Katrin Trüstedt Externalization On Stage The Exil Ensemble’s Hamletmaschine* In the summer of 2018, the Berlin Gorki Theater’s Exil Ensemble premiered Heiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine. The performance confronts Müller’s text from 1977, already a collage of various text fragments, with texts from Syrian artist Ayham Majid Agha, including references to the Arab spring, the current situation of refugees in Germany, and a “blood line from Damascus to Berlin”. Something about this confrontation strikes me as interesting, and makes me uncomfortable at the same time. When the audience watches this confrontation from a comfortable distance, it seems that there is a tendency to delegate these issues to institutions like the Gorki theater. If art can generally give certain subjective or social realities an external existence, as the psychoanalytic tradition has suggested,1 the theater can provide a spatial arrangement, an architectural reality for such an externalization, where these realities are, so to speak, removed from the auditorium and are put instead on a separate stage, where they can be watched from a certain distance. In the case of this performance and this space provided by the Gorki theater, the presentation highlights the problematic aspect of such an arrangement. It is this complex dynamic of externalization that I want to trace in the following in its relation to migration (I), to theater (II), and to the specific performance of Exil Ensemble’s Hamletmaschine. I. We know the dynamic of externalization as an important figure of thought in psychoanalytic, sociological, and economic discourse. Processes of externalization generally consist in giving something “outward form”, as the OED has it (“To make external; to embody in outward form; to give or attribute external existence to; to treat as consisting in externals)”2. At the same time, externalization makes it possible to disassociate ourselves from this externalized entity. In economics, externalization has therefore come to mean: “To exclude costs from a pricing * Penultimate draft; please cite the forthcoming published version: Katrin Trüstedt, “Externalization On Stage. The Exil Ensemble’s Hamletmaschine,” in: Martin Jörg Schäfer, Karin Nissen-Rizvani (eds.), TogetherText. Prozessual erzeugte Texte im Gegenwartstheater, Berlin: Theater der Zeit 2020, 142–155. 1 structure; specifically to fail to take into account (social or environmental) costs resulting from a product’s manufacture or use when formulating an economic strategy, either deliberately or as an oversight.”3 Externalization in this sense is not just outsourcing, but includes removing something – at least partially – from view and from consideration: the costs are obliterated from the account.4 Meanwhile, these costs pile up elsewhere, and become the concern and burden of someone else. In his book Around Us, The Deluge: The Externalization Society and its Cost, the German sociologist Stephan Lessenich shows how externalization serves as an organizing principle of the contemporary Western world order.5 Western social life rests on certain costs – especially social and environmental costs – being masked and shifted elsewhere: out of sight and onto others. One striking example of such an externalization is the literal exportation of waste to the Global South; other examples include the hidden social, medical and psychic burdens put onto those working for and producing the products that Westerners rely on in their everyday life. Lessenich explains the ubiquity of externalization through the dominance of convenience, habit, and the fear of losing a certain standard of living, which usually makes us repress the costs that we conveniently don’t see. But one might also see other, more complex factors at work in externalization than simple convenience. The dynamic of externalization implies a larger and more complex form of systemic externalization creating a marginal, transitory space of exception – a dynamic that involves several psycho-political factors reinforcing it. Three features in particular contribute to the complexity of the dynamic: First, it operates in a circular and self-perpetuating fashion. Externalizations have the peculiar character that they reinforce themselves and create constant need for new externalizations to sustain the fragile status quo. They naturally give rise to the “return of the repressed” which creates the need for new repressions for which the same will be true.6 Externalization thus generates a bad infinity of externalization after externalization. Secondly, this dynamic goes along with a latent type of knowledge and awareness of the externalizations involved. The systemic complicity and a complex and indirect awareness of responsibility evoke defense mechanisms that aim to shield us from this knowledge and related responsibility, leading, again, in an ironic way to repeated and reinforced externalizations. Thirdly, externalization