Ways of Belonging: Navid Kermani and the Muslim Turn 31 Between Play and Mimicry: The limits of humanism in Verrücktes Blut 1 Priscilla Layne University of North Carolina abstract: In 2010, playwrights Nurkan Erpulat and Jens Hillje used Jean- Paul Lilienfeld’s French film La journée de la jupe ( Skirt Day ) as a model for Verrücktes Blut , a play about one teacher’s unconventional methods of integrating Turkish-German Muslim youth in mainstream society. In this essay, relying on postcolonial theory, I read Verrücktes Blut as Erpulat and Hillje’s resistance to the racialization of Islam in Germany by dissolving the borders that allegedly exist between Turkish and German culture, and Islam and Christianity. The key to dissolving these borders is the playwrights’ use of Schiller as an intertext. For this reason, I compare this German adaptation with the original French film to explore how introducing Schiller as an intertext, in place of the original intertext of Molière, allows the playwrights to bring the themes of performance, embodiment and identity into constellation in a manner that critiques Western-centric debates about integration. Keywords: racism, humanism, gender, Islam, postcolonialism Das Einzige was in dieser Schule funktioniert, ist die Bühne. Theaterbühne! Wir spielen Theater. Aber was wird aus mir, wenn das hier zu Ende ist? Oberstudienrat, wie Sie Frau Kelich? Ein echter Erfolgskanake? Oder Ehrenmörder in Alarm bei Cobra 11. Tja, tut uns Leid, aber Erfolgskanakenkapazität ist gerade zu Ende. Der Kanakentatortkommissar ist schon besetzt. Wie viele Erfolgskanaken erträgt das Land? (Hasan in Verrücktes Blut 2�4) “Dirty nigger! ” or simply “Look! A Negro” […]. Locked in this suffocating reification, I appealed to the Other so that his liberating gaze, gliding over my body suddenly smoothed of rough edges, would give me back the lightness of being I thought I had lost, and taking me out of the world put me back in the world. But just as I get to the other slope I stumble, and the Other fixes me with his gaze, his gestures and 32 Priscilla Layne attitude, the same way you fix a preparation with a dye. (Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks 89) In the first quote, which stems from Nurkan Erpulat and Jens Hillje’s play Verrücktes Blut, a Kurdish student named Hasan laments that his teacher Frau Kelich’s theater lesson has been the only place where he feels free to step into any role he wishes. Though his teacher has become a successful example of integration—a Turkish woman who is married to a German man, speaks fluent German, and teaches literary classics—Hasan wonders whether there is room for one more “Erfolgskanake” in Germany. If there isn’t, the only roles that will be available to him, both on and off the theater stage, are those that perpetuate negative stereotypes. By lumping Frau Kelich together with the Turkish commissar on the German series Tatort, Hasan seems to suggest that an “Erfolgskanake” is anyone whose Turkish identity does not designate him or her to marginal roles. 2 Hasan’s repetitive and dismissive use of this term suggests that, rather than making an honest effort to give all Turkish-Germans equal opportunities, the German majority seeks to fill some set quota of successfully integrated Turks, so as not to appear biased. In the second quote, which is from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon reflects on the moment when French stereotypes about blackness call him into being as a black man. In an Althusserian act of interpellation, as soon as Fanon is called a “Negro,” he immediately embodies all of the stereotypes about Negroes. He is reminded of this fact in each and every interaction he has with whites. What these two quotes have in common is a problem at the intersection of racial stereotypes, embodiment, and freedom. Both Fanon the psychoanalyst and Hasan the fictional character feel paradoxically imprisoned in free societies, because, due to no fault of their own, their bodies simultaneously reflect negative images and are incapable of fitting positive ones. I begin with these two quotes in order to demonstrate the ways in which postcolonial theory can help unpack Turkish-German texts about racism, as in the case of Verrücktes Blut. 3 Fanon is clearly responding to French racism against blacks. But is Hasan describing racism, Islamophobia, or a combination of both? Since the end of the Second World War, the use of the term “race” in Germany has been taboo due to its associations with a Nazi ideology that sought to systematically murder those who were deemed of an inferior “race.” Because contemporary German society avoids using this term, not only does one not find the category of race in identification documents, but violence and discrimination against those who look different than the white German norm have historically been deemed xenophobia. Hasan represents thousands of second-generation Turkish-Germans Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in „Verrücktes Blut“ 33 whose parents immigrated to the country, but who themselves were born and raised in Germany and who are therefore not foreign to Germany. Although these second-generation Turkish-Germans have been socialized in Germany, German society has attempted to externalize them, because they do not fit the white, Christian norms that define German and European belonging (El-Tayeb). 4 Although debates about Turkey’s suitability for the European Union and Turks’ ability or lack thereof to integrate in Germany are clearly marked by an anxiety around whiteness, the discussion is not acknowledged as such since race is not considered an issue in Germany. Thus, instead of openly debating Germans’ dependence on a white identity, German society has shifted the focus to Turkish-Germans’ religion, “racializing” Islam, in order to argue that Turkish-Germans and Turkish culture are incompatible with the German public discourse (Bayoumi; El-Tayeb). Rather than being specific to Germany, this racialization of Islam is a global phenomenon also at work in France, the UK and the US, to name a few examples. This racialized discourse about Islam paints it as misogynist, premodern, and homophobic in contrast to a tolerant, secular German (Western) culture. While differences in religion were not considered problematic during the first two decades of Turkish migration to Germany, Germans found it necessary to Other Islam once it was clear that Turkish guest workers, their families, and subsequent generations planned on staying (Chin 82). When Islam is Othered through race, Muslims and Turkish-Germans of all generations can be viewed as not belonging to the nation, regardless of their birthplace, language ability, citizenship status, and even religious convictions: while not all Turkish-Germans are Muslims, if the German public considers Islam a race, then even Turkish atheists are perceived as Muslims. This racialization of Muslims has become even more widespread due to rising fears of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism that have characterized the new millennium. It is because of this racist perception of Islam, and the way it works to externalize Turkish-Germans, that I find it useful to consider how postcolonial theory can help unpack texts like Verrücktes Blut. Racist thinking draws its power in part from racists’ attempts to lock individuals in a (negative) definition: “Under a racist regime, there is no escape from who you are (or are perceived to be by the power elite)” (Bayoumi 275). I read Verrücktes Blut as Erpulat and Hillje’s response to Othering Islam by dissolving the rigid borders that allegedly exist between Turkish and German cultures, and between Islam and Christianity. The key to dissolving these borders is their use of Schiller as an intertext in a way that reveals the relativity of both German and Turkish cultures. In Verrücktes Blut, secondary school teacher Sonia Kelich tries to free her students from the bind of a fixed identity with the help of her theater lesson. 