is the
reason the doctor is denied entry onto a boat in the very next scene, and the reason that
Sophie believes the Weiler is still alive. Effectively, it is the failure of identity, and not
character or character agency, that drives the narrative of the play. This is an effective
refutation of traditional narrative drama, surrendering the power of rational development
based on character and causality to the illogic of chance and error.
The third dramaturgical means Braun develops is the interlude. These allude to the
action of the book and focus on similar themes. However, they involve no dialog or
character. Rather, they are lengthy textual citations. Unlike the interruptions and jumps that
create narrative vertigo, in these interludes none of the characters of the play appear, and
there is no dramatic development or dialog, but instead direct address, literary fragment,
26 Oran is a port city in Algeria. In the novel most ships that the refugees attempt to get onto do not sail directly to South-America, Mexico, or the United States, but are headed towards a secondary port where they can transit onto a ship heading to such destination.
130 and physical performance. It is in these interludes that Braun stages his critiques of progress and statist historiography. Within these interludes Braun also argues for a meaningful antifascism, that is a revolutionary antifascism that critiques the status quo.
In the first Interlude, Braun criticizes progress through an allegory:
The future, my sires. At the end of a ravine, the walls of which rise abruptly right and left, sits a stretched-out tiger, filling the gap with her body, behind which shines the white infinite vastness, and looks with an indifferent unwavering stare at the observer ahead, the magnificent predator: there the observer cannot stay. He has to go through this narrow rocky track to the finish [Ziel].27 In this allegory the future can be reached only via one single route, created by the walls that determine the course of progress. Ahead lies a promised future (infinite white vastness), but the way is barred by an insurmountable obstacle, or certain calamity. Man
(sic.) is but an onlooker at his own unfolding destiny, the “finish” (or goal). This allegory retells Kafka’s “A Little Fable”, in which a mouse is caught between trap, corner, and cat.
In the fable the cat answers the mouse’s question of how to avoid the trap: all the mouse must do, counsels the cat, is run the other way (and be devoured by him). In Braun’s version the cat, the supreme predator, is what lies ahead, inevitably. Behind is not Kafka’s double- bind, but an imposed movement ahead or progress: “there the observer cannot stay.”
Braun’s allegory is a conversation between Kafka and Benjamin, which inverted the perplexed gaze of Benjamin’s angel of history. In Benjamin the angel, who was facing the past, is forced to see the ruins of history behind as they are piling up, as progress propels it away from them. Braun, on the other hand, articulates the horror of moving towards such a foretold future, where progress takes the form of a straightjacket which captures us in
27 (Braun 2014) P. 192
131 unstoppable movement. If Benjamin’s angel of history is a critique of the historiography
of progress, with its assumption of the teleological necessity of the contemporary, Braun’s
inversion of perspective, moving from facing history to facing the future, takes it aim at those who act from within the temporality of progress.
The Marxist determinist sees only one necessary outcome, where teleology suffuses political analysis (the metaphysical image of infinite white). The reshuffling of the mise-
en-scène of Kafka’s fable leaves the tiger ahead, and narrative structure, the compulsion to
move forward with the story, as the double-bind. However, the re-articulation also removes this trap from the maw of the cat to the observer’s narrating mouth. The drive of progress is nothing but the structure imposed by the narrator: a defeated soldier, in Braun’s allegory, contemplating the futility of the apparent option ahead (the meaninglessness of exile).
The second critique of progress comes in the second interlude, with an attack on the logic of industrialization. The background is dystopian, a coast strewn with plastic rubbish, fattened bodies against a murmuring sea, polluted by media (broadcasts
[Sendern]). “[I]n our back the Megamachine, the slow FORWARDS urges through the mud.”28 Again, Braun conjures Benjamin as he evokes a slow-moving, nightmarish, industrial complex. This is the image of contemporary progress, forcefully mastering nature, turning it all into commodity, and then waste. This image of life-endangering industrialization, blind subjection of the earth to the production of commodities, is
developed further: a thunderclap shakes the air and earth, and the “sky is tearing open, the
bulky-waste of the revolutions rising to the crotch.”29 The first revolution this brings to
28 (Braun 2014) P. 203 29 (Braun 2014) P. 204“jetzt reißt der Himmel auf, der Sperrmüll der Revolutionen ragt bis in den Schritt.“ (p.204)
132 mind is the Industrial Revolution, opening the age of mass production. However, the
allusion makes no distinction, revolutions (in the plural) driving towards one and the same
end, pointing out the resemblance between communist and bourgeois revolutions. Despite
its politically/socially emancipatory telos, the communist revolution remains as committed
as its bourgeois counterpart to ushering in rapid industrialization (the pre-requisite for the truly communist utopia), and in this era, offering as much consumer goods to its public as the capitalist system.
Braun’s critique of statist historiography comes in the first interlude. He does this by reminding the audience of those elements of history that are edited out. The first is a physical performance, which is described in a stage direction:
Policeman as a clown, he pushes the grotesque crowd into the bright light. The crowd remains abjectly bitter [demütig erbittert]. They see/play the operetta of might: Hitler-Stalin pact. They bend in disgust/applauds. Black curtain.30 The state, in the form of the police-clown, cordons a crowd and prepares it to spectate. The
crowd is then forced to view the rehearsed and refined retelling of events. In this farcical
version of Nazism and Stalinism, the disavowed histories are staged in agreeable form, as
operetta. The short description, reminding of the wartime pact between Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union, reflects uncomfortable truths about might: its self-interest, and its ability to forget its complicity. Winkelgrund, in the Gorki production of the play, decided to stage this scene as a dance between caricature figures of Hitler and Stalin. The dance brought together elements of German and Russian folk dancing, as well as ballet- like choreography. At first, the choreography showed Hitler and Stalin fighting, but soon an agreement was found (celebrated by the police-clown), that turned the dance into a
30 Ibid. P. 193
133 sexualized duet. The scene resembled a deranged cartoon, involving lewd physical
comedy, a light entertainment that obfuscated what it was showing. The rest of the cast,
put up against the wall by the policeman, were forced to look at the scene with a rectangle
of light illuminating only their faces.
The second critique follows in the next part of the same interlude. Here Braun
inserts a long section from Peter Weiss’s novel Aesthetics of Resistance, describing the
execution of the members of the Red Orchestra, an antifascist resistance ring uncovered by
the Nazis. The choice of the passage is significant. In contrast to the Operetta of Might,
this scene is anything but farcical. It describes the execution in minute detail: “The cracking
of the spine was audible. The face turned blackish blue. The eyeballs came out. For a few
seconds, her tongue flickered in her wide-open mouth.”31 History here takes a vastly
different form, highlighting the work of historiography.
Winkelgrund clarified this reflection on historiography by having the clown-
policeman remove his costume on stage to read the section to the cast, who stayed in the
same place. Using the same figure of authority to stage history contrasted the two modes
of articulation, the Operetta and the novel extract. During the reading of the extract half
naked men struggled carrying rock-like objects around the stage. Under red light, the
figures were reminiscent of Sisyphus, the Greek myth of a man punished to roll a rock up
a mountain for the rest of his life. If the operetta worked through spectacle, here there seems to be nothing but text, calling attention to the labor of aesthetic representation, and the different effects these stagings of history achieve. The Sisyphean figures seemed to focus
31 (Braun 2014) P. 194
134 on the labor of history, or perhaps, counter to the lightness of the Operetta, of the weight history leaves in its wake.
Braun’s Benjaminian dramaturgy and the border
Braun’s meticulous efforts to undermine the formation of traditional narrative disrupted the key historiographic principles on which the border as a formation of historiography in space relied on. Both the confirmation of the current as necessary
(statism), and the clear delineation of stages towards a telos (progress) were not simply avoided, but actively frustrated. Furthermore, in the power of the temporality of death in in life the dramaturgy showed the power of that which has been to change and influence the contemporary; Antifascists were not simply bequeathing their identity, but forcing the living to grapple with the question of truth and lie in the current moment. If the temporal boundary that put historiography into space needed the stability of historical stages in order be “true,” the power of misrecognition, the uncertainty of identity, revealed the precarity of the claims of East German antifascist mythology.
The central role of antifascism in Seghers’ novel allowed Braun to use the borders of Europe during the war as counterpoint to the Berlin Wall (and East German border). In
Transit, where Europe has been largely overtaken by fascist forces, Marseille as a border- port should mark the spatial limits of fascism and non-fascism; any yet, Seghers’ discovered the need to remain and resist as the true option for antifascist identity. It allows for a precarious life of resistance, as opposed to the metaphorical death (sinking) of the
Montreal. Antifascism, as a form uncertain hope, as vital source of identity, demanded a futurity open to critique and reimagination. Braun set up the relation between the wartime- border and the Wall as a non/identity, not simple contradiction but necessary reflection.
135 The counterpoint opened up a space for reflection on the problem of antifascist identity that these boundaries posed.
Braun mobilizes this dramaturgy at a number of points to grapple specifically with the question of the border and its relationship to questions of history and antifascism. In the different scenes of confusion and misrecognition, Braun shows the border as a space of absurdity, where one’s past and antifascist activity determine one’s mobility. In the second interlude, Braun directly references the border, the wall, as both threat and promise of critical antifascist action.
The first is a scene in which the doctor is denied a transit visa through Spain because of “A confusion with a man of the same name.”32 Since the man he is confused had crossed
the border illegally, the doctor is now denied boarding on the ship. This leads to an absurd
situation: “I cannot stay, and I cannot leave, I cannot stay, because I cannot leave.”33 For, although the play does not explain this, one must prove that one is a refugee trying to leave in order to receive a permit to stay in Marseille. Once one’s ability to leave is denied, this forecloses one’s ability to obtain the permit to stay. The border is revealed as a site of utter absurdity, due to its total control and bureaucracy. The border is where identity and agency become locked together most powerfully, where identity determines the ability to move freely. At this intersection, the document, which is effectively the state’s power to trace history and prove historical identity (name, place of birth, past border crossings) is key for the ability to continue moving as one pleases. Lastly, since the man with whom the doctor
32 Ibid. P. 182 ; “Eine Verwechslung mit einem Mann gleiches Namens“ 33 Ibid. P. 183 ;“Ich kann nicht bleiben, und ich kann nicht fahren, ich kann nich bleiben, weil ich nicht fahren kann“
136 is confused is an allusion to Benjamin, who was escaping the Nazis due to his antifascism,
Braun in fact brings antifascist identity into play here.
In the Gorki production of the play this function of the document was highlighted
already in the very first moment of dramatic action. When Seidel arrived at the hotel, the
owner, Wirtin, demanded his papers to offer a room. Seidel responded with a frenzied
search, frantically patting his jacket before he relaxed and took his documents out of an
inner pocket. This representation of Seidel, frantic about his own identity, was maintained
throughout the production, and he seemed to lack character, pulled this way and that by
the needs of others. The documents, his history, anchor and identify him when they are
demanded by authority. On the other hand, it is his lack of identity-history (or goal, as I
will discuss later) that renders Seidel open to misrecognition.
The second turn to border is in the second interlude, shortly after the discussion of the megamachine:
BUT THE EXCLUDED, CORNERED ON THE EDGE, NOW COME TOGETHER IN AN UNCONQUERABLE ALLIANCE – IN THE IMAGE OF THE WALL TO WHICH THEY STAND WITH THEIR BACKS. THIS WALL IS THE BORDER OF THE EARTH ITSELF, AGAINST WHICH WE CAN BE SQUASHED AT WILL, IF WE DO NOT SLOW DOWN AND STOP THIS MAN-MADE BIG MACHINE BEFORE IT FINALLY STRIKES.34 This rallying cry to halt our deadly trajectory inverts the function of the wall; it does not quell resistance but exemplifies it. The wall we are up against (invoking the imagery of the execution) is the limits of the earth, its capacity to withstand the onslaught of the
34 (Braun 2014) P. 204 „ABER DIE AUSGEGRENZTEN, DIE AN DEN RAND GEDRÄNGTEN HABEN JETZT EINEN UNÜBERWINDLICHEN VERBÜNDETEN - IN GESTALT DER WAND, ZU DER SIE MIT DEM RÜCKEN STEHN . DIESE WAND DAS SIND DIE GRENZEN DER ERDE SELBST, AN DENEN WIR FREILICH ZERDRÜCKT WERDEN KÖNNEN, WENN WIR DIE VON UNS GESCHAFFENE GROSSE MASCHINE NICHT ABBREMSEN UND AUFHALTEN, EHE SIE ENDGÜLTIG ANSTÖSST.“
137 machine: industrialization and militarization. At the same time, the wall is also the image
and form of the potential revolt, the stemming of the steady “progress” of the
megamachine. Braun implores, “[…] there is no fleeing, we must go in.”35 Here Braun
expresses the global “consensus” of the productivist reason, of mastery over nature (and
humans). This is an echo of Benjamin’s discovery of the moment of revolution as an
attempt at activating the emergency brake. The new antifascism resists the global form of
industry-as-domination domination (in its dual shape in the megamachine). This
antifascism aims to put the brake on the un-critical “progress” that drives the machine.
Braun rejects the antifascist bordering between the East and the West. Like Benjamin, he
recognizes the links and continuities of epochs, and how they permeate the contemporary
reality on both sides of the Wall. Instead, he asserts the need for critical reflection, a
repurposing of antifascist resistance, deploying it in relation to contemporary social
relations where the drive of progress is threatening the conditions of human existence.
Part II: New Political Movements and Crossing the Border
The last section concluded with the discovery of the megamachine as the new object
of antifascist resistance. Braun borrowed the concept from Rudolf Bahro, an East German
leftist dissident, who had used it in his 1977 book The Alternative where he outlines a non- capitalist alternative to Lenininst-Stalinist Marxism, focused especially on the need to withdraw from the industrial complex.(Bahro 1984) Importantly, Bahro was forced into
exile by the state after publishing his book. With the megamachine, Braun calls for a new
resistance to rapid industrialization and militarism. This was a clear reflection of the
35 Ibid. P. 204
138 growing dissident politics of the 1970s and early 1980s, which saw a peace movement and
an environmentalist movement grow under the auspices of the church in East Germany.
And yet, the question remains: why did Braun embed this new politics within Seghers’
novel and the story of political exiles leaving Europe? I will argue in this section that this
choice is a reflection of the growing importance of emigration, exile and the crossing of
the Berlin wall towards the late 70s and early 1980s, when Braun wrote Transit Europa.
The two main developments are an emigrationist movement and a Marxist exodus (in
which Bahro was a participant). The emigrationists were a dissident movement that
demanded the right to leave East Germany, whereas the Marxist exodus was the response of the Left intelligentsia to a new wave of repressions in the late 1970s. I will show in this section that while turning to Seghers, Braun nevertheless departed from her attention to refugees trying to flee Europe. Instead, he emphasized the discovery of resistance in her
narrative, pointing to the need to insist on staying and fighting.
Braun rejected the emigrationist hope to find political meaning in exile, as a utopian
other space where political action is not curtailed. Already in the introduction this much is
clear: “The truth is: they did not arrive. At least not where they wanted. Even if they had
two legs, even if they had a hope, a goal.”36 The socialist project was still the space in
which there was the potential for him to critique, reject existing conditions, and act. The
play criticizes militarization and industrialization as the underlying rationality of the time,
which must be resisted within the existing political space: there is no escape. In years
marked by Braun’s own experience of the increasing exodus of colleagues from the GDR,
36 (Braun 2014) P. 177 „Die Wahrheit ist: sie sind alle nicht angekommen. Jedenfalls nicht dort, wo sie wollten. Auch wenn sie zwei Beine hatten, auch wenn sie eine Hoffnung hatten, ein Ziel.“
139 and his disappointment with its ongoing repression of dissent, the play expresses severe
criticism of the state: it offers a call for renewed commitment to socialist ideals (as Braun
understands them). And yet, his strong commitment does not embrace a heroic imagination
of resistance, in which justice and right is rewarded by necessary glory. On the contrary,
there is no obvious hope (understood as inevitable success) in resistance.
The peace and environmentalist movements are important to my analysis because
they demonstrate the growing power of political movements that look beyond the
opposition of us-versus-them prescribed by the GDR-propagated concept of border. The
movements emerged during a period of relaxation, and even liberalization in the 1970s, when there was acceptance of non-state social organization within the church.37
Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s this newfound space allowed for numerous social-
political organizations to form. The peace movement and the environmentalist movement
were by far the most successful.
The peace movement, which had its roots in the 1960s grew substantially after the
GDR signed the Helsinki Accord in 1975, which included a commitment to the peaceful
resolution of disputes. The war anxiety driven by the stationing of nuclear weapons in
Western Europe in 1978 further popularized the movement and led to the establishment of
an annual peace week. Activity within the church continued until the more controversial
37 The protestant church entertained an ambivalent relation with the state throughout. Initially marked by opposition and state persecution, relations relaxed and solidified through the 1960-70s. Following the separation between the East and West German churches, relations improved, allowing the East German church to become relatively autonomous (in no direct clash with the state). Following a meeting in 1978 between state and church representatives, the church became an officially sanctioned autonomous social institution, a status that turned it into a space for non-public organization. This meant that the church had an interest in intervening and moderating the dissenting groups organizing under its aegis, maintaining “boundaries that must not be overstepped” as Bishop Leich articulated it in March 1983.
140 Berlin Appeal,38 which demanded East German disarmament and dialogue with the West
in 1982.39 In parallel, environmental issues were gaining prominence and they took a
prominent role in the church’s peace week in 1982. Despite the fact that East German state
ideology ascribed environmental destruction to capitalist exploitation and had highly
progressive environmental protection legislation, this legislation was never enforced and
the focus on industrial development resulted in environmental degradation. The
environmental movement was cognizant of its global allegiances, but it also focused on the
dramatic effects of national industrial policy, such as acid rain destruction, coal burning
deterioration and the chemical pollution of water and land.40
The ideological formation of which the Wall was emblematic for the GDR,
antifascist on the one side and imperialist-capitalist on the other, ascribed the threat of both
war and environmental destruction to the internal mechanisms of capitalism. Capitalist
societies’ ever-expanding exploitation necessitated taking over new markets and this led to
wars, while the need to constantly increase consumption led to environmental destruction.
The peace and environment movements rejected this narrative and instead proposed to
focus on actually existing conditions: a world order based on industrialization and arms
race (in which both East and West took part).
Volker Braun expressed this perspective. In Transit Europa we see a critique of the narrative structure that undergirds the antagonistic world view of statist antifascism.
38 The Berlin Appeal was organized Robert Havemann and Reverend Eppelmann in 1982, demanding removal of nuclear weapons from Europe, removal of occupying forces form Germany and freedom of expression. Drawing a equivalency in demands (both from capitalist and socialist worlds) it broke with East Germany’s representation of itself as a force of peace; moreover, addressing the question of the division of Germany, it showed that the anti-war movement could drift into what the state saw as risky questions. 39 40 Jones – origins of the east german..
141 Instead of the imperialist-capitalist on the other side of the Wall, Braun re-articulated the
threat: the megamachine driving forwards on both sides of the Wall. This articulation called for a new and different organization of resistance, for which Braun appropriated the founding moment of East German socialism: “interests are organized for the sake of a religion of the NEW PEOPLE. My paradise was opened by the Red Soldier, and thus companion [Genosse] Shutyourmouth came into the world.”41 The communist liberation
(of Germany from the Nazis) was the founding moment of utopian hope, but it was also the birth of the repressive socialist state that silenced its citizens. Showing this link through juxtaposing the (liberating) red soldier with the secret-service agent (companion
Shutyourmouth), Braun decisively breaks with the form antifascism took in the actually existing socialist state. Contesting the state’s continuous narrative of emancipatory history,
Braun appropriated the antifascist narrative for new revolutionary movements against the megamachine.
Crossing the Border: Emigrationists and Marxist Exodus
We will remember that Braun articulated this new politics in relation to the Wall.
When he described the excluded with their backs against the Wall, Braun re-imagined it as both a threat (people are being crushed against it), and as a possibility (blocking the momentum of the megamachine that must be resisted). But this Wall appears in a play about refugees and their flight, and Braun was acutely attuned to the restrictions of movement associated with the Berlin Wall. In order to understand Braun’s relation to the
41 (Braun 2014) P. 204 „Die Interessen verkabelt für die Religion vom NEUEN MENSCHEN. Mein Paradies wurde vom roten Soldaten geöffnet, mit dem der Genosse Haltsmaul auf die Welt gekommen ist.“
142 question of migration, we must further situate Transit Europe in the context of border crossing in East Germany.
The building of the Wall in 1961 had largely eliminated the problem of people leaving East Germany (Republikflucht – republic-flight). Furthermore, the state granted only limited approval for exit visa requests. This changed after the 1972 Basic Treaty, which ensured increased allowance for visitor visas “on urgent family matters”42 and brought about a dramatic increase in visa requests. East Germany’s ostensible recognition of the right to travel and movement in the Basic Treaty and with the signing of the 1975
Helsinki Accords legitimized the issue of movement as grounds for appeal and contestation. At the same time, rumors were growing that one could petition for approved emigration.
Dale points out that in these years making an emigration request was a political decision and action, a public rather than a private matter: “It entailed a courageous and public rejection of the patria. Oppressed, frustrated and eager to accelerate their exit, applicants tended to find one another, exchange experiences and concoct strategies for hastening their departure.”43 Despite initial denials by officials, obfuscation of procedure, endless waiting periods and persecution (such as loosing work, education positions, and denial of visiting visas to the west),44 requests were quickly growing in number. So much so that at the end of the 1970s there was a social movement demanding the right to move, which increased pressure on the state to further liberalize the border regime. By 1983,
42 Major, Behind the Berlin Wall: p. 198. 43 Ibid.: 88. 44 It is important to note that a significant part of the persecution would be the social ostracism. Under the threat of surveillance, many simply turned away from applicants, worried for their own standing in relation to the state.
143 emigrationist groups (as they were known) were holding public protests in the form of
vigils. Individuals’ demands to leave the GDR drove the movement. In so far as it reflected
an understanding of the central role of the Wall in the sovereign claim of the state
(necessary for its survival), the demand to leave the GDR was a mode of public dissent
against the state. And indeed, this was how the state reacted to it.
Two major emigrationist actions took place during the year Braun started writing
Transit Europa. The first happened on January 20, 1984, when six emigrationists occupied the library of the US embassy in East Berlin and demanded political asylum. They were
followed on February 24 by another twenty-five who got into the FRG embassy in Prague,
refusing to leave without being granted safe movement and asylum in the West.45 The first group offered a letter addressing Honecker and Reagan, in which they declared their action as a move of last resort: they would hunger strike until granted exit, stating that "Because of our inner convictions, a life for us in the GDR (East Germany) has become impossible".46 In Prague, Ingrid Berg, together with her husband and two children, made
the headlines – she was the niece of Willi Stoph, Chairman of the Council of Ministers (the
East German equivalent of prime minister).
Both groups were successful in forcing their exit, not least because of the large
media attention their stories garnered. These were organized emigrationist protests, clear
in their criticism and demands, with foreign media alerted in advance. The result was the
state’s public humiliation, and a scandal that called attention to the despair of those willing
45 Manfred Görtemaker, “The Collapse of the German Democratic Republic and the Role of the Federal Republic,” GHIL Bulletin XXV, no. 2 (November 2003): 54. 46 Warren Getler, “6 East Germans Seeking Asylum At U.S. Embassy Letter to Reagan Threatens Hunger Strike to Get Visas”, Washington Post, January 21, 1984
144 to risk so much to leave the GDR. Media reports commonly discussed the issue as a
“refugee crisis”. By the end of the year, the government approved over 35,000 emigration
requests—over four times the average approved visas in previous years.47 The GDR
government’s decision to grant so many exit visa requests in 1984 must be understood also
as a response to this crisis, an attempt to pull attention away from the border regime and
relax the internal pressure of emigrationists.
Emigrationist organization was gaining pace, but it remained in tense relations with
other emerging social movements in East Germany. Essentially, while emigrationists were working for the right to leave the state, other social movements understood themselves as
working to build legitimacy for change in East Germany. And yet, because of the repressive
state and its curtailment and harassment of critical voices, from the late 1970s there was a
significant exodus of leftist-critics, who were either forced or found it necessary to go into
exile.
The Biermann Affair of 1976 was a turning point for growing disaffection and crisis
among the Marxist intelligentsia, who were critical of the state but committed to the ideal
of a communist alternative. Rolf Biermann was a singer and a notorious left-critic of the
SED, whose citizenship was revoked while he was on tour in Köln (West Germany). The exiling of Biermann, who was part of the artistic elite of East Germany, was met with a letter of protest by twelve of East Germany’s most prominent writers, including Braun:48
Bearing in mind Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, according to which the proletarian revolution is constantly self-critical, our socialist state should, in contrast to
47 (Torpey 1995a) P. 92 48 The letter was signed by Sarah Kirsch, Christa Wolf, Erich Arendt, Jurek Becker, Volker Braun, Franz Fühmann, Stephan Hermlin, Stefan Heym, Günter Kunert, Heiner Müller, Rolf Schneider, and Gerhard Wolf.