includes not only rejection but a peculiar form of ambivalence towards its manifestations. According to psychoanalytic discourse, the projection of internal content onto others has the double function of both getting rid of the content and keeping it close at the same time, so that one can both relate oneself to and dissociate oneself from it. There is thus a doubleness of embodiment and exclusion: 2 externalization gives outward existence to something in order to both remove it from sight and keep it in view at the same time. In this way, it is at odds with itself, which is a third reason why it gains a circular and self-referential character according to which externalization becomes a mode of coping with the effects of previous externalizations. The complex dynamic of externalization becomes especially crucial with regard to the issue of migration. On a first level, it seems that migration itself can be conceived of as an externalization. In The Figure of the Migrant, Thomas Nail traces migration’s long history and diverse forms, suggesting that migration is actually not an abnormality or exception as we tend to think of it today, in thrall to the fairly recent idea of a nation state as a stable and organic, self-reproducing and self-sustaining whole.7 Against this background, it seems that the migration nation states mark as exceptional and try to keep at bay is itself an externalization. Instead of moving ourselves, we let others move for us.8 On a second level, today’s migration is produced and constantly reinforced by the various externalizations that are part and parcel of the Western mode of living. The global economic injustice sustained by the externalization of certain kinds of labor and care, the externalization of global conflicts and the environmental effects of Western life in other parts of the world are all major factors driving migration. The consequences of the Western mode of living in terms of climate change, waste, economic exploitation and political crisis reproduce a situation in the Global South from which many are then forced to flee. On a third level, migration produces a secondary push for its repression and externalization. Returning to the very centers which were aiming to protect themselves from them, migrants, as the embodiments of previous externalizations, face a renewed push for their expulsion. The externalization of costs leads to reinforced migration and thus to a return of the effect to its sources. The political reaction to migration’s making the effects of externalization palpable is yet again to externalize. Various political agents in the European Union try to make migration – which results at least partly from the externalization of the social costs of Europe’s modes of production and life – someone else’s problem and concern. Germany outsources the problem of dealing with migration to countries at Europe’s southern borders like Italy and Greece; Europe as a whole in turn externalizes it further to places outside of the European borders.9 In an art installation titled Liquid Violence at the biennale Manifesta in Palermo in 2018, the group Forensic Oceanography gave visibility to what is usually removed from sight. Forensic Oceanography is a project exploring the militarized border regime in the Mediterranean and the spatial and visual conditions that have resulted in thousands of deaths at European maritime 3 borders, using various technologies such as satellite imagery, ship location data, geospatial mapping, and drift models. The three-part installation Liquid Violence visualizes the systematic and multi-level externalization of the figure of the migrant enacted by Europe’s current border regime. One of the videos it includes, Liquid Traces (2014), tracks the fatal trajectory of one “left-to-die-boat” with migrants attempting to flee from the violent conflicts following the Arab spring, conflicts which were not prevented but actually reinforced by NATO’s militarization of that region. Although the boat was evidently inspected by an aircraft, helicopters, and a military ship approaching it in circles, and in spite of clearly being on NATO’s surveillance radar, as Liquid Traces shows, the people in distress on the boat were left to die. On 28 March 2011, after having entered the Maltese Search and Rescue area, the vessel ran out of fuel and began to drift back until April 10, when it landed southeast of Tripoli. Eleven of the seventy-two migrants were still alive; two died shortly thereafter. Literally staged at the margins of Europe, in a Palazzo facing the Mediterranean Sea, this screening was part of a larger installation arranging a whole constellation of cases in such a way that the viewers could only focus on one at a time, while necessarily turning their back on others. This installation is particularly interesting in the way it exhibits the intricate relation between visibility and invisibility and the usage of respective techniques with regard to the regime