5 Her students are a motley crew of youth who appear to fulfill every negative 34 Priscilla Layne stereotype about minorities in Germany. While most of the students are Turkish Muslims, it is important that one of the students, Bastian, is a white German. Although it is not plot-relevant, the inclusion of Bastian shows that, in a place like Kreuzberg, the Kanak identity performed by the students can cross ethnicities. Therefore, being a Kanak is more about an attitude and behavior than an ethnicity or religion, even though being Muslim can play an additional role in why some students have difficulty integrating. Sonia’s students are loud, rude, violent, and disrespectful. They pay no attention to their teacher’s attempts to educate them about German cultural staples, namely Sturm und Drang and Friedrich Schiller. Frau Kelich is unable to control her class, until she discovers a gun on one of her students and decides to use it against them. This turn of events allows her to take the class hostage and force them to act out scenes from Schiller’s plays. Sonia believes that through embodying literary figures from these plays, her students can learn to be more modern and rescind their parents’ traditional ways. Sonia’s educational project assumes a conflict of ideology between the Muslim minority and the German majority, which resonates with the cultural binaries Katherine Ewing describes in Stolen Honor : patriarchy and machismo vs. feminism and sensitivity, interdependence vs. independence, heteronomy vs. autonomy, and hierarchy vs. equality. In Verrücktes Blut, Sonia tries to replace the students’ supposed Muslim ideals with German ones, making her lesson an attempt at implementing integration through the arts. This play, which was voted best German-language play by Theater heute in 2011, 6 is a loose adaptation of French director Jean-Paul Lilienfeld’s film La journée de la jupe ( Skirt Day ) from 2008 . Yet Erpulat and Hillje only really adapted Lilienfeld’s core concept: a secondary school teacher takes her class of disobedient immigrant Muslim students of various ethnicities hostage and attempts to teach them humanist values. Beyond this main idea, the film and its German theatric adaptation are incredibly different, though they do share a few superficial similarities including the teacher’s name, Sonia. Skirt Day remains in the realm of melodrama: the students never break out of ethnic stereotypes, and the film ends with two tragic deaths. In contrast, Erpulat and Hillje add humor and irony to the narrative by inserting Brechtian song interludes and having actors break the fourth wall to allow the audience moments for critical reflection. Erpulat and Hillje employ these techniques to elevate the narrative to a metatheatrical level and thereby question the boundaries between performance and reality. In this essay I argue that, while Lilienfeld’s film ultimately suggests that minorities choose to be on the margins and should instead choose to submit themselves to dominant French culture, Verrücktes Blut asks whether so-called Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in „Verrücktes Blut“ 35 “minoritarians” really have the freedom to embody what they choose, if they continue to be imprisoned by the image the majority has made of them. I take the term “minoritarian” from Fatima El-Tayeb, who describes minoritarians as “so-called immigrants who were born and raised in their countries of residence” (xxx). I rely on postcolonial theory and scholarship on Turkish-German culture in order to discuss the effects of racism, stereotypes, and racial discrimination on Turkish-German Muslims. Comparing the French film with its German adaptation helps get at the core of what Verrücktes Blut contributes to current debates about integration. 7 Erpulat and Hillje’s adaptation not only challenges ethnic and religious stereotypes, but also interrogates modern-day Enlightenment projects which aim to integrate immigrant youth through exposing them to “high” European culture. Most of all, Verrücktes Blut complicates Lilienfeld’s initial narrative and argument about integration by giving more importance to the students’ drama lesson. Hasan’s refusal to let the play end underlines the disconnection between the world within and the world beyond the play. Hasan asserts that, in the eyes of the German majority, Schiller’s ideas remain Western values that Turkish immigrants can playfully mimic, but never really embody, because Turks have been imprisoned in a racialized view of Islam. In order to demonstrate this, I first evaluate Lilienfeld’s film so that I may then highlight how and why Verrücktes Blut deviates from it. Second, I explore why Erpulat and Hillje chose to replace Lilienfeld’s use of Molière’s The Would-Be Gentleman as an intertext with several works by Schiller and what bearing this has on integration through art and the act of inscribing German citizenship onto the body of the Other. Finally, I elaborate on the importance of Schiller’s concept of Spieltrieb for Verrücktes Blut ’s arguments about role-playing and the authors’ general criticism of a Western-centric definition of integration that deems Islam incompatible with German values. When Erpulat and Hillje replace Lilienfeld’s intertext—Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme ( The Would-Be Gentleman )—with Schiller’s Die Räuber and Kabale und Liebe, the playwrights actually build on Schiller’s philosophy and his plays’ themes in order to support their broader criticism of Germany’s integration debates, rather than merely shifting the cultural reference for the audience from France to Germany. Erpulat and Hillje do not merely look to Schiller as a representative of the German Enlightenment. Schiller’s philosophy of aesthetic education allows the playwrights to bring the themes of performance, embodiment, and identity into constellation by invoking the Schillerian concept of Spieltrieb, a notion which Schiller used to propose that (role-)playing can help shape responsible democratic citizens. By incorporating this philosophical idea, Erpulat and Hillje briefly open up the possibility for a space in German society, 36 Priscilla Layne where, through role-playing, minoritarian youth can become a part, not only of contemporary German society, but also of a larger history of Western culture. The audience of Verrücktes Blut is initially led to believe that through acting out these canonical German plays, the students begin to embody Schiller’s roles, resolve their real problems, and learn something about tolerance. Locating the play’s roots in experimental theater of the 1960s and 1970s, Olivia Landry refers to this process as a “pedagogy of embodiment” (105). By forcing the students to adopt certain roles that correlate to their own lives, Sonia actively dissolves the border between actor and role. According to Landry, this “pedagogy of embodiment” ultimately fails on a metatheatrical level because of the gap maintained between the actors and the play’s typically white, middle-class, and middle-aged audience. Instead of focusing on how a pedagogy of embodiment fails on the level of performance, this essay looks for theoretical reasons for this failure by engaging more directly with Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters and drawing on postcolonial theory. In an interview with the English-language magazine Ex-Berliner, Nurkan Erpulat described why viewing Skirt Day initially motivated him to write Verrücktes Blut. He also shared what he found so questionable about the film: The idea came from the Ruhrtriennale. They have a three-year program with three religions. The second year [2010] was Islam, and for the school part of the festival, they wanted to do something about youth and they found this film. For me the film was problematic: these male youths are portrayed as violent, and as victims and criminals at the same time, and by the end they’re still the same. (Erpulat) As Erpulat asserts, part of the problem with Skirt Day is the film’s inability to move beyond a Eurocentric humanism that seeks to “save” immigrant Muslim youth from themselves and therefore paints them as uncivilized. In the film, the markers of barbarism are whatever tropes seem to oppose French values: machismo, sexism, violence, and purity, to name a few. Not only do these tropes only apply to certain bodies, namely the students’, but these bodies also have a permanence assigned to them, as opposed to their teacher, Sonia Bergerac, who is a more complex character. The students are guilty of misjudging Sonia as a racist French nationalist, when in fact, Sonia is exposed as having North African parents and therefore an intimate knowledge of the immigrant experience. In comparison, there are no hidden qualities about her students. They initially appear to be either violent thugs or staunch traditionalists, and that is what they ultimately reveal themselves to be. The film capitalizes on the stereotype of the angry, violent, North African Muslim immigrant, which had been widely circulated four years prior, when three weeks of rioting in the Parisian banlieues Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in „Verrücktes Blut“ 37 raised alarm throughout Europe that Muslim youth were incited to violence by radical religious beliefs (El-Tayeb 15). The film’s title refers to Sonia’s decision to wear a skirt to school one day, a political act that breaks the school policy forbidding female teachers from wearing skirts in an attempt to make students view female and male teachers as equals. This is an example of the “complementarity of the sexes” of which Ewing speaks in her discussion of the headscarf ban in France in Stolen Honor. 