145 anachronistic social forms, be able to tolerate such discomfort [as Biermann caused] in a calm contemplative way. We do not identify with Wolf Biermann’s every word and action, and we dissociate ourselves from attempts to misuse the Biermann case against the GDR.49 The state-endorsed writers’ elite had never voiced such dissent or organized protest before
(nor would it again, until 1989).50 It stated in unambiguous terms the central problem of a
rigid socialist state which is unable to tolerate criticism, while also re-articulating and
confirming the writers’ commitment to the East German state and ideal. When the GDR
authorities refused to publish the letter and it ended up being published in the West, Volker
Braun objected publicly, because this official response ignored the signatories’ declared
decision to protest in a way that would not be easily coopted for anti-communist propaganda. Nonetheless, the shock of the step taken against Biermann was deep, and many in the literary community decided to leave the GDR. It started what Joppke has described as “the intellectual exodus.”(Joppke 1995)
As Soviet politics were liberalizing (a process that came to a peak with Gorbachev’s
Glasnost and Perestroika in the mid-1980s) there were hopes for similar developments in
East Germany. These hopes were soon shattered. An example of this happened in 1979,
when the prominent Marxist dissenter Bahro was forced to leave the GDR, after spending
two years in prison following the publication in West Germany of The Alternative. This
was another blow for those who had hoped in the early 1970s that Honecker and détente
would herald a state more open to criticism,51 or that there would be developments in East
49 Brown, Allison [tran], “Declaration of Protest against the Expatriation of Wolf Biermann” GHDI, http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=1172 (accessed June 16, 2018) 50 Many found different avenues to express their criticism, this occasion was unique in how organized and public it was. 51 Roger Woods, Opposition in the GDR under Honecker, 1971–85: An Introduction and Documentation (Springer, 1986): 6. Woods proposes that there was an ideological shift in the early 1970s. Before, the dominant form of Marxism stipulated the actual sublation of contradiction within the form of the state, that is, in effect, there could be no conflictual social relations. The ideological shift in the early ‘70s reverted to
146 Germany similar to those of Glasnost and Perestroika. It seemed, to many, that working or waiting for change from the inside was futile. This gave further impetus to political or ideological emigrationists,52 and endorsed the idea that exit was a legitimate position for those critical of the state.
Braun had already addressed this slow exodus in his poem ‘Der Müggelsee’ (1977), the memory of a day rowing across a lake with Biermann and fellow writers, Bernd
Jentzsch, Reiner Kunze and Sarah Kirsch.53 In this poem we see an early formulation of themes that would return in Transit Europa: the ship and sailing as metaphors for the political project, here recollecting a time when project and hardship were shared “and we
were in the same boat” (Und wir säßen im selben Boot). The poem communicates Braun’s
sense of abandonment, almost betrayal, of loss of friends, and with that the destabilizing
(almost spoiling) of the shared commitment or vision.
More importantly, this context of slow exodus was formative of Braun’s adaptation
of Seghers’ Transit. Still committed to the socialist project, Braun turned to Transit in order
a more clearly Leninist approach, which in recognizing the role of the vanguard party also allows for social contradiction. Woods argues however that the effect was a return of the political role of the party, rather than processes of criticism and reflection within. 52 The distinction here is between those who were primarily inclined towards finding a way to force their own exit, and those who saw emigration as a larger social cause. Obviously, the decision to leave, even if for “personal” reasons, is highly political, but the distinction is nonetheless valuable. It was, however, not always easy to make, as many who might have been initially driven by personal reasons might over time have come to think of their action in broader social terms. In the absence of political culture outside of the party, organizing through personal necessity, was one route along which social consciousness could develop. 53 Peter Graves, “Sarah Kirsch: Some Comments and a Conversation,” German Life and Letters 44, no. 3 (1991): 271–280; Frank D. Hirschbach, “A New German Literature in Exile?” World Literature Today 55, no. 4 (1981): 577–582. As Graves (1991) points out, Kirsch offered a poetic response of sorts, describing the “the shadows of the friends // scattered all four winds”, expressing both the sense of loss, and of powerlessness and dislocation.
147 to both articulate the need for a new antifascism and resistance, and the need for its continuation in the GDR.
Border Crossing in Transit Europa
For anyone who’s familiar with Anna Seghers’ novel, the most dramatic change in
Braun’s adaptation will be the minimal role he gives to her attention to the detail of refugee lives and their attempts to cross the border. Instead, Braun focuses on the theme of the characters’ orientation towards a goal, and the significance of struggle for identity and life.
Finding a new importance to staying and fighting, Braun turns a novel about leaving into a play about re-found commitment.
Seghers’ investigation of border as a state of being, her exploration of the associated routines, alienation, hopelessness, as well as lack of agency, is one of the most powerful aspects of Transit. In it the refugee’s life is in limbo, a bureaucratic state of abeyance, as they wait for ships that may never come or leave. The border features in the novel as a place where life is on hold, suspended: a Kafkaesque space of denial, outside of life. As long as the refugee-protagonist of the novel does not insist on leaving, does not lose himself in the frenzied logic of getting-out, and rather gives in to living in this limbo, he can make use of the border. It becomes a space of refuge from the very rationality that maintains it: on the pretext of attempting to leave the hero operates between the lines, able not only to sustain himself but to manipulate and navigate the space to his ends. It is only when he decides to leave, foregoing his privilege in relation to the border (achieved by treating it as a game), that he joins the ranks of the desperate given over to the mercy of border-logic.
148 Of all this, we find very little in Braun’s Transit Europa. There are traces of it in scenes like the misrecognition by the Mexican consul, or the doctor being denied a visa due to a mistake. Instead, we see how Braun investigates the theme of the goal, Ziel, and how it determines character and behavior. Ziel in the play rests on the question of ethos: the drama linking identity (character) to a goal or ideal. In the play the ethos of the figures anchors the characters’ subjectivity: the projection of their character through the translation of moral into action stabilizes their identity. Without a goal they lack self-hood and are unable to assert themselves in the world. This is most pronounced in the vacuity of character of Seidel, the protagonist, who is completely overwhelmed by the identity of
Weiler, the dead antifascist. Not only is he misidentified as Weiler repeatedly, but his actions trying to obtain a visa are attributed to Weiler as well. This comes to a peak after the second interlude, in a scene that began with laud explosions of a munition cargo train.
Seidel is caught by mud-coats (an iteration of the oilskins) and finds himself missing one of his legs. In deciding to stay and joining the resistance he symbolically becomes Weiler.
Through the work on ethos, meeting the distress of confusion (Verwechslung) and loss of identity with the re-discovery of a goal (Ziel), Braun recovers the antifascist identity and the power of resistance. The strongest expression of this is developed in a dialog between Seidel and his love interest, Sophie – the wife of the dead Weiler She tries to convince Seidel to go back to the embassy to make Weiler (whom she believes to be still alive) request a visa for her as well, so that she will be able to leave with the doctor. In this scene Braun makes a distinction between immediate purpose or aim (Zweck) and a larger goal (Ziel). Any appeal to an office or institution; any attempt to flee through direct action is denied in the play as useless (zwecklos). Both Sophie and Seidel get lost (here the passive
149 is important, they are led astray) in the immediacy of purpose, the futility of circumstances and the distraction they pose. This purpose makes them unable to maintain the horizon of a goal and the stability and self-identity of ethos. Weiler, on the other hand, “he has a goal.
He knows what we are here for! A destination over and beyond oneself. He sees it, and he wants it. What will become of us when we are free. When we live.”54 Sophie describes in
Weiler one whose moral character, ethos, and wider orientation towards an ideal drive his action. The ability to maintain this orientation shifts the question of use and uselessness, from the immediacy of aim and its orientation to outcomes to the alignment of action with an internal ideal. In the conditions of the border, the orientation to immediate outcome is tantamount to loss of self, and the ability to maintain a wider horizon and criteria for meaning offers both identity and hope. This position is not devoid of irony, knowing as we do that Weiler committed suicide.55Braun’s orientation to a Ziel, and particularly to resistance, is not blind to reality, and shortly afterwards in the first interlude, we hear that
“resistance was futile”56 (Zweckloss, literally: without purpose). Importantly though, lack of freedom does not negate action. Quite the contrary, the promise of potential freedom
(which is never guaranteed) compels action. This is part of Braun’s Benjaminian rejection of progress, denying determinism but maintaining revolutionary hope. The aporia of Ziel in the face of hopelessness is precisely this, and Braun proposes the necessity of the orientation even in the face of futility. This is the contradiction of resistance in the face of
54 (Braun 2014) P. 190 ; „Aber er hat ein Ziel. Er weiß wozu, wozu wir dasind! Ein Ziel für mehr als sich. Er sieht es, und er will es. Was mit uns wird, wenn wir frei sind. Wenn wir leben.” P. 190 55 It is worth noting that in the novel, when the protagonist hears about the man who committed suicide in the Pyrenees he thinks: “How could a man have such enormous hopes for his journey’s destination that going back should have seemed so unbearable?” 56 (Braun 2014) P. 192
150 mounting pressure and loss of hope, where action finds its drive not in its assured success,
but in belief in its necessity.
Giving Ziel such importance for identity and life, Braun looked to counter the
pervasive hopelessness in the moribund GDR. The ongoing preoccupation with border- crossing, migration, and exodus, festered into a popular imagination the deadliness of the
GDR and the need to escape it. The border situation of emigrationists, suspended between
East Germany and the West, denied life normal life by the regime, became symbolic of
East Germany life more generally. The border, in this imagination of East Germany, is the threshold between life and death. Braun, in Transit Europa, inverts this, fusing an image of life with identity-as-resistance; the border becomes the site of struggle, where resistance
means the articulation of the limit of the logic of the megamachine. Death is on the other
side: if struggle means life, then the appropriative move of the West, denying meaning to
political resistance not by repression but by celebrating its “freedom”, is the space of
political death.
In the Gorki production this came across most powerfully in the scenes following
the attack on the munitions train. Seidel sat on the floor, displaying his severed leg, more
pitiable than ever before in the play. But contrastingly, he seemed to have more presence
than ever before in the play. The stage directions indicated this describing his text as “very
clearly”. In the production his voice was stronger, and he could express his own need from
the world as a cry: “The world is a fragment. I need a montage.” Wirtin, the hotel owner,
gave this further symbolic representation when she used the severed leg to represent an
erection as she left the stage with the mud-coats. Having assumed the antifascist role, deciding to stay and fight and become Weiler through the loss of the leg, Seidel found an
151 ethos and goal. Remarkably, this was a scene of life and vitality, compared to the
lifelessness of the scene between Sophie and the doctor on the ship that immediately
followed. Life, and hope, is found in resistance. In leaving there is only death.
Braun used the theme of Ziel in order to revive the power of resistance and
antifascism. But he also chose to limit his engagement with the representation of the life
of the refugees in Segher’s novel. These parts of the novel would have resonated strongly
with image of East Germany as moribund, sick and dying. We have already seen a powerful
example of the image of the non-life of the GDR in the letter from emigrationists who
occupied the West German library. They described how “life in the GDR was made impossible,”57 for those who had applied for an exit visa, waiting indefinitely to for the
state to allow them to leave. Dale further elaborates on their conditions:
Sustained pressure was applied to applicants to withdraw their applications. The process itself was designed to be demeaning and frustrating, and was often unsuccessful; applicants faced the prospect of years of waiting for a leaving date that might never arrive. And the waiting room was not a pleasant one. […] They were condemned to life on the fringes of society. At work, they would face the sack or demotion. The gates of universities were closed to them too. Forced to give up their passports, some were even denied the right to travel within the country.58 Dale describes the conditions through the spatial metaphor of the waiting room, as
an experience of denial and indefinite suspension, a sort of purgatory, where one is always
on the cusp. Importantly, this abjection before the state is also key to understanding the
conditions of existence in the GDR, where citizens were always under the threat of such
denial. It is this menace of the state that permeated lived-life in the GDR making it a quasi-
57 My emphasis. 58 (Dale 2005) P. 87
152 life, always under threat. The denial, under this threat, of real civic and public life then is
the mirror image of the non-life of the border.
This perspective of the denial of human rights, of basic freedoms, illustrated the
eastern side of the Iron Curtain as non-life, life devoid of agency, reduced to coerced
conformity. Such ideological expression built in the early 1980s on the growing perception
of the GDR as a space suffering from mortal illness. Economic stagnation and dependence
on Western support lent support to the image of the GDR as a patient on life support, while
the surge of emigration in the early 1980s, particularly of writers and activists, experienced
as a seeping-out of vitality, played into the same metaphor. In choosing not to use Seghers’
novel’s images of suspended life at the border Braun rejected this metaphor. Instead, Braun
turned to Seghers’ other narrative organization of life-death spaces: the doomed Montreal
(destined to sink from very opening of both novel and play) on the one hand, and on the
other the protagonist’s discovery of the vital-self in the decision to stay in France and join
the resistance.
This connection between life and resistance is articulated already in the play prolog,
which ends with the line: “I hardly remember the purpose of the exercise. Nothingness
before me, all-of-that-no-more, all-of-that-not yet. The living are those who fight.”59 Life is found anew only in this limited yet powerful articulation of life-through-fight, of life as resistance. Versions of this statement appear in both interludes. Just before the Hitler-Stalin operetta of might, the final statement of the Outing of the Dead interlude is: “a person is, who resists // there is no other side.”60 We return to the question of ethos. Personhood and
59 (Braun 2014) P. 177 ; „Ich entsinne mich kaum, was der Zweck der Übung war. Vor mir das Nichts, das Allesnichtmehr, das Allesnochnicht. Die Lebenden sind die, welche kämpfen.“ 60 Ibid. P. 193
153 identity are not self-evident but depend on this supplement: they are enabled or actuated through resistance. The consequences of this stance are connected to the border: flight is meaningless, there is no “otherside” which can make the act of leaving a politically meaningful one.
This rejection of “otherside” alludes to what Braun only posits in the third interlude, namely, the totality against which the struggle must be waged, the rationality from which crossing the border is no escape, the limit of which is the limit of humanity. “There is no fleeing: we must go in.”61 This totality is the compulsion of history driven by an internal rationality that is self-destructive: the megamachine. The space of death is the space of exile, removed from the potential of resistance by the choice of leaving. Life is actuated through resistance - through insistence on a goal, even when such an orientation promises no simple hope.
I have argued that Transit Europa was a response to the political conditions of the early 1980s, reflecting the new social movements and affirming the meaning of staying during years of growing emigration and exodus due to loss of hope. This play was Braun’s attempt to rally hope, not because of evidence of change but despite hopelessness. This is articulated most strongly in the first interlude: “Hope is the opposite of security. / hope is, when all is falling apart!”62 The first part of this couple is a quote from Ernst Bloch, the famous theorist of hope, and the second seems to be Braun’s own articulation. An articulation particularly apt to transition us to 1989.
PART III: The Crisis of 1989 and Preserving Socialism
61 Ibid. P. 204 62 (Braun 2014) P. 192
154 In this third part, I turn to 1989 in order to situate the first full run of Transit Europa,
which premiered at the Gorki Theater on December 21st, 1989. While Braun wrote the play in the early 1980s, responding to the growing emigrationist movement and his experience of the Marxist exodus, the play’s later rehearsal and performance coincided with a crisis of migration that turned into a full-blown crisis of political legitimacy. The peaceful
revolution of 1989 combined similar attributes of a growing border crisis due to
emigrationist pressures met with an inadequate state response producing further political
destabilization. Although hindsight often brushes over the significance of the call for reform and the continuity of the socialist state, assuming the will of the people was always unification with West Germany, I show the important role of the call for reform in the protests of 1989. A popular slogan of the reformists, “we are staying here,” was both an affront to the state in demanding change, and it was testament to the continued conviction in a socialist project. The state intelligentsia, including Braun, was at the forefront of these demands for reform, and continued to advocate for them even after the fall of the Wall. It is with reference to these appeals by the socialist-dissident intelligentsia of the disintegrating GDR that we need to think about the production of Transit Europa at the
Gorki.
In 1984, a crisis had developed around dramatic attempts of emigrationists to force
their exit from the GDR. The same would happen in 1989. Once again, the state found
itself treading between the immediate fear of exacerbating social dissatisfaction and its
reluctance toward real reform, relaxing emigration while maintaining most of the travel
restrictions. In 1984, the government response had worked as a steam valve. Conversely,
the limited action in 1989 served to embolden the semi-organized social movements and
155 the general public. The encounter of growing popular willingness to protest and demand
change with a reluctant response from the state created an escalating dynamic of social
instability coupled with institutional disarray.
The events of 1989 were triggered by the dramatic changes happening in Eastern
Europe that destabilized East Germany’s borders and turned into a migration crisis. On
May 2nd, 1989, Hungary began dismantling the barbed wire from its western border fence
with Austria. In the following months, the tactic of seeking refuge in FRG embassies
restarted. Hundreds, and later thousands, of GDR citizens attempted this in Budapest and
Prague, with numbers growing to the point that the embassies were forced to close.
Despite the de-militarization of the border, Hungary was still not allowing East
German citizens to cross into Austria. On August 19, 1989, opposition leaders in Hungary
organized the Pan-European Picnic protesting the still barricaded (albeit no longer barb-
wired) border with Austria. For this protest, attended by 10,000-20,000, the organizers
attained permission to make a hole in the fence, through which demonstrators would take
a short trip into Austria and return. However, on the day of the event hundreds of East
German emigrationists arrived on the scene, seizing the opportunity to flee.
At the same time, Bonn was mounting pressure on Hungary: in a meeting between
Helmut Kohl (Chancellor of West Germany) and Miklós Németh (the newly elected prime
minister of Hungary) the former made the extension of credit to Hungary dependent on
denouncement of the agreement with East Germany for border control enforcement of East
German citizens. Shortly after, on August 25th, Németh announced that Hungary “cannot be transformed into a giant camp,” and that he would let GDR citizens cross the border. At this point, there were over 150,000 GDR citizens in Hungary. On September 11, 1989,
156 Hungary opened its border. Close to 18,000 GDR citizen escaped in three days. An
agreement was also reached between Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the two Germanies to resolve the problem of the thousands of East Germans occupying embassies and demanding exit. They would be granted transport to the West on the provision that the trains would pass through East Germany, which would give them exit visas in an attempt to save face. By November over 22,000 citizens had left the GDR in this way.
In response to this growing crisis, the East German state began a propaganda offensive, accusing the FRG of “slave-trading,” kidnapping people across the border, and engaging in brainwashing. In addition, the state blamed those who had left for their weakness, seduced by promises of consumer goods. This reached a crescendo in
Honecker’s infamous announcement that “Their [the emigres’] behavior is a kick in the teeth for moral values and they have excluded themselves from [literally: put themselves outside the boundaries of] our society. No-one should shed any tears for them.”63 The day
after Honecker’s announcement, the Politburo made a decision to temporarily close the
borders to Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria. This decision, however, contributed to
anger and dissatisfaction in the GDR: those left behind felt that they were being punished
for staying in the GDR.64 Despite the propaganda efforts most GDR citizens understood
those who left, even if they did not support their actions. The sheer numbers meant that
everyone knew someone - a family member, colleague, or friend - who had fled. For those
who stayed, the large migration also meant a growing strain on workloads, the sudden loss
63 “sich selbst aus unserer Gesellschaft ausgegrenzt,“ Neues Deutschland, 2 Oct. 1989. 64 Major, Behind the Berlin Wall, p. 240.
157 of hundreds of professionals, and recalled the self-escalating cycle of migration and worsening conditions of the early 1960s.
All of this added to the protest and disaffection already emerging in East Germany.
Throughout the year, dissident groups were mobilizing increasingly more visibly. In March emigrationists in Leipzig began protesting every Monday. The existing Monday Peace
Prayers were extended to the issue of freedom of travel. These demonstrations attracted only limited numbers, but despite repression by the police, they too were steadily growing.
After the opening of the Hungarian borders in September, the freedom of travel demonstrations gained pace, with hundreds turning into thousands. Five thousand protesters joined the September 25th Monday protest to demand legalization of political
movements. By this point both organizational capacity and willingness to protest were
clearly shifting gear, especially in Leipzig. On October 3rd, when the borders to
Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria were closed, 20,000 crowded the Dresden train-
station. They were trying to hitch a ride on the passing train, which carried embassy-leavers
on their way to the West. October 7-9 saw demonstrations arriving in Berlin. Berlin’s
2,000-person demonstration on the 9th was outweighed by Leipzig’s eighty thousand and
Dresden’s twenty-two. By October 23rd 300,000 demonstrators were out in Leipzig.
In a state that had known no protests, this was a full-blown crisis. The SED
Politburo recognized the real threat posed by continued inaction on the demand for change
in the border regime. And yet, the measures taken fell far short of the demands for change.
Honecker’s resignation on October 18th opened discussion of several new travel laws. In
these discussions, two central worries were voiced: the effect of a loss of workforce on the
158 flailing economy,65 and the implication on foreign currency reserves if mass travel to the
West was allowed. In the face of demands for the freedom of movement, the discussion revolved around minutia: the removal of justification of travel for the exit visa application.
Even that proposal was rejected. The new proposed border regulation of November 3rd
maintained the requirement to explain the reason for travel, limited travel to a month, and
kept the restriction on currency exchange.
The question of right of migration was resolved, and the demand for freedom of
movement shifted to the right of travel: if one could leave the GDR, surely one should be
able to travel to the West freely. The authorities’ growing apprehension was that
maintaining an authorization regime for travel would simply push many who were denied
travel to apply for exit. In order to delay the anticipated mass travel, an option was proposed
to allow travel with the caveat of holding a valid passport, which only four out of sixteen
million GDR citizen possessed.
On November 4th the famous Alexanderplatz protest of “colleagues and friends,
thinkers-alike and stayers-here”, calling for freedom of speech, association, and the
renouncing of the SED’s constitutionally protected “Leading Role” drew over 500,000
people to the streets. On November 9th a proposal was made that would allow both migration and private travel without any authorization. Major points out that “Whether the gathered delegates […] realized the implications is unclear, since there was no substantial discussion.”66 The result was the famous confused TV announcement of the new
65 In the wake of Honecker’s resignation the top echelons of the SED were “amazed” to discover the mountains of foreign debt the GDR had accrued. See: John C. Torpey, Intellectuals, Socialism, and Dissent: The East German Opposition and Its Legacy, vol. 4 (U of Minnesota Press, 1995). 66 Major, Behind the Berlin Wall, p.253.
159 regulation, which Günter Schabowski, the Politburo public spokesperson, said was
“effective immediately”.
From “We are the People” to “We are One People”?
The result of Schabowski’s announcement is well known: thousands flocked to the
Wall demanding to pass through and the guards, with no instructions on this new
regulation, decided to open the check-points. In a matter of days the Wall was torn down.
Within ten days, eleven million East Germans visited the West. By the end of the next year,
unification was concluded. The quick succession of events obfuscates the magnitude of the
change, from the opening of the Wall to the end of the GDR. Critically, the demand for
change in East German policy, the reformist agenda, was replaced by protestors demand
for the end of the East German state and its absorption into West German institutions. This key shift is codified in a historiography that traces these events as a change from “We are the people” to “We are one people”.67 This is almost always a passive sentence, a change
happening by itself, for example, “Rather than democratically announcing that ‘we are the
people’, the slogan became the more nationalist ‘we are one people’.”68
This passive tone reveals how the historiography rests on a narrative of revelation.
Once the restriction on free speech and assembly was lifted, the assertion goes, the underlying demand of the people, which had always been there beneath the surface, could emerge. This demand was none other than the end of the GDR and its absorption into West
Germany. For example, Joppke maintains that the people “intuitively grasped the national
67 See for example: (Bernhard 1993; Pfaff 1996) 68 (Major 2010) P. 253
160 implications of the revolution against communism.”69 The claim is that the people’s
demonstrations were always against the socialist project. The invocation of the two slogans, “we are one people” and “we are the people” works like a mantra. The symbolism of the small, but endlessly meaningful, change of a single word stands in for the vast social transformation that it represents.
This narrative is clearly a powerful one. It meets the need for a historiography that explains the rapid pace at which the process unfolded. At the same time, it provides a liberal narrative of the actualization of the will of the people for the unified state.70 Perhaps most
importantly, it creates an image as if at the very moment the question of the fate of the state came up the outcome was already sealed. The tight prosody of “from the people to one
people” implies that the one people was somehow always-already latent in the people. This
narrative obfuscates the fact that the question of the state’s future was a source of tension
within the protests, and that the majority of the protests were led by dissidents, who saw
the aim as reforms within the socialist state.
Dissidents working for reform were widely known as “Hierbleiber”: here-stayers.
