A stage 
for an open society

German managers do not wear T-shirts flaunting 
the name of their company in large lettering. Not even German theatre managers do that. Shermin Langhoff is a little bit different, however. The director of the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin proudly dons her 
theatre’s merchandising product for work. She has a firm hand-shake and exudes enough good humour for ten people, as if her job were not stress but a vacation. Needless to say, she 
has every reason to be in good spirits. In her very first year as director of the smallest of Berlin’s city theatres, “the Gorki” was nominated “Theatre of the Year”. It is frequently booked out and some of its productions travel to festivals, so she herself and her artists are riding a wave of approval.

Yet when she started out in 2013, she did everything “wrong”. Shermin Langhoff’s Gorki was the first German city theatre 
to be given a clear thematic label. She also engaged a number of unknown actors with names Germans find difficult to pronounce, rejected all good advice on how to draw up a successful programme and blithely ignored the fact that this poorly subsidised theatre had no reserves in case of failures. But Shermin Langhoff has a mission, and for this a large venue was overdue.

Langhoff’s new motto over the door of the Gorki was “Post-­Migrant Theatre”. From a rear courtyard theatre in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, a neighbourhood refuge where for five years she had developed her idea of an intercultural theatre, she moved to the rear courtyard of the big Berlin cultural institutions along the boulevard Unter den Linden. Her self-confident claim that a theatre of newcomers-in-town had a place at the very heart of Germany’s conception of itself, was to 
be demonstrated in the temple-like building of the former 
Singakademie, which has served as a theatre since 1952.

One might believe that between Humboldt University and the German History Museum, where her “post-migrant theatre” has established itself, internationality was a matter of course these days. And this is certainly so in many parts of German society on this, the 25th anniversary of German Unification. Yet while directors from western Europe and the United State are often guests in the city theatres, only rarely will you find actors from Turkey, Africa or eastern Europe in their ensembles. The perspective from which themes are viewed on stage shifts with directors and actors with hybrid identities and different migration histories.

“Our theatre reflects what makes this city,” says Langhoff. In her international ensemble, life paths intertwine across continents, with roots in Kazakhstan, Israel, Africa or Schrobenhausen, and become knotted together in the respective project. The rule for choosing colleagues is that the “country of origin plays no role”. Indeed, this is her core message. In this “conflict-zone project”, as Langhoff calls it, there is neither clientele art nor a false consideration of national sensitivities – for example, when Shermin Langhoff, a Cherkessian born in Turkey, initiates a series of projects on the mass murder of Armenians in 1915, which the government of the country of her birth does 
not regard as genocide; or when in the course of the festivities marking the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall the artists group called Centre for Political Beauty dismantles the memorial crosses to those killed trying to escape so as to erect 
them anew at the external borders of the European Union where refugees are dying today. By then it is evident that the Gorki theatre advocates humaneness without borders, and does so with a broad historical horizon and without national bias. “We take history personally”, says Langhoff, “and that is what characterises us.”

This expert for heartfelt rebelliousness has chosen as her co-intendant, Jens Hillje, a dramaturgy specialist. Hillje is very 
familiar with German theatre, having been in the management team of the Berlin Schaubühne for ten years. He off-sets the hands-on optimism of his partner with pessimistic social analyses. “One of the fundamental experiences and assumptions of this theatre is the realisation that in every state things could take a totally different political direction,” says Hillje with a view to the anti-democratic developments and current conflicts in Central and Eastern Europe and in the Middle East. What links this duo is their faith in a modern popular theatre, meaning, not dialect or comedy theatre, but “a theatre aimed 
at everyone, not just the middle class.” An “urban popular 
theatre”, Langhoff interjects. The theatre programme offers this urban population up-dated classics by Ibsen, Hebbel or Kleist, and comedies about life as an Islamist or a homosexual in a small town, projects about the civil war in Yugoslavia or lively narrative pieces about problems in Berlin’s various neighbourhoods.

The fact that his new popular theatre can sometimes be a 
bit shrill, simple or didactic means that many critics find the overall project better than its constituent products. But the 
audiences feel it’s relevant to them and go in droves to this post-migrant theatre. “This kind of audience wants to become involved,” Hillje is proud to say. And Langhoff adds: “The people feel that it is they who are being addressed, in all the heterogeneity that makes Berlin what it is.”

Part of this heterogeneity is the political leadership of the country. Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose private apartment is located not far from the theatre, has attended performances, as has Federal President Joachim Gauck or Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who also took part in workshop talks at the Gorki. Shermin Langhoff is clearly delighted that the discussions about the openness and diversity of German society initiated here daily are being met with such a broad interest. But she is also a bit afraid of the “abundance of sympathy”. The themes that preoccupy the Gorki, i.e., migration and intercultural conflicts, are not really the stuff of too much consensus!

“We would not exist if there were not a lot to do,” says Hillje. 
But the old attempts to promote a freer and more just society with left-right rivalry, the great isms or intellectual know-alls, are not a model for these post-migrants. “Ultimately, enlightenment is about who is decent and who is a rogue,” says Shermin Langhoff. And getting this critical message from the theatre 
to society presumably works better with the enthusiasm expressed in a simple sentence: “Politically, I regard what we are doing here as so very important,” Langhoff rejoices during our conversation. To which one can only say: the country needs people like this.” ▪