8 In Ewing’s words, this is the “French ‘solution’” to the contradiction between sexual difference and the fact that “French national identity is based on the abstract principle that equality depends on sameness” (186). If men and women are biologically different and males and females are gendered differently, how can all French citizens be treated the same? Normally this contradiction is resolved by flaunting sexuality. Instead of trying to hide women’s physical difference, French society embraces the sexuality and nudity of all French citizens and this is intended to have an equalizing effect and stand in contrast to Islamic countries that insist on women’s modesty (Ewing 186). But the school at the center of Skirt Day takes an opposite approach: equality is performed by downplaying sexual difference and covering up femininity, a move that coincidentally aligns with Islamic values about female modesty. Thus, although school officials might be attempting to appease all cultures by enforcing an understanding of equality that downplays sexual difference, Sonia feels that by denying her right to wear a skirt, the school infringes upon her rights. She therefore accuses the school of giving in to Muslim students’ views towards clothing and femininity. Her feelings are further validated when her Muslim students tell her that by wearing a skirt she has made herself fair game for disparaging remarks about her sexuality. By highlighting the significance of Sonia’s skirt, the film implicitly addresses Islamic modesty and Muslima visibility, for the Muslim girls in her class all wear pants so as not to be labeled “whores.” Furthermore, while a male colleague defends the students’ bad behavior, insisting that one must try to better understand their culture by reading the Koran, he has no problem with condemning Sonia for wearing a skirt. He places the blame on her, claiming that her clothing has incited the students to verbally abuse her. By aligning the state with the Muslim youth against Sonia, the film suggests that, in contemporary French society, secular neoliberalism has mistakenly resulted in mollycoddling Muslim students—tolerating their sexist, premodern beliefs—and limiting the freedom of the French majority. This argument seems to have had appeal across the Atlantic: one American reviewer wrote that the school’s “no skirts” policy shows the faults of “well-meaning liberalism and the loonier aspects of contemporary political correctness” (Eley). 38 Priscilla Layne In Skirt Day, when Sonia takes her students hostage, she seizes the opportunity to confront them with their sexism, racism, and general bullying of her and each other. Sonia’s lesson for her students is that just because they’ve been victimized, this doesn’t give them the right to victimize others. In line with contemporary neoliberal attitudes, she demands that her students stop looking to others to solve their problems and instead take responsibility for themselves. The fact that Sonia herself is actually of North African descent indicates she knows that tough love is the best for these students. The film seems to suggest that Sonia’s students choose to misbehave, whereas they can just as well choose to integrate in French society through education, like their teacher has. They might have to give up the traditions of their homelands in order to do so, but didn’t they come to France to have a better life and succeed there in the first place? The irony that this authority figure uses violence to teach her students civility escalates at the end of the film, when Sonia has decided to give in to the police after insisting they seek justice for a female student who has been raped. Once Sonia drops the gun and attempts to usher the students to the door, the normally reserved student Memet models his teacher’s behavior by grabbing the gun and shooting a boy to death because he threatened Memet’s sister. The drama ends when Sonia tries to take the blame for the shooting death and is shot by the police while attempting to protect Memet. Thus, Sonia dies a martyr. Ironically, her act of martyrdom mirrors the Jihadist acts associated with suicide bombings. Like a terrorist, throughout the film Sonia positions herself in opposition to mainstream society and is willing to resort to violence in order to be heard. She risks her own life for a group of students and so that they will believe that she truly cares for them and therefore trust her beliefs about integration. The main difference between Sonia and the kind of Jihadist martyr that haunts the news is that she gives her life for a secular rather than a religious cause. And, unlike with Jihadist martyrdom, here the audience is supposed to sympathize with Sonia, as do her students, who pay tribute at the film’s conclusion, when we see several students at her funeral, with the young women donning skirts in her honor. The final shot of the film is a close-up of the girls’ skirts and bare legs. Without faces, they become anonymous symbols of the triumph of French liberation and sexuality over Muslim modesty. With this ending, the director implies that Sonia’s sacrifice was not in vain and assimilation has been accomplished. Many critics were turned off by this kind of populism. For example, the German reviewer Christina Nord states: “[D]e la jupe’ [ Skirt Day ] bleibt schematisch allein schon deshalb, weil die einzelnen Akteure sich wie Schachfiguren auf dem Spielfeld des Kulturkampfs aufführen” (Nord). But several reviewers of Skirt Day seemed to have no trouble accepting the stereotypes it perpetuates. Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in „Verrücktes Blut“ 39 In a review in Variety, Derek Eley even refers to Sonia’s student and antagonist, Moos, as simply “the big black guy” (Eley). With this phrase, Eley turns Moos into a stereotype by erasing his name. This description also makes the conflict solely about race and gender: the black male student threatens to rape the white female teacher. While this gendered and racialized dynamic is important for the film, Eley takes for granted Moos’s religious identity as a Muslim. Although it is unclear whether all of the students are Muslims, those who speak up clearly are and constantly challenge each other by questioning who is truly devout, who can or cannot speak Arabic, and who is honorable. Regardless of a student’s nationality, language, gender, or race, in this class one’s familiarity with Islamic culture is the most important cultural capital. The film plays on the public’s fears of an Islamization of France by portraying only characters who feel it is not right to question Islamic beliefs or those who equate Islam with the oppression of women. And Lilienfeld clearly asks us to deride the former and have sympathy for the latter. This reductive binary does not reflect the reality of contemporary Muslims, many of whom encourage an ongoing debate about Islam (El-Tayeb). In contrast to Skirt Day, Verrücktes Blut succeeds in offering much more complex characters, which has a lot to do with the play’s structure. Certainly, the shift in medium from film to play brings noteworthy changes. But many of the changes in Verrücktes Blut are linked to Erpulat’s own criticism of the film and his claim that he in fact found only thirty seconds of the film interesting, and he and Hillje “took them and made them three fourths of the play” (Erpulat). Verrücktes Blut begins before the actors of the play have even taken on their roles, a decision that creates a critical distance between the actors and the characters they are playing. In the prologue to the English translation, Hillje and Erpulat describe the play as including “three styles or levels of acting”: The actors are themselves, actors preparing to take on their characters, aware of the audience, real time. Second, the actors take on their characters for this play, like when they put on the costume elements of their character and they take on the physical, vocal etc., qualities. The third level is when these Kanake characters “embody” the characters in several Schiller plays they read from in their drama class. (Erpulat and Hillje) By disturbing the illusion of the theater, and allowing the audience to see the actors transition from the first to the second level of acting, Hillje and Erpulat show the audience that the signs they are about to witness are not as natural or stable as one might believe. In contrast to the power that the word “Negro” holds in Fanon’s theory, permanently coloring him like a dye, Verrücktes Blut weakens the term Kanake because it is not meant to fix the characters it references in a stable, persisting identity. 40 Priscilla Layne By establishing these three levels of acting, Erpulat and Hillje engage with the instability of racial stereotypes. To quote Homi Bhabha, what makes a stereotype powerful is its “dependence on the concept of ‘fixity’ in the ideological construction of otherness. Fixity, as the sign of cultural / historical / racial difference in the discourse of colonialism […] connotes rigidity and an unchanging order” (18). An allegedly fixed sign, the stereotype is “a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always ‘in place,’ already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated” (Bhabha 18). Fanon uses the same language when he refers to how the “Other fixes [Fanon] with his gaze” (89). Although Bhabha specifically speaks of a colonial context, his theorization of the stereotype is also revealing for understanding the racialization of Islam. As a symbol of knowledge, the stereotype allows a racist to feel power over Muslims, the power to feel that he really knows them. Nevertheless, because the stereotype is not based on any inherent qualities, but rather is a construction, as soon as a Muslim subject fails to conform to this knowledge, the power of the racist is undermined. This is what causes the racist’s anxiety over needing to see the stereotype constantly repeated. The second level of acting points to the construction of the stereotype, because the actors must actively adopt these stereotypes and inscribe them onto their bodies. Landry refers to this process as “bodily mimicry”: “Playing with clichés about Muslim youths, these young actors are not simply meant to represent the ‘otherness’ that society projects onto them; instead, in a performative