Performing New German Realities:

Turkish-German Scripts of
Postmigration Lizzie Stewart
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CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE
INTERACTIONS
SERIES EDITORS: ELAINE ASTON · BRIAN SINGLETON

Performing
New German Realities
Turkish-German Scripts
of Postmigration
Lizzie Stewart
 Contemporary Performance InterActions

Series Editors
Elaine Aston, Lancaster University, Lancaster, Lancashire,
UK
Brian Singleton, Samuel Beckett Centre, Trinity College,
Dublin, Ireland
Theatre’s performative InterActions with the politics of sex, race and
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 Lizzie Stewart

Performing New
German Realities
Turkish-German Scripts of Postmigration
Lizzie Stewart
King’s College London
London, UK

ISSN 2634-5870 ISSN 2634-5889 (electronic)

Contemporary Performance InterActions
ISBN 978-3-030-69847-8 ISBN 978-3-030-69848-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69848-5

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021

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Cover illustration: Elmira Bahrami as Perikızı in Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Perikızı, dir. by
Michael Ronen (Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Berlin 2011). Copyright Ute Langkafel/Maifoto

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
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 To my mum, Claire Stewart. Thank you for everything.
To the artists, practitioners, thinkers, and friends who I got to spend time
with in writing this book and whose work changes worlds. Thanks also for
changing mine!
 Preface

A note on spelling and translation. The spelling of Turkish names and

titles is sometimes Germanised in Germany through loss of diacritics. This
can represent a spectrum of positionings from disregard for or ignorance
of the information carried in Turkish spelling, to linguistic assimilation
via older print technology norms in Germany, to an active political asser-
tion of German belonging on the part of the individual involved. While
it can be difficult to determine which positioning is at work, here I aim
to use the variant which appears to be actively preferred or repeatedly and
actively used by the person in question. Thus I refer to Feridun Zaimoglu
rather than Feridun Zaimoğlu, for example, and Shermin Langhoff rather
than Şermin Langhoff, but Neco Çelik, not Neco Celik. The exception
to this rule is when I am quoting another’s work there I maintain the
spelling used in the source quotation. Unless otherwise stated all transla-
tions from the German here are my own. The German original is included
in footnotes for multilingual readers.

London, UK Lizzie Stewart

vii
 Acknowledgements

If making theatre is a collaborative process, so too is researching it, and

I am incredibly grateful to all those authors, theatre practitioners and
administrators who gave up their time and energy by making themselves
available to interview, or assisting me with access to sources. First and fore-
most, my thanks go to Emine Sevgi Özdamar for our conversations and
for access to some of the sources used in this study. The pleasure her work
gives me is immense and I do hope I have done this some form of justice
here. My thanks also to Feridun Zaimoglu for allowing me to visit him
at home for a fascinating conversation in Kiel. I am particularly grateful
to both authors for agreeing to speak to me for this project despite their
personal differences. My sincere thanks also go to my other interview part-
ners throughout the project for racking their memories of past produc-
tions and answering my questions with such generosity of spirit: Nora
Bussenius, Neco Çelik, Axel Gade, Stefan Nagel, Luk Perceval, Michael
Ronen, Christian Scholze, Lars-Ole Walburg, Ingo Waszerka and Anja
Wedig.
I am grateful to the following archives and archivists for access to many
of the materials in this book: Ann Kersting-Meuleman of the Abteilung
Musik, Theater, Film at the Universitätsbibliothek J. C. Senckenberg,
Goethe Universität Frankfurt; Carsten Niemann of the Theatermuseum
Hannover and the staff of the Münchner Stadtarchiv; the Deutsches
Theatermuseum. Special thanks also go to the very helpful Thomas

ix
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Maagh of Theater der Autoren and Tanja Müller of the Rowohlt Theater-
verlag. I am also very grateful to all of the administrators and theatre prac-
titioners who turned archivist for me, giving me access to materials other-
wise unavailable. In addition to those already named above, these include:
Isabelle Yeginar, Stefan A. Schulz, Sophie Fleckenstein, Sabrina Schmidt,
Flori Gugger, Maike Lautenschütz, Thile von Quist, Christina Ratka,
Felix Mannheim, Monica Marotta, Chantel Kohler, Tunçay Kulaoğlu, Eva
Linke, Osman Tok, Sarah Reimann, Lutz Knospe, Insa Popken, Jenny
Flügge, Verena Schimpf and Julia Mayr. The late Fereidoun Ettehad was
particularly helpful and deserves special mention here. Finally, a thank
you to Tuğsal Moğul, who introduced me to Herr Ettehad and sneaked
me in to see Verrücktes Blut in 2011. Images used in this book are
subject to copyright and are reproduced here with the kind permis-
sion of Emine Sevgi Özdamar; Stefan A. Schultz; Universitätsbibliothek
Frankfurt a.M., Archiv Schauspiel Frankfurt; Münchner Kammerspiele;
Andreas Pohlmann; Ute Langkafel / Maifoto Berlin; Ballhaus Naunyn-
straße; Maxim Gorki Theater; Sandra Then-Friedrich; raumlaborberlin;
Matthias Horn; Christian Nielinger / www.nielinger.de; Ulrich Greb /
Schlosstheater Moers. Quotations from unpublished scripts are with kind
permission of the authors, Verlag der Autoren and Rowohlt Theater
Verlag.
The research presented here began as a Ph.D. funded by the Arts and
Humanities Research Council (UK) and also benefitted significantly from
additional funding for research trips in Germany provided by the DAAD
(Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) and the AGS (Association for
German Studies, UK). The research and writing of that thesis would
not have been possible without this financial support. Thanks also go
to my Doktormütter Laura Bradley and Frauke Matthes—I am extremely
grateful to them both for guiding me so expertly, so elegantly, and so
very patiently through the Ph.D.. Special thanks also go to my examiners,
Margaret Littler, Moray McGowan and Peter Davies for their feedback,
to Sarah Colvin for encouragement to do postgrad study, and to Izzy
Madgwick, who, during our Erasmus year in Heidelberg, took me both
to the theatre for the first time and to a class on Interkulturelle German-
istik—opportunities which would not have been possible for me without
the Erasmus scheme the UK may soon leave.
In writing the thesis which led to this book, the University of Edin-
burgh German department and the LLC postgraduate community were
a constant source of stimulation and support, particularly Muireann
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xi

Crowley, Joanna Neilly, Dora Osborne, Mikey Wood, Laura Chapot,

Lila Matsumoto, Hannah Lena Hagemann, Majied Robinson and Yusef
Hamdan. In trips to Berlin, so were Dieuwke Borsma, Hanna Wolf,
Nina, Rose Mallard, Sandra Dinter, Ninnette Poetzsch, Neco and Nermin
Çelik, and Dilan Gülmez. In terms of further academic support, I would
also like to thank Christel Weiler for hosting me during my DAAD
fellowship at the Freies Universität Berlin. Two postgraduate summer
schools/workshops and the people I met there were also of partic-
ular influence: the University of Utrecht School of Critical Theory’s
Intensive Programme on G-local Cosmopolitanism and the Transna-
tional German Studies workshop organised between the Universities of
Warwick, Michigan and the Humboldt, Berlin in 2013.
Although the Ph.D. was completed in 2014, reworking this into the
book has taken quite a while longer. In the interim, earlier versions
of some material in this book were published in articles and book
chapters. Some paragraphs on postmigration in the chapter “Scripts
of Migration: Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Early Plays (1982–2000)” first
appeared in: Lizzie Stewart. 2017. “Postmigrant theatre: the Ballhaus
Naunynstraße takes on sexual nationalism”. Journal of Aesthetics &
Culture 9 (2): 56–68. Sections of the performance analysis and history
which form part of the chapter “Zaimoglu/Senkel/Shakespeare: Othello
(2003) and the Turkish-German Rewrite” were first published in the
following two articles: Lizzie Stewart. 2017. “Countermemory and the
(Turkish-)German Theatrical Archive: Reading the Documentary
Remains of Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Karagöz in Alamania (1986)”.
Transit 8 (2): 1–22. http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/0fq2m874;
Lizzie Stewart. 2016. “Ümmü in Alamania? Female Voice and Song in
the Premiere Production of Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Karagöz in Alamania
(1986)”. Oxford German Studies 45 (3): 254–74. An earlier version of
the chapter “The “Neo-Muslima” Enters the Scene: Zaimoglu/Senkel’s
Black Virgins (2006) and the Postmigrant Theatre” appeared as Lizzie
Stewart. 2014. “Black Virgins, Close Encounters: Re-Examining the
‘Semi-Documentary’ in Postmigrant Theatre”. Türkisch-deutsche Studien
5: 81–102. Some paragraphs in the chapters “Scripts of Migration:
Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Early Plays (1982–2000)”, “Performing Insti-
tutional Change: New Faces, Shadow Voices (2008)”, and “Celebrating
the New “Normal”? Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Perikızı and the Festival
Context” also appear in: Lizzie Stewart. 2018. “‘The Future Market
and the Current Reality’: Interculturalism in the German Context”.
xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In Interculturalism and Performance Now, ed. by Charlotte MacIvor

and Jason King. A paragraph in the conclusion first appeared in Lizzie
Stewart/Frauke Matthes. 2016. “Ümmü in Alamania? Female Voice and
Song in the Premiere Production of Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Karagöz in
Alamania (1986)”. Oxford German Studies, 45 (3): 254–74. My thanks
to the publishers of the above for permission to republish this material
in revised form here as part of a broader argument. Research by other
scholars in this area has been growing rapidly since the completion of the
thesis with which this book began, and I have tried to be thorough in
incorporating more recent relevant publications into the finished version
of the book. However, it may be that some newer pieces published during
the final stages of work on this manuscript, when access to resources was
limited by coronavirus restrictions, are omitted—for this my apologies.
Between the Ph.D. and the book, I held a series of short-term teaching
positions at University of Edinburgh, University of St Andrews and
University of Cambridge, before being given a permanent position at
King’s College London. If job insecurity and lots of teaching made it
difficult for me personally to focus on the bigger picture required for
the book, I am nonetheless hugely grateful to the wonderful colleagues
from each these departments which supported me financially, intellec-
tually, and emotionally to further develop the research into the form
presented in this book. Especial thanks for the emotional at this stage to
Cathy Barbour, Ina Linge, Marie Kolkenbrock, Erica Wickerson, Katha-
rina Kärcher and Manu Cusin. This book would also not be what it is
without the series of conferences run by the research group on postmigra-
tion led by Moritz Schramm et al in Denmark, two conferences on theatre
and interculturalism at University of Galway run by Charlotte McIvor
and her fantastic colleagues there, or the GSA seminar on “(Post)Migrant
Theater: Past, Present, and Future” in 2017, nor without pushes (big and
small) provided by Onur Nobrega, Charlotte McIvor, Vicky Angelacki,
Moritz Schramm, Azadeh Sharifi, Áine McMurty, Ben Schofield. The
group from King’s. Amherst, and Michigan at the 2019 Transnational
German Studies Workshop in Amherst gave valuable input on the initial
draft of the introduction and preface. I am grateful to King’s College
London for financial support from the Arts and Humanities Faculty Publi-
cation Subsidy fund and to the fantastic Annegret Maerten for her work
as research assistant in securing permissions to reproduce images and
unpublished materials. Finally, my thanks to the anonymous reviewers
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xiii

of the manuscript and to my editors at Palgrave for their patience and

support.
On a final, personal note, I would like to thank my mum, Claire, and
my sister Jennifer, for helping me understand and have faith in the process.
My thanks and love to them, my sister Megan, my dad, Dougal, and to
his wife, Sine also, who we lost in 2018. And a special thanks and love to
Bella Adey and to James Leveque, who have been there all the way.
I have thanked a lot of people here—all errors remain, of course, my
very own.
 Contents

Prelude: Scenes from the New Germany 1

Introduction: Turkish-German Scripts of Postmigration 11
Scripts of Migration: Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Early Plays
(1982–2000) 61
Zaimoglu/Senkel/Shakespeare: Othello (2003)
and the Turkish-German Rewrite 107
The “Neo-Muslima” Enters the Scene: Zaimoglu/Senkel’s
Black Virgins (2006) and the Postmigrant Theatre 149
Performing Institutional Change: New Faces, Shadow
Voices (2008) 185
Celebrating the New “Normal”? Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s
Perikızı and the Festival Context 225
Conclusion: Scripting New Realities 269

Works Cited 283

Index 313

xv
 List of Figures

Scripts of Migration: Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Early Plays

(1982–2000)
Fig. 1 Mise-en-scène at close of Karagöz in Alamania, dir.
by Emine Sevgi Özdamar (1986). Still from unpublished
audiovisual recording 67
Fig. 2 Poster for the premiere of Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Karagöz
in Alamania (1986), featuring Tuncel Kurtiz as Karagöz.
Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt a.M., Archiv
Schauspiel Frankfurt, Saison 1985/1986 78
Fig. 3 Volker Spengler as the Intellectual with typewriter in bathtub
plus live donkey in background. In Karagöz in Alamania,
dir. by Emine Sevgi Özdamar (1986). Still from unpublished
audiovisual recording 87
Fig. 4 Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Keloglan in Alamania, dir. by Murat
Yeginer (2000). Photograph by Stefan A. Schulz 98

Zaimoglu/Senkel/Shakespeare: Othello (2003) and the

Turkish-German Rewrite
Fig. 1 Othello, in a version by Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter
Senkel, dir by Luk Perceval (2003) (Stage Design by Katrin
Brack. Photograph © Andreas Pohlmann) 119

xvii
xviii LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 2 Thomas Thieme as Othello embraces Julia Jentsch

as Desdemona, to the exclusion of Wolfgang Pregler’s Iago.
In Othello, in a version by Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter
Senkel, dir by Luk Perceval (2003). Photograph © Andreas
Pohlmann 129
Fig. 3 Thomas Thieme as Othello embraces Wolfgang Pregler’s
Iago. In Othello, in a version by Feridun Zaimoglu
and Günter Senkel, dir by Luk Perceval (2003). Photograph
© Andreas Pohlmann 130