of visibility imposed by surveillance tools like those of NATO. Liquid Violence shows how the responsibility to rescue migrant ships is externalized from Italy to NATO and back again, and often from there to uncertain agents on the margins of Europe, in spite of international law establishing the duty to rescue people in distress at sea. The videos involve various strategies for making visible what is kept in the transitory and violent space of the sea and on the margins of visibility, marking the unseen in the context of the visibility regime of our surveillance era. It re-appropriates this surveillance data in order to make visible what these techniques are usually used to block from view, highlighting the sea as this non-space of exception, between lands, nation states and borders.10 Outlining and revolving around the invisible act of violence by neglect, it points us to the invisible bodies and invisible lives entrapped in this externalization. We can see what we are in fact not seeing. This brings me to a particularly difficult aspect of the dynamic of externalization. It has particular relevance to the specific set of artistic strategies of making visible that we call theater. Migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees seem to take on the role of confronting Europeans with some hidden or repressed guilt, and of giving such guilt a (new) face. And because they do this inadvertently (since this role is assigned to them), when such guilt is then rejected, attacked, 4 repressed, or expelled, so are they. The complex projective dynamic of externalization thus seems to include what Adorno (in a different context) called a guilt-defense mechanism.11 According to this line of thinking, there is a partial, abstract and latent awareness of the systematic exploitation that reinforces migration, as well as of its externalization. But having this half-knowledge initiates not a process of progressive acknowledgement of one’s role, but rather the rejection of knowledge and responsibility by rejecting migrants and refugees who appear to embody and personify such knowledge and responsibility in a self-reinforcing vicious circle.12 And, at the same time, the political discourse is dominated by the figure of the migrant, with which certain election campaigns are obsessed. Since Germany’s right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland became part of the German parliament, the term “migration” or “migrant” has been used excessively, replacing other terminology like refugee or asylum seeker that might suggest a “legitimate” reason for migrating.13 Their deliberate choice of terminologies seems to suggest that migration itself is considered a threat to be fought against. Migration is being removed while being kept present and alive at the same time – as something to be rejected and removed all over again. II. In The Human Condition from 1958, Hannah Arendt aimed to retrieve a political dimension of human existence that she felt was lost in modern life. And she tried to uncover what such a political existence depends upon. It depends, Arendt argued, on a public space of appearance that we constitute through our shared words and deeds and that makes it possible for us to take on a political existence in the first place: to take part in and be a part of a shared polis. For Arendt, the space of appearance is that space “where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things, but make their appearance explicitly.”14 Such a public space of appearance can and in fact must be constantly re-created anew where individuals gather together politically. But as we also know, appearing in public is far from simple. There are certain conditions of possibility for appearance and expectations of who is to appear in public – which in turn do their part to constitute and limit the structure of the public sphere. Arendt developed her conception of what it means to appear on the basis of the structure of the Greek polis, which she praised as the foundation of Western democracy. But the Greek Polis as a public space was the domain of the free man and citizen, not of the slave, not of the woman, not of foreigners (barbarians). As Judith Butler has critically remarked, Arendt’s “view of the foreign, unskilled, feminized body that belongs to the private sphere is 5 the condition of possibility for the speaking male citizen (who is presumably fed by someone and sheltered somewhere).”15 So who or what appears onstage – who gets seen and heard in public, and whose actions count, politically – is conditioned and marked by what is happening offstage: what is unseen, unheard of, and unaccounted for. In her performative theory of assembly, in which she takes up Arendt while criticizing her, Butler inquires into these “conditions of appearance”: “what makes it possible to even come before the law (a Kafkan question, to be sure)? It would seem that one has to have access or standing, or that one has to be able to