Their insistence on an “internal” solution was such that these dissidents refused
participation in emigrationist-organized events and kept emigrationists from joining in
their activities.71 This separation was necessary to the popular perception of here-stayers
69 (Joppke 1995) P. 227 70 Liberal here is important, because the question of how Western-driven unification was, how the West pushed for quick process, and which forces were used to achieve this, might undermine the democratic narrative featuring the intuitive and autonomous will of East Germans. 71 (Torpey 1995b) Torpey gives a fascinating example of this when he refers to the Rosa Luxemburg demonstration, a yearly state event, during which in 1988 emigrationist groups proposed to stage a counter protest. This became a signature protest of the building opposition in the years before the fall of the Wall, receiving wide coverage in Western media; the event was often cited for its successful highlighting of the hypocrisy of the dictatorship of the proletariat by marching under Luxemburg’s famous dictum that “freedom is always the freedom to think otherwise”. However, Jeschonnek, one of the organizers of the
161 as legitimate political actors, and their suppression by the state as unjustified. An
illustrative encounter between the groups took place on September 4th 1989 during the
emigrationists’ weekly Monday March in Leipzig. As the march for the freedom of
movement was attracting more protestors, another group emerged, holding up signs that
read “We are staying here” (Wir bleiben hier). This was not a reactionary or SED driven
protest. In the face of the state’s violent dispersal of protests, it was a cry of perseverance
against the arrest and deportation of dissidents; and an announcement that the state could
not rid itself of its opposition. Furthermore, given the recent memory of the murderous
repression of protestors at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and East Germany’s very public
support of that repression, vocal insistence that protest would not disperse in the face of
police brutality was both brave and highly risky.(Shen 2019)
The encounter sharpens the political contours of the tension between reformists and emigrationists. If the banner “We are the people” is the basic pronouncement of democratic sovereignty, then “We are staying here” is the militant reminder that the people will not, to quote Brecht’s famous 1953 poem, be dissolved. Staying here is the democratic cry against the state that seeks to equate dissidence with losing one’s right of belonging
Political historians of this end of socialism in 1989 often erase the political stakes of these calls for reform. In his seminal research on dissent in the GDR, Joppke goes so far as to argue that the distinction between leavers and reformers is in fact between dissenters and non-dissenters: he argues, the only real opposition in East Germany was the
emigrationist group within the church that organized the protest, argues that none of the dissident groups were willing to take part in the action: it was not a wide opposition protest at it is usually portrayed, with emigrationists having to protest by themselves (Torpey, p.110).
162 emigrationist movement.72 This is a particularly strong articulation of the argument that
refusing to deny the communist state outright, reformists were in fact supporting it. This
argument is challenged by the historical political perspective I have proposed of East
Germany. Namely, it fails to take note of the stakes of reformist opposition to SED rule,
where activist work for reform was dangerous and ethically driven. Perhaps most
importantly, denying the role of reformers misses the dynamic interplay between
emigration and reform in the development of peaceful protest in 1989, the way the two
drove one another throughout that year.
[the] growing exodus played a pivotal role in raising the consciousness of those determined to stay put, and even of those previously indifferent. […] exit [emigrationists] and voice [reformists] could be mutually reinforcing, acting in tandem rather than diametrically. (Major 2011 p. 242) As the crisis of migration was deepening, the cause of freedom of movement was gaining
pace. More importantly, previously passive citizens of the GDR were increasingly willing
to join the demand for change, both in terms of immigration and reform. Although tensions
between the causes remained, they were also mutually reinforcing in a context of increased politicization.
In this section, I have tried to bring attention to the ‘remainers,’ a political position accounts of the events of 1989 often neglect. The revelatory narrative of “from the people to one people” neglects it because it clashes with the image that the protesters secretly always meant to topple the socialist state. More over, even if not always stated as polemically as Joppke does, commitment to the socialist project, in the context of the
72 Joppke argues that dissidents’ acceptance of the GDR as a sovereign state meant “implicit loyalty to the rulers”. As they did not voice their opposition to Communism means for him that this section of the dissenters were not real opposition. (Joppke 1994)
163 crashing down of Soviet socialism throughout Eastern Europe, feels counter to the
revolutionary movement. It is tinged with the suspicion that reformism entailed supporting
the existing East German state. I’ve argued that neither the history nor the politics were
this simple. In these critical moments of the crisis of 1989, the major protest developing
did not demand the dissolution of the state. However, many were fearful that the depth of
destabilization was such that the future of the socialist project was under serious threat.
For many in the socialist reform movement, the opening of the border was seen as
a threat to the already fragile conditions in the GDR.(Andrews 1998) It brought the specter
of mass abandonment of the socialist project, and premonitions of mass demand for the
dissolution of the state altogether. They voiced fears of “Western colonization”,(Pizer 2017)
of the GDR becoming incorporated by its larger capitalist neighbor. The fear of mass
exodus on the one hand and of fomenting nationalist sentiment on the other was such that
even expressed their opposition, even “extreme rage”,(Andrews 1998) for the opening of the
border and Wall.
East German Intellectuals’ Response to the Crisis of 1989
During the famous November 4th Alexanderplatz demonstration, the famous East
German novelist Christa Wolf addressed the crowd: “Imagine there is Socialism and no-
one runs away!” This is a wonderful example of the role that the leading intellectuals of
East Germany played throughout the crisis. We hear in her remarks a growing willingness to confront the inadequacies and failures of the real existing socialism, to face the reality of popular dissatisfaction, and yet a continued belief in the project. Braun was part of this group of public intellectuals, who would, over the next few months, try to maintain the
164 hope and the potential of socialist project in the face of the huge changes the East German
society was undergoing.
On November 10th, a day after the fall of the Wall, social organizations (such as the
New Forum and Democratic Awakening) as well as leading intellectuals, such as Braun,
Stefan Heym and Wolf, published an appeal in the West German newspaper Die
Tageszeitung under the header “Bleiben Sie bei uns” (stay with us):
Dear fellow citizens: We are all deeply worried. We see the thousands who leave
our country every day. We know that a failed policy, even that of the last few days,
has strengthened the distrust in the renewal [reform] of this polity. We are aware
of the impotence of words in relation to mass movements, but we have no
means other than our words. Those who leave now reduce our hope. We ask you
to stay in your homeland, stay with us!73
The appeal formulates the sudden shift in relations between the demand for reform and the
pressure of political disintegration expressed through those leaving. The statement about
the impotence of words is particularly important. In it the text points towards its own lack
of power, the gulf between the linguistic performance of the appeal and the materiality of
leaving. As such, this is the appeal of intellectuals and writers, no longer assured of their privileged position in a society now driven by the silent ‘vote’ of those leaving.
But the “impotence” concerns also the gulf between the reasons for leaving and the
assurances that the plea can give. The appeal addresses its own inadequacy in relation to
the presumed promise of the West: freedom from the repressive state and potential
73 Translated by me. See: https://www.ddr89.de/texte/appell4.html accessed : 5/5/2020
165 prosperity. It can only offer a difficult but useful (meaningful) life: participation in larger
social change. The authors’ is a humble approach, born from the recognition of the need to
differentiate themselves from the Soviet state’s practices of denial and lying to the
population. Finally, it reflects how the demands of oppositional movements pressing for
reform were jeopardized by the sudden opening of the border. The plea ends with a call to
take part in the shaping of a “democratic society that preserves the vision of democratic
socialism”, and a recognition that this utopian potentiality had been “nipped in the bud” by
the Stalinist state.
It wasn’t long before the same writers published another appeal titled For Our
Country on November 26th, 1989. If the stay with us appeal recognized a gap, this open letter was an attempt to deal with the authors’ recognition of the chasm between the course they had pursued and popular desire. For Our Country recognizes the excesses of the regime and the contradictions of its brand of socialist life as well as the resulting popular hatred of the regime, people’s exhaustion from restriction and fear, and from shortages and other deprivations marking GDR life. The appeal sets up a choice:
Either: We demand the continued independence of the GDR. In co-operation with those states and stakeholders prepared to help we should muster all our strength to develop a society of solidarity, in which we guarantee peace and social justice, freedom of the individual, freedom of movement for all and the protection of the environment. Or: We have to accept that the powerful economic forces – along with the unacceptable conditions that influential West German industrial and political figures demand in return for their support – will lead to a sell-out of our material and moral values, and, sooner or later, an assimilation of the GDR by West Germany.74
74 Translated by Max Hertzberg. See: http://www.coldwarcultures.group.shef.ac.uk/for-our-country/
166 Although the letter tried to address what the authors saw as the legitimate grievances of the population, we are also starting to see some of the inability of the authors to come to terms the changes happening around them. Tellingly, the letter does not acknowledge the popular basis for the demand for unification. The only reason for eventual unification the authors recognize is yielding to external powers. The letter conveys an ethical choice between resilient dedication to the promise of a free, just, peaceful, and environmentally conscious socialist utopia, and the “selling out” of these values. The latter offers what we might call a vulgar-economic reading of the material conditions of the crisis, while denying the political crisis, with its loss of confidence and commitment to the state.75 Alongside such economism is a second denial: the letter’s authors seek refuge in a disintegrating socialist alliance (“In co-operation with those states and stakeholders prepared to help”). Looking back at this appeal, we see a group blind to the extent of change their world is going through.
It is with reference to these appeals by the socialist-dissident intelligentsia of the disintegrating GDR that we need to think about Transit Europa. The play evinces the ongoing criticism of and resistance to the emigrationist movement as abandoning the political cause and the moral-political value of “staying.”
Staging Transit Europa in East Germany after the Fall of the Wall
It is up to theatre today to develop socialism from science to utopia. The break- away [Ausbruch] which the piece has to make from the fleeting mechanism [Getriebe] of the old fable, is into communism. In the dire times of persecution and slaughter, utopia was nearer, in this volatile Europe, but the pressure of fifty years' experience casts a harsher light on it.
75 Given the extent of debt and dependency revealed after Honecker’s resignation, the GDR really was at the mercy of West German decision makers. Maier, Dissolution, p.77.
167 The above extract is a diary entry by Braun from the time he was writing Transit Europa
and it was part of the program handed out to the audience for the Gorki production in
December 1989.76 The extract introduces us to the role Braun thought theatre should play
at a time of necessary change in socialism. Braun understood the changes in the socialist
world as necessary reversals of the defects of existing socialisms. At the same time as he
deemed these changes necessary, Braun nevertheless demanded rigorous self-criticism and
questioning of their direction. From this perspective Braun suggested that theatre can disrupt the determinist narratives of existing socialisms and open space for a return for a utopian socialism, which is oriented towards true communism. This was indeed the role that the Gorki production of Transit Europa attempted to play. The play was not a reflection of the crisis of migration, but rather a metaphor for the great change Europe was undergoing.
In an interview with the production’s dramaturg Sylvia Marquardt, which was printed in the program, Braun explicitly denied the contemporary moment as analogous in terms of refugees and instead pointed out the metaphorical relation to a time of great change:
We are not a minority of refugees who must save their skin by changing their location to get away from their annihilators; but today, we must unexpectedly all change "place", our ideological and economic location, if we do not want to destroy ourselves through armament and industry. We are the persecuted and the persecutors both at once: our problematic line/direction, and the transit we are begging or fighting for, is reforms.77
76 All program materials come from the Gorki Theatre Archive. 77 „Wir sind nicht die Minderheit der Flüchtlinge, die durch Ortswechsel ihre Haut retten müssen von dem Zugriff der Vernichter; Aber heute müssen wir unvermutet alle den „ort“, unseren idologischen und ökonomischen Standort verändern, wenn wir uns nicht selbst vernichten wollen durch Rüstung und Industrie. Wir sind alle die Verfolgten und die Verfolger: unserer problematischen Zeile, und das Transit, um das wir betteln oder um das wir kämpfen, sind Reformen.“
168 Thus, Braun denied any similarity between those leaving in 1989 and the refugees of the
play. This was not a one-off. Later in the interview, Braun commented that “when I wrote
the play the current refugees, from East Germany to West Germany, were unimaginable
[nicht zu denken]. Of course, the ghosts pass over the stage.” Transit Europe was, therefore, not an allegory-play on the conditions of emigrationists veiled behind the refugees of the
1940s. As the long quote illustrates, for Braun the crossing is metaphorical: it stands in for the changing political space, and the need to take responsibility for shaping the changes.
Despite Braun’s denial, I would argue that those emigrating, including the Marxists
going into exile, in both 1984 and 1989, were too strong of a presence for the play to simply not have anything to do with them. But Braun needed to find a way to transform this question, which was threatening the very possibility of the socialist project, into a form that would help imagine the forward movement of the socialist project. Theatre could help transform and refunction the leavers’ drama into a projection of the drama of social change.
That is why we still encounter the figure of the refugees, crossing the stage as ghosts.
The figure of the refugee, full of potential at a historical moment when thousands were fleeing across crumbling borders, now served as a symbol for a different type of transformation. This transformation concerned how the collapse of the Stalinist regimes would require new political forms in East Europe. Braun approached these transformations in a two-fold manner: they were necessary and they had to be rigorously critiqued.
Braun articulated the necessity of these changes in an interview he gave to a
Hungarian newspaper and distributed to audiences arriving at the Gorki theatre to see
Transit Europa. In the interview, Braun evaluated the changes happening in Hungary at the time as: “it is a fantastic, that is, realistic decision of the Hungarians.” This stitching
169 together of the fantastic and the realistic foregrounds the radical nature of the times. What
was utterly fantastic in terms of recent history was not only happening, but it was the
sensible (“realistic”) response to the changing conditions. Braun’s remark gestured to the
fantastic reality of the utopian, which is a radical break from the status quo. At the same
time, this radical break is rationally necessary, that is, realistic. Braun shows here his
commitment to radical change, unlike those concerned and even opposed with the rapid
changes at the borders of the socialist world.
For Braun the necessary and fantastical break with the status quo was just as true
for East Germany. In the same interview, Braun mentioned the scene of Hans-Dietrich
Genscher, the FRG’s foreign minister (who had himself fled the GDR in 1952), proclaiming from a balcony, the agreement to let those seeking asylum in the Prague embassy to enter West Germany. Braun described how he was fantasizing that this was in fact Oskar Fischer, the GDR foreign minister, proclaiming everyone was free to leave, for as long as they wanted. He finished by saying: “Well, we see, the utopian text became real from one day to another.” It is clear in this interview that, unlike the reluctance of the socialist opposition in East Germany in 1989 in the face of fast-paced changes, for Braun the idea of a radical break, which would introduce democratic freedoms, and particularly
the freedom of movement, was necessary to achieve utopian change.
However, Braun’s recognition and celebration of the fantastic and the utopian
quickly moves towards the need for critical reflection on the direction of these changes. In
the Hungarian interview, Braun quoted from Peter Weiss’s Aesthetic of Resistance:
“Liberation cannot be handed to us, we have to conquer it ourselves. If we fail to conquer
it ourselves, then it will have no consequences for us.”(Weiss 2005) Braun then reversed the
170 formula: “If we liberate ourselves, there are consequences”. Weiss’s famous articulation on the critical importance of auto-emancipation casts it as the only form of emancipation possible. Liberation requires the labor of liberation, which is transformative: it is a process and an identity rather than a condition. To this, Braun’s reversal added that, in addition to being self-actualization, liberation is also non-teleological. It is not the end of a process.
Instead, liberation is a non-finite process, and once a moment of liberation is achieved, consequences arise (necessitating further emancipatory labor).
“They [the consequences] cannot be measured. We will have to carry it. We must also cruelly and thoroughly criticize the new illusions. We are in danger of taking a half step; we would be standing on the other leg in the same spot. Or we travel and are still not at our house. Half-measures are usually expensive. So it is in housing, and so in the reconstruction of the state.” Braun’s comments here clarify his commitment to utopian thought and criticism, relentless in its demand on reality. He is unwavering in his critique of the state, including the anti-Stalinist demand not to delay freedom in the name of control over the process of change.
This returns us to the journal entry quoted in the program. Here, Braun stressed that
“Emancipation is a long labor which consumes us but is not finished by us. Also as regards our transit-issue today one must question the direction first of all: And then we will get a sense of what boundaries we have to cross.”78 This quote brings together the multiple threads this section has worked through. If the changes East Germany was undergoing were necessary, then this moment to “question” the direction is the meaning of the break with
78 „die befreiung eine lange arbeit, die uns verbraucht und von uns nicht erledigt wird. auch in unserer heutigen transitangelegenheit ist ja zuallererst nach der richtung zu fragen: und dann werden wir ahnen, welche grenzen wir zu überschreiten haben.“
171 progress. Rather than following the radical break like it is emancipation in itself, facing the
consequences is the leap to utopia. The quote joins the critique of the temporality of
progress with the metaphorical border-crossing (the revolutionary change happening in
Eastern Europe); Braun was re-formulated the resistance of the megamachine, that took the
form of the wall (halting) in the play, into inquiry of the borders crossed in light of the
events of 1989. If the Wall expressed the state-confirming antifascism, new reflection must determine what utopian futurity will direct change.
Braun hoped that theatre, , could help make examine the boundaries faced in 1989, the need to actively find a new direction. In the quote this section opened with, Braun emphasized the break from socialism as science (both economism and state Communism), and the need to return to utopia. This evocation of utopia, as an orientation towards a hoped for but uncertain future, reminds us that the dictatorship of the proletariat was always just the stage before communism – the still unthinkable transcendence given the current
conditions. In this context, Braun asserted, the role of theatre was to break with the old
fable: the mechanistic view of history. We’ve already seen how Transit Europa was exactly
such an attempt at critical reflection on the concept of progress. Moreover, Transit Europa
offered a dramaturgy that can help illuminate what it meant to think antifascism without
the narrative of progress. This is what it meant for Braun to face the consequences of
emancipation.
If this is the general contour, the last piece of the puzzle concerns what Transit
Europa offers to help facilitate this reflection. Through Seghers’ novel, the role of theatre
as a critical faculty was marshaled to focus attention on the importance of staying, as a
metaphor and as a political response to the uncritical direction revolutionary events were
172 taking: yielding the formulation of the political organization of East Germany to a nationalistic image of unity. This was what the quote I started this section showed. It is worth quoting more fully, to see how Braun explained the choice to turn to Seghers:
we certainly feel the transitive nature of our existence, and the fleeting, unfounded, illusory yearning-for-the-other - whatever it is over there. in Seghers the great decision to stay, the journey into the land instead of the uncertain sea, belonging to the group [mannshcaft] of the continent. that was, in the war, the solid, antifascist agenda of this author, who found her people again in the onset of the resistance of the people. the longed-for change could be projected into the hope. our present dull and burning sensation is rather irritated by the pragmatic goals, the plan specifications, the five-year-plans.79 Braun was pointing to the function of staying in Seghers’ text as finding meaning in
continued resistance. Resistance is the practice through which the denied change of the
contemporary reality can be transformed into hope. This was particularly true in the context
of 1985 when change was actively stifled by the regime. In that context, staying meant
maintaining hope. In the context of 1989 this meant self-criticism and directing the energies
released by the changes society was going through.
Conclusion
Winkelgrund’s production of Transit Europa aimed to highlight the remarkable
emancipatory potential of the historical moment and to challenge an uncritical celebration
of the fall of the Wall, that would neglect the necessary question: what next? The
dramaturgical materials show how Winkelgrund and Marquardt tried to help the audience
understand the connections that Braun had made, and how he thought about their potential
relevance to moments of immense social change. I have tried to show throughout the
chapter how the production’s aesthetic choices helped pronounce the questions of identity,
79 From program. My translation.
173 goal orientation, and the challenge to East German historiography. It is perhaps
illuminating to end with the strongest way the production tried to illustrate the connection
between what was explored on stage and the realities unfolding in the GDR.
In the final moments of the second interlude, when the play announced the need for
a renewed antifascism to resist the megamachine, the production broke through the
proscenium boundary of stage. This was a climactic moment , when the text describe the
new orientation of the oppressed who find themselves against the wall. In the production,
the text was delivered by the male actors of the cast sitting in identical long coats and hats,
reading from newspapers and speaking directly to the audience. After the line “There is no fleeing, we must go in. We will not leave the continent”, the actors removed their overcoats, hats, and ties, changing back to their character costumes. They continued to move and sat on the front edge of the stage, treating the text itself as stage direction: “CORNERED ON
THE EDGE, [the oppressed] NOW COME TOGETHER IN AN UNCONQUERABLE
ALLIANCE – IN THE IMAGE OF THE WALL TO WHICH THEY STAND WITH
THEIR BACKS.” As they delivered these linesthe actors came off the stage and into the auditorium. As they did so, a loud noise started, evocative of the megamachine mentioned in the text, and prefacing, with the sound of explosions, the scene of Seidel’s arrest after the resistance operation against a munitions train.
The image of this group in identical costume, sitting casually, cross-legged, reading newspapers, was evocative of both the refugees leaving on the ship, and the “quiet citizenry” that merely take in, observe, read in the paper. This was an image of anonymity, these people in this costume could be anyone (reminiscent of the 1950s detective blending into the crowd behind his paper). It called attention, again, to the question of what gives
174 identity. The answer came with the moment of transition, the refusal to leave, the
recognition of the limits of the illusion that crossing the border means change of the
political space. Merely reading about the events in the newspapers, allowing them to
happen by themselves (deterministically), missed the need for critical reflection on what
was happening. At the point of refusal (in the text) the actors removed the homogenizing
costume, making the subject-as-character come through. The breaking of the spatial contract, first of the proscenium frame and then the fourth wall as the characters headed into the auditorium, emphasized the production’s engagement with the unfolding events
“outside.” The actors had decided not to cross the Wall, the border of the existing state but also that of the socialist project. Instead, they were staging a critique of their reality; symbolically, they broke the boundaries of the imagined world of ideas and the “real” world of the auditorium. The breaking of the fourth-wall did not break them away from their community, but brought them together into the moment of resistance. Although the representational walls had fallen, they could still find a Ziel and revolutionary orientation.
The alliance of the actors was not in forced conformity (of the identical raincoat). The actors found Ziel in the formation of a new identity and comradery in the auditorium. A different Wall, metaphorical, had to be put up, in the shape of a antifascism resisting the logics of the megamachine. Here the aesthetic, political, and historiographic trajectories meet. The demolition of the antifascist Wall that froze the socialist project in a state historiography of victorious final stage of social relations; the struggle for a Ziel and identity; and the proposal of a futurity, a politics, that rejected domination (of nature and other humans). It tied together Braun’s Benjaminian critique of historiography, for an aesthetic intervention of history into Jetztzeit.
175
176 CHAPTER III: The First Fall of the European Wall, Compassion, and the
Humanitarian Border
Introduction
In the summer of 2015 there was a dramatic increase in the numbers of migrants
crossing into the European Union (EU).1 This number had been growing steadily for years,
and especially since the beginning of the civil war in Syria, with large numbers of refugees fleeing Syria through Turkey. However, in 2015, over an unprecedented 1,000,000 migrants arrived in Europe, marking a dramatic increase from previous years.2 As a result,
migration, asylum seekers, and border policy in Europe quickly became the central and most controversial political issue in both national and EU level debates. Thus, the refugee crisis, as media and politicians called it, erupted. Critics, argued against this description, pointing out that Europe was struggling with numbers significantly lower than countries like Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, which had received the large majority of Syrian refugees. The absolute numbers were lower; the relative numbers were incomparably lower; and wealthy European countries as opposed to other receiving countries had the material means to support them.
1 Throughout this part I use “migrant” to describe all those attempting to cross to Europe for migration. I do not mean by this to deny claims for asylum and refugee status but rather choose the descriptor: regardless of reason, documentation, visa status, all those attempting to make their way to settlement across borders are migrants. I use “asylum seekers” or “refugees” when the specific reason for migration is in question or otherwise relevant to the discussion. I do not use “illegal” or “irregular” migrants: governments, EU institutions, and right-wing activists use these descriptors as apologia (at best) and justification (at worst) for the denial of rights, sub-human conditions, and immoral border practices. 2 In 2014, for example, the International Organization for Migration recorded 563,000 asylum claims in Europe (compared to 1.2 million by the end of 2015). See: https://gmdac.iom.int/global-migration-trends- factsheet ; Accessed : 5/5/2020
177 At the same time, in the absence of an overarching policy regarding refugees, the
“sudden influx” exacerbated existing tensions around the distribution of asylum seekers,
leading to a crisis within the EU political structure. This crisis resulted, for example, in the
temporary reintroduction of border control between EU countries for the first time since
the implementation of the 1985 Schengen Agreements.3 EU countries also experienced
internal pressures, as questions of immigration policy and xenophobia became more acute
and right-wing, nationalist, and populist movements grew quickly. Germany witnessed
significant growth in the support for right-wind extremism in the form of demonstrations by Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident), support for AfD
(Alternative for Germany), and xenophobic attacks on migrants. Even Angela Merkel’s
CDU experienced significant internal tension, especially with its sister organization, the
Bavarian CSU.
