Karagöz in Alamania
Karagöz in Alamania is a socially critical comedy directed by Emine Sevgi Özdamar from 1982 . It is the first German-language stage work by a German-Turkish author to be performed in a major German theater. This took place in 1986 at the Schauspiel Frankfurt .
Emergence
The work was originally created in 1982 as a commissioned work for the Schauspielhaus Bochum . Possibly the reason for writing was even further back, namely in the early days of the Turkish ensemble at the Berlin Schaubühne, where Özdamar was briefly commissioned to write a piece about Turks in Germany, which did not materialize.
The title Karagöz in Alamania is ambiguous: on the one hand it can be deciphered with "Schwarzauge in Deutschland" (here Schwarzauge is the name of the main character), on the other hand "Karagöz" is also the name of the traditional, typically Turkish shadow theater , from which Özdamar means her first play borrowed numerous stylistic elements, so that the title Karagöz in Alamania could also be translated as "Karagöztheater in Germany".
After its creation, there were several attempts to get the piece to be performed in German theaters (in addition to the Schauspielhaus Bochum, also at the Schauspielhaus Köln ), but these failed for various reasons, so that it ultimately took four years until Karagöz in Alamania finally in Frankfurt was seen on stage for the first time.
content
The piece, which is close to the grotesque and the cabaret , tells the story of Karagöz, who sets off with his talking donkey Şemsettin for the auspicious, rich Germany after he was examined by Dr. Mabuse has proven to be "suitable" for this. The choice of the name Doktor Mabuse can be seen in this context as a picture for the recruitment process of German companies in Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s. B. Hasan Çil , the chronicler of this period , has documented.
In the continuation, the piece describes life between two home countries over the annual travel there and back, ultimately a whole biography. At the beginning, the title character is almost a teenager; towards the end of the play, a last visit to the home village is described; the protagonist is now an old man. Germany itself only appears as a door that takes people in or spits them out.
Numerous encounters take place on the outward and return journeys - with people (civil servants, guest workers, second generation migrant children, prostitutes, dead people), but also with personified animals and objects. As the story progresses, living beings and objects show themselves more and more shaped by two cultures, often exaggerated in a strange, cabaret-like manner. Karagöz and his donkey comment on everything with typical Karagöz language and word games, they argue and sometimes fight.
While Karagöz rises more and more to a highly respected man from village scene to village scene, he seems lost in the German environment. For the unfortunate situation in Alamania, however, no sympathy can be expected from those who stayed at home; Karagöz and his fellow sufferers are seen by them as modern gold diggers , but "their sources of love dry up (above)" (Özdamar).
shape
The life principle of traveling back and forth also significantly determines the dramaturgical structure of the work: The commuting between the rural surroundings and the Federal Republic of Germany via Istanbul is illustrated by numerous, often indistinct scenes . The plot leads over two dozen scenes and encounters with a myriad of different characters (almost a hundred).
Although not a shadow play, the form of the piece is based on the traditional Turkish shadow theater (Karagöz), which is also expressed in the ambiguity of the title: You can see disputes that have led to pointlessness, and sometimes even the hearty, folk-style typical of shadow theater Language in rhyming pairs. In addition, the figure constellation between the donkey and its owner is also borrowed from shadow theater: the popular figure (Karagöz) equipped with peasant cunning and witty humor and the intellectual, philosophical type (his donkey) as the opposite pole. In addition, the overdrawing of the figures into one-dimensional characters is typical of Karagöz, as is their numerous appearances, including representatives of marginalized groups and mythical creatures.
In addition to being inspired by Karagözin, there is also a strong influence of Bertolt Brecht's epic theater , which Özdamar dealt with in Brecht productions in France in the 1970s. In addition to alienations, the action is explained by songs and poems, pantomimes and dances stylistic devices used. German is the predominant language in the play, which is linguistically close to the theater of the absurd , although broken German and uncommented Turkish can be heard as well.
Productions
The play premiered on April 26, 1986 at the Schauspielhaus Frankfurt. Özdamar himself directed. It was the first time that a German-language play by a Turkish-born author was staged in a major theater. The performance received media attention that no German-Turkish theater project had received before.
There were new productions in the cellar theater Innsbruck (2000) under the direction of Johannes C. Hoflehner , but z. B. also in English-speaking countries.
effect
At times the piece overwhelmed the German audience; some dialogues, most of which consisted of a series of Turkish proverbs translated literally into German, were completely beyond our understanding. The fact that the German audience was not familiar with the tradition of Karagöz theater sometimes led to misunderstandings or incomprehension, for example the one-dimensional exaggeration of the characters was not understood as a stylistic device.
These effects were entirely intended by the author; the sometimes incomprehensibility of the play made the topic, namely the situation of migrant workers in Germany, tangible for German viewers through the aspect of self-awareness: for the duration of the performance, the play transported the theater-goer into a world between languages and between cultures.
Critics often did not understand this approach, which was also due to an explanatory leaflet that was not discussed with the author and that was produced quickly and distributed at the entrance to the auditorium before the premiere. This anticipated elements of the play, whereby a direct effect on the audience was destroyed and characterized Karagöz in Alamania, as it were, unfavorably influencing the audience position as an "experiment" and not as a work of modern theater. As a result, the majority of the mass media judged the play to be inferior or confused. The Bild newspaper even spoke of "amateur theater" despite top-class actors such as Tuncel Kurtiz . There were also positive voices, but only the Saarbrücker Zeitung actually discussed the staging in terms of content and form. B. as the only sheet after the first performance shows that Özdamar "with all tradition (breaks) and the events colorful (mixed up) to illustrate the turmoil of the Turkish migrant workers".
From today's perspective, Karagöz in Alamania is initiating the increased turn of Turkish-born authors in Germany to the German language as a "written language".
Özdamar himself has long been one of the most recognized contemporary German-speaking authors. Related theatrical works by the author continued the Karagöz , which was dedicated to the first generation of "guest workers", in a certain way: while Keleoğlan in Alamania (1991), published almost ten years later, dealt with the problems of the second generation, one can do that recently The children's piece Noahi (2006) was devoted to the third generation, now completely at home in Germany.