enter and to appear in some form.”16 To respond to the limitations of such “conditions of appearance”, Butler suggests a political practice of developing forms of interdependency that can transform the field of appearance. This political process is one of – collective, interdependent – self-constitution.17 Among her examples for forms of political assembly that highlight our interdependence and transform the realm of appearance are Occupy Wall Street, the Arab spring, and Black Lives Matter. Picking up on Arendt’s conception of the single “human right” – the “right to have rights” –, Butler claims a human right to appear. As she argues, Arendt’s claiming a right to have rights is itself performative, and so, of course, is Butler’s right to appear: It involves a “plural and performative positing of eligibility where it did not exist before.”18 But how exactly is such a positing possible? Even if we leave the question of the changed media conditions and the transformed character of today’s public realm aside,19 we have to acknowledge, following Butler, the extent to which the intricate conditions of appearing and the performative character of claiming a right to appear tend to escape our grasp.20 Theater has a special capacity to bring this into view. Though a paradigmatic public space of appearance, it is, however, a very peculiar one, in which not only do appearances occur, but the question of what it means to appear and what it takes to do so is itself raised practically and experimentally. Theater has exhibited, reflected and explored the politics of appearing in various forms and settings throughout its history. If it is indeed a paradigmatic place of appearing, of making visible in the here and now – as opposed, for instance, to other literary forms like narration –, the question as to how theater can bring invisibility into view and put the place of disappearance and exiting on display is particularly important.21 As theater can reveal, any present visibility in the here and now always relies on the realm of the invisible. The space of theater is marked by the distinction between onstage and offstage which underwrites any theatrical appearance and can itself be exposed theatrically.22 Furthermore, all theatrical visibility is given under the condition of a particular perspective 6 which renders any complete ‘overview’ impossible even as such overview may be presented as desired. In this sense, the spectator is situated in a theatrical laboratory negotiating various forms and dynamics of (in-)visibility. As a public space, and as a transitory and temporal space of exception, the theater corresponds to and reflects upon other exceptional and transitory spaces. In this way, its techniques and strategies of visibility and invisibility unfold a revelatory and transformative potential with regard to the politics of appearance. The theatrical tradition since Brecht, in which Heiner Müllers Hamletmaschine has been situated, and which has been labeled “post-dramatic”23, reveals the active role of the spectators and challenges their routines of acknowledgement and avoidance, of directing and averting their gaze. It thereby addresses the many who don’t get to appear in public, are hindered from appearing, will not get seen or heard, or will appear in an indirect way, highlighting our own role in this (that of the spectator). Such engaged and practical reflection is not limited to the realm of theater, but expanded in forms of performance engaging with theatricality. In “Resistance of the Object: Adrian Piper’s Theatricality”, Fred Moten brings out the constriction of the gaze that Adrian Piper has addressed as a black performer. Her performance is deployed in order to move beyond what Piper calls the “visual pathology” of racist categorization. “For Piper, to be for the beholder is to be able to mess up or mess with the beholder.”24 Beholding should conversely, in Moten’s view, be understood as the entrance into a scene, and that means, into the context of the other. We have to enter the scene of the other if we want to challenge the limits and boundaries of the space of appearance. To consider some important theatrical modes of doing so, I will now turn to Müller’s play Hamletmaschine. III. The Exil Ensemble’s performance brings out mechanisms of externalization on different levels. This dimension is already visible in the text of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine itself. The text starts with the ruins of Europe after WWII and with the Western intellectual – Hamlet – turning away from them: “I was Hamlet. I stood on the coast and spoke with the surf BLABLA at my back the ruins of Europe.”25 The play thus starts with a gesture of avoidance. There are traces of the violence of this externalization within the text. Hamlet: “Somewhere bodies are being opened, so that I can be alone in my blood.”26 While Hamlet is turning away and retreating into his own undivided self, he acknowledges that there