On the other side of this political crisis there was the experience of the migrants themselves. Pictures of overcrowded and unsafe boats drifting in the Mediterranean, waiting to be found by coast-guard ships, filled newspapers and news broadcasts. Between overcrowded refugee camps in Greece and thousands who died in the Mediterranean, hundreds of thousands took a complex and dangerous route through Eastern and Central
Europe to arrive to Northern Europe, Scandinavia, and the UK – the most preferred countries of settlement. Images, from train stations full of refugees in Central Europe to
Hungarian border control agents violently attempting to stop migrants, showed the extreme conditions refugees traveling to Europe had to deal with. Finally, even those refugees who
3 “Deutschland führt vorübergehend Grenzkontrollen ein“, Der Spiegel, September 13, 2015 https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/fluechtlinge-deutschland-fuehrt-voruebergehend- grenzkontrollen-ein-a-1052704.html accessed : 5/5/2020
178 made it, had to start building a life in a place where their very existence was hyper- politicized, and where governments and civil society organizations were scrambling to figure out how to cope with the new arrivals.
A central narrative in the so-called 2015-16 refugee crisis concerned humanitarian need. Media stories, articles, and exposés about the conditions from which refugees were fleeing abounded: through the treacherous travel at sea, to destitute conditions in refugee camps, train stations, and in processing sites and hostels, the migrants’ suffering and precarity were seemingly everywhere.(Georgiou and Zaborowski 2017) Many in Germany
and Europe responded by volunteering time and resources to the aid of migrants. Following
an initially unclear political response in the face of the seemingly sudden surge in
migration, Angela Merkel’s famous “Wir schaffen das” (we can manage) inaugurated a
German “Welcome Euphoria”. In the face of opponents to her open border policy, she
remained determined that it was the moral obligation of Europe to take in refugees.
Although this early welcoming rapture abated, changing into “Compassion Fatigue” and a
right-wing backlash against Merkel’s government and policies, the central theme of the
border as a problem-site of humanitarian need remained. Issues from human trafficking to
conditions in (now “offshore” Libyan and Turkish) migrant camps and processing sites
remained prominent news items. And of course, so did the counting of migrants killed at
sea.
The humanitarian border are all those moments in the migration process which are
known through the suffering and death of migrants. This knowledge about the border
produces demands justified by moral values and sentiments for border practices aimed at
the management of the precarity of migrants and on alleviation of their suffering. Migrants
179 drowning in the Mediterranean are one such moment, used to justify both rescue missions
and coastal surveillance to prevent ships leaving North Africa. It is a concept of border
which relies on a combination of correct feeling (compassion) and political criteria (moral
values and sentiments). My argument is not that the German public and politicians
unanimously recognized the border as a humanitarian site, that is, a site where practices of
preservation of life and the limiting of suffering take on primary significance. The humanitarian framing of the border in public discourse was itself contested, and often attacked by right-wing politicians and activists. But even such negative responses to the humanitarian border engage with this relatively new way in which we have come to understand the border: as a site where actions are scrutinized with reference to the problem of humanitarian need, and where the language of humanitarianism is employed to justify bordering measures.
Although coming under scrutiny after the summer of 2015, the problematic of the humanitarian border in Europe was around before the 2015 crisis. The first performance I examine in this chapter is The First Fall of the European Wall, organized by the Center for
Political Beauty (CfPB - Zentrum für Politische Schönheit) in November 2014.4 In this
performance, the political-performance activist group founded by Philipp Ruch in 2008
illegally removed a memorial situated near the river Spree in Berlin, dedicated to people
who died trying to cross the Berlin Wall. Mobilizing the emotional resonance of the
memorial, the Center protested the contemporary border practices of the EU, and
particularly the death of migrants in the Mediterranean. The performance was a critique of
the history that was put to work un-self-reflectively in the memorial, as a way of celebrating
4 From here on, CfPB.
180 and affirming contemporary German and European space as a bastion of progressive liberalism in which the “problem of borders” has now been “solved.” The performance showed how this narrative of identity and history had to obfuscate how hundreds, and then thousands, of migrants had died trying to cross the European border every year since the early 2000s. The performance took the emotions evoked by a memorial that served to stabilize a new German identity (the anger at the deaths of the victims of the Wall and shame of the collective responsibility for it) and redirected them towards the contemporary reality of border. The Center demanded that the same recognition and mourning be given to migrants, and that action be taken based on this. However, committed to the humanitarian self-image of the democratic-liberal new Germany and demanding a truly, non-cynically, humanistic and humanitarian policy, the Center and to that affirmed this self-image.
Performances like that of the CfPB take part in the formation of the humanitarian border. Such performance orients public discourse towards ways of understanding borders which are centered on migrants’ suffering and precarity, and how we might alleviate this suffering. These performances of humanitarian bordering work on the assumption that stimulating people’s awareness of suffering will translate into, at the very least, support of policy oriented towards the protection and care of migrants. Different types of representations, from media to art, attempt to compel the correct feelings that will encourage action, corrective to the suffering they represent.
The second performance I examine in this chapter is director Milo Rau’s
Compassion: The History of the Machine Gun (Mitleid. Die Geschichte des
Maschinengewehrs), which premiered at the Berlin Schaubühne in January 2016. A
181 verbatim performance developed primarily from materials collected in interviews with
NGO workers in Central Africa, Compassion was a critical response to the celebratory and
self-congratulatory German response to the refugee crisis epitomized in “Welcome
Euphoria”. Rather than creating a performance that encouraged compassion towards
migrants and supported humanitarian practice and intervention, the performance criticized
humanitarianism (and its emotional underpinning) as a self-absorbed practice that
redeployed existing ideologies of European superiority. Linking this critique to the
function of contemporary theatre, it criticized political theatre’s representations of the
suffering-Other as a form of cultural exploitation. It showed how the function of this kind
of theatre was to create moments of shared feeling through which the audience could affirm
its own identity as holding the correct political positions and feeling correctly towards the
“wrongs” of the world.
In my analysis of the two performances I show how each engages with the concept of the humanitarian border regime. The pieces differ dramatically in the histories they evoke: The CfPB leverages the moral outrage against the Berlin Wall and the murderous practices around it, as instructive for the humanitarian protest against the contemporary
European border. Compassion, conversely, complicates the assumption of moral good underpinning humanitarian responses to the border crisis, by showing a highly ambivalent image of the history of humanitarian involvement in Central Africa and its effects. Through these two histories the two performances show vastly different approaches to the role of
humanitarian ideas and logic in European border practices, and in the formation of
European identity. The CfPB performance, by highlighting the hypocrisy of celebration of
ideals of freedom and human rights while thousands are dying at the border, attempted to
182 mobilize the identity attached to these values by pointing to German (and European)
blindness or unfeeling to migrants dying at sea. It was taking part in the economy of compassion of the humanitarian border. Milo Rau’s Compassion on the other hand
criticized the prevailing structure of European humanitarian-liberalism, showing its
limitations and self-interest.
Before turning to the performances, I first discuss the notions of humanitarian
reason, the humanitarian border, and the role of affect and emotion in the moral economy
that underpins these notions.
Humanitarianism and Humanitarian Reason
In his seminal work on Humanitarian Reason Fassin argues that since the 1970s
there has been a discursive shift towards humanitarian need in the framing of political
issues and the kinds of solutions developed by state and non-state actors (in the form of
policy and direct action).5 Most generally, humanitarian reason orients politics and political
action towards measures for the alleviation of suffering. Media, the academy, and political
actors, such as foundations, local and international NGOs, frame crises around experiences
of deprivation ranging from poverty, illness, and hunger to human rights abuses. Such
framing aims to mobilize moral sentiment, care and compassion, and support action to end
the suffering in question. Humanitarian reason then is a discourse, based on practices of
knowledge formation, that produce and justify practices of government, all centered on the
recognition and alleviation of different forms of suffering.
5 (Fassin 2011) P. 24
183 Historically humanitarianism action taken by primarily by individuals private
organizations to “save strangers”.(Wheeler 2000) It has more recently expanded in the form
of “humanitarian intervention,” a framework legitimizing international action in crises
against the will of local sovereign (and in fact, often because of situations caused by local
authorities), such as the 1999 NATO military intervention in Yugoslavia, as a
Responsibility to Protect. Fassin’s discussion of humanitarian reason expands it as a new
justification for local governmental practices. Humanitarian reason translates into a form
of government that “can be defined as the administration of human collectivities in the
name of a higher moral principle, which sees the preservation of life and the alleviation of
suffering as the highest value of action.”6 Fassin describes how national politics
increasingly aim towards governing precarious lives, identifying and categorizing lives at
risk and suffering, and deploying different means to protect and remedy the suffering of
such Others. He understands this change in the moral economy as a political shift away
from the demands towards actions that do not endanger the status-quo, demanding remedial action rather than structural change.
Fassin argues that there has been a qualitative and quantitative shift in the role of
moral sentiment towards the end of the twentieth century, and that a corelated expansion
of the orientation towards the “disadvantaged and the dominated” focuses on (the
perception of) individual suffering and the need to alleviate it.7 This has led to a shift in
political rhetoric as “inequality is replaced by exclusion, domination is transformed into
misfortune, injustice is articulated as suffering, violence is expressed in terms of trauma.”8
6 (Fassin 2007) P.151 7 (Fassin 2011) P. 5 8 Ibid. P. 6
184 These changes are not merely semantic. Humanitarianism’s orientation towards suffering
highlights the effects of social conditions and focuses action on the need to alleviate these effects rather than the social and political frameworks responsible for injustice and
domination. Although he recognizes that sentiment has always been a central part of
political appeal, Fassin seems to point at an increase in the function of emotional appeal as
leading responses that divert attention from demands for “deep” change on the basis of critical analysis. Fassin’s analysis seems to reproduce dichotomous criticism of sentimental appeal against political reason. He attempts to explain the role he ascribes to sentiment in the structural form of compassion, which he posits as necessarily hierarchical and without reciprocity.9 Nonetheless, it is hard not to read his insistence on the decisive role of moral
sentiment as a classic structuralist (and masculinist) chastising of the role of emotion in
politics.
If the new practices seem less political, the shift that introduced them is deeply
political. Fassin points out how since the mid-1990s the adoption of international doctrines
(such as the “Responsibility to Protect” in 2005) and the growing role of large philanthropic organizations (such as the Gates Foundation) “redrew the political map of the world”, around a politics of humanitarian intervention and alleviation of suffering.10 The result is
an alignment in rhetoric and justification between dominant powers (institutions and states)
and progressive forces. This change not only entails a shift away from “more political
demands”, it also offers a discourse through which conservative policy can claim
9 Ibid. P. 3 10 Fassin, Humanitarian Reason, p. 15.
185 humanitarian justification. A stark example is the use of Responsibility to Protect rhetoric
by the US in January 2003 in preparation for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Offering a longer history of humanitarianism and humanitarian intervention,
Michael Barnett describes and challenges a narrative that emerged in the 1990s of a change
in the role of humanitarian action, beyond its historical roots in personal-private actions in response to humanitarian crises.(Barnett 2011) According to this narrative, governments
became increasingly involved in humanitarian aid, and humanitarian work expanded
beyond its remedial function to actions understood as quasi state-building (from education to support for democratic institutions). In this historical account of humanitarianism, the shift is articulated as a transition from moral to political action. Barnett argues that this narrative (prevalent in critiques of the “political turn of the 1990s”) imagines a “non- political past,” featuring a humanitarianism shorn of political interest. He argues that the supposed separation of the moral and the political, and blaming recent developments for their intertwining, overlooks a complicated history in which the two have long coexisted.
Between Fassin and Barnett, we see how humanitarian reason has become central to national politics (and to demands for political action), and how humanitarian action
(never quite as morally removed from politics as its supporters like to imagine) has become an edifice of international relations. Both authors see a central role for the management of the representation of others’ suffering. Since the 1990s the availability of media images and representations of suffering is almost unlimited. Coinciding with this, the scale and scope of humanitarianism have grown exponentially including, for instance, the sums of
186 money involved (from around two billion in 1990 to eighteen billion in 2011 and close to twenty-nine billion in 2018),11 to the huge number of aid organizations and workers.
Representation of suffering plays a key role in the shift towards humanitarian- oriented practices and policy. Fassin, for example, quotes a journalist: “What is required today is suffering— particularly the suffering of women and children, because it moves and mobilizes people more easily.”12 This quote, from the context of the AIDS epidemic in 1990 South Africa, illustrates how representational practices produce figures conducive of emotional response necessary to justify practices to alleviate suffering. While Fassin emphasizes primarily the linguistic-discursive shift in governmental practices, I am interested in the ways in which representation takes part in the articulation of the border as a site of humanitarian need.
Humanitarian Border
Not only has humanitarian action transformed from aid work across borders to a logic functioning within borders; the border itself has become a site of increased humanitarian interest. Border scholarship has reflected this, critically engaging with the humanitarian reason driving new border policy. In an influential chapter on Foucault and
Frontiers: Notes on the Birth of the Humanitarian Border,(Walters 2010b) William Walters discusses how in the past twenty years humanitarianism has had a growing influence on the discourse surrounding border security and management, the development of border policies, and the practices of an expanding regime of border control. Migrant retention
11 According to the Global Humanitarian Assistance Report 2019 https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/GHA%20report%202019_0.pdf accessed 5/5/2020 12 Fassin. P. 125
187 centers, where local police authorities detain migrants caught attempting to cross the border, have been especially influenced by this change in discourse, seeing more scrutiny of conditions and facing expectations that they function as centers offering basic humanitarian support. As a result of civic and international organizations’ growing scrutiny of migrant deaths during attempts to cross borders and evade border patrols and security, humanitarian language and practices are becoming an important part of border regimes.
This is especially true of the borders between the global south and the global north, between
Mexico and the US and between Europe and Africa and Asia, where there is on the one hand a heightening of security and control, and on the other ever increasing visibility of the conditions of migrants who try to cross and get detained at the border. The humanitarian border has two facets: it is the border practices focused on alleviation of suffering; it is also the concept formed through cultural practices that focus our attention on suffering and death in migration. As NGOs and international organization “problematize the border as a site of suffering, violence and death, and a political zone of injustice and oppression.”13
They, and other cultural agents, produce the humanitarian border as a concept of border.
Focusing on the Mediterranean border between Europe and North Africa, Walters shows that since 2007 both NGOs and international organization have paid increased attention to the precarity of refugees traversing the seas, and at the need to attend to their basic rights and humanitarian needs. He argues that as Italy was escalating its “fight against illegal migration,” it was coming under pressure by international organizations and NGOs regarding the conditions of migrants in Lampedusa. In response the International
Organization for Migration (IOM) took to providing humanitarian relief on the island,
13 Ibid. P. 149; my emphasis.
188 describing its activity as “humanitarian assistance for many exhausted migrants who arrive
after perilous journeys on unseaworthy vessels.”14 By treating the precarious conditions of
migrants created by Italy’s new border practices the IOM “operationalized in an attempt to
manage a political crisis and neutralize some of the controversies which Europe’s ongoing
confrontation with mass migration is now facing.”15 Offering humanitarian relief
effectively tempered the political outcry against the border practices of Italy, thus aiding
the conditions for the “fight against illegal migration” to continue.
While Walters focuses on the development of rhetoric demanding humanitarian
practices at the border, Nick Vaughn-Williams proposes that humanitarian reason is
coopted by authorities to legitimize their strategies of control at the border. He argues that
by focusing on “abstract and idealised” concepts, humanitarian rhetoric can easily be used
to legitimize repressive practices. (Vaughan-Williams 2015) He shows how the EU
Commission in 2011 and 2013 had absorbed the language of human rights and individual
protection, pronouncing that: “In essence, migration governance is not about ‘flows’,
‘stocks’, and ‘routes’, it is about people.”16 The commission classified these people as
vulnerable subjects in need of protection (including minors and victims of trafficking),
committed itself to a migrant-centered approach respecting the Charter of Fundamental
Rights , and pledged to protect these people both en-route and upon apprehension by
authorities. The appropriation of the language of liberal-progressive NGOs goes so far as the Commission proposing that “A migrant-centered approach is also about empowering
14 International Organization for Migration (2007) ‘Director General Visits Reception Facility on Island of Lampedusa’, IOM Press Briefing Notes, June 29. Archived by Migreurop at http://archives.rezo.net/migreurop.mbox/200706.mbox/%3C9CA3DF28-7E56-4E87-9A91- [email protected]%3E ; Quoted in: (Walters 2010b) P. 144 15 Ibid. P. 144 16 Ibid. P. 3
189 migrants”.17 Vaughn-Williams’s shows the entry of rhetoric of humanitarian needs into the
discourse, in language concerns about migrants’ life, well-being, and suffering, and used
to justify ever more elaborate border practices.
On face value it can seem that the process and practices oriented to the humanitarian border is the opposite of securitization (defined as the construction of the migrant as a threat, and the development of the means of controlling that threat). However, many border practices can, and are, justified by politicians and policy maker as aligning with both: patrol and surveillance, as well as efforts to subvert trafficking, function to control migration and protect migrants’ basic rights. Vaughn-Williams and other critical Border Studies scholars, examine the two in symbiotic relationship.18 Pallister-Wilkins develops this dual analysis
further in an ethnographic study of border police in Everos, the border region between
Turkey and Greece, and of the FRONTEX offices in Poland. This account illuminates how
invested FRONTEX’s expert practitioners and border police are in the protection of
migrants: they see it as part of their work, even if prevention of irregular border crossing
is their main task. Pallister-Wilkins elaborates this tension through the figure of the human-
trafficker, to whom both border police and FRONTEX personnel repeatedly refer as the
“bad-guy.”19 As a humanitarian threat, the trafficker aims to profit from the misery of the
migrants and has no commitment to their wellbeing. As a security threat, the trafficker is
responsible for maneuvers and ploys intended to subvert and circumvent control.
17 Ibid. P. 3 18 This is implied in Fassin as well, going back to the Sarkozy example. 19 It is FRONTEX briefing to its employees to use such simplified agonistic language when talking to the media and researchers.
190 Images of the suffering and humanitarian needs of migrants are central not only in
the representation of the conditions at the border, but also in the representation of the
reasons for migration. De Haas takes issue with how “popular images of extreme poverty, starvation, tribal warfare and environmental degradation amalgamate into a stereotypical image of ‘African misery’ as the assumed causes of a swelling tide of northbound African migrants.”20 He proposes that the image of the suffering migrant is put to use for inadequate
policy solutions, particularly the idea that migration can be stemmed by addressing the
“causes of migration” in the sending countries. Such policy neglects the reality that
migration continues because it provides cheap exploitable labor in receiving nations, a fact
which both local and EU political elites are unwilling or unable to address. Moreover, he
argues that the portrayal of suffering migrants fleeing hardship and dire conditions (from
poverty to environmental crisis) heightens anxieties in the receiving countries of potential
“influx” of migrants. These images of unstoppable waves of crisis-driven migrants
generates a demand for further securitization of the border,21 which in turn justifies policies
that make migrants even more vulnerable to labor exploitation. This representation
ostensibly focused on the suffering of the Other, then, puts them in a more precarious and
exploitable position.
De Haas argues that this image of migration driven by hardship and life- threatening conditions, is manufactured by media and political actors, and that it is a political rather than a factual representation. Although this is an important argument that highlights the link between securitization and humanitarianism, we must note that since the
20 (De Haas 2008) P. 1305 21 Second argument, regarding aid and the need to treat the causes of migration…
191 publication of de Haas’ article in 2008, the numbers and patterns of migration have changed
significantly. For example, a 2017 joint review by the IOM (International Organization for
Migration) and the UN Migration Agency shows that the recorded number of
“unauthorized arrivals by sea” to Europe was in the tens of thousands until 2013, rising to over 200,000 in 2014 (and famously passing the one million mark in the following year).22
The same review also shows dramatic changes in the percentage of refugees among
migrants arriving after 2013, with official numbers (calculated through the application of
relatively rigid definitional and identification criteria) showing an increase from around
30% to 60% before dropping back to pre-2013 levels in 2016. However, interview-based
research conducted in 2016 with migrants arriving in Italy found that around 60% cited
insecurity or conflict as the reasons for migration, and 43% cited discrimination. Only 23%
cited economic reasons.(Fargues, Philippe 2017)
The Refugee Crisis and Emotional Appeal in European and German Media
Representation
In all these accounts of the function of borders and the language used by
international organizations and border authorities (such as FRONTEX or the EU
Commission), the rousing of public emotion and sentiments is central to the purposes of
both the securitization and the humanitarianization of the border regime. Images of human
suffering arouse feelings of compassion, garnering support for different policy and
practices in response. This apparatus relies on the communication and circulation of
22 United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2017). International Migration Report 2017: Highlight
192 discourses and images of suffering to the public, as well as the framing of these images as
calling our compassion and support.
Research into media responses to the crises reflects the narrative of tension between repression and compassion, categorizing images that support one or the other. For some
these are mutually exclusive orientations, while others highlight how the images are
mutually reinforcing. While some emphasize how this limited the perspectives represented,
others highlight the contest between narratives that are mutually exclusive,23 or conversely
how these narratives reinforce a similar end. Holzberg et al., focusing on German media,
argue that the discourses work together in forwarding an image conducive to the changes
they see in the border regime:
We contend that this discourse of deservingness – in which the humanitarian logics of protection and the securitizing rhetoric of deterrence mutually reinforce each other – directly mirrors and extends the humanitarian securitization of European borders.24 In effect, all parties, from politicians, through humanitarian organizations, to the media and
scholarship, form echo chambers within which these are the dominant terms to understand
European borders since 2013. For example, although all of these mention xenophobia and racism as part of the discussion, these do not become a central theme in any of the accounts.
These accounts converge on the importance of an emotional appeal as part of the media representation. Similar to Georgiou and Zaborowski’s foregrounding of the humanitarian appeal as “emotional,” which they contrast to the “distant, emotionless” discussion when representation is supportive of securitization, Holzberg et al. discuss how
23 (Berry, Garcia-Blanco, and Moore 2016) Available at: www.unhcr. org/56bb369c9.html ; (Georgiou and Zaborowski 2017) 24 (Holzberg, Kolbe, and Zaborowski 2018) P. 536
193 certain figures, particularly that of Alan Kurdi, symbolized innocence with the aim of
“evoking compassion and pity”.25
Throughout the so-called Refugee Crisis, German media dealt extensively with the role of emotions in public response as well as political decision making. In these debates, conservative politicians and journalists primarily accused pro-migration advocates of responding emotionally (with empathy and compassion) instead of rationally; and pro- migration voices insisting on the importance of compassionate response, or reversing the argument and claiming that conservative positions were unreasonable manifestations of feeling: fear and xenophobia. This discussion became very pronounced after Thomas de
Maizière, the Minister of Interior and a member of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party
(CDU), stated in April 2016: “we will now have to endure some difficult pictures.”26
Responding to criticism regarding the “forceful return” (of migrants) agreements made with Turkey, de Maizière was implying that rather than respond emotionally to images showing the policy being implemented, Germans would have to endure the emotional response such images evoked, and act rationally, supporting the government and this course of action. This line of argument, contrasting an emotional response to a rational one, was of course not new. For example, in August 2015 the conservative daily Die Welt published an article titled “those who feel only compassion [Mitleid] have no reason
25 Ibid. P. 546 26 “Müssen jetzt ein paar harte Bilder aushalten“, Die Welt, April 7, 2016 https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article154124619/Muessen-jetzt-ein-paar-harte-Bilder- aushalten.html
194 [Verstand]”. The article claimed that the hope that Germany could take in hundreds of thousands of refugees was unrealistic.27
Although polemical in its tone, the Die Welt article voiced a change of sentiment that was prevailing in Germany. After the initial “Welcome Euphoria,” opposition to the open border policy and to Merkel’s position was growing quickly in the face of the refugees arriving. In September 2015 Der Spiegel ran the article “the idealization of the foreign”, focusing, like the Die Welt piece, on what it called the overly rosy portrayal of the refugee circulated by the media in order to calm the German public toward the open borders policy.28 After criticizing the German media’s portrayal of the refugees, the piece stated that “it is touching to see how many people in Germany are actively helping to give a friendly welcome to the refugees who seek entry. But it is not the job of journalists to be moved in the first place.” The author of the piece accused the media of succumbing to emotion and thus failing to provide an impartial representation. Assuming that the emotional response aroused by the media portrayal was not only garnering support, but in fact grounding the open border policy, the author added that “a policy that relies on emotional states is quickly abandoned.” The embrace of compassion and pity, with moral sentiments grounding policy, was quickly weakening.
