Jewish joke telling in Muttersprache Mameloschn: performing queer intervention on the German stage

Abstract

This essay explores the central role of Jewish joke telling in Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s play Muttersprache Mameloschn (first performed in 2012). Subversively revealing the problematic of essentializing cultural, national, and even sexual identity, Jewish joke telling figures as a performance of social and political resistance and disidentification in this play. Engaging with Jack Halberstam’s queer epistemology of failure and José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of queer disidentification, I propose that the act of Jewish joke telling by a young lesbian plays out as a new queer project of intervention in this play that confronts both antisemitism and culturally positioned sexual hegemony.

Keywords:

• contemporary German theater
• Jewish jokes
• performance
• queer theory
• Jewish lesbian identity

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editorial collective at Women and Performance and the anonymous peer reviewer for their insightful feedback and comments.

Note on contributor

Olivia Landry is currently a Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh in the Department of German. She will begin a position as the William H. Bonsall Acting Assistant Professor of German at Stanford University in the fall of 2016. Her research interests include contemporary German and European transnational theater and film, gender, sexuality, performance, and social justice. She has authored a number of articles on these topics that have appeared most recently in Transit, Colloquia Germanica, Seminar, and The Germanic Review.

Notes

1. I have chosen to use the German title of the play as opposed to the English translation “Mameloschn Mother Tongue” (translated by Katy Derbyshire) because I base my analysis primarily on the three performances I attended at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and on the published German text. However, I would like to thank Sasha Marianna Salzmann and the Goethe Institute for German Culture in Boston for providing me with an unpublished English translation of the play, which has been a helpful reference.

2. This was the first production of the play. Starring Gabriele Heinz, Anita Vulesica, and Natalia Belitski, it premiered on 12 September 2012 at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. While mostly faithful to Salzmann’s original text, Bartkowiak does use a different joke to open the play. In the published version, the first joke is about a son’s Freudian slip about his overbearing Jewish mother. See (Sasha) Marianna Salzmann, Muttersprache Mameloschn / Schwimmen lernen (2013a).

3. The play has been translated into English by Katy Derbyshire (though not published) and presented as a theatrical reading in the United States at the Goethe Institute in Boston under the title Mameloschn Mother Tongue (October 2013). It bears mentioning that “Muttersprache” and “Mameloschn” both mean “mother tongue” in German and Yiddish, respectively.

4. See for example the following interview with Sasha Marianna Salzmann at the Goethe Institute for German culture in Boston (2013b). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB0lsLyMVnA.

5. An active playwright in Germany since 2010, Salzmann’s rich repertoire of plays include: Weißbrotmusik (2010, dir. Nick Hartnagel); Satt (2011, dir. Stefanie Bauerochse); Beg Your Pardon (2012, dir. Hakan Savaş Mican); Muttermale Fenster blau (2012, dir. Carina Riedl); Fahrräder könnten eine Rolle spielen (co-written with Deniz Utlu) (2012, dir. Lukas Langhoff); Schwimmen lernen (2013, dir. Paul-Georg Dittrich / Hakan Savaş Mican); Kasimir und Karoline (2013, dir. Nurkan Erpulat); Wir Zöpfe (2015, dir. Babett Grube); and Meteoriten (2016, dir. Hakan Savaş Mican).

6. Making up Germany’s largest cultural minority, Turkish Germans’ history predominantly began with the labor agreements between West Germany and Turkey in the postwar period, initiated in 1961 and extending to 1973. It is a fact that many Turkish citizens chose to settle in Germany indefinitely. Herself a Turkish German, Shermin Langhoff is also the former artistic director of the smaller-scale Berlin theater Ballhaus Naunynstraße, which gained notoriety in its five years under her direction (from 2008 to 2013) as a theater focused primarily on Turkish German narratives and performances. The concept of postmigrant theater originated even earlier in 2006, when Langhoff organized the first postmigrant theater festival Beyond Belonging: Migration at another Berlin theater the Hebbel am Ufer.

7. In addition to its extensive repertoire of plays, as part of its postmigrant focus, the Maxim Gorki Theater regularly holds discussion sessions, panels, readings, and presentations on topics of immigration, discrimination, human rights, etc. For more information on the theater’s program, see http://english.gorki.de/.

8. It should be noted that of the roughly 15,000 Jewish-Germans who survived the concentration camps only a small fraction remained in Germany. Many fled to Israel after the country declared independence in 1948.