are others bearing the cost for him of being alone in his “blood.” Ophelia, on the other hand, addresses “the capitals of the world,” 27 not in her own name but in the name of “the victims.” While those “victims” are 7 nowhere specified, her line “Under the Sun of Torture”28 quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.29 In the name of these victims or wretched of the earth, she therefore seems to invoke an anti-colonial critique of global imperialism and the colonization of “others” who are excluded from the capitalist centers and the visibility that comes with inhabiting these centers. There is something obviously problematic about her claim to speak “in the name of the victims,” and we could think of Gayatri Spivak’s criticism of the Western Intellectual who speaks for what she calls the subaltern.30 And yet it seems to me that in all her excessiveness, Ophelia does not even claim herself to be legitimized in this act in any way. From the position of a silenced victim herself – the position of the victim of the paradigmatic Western intellectual Hamlet – Ophelia dares not just to claim her very own space (as Antigone had before31), thus constituting herself, but to speak for others in a gesture that obviously contains an excess of appearance (a “too much” in contrast to Hamlet’s regressive “too little”) which is beyond possible legitimation. The Exil Ensemble aims to insert other, excluded voices into this text of Hamlet and Ophelia. It consists of artists from Syria, Palestine and Afghanistan with various histories of exile and migration. Not only this ensemble, but the whole Gorki theater including artistic director Shermin Langhoff and in-house director Yael Ronen has become one of the main representatives of what has been deemed “post-migrant theatre.” This term refers not only to what is performed onstage, but to the structure of theater itself, the ‘offstage.’ For the rightwing German party AfD, the Gorki theater with its artists from these diverse backgrounds has become a favorite target; activists of the rightwing Identitarian Movement staged “aesthetic interventions” directed at the Gorki Theater.32 In this sense, this theater has become both a site for exploring theatrical forms of appearance and the target of political attacks, including attempts to exclude the performers who are seen as outsiders by part of the German and European public and who are given a platform here. In the performance, we are confronted with one singled-out figure who introduces an external element and interrupts Müller’s Hamletmaschine, a theatrical machine already replaying and interrupting Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This figure introduces another text into the original Müller play: the Arabic text by Syrian artist Ayham Majid Agha mentioned above, which makes reference to Cain and Abel, the Arab spring, graves where weapons are found, and a “blood line from Damascus to Berlin”. The Arab spring intervenes in the Communist spring of Müller’s play; the second clown of the Arab spring inhabits the second clown of the Communist spring. 8 The actor’s lines suggest our responsibility for the war in Syria and some form of outsourcing violence, which causes migration to Europe only to externalize it again once migrants have arrived there, in all the ambivalence and circularity characteristic of that dynamic. The insertion of this foreign text seems to pick up on the anti-colonial moments of Ophelia in Müller’s Hamletmaschine, but also on the tradition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the Middle East, where, for the past five decades, as Margaret Litvin has shown, Arab intellectuals have identified with Hamlet, with the times being ‘out of joint,’ and with political hopes being frustrated by some corrupt older generation. The most obsessively quoted literary work in Arab politics today according to Litvin, Hamlet can appear as the essential Arab political text.33 And yet, despite such existing links between the texts, the intertextual relation here seems to be one of insertion that happens from the margins. How is this marginal position marked in the performance? First of all, the differentiation of the actor who inserts the “foreign” text from the rest of the ensemble happens not on the level of the actors’ backgrounds, as exile and migration are in the backgrounds of all the performing artists, but on the level of the relation between the different textual elements. The group of actors performing the roles already included in Müller’s Hamletmaschine are not tied to identifiable roles that pertain to each and every one of them exclusively; they rather seem to shift from role to role, as the roles are passed from actor to actor. The singular figure inserting the text, however, seems different. He does not move freely from role to role. It is this figure, somehow singled out, who comes to embody an external textual element and to interrupt the Hamletmaschine with a “foreign” text projected onto a screen onstage and projected by us onto that figure. In this production, all performers are clowns, exhibiting the plural, collective appearance of a particular type of alienation, foregrounding the “second clown” of the communist or Arab spring,34 though taking a particular turn – towards the outcast, towards the stranger, and towards the figure of the migrant. For Agamben, the commedia dell’arte character Pulcinella is an archetype combining the clownish with the figure of bare life, as characterized by the ban which, in its ambivalence of inclusion and exclusion, resembles the dynamic of externalization.35 In Tiepolo’s drawings, Pulcinella is shown in his other corpo-reality, foregrounding a deformed body which is at the same time playful. Pulcinella is playful in transgressing boundaries and separations between human and animal, man and woman, insider and outsider, the one and the many, work and leisure, actor and author. This link Agamben makes between the homo sacer and the comedic figure seems to correspond to the 9 migrant clown of the Exil Ensemble’s performance, reflected here in an oscillation between a multitude of playful clowns and the singular outcast. That fact that the inserted text can be seen as an element foreign to the original text is also marked in other ways. The text is in a different language which most theatergoers in the audience will not be able to understand without subtitles; it is met with perplexed reactions from the other actors performing Müller’s Hamletmaschine and accompanied by a change in music and light; the figure reciting it is situated below or behind the others; and – perhaps most importantly – the projected text is demarcated as a “Comment.” This text exists only in the performance, not in the script that the performance is based on; and the performance of this inserted text introduces both older and more contemporary contexts that deviate from the contexts invoked by the written script of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine, a post-war play. In this way, the comment inserts itself into the text and seems to insist on having a voice that Ophelia only claims to speak for in the text. The figure who inserts this external text literally comes from the margins of the stage, namely from a trapdoor below, like the returning, repressed figure of the ghost in Hamlet, and he speaks from this position about digging graves which he calls the Middle East, and finding the weapons that were exported to the region, from this marginal position thus linking the center and the outskirts to which violence is in a certain sense externalized. In another scene, recalling in some sense the grave digger scene in Hamlet with its gallows humor, we see the same figure, positioned in a different realm, appearing more like a projection on a screen than a living body onstage. Although on the same stage as them, he is actively ignored by the others, who turn their backs on him (recall Hamlet: the ruins of Europe at his back). Suddenly, we see this figure vanishing from view behind a screen, the production displaying one technical way to make someone disappear. And then that same figure gets literally pushed down under the trapdoor by another, female figure (Ophelia?). If the play displays a dynamic of externalization, it is completed by such a gesture of triumph, of self-assertion, which is literally based on the repression of the figure interrupting the European play with a text marked as foreign to it. Rather than just personifying a foreigner, the “foreign” figure we saw exiting in this way exposes foreignness on the textual, formal and technical level. He almost seems to be part of the space and arrangement of the theater, marking its liminal spaces: the figure is reciting a text that is projected onto the screen just as it is projected onto him; he articulates a commentary that interrupts the different acts of the play just as the curtain would in traditional theater; and he speaks from offstage, beneath the stage in one scene and projected onto a screen in another, 10 demarcating and traversing the borders of the theatrical space. The particular media that distinguish theater make it possible to insert a foreign element—like this text and the figure associated with it—without fully integrating them. They are involved rather as foreign elements. This marginal presence in the distance foregrounds the theater as a precarious common space where the different bodies, faces, and roles can appear and disappear, enter and exit from view, and relate to each other in a complex dynamic of glances and projections, of distancing and – at least in the temporary and exceptional moment of the performance – of partaking. When we in the audience laugh at the excessive and hyperbolic gestures of the clown atop the trapdoor – and it is, after all, a play of clowns – we may be a bit relieved that we can laugh from a safe distance while feeling good about “listening to other voices” as a form of “virtue signaling.” In this sense, the theater is not only a place where externalization can be displayed on stage, but also one where what is happening onstage is an acting out of something in our name and for our sake. And yet, being in the same room as the figures onstage and being addressed by them, we cannot help but be complicit in what is happening onstage and for us, making the laughter at least partly uncomfortable. Perhaps this is the greatest achievement of this performance: in good old Brechtian tradition, making us feel uncomfortable in our own externalizing habits, which are entangled in complex ways with the spectacle of clowns we are at the same time enjoying. 