The “Neo-Muslima” Enters the Scene: Zaimoglu/Senkel’s

Black Virgins (2006) and the Postmigrant Theatre
Fig. 1 Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel’s Black Virgins, dir.
by Neco Çelik (2006). Photograph © Ute Langkafel Maifoto
Berlin 163
Fig. 2 Opening sequence of Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel’s
Black Virgins, dir. by Neco Çelik (2006). Set of three stills
from unpublished audiovisual recording 164
Fig. 3 Alien Communication Scene in Steven Spielberg’s Close
Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) 166
Fig. 4 Alien Arrival in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters
of the Third Kind (1977) 166

Performing Institutional Change: New Faces, Shadow

Voices (2008)
Fig. 1 Full cast on-stage in Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel’s
Shadow Voices dir. by Nora Bussenius (2008). Photograph ©
Sandra Then-Friedrich 203
Fig. 2 Patrick Gusset as “the Dealer” in Feridun Zaimoglu
and Günter Senkel’s Shadow Voices dir. by Nora Bussenius
(2008). Photograph © Sandra Then-Friedrich 207
Fig. 3 Andreas Grötzinger as “the Moroccan” in Feridun Zaimoglu
and Günter Senkel’s Shadow Voices dir. by Nora Bussenius
(2008). Photograph © Sandra Then-Friedrich 208
Fig. 4 Vernesa Berbo, Michael Wenzlaff, Murat Seven and Aloysius
Itoka as unnamed characters in Feridun Zaimoglu
and Günter Senkel, Shadow Voices dir. by Nurkan Erpulat
(2008). Photograph © David Baltzer/bildbuehne.de 217
 LIST OF FIGURES xix

Celebrating the New “Normal”? Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s

Perikızı and the Festival Context
Fig. 1 The map of the Ruhr area created by raumlaborberlin
for Odyssee Europa audience members. Image ©
raumlaborberlin 237
Fig. 2 Katja Stockhausen as Perikızı, and Holger Stolz, in Emine
Sevgi Özdamar’s Perikızı, dir. by Ulrich Greb (2010).
Photograph © Christian Nielinger/www.nielinger.de 243
Fig. 3 Scene with marching hens and APE van in Emine Sevgi
Özdamar, Perikızı, dir. by Ulrich Greb (2010). Still
from audiovisual recording 247
Fig. 4 Audience movement in Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Perikızı, dir.
by Ulrich Greb (2010). Still from audiovisual recording 253
Fig. 5 Publicity Flyer advertising production of Emine Sevgi
Özdamar, Perikızı, dir. by Michael Ronen as part
of the Almancı programme (2011) 259
 Prelude: Scenes from the New Germany

Scene 1: West Germany 1991/the Heiner Müller

Archive, 1997/A Stage in North-East Germany, 2000

a rehearsal of “Madame Butterfly” is taking place; after some time it is

interrupted by a shout of “break”. Everyone goes to the canteen. […] Kelkari
in a Madame Butterfly mask, wig and costume, polishes the stage with a
floor-polishing machine. (Özdamar 1991, 2–7)1

In the turmoil of post-unification Germany, the Turkish-born, German-

resident actress, director and playwright, Emine Sevgi Özdamar sends her
new play manuscript, Keloglan in Alamania (Keloglan in Germanie),2 to
her colleague, the renowned East German director and playwright Heiner
Müller. Following his death it lands in his archive in the German Academy
of the Arts as object “Müller-Heiner 8744”. A metatheatrical piece, the
manuscript opens by imagining the means of entry into the German
theatrical landscape available to a fictional Turkish-origin artist, Kelkari, in

1 “Auf der Bühne findet eine Probe der ‘Butterfly’ statt, die nach einiger Zeit durch
den Ruf ‘Pause’ abgebrochen wird. Alle gehen in die Kantine. […] Kelkari in Madame-
Butterfly-Maske, Perücke und Kostüm bohnert mit einer Bohnermaschine die Bühne.”
2 “Alamania” is a slightly distorted spelling of “Almanya”, the Turkish word for
“Germany”. Keloğlan is a character from Turkish children’s literature.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
L. Stewart, Performing New German Realities,
Contemporary Performance InterActions,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69848-5_1
2 L. STEWART

the 1990s. Nine years later, as the reunified Germany formally acknowl-
edges itself as a country of immigration, the play script finds its first
full production:

Kelkari: Do I disturb you if I polish here? I – I am the cleaning lady, what

else would I be doing if I wasn’t cleaning here? Ah, in my country I was
an opera singer. Ah, with this wig and mask I sang the Madame Butterfly.
(ibid., 7)3

Apart from when she gets her hands dirty performing work useful to
the broader production, the character Kelkari is unable to find space on
stage as artist in Germany: her fate appears to presage that of the play she
appears in. While part of the archive of political theatre which spans the
former East and West German states as script, as performance this play
has long to wait to find its way in between other, more canonical, spec-
tacles. As Berlin-based actor and theatre organiser Mürtüz Yolcu notes
sardonically: “the Turk did not come to theatre to play theatre, after all”
(quoted in Boran 2004: 79).4

Scene 2: Moers Schlosstheater, North-Rhein

Westphalia 2011/Istanbul, Turkey Late 1960s
Ten years later in our off-stage timeline, the early 2010s finds Özdamar’s
work on-stage in a small town in North-West Germany. This time the
play, Perikızı, named for its main character,5 takes us back in time to
Istanbul and the late 1960s Istanbul. Here a father warns his daughter
against pursuing a career as an actress in Germany:

3 “Störe ich Sie, wenn ich hier bohnere? Ach, ich bin die Putzfrau, was soll ich denn
sonst tun, wenn ich hier nicht putze. Ach, in meinem Land war ich Opernsängerin. Ach,
mit dieser Perücke und Maske habe ich die Madame Butterfly gesungen.”
4 “schließlich ist der Türke ja auch nicht nach Deutschland gekommen, um Theater zu
spielen.”
5 The name is drawn from the Turkish for “fairy” and “girl”.
 PRELUDE: SCENES FROM THE NEW GERMANY 3

on a European stage a Turkish woman is a Turkish woman and a Turkish

woman is a cleaning lady. That is the daily reality and in the theatre it
becomes the nightly reality. (Özdamar 2010, 290)6

A few months pass in both timelines and this same daughter is on stage,
transformed via a new actress and some in-house additions to the script,
at the Ballhaus Naunynstraße theatre in Berlin Kreuzberg,7 in a produc-
tion directed by Michael Ronen. Swinging high above the audience on a
trapeze, she declares “I want respect, I want recognition, I want applause!
For my abilities! For the thing I can really do! Acting! […] You think you
have paid for the show and can expect a performance? […] I shit on your
theatre tickets” (Ronen 2011).8 Refusing to reinforce the daily reality in
the mode of consumable spectacle, this agile artiste scatters scatological
scorn on iconicity, demanding acknowledgement of her playful skill both
within and beyond the world of the play.

Scene 3: The Main Stage & Foyer

of the HAU Theatre: Berlin, 2006
Rewind a few years, to a time when the Ballhaus Naunynstraße has yet
to open as a venue demanding a shift in the ways in which artists with
a personal or family history of migration are positioned in Germany. It
is 2006, Berlin, and a group of artists soon to be closely involved in
the Ballhaus are experimenting with theatrical interventions as part of
a small festival held at the HAU (Hebbel am Ufer) theatre.9 Critical
attention is hooked by one play in particular, Black Virgins (Schwarze
Jungfrauen), written by literary provocateur Feridun Zaimoglu with his

6 “auf einer europäischen Bühne ist eine türkische Frau eine türkische Frau und eine
türkische Frau ist eine Putzfrau. Das ist die tägliche Realität und am Theater wird es
nächtliche Realität.”
7 Kreuzberg is well-known as a “Turkish” district in Berlin. The place of the Ballhaus
Naunynstraße within the theatrical landscape of Berlin will be outlined in more detail
in the chapter “The ‘Neo-Muslima’ Enters the Scene: Zaimoglu/Senkel’s Black Virgins
(2006) and the Postmigrant Theatre”.
8 “Ich will Respekt, ich will Anerkennung, ich will Applaus! Für meine Fähigkeiten! Für
das, was ich wirklich kann! Schauspielern! […] Ihr denkt, ihr habt für die Show bezahlt
und erwartet eine Leistung? […] Ich scheiße auf eure Eintrittskarten.”
9 The place of the HAU within the theatrical landscape of Berlin will be outlined in
the chapter on “Zaimoglu/Senkel’s Black Virgins (2006) and the Postmigrant Theatre”.
4 L. STEWART

colleague Günter Senkel , which promises an evening based on interviews

with Muslim women living in Germany. As the audience settle into their
seats, an otherworldly blue light fills the gaze. Offset by the digital tones
of a Sci-fi classic, a body-suited, bald-capped figure steps forward and
declares:

What kind of cheap game am I playing here? I do know that I’m pitting
impertinence against assumption. You think you know how I am and I
address you to prove the opposite – to leave a really vulgar impression.
But that is really how I am and everything is true. Almost everything is
true.10 (Zaimoglu and Senkel 2006, 37)

At the end of the performance, a group of audience members who have

come to hear the perspectives of young Muslim women in Germany
gather in the space where the stage ends and the real world begins,
confused about the distinction between the two. Waiting for clarity, as
the actresses enter the foyer in their own clothes, none visibly marked as
Muslim, a murmur of relief escapes. The director, Neco Çelik, looks on
amazed: “The fact that these women were just not perceived as actors,
that was the crazy thing for me” (Çelik 2012).11

Scene 4: The Sony Centre,

Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, 2011
Back to the future, we return to the early 2010s. A pistol-wielding
teacher, Sonja, faces off against a teenage pupil, Hasan. In her other hand
the cheap yellow Reclam edition, familiar to any schoolchild in Germany,
of Schiller’s An Aesthetic Education. At gun point she forces Hasan to
perform the role of Franz in Schiller’s drama The Robbers , correcting his
pronunciation until it meets her standards of German.

10 “Was treibe ich hier für ein billiges Spiel? Ich weiss [sic] doch, dass ich Zumutung
gegen Vermutung setze. Ihr glaubt zu wissen, wie ich bin[,] und ich rede dagegen an
– um einen richtig vulgären Eindruck zu hinterlassen. Aber ich bin tatsächlich so und
alles ist wahr. Fast alles ist wahr.”
11 “Dass man diese Frauen nicht mal als Schauspielerinnen wahrgenommen hat, das war
für mich [das Verrückte].”
 PRELUDE: SCENES FROM THE NEW GERMANY 5

HASAN: Innallec
SONIA: Intellect.
HASAN: Innallec
SONIA Intellect. Who’s supposed to believe that you’re not apes
when you can’t even pronounce this word correctly: Intellect.
(Erpulat and Hillje [2010] 2014, 27)12

If “man is only man when he plays” (Schiller 1793/1794), here racialized

language combines with a reading of any non-standard performance as
“failure” to deny humanity to the character of Hasan. Several scenes later,
Hasan, the teenager has gained control of the gun from his teacher and
turns it on the audience. Oscillating between Schiller’s text and the role
of actor with a background of migration, “Hasan” exclaims:

HASAN: And I’ll play Franz. I’m Franz and I’ll stay Franz…
“I have every right to be angry at nature. Why did nature give me this
ugliness? These Hottentot’s eyes?”
What do you see in me? An actor or a Kanake?13 Still?
[…] We act. But what’s going to happen to me when this is over?
Become an established secondary-school teacher like you Miss Kelich?
A real model Kanake?
Or commit an honor killing on a TV show. Hmm, sorry, we’ve reached
our capacity for model Kanakes, the role of the Kanake inspector on the
detective show has already been filled.
How many model Kanakes will our country tolerate anyway?14 (Erpulat
and Hillje [2010] 2014, 67–68)

12 Translation by Priscilla Layne.

13 “Kanak” is a common pejorative word for a Turkish person in Germany and often
also applied to other people of colour there (on the colonial roots of the term used as
hate speech see Seidel-Arpacý [2003, 206]; on its broader usage see El-Tayeb [2016,
65–68]).
14 “HASAN: Und ich werde Franz spielen. Ich bin Franz und ich bleibe
Franz… /Ich habe große Rechte über die Natur ungehalten zu sein… Warum
musste sie mir diese Hässlichkeit aufladen? Gerade mir diese Hottentotte-
naugen? / Was seht ihr in mir? Einen Schauspieler oder einen Kanaken?
Immer noch? […] Wir spielen Theater. Aber was wird aus mir, wenn das
hier zu Ende ist? Oberstudienrat, wie Sie, Frau Kelich? Ein echter Erfolgs-
kanake? /Oder Ehrenmörder in Alarm bei Cobra 11. Tja, tut uns leid, aber Erfolgs-
kanakenkapazität ist gerade zu Ende. Der Kanakentatortkommissar ist schon besetzt. /
Wie viele Erfolgskanaken erträgt das Land?”
6 L. STEWART

Via the character of Hasan, a critique of the violence which has often been
at work in policies of social and cultural integration in Germany becomes
connected to a critique of the career opportunities for the actor who plays
him. The play this scene takes place in, Crazy Blood (Verrücktes Blut ), is
live-streamed during the 2011 Berliner Theatertreffen onto the screens
of the Sony-centre, a building built in the space formerly occupied by
the Berlin wall. This critique becomes briefly situated at the literal and
symbolic centre of the post-unification Berlin Republic.

Scene 5: Heidelberg, the Same Year

The director of the production in scene four above, Turkish-born and
-educated, Berlin-based director Nurkan Erpulat, is himself asked to
perform in a Q&A at a well-known theatre festival in South-West
Germany. Answering the question of what making theatre with “his
background” means, he explains:

Making theatre with my background […]. That means that many people
really do see me as a Turk rather than as a director[…]. That means that
when I thematise a love story, for example, it tends to be pigeon-holed as
a migration story. And it means that […] when I send this actor or the
other on stage – black-haired, black-eyes – and I let them run riot in some
way, […] it is immediately understood as authentic.15 (Linders et al. 2011;
my transcription & translation)

In the discussion, further issues raised include clichéd casting prac-

tices, audience expectations surrounding the type of German accent they
encounter on the German stage, the lack of Turkish-German presence in
administrative and production roles in the German theatrical landscape,
and the lack of interest and determination until recently in engaging with
theatre as a means not just to mirror society but also to thematise and
challenge established ways of seeing or habits of viewing (Linders et al.
2011). While in the political sphere, the Federal Republic of Germany was

15 “mit meinem Hintergrund Theater zu machen. […] Das bedeutet, dass viele Leute
in mir tatsächlich eher einen Türken sehen als Regisseur. […] Das bedeutet, wenn ich
irgendwie eine Liebesgeschichte thematisiere, es eher als Migrationsgeschichte eingeordnet
wird. […] Und das bedeutet […], wenn ich irgendwelche Schauspieler auf die Bühne
schicke, schwarz-haarig, schwarz-augig, und ich [sie] irgendwelche Randale machen lasse
[…], [es] sofort als authentisch begriffen wird.”
 PRELUDE: SCENES FROM THE NEW GERMANY 7

marking the fiftieth anniversary of the recruitment agreements which led

to large-scale Turkish migration to Germany by celebrating and debating
the “success” of the integration of its Turkish population, Erpulat’s
comments and the scenes sketched above raise serious questions about
the performances demanded of migrantized actors in Germany both on-
and off-stage.