Critics of this change in public sentiment, and the argument made for it, responded with a counterargument: German rejection of refugees and migrants was irrational. In
27 Broder, Henryk M., “Wer nur Mitleid empfindet, der hat keinen Verstand“, Die Welt, August 25, 2015 https://www.welt.de/debatte/henryk-m-broder/article145576852/Wer-nur-Mitleid-empfindet-der-hat- keinen-Verstand.html 28 Fleischhauer, Jan, “Die Idealisierung des Fremden“, Der Spiegel, September 1, 2015 https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/deutschland-und-die-fluechtlinge-die-idealisierung-des- fremden-kolumne-a-1050820.html
195 October, three months after the Die Welt article, the left-leaning Süddeutsche Zeitung
published an article entitled “Why has compassion [Mitleid] departed?”29 Observing this
shift in public attitude, the newspaper turned to earlier representations of refugees as
beneficial for Germany (such as supplying its workforce with young workers) to state:
“Germany profits from the refugees. So what? Does that play a role, when it comes to the
limit [Grenze] of resilience [Belastbarkeit]?” The article reversed the Spiegel and Welt
argument. It redefined and reclaimed the rational, non-emotional response, arguing that a
policy of welcoming and support for refugees was actually congruent with Germany’s
needs and to its benefit. The Süddeutsche Zeitung juxtaposed its rational position to the
concept of “limits of resilience”, popularized by CSU30 Minister of Transport Alexander
Dobrindt to describe Bavaria as having reached the limits of how many refugees it could
“welcome”. Further inverting the argument, the newspaper suggested that the “limits of
resilience” entailed an emotional (non-rational) approach to accepting refugees into the
German space. Such a limit, for example, could not be connected to a rational, objective
threshold. Rather, these conservative articulations demonstrated of how “reaching the
limit” was a conception influenced by the public opinion.
The back-and-forth between the Welt, Spiegel, and Süddeutsche illustrates the
ongoing debate on Germany’s moral economy: How to balance the “emotional” and
“rational” elements of the political crisis of popular legitimacy for support for migrants?
In the aftermath of 2015’s “summer of migration”, difficulties in social and cultural
adaptation caused growing friction between migrant-supporting and conservative
29 Gierke, Sebastian,“Warum das Mitleid verloren geht“, Süddeutsche Zeitung, October 14, 2015 https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/fluechtlinge-in-deutschland-warum-das-mitleid-verloren-geht- 1.2683866#redirectedFromLandingpage 30 The Bavarian sister party of the CDU
196 elements. Der Spiegel, for example, ran an article that argued that “in the refugee debate,
agitators and babblers pretend that reason and empathy are mutually exclusive, as if
selfishness is sensible per se.”31 The article was responding to the rhetoric taken up by the
right-wing of the center-conservative CDU, as well as to the increasingly audible voices of
the far-right AfD, whose vice-head Alexander Gauland controversially stated that “we
cannot be blackmailed by children's eyes.”32
Empathy and compassion continued to feature strongly in public discourse around
migration, and this was enough to warrant interest in them as structures of human emotion.
Over the next year articles dedicated to these emotions referring to evolutionary
psychology as well as to what they implied in terms of a cost-benefit analysis appeared
regularly in German papers. Although their main focus was not always directly the debates
over migration and refugees, the articles were clearly prompted by these debates, evident
in titles like “The borders of empathy.” A more recent interview with a psychologist in the
Morgenpost newspaper summarized the shifting tides of emotional response to the arrival
of refugees in Germany:
Initially there was a [response] similar [to the response to the trapped Thai children
in 2018] a large wave of empathy with active forms of engagement for the
Mediterranean refugees. But the tragedy went on for too long. For many powerless
people watching this, this led to a kind of “getting used to”, habituation, effect with
31 Trenkamp, Oliver, “Wir müssen das Aushalten ausschalten“, Der Spiegel, October 4, 2016 https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/fluechtlinge-in-idomeni-warum-wir-solche-bilder-nicht-aushalten- muessen-a-1086444.html 32 Portman, Kai, "Wir können uns nicht von Kinderaugen erpressen lassen", Der Tagesspiegel, February 25, 2016 https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/afd-vize-alexander-gauland-ueber-fluechtlinge-wir-koennen- uns-nicht-von-kinderaugen-erpressen-lassen/13009192.html
197 mixed feelings between frustrated helpfulness and an inner turning away from the
visually concrete, guilt inducing reports of an inhuman reality. This dynamic
encouraged an emotional style of public debate and a shift away from initial
compassion to a fortress-mentality, and this impacted politics.33
Rather than the psychological analysis of diminishing responsiveness to the tragedy, what
is more important to my argument is the framing of the discussion as a relation between
emotional responses and media representation. The use of tragedy is interesting in this
context: a dramaturgy of events that heightened a drama of suffering. The emotional
imagery translated into “emotionally styled” public debate that echoed and the “emotional”
representations, that is, the representation of suffering. Finally, it is the result of this heightened emotion that it was reversed into a fortress mentality.
These discussions in the German media show how the humanitarian border, which
relates to migrants and border activity through the question of suffering and the saving of
precarious lives, gave rise to a debate dominated by a discourse on emotions and affect.
Observing this relation between emotional responses and border policy and practices, we
see the humanitarian border emerging as a field of contest over affect. Within this field,
representations of the border, and particularly of suffering at the border, became especially
significant. We also see how a second level, a meta-discourse about the circulation of
images, became an important part of the struggles over the European border.
33 Kalischewski, Jennifer, “Höhlen-Drama gegen Flüchtlinge: Psychologe erklärt Mitgefühl“, Berliner Morgenpost, July 10, 2018 https://www.morgenpost.de/vermischtes/article214811427/Huoehlen-Drama- gegen-Fluechtlinge-Psychologe-erklaert-Mitgefuehl.html
198 Compassion and Empathy as Emotion and Affect: The role of the Spectacle of
Suffering
Scholarship in literature and cultural studies provides helpful guidance to better
understand the relationship between representation and compassion or empathy. Within
these fields, affect theorists’ engagement with fellow-feelings such as compassion,
empathy, and pity, often hinges on the relationship between text or spectacle and audience,
while critically considering the social relations that spectatorship reproduces. These help grasp the normative pressure of the formation figures of compassion; articulate the hierarchies implied in the affective relation; highlight the experiences privilege embedded
in compassion; and finally, the involvement of such affects in identity formation of a
community of feeling.
I use compassion and empathy in my discussion primarily because most of my
primary sources (as seen in the previous section) use them. They have a long history of
discussion in performance and theatre studies, as well as in political theory. For my
purpose, I find Lauren Berlant’s definition is useful, that recognizes that “There is nothing clear about compassion except that it implies a social relation between spectators and sufferers, with the emphasis on the spectator’s experience of feeling compassion and its subsequent relation to material practice.”34 Empathy, on the other hand, does not imply the
same social relation, or the connection between feeling and material action. Empathy
signals the ability to imagine the state of the other, to “put ourselves in their shoes.”(Pedwell
34 (Berlant 2004) P. 1
199 2016) They are linked because the ability to empathize, to feel the suffering of the other, is
a condition for the social relation and material practice of compassion.
My use of the term “spectacle of suffering” (or misery) draws from Hannah
Arendt.(Arendt 1990) Arendt uses it in her discussion of the “politics of pity”, where the
direct encounter with misery arouses a compulsion to aid the one suffering. Arendt focused
on this public appeal to pity or compassion to develop her main argument that such appeal
entailed a break with politics, based on her famously narrow definition of it. I invoke the
spectacle of suffering slightly differently, to point to the ways in which cultural actors
(from media to NGOs, artists and private persons) take the suffering of others, which is an
event and an experience, and transform it in order to make the suffering known to a public.
In the case of the border, this entails the representation of those elements in the border
regime in which refugees’ and migrants’ suffering is evident, if not at the center of attention. The migrants’ “dinghy” boats, the treacherous sea, the refugee camp, and the medical clinic are regularly evoked for this purpose.35 The spectacle of suffering functions on two levels: the internal-psychological, where the individual spectator responds to the representation, and the circuit of representation, which is the space produced by the interplay and hierarchy between images. Through repeated exposure to the spectacle of suffering in the circuit of representation, in contexts that signal to us how we are expected to respond, we learn to respond to them in the correct ways.
Compassion then is a constructed affective response to images that are recognizable through their participation in a series of similar images. This is a very different
35 It is important to note the selection process of these elements: not all potential images of such “parts” of the border qualify. The clearest example is how a border section with a fence and guard-post represents the border more often than sections of it that do not have such a physical barrier.
200 understanding of the role of the image than that of Luc Boltanski, who highlighted the work
of the image in mediating between the particular and the general.36 For Boltanski, the
spectacle of suffering transforms the particularity of the emotional response (I feel and
recognize the specific pain of this other) into a wider recognition of a condition,
experienced by a group. This transformation allows the emotional response to turn the
moment of encounter with and response to individual suffering into a concept detached
from the particularity. Thus, it permits action beyond the suffering individual: This is the
transition into the political. The spectacle, according to Boltanski, functions as a
“procession or imaginary demonstration of unfortunates brought together on the basis of
both their singularity and what they have in common.”37
Returning to my definition of the spectacle of suffering, of representation aimed to arouse compassion. It is a representation composed intentionally to facilitate easy recognition of suffering and the identification of the roles of those involved: compassionate observer and desolate sufferer. We will see later how these roles structure a relation between them. But first I need to examine the work that the transformation of the event into a spectacle does. One major way the spectacle achieves these aims is through the use of figures, or tropes. The repeated presentation of certain roles facilitates the formation of figures, such as the human-trafficker, the “extremist in disguise”, and the “deserving refugee”.(Holzberg, Kolbe, and Zaborowski 2018) These figures are both products of
representation and give further power to representation (as generalizable).
36 (Boltanski 1999) P. 4 37 Ibid. P. 50
201 The formation and maintenance of these figures occurs within the circuit of
representation, when an actor releases the spectacle for public consumption. The circuit
categorizes similar representations and hierarchizes them. For example, the repetition of
images of refugees being rescued from drowning boats produce, in the public-conscience,
that moment as a site of intervention, and the migrant on the boat as a figure in danger. It
marks them as more important than those languishing in refugee camps in Lesbos or in
transition centers in Germany. Implicit and explicit reference to the representation of migrants help create and support frameworks for understanding migrancy. We saw an example of this earlier in De Haas’s argument, that alongside discussion of the threat of waves of refugees, images representing the effects of poverty, environmental calamity, or war, reinforce fears of inundation and loss of control over the borders. Although much of
the power of the circuit comes from reliance on existing figures, this is also the way in
which new figures are formed (as objects of public interest).
Although new images do form in the circuit, the spectacle of suffering relies on
already existing patterns, images, and figures to create the intended (and expected)
emotional response. Recall Fassin’s quotation of the South African journalist who
demanded images of suffering children and women, who are perceived as innocent victims.
Claudia Aradau’s writing on human trafficking deepens the analysis of such
conventionalization of representation.(Aradau 2004) Discussing the use of narratives of
sexual abuse by victims of trafficking, she shows how narratives that were initially
introduced in order to challenge policy that framed trafficked women as “illegal
immigrants” and “illegal prostitutes” slowly became a means to distinguish deserving
victims from threatening migrants. This is the process Lauren Berlant theorizes when
202 arguing that (positive, pro-social, and progressive) “optimism has costs when its images
involve enforcing normative projects of orderliness or truth.”38 The “optimistic” images of
those deserving compassion (optimistic because they function to encourage care and
protection) have another side: the demand that those in need behave themselves. In
humanitarian narratives of victimhood we see counter figures emerge: the asylum- seeker/refugee is mirrored by the human-trafficker/terrorist; the survivor of trafficking by
“the illegal.”(Aradau 2004) Figuring and recognizing the positive (normative) subject of
compassion requires designating those who fail to live up to this definition, those who
(within a context of political interests and distribution of resources) illegitimately ask for
protection.
What kind of subject position does this affective relation produce? Berlant notes
the position of privileged giving: the compassionate person occupies a place of stability
from which they are able to experience the suffering of the other and act to alleviate it.
Compassion establishes an unequal relationship between the object and subject of
compassion: the suffering other and the compassionate self.39 The relation distinguishes
between an active, and affectively agential, compassionate subject and a seemingly passive
sufferer. Assuming a spectacle (image, story, or performance), rather than an active encounter has evoked compassion, then the sufferer is completely removed from the scene of affective action.
In contexts of unequal power relations compassion reproduces the conditions of inequality. Elizabeth Spelman argues that “Compassion, like other forms of caring, may
38 Berlant, 2004, p. 5 39 Not only an object role.
203 also reinforce the very patterns of economic and political subordination responsible for
such suffering.”40 Spelman argues that care distributed along lines of social capital tends
to reassert dependence (patterns of subordination). This is particularly striking in cases in
which the focus of care is purportedly aimed at ameliorating a need, but structurally
recreates the social conditions of that need.41 Ahmed similarly argues that the spectacle of suffering reinforces conditions of inequality as “The over-representation of the pain of others is significant in that it fixes the other as the one who ‘has’ pain, and who can overcome that pain only when the Western subject feels moved enough to give.”42
Compassion in this description produces the dependent subject, justifying relations of
subjugation.
It is easy however to overlook the role representation has in Ahmed’s formulation.
From this perspective, Ahmed’s argument is quite different from that of Spelman. Ahmed’s
focus is on the circuit of representation, whereas Spelman’s argument touches on the way
the compassionate outcome (care) maintains existing subordination. For Ahmed, it is
representation that does the work of fixing identities, which in turn justify and practices
that maintain relations of domination. A particularly important way in which this works is
by forming “community of feeling,” binding together those who feel the same way towards
an object. Discussing declarations acknowledging wrongdoings against aboriginals in
Australia and expressing shame and guilt for them, Ahmed analyses how these emotions
40 Elizabeth V. Spelman, Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering (Beacon Press, 1998), p. 7. 41 It is interesting to note that there are two versions of this argument, one conservative and one progressive. In the conservative articulation it is the welfare state that does the caring and disincentivizes those to whom care is given from working for their own good. In the progressive version which we see here, the emphasis is on the dependency on private philanthropy or superficial attention to suffering as opposed to attention to root systemic causes. 42 Ahmed, p. 22.
204 bring together the nation feeling them, articulating an “us” as a community of feeling.43
Ahmed focuses on what the emotion does to those feeling it, and the language used in the declarations (for example, how it articulates the subject feeling shame as having no personal responsibility). Taking Ahmed’s interest further, I am interested in the way differences in choices made within the performance on the emotion raised, and therefore on the identification it fosters.
This orients my investigation towards the subject conjured by compassion. Fellow feelings, putting ourselves into another’s shoes, entails imagining the state of others and a our own response to that state. Because of this, fellow-feelings are credited as opening
“channels of communication and understanding”44 by expanding the ability to rethink and reform the boundaries between self and other. Through the act of imagination and recognition we become able to comprehend beyond our own experience. Carolyn Pedwell criticizes fellow-feelings for the assumption that I can meaningfully know the experience of the other.(Pedwell 2012) It is essentially connected to a kind of self-identification with a position of privilege. Imagination, necessary in order to recognize the other and their experience and thereby extend beyond ourselves, is a cultivated illusion. Both imagination and identification (finding similarity) depend on the subject’s own experience: they require filling in the material that is missing from the spectacle of suffering, and the interpretation of that material. The common empathic response: “I can only imagine” points exactly to this epistemological limit of the imagination. The ability to feel correctly is contingent on prior exposure to images of suffering and the degree society has encouraged us to which
43 (Ahmed 2004) P. 102 44 (Pedwell 2012) P. 283
205 responses to them compassionately. Compassion then is a cultivated feeling and depends
on the degree to which a group attaches value to such feeling. Again, this points towards practices of group identity formation, and the willingness of a group to assume subjectivity
of privilege. Given the need to cultivate compassion, and how it relies on the identification of oneself with the subject of the spectacle, we are also more able to feel compassion for particular subject and not for others.45
I have argued that this is not different for the cultivation of compassion in support of humanitarianism, in the formation of moral sentiments that demand the alleviation of suffering. I have began to give examples of how the structure of the spectacle works in these cases through a focus on suffering at the border and the formation of figures of suffering others. In the following section I will turn to the first performance, to examine how performance that is critical of national identity formation through celebratory narrative of feeling correctly takes part in the production and affirmation of the humanitarian border.
The Center For Political Beauty: The First Fall of the European Wall On November 6th 2014, three days before the 25th anniversary of the fall of the
Berlin Wall, the Center for Political Beauty (Zentrum für Politische Schönheit. CfPB)
issued a press release, accompanied by materials relating to its latest political protest. The
press release revealed that five days earlier, the CfPB had orchestrated a complex heist of
the Weisse Kreuze (White Crosses), a memorial in Berlin for those killed trying to escape the GDR. Founded on “the group’s basic understanding is that the legacy of the Holocaust is rendered void by political apathy,”46 much of the Center’s work problematizes the
45 Boltanski, for example, discusses the way in which imagination is structured by prior experience as the need for it to be “nourished”. (Boltanski 1999) P. 50 46 https://politicalbeauty.com/; Accessed: 5/5/20
206 relationship between Germany’s culture of remembrance (Erinnerungskultur) and contemporary German reality, exposing Erinnerungskultur as hypocritical and un-self- reflective. Called the First Fall of the European Wall the center described the action as the memorial “fleeing” the upcoming anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall,47 and produced images that placed the crosses in the context of the contemporary EU border.
The action functioned as a critique of the culture of remembrance, and highlighted the self-congratulatory and superficial way the Wall and its victims were remembered in post-unification Germany. In fact, days later the events celebrating the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Wall focused on the narrative of triumph of freedom: with Berlin mayor
Wowereit’s celebration of “Europe that had learned not to fight conflicts any longer, but peacefully at the negotiating table… the end of the division of Germany and Europe. The start of a new era.”48 Merkel’s distinguished between the European space and other places around the world “where freedom and human rights are threatened,”49 and where people need to shape their future to make things better. It is against such festivity that the CfPB action revealed how contemporary German (and European identity) relied on a narrative of history celebrating how its political space has overcome the “problem of the border,” and transformed into a bastion of freedom and human rights. It juxtaposed this uncritical attitude to history with one that demanded reflection on the relation between past and present injustice, directed attention to the public blindness to the plight of thousands of
47 https://politicalbeauty.com/wall.html; Accessed: 5/5/20 48 “Die Rede von Klaus Wowereit beim Festakt zum Mauerfall“, Berliner Morgenpost, november 9, 2014 https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article134166736/Die-Rede-von-Klaus-Wowereit-beim-Festakt-zum- Mauerfall.html 49 https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/aktuelles/tag-der-freude-und-des-gedenkens-411126 Accessed: 5/5/20
207 migrants and refugees dying in their attempts to cross the Mediterranean into Europe, and
to the reality of the securitized European border.
In order to do this the action relied on a redeployment of the emotional commitment
of the White Crosses memorial. The memorial evoked grief for those who had died, but
also admiration for the resistance implied with their attempt at freedom; the pain and anger
regarding a murderous history both recent and unthinkably distant, but also celebration of
the very different current reality. In the German context and the very public struggle with
the implication of its 20th century history to identity, the memorial also arouses shame and
guilt of collective complicity. Connecting the memorial with a contemporary border, the
action also brought back the feelings associated with the memorial’s history, when it was
erected in West Berlin in the 1971. Then, it was site where grief and mourning, anger, and importantly compassion towards the dead and others wanting to escape to the West, were oriented towards the still existing border, emotions directing a demand for action and change rather than reflection.
The action took these emotions evoked by the memorial and redeployed them in relation to current European borders. It used parody and irony to denounce the facile celebration of the Fall of the Wall as a moment which cemented Germany as an ideal land
of liberal-democracy. It inverted the logic the memorial, marking the place where people
had died at the border; left as empty frames, the memorial-mark pointed to the place where
people are dying, showing the memorial was as an absence of thought. While shifting
attention to the border of Europe as a space where death and abandonment were happening,
it refused to recreate spectacles of suffering migrants, instead images that used the
aesthetics of landscapes and portraits. And it highlighted the limits of morning and caring,
208 extended towards those remembered by the crosses, but denied from those migrants attempting to cross the borders of Europe. Calling attention to the existing border as a space of death, it demanded that compassion would be extended towards migrants, that humanitarianism be extended to those precarious lives.
However, the action also recreated the hierarchical relations between the compassionate and those deserving compassion, taking the role of active agents extending their humanitarianism to the (passive) migrants. Although critical of the narratives of historical “overcoming” underlying the celebration of the Fall of the wall, they CfPB (and the performance) relied on the same core values, the enlightenment heritage of humanism and freedom, and their contemporary manifestation in human rights and humanitarianism.
As a performance of renewed commitment to this heritage and values, it functioned as an opportunity for identification with self-identified ideals of Western/European “goodness”.
It was critical of the blindness and cynicism of the contemporary celebratory face, but not the of the ideology and reason.
The action was a complex event, unfolding over a couple of weeks and involving a variety of media. It began with an elaborate production on November 1st, around the
location of the memorial. Situated on the western bank of the river Spree, on a busy tourist
promenade not far from the Reichstag, the crosses that made up the memorial were at a
particularly conspicuous location in a high security area. The footage of how the CfPB
removed the crosses shows a scenario carefully put together to give a sense of ordinariness,
to avoid attracting attention.50 It included, for example, a literary tour of the city for
50 https://youtu.be/pty0yNPeubk ; Accessed: 5/5/20
209 students (actually led by an activist of the center) that stopped by the memorial, offering a
short lecture on Machiavelli and Kafka. It was a distraction not by diverting attention, but
by creating an image so mundane it discouraged suspicion. The removal of the crosses itself was a show, put on by a group of activists dressed as maintenance workers in yellow-
reflector jackets. Instead of rushing through the removal, potentially arousing interest in
their action, they took their time, even placed a protective cloth on the ground in front of
the crosses and transferred them off the site casually.
The CfPB treated its project as an elaborate theatre performance. This was reflected
in the fact that they documented the removal, and it is reinforced by the description of the
different parts of the event as “acts” on the group’s website.51 A Tagesspiegel article about the removal of the crosses reflects the theatrical nature of the action as well, describing the theft as “performing a play” and describing the participants as actors and directors, and the security as spectators.52
The second part of the production took place on November 6th, three days before
the official 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The date seems carefully chosen: close enough to the official event to be already associated with it and to become part of the media coverage happening around the anniversary; and yet long enough before the official commemoration ceremonies to avoid being crowded out of the news cycle. The CfPB released materials to the local, national and international press, and made its members available for interviews. The action/news-story was particularly successful because the
51 https://politicalbeauty.de/programmhefte.html ; accessed 5/5/2020 52 Tiemo Rink, “Wie die Mauerkreuze verschwanden“, Der Tagesspiegel, June, 16, 2015 https://www.tagesspiegel.de/themen/reportage/ein-zeichen-fuer-die-fluechtlinge-wie-die-mauerkreuze- verschwanden/11663960.html
210 removal of the crosses had gone unnoticed, and the action was then covered by dozens of articles in all major German newspapers, numerous television and radio discussions, and even received significant coverage in the world media.
The official description that the Center provided was that the crosses “collectively left the city’s government quarters to escape the commemoration festivities for the fall of the Berlin Wall’s 25th anniversary. In an act of solidarity, the victims fled to their brothers and sisters across the European Union’s external borders”.53 The group sent materials to the press including: photos and a video documenting the site of the removal; a series of photos of the crosses (or, more probably, replicas of them) attached to the border fences of
Europe in different landscapes; and a series of photos of the crosses held by refugees in a forest not far from Melilla, the Spanish border enclave in Morocco.54 The group also set up a website and published videos, including the description of a planned final act during which buses with paying activists would leave from Berlin to the EU border in Bulgaria aiming to tear down the wall marking the boundaries of Europe. Signaling their intention, the website included an IKEA-style instruction leaflet for how to cut a border fence with manual or electric cutters. The group raised money for this bus trip on indiegogo, a fundraising web-platform, and managed to raise over $43,000, 662% of the initial $6,499 goal set on the website.55 After the trip to the eastern border of Europe, Bulgarian police stopped the activists before reaching the physical barrier.
The Center’s rejection of the memorial, and of the role of memorialization and commemoration in German public life, is rooted in a rejection of how the memorial affirms
53 https://politicalbeauty.com/wall.html ; accessed 5/5/2020 54 For examples of the images 55 https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/erster-europaischer-mauerfall#/ ; accessed 5/5/2020
211 contemporary Germany as a space of freedom and without “the problem of the border.” To
understand this function of the memorial I go back to the occasion of its unveiling in its
current location. Wolfgang Thierse, then president of the Bundestag, unveiled the White
Crosses memorial in its new location on June 17, 2003, on the 50-year anniversary of the
1953 popular revolt in the GDR. The memorial had been moved to the other side of the
Reichstag for the renovation and building of the new government complex in 1995. His
comments at the event largely rehearsed Western Cold War ideology about East Germany.