1 For Freud, a dream is “an externalization of an internal process [eine Veräußerlichung eines inneren Vorganges]”. See Freud, Sigmund: “Metapsychologische Ergänzung zur Traumlehre”, in: Gesammelte Werke, vol. X, London 1949, pp. 412 – 426, here: 414. Cf. Laplanche, Jean/Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand: “Projection”, in: The Language of Psycho-Analysis, London 1988, p. 354f. 2 OED online, entry “externalize, v.” (https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/66998?redirectedFrom=externalize#eid [Last Access, June 10, 2020]). 3 Ibid.; see also Ainger, Katharine: “The New Peasants’ Revolt”, in: New Internationalist, 2 Jan 2003 (https://newint.org/features/2003/01/01/keynote): “How ‘efficient’ is a system of agriculture that ignores (‘externalizes’) the huge costs of removing chemical contamination from water or losing genetic diversity?” 4 The German term “entsorgen” captures this aspect of externalization: to remove something from our concerns and release it from our care (cura) (etwas entsorgen), and thereby rid ourselves of such worry or care (figuratively we might say: sich ent-sorgen). 5 Lessenich, Stephan: Neben uns die Sintflut: Die Externalisierungsgesellschaft und ihr Preis, Berlin 2016. 6 On the complex economy of repression according to which “repression proper” is actually a secondary form of repression, a repeated pressure repressing the after-effects of a primary repression (“Nachdrängen”), see: Freud, Sigmund: “Die Verdrängung”, in: Gesammelte Werke X, Frankfurt a.M. 1946, pp. 247 – 261, here: 250. 11 7 Nail, Thomas: The Figure of the Migrant, Stanford 2015. On the notion that the figures of the migrant, the stateless, and the refugee should not be seen as an abnormality, but instead as defining figures of our time, see Arendt, Hannah: “We Refugees”, in: The Menorah Journal 31:1 (1943), p. 69 – 77.; see also Agamben, Giorgio: “We Refugees”, in: Symposium 49:2 (1995), pp. 114 – 119. 8 One important exception in the contemporary Western life form that runs contrary to this is, of course, tourism. 9 Take for example the EU-Turkey deal to “end irregular migration flows from Turkey to the EU” (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-security-eu/eu-says-expects-turkey-to-uphold-commitments-onmigrant-flows-idUSKCN20M1O0 [Last Access, June 10, 2020]), which includes 3 billion Euros to institute what has fittingly been called “Fortress Europe” (“Festung Europa”). The responsibility for dealing with migration from Africa is externalized: Europe finances operations carried out by other countries and delegates the responsibility to Libyan and other northern African authorities. Cf. Bossong, Raphael/Carrapico, Helena (eds.): EU Borders and Shifting Internal Security: Technology, Externalization and Accountability, Heidelberg 2016; Gaibazzi, Paolo/Dünnwald, Stephan/Bellagamba, Alice (eds.): EurAfrican Borders and Migration Management: Political Cultures, Contested Spaces, and Ordinary Lives, London 2017. 10 What is highlighted in this video is not the land, but the sea, as the non-space captured from the perspective of land. Regarding this opposition cf. Carl Schmitt’s development of the order of social human life in his Nomos of the Earth: “Third and last, the solid ground of the earth is delineated by fences, enclosures, boundaries, walls, houses, and other constructs. Then, the orders and orientations of human social life become apparent. [...] Law is bound to the earth and related to the earth. This is what the poet means when he speaks of the infinitely just earth: justissima tellus. The sea knows no such apparent unity of space and law, of order and orientation.” (Schmitt, Carl: The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum, New York 2006, p. 42.) 11 There are obviously many attempts to explain racialized violence and anti-immigration sentiments e.g. by recourse to forms of ressentiment or envy which also emphasize the role of projection. I don’t want to reject any of these explanations, nor reduce these complex phenomena to just one factor, but simply highlight a certain complex dynamic that seems crucial. 