An essay by Knut Ove Arntzen (University of Bergen)
In this essay I will give an outline of different ways of perceving forms of exile, especially with reference to artistic exile in the context of drama and theatre. I think we can differentiate between temporary exile, where the artist has escaped with then intention of returning or finally getting the chance to return. This kind of exile can take many routes, or one can speak about a topology of the exile in the sense of a geographical configuration or weave or pattern. The main example I want to bring forward of this form of exile is Bertolt Brecht.
His topology of exile is quite impressive, as he went for his first long stay in 1933 to Denmark where he settled in Svendborg until 1939, and from Denmark to Finland via Sweden. In Finland he was hosted by the Finnish-Estonian writer Helena Wuojoki, who gave him the material for the play Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti. They spent the summer in Marlebäck, an estate on the countryside outside Helsinki. From there on the topos changed via the Soviet Union to California, where he lived in Santa Monica. Although the dream of a career as a Musical script writer in New York, he had to go back to Germay after an interrogation by CIA, accusing him for being a communist. He never spoke good English, so it seems natural that an American career remained a dream, and more or less by force of expulsion he decided to go back to Europe where he was refused to settle in Austria (but got an Austrian passport) and accepted an offer to start his own theatre in East Berlin, becoming the star of East German theatre by the Berliner Ensemble, first situated in Deutsches Theater and then in his first theatre, Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, where he had taken part as a songwriter in the Production of the Three Penny Opera (Dreigroschen Oper). Ironically enough, that was the site where his fortune was made – the fortune that enabled him to take this long trip of emigration. But he ended up where he started.
The second form of exile is the Permanent Exile, which also could be described as the Terminal Exile, based in a final setteling down with almost no possible return-possibility. This form of exile I want to exemplify with the Jewish-Russian cabaretist and playwright Jura Soyfer. He came with his parents from the City of Charkow [ Zaristic Russia, today Ukraine ], where he was born in 1912, to Vienna with his parents fleeing the Russian Revolution. The father had been running business in Charkow, and one of his plays was titled Astoria, paraphrasing the invention of the new state of «Austria» after 1918, by two vagabonds meeting an American lady in a Road cross some where in a no-man´s land. Other plays by Soyfer, written in the style of cabaret-dramaturgy, are Der Weltuntergang, Vineta, Die versunkene Stadt und Broadway-Melodie 1492, the first one a kind of paraphrasing Vienna and the other at the occasion Columbus discovering America.
Soyfer worked in the political underground in the time of Austrofascist dictatorship and was 1937 imprissoned, but came free because of a General Amnesty. In the days of the Nazi occupation of Austria he tried to cross the border to Switzerland. He was accused of political activism on the left side and to be a Jew, came to the prisons in Feldkirch, Bludenz, Innsbruck and was internated in the concentration camp Dachau before he finally was sent to the concentration camp Buchenwald where he died of tyfus in 1939.
I want to dwell a little bit with Astoria, a play which is dealing with the image of two vagabonds or Landstreicher if you would like. One of his most well known songs is the song about the vagabond, translated into 36 languages.
In her article «Mein Bruder Vagabund»: Zum Nomadischen im Werk Jura Soyfer, Zalina Mardanova from the University of Vladikavkas in Northern Ossetia, a Russian Federal Republic, she speaks about Die Lebendigkeit Jura Soyfers, referring to Soyfers essay Die Tendenzbühne und ihr Publikum from 1932, speaking about how the audience in a theatre must be «packed» together in an atmospheric situation to be exited, and reacting politically. In the end of Astoria the last song is an urge to all proletarians to unite, and indicating the «Lumpenproletariat», those on the bottom of the society, referring directly to a song of the play: Das Lied vom Vagabunden, which Zalina Mardanova interprets as nomadic. In her article she says, to quote in German: «Das Nomadische stellt sich in seinen Texten – spielerisch und mit der Freiheit der künstlerischen Form eines Nestroy-Nachfolgers, eines politischen Kabarettisten, der auch der neoromantischen Sehnsucht nicht fremd war – auf vielen Ebenen ein (Mardanova 2009, 151). So, the main figures in this play are nomadic. In my article On Nomadis I define Nomadism the following way:
«Nomads can be understood in different contexts, as in an anthropological sense, nomads as a new concept in philosophy and nomads as a real and methaphorical concept for new artistic praxis both in real and metaphorical senses. The real sense is refering to art among nomadic people and metaphorical is referring to nomadism in new artistiic and theatrical creation».
