Race, Guilt and Innocence: Facing Blackfacing in Contemporary German Theater

In the spring of 2012, the use of blackface/blackfacing in German theater, long an unremarked-upon practice, became the object of public protest, and prompted heated debates about the politics of race and representation. Through a discussion of the Deutsches Theater’s production of Unschuld (Innocence) by Dea Loher, which stirred up the controversy, the essay shows that blackfacing is part of larger patterns of racial representation. These have recently come under increasing scrutiny in Germany. The controversy about blackfacing is a symptom of larger tectonic shifts in narratives of German identity as postnational, postracial, and cosmopolitan.