Thierse described the 1953 strike and popular uprising in East Germany as the “will-of-
freedom” of the people, a partisan account of the history of the GDR.56 This account
contrasts the totalitarian regime with the people, who are presented as having always-
already yearned for the liberal-democratic future of a unified Germany.57 This reflection is
reinforced in Thierse’s aesthetic analysis: “I find that the deliberately simple ‘White
Crosses’ in the midst of the very modern architecture on the banks of the river Spree are
particularly powerful. Let us not forget: where the ’White Crosses’ are now placed, was
literally the saving shore at that time.” Thus, Thierse associated the smoothing out of
historical narrative with the aesthetic simplicity of the crosses that in turn resonated with
the post-modern architecture of the new buildings. In doing so, he suggested that the
contemporary architecture of politics, both in Germany and the new Europe, aesthetically
write over past complexities and trauma; the architecture and memorial are the culmination
of, and the answer to, the history of totalitarianism.
56 All quotes from Thierse’s speech are my translation; see original German: http://webarchiv.bundestag.de/archive/2006/0807/aktuell/presse/2003/pz_0306173.html ; accessed 5/5/2020 57 See chapter 2 and the discussion of historiography of totalitarianism and the shift from “We are the people” to “we are one people” P.163
212 This connection by Thierse rehearsed the history of the White Crosses memorial as a reaffirmation of West German anti-communism in 1971. From the late 1960s, West
Germany began shifting towards Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik: the gradual de-facto recognition of the GDR and the normalization of relations with it. As the reality of the continued existence of the socialist state consolidated, memorials and anniversaries continued to serve “twofold commemorative functions: preserving memories of the deceased individuals and enhancing the broader Western narrative of the Wall as concrete proof of the East German regime’s illegitimacy.”58 However, this was no longer the bitter and total animosity of the first fifteen years of the two German states. Although politicians engaged in some ideological grand standing, there was limited interest in fueling public furor towards the Wall. In fact, in 1972, a year after the erection of the White Crosses, the
Basic Agreement was signed, which regulated much of the interaction between the
Germanies.
When the Berlin Citizen Group brought together the crosses for multiple victims to form a single commemoration site in 1971, it was an attempt to force the issue of the systematic killing and brutality at the border, and to stage displeasure at the realpolitik of normalization. By setting up a central memorial, an initiative that the state did not take, the
Berlin Citizen Group turned the dispersed sites memorializing individual killings (which were recognized as sites of protest only on memorial days) into a permanent, continual
58 (Ahonen 2010) P. 135
213 reminder of the root injustice of death at the Wall. It was an attempt to resist Ostpolitik by
re-invigorating the West’s “anti-communist” 59 stance.
In returning to the stark contrast of freedom versus totalitarianism, Thierse was
returning to the discourse of the early 1960s, when West Germany was strongly anti-
communist. During those years the state used the Wall and killings by border-guards as
opportunities to delegitimize the East German socialist state. For example, a 1965
newspaper article after the killing of Hermann Döbler decried how it exposed the “pseudo-
humanitarian façade of the latest SED-policies.”60 If in the early 1960s West Germany, both state and press, sought to expose the cynicism of East German claims for peace and
human rights, the actions of the Citizen Group, one decade later, called attention to the
“pseudo-humanitarian” position of West Germany, which denounced the East German
regime while expanding relations with it.
Unveiling the new memorial in 2003, the state was consolidating a contemporary
German identity by contrasting it to the past. The new government center buildings,
commissioned to be symbolic of “German democratic values” and of unification,(Brenner
2017) were designed in the early 1990s as highly modern buildings, that could be anywhere,
and particularly anywhere in Europe— this new aesthetic space reflects Germany’s
participation in EU politics and within a global order.61 This architectural space is an
aesthetic negative of the history of Germany, explicitly reversing the logics of a north- south axis used in during the Third Reich for an east west axis. The neo-classical and
59 I use anti-communist as a narrow category: the cold-war ideology of absolute rejection of, and opposition to, socialism. This ideology took shape, for example, in the historiography of totalitarianism, that presented fascism and socialism as ethically and politically equivalent. 60 Quoted in Ahonen, p. 159 61 (Huyssen 2003) P. 60
214 Prussian former aesthetic was replaced a modernist one. The contemporary, as it is staged here, is cosmopolitan, and the architecture is of globalized and multinational modernism.(Sklair 2005)
And yet behind this new internationalized Germany, elements of the past are preserved, like the Reichstag with its new glass dome. This is what Rudy Kushar describes as the complex relation between preservation and the “unstable optic identity of the nation.”62 The past, and especially its horrors, are brought into the present as stabilizing elements: it is an immutable past that has been overcome, and on which the present rests.
The past is done away with, in how little of tradition comes into the new building; at the same time the past needs to be maintained in order to contrast with this newness. The past is not forgotten, but removed through its sudden foreignness. Against the past of unfreedom, a Walled past, the contemporary stands as a space of freedom, where the deadly borders have been removed—this is the invocation of Thierse. However, the past’s resistance to stabilization as didactic narrative makes the stabilization attempt always partial and open to contestation.
Such contestation indeed happened, as neither the families of the memorialized victims or the Federation of Central Germans (the new name taken up by the Berlin Citizen
Group) were happy with the changes made by the city to the memorial (which included the reduction of the number of crosses from thirteen to seven, and not using the original crosses). The federation refused to remove the crosses from their temporary location, and when the city tried to forcefully remove them it was denied by protest.63 This protest was
62 (Koshar 2000) P. 330. 63 (Saunders 2018) P. 221
215 not against the use of history in the formation of contemporary German identity, and definitely not against the importance of this particular history. The federation struggled for a more conservative nationalism, rejecting the modern Euro-oriented cosmopolitan New
Germany.
Unified Berlin has used these memorial images to solidify its liberal identity as the vanguard of human rights and humanitarianism.64 The commemorated past has served as a point of reference for the achievements of the new political space, which constituted itself as utterly foreign to this past: the past was the new Berlin’s negative mirror image.
Returning to CfBP’s action in light of this historical-political context, I argue that it was Thierse’s statist version of victorious history and the role of memorialization in stabilizing the identity and political imaginary of the New Germany that the CfPB challenged in their action. The CfPB redeployed the memorial as currently relevant, a demand to recognize today’s political brutality at the European border, a reality of murderous borders no longer visible in Berlin. They did this both through the deployment of irony, exposing the celebration of the New Germany as a space of freedom and human rights as hypocritical, and by denying the narrative of contemporary space-free-of-borders through exposing how the borders of Europe work today.
The ironic perspective the CfPB approached the memorial with already appears in the production it staged for the purpose of the removal. The tour-guided visit to the memorial seems to mock the way the memorial functions as a pompous and uncritical
64 This identity is perhaps best articulated in Berlusconi’s address to the European Parliament in 2003, after the death of migrants trying to make their way to Sicily: “our European Christian tradition compels us to look to these immigrants with a spirit of reception worthy of our level of civilization.” Cited in: (Albahari 2017) Available at: https://escholarship.org/content/qt22c1k8xh/qt22c1k8xh.pdf accessed: 5/5/20
216 reflection on German history made for tourists. This is a self-conscious, parodic
performance. This attitude was borne out in the announcement of the removal of the
crosses, that the (dead) victims had fled “in solidarity” to their brothers and sisters on the
borders of Europe. The use of “fled” reminds us of the way the victims were killed, and
the image created is almost playful, bordering on the inappropriate to create controversy.
The invocation of solidarity offers the dead as an alternate to a population that shows little
care, an imaginary response which mirrored the death of migrants trying to cross into
Europe, with flight out of those how had died trying to flee East Germany. This parodic attitude is maintained on the website description of the action, happening while “Berlin’s
politicians sent balloons up into the air listening to nostalgic and sedating speeches in an
Oktoberfest-like ceremony”. This description of the celebration of the 25th anniversary of
the fall of the Wall is a direct rejection of the way Germany relates to history, in
celebration-ceremony that appeases the contemporary without interrogating the past. This
highlighted the memorial ceremony in its political function, a PR opportunity. Such a celebration functions as sedation, reassuring citizen of the stability of the political reality
by maintaining a tourist spectacle (Oktoberfest-like ceremony).
Contrasted to this parodic stance towards the official memorialization, the
performance used a very different tone when exploring what is hidden by this version of
history that affirms the present as having overcome the problem of the border. The Center
dropped the mischievous approach completely. When the Center publicly announced the
action on November 6th, they also returned to the site of the memorial. Not trying to be
inconspicuous, they arrived at the site of the memorial wearing t-shirts with HUMANITY printed on them and attached post-it notes reading “es wird nicht Gedacht” (literally, this
217 is not thought) and “Toumani Samake” in the empty frames of the crosses. The first post-
it note gestures to the German word for monument or memorial, denkmal: if a memorial is
a place of thinking, then this is a failure of thought. Thierse’s 2003 speech is again a good
example of the kinds of lack of thought the CfPB was pointing to, seemingly oblivious to
the deadly nature of contemporary borders. It was a lack of thought to talk of the how the
Berlin Wall “became the deadliest border in the world,” in a year when the UN estimated
that between 750-1250 migrants died in the Mediterranean—roughly the same as the number of people who died trying to cross the inter-German border throughout the 27 years of its existence. This obliviousness was even more startling when he said that when visiting the site one “thinks of deadly borders in other parts of the world, of oppression, incapacitation, violation of human rights in many parts of the world. […] The mechanisms of oppression that lead to memorial sites like this must have no future - nowhere in the world. [my highlights]” This remark makes unambiguously clear the political space of
Europe that Thierse imagines and represents, a space of freedom and rights, in contrast to
“other parts of the world”. The border in this image it is between the liberal space of Europe and the space of oppression— separated not only spatially, but also temporally (“must have no future - nowhere”). In contrast to this kind of spatio-temporal bordering of the political space of Europe, the Center reminded those visiting its website that “Since the fall of the
iron curtain, the EU’s border has taken 30,000 lives.”65
Instead of this image of the borders that is implied by the state-narration of the memorial, the CfPB insists on revealing other faces of the borders of Europe. In putting
65 In 2003 alone the UN estimated that between 750-1250 migrants died trying to cross the border to Europe.
218 the name Toumani Samake in the post it notes, the performance drew a strong parallel between those killed at the Wall and contemporary EU border practices, laying bare similarly cynical claims of humanitarianism and human rights protection in both historical situations. Toumani Samake was a 23-year old man from Mali who tried to cross the EU border-fence in Melilla, Spain, in October 2014. Videos from the border show Spain’s border patrol, the Guardía Civil, beating migrants attempting to climb over the fences, and
Proasyl, a migrant support NGO, has since argued that this footage includes the moments of the killing of Samake.66 Focusing on this killing by mentioning Samake’s name
presented the border as actively murderous, not as “merely,” passively abandoning
migrants to die in the Mediterranean. Here, European border police stood accused of
brutally killing migrants who were attempting entry. Tellingly, the media coverage of the
event did not pick up on this part of the performance.
The Center released two sets of images of the crosses: in one set they are attached
to fences of the external border of Europe, and in the other they are set they held up by refugees. These images also work to expose the realities of the border that are left out by the celebratory narrative of the Fall of the Wall. Both sets of images taken from the border, shared through the media and on the Center’s website, offer a very clean image of the border. The images of the relocated crosses attached to the border fences show scenes empty of humans, with no guards or migrants in sight. The border stretches through a natural scenery, with no way of telling what is on the inside and what is out, or where these fences might be located. In contrast to the urban environment from which the they were taken, these emphasizes how foreign this border is to the space of Berlin, how on the fringes
66 https://www.proasyl.de/news/was-geschah-mit-toumani-samake/
219 the façade of a New borderless Europe, almost unrecognizable as the same space, the
borders still rise.
Evocative as images, these representations avoid the question of how the borders
function, the kind of practices that animate them, of the border as a process.67 They resonate
with the popular image of a border from a geography book or atlas: a line of separation
drawn across a landscape.(Salter 2012; Kopper 2012) The Center’s website complicates this
image by superimposing a description: “The front of the picture shows the iron curtain.
Behind it, the European Union is making room for the newest generation of surveillance
technology. On the ground behind the white cross is a camera pole which will detect
refugees as part of Eurosur [European Border Surveillance System] and report them to the
local police.” The Center’s text and images gesture here to how the contemporary borders
of Europe take part in a distribution of a world space: how the borders pictures are the
frontier of the global north keeping itself separate from the global south. It does this through
linking the past world order, the Iron Curtain of the bi-furcated world order of the cold-
war, to the present of the border and the contemporary borders of Europe. This moment in
the performance is the only one that breaks from the demand to protect migrant lives to
criticism of the global power relations the borders maintain. Breaking from the
humanitarian demand, it sheds light on the practices of border (left invisible by the picture):
the securitization through surveillance and deployment of police.
67 James Wesley Scott, “European Politics of Borders, Border Symbolism and Cross-Border Cooperation,” in A Companion to Border Studies (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), 83–99; David Newman, “The Lines That Continue to Separate Us: Borders in Our ‘borderless’ World,” in Border Poetics De-Limited (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2007), 27–58.
220 The other set of images, of migrants holding up the crosses, presents the viewer with questions regarding care and responsibility: to whom do we extend care and responsibility and who remains unseen? The images, contrasting the memorial crosses with the figures holding them, asks whose death gives cause for mourning and whose precarious life remains undeserving of grief. Again, the images themselves give us very little context, leaving it to the viewers to make their own assumptions about the black people holding the crosses. This effect focuses attention on the structures in place to make certain lives and deaths known intimately, and others left hidden behind numbers and statistics. The contrast between white (crosses), commemorating assumed white Germans, and black (bodies) can also resonate with a question of racism of the world order: black bodies are both excluded and left to die, with no accountability.
These images crystalizes the question of humanitarianism in the performance. The images shift the affective attachment to the victims identified by the crosses to the migrants holding them: they transpose the recognition, shame, and grief from the victims of the Wall, to the bodies endangered by the contemporary border regime. A response on the Center’s website from Cesy Leonard, an activist, clarifies this. She focuses on the attention that the action received, contrasting it to the attention garnered by the capsize of a boat in Turkey that killed 24 migrants, and argues that “This reveals the true face of German society. Every society only mourns its own victims. As soon as you’re from somewhere else, people don’t really think about you. We can only fully pay tribute to those who died at the Berlin Wall if we also think about the new victims.”
The Center also released four interviews conducted with the same group of migrants form the photographs. The interviews are held in French, and from extreme close
221 up on the faces of the migrants, leaving the background (the woods of images of the
migrants holding the crosses) out of focus. Although you can hear the voice of an
interviewer asking questions at a few points, the focus is entirely on the faces and the
narrative they offer. Unlike the professionalism and very clear intentionality of the rest of
the elements of the performance, crafted and meticulously executed, these videos seem
amateurish (for example, at one point the camera man needs long seconds in order to stabilize and re-focus the image). Throughout the short interviews, ranging between a minute and three minutes, the migrants repeat again and again that they suffer. They make appeals to be saved: “we suffer, it is up to you to help us. We cannot do anything. It is up to you.”68 In one of the interviews the appeal is directed specifically to the European
community, which is also prompted again by the interviewer asking “what do you want to
say to the European community?”69 The interviewer also asks at one point directly: “what
does freedom mean to you?” This is the only part in the action in which migrant are seen
and take any part in the performance. However, it recreates the relations between the active
compassionate European and passive sufferer most clearly. These are the social structures
of dependency and privilege that compassion risks reinforcing, staging the migrant as that
who suffers (As discussed by Ahmed) and the European as able to act as savior, what
Pedweel described as “purview of those who are already socially privileged”.70 It reinforces the logic that traveling to the border to cut it down mimics: of the white activist driving change for the suffering (reversing the perceived role of the protestors of 1989).
Invoking that “among us there are many children” the interview takes part in the
68 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhnW7x05dfQ ; accessed: 5/5/20 69 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTxR60EplVI ; 5/5/20 70 (Pedwell 2012) P. 283
222 reproduction of figures that arouse compassion. However, offering narratives of those
escaping hunger,
Although these videos rely heavily on the repetition of a statements of suffering,
the performance refuses to reproduce images of suffering, spectacles of suffering migrant
death and precarity. Even when pointing at an actual death, that of Toumani Samake. The
images of the migrants holding the crosses do the opposite of showing death: they create
an unsettling relation between the very live bodies of migrants and the unavoidable
implication that they are being made to die at the border, abandoned to death at the border.
Although the performance refuses to show suffering, it implicates the audience in not
caring for these bodies, appealing to Germans and Europeans to see this suffering, rather
than the sedation of celebrating the Fall of the Wall. How does the Center’s refusal to show suffering effect the appeal of the performance to compassion? Similar to the empty frames
of the crosses, the refusal to show suffering forces the audience to conjure the images of
suffering that they expect, showing the working of the circuit of representation. It
highlights the exposure to the spectacle of suffering that we are already saturated in, and
actively suppress in order to celebrate Western freedom and protection of human rights.
Furthermore, the refusal exposes the expectation of the audience, and asks what the
existence of such expectation, the desire to witness suffer in order to experience
compassion, mean about the audience.
Cesy Leonard’s comment about mourning for one’s own dead also highlights the
Center’s political analysis of the border. The aspect of the boundary on which Leonard
focuses is that of the affective power of national belonging, which differentiates, in the
case of the memorial, between those who receive tribute and mourning and those who are
223 left unseen. This criticism was foregrounded in another action by the Center, The Dead are
Coming in 2016, in which they brought the body of a Syrian woman who died trying to
cross the border to burial in Berlin.(von Bieberstein and Evren 2016) The original memorial
takes part in the formation of national identity, and in the consolidation of an image of
contemporary Germany, through the mourning of the nationalized dead. As such, it is part
of the determination of national boundaries. Such determination, Leonard points out, is
reproduced through media representation and its structuring of an economy of care and
protection. This is an argument that Alexandra Hildebrandt, the director of the Checkpoint
Charlie Museum and the purported owner of the White Crosses of the memorial (who
decided not to file against the action), could agree with as well.71 In an interview she said
that “she is ashamed of the large number of people drowning in the Mediterranean on the
way to Europe. That empathy [of the past, towards the dead of the Wall] has been lost, the
willingness to give up something of your own prosperity.”72 She added that “I am ashamed because we in the museum talk too little about today's refugees, although we should, actually.”
The CfPB action used the same emotional vocabulary as the original memorial, while expanding the scope of subjects implicated by the history the memorial commemorates. Although it ostensibly made the demand that the border be removed, it primarily showed the violence of the border, and created the condition for a stronger demand for action directed to the precarity of migrants. It shared the same imagination of
71 Hildebrandt, who claims to be the owner of the White Crosses of the memorial, publicly criticized the Center’s action as insensitive, but also pressed no theft charges. 72 Rink, Timo, “ Wie die Mauerkreuze verschwanden“, Der Tagesspiegel, June 16, 2015 https://www.tagesspiegel.de/themen/reportage/ein-zeichen-fuer-die-fluechtlinge-wie-die-mauerkreuze- verschwanden/11663960.html ; Accessed 5/5/2020
224 the border as a denial of freedom and rights, and as a scene of death, a barrier that imperils life. To stage its demand, the Center evoked the same conceptual world of the memorial, of freedom and human rights. This is the power of the performance: The Center’s action functions as a corrective, pointing out the limits of historical reflection, and the hypocrisy of the German state that claims to have achieved these values and celebrate (and proliferate) them elsewhere. But it also reveals its limits as critique. Sharing the conceptual framework of Western liberalism, elides the historical political role justifying practices from colonialism to military intervention. Making demands in the name of what Vaughn-
Williams had called “abstract and idealized” both takes part in their reproduction as narratives of progressive virtue, and obfuscates how they maintain structures of subjugation (here, blurring the line between the revolutionary demand to remove the border and the world order it preserves and the demand for humanitarian action). Similar to
Walter’s critique of the IOM’s function in providing humanitarian relief in Lampedusa, focus on suffering of migrants at the border misses the border it upholds, as well as, for example, the continued denial of work and housing rights to asylum seekers in Germany.
The Center’s embeddedness within Western values, and particularly its participation in the imaginary of humanity and humanitarianism, is clear in how it introduces itself: “The Center for Political Beauty is an assault team that establishes moral beauty, political poetry and human greatness while aiming to preserve humanitarianism.”73
This conceptual world repeats when the Center describes its mode of operation as a group that “engages in the most innovative forms of political performance art - an expanded approach to theatre: art must hurt, provoke, and rise in revolt. In one basic alliance of terms:
73 https://politicalbeauty.com/index.html ; Accessed 5/5/2020
225 aggressive humanism.”74 This is the conceptual world that Talal Assad describes as that of
Modern Virtue, a narrative of humanism bequeathed by enlightenment thought, oriented
toward universal humanity, and committed to benevolent reduction of suffering
(compassion) that legitimizes humanitarianism.(Asad 2015) It is the base of a world view
that imagens progressive human betterment through Western thought and its expansion in
capitalism and liberalism.75
Importantly, the Center’s description flirts with parody and irony, expressing a
self-consciously exaggerated righteousness. Its appeal to moral beauty and greatness, and
its linking of aesthetics and politics in political beauty and poetry, goes so far that it is in
fact reminiscent of the “Anesthetization of Politics” that Walter Benjamin famously found
as central to fascist ideology.76 This raises questions regarding how committed the Center really is to the ideas in these descriptions, or if they function as a way of generating interest
(similar to the way its art-activists smear mud on their faces reminiscent of partisans or guerrilla fighters). However, on the level of the demands the performance makes, as well as the consistent use of language of enlightenment, humanism, human rights and humanitarianism in their manifesto, the conceptual world does not seem to be what is challenged.
The effect of keeping within the matrices and logics of humanitarianism can be examined through returning to the role of compassion in identity formation as described by Berlant and Ahmed. Clearly the actions of the Center propose identification with a
Germany and a European project that the Center hopes might be rid of their hypocrisy,
74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. 392. 76 (Benjamin 2010) p. 35
226 actuating the underlying values they purport to hold. Effectively, this imagination of a
“good” emanating West maintains the relations that compassionate attachment ascribes between those meant to feel compassion and those to whom compassion is extended. We see this, for example, in the relation of activity and passivity in the performance between the Center and the migrant subjects. It also shows in who it calls to take down the European border: people able to contribute to the online fundraising and take time to travel to the border in Bulgaria. Compassion’s reliance on previous experience to structure the affective relation is also clear, first and foremost in the performance’s reliance on a past example of emotional response to the memorial. The memorial serves as an example and trigger for a mode of relating to the suffering of the Other, those committed to the ideals of freedom and rights.
We can observe a parallel between the Center’s action and the very practices they criticize: they question the use of history (death at the Wall) to stabilize a contemporary imaginary and identity (of a progressive, liberal, human rights abiding EU). But they do not seem to question what humanitarianism or human rights have justified in international politics, or the identity they stabilize. The categories of humanitarianism and human rights, and the histories of world order and domination that they are a product of, remain unseen.
This is most glaring regarding in the demand for humanitarian action that does not see how humanitarianism has maintained structures of subjugation between global north/global south (this is the focus of my discussion of Milo Rau’s compassion). Although I have previously noted how the description of the border fence as an “Iron Curtain” potentially intimates a world order that the EU border maintains, the connection between this world order and the conceptual world of humanitarianism remains invisible.
227 The Center is also seemingly unaware of the politicized history of human rights. In
his book about the history of the adoption of human rights discourse, Samuel Moyn
highlights its embeddedness in cold war anti-communist ideology.(Moyn 2012) Moyn
quotes Gerhard Ritter, one of the early advocates of the adoption of such a discourse,
proclaiming human rights in 1945 as “the essential hallmark of Western civilization in contrast to ‘totalitarian’ state slavery.” Early advocates were conservatives seeking to define human rights as “the essence of European civilization in the European Convention.”
Moyn’s argues that their present currency relies on the fact that “Cold War origins of the
[human rights] convention were forgotten.” Self-criticism, in the case of the Center’s work,
would therefore have to involve an interrogation of the links between contemporary
dynamics of political power, and how concerns for humanitarianism and human rights were
used to justify and rationalize anti-communist positions and actions. The same ideals
transformed after 1989 to form lynchpins in the contemporary world order dominated by
Western capitalist-democracy, continue to function the justifying rhetoric, articulating the
space for recourse and action against repression (as we have seen, always outside of Europe
and the West) and justification of intervention (economic or military) that manifests the
political interest of the West. Following this kind of critical line would illuminate the
connection between the historical structures and the contemporary juxtaposition between
a righteous/exploitative global north and an impoverished/deprived global south. This
historical analysis brings together the criticism of the humanitarian border as we have seen
in Walter’s and and Pallister-Wilkins, aimed at the practices of bordering, and shows how
they go hand in hand with Balibar’s articulation of the overdetermination of borders: while
228 fulfilling a local function, the border also functions as a projection of the “partition of the
world,” and of the processes and history that the world order distributes in space.77
This is what, to some extent, Cesy Leonard recognized and lamented about the
response to the action, both outraged and in support, far outweighed the attention to a
capsized boat in the Mediterranean. Engagement with the performance was an act of
recognition and identification in and of itself. While the performance’s ability to mobilize identification with humanitarianism (and compassion) to demand action alleviating migrant suffering at the border was its strength, here too lay its limitation. Confronted with the image of the border that the action established, the spectator does not merely feel
correctly personally, in the sense of confirming their humanitarian and humanist values;
but they are also affirmed in the participation in a collective identity. It encouraged a
narcissistic involvement in what our response to the actions told about “us”: it confronted
us with our compassion, our historical sensibility, our “welcome Euphoria.” This latter
aspect of the performance actually was in conflict with its own purported political stakes.