play on perception—that is, in an act of bodily mimicry—they also intentionally and subversively embody this ‘otherness’” (Landry 109). Although Hillje and Erpulat begin the play in this way in order to challenge a German audience’s stereotypes of students with immigrant backgrounds, this attempt was not always successful. In an interview, Erpulat insisted that despite the play’s dependency on a schism between the actor and the role, he expects that the audience will still forget this gap (Erpulat). For example, when the actors take on their roles as Kanaken in the second level of acting, 9 they accomplish this through a string of offensive behaviors: cursing, spitting, and crotch grabbing. As soon as the actors look their part and begin this behavior, the audience forgets the “performance,” because the actors have seduced them into accepting this as realism. And Erpulat’s assumptions are confirmed in the following review about a performance of the play in Karlsruhe. In the Badische Neueste Nachrichten, Andreas Jüttner beamed that “Das Ensemble [besteht] aus migrantischen Schauspielern,” which implies “dass hier authentische Schicksale verhandelt würden” ( Jüttner). However, Erpulat and Hillje use a variety of tactics in an attempt to counter the seduction of realism, such as including numerous German folk songs as interludes, which interrupt the action, serve as ironic commentary, and signal new scenes and acts. 10 Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in „Verrücktes Blut“ 41 Aside from their anti-realism, Hillje and Erpulat also depart from the film by cutting all of the additional characters of the story who exist outside of the classroom. While Lilienfeld has a drama play out not only between Sonia and her hostages, but also between Sonia and the police trying to negotiate with her, and among Sonia’s colleagues, who cannot agree on the best way to deal with these students, Verrücktes Blut focuses all of the action in the classroom. By eliminating the additional teachers and the incompetent police force and Minister of Education, Erpulat and Hillje prohibit the audience from searching for ways that society has failed Sonia. Instead, while Sonia might begin the play as a victim, as the play progresses our sympathy shifts towards the students. In order to discuss a further significant difference between Skirt Day and Verrücktes Blut —when the actors break the fourth wall in the final scene—it is necessary to first consider Hillje and Erpulat’s decision to replace Molière with Schiller. In Skirt Day, before the theater lesson is derailed, Sonia has students act out scene iii from act IV of Molière’s The Would-Be Gentleman, which the students should have memorized for the lesson. During this scene, a man named Covielle deceptively convinces the main character, Monsieur Jourdain, that the son of the Turkish sultan is in love with his daughter. In actuality, this Turkish visitor is really the Frenchman Cléonte, a middle-class man whom Jourdain does not consider good enough for his daughter. Molière’s play demonstrates how Western Europeans’ views towards Islam have changed throughout history, for in The Would-Be Gentleman, religion is not as important as the positive value of wealth and power. Monsieur Jourdain’s acceptance of a possible Turkish sonin-law reflects a degree of religious tolerance during the Enlightenment which resulted in more nuanced portrayals of Muslim characters in European theater (Berman 127). None of the context for this scene is explained in the film. Sonia gives the students some biographical information about Molière, but there is no discussion of the play’s plots or the characters. Rather, Lilienfeld uses Molière as a backdrop. When Sonia forces the students to participate—role-play and interact with one another—this sets the stage for the conflicts between them that give her an opportunity to condemn their behavior. Verrücktes Blut, however, places greater emphasis on why the students are performing scenes from Schiller’s Die Räuber and Kabale und Liebe. In fact, the play places so much emphasis on these intertexts that soon after Sonia takes the stage, she has a rather long monologue during which she describes the Sturm und Drang period and its legacy of rebellion. Subsequently, at several crucial moments in the play, Sonia suggests that Schiller’s plays could possibly help the students better understand democracy, tolerance, and freedom. After the students read a scene from Die Räuber, Sonia 42 Priscilla Layne declares: “Ja Mörder, Räuber, das seid ihr jetzt - ohne Vater und ohne Liebe - das seid IHR ! Und jetzt könnt Ihr es endlich mal aussprechen” (I.i). This patronizing statement suggests that her students are incapable of expressing their feelings and must instead rely on a German classic to help them speak, ultimately letting German thinkers like Schiller speak for them. In the case of Kabale und Liebe, following a scene between the two lovers Luise and Ferdinand, Sonia asks Musa, a male Muslim student who is her main aggressor: “Was lernen wir aus dieser Szene? … Luise ist keine Nutte! … War sie noch nie! Und was lernen wir noch, Musa? Manchmal werden Menschen zu Dingen gezwungen, verstehst du das? Und es ist nicht fair, Menschen immer gleich zu verurteilen” (I.ii). From these brief examples, one sees that Sonia intends for the violent young men to see themselves reflected in Die Räuber, while the tragic love story in Kabale und Liebe is meant to teach them that “honor” is relative. 11 In particular, Sonia’s lesson about honor is supposed to challenge her Muslim students’ understanding of the term as it relates to modesty and women’s bodies. According to Werner Schiffauer, in Muslim Turkish families, “honor” indicates the clear border between the private sphere of the family and the public sphere, which is a specifically male space: “Die Ehre eines Mannes ist beschmutzt, wenn diese Grenze überschritten wird […]” (65). Just like in the film, in the play Sonia’s students criticize her for wearing a skirt, because she is perceived as flaunting her sexuality. Because they believe her skirt reveals parts of her body that should be kept private, her students condemn her for crossing the border between public and private and therefore behaving dishonorably. A female student, Mariam, gives the same reason for why she refuses to remove her headscarf: she does not want to reveal her hair in front of the boys and therefore lose her honor. By teaching students that “honor” can mean different things depending on the context, Sonia encourages them to be more tolerant of behaviors they might otherwise automatically reject. German popular opinion on headscarves is just one example of how a country that sees itself as tolerant of religious difference can run into a contradiction. As opposed to France, where a law bans headscarves in public schools, in Germany it is not illegal for students to wear headscarves. However, several German states have passed laws banning teachers from wearing them. And in Berlin, the ban even applies to civil servants (Ewing 187). [In Germany] the argument was made that since the headscarf is contested among Muslims and is associated with Islamic fundamentalism, which involves active proselytization, it is not simply a religious symbol but a political symbol. […] Many groups felt that banning the headscarf would promote the integration of Muslim youth because it was assumed that wearing a headscarf prevented a girl from fully interacting with her classmates and that it was likely that she was being forced to wear it. (Ewing 188) Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in „Verrücktes Blut“ 43 The German headscarf debate has resulted in some unlikely alliances, uniting conservatives and feminists who believe that the headscarf is a symbol of oppression from which Muslim women must be freed. In Verrücktes Blut, Sonia believes she has succeeded in liberating Mariam when the student finally heeds her requests and removes her headscarf in order to tie up one of the boys. This act presumably symbolizes Mariam’s willingness to break with Muslim tradition and adapt to a German tradition of feminism. Her student’s physical transformation from wearing a headscarf to freely whipping around her hair in a dance of liberation exemplifies the “pedagogy of embodiment” Sonia attempts to use. Thus, by asking Mariam to step into the role of Luise from Kabale und Liebe and recite Luise’s powerful challenge to her alleged dishonor, Sonia uses Schiller’s play to inscribe a certain German understanding of freedom onto her students’ bodies. According to Schiller, an engagement with the arts is what makes a person fully capable of enjoying his or her freedom—a claim that Verrücktes Blut deliberately addresses when Sonia quotes a well-known line from Schiller’s Ästhetische Erziehung : “der Mensch soll mit der Schönheit nur spielen, und er soll nur mit der Schönheit spielen. Denn, um es endlich auf einmal herauszusagen, der Mensch spielt nur, wo er in voller Bedeutung des Worts Mensch ist, und er ist nur da ganz Mensch wo er spielt” (I.i). Sonia’s segue from an introduction of the Sturm und Drang era to this quote suggests a link between Schiller’s Sturm und Drang period and his Ästhetische Erziehung. However, Ästhetische Erziehung was written after Schiller had already become disenchanted by