The two vagabonds, Hupka and Pistoletti, are symbols of both popular culture and the nomad as a counterimage to the Staatsmachine, The statemachine with its bureaucracy. The point is to avoid it by keeping to the freedom of the wanderer. Mardanova refers also to Deuleze and Guattari in her article, to the Mille Plateaux, dealing with captialism and schizofrenia. So, by this reference we are touching upon the third definition of Exiles, which I will describe as the nomadic or circulating. It is very fit to describe the postmodern forms of exile, especially connected to artists migrating in-between east and west, and in-between continents.
However, artistic migration and nomadism in scenic and dramatic sense, is an old phenomenon. Touring or strolling Commedia dell´Arte Companies and English strolling companies as well as German Haupt- und Staatsaktionen are examples from the 16th and 17th centuries, whereas jugglers and joculatores are even older on the road, with outspring in Antiquitiy and the Middle Ages. These were sometimes artists coming back to their countries of origin, but some stayed on where they came to and contributed to developing theatre culture in their new environment. Touring theatre companies was a central part of European theatre history in the Nordic countries in the 18th and 19th centuries, and in the 20th century many Jewish theatre directors were on the road not only in Europe but also inbetween the continents. In Europe many dramatic writers changed country both before and after the Second World War, like the Irish Samuel Beckett or Rumanian Eugen Ionesco. The Theatre of the Absurd more or less came to being that way, rooted however in popular culture and the grotesque – and don´t forget the vagabonds in Pozzo and Lucky in Samuel Beckett´s Waiting for Godot, En attandant Godot.
In this sense Bertolt Brecht was also a vagabond in his exile topology, and maybe he is the most well known but by far not the only one. From Hungary in 1956 to Czechoslovakia in 1968 many theatre artist went into exile, like the scenographer Lubos Hruza who for many years worked in Oslo and Bergen – following in the traces of Russian and Baltic refugees fleeing the Russian Revolution and working as scenographers in Norway in the 1920s and 1930s. They brought a high level of artistic perfectionism. Different to the older more historic migration, many of the 20th century migrants were not migrants by willingness. Those who came from Bulgaria after the Communist take over there, were forbidden to return by law. After the fall of wall, a wave of artists from Eastern Europe came to the West to seek education and practice, like the well known Serbian (ex-Jugoslavian) performance artist Marina Abramowicz. During the Bosnian war many also came to seek new countries.
The wave of refugees coming from the Iraqi- and Syrian-crisis settled in Germany, were the phenomenon of Migrantentheater was established, a kind of theatre with their participation in smaller companies especially in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Some of them, including second generation Bosnians were together with the Israeli director Yanel Ronen invited to take of the institutional theatre Maxim Gorki in Berlin, where they have created a series of productions. In my contriubtion to the project, I will focuse on contemporary productions dealing with artistic migration in theatre and performance who lived some years in the 1930s. One of the productions is a performance lecture by Norwegian dramatist and scholar of German, Finn Iunker staging in 2017 a chess game between Brecht and Walter Benjamin. I have chosen two productions dealing with the exiled Bertolt Brecht in Svendborg, Denmark, where Benjamin during on of Benjamin´s visitis. The additionally I want to take a look at the Svendborg-based theater company Baggårdsteatrets production of Brechts Svendborg poems of exile (2018). Then I will compare with a 2017 production directed by Yanel Ronen at the Maxim Gorki Theater based on a paraprhasing of Hölderlin´s Winterreise-poems. Together with the general introduction and historical background, these examples are meant to put an immidiate and methodical focus on the question of theatre, performance and drama in the context of migration and different forms of exiles.
References:
Arntzen, Knut Ove, «From strolling companies to Jewish-Yiddish theatre in perspective of Nomadism», Bordering Europe. Our Marginals: Old and New. Perspectives from Literature, philosophy and Art, edited by Viorel Vizureanu, Sissel Lægreid og Oana Serban, Editura Universitatii din Bucturesti, Bucuresti 2017.
Gray, Ronald, Brecht. The Dramatist, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1976.
Krogh, Torben, Forudsætninger for den Casortiske pantomime”, i Studier fra sprog- og oldtidsforsking, nr 171, Povl Branner, København 1936.
Maradovna, Zalina, «´Mein Bruder Vagabund´: Zum Nomadischen im Werk Jura Soyfers», Jura Soyfer und die Alte Welt, ed Herbert Arlt, Wien 2009: INST.
Puklyte, Ina, «Reconstructing a Nomadic Network. Itinaries of Jewish Actors during the First Lithuanian Independence», in Nordic Theatre Studies, vol 27, no. 1-: Theatre and the Nomadic Subject, ed Stephen Wilmer, 2015.
Jura Soyfer und Theater, ed Herbert Arlt, Frankfurt am Main 1992: Peter Lang.