Scene 6: The Weekly Column of the Maxim Gorki

Theatre, Berlin (2019)/A Desk in London (2020)
Almost sixty years after Turkish labour migration to Germany first began,
thirty years after German unification, twenty years after Germany’s recog-
nition of itself as a country of immigration, and nearly ten years after
scenes 4 and 5, many of the directors and playwrights mentioned here
have gone on to find a theatrical home at the Maxim Gorki theatre in
Berlin. One of the key state-funded theatres in Berlin, albeit the smallest,
arrival there can to some degree be read as arrival at the centre of
the theatrical establishment. Mely Kiyak, journalist, author, writer of a
fortnightly theatre column for the Gorki theatre and of her own play
Aufstand: Monolog eines wütenden Künstlers (Uprising: monologue of a
furious artist, 2014) reflects back on the new position occupied by theatre
practitioners with a background of migration in Germany:

I cannot really answer the question of whether – from my perspective –

things are getting better or worse. Because I think that in the past twenty
years alone a great deal of progress has been made in Germany. At the
same time, it was very stressful and came at a high price. There was also
never the time to pause internally for a few years and enjoy the ground
won. Everything is always a battle. […] This theatre really is the theatre of
my dreams. Who gets to say that their cultural political demands have been
fulfilled in the space of only a few years? […] But – and this is the other
side of things – this institution is constantly threatened, cannot concentrate
solely on its art, but must justify itself and its existence again and again.
This is a noticeably different form of theatre-making than in Stuttgart, or
Frankfurt or Vienna. It does make a difference whether as a theatre maker
you are adopting a position on behalf of a third person or always also for
8 L. STEWART

yourself. Therefore, no, things are not getting better. On the contrary, the
better things get, the worse they are. (Kiyak 2019)16

What changed between the failed dreams of the fictional Kelkari and the
establishment of Kiyak’s dream theatre? Which battles were fought by
and around theatre practitioners with a background of migration? How
do the stresses and ambivalences Kiyak relates here map onto and inter-
vene in shifts in the self-understanding of Germany as cultural political
entity? Which new realities have been scripted in the theatrical sphere—in
the imaginations of playwrights, readers, audience members; in the enact-
ment and direction of such scripts on stage; in the performance of new
institutional cultural politics?
This book aims to respond to the questions raised by these scenes—
which thematise Turkish-German discontent with the on- and off-
stage roles migrantised theatre practitioners have been asked to play in
Germany—but also to the gaps which exist between these scenes. It does
so from the perspective of a researcher based in another country, the UK,
where different migration histories and cultural politics have formed the
dominant norms and built their own blind spots: my hope is that looking
to the German context here also helps us look to ourselves anew. As in
this prelude, this distance both makes possible and limits the dialogue
with cultural practice throughout the book. This book is also written by
an individual who has not been subject to the migrantized misrecogni-
tion the scenes above register,17 but who was struck by this work, and

16 “Trotzdem kann ich die Frage, ob etwas – aus meiner Sicht – besser oder schlechter
wird, nicht recht beantworten. Denn ich finde, dass sich allein in den vergangenen zwanzig
Jahren in Deutschland ein großer Fortschritt vollzogen hat. Gleichzeitig war es auch sehr
anstrengend und hat einen hohen Preis gekostet. Auch war nie Zeit, ein paar Jahre
innezuhalten und die Errungenschaften zu genießen. Es ist ja immer alles Kampf […]
Dieses Theater ist wirklich das Theater meiner Träume. Wer kann von sich behaupten,
dass sich seine kulturpolitische Forderung innerhalb von nur wenigen Jahren erfüllt hat?
[…] Aber – und das ist eben die andere Seite – diese Institution wird ständig bedroht,
kann sich nicht nur auf seine Kunst konzentrieren, sondern muss sich und seine Existenz
immer wieder rechtfertigen. Das ist eine deutlich andere Form des Theatermachens als
in Stuttgart, Frankfurt oder Wien. Es macht nämlich einen Unterschied, ob man als
Theatermacher für jemanden Dritten Position bezieht oder immer auch für sich selbst.
Deshalb, nein, es wird nicht besser. Im Gegenteil, je besser es wird, desto schlechter wird
es.”
17 Having moved around a lot as a child I grew up with the “wrong” accent, an
English accent in Scotland. While what my tongue said about me to others often didn’t
 PRELUDE: SCENES FROM THE NEW GERMANY 9

then stuck to it in her own. I rehash the scenes in written form and in an
academic context in the hope that this secondary engagement continues
to draw attention to the important work of the real experts, the prac-
titioners and playwrights at the heart of this study, after the theatrical
moment has passed.

Works Cited
Boran, Erol M. 2004. “Eine Geschichte des türkisch-deutschen Theaters und
Kabaretts.” PhD diss, Ohio State University. Accessed May 1, 2010. http://
etd.ohiolink.edu/view.cgi?osu1095620178.
Çelik, Neco. 2012. Personal Interview. Berlin, May 23.
El-Tayeb, Fatima. 2016. Undeutsch: Die Konstruktion des Anderen in der
postmigrantischen Gesellschaft. Bielefeld: transcript.
Erpulat, Nurkan, and Hillje, Jens. [2010] 2014. “Crazy Blood.” Translated by
Priscilla Layne. The Mercurian 5 (1): 8–68.
Kiyak, Mely. 2019. “Je besser es wird, desto schlechter wird es.” Kiyaks
Theaterkolumne. http://kolumne.gorki.de/kolumne-101/.
Linders, Jan, Nurkan Erpulat, Jens Hillje, Tuğsal Moğul, and Aljoscha Begrich.
2011. “Jenseits von Identität – Postmigrantische Kultur: Diskussion mit
Autoren und Theatermachern.” Unpublished audiovisual recording of public
discussion at Heidelberger Stückemarkt, Heidelberg, June 4. Accessed thanks
to Jenny Flügge/Heidelberger Stückemarkt.
Özdamar, Emine Sevgi. 1991. Keloglan in Alamania Oder die Versöhnung von
Schwein und Lamm. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren. Reprinted in
Die deutsche Bühne, 71 (10) (2000): 3–37.
Özdamar, Emine Sevgi. 2010. “Perikızı.” In Theater Theater: Odyssee Europa,
aktuelle Stücke 20/10, edited by RUHR, et al., 271–333. Fischer: Frankfurt
am Main.
Ronen, Michael (dir.). 2011. Perikızı. Written by Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Adapted
by Michael Ronen and Tunçay Kulaoğlu. Unpublished Audiovisual Recording,
Ballhaus Naunynstraße. Berlin. Accessed thanks to Chantal Kohler/Ballhaus
Naunynstraße.

match my own lived experiences or senses of affiliation, the historical power relations
between England and Scotland are very different to those between Turkey and Germany
and neither structural nor racial discrimination have been part of my experience.
10 L. STEWART

Seidel-Arpacý, Annette. 2003. “Kant in ‘Deutsch-Samoa’ und Gollwitz: ‘Hospi-

talität’ und Selbst-Positionierung in einem deutschen Kontext.” In Spricht die
Subalterne deutsch? Migration und postkoloniale Kritik, edited by Hito Steyerl
and Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 195–212. Münster: UNRAST.
Zaimoglu, Feridun, and Senkel, Günter. 2006. Schwarze Jungfrauen. Reinbek:
Rowohlt Theater Verlag.
 Introduction: Turkish-German Scripts
of Postmigration

In the wake of the so-called refugee crisis which peaked in 2015, a strong
association seems to be forming in English-language theatre scholar-
ship between German-language theatre and engagement with migration.1
However, little attention has been paid to the pre-history of often embat-
tled and marginalized work by earlier migrantized theatre practitioners in
the Federal Republic of Germany and their work in forging networks and
spaces within the German theatrical establishment.
Indeed, while “one of the lead actors in the drama of globalisation
in the twentieth century is the immigrant labourer” (Mani 2007, 50)—
classically exemplified through the figure of the Turkish guest worker in
Germany—this drama and the Turkish-German actor, playwright, director
or dramaturge long seemed notably absent from the actual theatrical
spaces of the Federal Republic. As late as 2004, Erol Boran, one of the few
scholars to have carried out detailed initial research in this area, argued
that theatre by Turkish-German actors, directors, ensembles and play-
wrights was left to take place on the margins of the theatre industry,

1 The number of papers which focused on or mentioned German-language theatre, and

stagings of Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Schutzbefohlenen (Charges [The Supplicants]) in particular,
at the 2018 IFTR conference on Theatre and Migration in Belgrade in July 2018 was
striking.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 11

Switzerland AG 2021
L. Stewart, Performing New German Realities,
Contemporary Performance InterActions,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69848-5_2
12 L. STEWART

far from the national stages, mainstream audiences and critical atten-
tion (78). Since the mid-2000s, however, theatre by first-, second- and
third-generation Turkish-German artists has begun to make its mark,
slowly becoming a more consistent feature on Germany’s influential
state-subsidised stages.
In 2006, Black Virgins (Schwarze Jungfrauen), an initially contro-
versial play on Muslim female sexuality and political positions including
Islamic extremism, written by Turkish-German writer Feridun Zaimoglu
and his co-dramatist Günter Senkel, became the first play written and
directed by Turkish-German artists to be the main feature on the front
cover of the influential German theatre magazine Theater heute (Theatre
Today). In 2008, the Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Berlin, opened as the coun-
try’s first forum for “postmigrant theatre”, creating an important space
for both established and emerging artists. Then, in 2011, Nurkan Erpulat
became the first Turkish-German director to be invited to present a
production at the prestigious annual theatre festival, the Berlin Theatertr-
effen, resulting in the live-streamed scenes outlined in the prelude to this
book. While the FRG officially accepted its role as a country of immigra-
tion in 2000, a decade later this shift appeared to be gradually effecting
substantial change within the state-subsidised theatrical landscape. This
study takes the relationship between theatre and migration in contempo-
rary Germany as its focus, and in doing so aims to draw further attention
to one vital aspect of this history: that of theatrical production arising
from scripts by German-language playwrights of Turkish origin.
Focusing on the fascinating fates of five plays by two Turkish-German
playwrights who are already well known for their award-winning prose
work—Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Feridun Zaimoglu, who writes for
the stage with Günter Senkel—this study asks where, when, why and
how plays engaging with the reality of Germany as a country of immi-
gration have been performed. Large-scale immigration to the FRG in
the twentieth and twenty-first century has occurred from a variety of
contexts including Turkey, Italy, Morocco, Vietnam and the former
USSR: at the last census, almost one in four people living in Germany
today were considered to have what is termed there a “Migrationshin-
tergrund” or “background of migration” (Bundeszentrale für politische
Bildung 2019), and the FRG is home to ca. 2.8 million residents of
Turkish origin (Harper 2011, 21). National discussions of citizenship,
 INTRODUCTION: TURKISH-GERMAN SCRIPTS OF POSTMIGRATION 13

integration, assimilation, multiculturalism and interculturalism have there-

fore frequently been conducted around, and with, Turkish-born and
Turkish-origin residents and citizens of Germany (cf. Mandel 2008).
In the wake of the success of the theatrical work at the Ballhaus
Naunynstraße, postmigration has been added to these discussions as an
alternative term which aims to centre migration and “New Germans”
as constitutive of contemporary German realities (cf. E. Yildiz 2014;
Römhild 2014, 2017). For sociologist Erol Yildiz, on one level post-
migration “has to do with the new narration of the migration history
of the so-called guest-workers […] [who are] actually pioneers of a
transnationalisation”, and with a non-reductive repositioning of subse-
quent generations “who do not have the same experiences of migration
as their parents or grandparents” (E. Yildiz 2014, 22).2 But, on another,
he argues, it also has to do with a broader accompanying epistemological
shift: one in which migration is recognised both academically and publicly
as a central constitutive element of society rather than as exception or
aberration (ibid.).
In the theatrical sphere, which popularised the usage of the term signif-
icantly, “postmigration” has been defined variously. For Deniz Utlu, an
author associated with the Ballhaus, postmigrant theatre emerges as a
“label under which political theatre is made by theatre practitioners ‘of
colour’”, while for researcher Azadeh Sharifi, it means “making political
theatre under postmigrant conditions. That means telling stories from
the margins, from the periphery, and still knowing the centre” (Sharifi
2013, 104).3 Shermin Langhoff, the artistic director with whom the term
is most closely associated, has recently highlighted the close connection
of Özdamar’s and Zaimoglu’s literary work to the development of her
concept of postmigration:

In these years [the early 2000s] I first came across the possibility of using
this term in connection with Anglo-Saxon literary studies, when I read

2 Es “geht […] um die Neuerzählung der Migrationsgeschichte der sogenannten Gastar-

beiter […] eigentlich Pioniere einer Transnationalisierung […] Zweitens geht es um
die Nachfolgegenerationen der Gastarbeiter, die nicht über die gleichen Migrationser-
fahrungen verfügen wie ihre Eltern oder Großeltern.”.
3 “Label, unter der von den Theatermacher_innen ‘of Color’ politisch Theater gemacht
wird”; “Politisch Theater machen unter postmigrantischen Konditionen. Das bedeutet von
den Rändern, von der Peripherie aus Geschichten zu erzählen und trotzdem das Zentrum
zu kennen.”
14 L. STEWART

an interview, in which the question was raised within the context of a

comparative literature seminar whether the literature of Zaimoglu could be
understood in comparison to that of Özdamar and others of the first gener-
ation as literature “after migration”. This question of writing, of narration
“after migration” tripped a decisive switch in my self-understanding and
my understanding of art.4 (Langhoff 2018, 304)