the violence of the French Revolution and turned his interests away from rebellion and towards Classicism. As was typical for the Classicist period, Schiller proposes in Ästhetische Erziehung how man can get closer to God and achieve a tolerant society through cultivating the arts. He argues: Alle Verbesserungen im politischen soll von Veredlung des Charakters ausgehen - aber wie kann sich unter den Einflüssen einer barbarischen Strafverfassung der Charakter veredlen? Man müsste also zu diesem Zwecke ein Werkzeug aufsuchen, welches der Staat nicht hergiebt […]. Dieses Werkzeug ist die schöne Kunst. (Schiller 33) And it is through “die schöne Kunst” that Sonia seeks to turn her “barbaric” students into ideal citizens. If one were to apply Schiller’s language in Ästhetische Erziehung to this classroom, Hasan would embody the ideal candidate for Schiller’s aesthetic education: man in a state of suffering. The other students defend themselves from others’ taunts. But when we are introduced to Hasan, he is a very meek character who merely allows things to happen to him. Through theater, more specifically by having Hasan step into the role of Franz Moor in Die Räuber, Sonia intends to build his confidence. For, to quote Schiller, “Der Übergang von dem leidenden Zustand des Empfindens zu dem thätigen 44 Priscilla Layne des Denkens und Wollens geschieht also nicht anders, als durch einen mittleren Zustand ästhetischer Freyheit” (90). If Hasan “plays” at being strong and confident, Sonia hopes he can imagine being so in real life and realize that he doesn’t have to be a victim. Yet, one must also acknowledge that the good intentions in Sonia’s Enlightenment project are also embedded in neoliberal discourse that ignores structural discrimination against Muslims and insists that in a tolerant, colorblind Western society, Muslims have the power to change their futures and should therefore stop whining about discrimination. Sonia’s attempts at encouraging Hasan to change reflect this attitude. She starts by mocking Hasan, adopting an offensive imitation of a Turk who speaks poor German: SONIA : Franz. Nix jetzt Hasan anymore. Und Franz hat ziemlich dicke Eier. Franz hat keine Angst. Franz hat ein ziemlich großes Selbstbewusstsein. Mariam, würde so ein Franz aussehen, den ich gerade beschrieben habe? Nein würde er nicht. Müssen wir dran arbeiten, Hasan. Wir fangen damit an, dass du den Kopf hebst. Kopf heben! ! Sehr gut, immer geradeaus schauen, nie auf den Boden gucken […]. (I.iv.) At first, Erpulat and Hillje lure the audience into accepting this feel-good story of awakening and integration. Sonia’s tactics involve getting students like Hasan to not simply half-heartedly read the words on the page, but to pronounce them correctly and really feel what they are saying. In Ästhetische Erziehung, Schiller stresses the importance of mastering the senses so that one might enjoy them: Solange der Mensch noch ein Wilder ist, geniest er bloß mit den Sinnen des Gefühls, denen die Sinne des Scheins in dieser Periode bloß dienen. Er erhebt sich entweder gar nicht zum Sehen oder er befriedigt sich doch nicht mit demselben. Sobald er anfängt, mit dem Auge zu genießen und das Sehen für ihn einen selbständigen Werth erlangt, so ist er auch schon ästhetisch frey und der Spieltrieb hat sich entfaltet. (109) For Schiller a Wilder merely feels, which is a passive, emotional, and haphazard activity. When a person is ruled by emotion, things happen to him. He waits for his senses to be engaged. In contrast, the cultivated man has control over his eyes, which are more objective than feelings. And with his eyes, the cultivated man seeks out objects to scrutinize and enjoy; he takes ownership over his environment. In German, the term “wild” has historically been used in reference to vegetation. The Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen describes “wild” as land that is “nicht gezähmt, nicht veredelt, unbewohnbar, grausam, roh” (1568). According to the Grimms’ Wörterbuch , the term was first applied to people in 1716 in regards to native Indians in the Americas, a use that has become most familiar as the “edle Wilde.” Schiller would have been familiar with this eighteenth-century use of the term. In fact, in 1793 he edited a poem entitled “Der Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in „Verrücktes Blut“ 45 Wilde” by Johann Gottfried Seume, in which a “Wilder” is described as a Native American. While Schiller does not explicitly racialize Muslims in his use of the term Wilder, he does establish a hierarchy of the senses with racial implications by juxtaposing the rational European against the emotional non-European. One should note, however, that Schiller is not praising all cultured Europeans. In contrast to the modern understanding of barbarian as “a rude, wild, uncivilized person” ( OED ), Schiller actually uses the term barbarian to describe those who only adhere to science and reason. For Schiller, “Wildheit ist die absolut gesetzte Sinnlichkeit (das >Tier<), Barbarei die absolut gesetzte Vernunft” (Luserke-Jaqui 416), but neither state is ideal for mankind. The ideal can only be achieved by the cultured European who can appreciate aesthetics. European thinkers often invoked this notion of cultural superiority to Other Muslims during the eighteenth century. Nina Berman describes this attitude against the backdrop of the French Revolution and modernization: While the struggle for citizenship rights, summarized in the famous motto “Egalité, Liberté, Fraternité,” envisioned a new age of equality, the human being who was to profit from these new rights was defined as European, male, and […] Christian. The inclusive gesture of religious tolerance was contradicted by ideas of civilization and race […]. Modernization, too, became an ideological force, legitimating political, military, and economic action pursued by German and other European nations against those that were not seen as modern, including the Middle East. (143-45) By suggesting that her students’ Turkish background and their religion are what keep them from fully participating in German culture, Sonia perpetuates this eighteenth-century discourse that racializes Muslims. An example thereof is her interaction with Mariam, whom Sonia profiles on the basis of gender by only assigning her the roles that are linked to the issue of patriarchal violence. By asking Mariam to step into these roles, Sonia attempts to enrage Mariam over the female characters’ treatment at the hands of the male protagonists. Sonia hopes to prove that Mariam wears a headscarf not as a choice but because of her submission to Islam, and that by actively identifying with Schiller’s strong female protagonists, Mariam will gain the courage to remove her headscarf. Sonia’s first attempt occurs when Mariam and Hasan act out a scene from Die Räuber. In this scene, Franz Moor resolves to force his brother’s fiancée Amalia into marriage. Sonia taunts Mariam, who is in the role of Amalia: “Der will dich zur Kapelle schleifen, Dich zur Ehe zwingen, an den Haaren will er […]. Was bistn Du für ne Muslima? ” (I.iv). Sonia’s rhetorical question, “What kind of a Muslim woman are you? ” and her taunt that Hasan wants to touch Mariam’s hair are both meant to provoke Mariam into action. But at this point in the play, 46 Priscilla Layne Mariam does not want to give up her headscarf. She only agrees to do so when Sonia threatens to shoot Hasan. However, Sonia responds dissappointedly, “Du machst es doch wieder für einen Mann. Du solltest es doch für dich machen” (I.iv). Prior to this Sonia pleads with Mariam, “Ich möchte, dass du deine Angst besiegst. […] Ich möchte nicht, dass die Leute Dich wegen Deines Kopftuchs angucken” (I.iv.). Thus Sonia implies that Mariam only wears a headscarf because she is controlled by men and afraid to do what she really wants. Mariam’s reply, “Die gucken doch, sollen die doch” (I.iv.) could be read as a form of Muslim feminism which supports a woman’s freedom of choice, even if she decides to wear a headscarf. Mariam insists on wearing what she wants, including a headscarf, regardless of how the public reacts to her. As the play progresses, one by one Mariam and her fellow students are allegedly liberated through engaging with Schiller’s classics. After playing the role of Luise in Kabale und Liebe, Mariam finally takes off her headscarf in order to embrace Western feminism and even lectures the boys about their use of the word “whore.” Afterwards, she dances around, enthralled by the feel of her now exposed hair. In particular, Mariam’s supposed awakening reveals several stereotypes that Germans have about Islam and Muslim women specifically. First of all, the notion that Mariam must remove her headscarf in order to become an outspoken feminist is a gesture that suggests there is no Islamic feminism and resonates with Islamophobic claims made by second-wave feminists such as Alice Schwarzer. 