12 A related dynamic has previously been analyzed in the specific context of antisemitism. As early as 1948/49, Hannah Arendt identified a particular form of German denial that goes along with putting blame on the victims in a report called “The Aftermath of Nazi Rule”, published in 1950 (Arendt, Hannah: “The Aftermath of Nazi Rule. Report from Germany”, in: Commentary 10 (1950), pp. 342–353). In the 1950s and 1960s, Theodor W. Adorno and Peter Schönbach identified a similar form of post-war German denial which Adorno called “guiltdefensiveness antisemitism” (“Schuldabwehrantisemitismus”) and Schönbach termed “secondary antisemitism” (cf. Adorno, Theodor W.: Guilt and Defense: On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar Germany, Cambridge 2010; Schönbach, Peter: Reaktionen auf die antisemitische Welle im Winter 1959/60, Frankfurt a.M. 1961). In a recent article, Lars Rensmann speaks of the “externalization of guilt” in this context and of the projection of the unwanted guilt onto the victims themselves. The intent of mentioning “guilt-defensiveness anti-semitism” in the current context of migration is not to identify or equate the dynamic of secondary anti-semitism with the dynamic of secondary externalization vis-à-vis migration, but rather to open a space of conversation in which different dynamics can speak to each other. It also seems to be one of the aspirations of the Gorki theater to allow for such dynamics in different contexts to touch upon each other and thus to allow for multidirectional memory. To name just one example, Winter Journey by the Israeli director Yael Ronen, which was produced in cooperation with the Exil Ensemble at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater, alludes both to the song cycle by Franz Schubert –which starts with “A stranger I arrived; a stranger I depart.” (“Fremd bin ich eingezogen, fremd zieh’ ich wieder aus”) – and Jelinek’s theater play based on it. Both versions of a Winter Journey are overlaid with the experience of migrants who are traveling through Germany and dealing with its history; one of their stops is Buchenwald. 13 See: https://projekte.sueddeutsche.de/artikel/politik/bundestag-das-gehetzte-parlament-e953507/ [Last Access, June 10, 2020]). 14 Arendt, Hannah: The Human Condition, Chicago 1958, pp. 198 – 199 15 See Butler, Judith: Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Cambridge 2015, p. 45f. 16 Ibid., p. 40f. 17 Regarding the crucial distinction between “self-constitution” and “self-representation” see ibid., p. 168f. 12 18 Ibid., p. 50. 19 It seems obvious that the structure of “the public” has completely changed, not just since the Greek polis, but even since Arendt wrote The Human Condition in 1958; but that is a subject for another occasion. 20 See Menke, Bettine: “Suspendierung des Auftritts”, in: Juliane Vogel, Christopher Wild (eds.), Auftreten. Wege auf die Bühne, Berlin 2014, pp. 249 – 275 21 See Menke, Bettine/Vogel, Juliane (eds.): Flucht und Szene, Berlin 2018. 22 See Menke, Bettine: “On/Off”, in: Juliane Vogel, Christopher Wild (eds.), Auftreten. Wege auf die Bühne, Berlin 2014, pp. 182-190. 23 See Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, New York 2006. 24 Fred Moten, “Resistance of the Object: Adrian Piper’s Theatricality”, in: In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition, Minneapolis/London 2003, p. 235. 25 Müller, Heiner: “Die Hamletmaschine”, in: Werke, vol. 4: Stücke 2, ed. Frank Hörnigk, Frankfurt a.M. 2001, pp. 544 – 554, here: p. 544; English translation: “Hamletmachine”, in: Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage, ed. and trans. Carl Weber, New York 1984, pp. 49 – 58, here: p. 49. 26 Ibid., p. 552 – 553 /p. 57. 27 Ibid., p. 554/p. 58. 28 Ibid. 29 Jourdheuil, Jean: “Die Hamletmaschine,” in: Hans-Thies Lehmann et al. (ed.), Heiner Müller Handbuch: Leben, Werk, Wirkung, Stuttgart 2003), pp. 221 – 227, here: p. 226. 30 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty: “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in: Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg, Champaign 1988, pp. 271 – 314. 31 Cf. Butler, Judith: Antigone’s Claim. Kinship between Life and Death, New York 2002. 32 They are thereby appropriating the kind of performative protest forms traditionally associated with leftist activism and re-appropriating them in a problematic move to performatively claim an identity that is claimed to be a simple and natural given, not the product of a performance. 33 Litvin, Margaret: Hamlet's Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost, Princeton 2012 34 On Müller’s own notion of the play as a comedy see Trüstedt, Katrin: “Alienation and Affirmation. The Comedy of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine”, in: Brecht Yearbook 44 (2019), pp. 102 – 121; on the modern complicity of tragedy and comedy, cf. Trüstedt, Katrin: Die Komödie der Tragödie. Shakespeares “Sturm” am Umschlagplatz von Mythos und Moderne, Rache und Recht, Tragik und Spiel, Konstanz 2011. 35 Agamben, Giorgio: Pulcinella or Entertainment for Children, Chicago 2018. 13