Ceren Bozkurt with guitar before the international strike coverage
Photo: Ute Langkafel/MAIFOTO
The political concerns of the evening are made no secret at the first premiere in the newly opened Studio Я Maxim Gorki Theater: “The Optimists” is about illuminating a gap in the historiography of the Federal Republic. A double void: labor disputes by migrants in the old Federal Republic remain invisible, and those by migrants even more so. Stories about female emancipation movements, in turn, leave out migrant people. The novel by Gün Tank, published by S. Fischer in 2022, is dedicated to women who are often only imagined in the “family reunion”. Only the daughters tell their stories.
Emel Aydoğdu’s production focuses on this first generation, the guest workers, and thus adapts the part of the novel that is suitable for the stage, but whose temporal structure is somewhat complicated. This evening at Gorki they are the protagonists, the militant workers of the 1970s who relentlessly stand up for their rights.
As soon as you enter the small studio theater, it becomes clear that their resistance is presented as an inevitability: the audience is led to their seats across the stage, where the four women flirt with each other and offer Çay. It seems as if they wanted to say: We are here, you can’t get past us. The piece follows Nour, Tülay and Mercedes, who came to Germany as migrant workers. In the Oberfpalz in Bavaria, they are united by the precarious living situation, characterized by hard work in a porcelain factory, cramped accommodation and unequal pay compared to their male colleagues. Not to mention the blatant racism of the old Federal Republic.
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Documentary film clips of the wildcat strikes at an automotive supplier in Pierburg and newspaper articles projected onto Eva Lochner’s gigantic gauze installation create factuality. This suggests: What you see here on stage may not have happened exactly that way, but it did happen. The real background is the strike year of 1973, when migrant workers in Bavaria, Berlin and North Rhine-Westphalia organized under the slogan “One Mark More”.
At times in the studio  everything seems like a kind of school trip: the three cuddle up to each other, do gymnastics through the stage set, which seems strangely out of place without the projection and resembles a gigantic cruise ship, and then fall back into the drill of the factory. In blue coats, they stack chipboard in synchrony, forming a choir of workers. They organize strikes and are successful because they manage to get the others, the skilled workers and unions, on their side. They are very close to each other anyway, always showing solidarity. Their protest culminates in an apocalyptic scene of resistance: they stand in artificial fog with megaphones and spray cans. Previously, the interaction between the three was sometimes hectic and uncoordinated, but suddenly everything seems to be happening in slow motion.
One wonders how it could happen that there is so much talk of a gap between industrial action and identity politics. Who is still helped by well-known narratives and traditional revolutionary romanticism? The revolutionary subject, who is often portrayed as a long-established factory worker, is this evening a migrant worker.
At the beginning, Ceren Bozkurt, Yanina Cerón, Aysima Ergün and Sema Poyraz introduce themselves as first, second and third generation migrants. A position is taken en passant in the sometimes tiring debate about representation in the theater: quite naturally, the four women also slip into the role of the presumably white, but above all male supervisors and bosses – and do so with a sharp wit. Consistently, what fails in other attempts to tell untold stories is enforced in the cast.
This happens so naturally that you could briefly indulge in the illusion that everything is okay. When the audience joins in with the four women’s songs, they celebrate their achievements together. In Ergün’s monologue, which quotes from Mely Kiyak’s now five-year-old “Will they deport us with the Flixbus?” column, the topicality breaks brutally into the story of the three, who are light-footed and hopeful, often from Bozkurt Accompanied on the guitar or saz, moving through the piece while singing. Here it is possible to draw lines of connection between daily politics and what is happening on stage. Given the political situation and the manifest plans of right-wing extremist politicians to deport migrants en masse, it would perhaps be grossly negligent not to do so.
An intervention by pro-Palestinian activists in front of the entrance to Studio Я, who protested against the (now withdrawn) anti-discrimination clause of the Berliner Senate and Gorky’s positioning after the Hamas attacks on October 7th. One would like to ask the optimists how the institution can succeed in creating solidarity between different parts of post-migrant society in the future without completely despairing.
Next performance: February 8th
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