Sex, Race and Power around the Stage

On 15 March Klaus Dörr resigned from office as the artistic director of Berlin Volksbühne. The debate in public had opened only two days before when the leftist newspaper taz run a long article about a group of ten women who worked in various functions and departments of Volksbühne and joined last summer to exchange information about experiences with sexual harassment by Dörr. In January they had informed the Berlin senator for culture, Klaus Lederer, followed by his examination of the accusations with Dörr in person in early March. When taz published their article, Dörr denied all claims against him in public – for a mere couple of hours before he went off the stage.

‘the saviour’ of Volksbühne

Dörr was seen as the saviour of Volksbühne after the disaster of Chris Dercon’s directorship that ended after less than a season in spring 2018. Born 1961 in West Germany, the man with a degree in economics pursued a remarkable career in German theatre. First an assistant to the technical director at Berliner Ensemble in the late 1990s, Dörr became a freelance producer of independent theatre, one of the first in this new field and even able to handle the complexities of musical theatre. His reputation grew as a legend, yet he joined Armin Petras as the artistic director of Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin in 2006. Petras was the creative head of the unit while Dörr acted as the managing director with significant influence on the whole business including guest directors, auditions and other hiring procedures. The much respected team premiered more than 50 productions during their first year, an output unseen before at any theatre in Berlin. The extreme productivity of an under-financed theatre exhausted them in the course of seven seasons upon which they took over the much larger Schauspiel Stuttgart in 2013. When Volksbühne was close to artistic and economic collapse due to Dercon’s total mismanagement, Dörr was appointed by Lederer for saving the theatre and leading it for two ‘repair seasons’. A job that was very well done by Dörr, who brought in high-quality guest productions in his first year and hired a new ensemble with new, mostly young female, directors afterwards, plus good figures in economic efficiency and at the box office. He mastered the most difficult job after Castorf had been removed from this theatre and it looked like there would be a peaceful transition to René Pollesch as the next artistic director this fall.

Dörr is charged with a number of things that relate to his power of hire and fire: It begins with gazing at breasts during conversations with women in theatre affairs, sending suggestive text messages to them, touching them with sexual intentions, and outside this field, discriminating an actress for her age with a statement that women over 50 would not belong on stage. Apparently, there would be little to win in a juristic battle and Dörr backed out immediately. But there is another side to the story, with another political dimension. A renowned dramaturge who had worked for Petras and Dörr at Gorki Theater had sent a warning to Lederer when he appointed Dörr to his rescue mission. His behaviour could be inappropriate towards women in his job dependency. If this whistle-blower info was simply ignored by Lederer, who was happy to have found the best man to save one of his most important theatres, it could become a related affair. Of course, all this happens when theatres are closed and Germany is suffering from the mess of failed Corona politics. It would be much bigger otherwise.

Düsseldorf

Another field boosted in German culture lately is the conditions of Afro-Germans, people of colour, of race relations and discrimination in general. What used to be the field of ethnic minorities like Italians, Greeks and Turks from the first wave of labour immigration in the 1960s and 1970s, this has now become a much more complex field of race and identity politics which was empowered by the Black Lives Matter movement among other things. There is a certain sensibility also in theatre now, as black-facing and casting politics, for instance, are concerned. Another side of the heated debate is the term ‘structural racism’ implying that all white Germans are racist by nature – which causes naturally a repulse that would help nobody in the end and yet fuels endless debates about discrimination, guilt and misbehaviour.

At Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, however, a severe case of racism occurred two years ago, and it took a while until it found its way to public debate which is already an essential part of the problem. Armin Petras (yes, the same director from above) was rehearsing Georg Büchner’s Dantons Tod (Danton’s Death) for which he created the additional character of Toussaint Louverture, a former slave. That was quite in the spirit of Heiner Müller’s The Missionwhich is indeed closely related to the other play about the French revolution. Louverture, as a real historical person a grand leader, was called by the director ‘the slave’, like these short names for roles that blend the actor with his work. In this case the young Afro-German actor Ron Iyamu, who found such naming an aggressive insult. While this may have been seen as somewhat ambiguous, Iyamu was also physically attacked and insulted during the making of a video for this Danton, when a colleague moved the knife in his hand towards Iyamu’s underbelly with a racist remark. He reported this to the dramaturge who was supposed to forward it to the people who investigate such misbehaviour in theatre. They offered Iyamu to make it public but he denied this in favour of his job. Later he reported the incident to a newspaper and a while after this as racist culture to the local radio station. Now the immense conflict is not only the racist quality of the incidents but also the accusation of the artistic director to have ignored them. Wilfried Schulz tries to negotiate the situation with Iyamu, who wants to leave the theatre anyway and blames it as a whole for having put the case under the carpet as long as possible. Yet, one would be careful to call this ‘structural racism’ inherent to German theatre as such.

In this case of Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus the power relations cannot be seen as direct and immediate as it was in Volksbühne with Dörr as the artistic director. Yet the whole interdependence of responsibilities in the sensitive work of theatre comes to the fore and must be brought under more control. At least one conclusion can be drawn from both stories: Artistic directors of such power and influence need more ‘checks and balances’ around them to make such shameful incidents public early on. (Published March 27^th2021)