The white masses look at their black man: “Othello” (in the translation by Werner Buhss) at the Berliner Ensemble, 2019.
Photo: dpa/Wolfgang Kumm
There’s this tough, self-confident woman sitting in the police station and speaking whatever comes into her head. “How’s the nigger torture going?” she asks a police officer. He doesn’t let himself be irritated by being asked about his cruelty and racism. At the very height of contemporary discourse, he takes exception to something else: “That now means torturing a person of color.”
This scene was on screens seven years ago when “Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri” came to German cinemas and caused one or two debates. The short dialogue used bitter humor to express what a misguided racism discourse can lead to. What is the torture of a person when faced with the use of an incriminated word? The film asks in a society that only knows colors but no longer knows social conditions.
And just as there has been debate about “Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri,” William Shakespeare’s “Othello” has also been debated for years. It is the story of the initially triumphant general named Othello, who is driven to jealousy and even frenzy by the malicious skill of his soldier Iago. Othello was part of society. Only one individual’s web of lies and the gaze of many others make him a black “beast”.
Genosse Shakespeare
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It distracts from this enlightening achievement of Shakespeare’s drama if one only focuses on whether Othello is played by a white or black actor. There is only one thing you can expect as a viewer: that the criticism of the false circumstances is taken into account in the scenic implementation.
It is not just the casting of the title character that is the subject of debate, but – as in the film described – the use of politically correct vocabulary. It is Shakespeare’s job to show how things are, and not how one could speak in a well-behaved, analytical way from a desk far away. Are the racist attributions in “Othello” not recognizable as what the majority of society is prepared to make of a respectable citizen?
“The moore of Venice” is the subtitle of “Othello” in the original English. And this is where the difficulty begins. One or two translators have turned it into “The Moor of Venice” in a pretty literal but somewhat old-fashioned way. In most schedules you can see that in German they prefer to avoid subtitles. Maybe it’s because of the cowardice of the theaters?
Because Comrade Shakespeare knew that Othello, what he seems, first had to be made. Through intrigue. By the circumstances. And so the playwright and director Werner Buhss found perhaps the most convincing variant of a German title in his – very unfairly criticized – translation of the tragedy: “Othello. Venice’s Negroes«. Reality teaches us that every society looks for its black man and finds him.
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