12 Secondly, Mariam’s subsequent dance of empowerment reinforces the notion that headscarves are oppressive, premodern objects that restrain Muslim women’s true selves. With the stage directions suggesting that the headscarf has alienated Mariam from her body—“ berührt ihr Haar. Erschrickt davor ”—the play insinuates that only without her headscarf can Mariam get in touch with her body and embrace herself as a desired and desiring subject. After Mariam’s dance of empowerment, an additional turning point occurs when the class discovers that Hasan has been sexually abused by an unidentified student, which Musa filmed with his phone. This is another decisive moment where the play deviates from the film. In Skirt Day, it is a female and not a male student who is raped. By changing the gender of the rape victim, the play addresses a further stereotype about Muslim culture: homosocial violence. In the essay “Multiple Masculinities in Turkish-German Men’s Writing,” Moray Mc- Gowan claims that among young Turkish men there is often a need to penetrate other’s territories, which can include other’s bodies: The tender, often erotic physical exchanges—embracing, kissing, hand-holding— between group members are defined as ‘friendship’ and never linked to being ibne [faggot], a term of abuse reserved for those who do not defend their own territory, Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in „Verrücktes Blut“ 47 that is, those who let themselves be penetrated. The decisive structural opposition is then not male / female or hetero / homo, but penetrator / penetrated. The penetrator’s heterosexual honour is not compromised by his participation in a mimed same-sex act, but indeed is confirmed by the role in it for which his greater manliness qualifies him. (295) According to McGowan, he who is penetrated is a homosexual because he has not defended his body (his territory). He who penetrates preserves his manhood because he is still in the dominant role. This claim, that in Muslim culture penetration between men can be separated from homosexuality and has more to do with showing dominance, has been portrayed in popular Western literature and film depicting Muslim culture, such as in Kutluğ Ataman’s film Lola und Bilidikid (1999) or in Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling book The Kite Runner (2003)� Despite the shocking revelation that Hasan has been victimized in this way, this scene concludes with a feeling of harmony, as the students and Sonia agree to have a democratic vote to decide how to punish Musa. Now Sonia’s reformed, newly-enlightened students are juxtaposed against Musa, who was a bystander to and therefore culpable for the barbaric act of rape. The apparent success of Sonia’s experiment is confirmed with a song that ends the act, a song that includes the lines, “Ich hab mich ergeben mit Herz und mit Hand / die Land voll Lieb und Leben, mein deutsches Vaterland.” “Ich hab mich ergeben” is a patriotic song written in 1820 by Hans Ferdinand Maßmann, an activist of the gymnastics movement (Richter 111). The roots of these lyrics in the nineteenth-century German nationalist movement make the song fitting for illustrating that the play’s Turkish students are now on the brink of giving themselves fully to German culture. However, Sonia’s “Enlightenment project” will soon be disrupted. When Sonia asks the students to vote on the appropriate punishment for Musa, she assumes that they have now adopted her thinking and will follow her lead. But when the students vote to pardon Musa, this upsets Sonia, who proposes they shoot him instead. Sonia’s suggestion not only registers as shocking to her students, but it shocks the audience members as well, who do not expect such a brutal suggestion from the same teacher who has spent most of the play educating her students about humanism. Thus, while her students have become ideal examples of Schiller’s aesthetic education, Sonia has actually become the very representative of Enlightenment thinking whom Schiller criticizes, and she therefore fittingly proposes the barbaric punishment of execution. If Sonia were to stay true to Schiller’s lessons of aesthetic education, she would suggest that there is still hope of taking Musa from violent criminal to responsible citizen. By instead insisting that Musa be killed, Sonia represents the brutal, dark side of Enlightenment thinking of which Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer 48 Priscilla Layne warn in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Sonia’s reasoning is that, if Musa poses the threat of physical harm to the others, rather than attempting to rehabilitate him, why not just execute him, thereby removing him from society altogether? Sonia’s suggestion recalls the populist opinion that Turks who have committed crimes in Germany be deported. 13 According to this mindset, deportation is a faster solution to German society’s problems than integration efforts. Although this line of thinking goes against everything Sonia has until now instilled in her students, she can justify her opinion with recourse to notions of progress. If permanently removing Musa will make for a better community, why shouldn’t his life be sacrificed for the good of the group? Ironically, this line of reasoning makes the possible execution of Musa take on the guise of an honor killing. The purpose of an honor killing is to punish and remove the offending party, thereby protecting the honor and well-being of the collective. Further, with her proposal, Sonia comes to embody the hypocrisy of Germany’s dealings with racial Others since the colonial period: a country that presents itself as enlightened and respectful of human rights, but whose thinkers and politicians conveniently excluded racial Others from the national fabric, looked away from the exploitation and abuse in the colonies, and, even today, fail to provide safe and sanitary living conditions for refugees from Africa and the Middle East. By associating Sonia with barbarism, honor killings, and ostracization, Erpulat and Hillje have once again undermined the alleged divide between Western and Eastern cultures, poking holes in the arguments used to racialize Islam. To Sonia’s dismay, the students embrace the freedom they have gained from their aesthetic exercises, overrule her, and insist that Musa live. By learning from Schiller’s plays to resist Musa’s bullying and punish Musa in a humane way, Hasan in particular has moved through the three stages of development Schiller describes in Ästhetische Erziehung. “Der Mensch in seinem physischen Zustand erleidet bloß die Macht der Natur; er entledigt sich dieser Macht in dem ästhetischen Zustand, und er beherrscht sie in dem moralischen” (Schiller 95). Nevertheless, the fact that Sonia, the orchestrator of this lesson, would suggest the students kill Musa shows the hypocrisy of an Enlightenment that would champion humanism, but defend executions. One might expect the play to end here. At this point, instead of a narrative about a group of tough kids who are rehabilitated through art by a liberal do-gooder, as we have seen in Hollywood films like Dangerous Minds (1995, dir. John N. Smith) and Freedom Writers (2007, dir. Richard LaGravenese), we actually have a story of the hypocrisy of humanism. This could be read as a quite effective retort against Thilo Sarrazin, who claimed in Deutschland schafft sich ab that one’s acceptance of the Enlightenment is the definitive factor that should weed out who can and cannot successfully be integrated into German society (Sarrrazin 270). In West- Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in „Verrücktes Blut“ 49 ern society, Islam has become a generic signifier for “irrational, morally inferior and barbaric masculinity and its passive, victimized, and submissive femininity” (Moallem 8), but the students’ resistance to Sonia’s verdict unveils that she is guilty of being just as violent as her allegedly crazy-blooded students. The key difference is that Sonia’s violence is sanctioned by her authoritative position, by the authority of the school and therefore the state. This begs the question, is there really a difference between street violence and state-sanctioned violence? In Skirt Day, Lilienfeld seems to argue that there is a difference and that Muslim youth would rather be subjected to the latter rather than the former. Towards the end of the film, Sonia drops the gun in order to check on Moos, the student she wounded, whom she believes to have fainted from his injury. This turns out to be a ruse that Moos uses to attack her until he is stopped by Latifa, who picks up the gun and attempts to return it to Sonia, ignoring the other students’ protests. Latifa exclaims, “If I don’t give her the gun, we all get outta here and then, then what? I get killed cuz I helped her? Akim too? Same ol’ shit goin’ down. I want us to be hostages for life! ” ( Skirt Day ). This statement places blame on the violent teens and not greater society. At least as a hostage, Latifa is under Sonia’s protection and can speak her mind. She prefers the freedom permitted by a violent authority figure representing the state rather than oppression at the hands of Muslim teen thugs. Memet has the same fear of retaliation, which is why he takes the gun in the end and demands he and his family receive money and a plane to Australia. Verrücktes Blut doesn’t justify state-sanctioned violence or street violence. In fact, the play doesn’t even end with this critique of violence. Rather, the play ends with the actors reverting back to the first level of acting and stepping out of their roles as high school students. The actress playing Sonia complains that her wig is coming undone. Another actor suggests, “Lass uns Döner essen gehen” ( II .iii.). However, one character refuses to end the play: Hasan. And here I’d like to turn to a reading of the play as a commentary on the limits of performance by engaging with Schiller’s concept of Spieltrieb. Schiller defines Spieltrieb as “das, was weder subjektiv noch objektiv zufällig ist, und doch weder äußerlich noch innerlich nöthig [ist]” (60). To paraphrase Schiller, play is what makes us human. When animals “play” it is instinctive: they are practicing their skills to survive on their own. Often when humans play, especially adults, it is intentional, not instinctive, and it is not essential for survival. But what is most important for Schiller is that through play we attempt to shape the world and become capable of imagining a new reality. Thus, play allows us to be independent enough that we do not let rules limit our imaginations. According to this concept of Spieltrieb, in Verrücktes Blut the students’ encounter with Schiller’s plays should not only channel their wild en- 50 Priscilla Layne ergy through creativity, but also make them capable of becoming free-thinking citizens liberated from traditions. In Schiller’s sense of the word, Spieltrieb, or aesthetic exercise, does not lead to a specific positive or negative outcome. The result of Spieltrieb is undetermined and that is why it is liberating: Durch die ästhetische Kultur bleibt also der persönliche Werth eines Menschen, oder seine Würde, insofern diese nur von ihm selbst abhängen kann, noch völlig unbestimmt, und es ist weiter nichts erreicht, als daß es ihm nunmehr, von Natur wegen möglich gemacht ist, aus sich selbst zu machen, was er will - daß ihm Freyheit, zu seyn, was er seyn soll, vollkommen zurückgegeben ist. (83) Schiller, indeed, asserts that “die ästhetische allein führt zum Unbegrenzten” (85). In actuality, however, Sonia’s goal is not to give her students room to think for themselves; rather, she wants to make them more “German.” She wishes to create them in her own image as the ideally integrated Turkish Muslim, for when the students actually come to a democratic decision on their own—a decision with which she disagrees—Sonia derides them for it and hopes to overturn it. One could argue that rather than active “play” in the sense of Spieltrieb, Sonia has actually been engaging her students in mimicry—they learn to mimic her notion of an ideal German citizen. In his essay “Of Mimicry and Man,” Homi Bhabha defines colonial mimicry as “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite ” (italics in the original, 86). The ambivalence inherent to this kind of mimicry is in place in order to secure the hierarchies of power. Teaching the colonial subject to be like the colonizer makes him or her easier to rule. For this reason, the colonial power imposes its language, laws, customs, and systems of belief onto its subjects. Nevertheless, the colonial subject may never succeed in being exactly like the colonizer, because this would allow for the two to be equals, and colonial exploitation only works if the colonial power can take from the colonized without being challenged. One could argue that in the German context, allowing for Turks and Muslims to be like Germans but not quite German maintains a society with second-class citizens who can be discriminated against for not properly embodying the nation’s ideals. This tension between Schein and Sein is actually central to Molière’s play, though he focuses on class rather than racial differences. Although Lilienfeld never explicitly highlights role-playing in Skirt Day, his choice of Molière’s The Would-Be Gentleman inadvertently brings this issue to light. Molière’s “wouldbe” gentleman Monsieur Jourdain is a man of recent wealth who lacks rank. Jourdain tries his best to fit in with the elite. He engages various teachers—a music master, a dancing master and a philosophy master—so that he may learn the Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in „Verrücktes Blut“ 51 customs of the aristocracy. And his greatest concern is that his daughter marry into a noble family. He admits, “I have money enough for my daughter. What I want is rank. I wish her to be a marquise” ( II .iii.). For this reason, Jourdain refuses to let his daughter Lucile marry Cléonte, her middle-class love interest. In order to trick Monsieur Jourdain into granting his approval, as mentioned above, Cléonte disguises himself as Turkish nobility and asks for Lucile’s hand in marriage. Monsieur Jourdain believes Cléonte’s disguise, because he is generally ignorant about the world and knows nothing of Turkish culture. Rather than being discriminated against based on ethnic difference, the faux Turkish sultan is exoticized and celebrated because he is thought to have the appropriate wealth Jourdain requires from any possible suitor for his daughter. Throughout Molière’s play, the jokes are at Jourdain’s expense because, despite his arrogance and efforts to appear cultured by spending money, he always misses the mark completely, because in his society the kind of cultural capital valued can only be embodied and not bought or learned. In contrast to Jourdain, Cléonte voices disgust for people who do not know their place, stating: “I consider that to make a secret of one’s social position, to dress oneself up in borrowed robes and to attempt to pass for what one is not is the height of baseness” (Molière 309). By choosing to have the students read a play with such a clear message of biological determinism, Lilienfeld appears to suggest that Muslim problem youth cannot simply dress themselves up in French culture to change who they are, and thereby further implying that their racialization is unchangeable. While in Verrücktes Blut, performing Schiller is enough to turn the students around, in Skirt Day it takes a tragedy—the teacher’s death—for them to see the error of their ways. In Skirt Day, the Muslim students’ rigid identities and their inability to truly embody French culture are framed as their own fault. When Latifa seizes the gun and proclaims “I want us to be hostages for life! ” she condemns the behavior of her peers, behavior that has made the outside world more frightening than the hostage situation in the classroom. In contrast, when this scene is played out by Hasan in Verrücktes Blut, he condemns the German audience and charges them with placing limitations on his body. After grabbing the gun, Hasan first threatens the actors on stage: HASAN : Haltet die Schnauze. Wir spielen weiter. Räuber. SChUSS 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 Hottentottenaugen? Was seht ihr in mir? Einen Schauspieler oder einen Kanaken? Immer noch? 52 Priscilla Layne Frisch also! muthig ans Werk! - Ich will Alles um mich her ausrotten, was mich einschränkt, daß ich nicht Herr bin. Wer hat wann wem was verweigert? Wer ist Schuld? Was wollen Sie von mir? Das Einzige was in dieser Schule funktioniert, ist die Bühne. Theaterbühne! Wir spielen Theater. Aber was wird aus mir, wenn das hier zu Ende ist? Oberstudienrat, wie Sie Frau Kelich? Ein echter Erfolgskanake? Oder Ehrenmörder in Alarm bei Cobra 11. Tja, tut uns Leid, aber Erfolgskanakenkapazität ist gerade zu Ende. Der Kanakentatortkommissar ist schon besetzt. Wie viele Erfolgskanaken erträgt das Land? Schwimme, wer schwimmen kann, und wer zu plump ist, geh unter! Solang wir spielen geht’s klar. Einziger Ort, der funktioniert. Und er ist schalldicht. Schalldicht! Hört uns jemand? Herr muß ich sein, daß ich das mit Gewalt ertrotze, wozu mir die Liebenswürdigkeit gebricht. ( II .iii.) Intermingling quotes from Franz in Die Räuber with his own frustrations, Hasan’s final monologue highlights the limits of Sonia’s humanist lesson. In her analysis of the play, Landry claims that Hasan’s final monologue indicts the audience because “Hasan declares that no matter how ‘integrated’ he is, he will never be ‘German’ enough to play the role of Franz Moor in a real theatre production of Die Räuber ” (113). However, what is at stake in the monologue is not whether Hasan can play Franz, but whether he can be free to play any role he chooses. In a way, playing Franz already typecasts Hasan. Quoting Franz directly, Hasan laments his “Hottentottenaugen,” a symbol of his racialization. In Schiller’s play, Franz’s unattractive appearance contributes to his lower status in comparison with his brother Karl. As a result of Franz’s jealousy over his brother’s charm and good looks, which have helped Karl win his fiancée Amalia and their father’s love, Franz grows bitter and vengeful, plotting to ruin his father and brother and force Amalia into marriage. Thus, Franz’s soul or his “inside” eventually reflects his unattractive “outside.” Likewise, Hasan believes that because he has features which German society deems unattractive and different, he will always be typecast as the evil Kanake. Despite evidence to the contrary, there are critics of multiculturalism in Germany who would rather not acknowledge the importance of colorism when it comes to integration. In Deutschland schafft sich ab, for example, Sarrazin questions why Turks have failed to integrate while other European immigrants like the French, Italian, and Poles have succeeded (312). He argues that Muslim immigrants aren’t discriminated against because of the color of their skin, but solely because of the headscarf. Once again, the headscarf becomes the sole symbol of Islam, premodern traditions, and oppression against women (Sarrazin 313). With these claims, Sarrazin conveniently blames Muslims for their own discrimination and refuses to acknowledge the ways in which Turks are racialized in the German media. Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in „Verrücktes Blut“ 53 The culturalist thinking that positions Germany as white and Turkish-Germans as non-white, non-Christian Others is exactly what would make a German audience incapable of accepting Hasan in any role other than “der Ehrenmörder in Alarm bei Cobra 11.” Erpulat believes this narrow-minded thinking is especially a problem in the theater: In all other countries, the theater is more progressive than the government. Twenty-five percent of the people in this country [Germany] have Migrationshintergrund. That’s one in four. Germany had been dealing with this for a while but the theater scene hadn’t. It was already happening in dance and opera, usually much more conservative forms. Asian dancers have been around for 20 years, but there’s still no Gretchen in Faust that has black hair. (Erpulat) Erpulat’s contrast between the realm of government and that of the theater recalls Schiller’s Spieltrieb once more. Erpulat suggests that, as opposed to the political realm, which usually reflects a very real, white hegemony, the arts are supposed to be a space of experimentation and creativity, a space where one can imagine a black-haired Gretchen. Hasan’s refusal to let the play end is an argument that while he may be able to achieve equality within the world of Verrücktes Blut, beyond the play his physical appearance determines that he will only be offered violent, stereotypical roles even if he masters German high culture. If one reads Spieltrieb as a space of the undetermined—a space where one can have a black-haired Gretchen—then Verrücktes Blut employs Schiller’s philosophy to argue that German minorities, including Turkish-German Muslims, must be allowed the same space for experimentation and fantasy as their white peers, so that they may truly have the freedom to choose who they want to be. But even if the mainstream is not yet willing to allow them this freedom, Verrücktes Blut still provides room for the Muslim youths themselves to take control of the narrative of integration and move it in a positive direction. One of the ways the play achieves this is by getting past the kind of language that positions Turkish-Germans as being “stuck” between two cultures. Rather than seeking to bridge two cultures, Verrücktes Blut undermines the notion that a border between cultures even exists. On the surface, thanks to Sonia’s efforts, the students’ engagement with Schiller’s plays appears to fulfill the goal of Integration durch Bildung, an initiative introduced by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung to ease immigrants’ integration into society by improving their access to education. Thus, Sonia’s lesson ostensibly falls into line with federal initiatives underway in Germany. However, by highlighting the themes of honor, gender, and sexuality in both Die Räuber and Kabale und Liebe, Sonia inadvertently reveals these plays as addressing topics that contemporary Germany only associates with Muslim culture, namely forced marriage and 54 Priscilla Layne honor killings. By reframing German classics in this manner, Erpulat and Hillje delegitimize the critics of integration who claim that these “Muslim” practices are hindering integration. Instead, in the students’ engagement with these plays, we recognize a history of violence against women that spans time and space, which is a far cry from the solidification of stereotypes and cultural difference that we find in Skirt Day. In the process of making these transcultural connections visible, the Turkish-German students in Verrücktes Blut claim Schiller for themselves and the resulting interculturality momentarily dissolves the borders between Turkish and German cultures, as well as between Islam and secularism. notes 1 I’d like to thank Johanna Schuster-Craig, Anne Marie Rassmussen, and Richard Langston for their feedback on an earlier draft of this essay. 2 From 2008 until 2011, Turkish-German actor Mehmet Kurtuluş played the commissar Cenk Batu on Germany’s longest running detective series Tatort. See Berna Gueneli’s article in this issue. 3 I acknowledge that the relationship between Germans and Turks is not a (post)colonial one; Leslie Adelson briefly discusses the problems with using postcolonial theory to analyze relations between Germans and Turks in The Turkish Turn (Adelson 177: note 32). However, one can still argue that the German majority has an investment in insisting that Germans and Turks are inherently different and, for that reason, I believe that postcolonial theory resonates with the Turkish-German experience, because it seeks to better understand how Western societies define difference and why the Western subject has historically needed to define itself against an Other. Understanding this process of Othering helps dispel misconceptions and exaggerations about the alleged differences between German and Turkish cultures. 4 Though Germany has become increasingly secular since the 1960s, conservative politicians often invoke the country’s Christian roots in order to differentiate Germany as European in contrast to Turkey, a country with a secular state but for which Islamic culture is definitive. As one can see, the act of favoring one religion over others in an otherwise secular society is not just a German phenomenon, but a global one, occurring in France, Turkey, and the US , to name a few examples. Several conflicts are revealed when Germans insist that Turkey is not a part of Europe based on religious reasons. First of all, even if Germany as a nation understands itself as secular, its individual federal states with stronger religious ties can be problematic, such as in Bavaria, where teachers are banned from wearing Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in „Verrücktes Blut“ 55 headscarves, while crucifixes are not only tolerated in the classroom, but were mandatory up until 1995. Furthermore, any attempt to draw a neat division between Europe and Asia based on Europe’s allegedly exclusive Judeo-Christian roots ignores EU countries with visible Muslim populations like those in the Balkans. 5 Verrücktes Blut is a German translation of the Turkish saying delikanlı, which refers to young men who behave recklessly. The play premiered on September 2, 2010, in Duisburg at the Gebläsehalle im Landschaftspark. Since then its main home has been the Ballhaus Naunynstraße in Berlin-Kreuzberg, where it is performed quarterly. The Ballhaus Naunynstraße Theater was founded in 2008 by theater director Şermin Langhoff under the patronage of award-winning Turkish-German film director Fatih Akın. Its plays are often referred to as postmigrant theater, a term which Erpulat disdains. See Landry. 6 Forty-four voters participated in the decision. The play was awarded this honor along with Elfriede Jelinek’s Winterreise. Theater heute is one of the most prominent theater magazines in the German-speaking world and it has been published monthly since 1960. 7 Olivia Landry points out that Verrücktes Blut premiered only days before Thilo Sarrazin’s controversial book Deutschland schafft sich ab was published (Landry 108). In Deutschland schafft sich ab, Sarrazin argues that Muslims have a poor ability to integrate, which he blames on their underemployment, lack of success in German schools, and their “starke Fixierung auf die heimatliche Kultur” (Sarrazin 262). 8 According to Ewing, the headscarf ban evolved from the fact that “in France, secularism is the common ground on which cultural citizenship rests. State institutions are rigorously secular, even if this means constraints on the freedom of religious practice” (186). 9 Originally a Polynesian word for “man,” Kanake has been reappropriated in the German language for the purpose of insulting the Turks who began migrating to Germany in the 1950s as guest workers. The term has since been reappropriated by Turks, a movement which is best exemplified by Turkish-German author Feridun Zaimoglu’s frequent use of Kanak in his literary debut Kanak Sprak. 10 This use of folk music is common for Erpulat. For example, folk music is used in a similar vein in the play Lö Bal Almanya. 11 In Erpulat’s words, during Sonia’s theater lesson “the students [are meant to] learn to adjust their idea of what girls are, that they’re not always sluts, through Kabale und Liebe, and they learn that they shouldn’t use violence through Die Räuber ” (Erpulat). 56 Priscilla Layne 12 See Schwarzer’s Die große Verschleierung. 13 One famous example is the case of Muhlis Ari (discussed under the pseudonym of Memet in the German press). Ari was born in Germany in 1984. In 1998 the German courts resolved to deport the fourteen-year-old after he had committed over sixty crimes. For more details, see Burger. Works Cited Adelson, Leslie. The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration. New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2005. Bayoumi, Moustafa. “Racing Religion.” The New Centennial Review 6.2 (2006): 267-93. Berman, Nina. German Literature on the Middle East. 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