Performing iden­tity: A city to lose and find oneself

Poet Mati Shemoelof cele­brates Middle-Eastern culture in the heart of Germany, theatre director Sharon Kotkovsky iden­ti­fies more strongly as an Israeli-Jew since she moved to Germany and film director Jakob M. Erwa explores iden­tity in a city of accep­tance. Sami David Rauscher and Noa Amiel Lavie talked to them about their choice to live in Germany and the way it influences their work.

Berlin – the chosen city

Mati Shemoelof, an Israeli author and a poet, has lived in Berlin since 2013 and believes the city allows people to explore their iden­tity. »Berlin has no walls. The Middle East has walls, not only between Israel and Pales­tine, but ever­y­where. Berlin doesn’t force you to assi­mi­late. In other capi­tals, such as Paris or London, the cost of living is pushing people out, but in Berlin there is this spot in the middle, that doesn’t force you to speak perfect German, but still welcomes you and gives you oppor­tu­ni­ties. Berlin, as Tel Aviv, is a very culti­vated city and whoever comes here, does it in the name of crea­ting and making art.«

Berlin is also an attrac­tive city for those who grew up close by and are fluent in German: Jakob M. Erwa, director, screen­writer and film producer from Austria chose to move to Berlin many years ago. He values the city’s many oppor­tu­ni­ties to simul­ta­neously forget and find oneself. »The city is very diverse and stands for accep­tance. It is this repu­ta­tion and reality of the city that makes me feel like I belong here.«

Shemoelof mentions that a lot of Israelis who are coming to Berlin think that they are about to be reborn at first. »Espe­ci­ally those who were part of Israel’s elite. This percep­tion is similar to that of other Jews who came to Israel when it had just been estab­lished and thought they could erase their own history as Jews in the Golan did. I and the people that I’m surrounded by know that we will never become Germans. We are Israelis, we are still part of the fami­lies we left in Israel and we still want to dimi­nish the colo­nial tension between Israel and Pales­tine, between Israel and the Arabic diaspora«.

Iden­tity in motion

Sharon Kotkovsky, an Israeli theatre director and performer, also found out more about her iden­tity and its rela­tion to history when she moved to Germany. In 2015 she decided to follow her German life-partner and moved to Potsdam. Kotkovsky first conceived a theatre project when the strug­gles connected with being an immi­grant became incre­asingly present in her life. ​“But also because of the issue of language”, she says. ​“I don’t speak German fluently and cannot yet create in German. I wanted to bring a unique perspec­tive to Germany – the Israeli one – along with my iden­tity as an artist and as a person. When I left Israel and moved to Germany, I felt my iden­tity in a way that I’ve never felt before, much more strongly. Because I’m a foreigner, I’m not German. And I knew that through theatre I could express myself better. It might be that one day I will speak fluent German and I could create some­thing else, but that would also come from my perspec­tive as an Israeli, as a Jew, as who I am”.

Kotkovsty knew that in Germany she could find a place to express and deal with her iden­tity, ​“I guess it’s because of our shared history, the war and the holo­caust”, she says. ​“Germans and Jews have a common history that cannot be erased. The strong diplo­matic rela­tions between Israel and Germany also help to bring these issues into Germany. I think that Germany is still trying to clean the ​‚guilt‘ or at least to deal with it.“

In Germany she found that she iden­ti­fied more as a Jew and as an Israeli than she had done when living in Tel Aviv, and she decided to bring this into her art. She met Sabine Wiedemann, a German director and theatre educa­tio­nist, and toge­ther they estab­lished a theatre group that in June 2018 invited young people from Israel and Germany to take part in a seminar in colla­bo­ra­tion with the dancing ram theatre and Hoch­Drei e.V.. ​“The project ​‘Schöne Schuld’ (beau­tiful guilt) lasted 9 days and brought toge­ther 12 people from Israel aged 18 – 26 and Germans of the same age from Potsdam and Bran­den­burg”, she recalls.