9. In 2015 in France, which has the third largest population of Jews in the world (nearly half a million), 8000 Jewish French citizens left France for Israel because of antisemitism. While the situation in Germany has been different, there are concerns of growing antisemitism often linked to concerns about the increased presence of Muslim asylum seekers in Germany. The quote from Salzmann is from a recent interview with Ijoma Mangold (2015) from the German weekly Die Zeit, “Rassismus trifft alle Minderheiten” (“Racism affects all minority groups”). The original quote reads as follows: “Wir müssen schauen: Wo haben marginalisierte Communitys Gemeinsamkeiten, wo können wir uns gegenseitig stärken und unterstützen? … Wir dürfen un nicht gegeneinander ausspielen lassen”. (Translations from German to English are my own unless otherwise indicated.)

10. See for example Naomi Seidman’s brief but comprehensive overview of the problem of antisemitic tradition of “queering” the modern Jewish man in her recent article “Reading ‘Queer’ in Ashkenaz: This Time from East to West” (2011).

11. Katka Reszke’s insightful study on the post-Holocaust generation in Poland acutely explores this phenomenon: Return of the Jew: Identity Narratives of the Third Post-Holocaust Generation of Jews in Poland (2013).

12. See, for example, Heather Love’s Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (2009) and Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003).

13. Salzmann states this in an interview for the Deutsches Theater and is quoted here from the play’s theatrical program.

14. There is some exception to this in other parts of Europe, especially in parts of Eastern Europe. As Ruth W. Wisse (2013) notes, Jewish comedy performance gained considerable momentum in Poland, for instance, just as the Nazis were solidifying their power throughout Europe. See No Joke: Making Jewish Humor, here 144.

15. Two exceptions include the work of filmmaker Dani Levy and the stand-up work of comedian Oliver Polak.

16. “Da ist Theater der einzige Ort, wo du das kollektiv (sic) erleben kannst, dass man seine Meinung ändern kann.” See Jens Hillje in interview (also with Shermin Langhoff, Tunçay Kulaoğlu, and Wagner Carvalho) “Im besten Fall stürzt das Weltbild ein” (2013), 14. (All translations from German to English are my own unless otherwise indicated.)

17. As Seizer points out in her abovementioned article, anthropologists Mary Douglas and Elliott Oring have made strong arguments for the inherent subversive nature of jokes. See Douglas’s essay “Jokes” in Implicit Meaning: Selected Essays in Anthropology ([1975] 1999) and Oring’s Jokes and their Relations (1992). That having been said, Oring has revisited his earlier work on jokes in his 2003 study Engaging Humor.

18. “Warum nimmt ein Jude keine Schmerzmittel? Weil der Schmerz dann weggeht” (Salzmann 2012, 9). (Translation by Katy Derbyshire.)

19. In late 2013 the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights published the results of a study exploring the experience of Jewish people living in the European Union. In the key findings, it is noted that 66% of respondents claimed that antisemitism is a “major problem” in their country and 76% stated that the problem of antisemitism has increased in the last five years. See further results of this study on the webpage for the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights: <http://fra.europa.eu/en/press-release/2013/combating-antisemitism-more-targeted-measures-needed>. We may also consider the increase in antisemitic crimes in Europe over the past year, including the high-profile murderous attack on the kosher supermarket in Paris following the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

20. It bears mentioning that some of the jokes from the original script by Salzmann have been altered by the director, Brit Bartkowiak. In fact, Bartkowiak inserts an additional joke in her staging. Unfortunately, I cannot confirm if this has also been in the case in other stagings of the play.

21. RAHEL: Das bin ich. Die Ziege. / CLARA: Ach so. / RAHEL: Ich bin doch schon längst weg (Salzmann 2012, 42). (Translation by Katy Derbyshire.)

22. See Boyarin, Daniel, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini, eds, Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (2003).

23. “Was meinst du mit ‘ich stehe nicht auf Männer’?” (Salzmann 2012, 35). (Translation by Katy Derbyshire.)

24. “Ich bin nicht zur Deutschen geworden. Ich bin schon immer eine Deutsche gewesen!” (Salzmann 2012, 26). (Translation by Katy Derbyshire.)

25. “Wie telefoniert ein kluger Jude mit einem dummen? Von Amerika nach Europa” (Salzmann 2012, 73). (Translation by Katy Derbyshire.)

26. I have not had the opportunity to see Wir Zöpfe, but it would likely provide an interesting comparison to Muttersprache Mameloschn in the context of joke telling. Here I refer to a critique from Spiegel Online by Tobias Becker, “Migrationskomödie ‘Wir Zöpfe’. Das Biest atmet schwer unter seinem haarigen Pelz” (Feb. 2015).