A few weeks ago, I went to see the Federico Fellini-inspired Das Schiff der Träume (geht einfacher weiter) at the Deutsches Theater, an absurdist tragifarce about a high society set on a boat that sinks in the Mediterranean. At one point, an actor wondered about when everything changed, when the sinking began – and bandied about notorious dates from 1933 and 1939, only then to name a day much closer to the present: October 7, 2023. Just as Berlin’s theatre has long been working through the NS-Zeit, it now, disclosed “Ship of Dreams”, feels the need to respond to October 7. But how have Berlin’s theatres, in this last year, responded?
Notably, the Palestinian actors Karim Daoud and Maryam Abu Khaled have remained off the stage since October 7.
A year ago, I wrote that “theatre has a great tradition of granting voice and visibility to people throughout society, spotlighting our shared mortal fragility. But Berlin’s theatres are failing all of us – no matter religion, race, or nationality – by failing to consider the real suffering of Palestinians as well as Israelis, by failing to engage the real angst of Muslims and Jews in Germany, by failing to engage antisemitism and Islamophobia simultaneously.” And, sadly, what I wrote then largely remains true.
Since I wrote that, we have seen October 7 refracted through a Ukrainian-Jewish perspective in Pavlo Arie and Martin Valdes-Stauber’s Postkarten aus dem Osten, where the pro-Palestinian protests were presented, darkly, melodramatically – but, for some, deeply felt indeed – as an echo of the Nazi years. October 7 provided the context for the reviews of Yael Ronen’s Bucket List, which was understood as the Israeli director’s reflection on the day as a kind of splitting.
Fiddler! A Musical! at Hebbel am Ufer couldn’t help but mention it too, as a cloud that hovered over what was to be a celebration. Michel Friedman has ascended to the Berliner Ensemble’s Neues Haus stage for a series of sharp conversations about Jewish life in Germany, including pressing Robert Habeck on October 7 of this year about the viability of Germany’s Jewish life.
But this partial list highlights only Jewish voices who have been allowed to narrate October 7, the war and, frankly, the genocide unleashed in its wake – as well as its effects on life here in Germany. For all the theatre’s anti-AFD posturing, what do we find when we look at Berlin’s stages but a theatrical world where the leading Arab voices have been, as they say, re-migrated out of it? Most actors of the former Exile Ensemble have entered into artistic exile. Notably, the Palestinian actors Karim Daoud and Maryam Abu Khaled have remained off the stage since October 7, and since spoken out about being sidelined.
This is not simply a matter of representation, but of narration.
There are some exceptions. The Volksbühne’s summertime Festiwalla festival did finally provide a stage for Mein bedrohliches Gedicht, which had been stricken from TD Berlin’s Monologfestival last November. Finally audiences could watch Lamir Ammis perform My Threatening Poem, a sixty-minute monologue by Dareen Tatour about her incarceration by the Israeli state. Festiwalla also offered stages for the experiences of Basta Theatre since its 2015 founding, as well as a mixed-media performance by Jenin’s Freedom Theatre.
The Berliner Ensemble made a little space in its Werkraum for the Gaza Talks series led by Alena Jabarine – three sessions in the spring that provided a bit more nuance and context than, say, the Tagesspiegel. HAU too has tried to maintain a more open attitude, insisting on theatre “as a place of coming together and dialog” that seeks to “understand the different and complex lived realities of the people in Israel and Palestine” and stands for “the right of everyone to a life in peace and without fear”. It even hosted an event on fighting antisemitism and racism together. However, with its schedule marred by cancellations and withdrawals, its list of Arab performers could be counted on a single hand.
This is not simply a matter of representation, but of narration. I can’t say I enjoyed Daniel Arkadij Gerzenberg’s Wiedergutmachungsjude, or “Reparations Jew”, at Studio Я – a painful work of reckoning with sexual assault in a ten-year-long “relationship” between a Jewish child born in the Soviet Union and his German pediatrician. But the piece is exemplary of the Maxim Gorki Theater’s importance as a site of postmigrant theatre. That is: Gorki’s pieces insist that its subjects, however similar to or different from their audiences, are understood as complex, heterogenous beings. They are children, parents, lovers, strivers, dreamers – they are more than their abstracted category of identity.
In this moment of callous killing and routine delivery of death on a grand scale, where parties across Germany’s political spectrum eagerly propose deportation of migrants, it is more important than ever to challenge such abstractions. It’s easier to support bombing or deportation when humans are rendered abstract objects, calculations in geopolitics. But there is no one who is not someone’s beloved, someone’s friend, someone’s family. And theatre can remind us of the relationality that we all share, if stories of such relationality make their way onto Berlin’s stages. Instead, there is an absence, an abdication of responsibility. And we all know too well what can happen amidst such Schweigen.