“The goal was to explore the subject of guilt from a personal perspec­tive. We worked with docu­men­tary theatre methods inclu­ding recor­dings of inter­views with each of the group members. Besides this, we also dealt with the issue of iden­tity, multi­cul­tu­ra­lism – espe­ci­ally tole­rance and demo­cracy – and all these big words, but through specific exer­cises”. Kotkovsky says that although the Holo­caust was never an offi­cial subject in the seminar, it was inte­res­ting to see how it came up espe­ci­ally through personal stories. ​“Also, the issue of iden­tity came up through personal stories that the parti­ci­pants shared throug­hout the work­shop. Even­tually, they used their personal back­grounds for their theatre perfor­mance on stage. They tried to show each other what it means to be German or Israeli”.

Leaving Israel for Germany

In 2012 Mati Shemoelof, origi­nally from Tel Aviv, was invited to a trans­la­tion work­shop by the Lite­ra­tur­werk­statt. ​“Back then, I didn’t think I was about to leave Israel, or even deviate from the path I was on, because I was at a good moment in my life: I had a column in a news­paper, I was a well-known poet and parti­ci­pated in a poets’ commu­nity named ​‘Cultural Guerilla’”. It was 2012 – a year after the Israeli social justice protests – Shemoelof had been one of the pioneers. A year after the protests, the atmo­sphere among many Israelis was of disap­point­ment because nothing had changed. ​“When I was invited to Berlin it was a critical year because there was a rela­tively big wave of Israelis who had moved there. In the mean­time, another war broke out in Israel (Opera­tion Pillar of Defence), another right-wing govern­ment was estab­lished, and the social justice protests had led us nowhere. When I was invited, I was thrilled by the new oppor­tu­nity to write outside of Israel. It was my very first time in Germany and I think I stayed in Berlin for almost one month. I met a lot of Israelis back then, most of them are already back in Israel. I went back to Israel and decided to move. I departed again in September 2013, and since then I’ve been here”.

It doesn’t seem too diffi­cult to find a new home in this city. Jakob M. Erwa shares the senti­ment that Berlin is diffe­rent to other places in the world. His last movie Centre of My World, inclu­ding a gay love story, was screened by film festi­vals all over the world. »In Moscow we were confronted with an audi­ence that was incre­dibly thankful and moved to tears. Finding out about the horror the queer commu­nity is facing there made me feel even more thankful of the condi­tions in Berlin, even though not ever­y­thing is perfect here«.

Estab­li­shing safe spaces

Berlin itself is not a safe space: There have been around 40 violent attacks directly linked to racism in the first half of 2018 accor­ding to offi­cial police statis­tics. In the first nine months of this year, 105 criminal offences had a homo­phobic or trans­phobic back­ground. Acti­vists regu­larly point out racial profiling that happens in the city.

Berlin’s commu­nity is resi­lient though. Safe spaces are estab­lished by those who want to change society for the better. Shemoelof is one of them. In 2015 he estab­lished a project named ›Poetic Hafla‹ with Barak Moyal, an Israeli artist who also had moved to Berlin. So far more than 17 events have been held. ​“The project cele­brates foreig­n­ness and mainly the Middle-Eastern culture. Both of us, Barak and I, are Mizrahim (Jews who origi­nally came from Arab count­ries) and these events are about getting toge­ther with Pales­ti­nians and local Arabs and it’s actually a cele­bra­tion of the immi­grants in Germany”, says Shemoelof. ​“We are talking about a multi­di­sci­pli­nary event: dance, theatre perfor­mance, poetry. I’m a poet, for example, so I present my poetry without subtitles. Others perform in French, Syrian, etc. Out of this mixture, what comes out, comes out. It can be either poli­tical, queer, or both”.

Shemoelof claims that cele­bra­ting foreig­n­ness is nice, ​“but I’m focu­sing on what happens when people are brought toge­ther. What are they talking about, for example. It’s not only about acknow­led­ging other languages, but also the actual spea­king. This is some­thing you can’t do in Israel. On paper you can, of course, but it is not some­thing that actually happens. Best case, you have maybe one Arab or one Israeli-Russian. What is special about Poetic Hafla is the cele­bra­tion of diffe­rent languages. This conver­gence of diffe­rent people from the Middle East is not some­thing that could ever happen in Israel. You can’t just sit with someone in Egypt”.