Offensive, discursive, narrative: just three of the attributes that could be mentioned in the context of publicist Mely Kiyak ‘s weekly column on the website of Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater. Here, for example, it is about identity(ies) and the politics with them, about old, new and secret representatives of political right camps, flawless Nazis and culture(s) of memory.
After all, it is a “theater column”, stage and performance situations, in short staging situations, real political plays and performances and quite a few German tragicomedies will be considered. But which, like the following example, only get their comic note from the excess of tristesse, which seems even more difficult to cope with without humor.
In “Germany cares. Will Fatih Akin get the Oscar?” the columnist quotes from German-language reviews of Fatih Akin’s film “Out of Nowhere” and forms from them, as she writes, a “terrible suspicion”:
“Possibly it is simply a shock for German film critics that a Turk (for me he is a Hamburg director, but I am quite alone in this view) could win an Oscar with a film about the greatest national disgrace since the founding of the Federal Republic, namely the NSU. It’s just too much. He has received the most important awards for years, is internationally recognized. This was okay for German film critics as long as he made films that could be classified as belonging to the “foreigner milieu”. But now the German critics will not forgive a German artist with Turkish parents. Making the NSU big. And then also with a German actress who usually only works for Americans. There appears to have been a betrayal here on several levels.”
More columns by Mely Kiyak can be found here (ZEIT Online), for example, and a conversation from her series “Where is your art at home?” with cabaret artist Serdar Somuncu can be found here.