Musa Dagh: Tage Des Widerstands dir. by Hans-Werner Kroesinger (review)

Hans-Werner Kroesinger has earned a reputation for making political theatre out of historical documents. Yet, his approach differs both from the emphatic dramatization of records, as in Rolf Hochhuth’s indictment of papal complicity in the Holocaust in Der Stellvertreter (The Representative, 1963), and from the unadorned presentation of verbatim text, as in Peter Weiss’s spare staging of the Auschwitz Trial transcripts in Die Ermittlung (The Investigation, 1964). Kroesinger has created documentary theatre since his Vermauern (Wall In, 2009; see Matthew Cornish’s review in Theatre Journal [67.1, 2015]) used the little-known though explosive exchange that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and German Democratic Republic (GDR) leader Walter Ulbricht had when planning the Berlin Wall in 1961. Like Die Ermittlung and Der Stellvertreter, Musa Dagh deals with genocide—in this case the deaths in 1915 of more than a million Armenians by murder, starvation, or exposure at the behest of the Turkish state, the ally of Imperial Germany in World War I—but unlike Weiss and Hochhuth he does not directly indict perpetrators, and he avoids the impassioned impersonation of historical actors that the latter used to elicit audience identification. Instead, the piece combines Brechtian restraint with a subtle but palpable acknowledgment of the emotional resonance of the material to explore the unresolved legacy of the slaughter in this centennial year.

The Gorki Theater is a particularly appropriate venue for this work. Named after the Russian writer who exemplified socialist realism and dedicated during the GDR years to presenting the theatre of the Soviet Union and its allies, its current Intendantin (artistic director) is Turkish-born Şermin Langhoff, whose profile embodies a new engagement with ethnic diversity in a theatre culture that has deployed problematic forms like blackface rather than seeking out German actors of migrant ancestry. Langhoff’s Turkish heritage and her association by marriage with the Langhoff dynasty, which had a long though conflicted association with theatre in East Germany, bring together the unsettled questions of German history and its transnational resonances. The premiere of Musa Dagh on 7 March inaugurated a series of events, which included films on the Armenian genocide and diaspora and an installation on the square in front of the theatre created by Armenian Canadian director Atom Egoyan, which featured clips of the company’s actors presenting statements that Franz Werfel collected from interviews with survivors in Syria while he was writing his documentary novel (published in 1933). Like his friend Franz Kafka, a German-speaking Jew who grew up in a Czechoslovakia shaped by the legacy of the Austrian Empire, as well as Czech nationalism, Werfel fled into exile after the rise of Nazism. His novel focuses on the flight of Armenian villagers to the mountains near the Mediterranean coast of southwestern Turkey, from where they were rescued by French warships. The title of the novel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, alludes to the Hebrew Bible in the forty days of suffering and the mountain named after Moses, who led the Jews out of Egypt. The performance title does not specify the number of days of resistance, but retains the Muslim version of Moses in the mountain’s Turkish name and thus highlights the intimate if fraught relationship between Jews and Muslims in the region.

Judica Albrecht, Martina Frenk, Armin Wieser, Falilou Seck, Till Wonka, and Ruth Reinecke in Musa Dagh: Tage des Widerstands. (Photo: Ute Langkafel.)

While supported by this supplementary material, the production wore its layers of reference lightly, but also with due seriousness. In keeping with the postdramatic form characteristic of German theatre today the six actors did not impersonate specific characters or historical persons, but did not merely replace the representation of character with the performance of the celebrity self, as is common on some other postdramatic Berlin stages. Instead, Kroesinger encouraged an understated presentation that borrowed from the Brechtian theatre of instruction while drawing subtly on...