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ANNA LENZ
betrügt und davonkommt, weil du weißt ja, wie das geht. Aber macht euch keine
Sorgen, Almanis, wir schaffen das zusammen! [Verlässt die Bühne].?7
Jilet identifies herself as a second-generation Migrant (“My journey was short,
truly. Just as short as yours [points to an audience member sitting in first row]
Uterus, out!”). But she also acknowledges that in the perception of many, she
does not differ from current refugees. That would be less of a problem if they —
especially since 2015 and the so-called “Fliichtlingswelle” [wave of refugees] (in
itself an old metaphor that, considering the horrors one can witness frequently
in the Mediterranean Sea has become at best “rather problematic”) — were not
the victims of systemic discrimination: “Yes, there is panic everywhere. I’m
‘Fliichtlingswelle’ as well, I’m ‘Nafri’ as well, North-African-multiple offender”.
‘Nafri’ is an abbreviation used by the Police in North Rhine-Westphalia and
this was controversially discussed after the police tweeted about frisking sev¬
eral people after incidents of mass sexual assaults in Cologne, New Year’s Eve
2017, when the police were accused of racial profiling.” She therefore estab¬
lishes herself as a spokesperson of an imagined community” that is constituted
of what was previously called “the piled-up potential of hate, [...] the piled-up
mistrust.” As an “othered”?° voice she analyzes the Germans (“Almanis”) and
their behavior: a sociological perspective from the outside so to speak, and on
the other hand, as I previously mentioned, to give context and explanations
to the first thirty minutes of the performed play, as her words are more ap¬
proachable and less ambivalent than Jelinek’s text. She puts herself into the
position that is usually held by a (Caucasian) wealthy “First World” power, that
comes fo another country. She sets herself the goal to provide the Germans
she’s addressing — the audience, the “you,” placed on the receiving end of the
play — with development aid. She wants to help them develop and uses the
phrase probably most commonly associated with Germany’s chancellor Angela
Merkel and her approach to the “refugee crisis”: “Wir schaffen das!” [We'll
make it!]. The crisis here is not the migrant culture but an (underdeveloped)
xenophobic society. This modus is not a new one but one that has become
increasingly popular in German comedy with comedians such as Kaya Yanar
and Biilent Ceylan — though, in the context of the play and Baydar’s uptake on
Jelinek’s discourses, it is rather more compound than the work of Yanar and
Ceylan. Baydar’s alter ego, Jilet, explains that a migrant is only a construct of
27 See Falk Richter’s production of the play (from 39:50 to 44:17).
28 Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa): Grünen Chefin kritisiert Kölner Polizei, Stuttgarter Nach¬
richten February 2, 2017, https://www.stuttgarter-nachrichten.de/inhalt.silvester-in-koeln¬
gruenen-chefin-peter-kritisiert-polizei-nach-einsatz.e2e51f6f-1b93-4217-b230-1b943216c¬
clc.html, accessed 28 August, 2020.
Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nation¬
alism. London/New York, Verso, 1983.
30 Edward W. Said: Orientalism, London, Penguin, 2003.
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