In the literary sphere, both authors are also known for the “performative”
and disruptive nature of their writing. Özdamar’s training and work as
a theatre practitioner in both Turkey and Germany are key subjects in
the semi-autobiographical novels and short stories for which she is best
known.5 This is reflected in a focus on the role of mimicry and theatrical
intertexts in the reception of her prose work.6 Similarly, Zaimoglu’s
almost legendary reading tours of his first prose success Kanak Sprak and
his frequent and energetic media appearances have also been the impetus
for many readings of his novels, his prose collections and his authorial
persona, as performative (cf. Cheesman and Yeşilada 2012, 4; Minnaard
2003; Schmidt 2008). While the question of narration after migration led

4 “Auf die Möglichkeit der Anwendung dieses Begriffs kam ich in diesen Jahren erst-
mals im Zusammenhang mit angelsächsischer Literaturforschung, als ich ein Interview
las, indem in einem Seminar der Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft die Frage erörtert
wurde, ob die Literatur von Zaimoǧlu im Vergleich zu Özdamar und anderen der ersten
Generation, als Literatur ‘nach der Migration’ aufgefasst werden könnte. Mit dieser Frage
des Schreibens, des Erzählens ‘nach der Migration’ legte sich in meinem Selbst- und
Kunstverständnis ein entscheidender Hebel um.” The original German uses the imagery
of a lever shifting, highlighting more strongly the concept as tool for changing understand-
ings and gaining leverage. Kevin Robins and Asu Aksoy also highlight both Langhoff and
Özdamar as artists whose work is exemplary of the “postmigrant perspective” on transna-
tionalism and the “enlargement of social and cultural meaning in the European context”
(158), which they argue is also present in or characteristic of the reflections of their inter-
view partners and focus groups: people of Turkish origin living in London and Berlin
who are not artists by profession (see Robins and Aksoy 2016, 163–70).
5 This is particularly the case with the semi-autobiographical novels The Bridge of the
Golden Horn (2007; Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn 1998) and Strange Stars Stare at the
Earth (Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde 2003), in which the protagonist “Sevgi” trains
as an actress and works at the Volksbühne. For an analysis of the semi-autobiographical
nature of these works, see, for example, Boa (2006); Bradley (2007).
6 This point is also made by Karin Lornsen amongst others (2009, 205). I will discuss
aspects of this secondary literature in more detail in the later chapters “Scripts of Migra-
tion: Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Early Plays (1982–2000)” and “Celebrating the New
“Normal”? Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Perikızı and the Festival Context”, which focus on
Özdamar.
 INTRODUCTION: TURKISH-GERMAN SCRIPTS OF POSTMIGRATION 15

to conceptual innovation for Langhoff, this study explores what happens

to that writing when it is intended for the theatre—and in several cases
how its conceptualisation as postmigrant theatre under Langhoff helped
facilitate that cross-media move.
In this book, I follow these playwrights’ scripts in their journeys into
publishers’ catalogues, into the hands of directors, dramaturges, scenog-
raphers and actors, and into performance. In the process, I connect these
scripts to the institutional changes performed around them, i.e. the insti-
tutional rescripting which accompanies them. As theatrical production in
Germany is a process which tends to take the play out of the playwright’s
hands, a key focus is to unpack the artistic relationships surrounding
each production and explore the negotiations at work between text
and performance, writer and director, ensemble and audience, concep-
tion and reception. Given the symbolic position of theatre in each of
the multiple incarnations of the German nation-state, and the delayed
self-conception of the contemporary Federal Republic as a country char-
acterised by immigration, I am also interested in the ways in which
stagings of plays by these artists might become caught up in, co-opted
to or used to critique discourses on ethnicity, racialized perception and
the politics of belonging in the Federal Republic of Germany. Put more
simply, when were these plays staged and by whom? How were migra-
tion and migrantized figures represented within them? How were they
received? And what does this have to tell us about cultural production and
aesthetics within the very particular circumstances of twentieth-century
Turkish migrations to Germany?
Following these scripts creates a necessarily uneven trajectory across
some thirty years, spanning the early 1980s to the present day. This
has been a period of transition not only for what could be termed
“Turkish-German theatre”—a term I will return to shortly—but also for
the Turkish population/s in Germany: a population often positioned as
broadly homogenous in German discourse but in fact including, and not
limited to, Kurds, Armenians, Turkish nationalists, communists, Muslims,
secularists, i.e. a highly diverse set of ethnic, religious and political posi-
tions and experiences (see Mandel 2008).7 During these years, the Federal

7 Labour migration generally occurred from more rural areas of Turkey, with families
joining workers several years later as a result of family reunification measures. However,
following the worsening political situation in Turkey in the 1970s and the military putsch
in 1980, a number of Turkish intellectuals, artists, activists, and members of persecuted
16 L. STEWART

Republic of Germany radically altered as a space to live in due to unifi-

cation with the former German Democratic Republic, the increasing
influence of the EU, changing citizenship laws and its late acceptance
of itself as a “country of immigration”. At the same time, the Turkish
population expanded from one of primarily first-generation immigrants
to third-generation residents and/or citizens.8 Following the attacks of
11th September 2001 in the USA, and the subsequent bombings in Euro-
pean capitals by so-called “home-grown Islamic terrorists”, the “drama
of globalisation” came to play in another way as in media discourse
the Turkish-German population increasingly came to be perceived as
“Muslim” (see Y. Yildiz 2009, 465–81).
Rather than attempting to fit an uneven development to a tidy histor-
ical overview of these years, I read the unevenness of the history traced
by these scripts as telling in itself. Many academic accounts of Turkish
cultural production in Germany begin with a lack, an empty space. Leslie
A. Adelson’s entry “Migrants and Muses” in David Wellbery’s A New
History of German Literature is subtitled as follows: “1979: Güney Dal’s
first novel attracts little attention when published in German translation”
(2004, 912). Curiosity about a similar empty space or lack of attention
surrounding productions of Turkish-German theatre is what drew me
to look at plays by Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Feridun Zaimoglu and
Günter Senkel when I began to do so back in 2010. In following the
trajectories their plays trace, I believe the spaces between performances
are as important to analyse, and as revealing, as the points at which
these plays become successes. Adopting a historicising approach to perfor-
mance analysis throughout thus allows connections to be made between
the performances as historical events taking place within an institutional
context, as outcomes of off-stage practices both artistic and social, and
as aesthetic instances. In doing so, this study explores the relationship
between the behavioural scripts a society often expects its migrantized
subjects to follow, the literal scripts produced by those subjects and the
multiple ways in which the productions of plays arising from these scripts

minorities also came to Germany seeking exile. Migration to and from Turkey and
Germany has also continued throughout this period, making it more sensible to speak
of Turkish migrations to Germany in the plural.
8 A form of jus soli was only introduced in the FRG in 2000. As a result, there still
exists a significant disjunction between birth and socialisation in Germany, and citizenship
of the country.
 INTRODUCTION: TURKISH-GERMAN SCRIPTS OF POSTMIGRATION 17

can themselves help create new realities within and beyond the theatrical
sphere.

Turkish-German Theatre: From

the Wings to Centre Stage
As Denise Varney highlights, to an extent “the German stage bears a
metonymic relation to the nation-state, which subsidises it, as in the
part for the whole” (2005, 2). The close relation between German stage
and German state dates back to the eighteenth century when state-
ments such as Friedrich Schiller’s “if we could witness the birth of our
own national theater, then we would truly become a nation” (1784,
218),9 provided rallying points for the construction of an “imagined
community” (Anderson 1983) called “Germany”. As in many Euro-
pean countries, the nation-building role of theatre in the newly-created
German state was continued into the twentieth century via strict censor-
ship of the stage in World Wars I and II (Hortmann and Hamburger
1998, 2). Individual artists of the avant-garde in Germany have focused
on creating a theatre of dissent rather than consensus throughout the
twentieth century. However, following the country’s post-war division,
a plentiful state funding system in both East and West Germany also
“aligned theatre with the discourses of democratic sovereignty in the two
states” (Sieg 2008, 314). Within this broader alignment, the legacy of
particularisation and decentralisation created a theatrical system charac-
terised by strong regional centres: the majority of funding for theatre
today comes from the budgets of the Länder (regional states), the local
authorities or municipalities, with a relatively small amount under the
control of national funding schemes (Weiler 2014). Although the state
theatre systems experienced significant financial upheaval in the initial
years following reunification, this was mainly the result of the difficul-
ties inherent in absorbing a socialist system into the capitalist economy
of West Germany and could be seen as part of a broader process of
consolidating, rather than opening up, ethnically defined notions of
Germanness.
It was thus only in May 2011 that the Dramaturgische Gesellschaft felt
the need to ask itself “Who are we?” and take “the intercultural society”

9 Translation here by Sigerson and Chambless.

18 L. STEWART

as the theme for its annual conference (see Dramaturgische Gesellschaft

2011).10 What prompted this shift? The introduction of European Union
funding for projects with specific remits intended to promote diversity
on the stage seems in part to have functioned to disrupt the close rela-
tionship between the German theatre and nation, “forc[ing] open the
demographic structure of the institution [… and] achiev[ing] what a
century of feminist complaints and several decades of immigrant activism
have not been able to accomplish” (Sieg 2008, 319). The routes through
which this funding and EU cultural policy feed into and alongside the
German system are complex, though. Banu Karaca notes for this reason,
“EU-related culture and arts support frequently plays a more supple-
mentary role” for both organisations and individual artists in Germany,
but “have nonetheless contributed to the reconfiguration of the way in
which national funding is framed, and thus has impacted how arts institu-
tions represent their work” (2010, 122). As the research in this book will
show, when exploring the German funding context, it therefore remains
important to also highlight the ways in which alterations to immigra-
tion and integration policies on a national level have affected the cultural
sphere and its funding. Here, notable instances are the alteration of
German Citizenship Law in 2000, the Immigration Law (Zuwanderungs-
gesetz) of 2005 in which “measures for the integration of immigrants
with legal long-term residence in Germany were anchored in law for
the first time” (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge n. dat.),11
and the introduction of a subsequent National Integration Plan by the
Federal Government of Germany (cf. Sharifi 2017, 336). These have all
had their effect, it seems, on the subsequent adoptions of “intercultural
action plans” (“Interkulturelle Handlungskonzepte”) by cultural senates
and institutions in Germany (cf. Stewart 2019).12
Certainly, the support (both financial and critical) which greeted “post-
migrant theatre” in the mid-2000s marked a stark change from a previous
reluctance to stage and engage stories of migration by or with migrantized
artists within the Federal Republic of Germany, particularly when it comes
to those of Turkish heritage. Erol Boran, one of the few scholars to

10 “Wer ist wir?”; “die interkulturelle Gesellschaft”.

11 “Mit diesem Gesetz […] werden erstmals Maßnahmen zur Integration der auf Dauer
rechtmäßig in Deutschland lebenden Zuwanderer gesetzlich verankert.”
12 This will be discussed in more detail in the later chapter “Performing Institutional
Change: New Faces, Shadow Voices (2008)”.
 INTRODUCTION: TURKISH-GERMAN SCRIPTS OF POSTMIGRATION 19

have worked on providing an initial systematic overview of this area

of cultural production, engaged in a combination of archival work and
extended fieldwork in his doctoral thesis (2004) to trace a history of
what he terms “Turkish-German theatre”. He begins with the arrival
of the first Gastarbeiter (guest workers) in 1961, some of whom were
greeted on arrival in Germany by the young Turkish student and future
dramatist Yüksel Pazarkaya. The third chapter of Boran’s thesis (2004)
focuses on this theatre and details the development of both amateur
and off-scene Turkish theatre groups in the FRG.13 These range from
Pazarkaya’s “Turkish Theatre Group”14 in Stuttgart in the years 1965–
68 to West Berlin-based groups in the 1970s and 1980s such as the
workers’ theatre group Halkevi İşçi Tiyatrosu (est. 1974), and Vasıf
Öngören’s Birlik Tiyatrosu (“Kollektiv-Theater”) which he established as
an exile to Germany in 1980. They also encompass temporary groups with
institutional connections such as the so-called “Turkish Project” at the
Schaubühne Berlin run by Meray Ülgen and Beklan Algan between 1979
and 1984 (101–09), and the founding of independent theatres such as the
Berlin Tiyatrom (“My theatre”) in 1984 and the Arkadaş (“Friendship”)
Theater in Cologne (92–135).
This history also traces the repeated interruptions to attempts at estab-
lishing permanent theatre groups with continued institutional recognition
or funding within West Germany.15 According to Boran, such attempts
were characterised both by disagreements amongst the artists involved
over the function of the theatre in question and by a sense of “cultural
isolation” resulting to a degree from failings on the part of the German
state’s role in facilitating engagement with Turkish-German ensembles or
theatre artists (78; 104). As Sven Sappelt points out, for a long time the

13 Other chapters focus on laying the theoretical and methodological groundwork of the
approach, outlining the history of theatrical practice in Turkey and on Turkish-Germany
comedic performance (stand-up and cabaret). Boran’s PhD was never published but was
made available freely online, and so has been drawn on by most scholars engaging with
Turkish-German theatre. This history as per Boran is also outlined in Nobrega (2014),
Sharifi (2017), Gezen (2018), for example. While there are necessarily limitations in the
analytical complexity and scope of the chapter on Turkish-German theatre history, it
remains a crucial source and has laid much factual groundwork.
14 “Türkische Theatergruppe”.
15 East Germany is not addressed here as the East German state did not engage in large-
scale recruitment from Turkey, although, as the outline of Özdamar’s theatrical biography
which follows shortly will show, East German theatre also has a role to play here.
20 L. STEWART