Compassion: History of the Machine Gun The Swiss playwright Milo Rau’s play Compassion: History of the Machine Gun
premiered at the Berlin Schaubühne in 2016.78 The play brings together the personal history
of Consolate Sipérius, an Belgian-Burundian actor sharing how she was adopted by a
Belgian family, with a verbatim performance devised from interviews with European NGO
workers in Central Africa performed by Ursina Lardi, a Swiss actor in the Berlin
77 (Balibar 1998) P. 220 78 The production was a collaboration between Milo Rau and his production company “International Institute of Political Murder” and the Berlin Schaubühne. It was collaboratively written by Rau and the two actors of the performance, Ursina Lardi and Consolate Sipérius.
229 Schaubühne ensemble. The performance was a critique of humanitarianism, particularly
humanitarian aid in Africa, as an exploitative practice that relies on and maintains
European and Western superiority. It criticized how a similar exploitative attitude
manifests in European political theatre: it stages the suffering of others under a guise of
political intervention, a symbolic performance of correct positions and feeling. Such theatre
is exploitative because of the cultural capital extracted in the process. Finally, the
performance reflected on how empathy functions in theatre: the different representational
practices that stimulate it and the experience of an audience wrestling with how theatre
makes them feel. It focused attention on the identify formed through the experience of
feeling compassion together in the theatre.
The production opened with a monologue delivered in French by a black woman,
Consolate Sipérius, sitting upstage-right behind a desk, speaking in profile-view to the audience, and facing a video camera set on the table in front of her. The image of her speaking face, together with a translation of her words into English and German, were projected onto a screen above the stage. She told her life story in an unaffected manner,
sparingly using objects and documents taken out of a small box as she talked. She described
witnessing and surviving the murder of her parents, Hutus killed by Tutsis in Burundi. She
described having been adopted into a white family and growing up in a small Belgian town,
offering details of the casual racism and prejudice she encountered there as a child.
Sipérius’s account of her life was followed by a second and much longer
monologue delivered by Ursina Lardi. Lardi moved on a stage strewn with wreckage, trash,
torn-up furniture, mangled wire, and carton boxes, but she delivered most of her
monologue from behind a lectern upstage-left. Like Sipérius, her image was projected onto
230 the screen above the stage. This image froze at times to allow Lardi to “step-out” of the narrating role and into conversation that engaged the audience directly.
Lardi’s monologue began with a reflection on the tasks of the actor (memorizing lines, performing) and the social role of theatre: “education of the masses.”79 She continued
on to her relation to the audience and the kind of performance she would like to be part of:
she wanted a simple and direct connection with the audience, leaving behind the screams,
blood, piss, and nudity for which the Schaubühne is known. Lardi then described the
research the production did for the performance, undertaken by the actors and the director
in Turkey and Greece. Lardi picked up from the lectern the famous picture of the drowned
Syrian child, Aylan Kurdi, washed up on a shore in Turkey. She described traveling with
the production to Bodrum, a town on the Aegean coast of Turkey, where Aylan died, and
portrayed the contrast between the beauty of the place and the misery of the refugees. She
spoke of how they followed the refugees’ route, traveling to the Greek islands off the shore
of Bodrum. The production then went on to volunteer at a refugee camp in mainland
Greece.
Lardi’s account of the volunteer work done during research for the production
served as a spring-board for the fictional narrative. It was a point of transition between
description of what Lardi the actor did and experienced, and the narrative (based on
interviews) that she takes on as her own.80 The volunteer experience reminds “Lardi” of
description of her experiences in “her” early twenties, when “she” worked for humanitarian
79 All citations from the play are taken from the English subtitles created for the show. 80 From here on I indicate where Lardi fictionally assumes the narrative based on interviews by using “” around her name and pronouns. I will also indicate where she reports on herself as an actor/artist using italics, and reserve the regular Lardi when reporting on the actor on stage.
231 and educational organizations in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). Lardi performed these stories, put together from extensive interviews held with human rights and aid organization workers, in the first person, as “her” own recollection.81 Throughout the monologue Lardi’s speaking face was projected onto the screen behind her. At times the projection was paused, allowing her to break from her presentation and engage the audience directly in a meta-discussion of the acting and empathetic engagement choices she was making. The relation between fiction and real, between Lardi the actor, Lardi the actor/artist that she reports on as part of the play, and the narrative she assumes from interviews, is at the center of the investigation of the piece. What identification is the actor taking on herself? What do we assume about the reality and non-reality of the representation we see? What are the different affective attachments that these constellations generate? Turning the projection on and off, moving between presentation and moments of direct speech, was only one of the ways the production was indicating shifts in the status of Lardi/Lardi/”Lardi” as a reporting subject. Each switch on/off shifted registers of real and character, similar to when she reported transitions between memories in Central Africa and experiences during research. These transitions marked the different elements of Lardi’s performance, and slowly fused them, making them harder and harder for the audience to differentiate.
“Lardi” narrated that “she” worked in the town of Goma on the shore of Lake Kivu, which had turned into a Rwandan refugee camp after the genocide. As “she” describes
“her” work, it becomes clear that many of the refugees were in fact the perpetrators of the genocide who had fled across the border. The stories give an increasingly harrowing image
232 of humanitarian aid, and end with the evacuation of the camp when it is attacked by
Rwandan Tutsi forces to revenge the genocide. The production reached a climax with Lardi
describing how during the research she had a nightmare in which “she” tried to save a
Rwandan colleague during the attack of the Tutsi instead of evacuating the camp. After
this scene, the focus returns to Sipérius, who offers an epilogue of sorts, describing her
reluctance to end performance the way the director was asking her to, recreating the end
scene of Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards and faking opening fire at the audience with an
imaginary machine gun.
To begin my analysis of the performance it is helpful to start with an article director
Milo Rau wrote for a Swiss journal, in which he discusses the “other side” of purported
Western goodness, the balance between humanistic image-making, humanitarian action, and exploitation.82 In this article, Rau focuses on what he describes as “cynical humanism,”
which takes all the correct moral positions and yet “this feel-good ethic is cynical because
it is ultimately apolitical.” This apolitical quality typically manifests itself with “the
petition,” which is a form that presents the moral self without any commitment of means.
In the contemporary West, Rau argues, people often mistake what he describes as symbolic
engagement for political action. Rau argues that this kind of action dominates European
(middle-class) life, with proliferating opportunities to symbolically display attachment to
liberal-democratic (and even leftist) ideals. Functioning as a “philosophy of life,” this
symbolic engagement is a central mode of decision making and consumer choice. This
philosophy sees any opportunity to imbue (and show) values, from equality and non-
discrimination to rights, as central to daily behavior: “This philosophy is humanistic
82 Rau, Milo,“Ich bin auch nur ein Arschloch!“ SonntagsZeitung, 25 December, 2015.
233 because our super-hipster does everything right from a moral point of view. He criticizes the EU's inhumane border policy, focuses on sustainable consumption and adopts genocide victims.” His criticism is not that the symbolic engagement does nothing, but that it confuses personal ethical behavior and its display with politics.
Rau finds such moral signaling “cynical” not because it is dishonest, knowing that its actions are mere façade and faking commitment, but because it fails to grapple with the inequality on which it depends: that contemporary Western wealth systemically depends on the exploitation and impoverishment of the rest of the world. He denounces practices of personal morality through symbolical action: “Only an idiot would want to pretend that
Change.org is going to change something in this criminal-context unique in human history
[menschheitsgeschichtlich einzigartigen Verbrechenszusammenhang]”. Instead, he proposes recognition of the complicity in and the dependence on wealth extracted from the rest of the world: “I benefit from the injustice of the world! I'm an asshole!” Rau does not expand on what this recognition does, and in a sense it is just as symbolic, showing oneself as even more politically savy. If this stance is holds meaning it is because it break with a liberal norm, the “philosophy of living.” It is potentially a disruption of the ethical frames that allow humanitarianism to function as justification of exploitation in the contemporary world order.
In the article, Rau discusses the question of borders directly. The humanist is against the EU border policy, but fails to understand the relationship between the political call to use borders to fortify national economic outcomes and the scenes of misery of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean. The humanist engages with the border superficially: “A joker posted a picture [on Facebook] of someone decorating Hungarian
234 border fence with Christmas balls.” For Rau, any display of general compassion
(understood as symbolic action) towards the scene of suffering obfuscates the reality of the structural relationship of exploitation between global north and global south: “The EU's external borders in the 21st century are what the class barriers were at the time of Marie-
Antoinette.” To follow Rau’s analogy, the humanist beheads Marie-Antoinette for offensively offering cakes but keeps the peasantry landless. Rau’s argument about the superficiality of these engagements in the manifestation in norms of personal behavior of the humanitarian logic that Fassin describes. They mirror the “superficiality” of policy oriented towards alleviation of suffering in attachment to symbolic politics. This philosophy of living consumes images of simplified relations and finds affirmation in responses that do not change the “underlying” political conditions.
Compassion, through “Lardi’s” narrative as a young NGO worker in Zaire, offered a powerful expression of the way this humanism manifests in humanitarian action. Rau exposed how racist prejudice and attitudes persist in humanitarian aid workers and showed how aid and NGO work is itself exploitative, both on a personal and an institutional level.
“Lardi’s” description of Hutu and Tutsi differences is a good example of how racist ideas are legitimized through ideas of benevolence: “the Tutsis are a bit lighter, tall and slender.
Giacometti figures. I can distinguish them at a first glance, the Hutus and the Tutsis. Only
European intellectuals maintain that one can’t distinguish between races.”83 “Lardi” was not oblivious to what “she” is saying, “she” treaded a line, not calling “her” observations racist, but attacked those “she” considered responsible for making such ideas unacceptable
83 All quotes from the play here are the text of the English surtitles for the production; received from the publisher. Surtitles, p. 23
235 (showing “she” realized these would be considered racist in Europe). Using a European
cultural reference (“Giacometti figures”) to describe the Tutsi offered almost a caricature
of privileged white woman camouflaging “her” racism as an appreciation of beauty. “She”
rationalized “her” racism: “It’s better to handle your culture in an offensive manner.
Because if not, you’ll never meet the Foreigner or the Other. Or understand them.”84
“Lardi” used contemporary progressive language, clichés like “meeting and understanding
the Other”, to legitimize attitudes “she” rationalizes as “truthful” recognition of the realities
of cultural difference. Effectively, “she” argued that “offensive,” non-politically correct,
racist descriptions of the world are an important and truthful expressions of it, as opposed
to anti-racist attitudes that hinder the European Westerner from coming in touch with the
world outside.
The performance showed how “Lardi’s” ideas are based in latent Eurocentrism, and
how this in turn transforms into practices of privilege. “She” explained how listening to
Beethoven helped her drown out her surroundings, a paradigmatic expression of
Europeanizing or whitening the space in order to make it palatable for her.85 “Lardi”
seemed self-aware of her privileged position in Zaire, and enjoyed it, when she recounted how she forced her way through stalled traffic: “I’m normally quite reserved. In that
moment, I felt how much power you have as a white woman. That at least, that was a very
positive experience.”86 Although “she” recognized the racialized power dynamics of the
situation, “Lardi” still enjoyed feeling empowered. In these examples we see the mixture
of European high culture, progressive thought (on the encountering Other and on feminist
84 Surtitles, p. 20 85 Surtitles, p. 21 86 Surtitles, p. 19
236 empowerment) and how these play out in a space of gross power difference. Christine
Wahl’s review of the play in Theater Heute criticized the play’s representation of racism as insignificant, since, she argued, the play’s probable audience held no prejudice towards
Tutsis or Hutus.87 This criticism misses the point of what these elements of the play seek
to achieve. They do not merely reveal the latent racism of Europeans, how thin the middle-
class progressive pieties of non-racism are (although even that exceeds Wahl’s dismissal
of the critique). The performance shows how easily racism can work through progressive-
liberal ideals, and proposes how the experience of providing aid in fact relies and
emboldens a sense of European-Western superiority.
Importantly superiority not only fosters ideas and attitudes but is tied up with the
structural relationship between those offering aid and those receiving it. On the personal level, “Lardi” described deciding to take a job with “Teachers in Conflict” because “it looks very good on a CV. And it makes an impression at parties.”88 The play shows how
the NGOs themselves treat aid work as needing little beyond basic (Western) education,
and they send underprepared, inexperienced, and unqualified Europeans to do the work.
“Lardi” confessed this: “I had no experience in terms of crisis.” “She” was also candid
about her lack of professional qualification: “Obviously, I had no training [for working
with adults on conflict resolution]. At the university institute for teachers training, I’d worked with children.” The institutional disregard of the requirements for the work mirrors in the position being an easy career opportunity for the young European graduate. Basic
87 “weil seine (sicher vorhandenen) Rassismen tendenziell woanders liegen als im Schwadronieren über vermeintliche Hutu- und Tutsi-Archetypen?“ [because their [Schaubühne audiences] (surely existing) racisms tend to be located somewhere else than ranting about supposed Hutu and Tutsi archetypes?]; (Wahl 2016) 88 Surtitles, p. 17
237 European privilege in itself is all that is required of “Lardi” for the NGO to pay for her
work in Central Africa.
Such “personal” mindsets and institutional practices are reflections of the wider exploitative nature of the NGOs work. “Lardi” described “these 1000 NGOs were fighting over the refugees. We didn’t do each other any favors, the camp was our prospect.”89
Humanitarian work is shown as parasitic and exploitative, treating the space of need and
suffering as a business opportunity. The use of “prospect” here is important: it points to the
world of natural resource extraction as metaphor. Just as Western corporations plunder
central Africa for natural resources, so does the humanitarian sector treat it as a land of economic opportunity. The link is in fact even stronger, as both industries rely on central
African political crisis and violence to enable extraction. Coltan mining, which came up repeatedly in the performance, is a particularly stark example of this. In the late 1990s and early 2000s western governments and corporations supported rebel groups in the Congo,
Rwanda, and Uganda in exchange for Coltan mining rights in the border region where
“Lardi’s” narrative takes place. This maintained the area in a state of constant de-facto war, ensuring that cheap extraction of ore for the international market went unregulated.(Montague 2002) In the performance, the refugee camp is also a stronghold of
Rwandan extremists, eventually leading to its attack by Rwandan Tutsi forces;
humanitarian aid itself functions similarly, creating conditions for the continuation of
violence. Fiona Terry, herself once an international aid worker in the region and an
international studies scholar, describes how this was happening in the region in which this
play was set: “Former leaders manipulated the aid system to entrench their control over the
89 Surtitles, p. 33
238 refugees and diverted resources to finance their own activities. In short, humanitarian aid,
intended for the victims, strengthened the power of the very people who had caused the tragedy. The consequences were devastating.”90 In the name of humanistic values, Central
Africa functions as a site of extraction of economic, and as “Lardi” reveals, symbolic
capital. It functioned as a way for Europe to both display and experience its own goodness,
and to profit.
In the parts describing the productions encounter with the European border, at the
refugee camp and in Turkey, it is not revealed similarly as a site of exploitation (as De
Haas and De Genova would argue, the border as a site of production of illegality that
maintains the “obscene,” invisible, reality of European exploitation of refugee labor(De
Genova 2013)). Rau was concerned, as previously noted, with the limited and un-political
European response to the refugee crisis as a problem of European border practices. The
performance introduces the border to challenge practices of representation that structure
political problems as humanitarian ones by presenting them as scenes of suffering. The
performance drew attention to the gap between the (media) representation of suffering and
the production’s experience of conducting its own research in Turkey and Greece. Lardi’s
report of the time the production team spent doing research in Turkey and Greece calls
attention to a discrepancy between expectations based on media coverage, and the
encountered reality. Her description departs from the expectation of unlivable conditions
driving Syrian refugees from Turkey to Europe: “Bodrum is very beautiful, the people are
extremely kind. The hotelier couldn’t understand why the family [of Alan Kurdi] hadn’t
90 (Terry 2013) P. 2
239 stayed in Turkey. Me neither, to be honest.”91 Describing the refugee camp in Greece she
goes a step further in debunking the expectation of European spectators: “A ‘camp’! More
like an extremely well organised village of tents. With little covered stalls almost
overflowing with food. Everywhere young women helping, sitting and smiling.”92 Taken
out of context, the audience might mistake this as a challenge to the narrative of crisis at
the border, and to the reality of the border as a space of death or suffering. This, I argue, is
a provocation: Like in the article, this is Rau’s display of himself as an asshole cynic. The
provocation challenges the audience to see something else in these descriptions: how they
highlight the limits of the common image of the border. These images are partial
representations that leave out the suffering the audience assume is also taking place. By
showing images that are not usually visible in the media the production focused the
audience on the role of representation in framing what and how we see the reality. In this
sense it is reminiscent of Jean Baudrillard’s argument regarding the Gulf War as a
simulacrum created by the media for the sake of Western audiences’
consumption.(Baudrillard 1995) He did not deny that something was indeed happening, but
argued that what was experienced through news reports was something else, a product of
Western interests reproduced by the media. Both Baudrillard and Rau push an extreme counter-image as a provocation. Baudrillard denied images of an impending “Total War”
(including weapons of mass destruction) by asserting no-war. Compassion challenges the
superficiality of engagement that is fed to, and consumed by, the European “humanist”
public. While questioning the image of Turkey and why refugees are determined to leave
it might be taken as a real question, describing refugees as “They all have a hipster look.
91 Surtitles, p. 10 92 Surtitles, p. 11
240 Well dressed, smart, with beards and gel in their hair. I was almost embarrassed by my everyday clothes”93 seems too brutal to simply take at face value. Put in the context of the play’s criticism of European/Western humanitarianism, the representation points to the role of media in maintaining an image of humanitarian need. Exposing the expectation of suffering also shows it as a demand, as Lardi’s description exposed her expectations concerning what might “acceptably” drive migration, thwarted when she comes face to face with what she perceives as the acceptable and even pleasant conditions.
Compassion develops a criticism of contemporary theatre that panders to the symbolic politics of its audience. This is especially blunt in the early moments of Lardi’s monologue, when she discusses contemporary political theatre and the process of making this production. She paints an image of contemporary political education through theatre, in which theatre tells audiences to “Save the world! Do this! Don’t do that! We must oppose the Nazis. We must help the refugees.”94 The Manichean nature of these exclamations hints at the simplicity of the ethical-moral world that this theatre creates, what Rau sees as symbolic politics. Theatre reciting these moral clichés functions as another outlet to feeling-correctly. It is a way for audiences actualize a desire Berlant describes as a “want to feel part of the world of goodness.”95 These representations set the scene for compassionate resonance, the power of the spectacle of suffering to motivate humanitarian attitudes: saving, helping. At the same time, they supply the imagery with which the humanitarian can identify. This kind of theatre calls us to “feel right,” which for Rau appeases the humanitarian’s emotional need to address the scene of suffering without
93 Surtitles, p. 12 94 Surtitles, p. 6 95 Lauren Berlant, Compassion : The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (Routledge, 2004). P. 7
241 changing suffering’s political causes. The shared experience in the theatre of a kind of
catharsis, exposure to images of suffering and feeling correctly, affirms my part in a world
of values. As with the petition, the encounter with this type of political theatrical image
allows the humanitarian to recognize and identify themselves easily within the audience:
by going to the theatre, the audience creates itself as a morally superior body, showing
itself that it feels correctly in relation to what is sees. The clarity of the image and the
identification it implies both generate compassion and provide a sense of belonging to a
community of feeling. I will return to this important part of the discussion later.
The second level of criticism of political theatre in Compassion concerns the
commodification of humanitarian identity in European culture. Lardi articulates this very
simply: “In the theatre in Europe, it’s common: Making money off the suffering of others.
Off the Syrians, the Central Africans, our grandparents, the Jews, the Ancient Greeks, the
Greeks of today. It’s our capital! Great discovery!”96 Commodified theatre mines materials for consumption by an audience: the market dictates the materials of interest. Lardi points to how the scene of suffering holds value. It is a commodity of cultural capital, and theatre responds to the demand for it, taking part in its circulation. Given the profit made (monetary or otherwise, as cultural capital) this amounts to the exploitation of those who suffer. Rau does not limit his criticism to explicit discussion; he embeds it in the form of the performance. Sipérius’s role in the play is to bookend the production, exemplifying how contemporary theatre exploits authentic Others, who share and present their own stories.
Lardi gave both a short history of the practice and a description of how it happened in the production of Compassion: “In the [20]00s: Animals and choruses of the unemployed.
96 Surtitles, p. 10
242 Then, there were the disabled. That’s already out. When we started working, the director
wanted to have a disabled person on stage. The playwright said: Are you sure? That doesn’t interest anyone anymore. And now, one wants refugees on stage. Consolate isn’t a refugee.
[But] At least she’s from Burundi, she survived a genocide. She told us her story.”97 This
(relatively) new practice of using “real” Others is ostensibly a progressive turn towards
opening the stage to different perspectives. Rather than privileged accounts performed by
actors appropriating the experiences of others, the Other is given ownership over their
narrative and afforded visibility. Compassion argues that this is another form of
exploitation, that monetizes in-vogue ideas about representation and politics (giving space
for minorities and under-represented people and redress of inequality through “Color
Conscious Casting”) while maintaining an air of progressive liberalism. This implicates
Rau himself, as a European reaping the benefits of the exploitation of the rest of the world.
Staging Sipérius so explicitly as a function, Rau both reveals the rationality of the aesthetic
practice and conveys that he is no less complicit. Again, taking on the role of the asshole
director in order to critique what he sees in European theatre, Rau positions himself both
within what he criticizes and outside of it. This performance is particularly slick, not only
smarter than anyone else in the room, but also, actually, more politically savvy. A self-
sacrificing asshole.
Finally, Compassion offered a complicated engagement with the question of
empathy and emotional connection in the theater. It explored the ties formed between actor
and role, and between actor and audience, not making a singular argument about these ties
but allowing them to permeate the performance’s engagement with compassion towards
97 Surtitles, p. 12
243 Others. This exploration was a further, and less pedantic, development of the question how
theatre allows its audiences to feel-correctly. Working with the layers of real and fictional,
the direct comments on connection and presence encouraged the audience to meditate on
the force of theatre’s affective resonance. Particularly, this honed-in on the implication of
the shared emotional experience in identity formation.
I already briefly discussed Sara Ahmed’s argument on the function of shame
produced by memorialization of violence towards aboriginals in Australia.98Affirming
shame as a shared Australian affect, Ahmed argues, transfers complicity and responsibility
from the individual to the nation, and produces of shame-without-personal-implication that functions to form and consolidate national identity. In this scenario creating and circulating shame works as a bordering practice, defining the nation as those who are shameful without being responsible. In the context that Ahmed analyzes, shame is based on two affective connections: with others who are collectively experiencing the same shame, and towards the Other, the aboriginal toward whom shame is felt. The adoption of national shame thus consolidates an us/them dichotomy not by articulating a common enemy, but by constructing a dividing line between “us” who feel shame, and “them” towards whom we feel shame. Ahmed uses “feel better” to describe what shame does in this context for the ones who experience it. I understand this in two ways. Firstly, publicly sharing the feeling, the recognition that this shame is not caused by individual/personal action but shouldered by the collective, allows one to feel better about the spectacle of suffering. Invoking shared shame, we are spared personal guilt. Secondly, this memorialization practice attaches positive value to feeling shame, conveys this as the appropriate and right way of feeling
98 (Ahmed 2004) P. 101
244 about the past. It trains citizen in how to feel better, feel in the right way, in order to form
a community of feeling.
Compassion discussed feeling correctly towards refugees in a similar way. After
bringing out the image of Aylan Kurdi, Lardi describes a conversation with Rau in which
see says she did not know the picture: “He [the director, Milo Rau] told me: ‘Everyone
knows it.’ Me: ‘No, I’ve never seen it.’ Him: ‘No matter. One knows it without having
seen it.’”99 Similar to the encouragement to feel guilt in Ahmed, the encounter with Kurdi’s
photo gives an opportunity to rehearse something already known, even if this particular
picture was not. Encountering this spectacle of suffering, this brief exchange suggests, does not change anything in how we see the world, it arouses no new feeling, because our response to it has already become part of a collective (European) consciousness.
Encountering the picture functions as an opportunity to affirm the feeling, recognize anew the knowledge of suffering, and feel compassion. If, then, we all “know” how to feel about the spectacle of suffering, evoking the shared affect brings “us” together through shared compassion.
