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. i 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