German government had no cultural policy in place for a group it had

never expected and was not keen to encourage to stay (2000, 277; Boran
2004, 97). Where policy concerns did begin to emerge, these tended to
focus on “preserving the connection with cultural traditions ‘back home’”
in the mid-80s (Kosnick 2004, 4), and then later on the “preservation
of distinctive cultural traditions […] now linked to ethnic identity poli-
tics in a multicultural framework” (ibid, 5). As a result, prior to 2000,
funding for Turkish-German theatre was frequently low, drawn from
social funds rather than cultural budgets, and rarely continuous in nature,
consisting rather of short-term, project-based subsidies (Boran 2004, 79;
158; 186).16 This in particular hindered rather than promoting the devel-
opment of existing theatre groups (Sappelt 2000, 283; cf. Boran 2004,
199) and, as Kira Kosnick highlights, created a divide between “high
cultural” work and the “socio-cultural” work expected of Turkish-origin
artists (2004, 12).
This suggests that theatre labelled Turkish or Turkish-German in
Germany has followed a very different path of development and recogni-
tion from that of Turkish-German literature or even film. Disagreements
over the aim of the art form, or the way in which it should be received, as
well as a lack of institutional acknowledgement of its aesthetic value, are
also characteristic of the history of Turkish-German literature and affected
both this literature’s dissemination and reception (see Cheesman 2007,
82–97). Tom Cheesman’s detailed work highlights a reception history
which has often projected its own progression in sophistication or quality
onto the literature, for example (ibid., 138; 2006). However, it seems that
these factors did not affect the production of literary works in quite the
same way as these circumstances would act negatively on theatre—an art
form yet more dependent on access to professional training and spaces,
funding and collaboration amongst a large group of individuals invested
in the value of a project.
What is more, in text-based theatre of the type primarily explored in
this study, “[t]he playwright’s creative labour ends with the completion
of the script, but the work itself is located with the performance event”
(Kidnie 2009, 15). The playwright’s name may stand on the programme
or published text, but collaboration is key in the creation of a performance

16 Boran names the Tiyatrom theatre in Berlin as the main exception here.
 INTRODUCTION: TURKISH-GERMAN SCRIPTS OF POSTMIGRATION 21

of the dramatic text.17 The director’s artistic concept, the dramaturge’s

reworking and cutting of the script, the scenographer’s visual framing,
and the actors’ bodies and voices therefore all contribute to the trans-
formation of the writer’s words into the theatrical work itself. Within
the German theatrical tradition in particular, with its emphasis from the
1970s onwards on director’s theatre and on what Hans-This Lehmann
terms postdramatic performance, it has far longer been the case that
“the director claims the authorial function” than in the UK (Bradby
and Williams 1988, 1; see also Lehmann 2005). As a result, it is much
more established there that the director’s artistic vision generally takes
priority over that of the dramatist and dramatic texts are frequently used
as “raw material” to be reshaped and reworked as relevant rather than as
blueprints to be realised. It is important to remember then that:

[t]he identity of the work of dramatic art […] is not limited by a supposed
originary moment of publication, either theatrical or textual, but continu-
ally constructed in response to production by users as varied as theatrical
practitioners, spectators and readers, and publishers and editors. (Kidnie
2009, 32)

My research shows that this is no less the case with the work of
Özdamar and of Zaimoglu/Senkel. While some of the play-texts have
been published, others are held by the publishers and are only available
on request. As a result, often the only version of “the play” an audience
has access to is that given in performance. The image of these works will
thus be shaped as much by the advertising of these performances, the
cutting and interpretation of the play by the theatrical team involved in
producing it, and an audience member’s memories combined with the
record of the play provided in reviews. Equally, where the play-text is
published, it rarely corresponds directly to the often heavily edited script
which was used as the basis for a performance.
In highlighting the challenges which Turkish and Turkish-origin
theatre practitioners faced in Germany prior to 2004, Boran effectively
denaturalises the lack of prominent Turkish-German theatre and theatre
practitioners on German state stages at that time. This is a move since

17 While literary products such as books, magazines and online writings are produced
in particular contexts and systems, their multiple circulations mean that as both artefact
and artwork they can be considered to have independent afterlives.
22 L. STEWART

taken further by Mark Terkessidis, who argues that many state-funded

institutions, including theatres, still function to serve the ethnically
defined “Volk” (people) rather than the diverse and actually existent
“Bevölkerung” (population) of the Federal Republic of Germany (2010,
108). I aim to build on these denaturalising and historicising moves
by highlighting that the more recent mainstream success of artists with
this background reflects a significantly changed production and reception
context. The usage of the label or term “Turkish-German” within this
study is therefore intended to contextualise the reception and institutional
positioning of theatrical work undertaken by migrantized practitioners,
and thus the material conditions for this cultural production, rather than
to suggest or search for an essentialist connection between the aesthetics
or content of this work and a specific national or cultural identity.18 The
processual term, “racialization” indicates that race is not a real, biological
category, but that racialized groups are constructed in a society to fulfil
certain ends which do have material negative effect on the racialized indi-
vidual and group. Similarly, here also refers to the way in which individuals
with transnational ties are consistently made to “migrants” who can never
arrive, irrespective of their own personal experience of migration, or their
citizenship status (cf. Tudor 2018, 1057).19 This others, externalises and
thus excludes particular population groups who are viewed through the
lens of their “background of migration” in Germany: (cf. El Tayeb 2016,

18 Similarly, Tom Cheesman and B. Venkat Mani consider the literary texts they deal
with, which in each case include literary works by Özdamar and Zaimoglu, to be “Turkish-
German” literature in the sense of literature whose production, themes or reception have
been marked by the specific historical situation of Turks in the FRG (cf. Cheesman 2007,
3). This focus does mean that this study is unable to engage systematically with the work
of other migrantized or racialized playwrights and practitioners in Germany, although the
new postmigrant theatre, while initiating from a network consisting of practitioners often
of Turkish origin, aims to a large degree to refuse essentialist divisions. However, here I
would direct readers to excellent new work coming from Jamele Watkins, Priscilla Layne
and Damani Partridge, which addresses contemporary Black performance in Germany,
including within the postmigrant theatre movement, as well as to Jonas Tinius’ extensive
recent work on Theater an der Ruhr.
19 Tudor uses the term “migratisation” rather than “migrantization”, to describe “(the
ascription of migration) as performative practice that repeatedly re-stages a sending-off
to an elsewhere and works in close interaction with racialisation” (2018, 1057). I use
the spelling “migrantization” here as this appears to be the more frequent usage in
the German and English-language contexts (see, for example, E. Yildiz 2014, 22), but
highlight Tudor’s discussion of the process and its relation to racialization as particularly
helpful.
 INTRODUCTION: TURKISH-GERMAN SCRIPTS OF POSTMIGRATION 23

146; Gezen 2018, 12). The two terms, although not synonymous, are
also closely connected in Germany where it tends to be individuals of
colour whose migration background is made visible (El Tayeb 2016, 65;
146–47; Tudor 2018). In referring to “migrantized” artistic practitioners,
I therefore refer to artists whose work tends to be perceived or positioned
in relation to their ethnicity in ways which do not in fact acknowledge but
rather often elide difference and specificity of experience, to exclusionary
effect.20
The playwrights at the heart of this study, Özdamar and
Zaimoglu/Senkel, for example, not only have very different histories
of migration, but also of engagement with the theatrical sphere. Born
in 1946 in Malatya, Özdamar grew up in post-war Turkey, moving to
West Germany first temporarily aged nineteen as part of the early wave
of labour migration to the FRG.21 She then returned to Turkey where
she trained as an actress, before political violence there led her to move
to Berlin in the late 1970s. During her initial temporary two-year stay,
Özdamar, who had already developed an interest in acting through roles
in Turkey, came into contact with Vasıf Öngören, a Turkish director
studying at the Berliner Ensemble in East Berlin.22 While in Berlin,

20 Erol Yildiz also argues for the potential of “postmigration” as term that can work
against such othering: “The “postmigrant” thus understands itself as a polemical term
positioned against the “migrantization” and marginalization of people who see themselves
as an integral component of society, against a public discourse which treats migration
histories as specific historical exceptions and which differentiates between native normality
and problems which have migrated in” (“Das ‘Postmigrantische’ versteht sich dann als
ein Kampfbegriff gegen ‘Migrantisierung’ und Marginalisierung von Menschen, die sich
als integraler Bestandteil der Gesellschaft sehen, gegen einen öffentlichen Diskurs, der
Migrationsgeschichten weiterhin als spezifische historische Ausnahmeerscheinungen behan-
delt und in dem zwischen einheimischer Normalität und eingewanderten Problemen
unterschieden wird.” E. Yildiz 2014, 22).
21 Although Özdamar first came to Germany as a Gastarbeiterin, her reasons for doing
so were slightly different from the usually cited economic push-and-pull factors. She and
her mother were not getting on well and as a result of the bilateral recruitment agreements
“the door to Germany was suddenly open” ([d]ie Tür nach Deutschland war plötzlich
offen; Özdamar, quoted in von Saalfeld 1998, 165).
22 As Boran highlights, this encounter was rewritten in fictive form in Özdamar’s 1998
novel Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (2004, 112–14). For more on Öngören, see Sten-
zaly (1984, 133), Sappelt, (2000, 67) and Gezen (2018). Öngören would later ground
the influential Birlik Tiyatrosu [‘Kollektiv-Theater’] in Turkey, a project he continued in
political exile in the 1980s in West Berlin and then Amsterdam. As Boran notes, Öngören
directed several of his own plays in West Berlin, including one in a German translation
24 L. STEWART

Özdamar also took German-language classes at the Goethe Institute and

spent a semester at the Fritz Kirchhoff Schauspielschule in West Berlin.
On returning to Turkey, she enrolled in the prestigious LCC theatre
school in Istanbul,23 and then took her first professional theatrical roles
in Öngören’s Ankara-based theatre as the Widow Begbick in Mann ist
Mann by Brecht and Charlotte Corday in Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss.
The 1971 military putsch in Turkey made life and work increasingly
difficult for Özdamar, however, and in 1976, she returned to Germany
to work with the acclaimed Swiss director Benno Besson—a former
collaborator of Brecht—at the Volksbühne in East Berlin. When Besson
left Germany for Paris in 1978, Özdamar followed him as director’s
assistant.24 Following this engagement, Özdamar returned to Germany
to join Claus Peymann’s “Bochumer Ensemble” at the Schauspielhaus
Bochum in 1979.25 There, as at the Volksbühne, Özdamar worked with
Manfred Karge and Matthias Langhoff, some of the leading theatre artists
of the day.26 While in the 1980s Özdamar was best known for this

during this period (2004, 113). For Boran, “the example of Öngören additionally high-
lights […] how difficult it was at the start of the 1980s to get a foot in the door of
the German theatre scene as a Turkish theatre practitioner – even for someone with a
reputation like Öngören’s” (“das Beispiel Öngörens aber zudem verdeutlicht […] wie
schwierig es zu Beginn der achtziger Jahre war als türkischer Theatermacher – selbst mit
einem Renommee wie dem Öngörens – in der deutschen Theaterszene Fuß zu fassen”:
114).
23 Language and Culture Center/Lisan ve Kültür Merkezi T.C., Istanbul, directed
by Beklan Algan from 1966 <https://www.lcc.com.tr/>. Algan also worked at the
Schaubühne in West Berlin in the early 1980s. Gezen also locates this as the LCC.
24 During that time, Özdamar was registered as a postgraduate student studying theatre
in Paris.
25 See also the detailed overview of Özdamar’s theatrical training and career provided
by Boran (2004, 136–39). According to Boran, Özdamar was also briefly involved in
assisting Beklan Algan with the Türkische Ensemble der Schaubühne Berlin (2004, 105).
Boran highlights many practitioners’ view that “Turkish theatre could have had the unique
opportunity back then to establish itself in the German theatrical landscape”, but that in
practice the ensemble’s work was characterized by “quite bloody battles” between those
involved: (“Das türkische Theater […] hätte damals die einmalige Gelegenheit gehabt,
sich in der deutschen Theaterlandschaft zu etablieren”; “ganz blutige Kämpfe”; 2004,
103–04).
26 At Bochum, she is credited as directorial/dramaturgical assistant on productions such
as Marie.Woyzeck (15/11/1980), for example. As documented in the 1986 volume edited
by Beil et al. which documented the work of the Bochumer Ensemble, she also appeared
playing a Turkish cleaning woman in Lieber Georg (2/2/1980; 520), shared the role of
 INTRODUCTION: TURKISH-GERMAN SCRIPTS OF POSTMIGRATION 25

theatrical work and for her film roles, in the early 1990s, she began
to publish prose fiction. In 1991, Özdamar was famously awarded the
Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, the renowned prize for the best new German-
language writing, for an extract from her first novel, Das Leben ist eine
Karawanserei (Life is a Caravanserai) and she has since been the recipient
of a steady stream of literary prizes including Berlin’s prestigious Fontane
Prize for literature.27
As will be seen within this study, the syncretic work Özdamar was
engaged in was actively discouraged in German cultural policy in the
1980s,28 meaning that younger artists such as Zaimoglu were unlikely to
come into contact with the direct legacies of these methods.29 Instead,
Zaimoglu, who was born in Turkey but has lived in the FRG since early
childhood and associates himself more with the so-called “second” and
“third” generation was brought up in a Turkish-German working-class
household with little interest in the theatre. Known for his controversial
literary work, which had been part of a drive for more political recognition
of second- and third-generation migrants as Germans in the mid-1990s,
he began to gain popularity first as a prose writer and activist and then
took on the additional role of dramatist when invited to be writer in
residence for a number of theatres (cf. Solmaz 2010).
While initially invited as a solo playwright, Zaimoglu primarily writes
for the theatre with his co-dramatist and friend, Günter Senkel. Senkel,
who appears to have no personal experience of migration, runs a book-
shop in Kiel, in North Germany, in addition to joining Zaimoglu in his

Lydia Antonowa with Gabriele Gysi in Karge and Langhoff’s production of Brecht’s The
Mother (Die Mutter 2/10/1983; 594), and played a “Turkish singer” in Heiner Müller’s
own production of The Task (Der Auftrag 13/2/1982; 563). In 1984, Özdamar left
Bochum but continued her work as an actress in theatrical productions in Germany and
France (Lennartz 2000, 29). She is also known as “the Mother of all film Turks” for her
roles in films such as Hark Bohm’s Yasemin (1988) and Doris Dörrie’s Happy Birthday,
Turk (Happy Birthday, Türke 1992) (die Mutter aller Filmtürken; Laudenbach 2002).
27 See also Boran (2004, 136–37). On the reception of Life is a Caravanserai see
Jankowsky (1997); Gramling, (2010).
28 Loren Kruger identifies Özdamar as a playwright who has “begun to explore the
possibilities of syncretic theatre in Germany” (2004, 327–28).
29 For a detailed overview of Turkish-German theatre in this period, see Boran (2004,
75–200). On the negative effects of cultural policy on Turkish-German theatre, see also
Sharifi (2011, 36).
26 L. STEWART

writing for the theatre.30 The process of their collaboration is described

by Zaimoglu as follows:

I am the extremist, I’m responsible for the language and the ideas. I slip
into the roles. My tasks are feelings and affects. Günter is the technician
who considers: the affects, ideas, and the language – do they work?! Does
the story function?! (Solmaz 2010, n. pag.)31

The lack of attention given to Senkel’s background in the existing schol-

arship, as well as in theatre reviews, and interviews is indicative of the
way in which both authorship and migrantization work in contemporary
Germany32 : notably even in the theatrical sphere, where collaborative
practice is more common, an emphasis on the author’s background as
heuristic device appears only in relation to Zaimoglu. Similarly, situating
the plays as products of successful literary authors does mean that Senkel
recedes into the background in this story. This is not intended to obscure
Senkel’s contribution to his and Zaimoglu’s plays, but simply reflects the
fact that he, unlike Zaimoglu, is not known as an author in his own right.
The very brief outline of the theatrical biographies of the playwrights
central to this study illustrates that the new “postmigrant” theatre does
not necessarily constitute a continuation or validation of earlier instances
of “syncretic” theatre often practised by the first generation or Turkish
theatre makers in Germany and epitomised here by the work of Özdamar.
Rather, they stand in a “broken” relation to one another,33 linked rather
by the degree to which gaps and breaks in theatrical projects can be
considered a constitutive part of the history of “Turkish-German theatre”.
At the same time, new funding for and interest in “postmigrant” theatre—
theatre by and with postmigrant artists which aims to bring a postmigrant
perspective into the theatrical sphere—is also slowly creating forums in

30 An author biography for Senkel is provided in Schütt (2011, 85).

31 “Ich bin der Extremist, bin fur die Sprache und Ideen zuständig. Ich schlüpfe in
die Rollen […] Meine Aufgabe[n] sind Gefühle und Affekte. Günther [sic] ist der Tech-
niker, der sich überlegt: Die Affekte, Ideen und die Sprache – geht das überhaupt auf?!
Funktioniert die Geschichte?!”
32 Contributions by Senkel have been included in two recent edited volumes dedicated
to Zaimoglu’s work: see Senkel (2011; 2012). Zaimoglu discusses the duo’s working
partnership in Solmaz (2010), Tiedke (2004b), and Gräff (2010).
33 Analogous to Derek Paget’s understanding of documentary theatre as a “broken
tradition” (2009).
 INTRODUCTION: TURKISH-GERMAN SCRIPTS OF POSTMIGRATION 27

which these distinctly developed ways of working are coming together and
interacting further. The Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Berlin, is an important
theatre to name here. As will be seen throughout the chapters to come,
the Ballhaus is an institution which has functioned to bring together
those who have long been active in the Turkish-German independent
theatre scene with theatre practitioners experienced within Germany’s
state-funded stage system, and with newer emerging practitioners.
In other parts of the country, and most particularly in the former West
Germany, such approaches have also increasingly being taken up by key
theatres in the state-funded theatrical landscape: references to particular
directors and theatres such as Schauspiel Köln and Karin Beier, or Schaus-
piel Hannover and Luk Perceval will therefore also recur throughout this
study. This marks a stark change from a previous reluctance to stage
stories of migration by or with migrantized artists within the Federal
Republic of Germany. The historical overview briefly sketched here high-
lights that the metonymic relationship between stage and state noted at
the beginning of this section thus also reflects a long existent lack of
acceptance of the Turkish presence in the FRG on an institutional level
and a hesitancy when it comes to offering migrantized playwrights, actors
and directors a stake in the theatrical imaginary.

Situating the Script

This hesitation is also reflected in the academic sphere. While much schol-
arship in recent years has focused on Turkish-German literature and film,
little research until very recently has been carried out into theatre by
Turkish-German practitioners.34 Many cross-media studies omit theatre
altogether (see, for example, Wagner-Egelhaaf et al. 2007), and newer
cross-media studies tend to focus on individual instances of theatre which

34 A range of both Zaimoglu/Senkel and Özdamar’s theatrical work has begun to attract
critical attention from scholars. However, this has thus far resulted in several separate arti-
cles rather than a broader overview and interest has mainly stemmed from scholars familiar
with their prose writing. With the exception of Zaimoglu/Senkel’s Black Virgins , which
has been the focus of some performance analysis, analysis of their plays in production, or
as theatrical events, is largely absent. Those analyses of Özdamar’s theatrical work which
do exist, for example, tend to be brief, embedded in a wider discussion of her other work
or of a broader concept, and based primarily on a reading of the dramatic text, rather
than the corresponding performance texts.
28 L. STEWART

have emerged as part of the postmigrant theatre movement. Mean-

while, in medium-specific studies focused on theatre in Germany, such
as Matthew Cornish’s Performing Unification: History and Nation in
German Theater after 1989, consideration of “Turkish-German theatre”
finds space in the epilogue rather than being seen as central to questions
of either history or nationhood (2015). For a long time, the most signifi-
cant exceptions were Erol Boran’s 2004 doctoral thesis, Zehra İpşiroğlu’s
reflections on her work between Turkey and Germany (2008) and a
study carried out in the early 1980s by Manfred Brauneck et al. on
“Foreigner’s theatre” (“Ausländertheater”) in the FRG and West Berlin
(1983). The findings from this report which relate directly to Turkish-
German theatre at that time are summarised in Stenzaly (1984). More
recently, Katrin Sieg has explored works by Turkish-German practitioners
as part of her broader study of Ethnic Drag (2002, 2010, 2011), Azadeh
Sharifi has provided a historical outline of the place of migration in the
theatrical institutions of Germany as part of a broader consideration of
the European context (2017, 334–39), while Onur Kömürcü Nobrega
has engaged in extensive and compelling ethnographic analysis of the
“working and living conditions of Turkish German artists throughout
the institutionalisation of postmigrant theatre and the implementation
of cultural diversity in the arts policies in Berlin’s cultural landscape”
(2014).35 Elsewhere, Misha Hadar (2019) has engaged in initial archival
work to reassess the work of the Schaubühne’s Turkish Ensemble, and Ela
Gezen (2018, 2019) has provided detailed insight into the place of Aras
Ören and Vasif Öngören within this history, helping shift “attention away
from thinking about Turkish writers in Germany purely through the lens
of labor migration, instead construing their work as a continued exchange
in the realm of theatre” (Gezen 2018, 106).36
This sudden upsurge in academic engagement stands in stark contrast
to the level of scholarly attention paid over several decades to other
forms of cultural production by Turkish-origin artistic practitioners in
Germany, or even to performance or performative events in which

35 Nora Haakh also has a book forthcoming on postmigrant theatre which readers can
look forward to.
36 In this study, Gezen uses an engagement with Özdamar’s theatrical background to
read her literary work but not her theatre plays.
 INTRODUCTION: TURKISH-GERMAN SCRIPTS OF POSTMIGRATION 29

Turkish-Germans may choose to participate.37 To a degree, this reflects

the long-standing lack of plays present on the larger and more influential
German national stages which are either by Turkish-German writers and
directors or which thematise the Turkish-German relationship. However,
beyond these stages, such work does have a longer history than often
assumed: writing in Die Zeit in 1982, Danja Antonovic highlighted the
existence of “theatre, literature, music: guestworker culture – culture,
that nobody wants” (1982).38 While academic studies have focused on
the literature and music referred to as equal partners by Antonovic, this
theatre has largely been written out of history and is only now in the
process of being recovered. This is partly due to what could be consid-
ered a double minoritisation within the academic sphere, in which the
frequent association of literary products of Turkish-German authors with
a “minor literature” (Amodeo 1996; Littler 2007) might combine with
an understanding of theatre as a “minor” art form and theatrical theory
as a minor field of study (Pavis 1992, 75–98). Amodeo, Littler and Pavis
use “minor” in the sense established by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze
here, i.e. to indicate not merely a marginalized position within a larger
matrix but also the ethical action of “becoming-minor”. However, it is
that position at the margins that is often used to designate such work
“unimportant” or “insignificant”: a designation this study contests.
This situation may also be exacerbated by the perception that the
ephemeral nature of theatre makes past productions inaccessible (cf.
Balme 2008, 132).39 The “traces” or “artefacts” which may remain of
a piece of theatre, however, are multiple, including the dramaturgical
department’s cut of the scripts, rehearsal and production photographs,
video and audio recordings, programmes, publicity materials, reviews,
rehearsal recordings, notes and anecdotes of post-show discussions, and
interviews. As Ric Knowles puts it, drawing on such sources “can not

