Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany (review)

Katrin Sieg's detailed account of ethnic drag as an index of the ways in which West Germans have engaged with, disavowed, and contested race in the post-Nazi period not only makes for fascinating reading but also expands and refines contemporary theoretical debates about masquerade and performativity. Working from concepts elaborated by critics such as Marjorie Garber and Judith Butler, but more cautious about claiming drag as an inherently subversive practice that challenges identity norms, Sieg shows the very complex relationships between performances of ethnicity and ethnicity's collective construction in specific historical and social situations. As a result, she is able to deliver both nuanced and penetrating observations on ethnic drag that take into account radical differences in positions of access to cultural power.

The book's analysis of ethnic drag's variable ideological work unfolds through a series of case studies that emphasizes the need for contingent interpretations of this performative trope. Collectively, Sieg's paradigmatic examples—drawn from theatre, film, popular culture, ethnographic representation, and recreational practices—suggest connections between specific ethnic masquerades across low and high culture in Germany, while sketching the complex substitutions, identifications, and disidentifications that drag entails. To contextualize her study historically, the author begins her case examples with an account of early-twentieth-century ethnic impersonation in Germany as enacted in Jew Farces (which derided attempts by Jews to assimilate and pass as German) and particular versions of Gotthold Lessing's classic humanist play, Nathan the Wise (1779). These performances, Sieg argues, helped to establish both the state-approved representations of anti-semitism evident in such texts as the now-censored Nazi-era propaganda film Jew Süss (1940) and also various positive depictions of Jews in a post-war theatre anxious to put the shame of the holocaust behind it.

Chapters 2 and 3 posit intricate links between German impersonations of American Indians and the nation's generalized failure to atone for the atrocities of Hitler's regime. In the various adaptations of Karl May's Winnetou westerns perennially staged at Bad Segeberg's summer festival since 1952, Sieg discerns a cathartic purging of historical guilt via the theatrical transfer of genocide from Germany to the American frontier, where the fictional German hero can act as blood brother and sympathizer to the Indians whose traditions are at risk. This is a convincing argument, well supported by a close analysis of the festival performances and a masterful précis of relevant social and historical factors. The proposition that this kind of ethnic drag operates as a "technology of forgetting" (84) in Germany is subsequently elaborated in an entertaining account of ethnic masquerade within Indian hobbyism (a leisure activity involving the study and/or quasi-ethnographic performance of Indianness), although Sieg takes a more positive view of this surprisingly widespread practice, arguing, unconvincingly in my view, that hobbyist impersonations demonstrate a form of ethnic competence that recognizes the limitations of biological concepts of race.

Moving to the processes by which the antifascist drag of the New Left attempted to examine race and ethnicity through depictions of foreigners migrating to Germany, Sieg identifies impersonation as a somewhat compromised pedagogical tool in texts that betray their authors' self-positioning as spokespersons for the subaltern classes. The following section, which explores homosexual desire in dramas about colonial conquest and third-world tourism, reveals further aspects of the white subject's investments in racialized cultural encounters. While both these chapters deliver highly sophisticated readings of the texts they discuss, they are missing the persistent awareness of theatricality that makes the earlier parts of the book so compelling. With the final chapter on ethnic travesties, Sieg's critique regains its full force, particularly in the eloquent discussion of the ways in which the triangulation of actor, in-group spectator, and dupe distinguishes between mimetic and performative readings of identity. Her inclusion of...