Compassion, shows the bordering function of humanitarian feeling as it constructs the borders of liberal-democratic European rather than national identity. The power of the representation of suffering inheres not in a particular subject seeing a particular image, but in the image’s function in relation to a greater whole. Simultaneously necessary (triggering the same feeling) and superfluous, the image functions as a common gesture of recognition of humanitarian feeling, its object or content is insignificant. The event of the triggering
99 Surtitles, p. 9
245 itself demands further attention: what is the difference between seeing this picture in the paper and on stage? Between reading a refugee’s narrative and having it performed on stage? Between seeing Sipérius as a live presence on stage and her projection on the screen?
The performance here pushes us to think not about the content of the representation but
rather about the ways in which the encounter with the material is organized: moving to the
dramaturgy of appearance, the intentional ways in which the performance structures how
the audience experiences the representation.
The performance explored this way in which the encounter is organized in the
theatre through the question of empathy. Throughout the performance Lardi makes a series
of declarations about the kind of relation she wants to create with the audience, focused on a notion of “presence”, which she describes as an immediacy of connection.100 She
describes how the actor could achieve such presence: “give it your all. Until you can’t stand
up anymore. You dance, you wriggle, you shout, you piss on stage.”101 The performer
accesses “total presence” through absorption in the concretely physical, the undeniable
reality of the body on stage. The physical extreme removes limitations on presence: “When
you’re completely exhausted. Additionally, naked. It helps.”102 Tongue-in-cheek alluding
to a genre of European avant-garde performance, that the Schaubühne itself was known
for, Lardi implies that this production of presence is achieved through acts of uncovering,
baring, and that the performer must remove a resistance that separates both audience and
actor from the reality of the moment. But she, she explained, does not want to achieve
presence in this way anymore, she wants to arrive at it through simple concentration.
100 Surtitles, p. 7 101 Surtitles, p. 8 102 Ibid.
246 However, something else important changes in the presence she describes when achieving it through concentration “From one moment to the next, I’m completely there. It’s just one step for me. I go into the situation. I go into the part.”103
By not discussing the crucial shift between presence with the audience and
psychological-realism “being-in-character,” the performance forces the audience attention on the representational decisions. What was the effect of these aesthetic choices on them?
As Lardi was turning into “Lardi,” were they feeling in presence with her? How does this shift effect the compassion they feel through her? And on another level, this attention to how the audience feels together, as an audience, asks us to reflect on how theatres choices of representation foster a moment of community of feeling, an experience of feeling together. This question became more acute as the performance built towards its emotional climax. As the relatively neat delineations between Lardi and “Lardi,” and between the different aesthetic modes of representation began to splinter, the audience was pushed to feeling more strongly.
Throughout the monologue “Lardi” largely maintained a conversational and matter-of-fact tone, reminiscent of an engaged professional presentation or TED-talk. This presentation modeled her description of total presence through concentration. She was “in- character,” an NGO worker sharing autobiographical experience and memories in a semi- professional manner. As the monologue progressed however, the events described became more violent, including scenes of Rwandan forces crossing the border to the (perpetrator) refugee camp to exact revenge. Listing the brutalities she encountered, “Lardi” (or perhaps
103 Ibid.
247 Lardi?) became emotional and had to fight back her tears. By this point, the two roles seem
almost completely fused. Nearing the emotional climax, she returns to the research trip, describes the memories from Central Africa coming back to her. She responded in her narrative of the production to the breaking through of the barriers between presentation and overbearing emotion that the audience was seeing in “Lardi’s” memories: “In the evening in my room, it was as if I was flowing in all directions. No idea what overwhelmed me this much. I simply started to cry.”104 She described a nightmare scene in which, feeling guilty for leaving behind her local colleague Merci-Bien, she returned to the camp rather than evacuate with the other European aid-workers. In the nightmare she was forced to witness the militia forces brutalizing Merci-Bien, and when she asked to leave the room to use the toilet she is forced to pee on her friend. As Lardi described this part of the nightmare she slowly pulled up her skirt and peed on the stage.
The sequence of representational practices that Lardi employed is important because it allowed the audience to examine their own response to these practices. When
Lardi and “Lardi” was creaming, crying, and pissing on stage, exactly the practices she described earlier as bringing the performer and audience into presence, the audience was both emotionally connected to her and reflecting on that connection. The same practices also, seemingly, took over Lardi through the force of the role, which disconnects her from
the on-stage reality of the moment and trapped her in the recollected nightmare in the refugee camp. Her buildup of empathy was foregrounded, allowing awareness of the different ways in which the practices make us feel. As the empathetic relations between
Lardi and her role seems to grow (which we see in her inability to maintain the more
104 Surtitles, p. 7
248 professional presentation style) the audience was left with the force of these
representational practices. Despite the fact that the represented action is reported as
nightmare, as fictional reality, the response to Lardi’s distress and actions is much stronger.
Confronted with such extremes of empathy (with role), what does the presence of the performer force upon the audience? Is the performance a form of affective manipulation?
Finally, feeling all of this together, having been brought to this climax, where does the performance leave us feeling, and how is this feeling different from encountering the picture of Aylan Kurdi, or watching the news?
Conclusion
The climactic moment in Compassion segued into “Lardi’s” revelation that “It’s me. I’m guilty of all this. Me. I’m the murderer and the rapist.”105 This was followed by
the final scene, when the focus returned to Sipérius. She recounted going to watch Quentin
Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, and particularly the film’s ending, when a Jewish woman
orchestrates the execution of a Nazi audience in a Paris cinema during the war. She then
turned to her own audience in the Schaubühne: “The director wanted me at this moment to
shoot at the audience with our fake kalashnikov. You: the Nazis. I: the Jew.”106 This scene
takes the asshole-director a step further, where he would stop at nothing to manipulatively
and in the crassest manner elicit a reaction from his audience. At the same time, despite
how crass this description is, coming in the immediate aftermath of the emotional climax,
it “hits” emotionally. What does this mean? How open are we to manipulation?
105 Surtitles, p. 45 106 Surtitles, p. 50
249 The play attempts to do what it deemed impossible: within the emotionally manipulative and exploitative opening and ending, to show the underlying political structure and not merely the superficial. It attempts to offer the politics that Rau is actually committed to, when Sipérius continued: “10 million victims. Sometimes it’s less, sometimes more than the Holocaust. For your gold, your coltan, your economy, to finance your culture.”107 Her monologue points to the political conditions that underlie the
“humanitarian crisis.” The audience is left with questions: is this any different of an attempt from the political theatre the performance criticizes? Or is this another performance attempting to show the political cause the really matters?
The work done by Compassion stands: it is easy to write this off as another layer, showing again the bind of making relevant theatre. There is no escape, there is no engagement deep enough to expose reality in such a way as to elicit meaningful action.
This is perhaps the clearest difference between Compassion and the work of the CfPB. The use of irony and parody by the CfPB ultimately takes pause in a commitment to deploy and deepen the engagement of European humanitarianism. Although CfPB were accused of cynicism, of lack of respect for the memory of those who died trying to cross the wall, it made a sincere call to realize the lessons of Europe’s past. The critique of the deployment of history in contemporary Germany revealed important pattern of celebratory flattening out of “difficult pasts”. And it showed the deep differences in the way Germany and Europe afford care and mourning, demanding recognition for the precarity of migrants without making a spectacle of it. In Compassion however, the ironic tone never relents.
107 Surtitles, p. 51
250 Both Compassion and The First Fall of the European Wall focus (at least some of) their attention at the contemporary European conceptualization of the border in humanitarian terms. They focus on the limits of this concept: how it is controlled by curated media representation (Rau) and how national belonging limits willingness to recognized others humanity, as mournable, and worthy of saving (CfPB). And still, they partake in the self-same articulation of the border in largely humanitarian terms. In both productions, the border appears as a space and object of humanitarian concern, a space of (anti)- humanitarian abandonment (that demands humanitarian intervention), a space of humanitarian intervention (the refugee camp), and an object of cynical humanitarian attachment (to which those enjoying the spoils of the world order can righteously attach their guilt). While the CfPB attempts to challenge existing relations to history and mobilize for “better” humanitarian practices, Compassion stages an intervention into their underlying logic and the role of representation in recreating it.
Representing the border in these ways, both performances, mobilize an
understanding of the role of compassion in identity formation. The CfPB mobilized
historical guilt for the Holocaust, and for the violence of the socialist regime in East
Germany, to demand realization of a German (and European) identity that reflects the
lessons of past horrors. Compassion on the other hand offered a critique of the role of
“symbolic engagement” in the performative production of European identity. This identity
manifests in symbolic attachment to moral or humanitarian behavior and values (from
freedom to rights), but such a superficial benevolence, as Asad describes it, eschews the
reality of Western exploitation of the Global South (and particularly Africa). Through the
analysis of both of the performances we see how the category of humanitarianism, and the
251 social relations implied by compassion, reproduce a boundaries between the spectators and the bearers of suffering.
252 Conclusion
When Germans talk about “the wall in the head,” they are thinking about the lingering prejudice between former West Germans and East Germans. They are thinking about the ways in which assumptions about the conditions in the East maintain a grip on the German imagination, picturing the eastern states as backwards places, and their inhabitants as unrefined, lacking in individual drive, making the East more and more a hothouse for far-right political organization and xenophobia. From the other side, for those living in the former Eastern states of Germany, there is the sense of West German condescension, an arrogance that thinks of itself as better than the East. This kind of regionalism, that at least partially mimics forms of traditional classist sentiments and elitism, attaches itself to the histories of disparate post-war political and social experiences, an imagination fortified by the economic disparities that continue to plague the relations between former East and West in the decades since unification.
Of course, this wall in the head is reference to a lingering effect of the Berlin Wall, continuing like a phantom limb, an internalized differentiation that follows the route the border once charted. But it is also a concept of border: a configuration of ideas, historical narratives, rationalities about human social behavior and the relation between culture and government; and although this is not what is commonly meant by the expression the wall
In the head, this concept of border is also expressed in practices, in policy, in instituted relations between the different states of the German federal system.
What the wall in the head illustrates is that the Wall here does not actually function as a metaphor, even though it might seem that way at first. The phrase does not simply appropriate the idea of the border/wall, an echo of the fallen Berlin Wall. What is at stake,
253 despite the superficial semblance of the meaning of the phrase, is in fact the underlying
constellation of meaning-making functions that maintain the “actual” distribution of the
political space, where the durability of the socialist-era prejudice is one part of the
underlying concept of border.
It is a worthwhile returning to this example, because it showcases a central discovery regarding the function of cultural difference as a concept of border since the
1970s as well. Here an idea of the cultural difference of Turks became central not only to personal and social relations between locals and migrants, but to the ways in which the limits of the polity were conceived. Although prejudice against migrants was an important part of the experience of migrants in West Germany, the idea of cultural difference transformed into an important scaffold around which politicians developed migration policy. The very “slipperiness” of the concept of culture, between traditions and habits, artistic expression, and essential cultural traits allowed the concept to function, for those who wanted it to, as a strong marker of the inability of certain Others to integrate, and the threat to the preservation of local German culture that proximity to sufficiently different culture posed. It is not surprising that formulations of this threat often shared images and ideas with miscegenation: the link between the structure of racism and the structure of
“culturalism” in European New Right, anti-migrant sentiments arousing since the 1970s, is quite clear.
Because culture was at the very center of the shift in the concept of border, it is not surprising to find that theatre could play an important role in the process by which an abstract idea of Turkish difference was substantiated and particularized. Discourse about, and representation of, Turks and their culture deepened knowledge about Turks in West
254 Germany, transforming them from a general (or generic) cultural Other into a particular:
Turkish foreigners; visibility and representation in cultural and media circulated
information and provided education to substantiate Turkish difference. This was by no means simply the interest of the anti-migration right, highlighting the dangers posed by the
Turkish Other and their inability to integrate; a progressive left was just as focused on
Turkish culture, arguing the need to understand it in order to foster better relations between locals and migrants, and to maintain the living connection of the minority group with its authentic culture. Leftists and parts of the local Turkish community imagined this connection to an origin as necessary in order to maintain identity and ensure survival and preservation in their unique culture. In the chapter I showed the adaptive role of theatre as a cultural practice, developing ways of functioning as a tool for public pedagogy, exposing the public to “authentic” Turkish culture. The Turkish Ensemble was not initially oriented towards such a multicultural agenda but was responsive to the media focus on elements of
cultural difference in their work. They showcased a novel approach to minority theatre
production, especially in their childrens productions aimed specifically for schools (as part
of a growing integration of diverse cultural material into the curriculum). This practice of making the culture of the other known, and educating both Turks and Germans on Turkish culture, increasingly ran into the double bind of such representation: artistically, they were regarded as either authentic to national tradition, or lost the interest of the public for merely imitating Western modern theatre practices; critics demanded that they showcase non- modern tradition only for this representation to be taken as evidence for Turkish non- modernity.
255 The focus on cultural authenticity and the expectation that the artists would
showcase Turkish cultural heritage meant that the cultural pedagogy was reproducing an
image of Turkish cultural identity as trapped in an antiquated cultural moment. My analysis
shows that the concept of border formed was implicitly a temporal one, a more or less explicit association of Turkish culture with backwards non-modernity. The discovery that
temporality was implicit and supplemental in the cultural concept of border also drives my
second chapter. Temporal difference was the core of the historiographic concept of border
formed around the intra-German boundary, and particularly the Berlin Wall. Stemming
from a Marxist understanding of political temporality as immanent progress towards
human emancipation—in Marxist theory, realized in communism— the East German state
fashioned itself in contradistinction to its capitalist counterpart in West Germany in
temporal terms. If revolution was the temporal shift, a definitive epochal break, such a shift
was made (literally) concrete in the form of the Berlin Wall—the Anti-fascist Defense
Rampart. The concept of border on which East German identity-border policy of
Delineation (Abgrezung) relied was this determined realization of progressivist-Marxist
historiography.
In this second chapter, I found that the power of theatre and performance in relation
to the historiographic concept of border lay in the ability to reproduce (or challenge) its
underlying temporal framework through dramaturgy, in particular through causal narrative
formation. Traditional dramaturgy makes linear temporal schemae concrete, upholding the same scaffolding of historiography that affirm the necessity of things as they are. Volker
Braun turned to Benjaminian critical historiography as a basis on which to create a counter-
dramaturgy that challenged the temporal assumptions of deterministic-statist Marxism.
256 This dramaturgy was relentless in its undermining of traditional narrative formation. But what does this refusal of narratives of teleology or progress allow? Braun turned to a critical perspective on the Real Existing Socialist State and found that state’s temporal similarity to its capitalist other: both assumed correlation between industrial production and determined human emancipation. Despite the appearance of a historiographic break between the socialist and capitalist worlds, the productivist ideology, that saw immanent progress in growing industrial capability, was shared and common between the advanced communist states (USSR and East Germany, primarily) and the industrialized capitalist states. In the face of this border, the horizon of militarized industrial progress shared (with a difference) by the capitalist and socialist worlds, that threatens with environmental and
military catastrophe, Braun reimagined the historiographic border as a renewed
commitment to revolutionary socialism. He proposed a re-formulation of the historiographic concept of border, as a revolutionary hand-break against the temporality of productivist industrialism.
For this criticism, Braun relied heavily on the connection between goal and identity, and the spatial correlative to the distribution of the spaces of life and death. For Braun, this connection affirmed the importance of local commitment, the potential to keep to East
Germany as a space of political potential despite its limits and the oppressiveness of the regime. Life for him was a question of politically meaningful life, a life of resistance. This thematic, of relation between crossing the border / exile / being refugee and the distribution of spaces of life and spaces of death, is shared with the investigation of the third chapter and the humanitarian concept of border.
257 In this last concept of border that I have investigated the border is thought of as a
threat to life and a place of suffering, a concept demanding action to alleviate said suffering and protection of the precarious lives of those who encounter the border. Importantly, for
this concept the border is not a space or line where one polity ends and another begins, but a large group of practices and events. On the one hand, it is the process of crossing, and therefor extends to wherever the journey of migration is happening. In this sense, the migrants found suffocated in trucks far from the course of the border nonetheless have died at the border. On the other hand, the border is the accumulation of elements that threaten or protect the migrant, from the treacherousness of the Mediterranean to the NGO vessels attempting to rescue ship-wrecked migrants. What we see is that it is precisely the border as a zone of betweenness, between life and death, a threat to well-being and life, that the humanitarian concept of border is oriented towards, as criticism of the conditions of border and as demand for life-protecting border practices. Of course, this humanitarian border also defines differentiated between those suffering and those responsible to feel compassion and alleviate this suffering, and functions also as distribution roles between practicing humanitarian relief, and those receiving it.
In relation to this concept of border, the art-action of the CfPB showed how performance is able to engage directly with the symbols of identity and mourning of the state, manipulate and challenge them. As an embodied practice of public thinking, performance is able to playfully (and potently) undermine and redeploy the ways in which the polity stages its relation to its history and constructs a contemporary identity. If the
traditional concept of border traces not only the limits of state sovereignty but also the limits of the responsibility of the state, putatively to its national-citizen, performance
258 demanding the extension of compassion towards those suffering at the border extend this
scope of responsibility. Insisting on the right, and in fact the necessity, to mourn the lives
of those dying at the border like those citizens who perished at the Berlin Wall reconfigures the primary function of the biopolitical border. Not merely a membrane and set of practices set to control the passing of bodies in and out of the polity, it is now a zone of necessary humanitarian action, extension of care and responsibility.
A second key function of theatre and performance in relation to the humanitarian border is the affective labor of performance, its ability to engender and evoke powerful feeling between spectators and performers. Critical in relation to the affirmation of the humanitarian border, reorienting emotions towards those to who compassion is often not afforded, performance also functions as an experience around which emotion is shared by a presumed public. Coming together in the act of witnessing and sharing the emotional resonance of the performance functions as an affirmation of a shared identity, potentially, or at least imaginatively, creating a community of shared feeling. The performance acts as a foil experience towards which a We feel together. We see here that although the humanitarian border is not ostensibly about the limits of the polity, by formulating a shared imagination of correct or good practice, the act of feeling righteous and good together is itself part of the affirmation of boundaries of belonging. And here appears the second beat of engagement with the humanitarian border: its affirmation of the core values and sensibilities of Western Democratic sentiment. While exposing the hypocrisy of celebrating democratic overcoming over tyranny and murderous practices at borders, the performance affirms the sense of shared humanitarian value, and a similar teleological ideal
259 of progress towards rights and freedom. Coming to feel together, affirming European core
goodness, functions through the reproduction of the migrant as the suffering other.
This angle of criticism is at the center of the work of Milo Rau in his attack on
Western humanitarianism in the production Compassion. The production offers a
challenging view in Western humanitarian practices through the experiences of
humanitarian aid workers in Central Africa. But for Rau this is a critique not only of
Western extraction-through-humanitarian-intervention, but of Western European
consciousness, sensibility; it is a condemnation of the ability to maintain through various
performances of “correct” ethical relation to certain matters and identity of goodness while enjoying the fruit of exploitation. This criticism is extended to theatre and performance, staging the suffering of the other in order to provide audiences with opportunities to feel correctly towards these scenes.
I have tried to show some of the unique ways in which performance engages the concept of border: as a form of public multicultural pedagogy; the potential of dramaturgy to affirm or challenge narrative patterns on which concepts of borders rely; as embodied
engagement with the concrete symbols of national history (such as monuments and
memorials); the emotional re-orientation of care towards others or the formation of a
communities of feeling. These investigations I have developed in this dissertation are just
a glimpse, historically and temporally bound, into the potential contribution that theatre
and performance studies can have to the study of borders. Further research into the relation
of performance and the concept of border is a framework which can expand and deepen
the ways in which cultural studies and the humanities contribute to this crucial field of
260 research in which they have been relatively peripheral, but for which I would argue their contribution is of great importance.
I would like to end this conclusion with some thoughts about where this dissertation began for me, and where it has ended. Specifically, it is important for me to note the political shift the world has seemingly undergone, and the implication of it for the politics of much of my critical investigation. The project began to really take shape in 2014, after
I read an article about the First Fall of the European Wall and decided to focus my work
around an exploration of questions of border. Before the summer of migration of 2015
brought the question of migrants, and particularly refuges, squarely into the headlines of
European politics, it felt necessary to critique and highlight the deadly politics of Fortress
Europe, the emerging border practices of Frontex, and their expansion into north Africa
and the Middle East through surveillance projects and outsourcing of the responsibility to
states such as Libya and Turkey, paid billions in order to act as containment centers for
would-be migrants. At the same time, it seemed vital not to narrow the perspective too much, not to focus only on the amelioration of the worst suffering happening at the border,
but to maintain a critique that allowed for demands for structural change to the political
reality that the borders were one part of. It was not enough to demand a less deadly border;
at the time, that the desperation of migrants seem to only penetrate European politics in
these moments of absolute abjection. What about the conditions faced by migrants in
Europe? Their exploitation? The state and community violence they are regularly exposed
to? It was a moment which called for vigilant criticism, like that of the CfPB, of the horrors
happening at the border, but also for a critique of the liberal response: to do just enough
that good-willed West Europeans don’t feel too bad about what is done in their name.
261 These two impulses – the need to criticize conditions necessitating immediate amelioration, and the need to criticize liberal reactions that respond but still maintain the underlying assumptions and conditions of border politics – run throughout the chapters. I researched the project through the heyday of Barack Obama’s presidency, feeling the urgency of the need to resist a façade of liberal-progressivism shielding (or obfuscating) the policies actually adopted by the president who received a Nobel Peace Prize ostensibly for being not-Bush. This was perhaps most obvious in Obama’s migration policy, deporting millions of undocumented migrants, earning the dubious title “Deporter in Chief” by migrant protection organizations. But this critique of Obama’s policies never seemed to stick, to penetrate the overwhelming sense of democratic-liberal America that Obama was an important turn for the better.
And then, Trump happened. Suddenly, the façade of a liberal America came tumbling down, in altogether horrifying ways. A sense of an earthquake in the very foundations of the liberal world order was much wider than the strong magnetism that
Trump and the US hold on our imagination. From Brexit through the quickening rise of extreme right political movements in Western Europe, the bastions of Western liberalism seemed in dangerous waters, and more and more of the “rest” of the world frighteningly fallen to illiberal-regimes: from India to Hungary, Israel to Turkey, Brazil and Russia. In the last months of dissertating my adviser, Prof. Margaret Werry, alerted me: you know, your criticism of humanitarianism will be landing very differently at this political moment.
Given the brutality of illiberal government, particularly towards minorities of different kinds, towards migrants, towards refugees, this perspective can seem deaf to the exigencies of the moment, the visceral desire for liberal relief in any kind of compassionate response
262 to the terror of this brutality. These are the days when overtly cruel images of separation
of children from their families at the US-Mexico border are dominating the imagination of
the excesses of the border. A criticism of humanitarian good-intention, of the limits of
compassion, can easily strike as detached and hollow.
Of course, this is true. As Judith Butler has noted about liberal recognition, it is
something the subject cannot-not want, especially when denied. Something of this must be
true now as well—criticism of so-called liberal do-good-pretention has become a lot more strained when encountering the threats of extreme nationalism, racism, and authoritarianism. Particularly difficult seems to be the relish with which these policies are taken up, almost an afront to liberal sentimentality and softness. And indeed, this is how the (liberal and further left) media reports on the misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, anti-migrant, racist, anti-environment, policy of many these illiberal regimes. How can we not wish back to the days of humanitarian liberalism?
In some way, I still want to insist that in the face of the brutality of contemporary
attacks on migrants, it does not seem enough to ask for a more humane system of maintaining the power relations at the border. While the brutality of persecuting those trying to provide minimal life-saving water to migrants crossing the desert needs to be wholly rejected, the critical drive to recognize the violence implicit in liberal practices should not be neglected. It is my hope that the kind of analysis I offer in these chapters is
not suddenly outdated by the all-the-more apparent “crisis of liberalism,” but on the contrary, it makes them as important parts of the ongoing project of criticism.
Of course, this dissertation is not primarily this kind of challenge to liberalism.
Even in this final chapter on the humanitarian border my aim is not to easily reject the
263 politics of compassion, much like I do not mean to deny the critical importance of certain
practices of multicultural pedagogy as it has developed since the 1980s. the core insight I
propose is about the significance, and malleability, of the concept of borders and the ideas
we attach to it. In these chapter I have aimed to unearth and bring forward formative
moments in which we can see the constellations of ideas undergirding this key political
concept: it does not “belong” to any particular political imagination, neither are there
conceptual constellations progressive of conservative in themselves. They form the key
terms around which a concept of border coalesces at a particular moment, the limits and extent of the political imaginary of a collective, a time. Performance in this understanding
of the concept of border is a mode through which these concepts are produced and
reproduced, a way in which they circulate but also part of what makes them malleable and
porous, open to re-imagination and critique.
264 Biobibliography
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