37 Detailed research had previously been done on events such as the annual Karneval
der Kulturen in Berlin, for example (see Sieg 2008, 321–22).
38 “Theater, Literatur, Musik: Gastarbeiterkultur – Kultur, die keiner haben will.”
39 Thus, Hannah Voss, whose 2014 book explores “the reflection of ethnic iden-
tity(ascriptions) in contemporary German theatre” explicitly concentrates “solely on the
aesthetic product, that is the theatre production”, arguing that this focus is due “amongst
other things, due to material available to me” (“allein auf das ästhetische Produkt, sprich
auf die Theateraufführung”; dies “ist under anderem auch dem mir vorliegenden Material
geschuldet”; 2014, 22).
Another random document with
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woman’s wig on, and a little rouge, and was dressed in the latest
fashion with a great hoop—for he meant to represent a lady, not a
peasant woman—anybody would have taken him for a pretty young
lady. The hoop and the sack and all the fallals a lady would wear
were of real service to him, as he could wear his uniform under
them, and so, if he should be found out and arrested, he would be
entitled to be treated as a prisoner of war. If he had been caught in
the French lines without his uniform he would have been strung up in
short order as a spy, according to the articles of war. I kept my
uniform on too, but that was a simple matter, as I was only disguised
by another suit of man’s clothing put on over it.
“My lord had something else under his hoop besides his uniform—a
good rapier, with a Toledo blade; and his lace neck-handkerchief was
fastened with a jewelled dagger that was more than a toy. He was to
be Madame Geoffroy in search of her husband, who was supposed
to be in the garrison, and I was to be a great, stupid, faithful Alsatian
servant, and my name was to be Jacques; and my name is Peter, sir.
I had no arms, only a great stick; but there was a knob in that stick,
and when I pulled out that knob I had a sword.
“We used to practise of a night in the tent. My lord had merriment in
him then, and officers always like a lark; and it would have made you
laugh, Mr. Washington, to have seen my lord, all dressed up as a
woman, pretending to cry, and holding his handkerchief to his face
while he rehearsed the story he was making up to the two young
officers. It was a yarn all about the supposed Madame Geoffroy’s
travels in search of her husband, and her delight when she heard he
was one of the officers of the Bouchain garrison; and, of course, she
would be told by somebody that there was no such officer in the
garrison, and then she was to give a screech and fall over, and I was
to catch her and beg her to control herself. Oh, it was as good as
play-acting! Often, when I have thought of that adventure, and have
remembered how my lord looked then and how he looks now—so
serious and grave, and as if he never played a prank in his life—I
could hardly persuade myself it was the same man. Well, Mr.
Washington, after we had got it all straight, one dark August night we
ran the sentries—that is, we slipped past them in the dark. They
thought we were deserters, although why anybody should desert
from our camp, where we had both victuals and drink in plenty, to go
to Bouchain, where they had neither, nobody could make out.
However, we heard the shots cracking behind us as we managed to
pick our way through the morass, and truly, sir, I think we were in
more danger of our lives while crossing that morass in the dark
between the English and French lines than at any other time. It was
terrible work, but we managed to get to a solid piece of ground,
covered with underbrush, where our outfit was concealed. Luckily we
had to conceal our clothes, for we were covered with black mud, and
we had a time scraping it off our hands and faces. At last, though,
after half an hour’s hard work there in the swamp, we were dressed.
We then had to steal about a mile off, through the undergrowth, to
the right of the French lines. This would have been easy enough for
us except for my lord’s toggery, but the little rents and stains we got
upon us gave the more color to the story we had to tell of a long
day’s travel and many mishaps on the way.
“After a while, sir, we got out on the open highway, and then we took
breath and made for the French sentries. I tied a white handkerchief
on to my long stick, and we marched along until we got to the first
outpost; and when the sentry levelled his piece and asked us ‘Who
goes there?’ my lord advanced and said, in a woman’s voice, ‘A
distressed lady.’ The night was dark, but the sentry could see it was
a lady, and then my lord said, ‘I am Madame Geoffrey, the wife of a
French officer, and I desire you to bring the officer of the guard to me
at once.’ That sounded straight enough, so the soldier took a little
whistle from his belt and whistled, and pretty quickly a smart young
lieutenant stepped up.
“The supposed Madame Geoffrey had then sunk upon the ground,
pretending to be almost fainting with fatigue, and after this, Mr.
Washington, I will make bold to call my lord Madame Geoffroy during
the whole of this adventure; for nobody thought he was anything but
a woman, and sometimes I had to rub my eyes and ask if I wasn’t
really named Jacques, and Madame Geoffroy and her big hoop and
her lost husband weren’t real.
“The Frenchmen are monstrous polite, as you know, sir, and when
the lieutenant saw a lady sighing and moaning on the ground he took
off his hat and bowed low, and asked what he could do for her.
“‘Let me see the commandant of the garrison for only one moment!’
cried Madame Geoffroy, clasping her hands. ‘My husband—my poor,
brave husband! Oh, sir, have some pity on a distracted woman, who
has travelled nearly seven hundred leagues in search of her
husband.’
“‘Was your husband an officer in Marshal Villars’s army, madame,’
asked the lieutenant, bowing again.
“‘He was—and is, I hope,’ said madame. ‘He was one of the King’s
Musketeers, but was taken prisoner at Oudenarde, and on being
exchanged he joined Montbrasin’s regiment because it was on the
frontier; and since that day, a year ago, I have been unable to find
any trace of him. I have strong hopes he is living, for I have no proof
that he is dead; and knowing that Colonel Montbrasin is the
commandant of the garrison of Bouchain, I have made my way here,
with incredible difficulty, even through the English lines.’ Now this
was really a very clever speech, for the King’s Musketeers was a
crack regiment, being the Grand Monarque’s own body-guard, and
no man was admitted into it unless he was of the best blood of
France. So the lieutenant thought Madame Geoffroy was a great
lady.
“‘Madame,’ said he, ‘it is not in my power to promise you an interview
with the commandant, but I will conduct you with pleasure to my
superior officer, who commands the main entrance to the town.’
“At that madame jumped up so sprightly and started to walk so fast
that I was afraid the lieutenant would suspect her. But that is just like
the French, Mr. Washington. One minute they are in the dolly dumps,
so that you would think they could not live, and the next they are
capering about, and laughing and singing as if they never had the
dolly dumps in their lives. Off we set for the main gate. We walked
along the intrenchments, and I kept my eyes open, and in spite of
the half-darkness I saw a good many things that they would rather
we hadn’t seen. Their works were in a bad way, and our siege-guns
had done their duty.
“Arrived at the gate-house the young lieutenant asked for the officer
in command—Captain Saussier. So Captain Saussier came out, and
madame went through all her story again. The captain ogled her, and
it was all I could do to keep my countenance when I saw that the
captain and the lieutenant were trying to cut one another out. They
made no bones at all of taking her to see the commandant,
particularly as she said she did not wish to stay, except until daylight
the next morning, for in a besieged town they don’t want any non-
combatants to eat up the provender. But although they were willing
enough for her to go in, they refused to let me. She made no
objection to this, which surprised me; but in a moment she fell into
one of those fits we had rehearsed for the commandant’s benefit,
when he should tell her, as we knew he would, that he had never
seen or heard of her husband. I came forward then with smelling-
salts, and presently she revived. That scared the officers a little, for
the bravest officer in the world would rather be out of the way when a
woman begins to cry and kick and scream. As soon as they led her
towards the gate she had another fit, and as good a fit as I ever saw
in my life, sir. Then I came running, of course, with the smelling-salts.
The captain evidently did not want her on his hands entirely as long
as she was in that condition, so he said perhaps—ahem!—it might
be better to take her servant along.
“‘Oh, my good, faithful Jacques!’ cried she. ‘It would be a great
comfort if I could have him with me in this trying time!’ So they
passed me in the gates along with her.
“She never stopped chattering for a moment while she was walking
through the streets with the captain, telling a long rigmarole about
her travels; but she used her eyes as well as I used mine. The town
was horribly knocked to pieces—houses falling down, the streets
encumbered with rubbish, and several breaches made in the walls.
They had managed to repair the breaches after a fashion, for the
French understand fortifications better than we do; but there was no
doubt, from what we saw in that walk at nine o’clock at night, that the
town and fortifications had suffered terribly. And there were no
women or children to be seen, which showed that they had sent
them all away, for some will remain in a besieged town as long as
there is anything to feed them on.
“When we reached the citadel we noticed there were not near
enough cannon to defend it; so we knew that they had been forced
to take the guns to place on the ramparts. At last, after going through
many long passages and winding stairs, we were ushered into the
commandant’s presence. He was a tall, soldierly looking man, and
he received madame very politely. The captain told the story of her
tremendous efforts to get there and her trouble, madame all the time
sighing and weeping. But here came in a frightful thing, sir. There
had been a Captain Geoffroy, an officer in Marshal Villars’s army,
and I felt myself turning pale when the commandant offered to let
madame remain in the town twenty-four hours until he could find out
something about this Geoffroy. But madame’s wit saved her.
“‘Pray,’ said she, clasping her hands, ‘what was this M. Geoffroy
like?’
“‘Tall,’ said the commandant, ‘with a swarthy skin and black hair.’
“‘Ah,’ cried she, muffling her face in her handkerchief, ‘it could not
have been my husband. He was short, and had light hair, and had
lost a part of his right ear in a duel; it disfigured him very much.’
“‘Then, madame,’ answered the commandant, ‘I can give you no
further information, for that is the only Geoffroy in the army of whom I
know anything, and from your description he cannot be your
husband. I will make inquiries among my officers, but I can give you
but little hope.’
“Madame sighed and groaned some more, and then said she would
be ready to depart at daylight in the morning, to begin her search
over again. The commandant offered her a room in the citadel,
warning her that it would be necessary for her to get out before
daybreak, as the English began their cannonade as soon as it was
light enough to see the French lines. Madame agreed tearfully to
this, and the commandant offered her some supper, smiling when he
told her it was not exactly the kind of fare he was used to offering
ladies. But she declined—we had not the heart to eat up anything
from those poor devils. So she was shown to a room, and I lay down
at the door and pretended to sleep; but you may depend upon it, sir,
that neither one of us slept a wink. Towards daylight the captain of
the guard came to waken us, and told us it was time to leave. The
commandant was up to bid madame adieu, as they call it in the
French lingo; and after thanking him for his politeness madame was
escorted to the gate, I following her, and thence as far as the picket-
line. And here, after the officer had left us, for the first time we
aroused suspicion. We were walking pretty fast, and something in
the supposed lady’s gait made the sentry suspect us. There was
another soldier, not a sentry, with him, and this fellow called after us
to stop. We were near the entrance to the bog then, and we knew
the way across it, particularly as there was now daylight enough to
see, so the only notice we took of him was to walk a little faster. The
soldier followed us clear into the underbrush, when my lord—for so I
will call him now—deliberately dropped his hoop and petticoat,
revealing a pair of legs that evidently belonged to the British army,
and a rapier, while from the waist up he wore a woman’s sack, and
had a hood on his head. The apparition dazed the soldier for a
moment, when my lord made at him with the rapier, and he turned
and ran, giving the alarm, however. We took to our heels and gained
the causeway, when the French fired a regular fusillade after us,
although not a shot struck; and our own people, seeing us running
towards them, thought we were escaped prisoners, and we got
within our own lines without trouble. My lord had some valuable
information to give the duke, and the adventure got out in the army
and made a hero of him. The French kept monstrous quiet about it;
you see, sir, we had taken the commandant himself in. My lord
repaid his politeness, though, by sending him a box of wine, which
we knew he needed for his sick; but the commandant was the most
chagrined man in the French army. They made a sortie soon after
that, but it did them no good, and within a week they surrendered.
The duke granted them all the honors of war, and the garrison
marched out with drums beating and colors flying. They had made a
gallant defence, and had not surrendered until they were starving.
That was the end of my serving with the great Duke of Marlborough,
for that was his last campaign. And soon after my lord left the army.
And I’ll be leaving his service by the toe of his boot if I don’t go to
him now; so good-night, sir, and excuse me if I have kept you out of
bed too long.”
With this Lance disappeared.
In a few minutes George was in bed, and for the first time a sudden
shock of homesickness came to him. His mother would not come to
him that night and kiss his forehead, as she always did. It almost
drove away the story of the siege of Bouchain; but in a little while he
had lapsed into a sleep, in which dreams came of Bouchain, and the
earl dressed up as Madame Geoffroy, and his mother sitting by the
fire smiling, and Betty playing on the harpsichord, and then deep
oblivion and the soundest of sleep.
 CHAPTER VI
The two days’ journey that followed were very much like the first day
—an early start, two hours’ rest in the middle of the day, and the
night spent at a road-side tavern. On the third day they left
civilization behind them, and their midday rest was spent in the
woods. They were then upon a lower spur of the Blue Ridge
Mountains. The road for the first two days had been fairly good, but
on the third day the four roans had all they could do to haul the
heavy coach up and down the rough highway. They stood to their
work gallantly, though, and Lord Fairfax remarked that the coach
could go twenty miles farther up the mountain, where he had a
hunting-lodge—a sort of outpost for Greenway Court, and where the
coach was stored. Glorious weather had followed them. The air was
keener and colder than in the low country, and Lance produced a
huge furred mantle, in which he wrapped Lord Fairfax, who sat and
read unconcernedly while the coach rolled and jerked and bumped
along. George was glad to make half his day’s travel on horseback,
and the exercise, as a warmer-up, was so much better than the
earl’s fur mantle that he felt sometimes like suggesting a gallop to
Lord Fairfax. But he had the wit to keep his suggestions to himself,
knowing that older men can do their own thinking much better than it
can be done for them by fifteen-year-old boys. George had enjoyed
every moment of the trip so far. His attacks of homesickness were
few, and he got over them by the philosophical reflection that he
would have been cruelly disappointed if his mother had not allowed
him to come. He began a letter to his mother, writing a little every
day, so that if he had a chance to visit the low country it would be all
ready to send at a moment’s notice. He was very happy. He had in
prospect a new and delightful experience in travel and association.
When that was over he had the cheerful hospitality and honest
gayety of his Christmas at Mount Vernon to look forward to with his
brother and his sister-in-law, whom he dearly loved, and dear little
Betty; and after that a return home, where he fitted naturally and
easily into the position of his mother’s best helper and counsellor.
The singular attraction between the man of the world and the
unsophisticated young provincial gentleman grew each day. George
had never before met any one who had Lord Fairfax’s store of
experience, as a soldier, a courtier, a man of affairs, and a member
of a great literary circle. Nothing was lost on the boy, and the earl
was charmed and interested to find that a chance word dropped here
and there would remain in George’s memory, who would recall it at a
suitable time to ask some intelligent question about it. Lord Fairfax
sometimes smiled at himself when he realized how much of his time
and thought and conversation were spent upon this boy, but he also
realized that an intelligent and receptive young mind is in itself one of
the most interesting things in the world, and when combined with the
noble personality and high breeding of Madam Washington’s son it
was irresistible. For the first day or two he always spoke to George
as “Mr. Washington,” and neither one could tell the exact occasion
when he dropped it for the more familiar “George.” But it was done,
and it put them upon a footing of affection at once. George continued
to say “my lord,” as that was the proper mode of address, but little by
little he revealed his heart to his new friend, and Lord Fairfax read
him as an open book. This was not at first, however, for George
modestly conceived himself to be a person of no consequence
whatever, and was much more eager to hear the earl speak of his
adventures than to tell all the ideas and protests and ambitions he
cherished himself.
On the evening of the fourth day they came to a log structure at the
foot of the mountains, where the coach was to be left. It was in a
cleared space on an open plateau, and above them towered the
great peaks of the Blue Ridge, which they must cross on horseback.
The night was bright and beautiful, a great vivid moon sailing
majestically in the heavens. There was in the clearing one large
cabin, with two beds in it and a large press, besides a table and
some chairs. In a smaller cabin two or three men lived the year
round, while built on to that was a substantial coach-house, where
the great chariot was stored, except when the earl went upon his
lowland journeys in state. When the cavalcade stopped in the
clearing Lord Fairfax alighted and walked into the large cabin,
followed by George. A fire roared upon the broad, rude hearth, and
in ten minutes Lance had unlocked the press, had taken from it
some bedlinen and blankets, and had made up the beds and laid the
table. Supper had been prepared in advance, and, as Lance was an
