OCR
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 several people after incidents of mass sexual assaults in Cologne, New Year’s Eve 2017, when the police were accused of racial profiling.” She therefore establishes 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 approachable 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 Nachrichten February 2, 2017, https://www.stuttgarter-nachrichten.de/inhalt.silvester-in-koelngruenen-chefin-peter-kritisiert-polizei-nach-einsatz.e2e51f6f-1b93-4217-b230-1b943216cclc.html, accessed 28 August, 2020. Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London/New York, Verso, 1983. 30 Edward W. Said: Orientalism, London, Penguin, 2003. «198 +