excellent cook, it was not to be despised—in particular a great
saddle of venison, which had been hanging up for a week in
anticipation of the earl’s arrival. George could hardly have told what
part of the day’s journey he always enjoyed most, but these suppers,
with the earl’s entertaining conversation, and his own healthy young
appetite, and the delicious sense of well-being when he drew up to
the fire afterwards, to listen and ask questions, were perfectly
delightful to him.
When they were seated at the table and about half through supper,
Lord Fairfax asked, smiling:
“How do you like the uncivilized wilderness, George?”
“But this is not the uncivilized wilderness yet,” answered George,
smiling too. “We have a table and chairs, and knives and forks and
plates, and beds and blankets, and silver candlesticks.”
“Still, it is the wilderness, and from now on we must depend upon
ourselves for company. The true meaning of the wilderness is,
absence from the haunts of men. We shall be entirely alone at
Greenway, except for a few negroes and Indians. You will probably
not see a white face, except mine and Lance’s, until you leave me.”
“It will be quite enough, sir,” replied George. “I would rather be with a
few people that I like than with a great crowd that I don’t like.”
“I felt the same in my youth. Afterwards there were circumstances in
my life which inclined me to solitude. I came to Virginia in search of
it, and I found it; and I also found peace. Once a year I go to the low
country—to Belvoir, my cousin William Fairfax’s; to your brother’s at
Mount Vernon; sometimes to see Colonel Byrd at Westover: but I
always return to my own fastness gladly. I feel more cheerful now
than at any time since we started. My old friends—my books—are
waiting for me in my library; I can only take a dozen with me when I
go away. My doves and pigeons, my dogs and horses, will all be the
happier for my return home. My servants will be glad to have me
back—poor souls, they have but a dull time of it all the year round;
and I myself, having lived this life so long, find that it suits me. I shall
have your company for several weeks; then I shall want you again
next year.”
“Next year, sir, I shall be sixteen, and perhaps I shall not be my own
master. I may be in his majesty’s service. But if I can come to you
again, you may be sure I will.”
When supper was over the earl drew his chair up to the fire, and, still
wrapped in his fur mantle—for the bitter wind blew through the
cracks and crannies of the cabin—sat in a reverie with his deep eyes
fixed on the blaze. George had meant that night to ask him
something about the siege of Bouchain, but he saw that the earl was
deep in thought, and so said nothing. He began to wonder what his
mother and Betty were doing at that time. It was after supper at Ferry
Farm, too. His mother was knitting by the table in the parlor, with two
candles burning, and Betty was practising at the harpsichord. In his
mother’s bedroom—“the chamber,” as it was called in Virginia—a fire
was burning, and around the hearth were gathered the household
servants picking the seed from the cotton which, when warmed by
the fire, came out easily. This they did while waiting until they were
dismissed at nine o’clock. What was Billy doing? and Rattler? While
thinking these thoughts George dropped asleep, and slept soundly
until Lance waked him raking down the ashes and preparing for the
night.
Next morning George wakened early, as he supposed, seeing how
dark it was; but the sound of the rain upon the roof proved that it was
not so early, after all. He glanced through one of the two small
windows of the cabin and saw the water coming down in torrents. A
regular mountain storm was upon them. George sighed as he
realized this. It meant weather-bound for several days, as the roads
across the mountains would be likely to be impassable after such a
storm. And so it proved. For four days there was only an occasional
let up in the downpour. Luckily, no snow fell. And Lord Fairfax
observed his young guest narrowly in these days of being cooped up
in a cabin, and found him less impatient than might have been
expected. George, seeing the elaborate preparations that Lance
always made for the earl’s comfort, imagined that he would ill
support the inconveniences of their enforced delay; but it proved
exactly the contrary. Lord Fairfax was not only patient but gay under
such annoyances as a leak in the roof and their rations being
reduced to corn-bread and smoked venison.
“It reminds me of our old days in the Low Countries,” he said to
Lance the fourth night they spent at the cabin.
“Yes, my lord; but, saving your honor’s presence, we would have
thought this a palace in those days. I don’t think I ever was dry all
over, and warm all over, and had as much as I could eat from the
time I went to the Low Countries until after we had taken Bouchain,
sir.”
“Lance has told me about that adventure, sir,” said George, slyly,
hoping to hear something more from Lord Fairfax about it.
“Pshaw!” cried the earl, smiling, “Lance is in his dotage, and can talk
of nothing but what happened thirty or forty years ago. Our
expedition was a mere prank. I found out nothing, and risked not
only my life but this poor fellow’s without warrant.”
“The duke, sir,” said Lance, very respectfully, “was of another mind.
And, sir, I have never thought of Madame Geoffroy, and her fits and
her fainting and her furbelows, these thirty-five years without
laughing.”
At which George went off into such convulsions of laughter that Lord
Fairfax knew Lance had told him the whole story.
After four days of stormy weather it became clear and cold. They
were only twenty miles from Greenway Court, but the earl sent a
man ahead to find out if the streams were fordable, and whether it
were yet worth while to start. The man came back the next day about
sunset, saying it would be possible for them to get to Greenway
Court the next day.
Although George had stood the confinement in the cabin stoically, he
was delighted to be on the move again, and both he and the earl
relished their last supper there the more for knowing it would be the
last. All the arrangements were made for an early start on horseback
next morning, and at nine o’clock Lord Fairfax and George were
about turning in when they heard a timid knock at the door.
Lance, with a candle in his hand, opened the door, and at first saw
nothing at all; but as his eyes became accustomed to the darkness
he saw a negro boy and a dog.
Lance was so surprised that he did not at first speak, but the boy
piped up very promptly: “Is Marse George Washington here, suh?”
George, on hearing his name called in that voice, jumped from his
chair as if he had been shot, and the next moment was standing face
to face with Billy, while Rattler sprang at him with wild barks of
delight. Billy’s greeting was brief and to the point.
“Heah I is, Marse George, wid Rattler.”
 “‘IS MARSE GEORGE WASHINGTON HERE, SUH?’”
“Where on earth did you come from?” asked George, breathlessly,
dragging the boy into the cabin. As the light of the fire and the
candles fell upon him he looked as if he might have come three
hundred miles instead of less than a hundred and fifty, he was so
thin, so hollow-eyed, and gaunt. His shoes were quite gone except
the uppers, and he was in rags and tatters; yet nothing could dim the
joy shining in his beady black eyes, while his mouth came open as if
it were on hinges. Lord Fairfax, turning in his chair, was struck by the
look of rapturous delight on poor Billy’s face. The boy, still grinning,
answered:
“F’um Fredericksburg, I tooken de horse mos’ ter de ferry, and den I
tu’n him loose, kase he had sense ’nough fer ter git ter de boat by
hisse’f. So arter I seen him mos’ up ter de boat, me an’ Rattler, we all
lights out arter de kerriage fo’ Black Sam an’ Gumbo have time fer
ter hunt fer me, an’ we foller de track clean f’um Fredericksburg ter
dis heah place.” Billy told this as if it were the commonest thing in the
world for a boy and a dog to follow a coach more than a hundred
miles from home. George was so astonished he could only stare at
Billy and gasp out:
“How did you manage to keep the track?”
“Dunno, suh,” replied Billy, calmly. “Rattler, he know de way better ’n
me. When de rains come an’ I los’ de wheel tracks, I say ter dat ar’
dog, ‘Lookee heah, dog, we is follerin’ Marse George’—he know dat
jes as well as a human; an’ I say, ‘You got ter fin’ dat trail an’ dem
tracks,’ an’ dat dog he know what I was talkin’ ’bout, an’ he wag he
tail, an’ den he lay he nose to de groun’, an’ heah we is.”
The earl had laid down his book and was listening intently to Billy’s
story. “And what did you live on—what did you have to eat on the
way—let me see—nearly eight days?”
“We didn’t have nuttin much,” Billy admitted. “De mornin’ we lef’
home I tooken a big hoe-cake an’ put it in my sh’ut when warn’
nobody lookin’. De fus’ day I eat some, an’ gin some ter de dog.
Arter dat I foun’ chinquapins an’ ches’nuts an’ some tu’nips ’long de
road-side, an’ I could eat dem, but de dog couldn’, so I kep’ dat hoe-
cake fur Rattler, an’ give him de las’ piece yistiddy.”
“Billy,” asked George, with tears in his eyes, “were you very hungry?”
For the first time a distressed look came into the boy’s face. He was
at his journey’s end, he was with Marse George, he had nothing
more on earth to wish for; but the recollection of the hunger of those
eight days—the cold, the weariness, the agonies of terror that
sometimes attacked him overcame him.
“Yes, suh, I was hongry,” he said, with a sob, “dat’s Gord’s truf; an’ ef
it hadn’ been fur dis heah dog you neber would ha’ seed Billy no mo’.
But dat dog, he go ’long snuffin’, an’ he were hongry too, I speck,
dough he had some hoe-cake ’twell yistiddy; an’ if de dog coul’ hol’
out, dis nigger could.”
“I’ll never, never forget it, Billy, as long as I live,” said George, half
crying.
Then Lord Fairfax spoke. “But how did you escape from being
stopped on the road for a runaway?”
“Dunno, suh,” responded Billy, using his favorite formula. “We didn’
meet many white folks on de road, an’ when we see ’em comin’ we
hide in de bushes. I ain’ never spoke ter a human sence we lef’
Fredericksburg. In de daytime we hide somewh’yar by de road an’
sleep, an’ we trabbel mos’ all night. ’Twas de full o’ de moon, an’ I
see dem tracks jes same as ’twas in daytime. Den, arter I los’ ’em,
dis heah dog, he jes keep de road hisse’f—an’ here I is.”
“Lance,” cried George, suddenly, “please get something to eat for
him—anything—everything you have!”
Billy’s eyes glistened as, in a moment, Lance whipped out of the
press some cold meat and bread, and he attacked it ravenously.
Meanwhile, George fed the dog, which was evidently the least
starved of the two. When Billy had eaten up everything that could be
produced for him, he quietly curled himself up near the fire, and in
half a minute he was sleeping the sleep of the just.
“What are you going to do with him?” asked Lord Fairfax of George.
“Keep him with me if you will allow me, sir.”
“But what will your mother say? He seems to be a strong boy—his
journey proves that—and he no doubt has his work at Ferry Farm.”
George smiled at the recollection of Billy’s “work.”
“I don’t think, my lord, that Billy is of the slightest use at Ferry Farm
unless I am there. My mother, who believes in everybody’s being
industrious, has done her best to make him work. So have his father
and mother, Uncle Jasper and Aunt Sukey. But except for waiting on
me, and taking care of my horse, Billy will absolutely do nothing. He
is not surly about it—he is always grinning and laughing and singing
—but—I can’t explain it exactly—he will work his fingers to the bone
for me, but he won’t work for anybody else.”
“I should not think Billy a very useful member of society,” remarked
Lord Fairfax.
George said not a word, but he did not like aspersions of any kind on
Billy. Seeing this, Lord Fairfax said, in his usual kind tone:
“If it gives you pleasure, you must, of course, keep him with you—
and indeed there is nothing else to be done that I can see; and as
you say he is no good to your mother when you are not at home,
perhaps he is better off here. He seems a faithful little soul, and I am
not surprised that you are touched at his devotion.”
George’s face assumed an entirely different expression, but he
merely said, “Thank you, sir,” and in a few minutes after, throwing a
bear-robe over Billy, George went to bed himself, with Rattler curled
up by him.
Next morning they took the road soon after sunrise. Billy, who had
enough of walking for some time to come, was mounted on one of
the pack-horses. Two saddle-horses had been brought down from
Greenway for the earl and his young guest, and together they led the
procession along the rough mountain road. The scenery was wildly
beautiful. Occasionally they wound along mighty precipices, where
the horses could scarcely pick their way. Again they forded mountain
streams that could only be breasted by the most tremendous
exertions. They made their way through a great cleft in the
mountains about midday, and began to descend towards the valleys.
The distance was but twenty miles, yet so difficult was the road that
it was late in the short autumn afternoon before Lord Fairfax,
pointing to a collection of roofs that lay directly below them in a
sheltered part of the valley, said to George, “There is Greenway
Court.”
By sunset they were riding up the rough road that led to the house.
It was a large, low building, with stables and offices projecting on
each side. The foundation was of stone, rudely but strongly
cemented. Half-way up the story and a half which constituted the
building the stone ceased, and logs, neatly and even artistically
mortised together, were carried to the roof. The effect was not
unpleasing, especially as many of the original forest trees had been
left, and the building blended well with its surroundings. Broad and
shallow stone steps led up to the main entrance, and two great oak
doors studded with nails gave entrance to it. George noticed that all
of the windows were provided with stout iron-bound shutters, with
holes for musketry in them. The door was also pierced for defence,
and a very slight examination showed that, if well garrisoned, the
building could be converted into a tolerably strong block-house. The
earl, as if reading the thoughts in George’s mind, remarked:
“We have to be provided here for attacks from the Indians, incited by
the French. The French have determined to extend their
encroachments eastward and southward by a chain of forts, and I
make no doubt that they contemplate a line that will extend from
Canada to Louisiana. They use the Indians as secret though
powerful allies, and by encouraging them to harry and murder the
whites in this wild part of the colony of Virginia, they think that it will
be abandoned, and that they can advance their outposts this far.
Greenway Court has withstood one siege, and can withstand
another. There is a spring directly under the house, and, having
some knowledge of mechanics, I have concealed the source, which
is at a distance from the house, and we get the spring-water by
merely going down into the cellar. Then I keep constantly on hand, in
this same cellar, stores of provisions and ammunition, so we are well
able to defend ourselves, even against burning—for the Indians have
found out the use of the torch against white men’s dwellings.
However, I hope we shall have no bouts with them while you are with
us.”
George said nothing, but he would have been more or less than a
boy if he had not longed in his heart for a bout with the savages, of
which he had heard much but seen little.
 CHAPTER VII
Inside, Greenway Court was not devoid of comfort, and even of
luxury. The main hall was open to the roof, and, like all the rooms in
the house, the rafters were left bare, and the walls rough cast in a
sort of brown plaster not unpleasing to the eye. In every room there
was a huge fireplace with great iron fire-dogs. In some of the guest-
chambers were the vast curtained beds of the period, but in Lord
Fairfax’s own room was a small iron bedstead that he had used in
his campaigns when a young man. His library communicated with his
bedroom, and was by far the most luxurious room in the whole
quaint building. It was lined with books from the door to the low
ceiling—George had never seen so many books in all his life before.
There were also a few portraits and one or two busts. Over the
mantel two swords were crossed—one a cavalry sword, and the
other a delicate rapier such as officers in the foot regiments used at
that day. George’s eyes fell upon them as soon as he and the earl
entered the room.
“The sword was the one I had the honor to use in my campaigns
under Marlborough, and the rapier”—here Lord Fairfax smiled a little
—“I had concealed about me when I entered Bouchain in disguise.”
After supper was over Lance showed George into a room with one of
the gigantic four-posters in it. The floor was covered with bear-skins,
and Billy was instructed to roll himself up in them for a bed, which he
did with much satisfaction, with Rattler on top of him, as soon as
George was in bed, which was not long in being accomplished.
Next morning George was up and around early, looking about the
place. He had never seen the mountains before, and was deeply
impressed by their grandeur, but in his heart he preferred blue water.
The scenery was even more striking in the blaze of the morning light
than he had supposed. On every side, beyond the valley, giant
peaks rose into the blue air, covered with vegetation to the very top.
He understood then the profusion of bear-skins in the house, and
thought what fine sport might be had in tracking big game through
the deep gorges and dark forests of the region. Lance came up to
him as he stood on the broad stone steps drinking in the wild beauty
of the scene, and inhaling the keen, sharp air, so unlike the softness
of the lowland atmosphere.
“There is great sport hereabouts, Lance,” cried George.
“Yes, sir; bears and Injuns, mostly—and rattlesnakes in season. Did
you ever eat bear meat, Mr. Washington?”
“No,” answered George; “but I have been told it is fine.”
“I’ve got some, sir, for supper to-night. The bears have been feeding
on persimmons and chinquapins and walnuts, and that always
makes the meat of a good flavor.”
“And how about the Indians?” asked George, smiling.
“Injuns and rattlesnakes have their seasons together,” answered
Lance, with a grim smile in reply. “They and their French friends
generally keep pretty close this time of year. I don’t know which I
would rather receive—the French and Injuns coming as friends or
enemies. Sometimes half a dozen of ’em turn up, usually in the
summer—the French always pretending to be traders or something
of that sort—and they bring two or three Injun bucks with them, to
carry their luggage, they say; but whoever saw an Injun carrying
anything but a firelock—if he can get one? They always profess to
belong to a peaceable tribe; but that’s all in my eye, sir. They hang
about for a day or two, asking for fresh meat or vegetables, and
making out that they don’t know how to get across the mountains,
and all the time the French are drawing maps in their note-books and
the Injuns making maps in their heads; for, Mr. Washington, your
Injun is full of horse-sense about some things. He can’t look ahead,
or plan, or wait—all the Injuns in North America couldn’t have taken
Bouchain—but for killing people, quick and sure, I don’t know of any
soldiers quite so good as Injuns. The French, sir, have a regular plan
in all their expeditions here. The last party that turned up got me to
talking about the way we had repulsed the redskins—for we have