This week in Berlin's “Ballhaus Naunynstrasse” theater there will be a performance of “The Story of the Last Thought,” a play based on a novel by Edgar Hilsenrath. The theater is located in Berlin-Kreuzberg, a quarter where many people with different cultural backgrounds live together, a lot of them of Turkish background.
About the play
The spectator enters the hall and finds himself in an oriental tent, in a completely different world, a fairy tale world that seems to be pleasant and cozy...
Exactly 94 years ago, Thovma Khatisian saw the light of day under wondrous circumstances: without parents and only through the thrust of a bayonet in the middle of the meager Anatolian landscape. He spends his life looking for his parents, but without any success. Yet, on a promising day, just a blink away from his last breath, he meets a storyteller who promises to reveal Thovma's secret.
“Many people will be looking for words, my little lamb,” says the storyteller, “in order to grasp your destiny. They will call it a massacre and the scholars will say, it's a genocide. Some smart ass will say, it has to be called Armenocid and the very last idiotic specialist will check it in dictionaries and insist that it should be called Holocaust... What all of them don't know, my little lamb, is that every human being is unique...”
A conversation with Mıraz Bezar (producer)
“I did not want it to become a historical treatise. This was not so easy, because one wants to give a lot of information. But I wanted the audience to be seduced. I wanted to make them laugh – but then oh, OK the laugh gets stuck in the throat…”
Mıraz Bezar, producer and director, staged the play with three actors: Recai Hallaç, Bea Kerbekian Ehlers and Mehmet Yılmaz. He explains that it was very intensive to work on the play and for the actors it was important to talk a lot. They wanted to know and understand everything, and for all of them it was a personal matter to act in this play.
Mıraz himself is from a Kurdish background and lives in Berlin. Producing this play also meant reflecting on his own history; the village where his grandparents used to live is close to the Armenian border and was formerly Armenian. The families of his grandparents moved there after the village was empty, but nobody in his family ever spoke explicitly about these events. It's true that the Kurdish public is aware of the Kurdish involvement in the genocide, but generally the Kurdish see themselves mostly as victims of the whole system. Still – the Kurdish had a lot of advantages from the assassination of the Armenians...
“I think that today's discussions do no justice to what really happened. It was something disastrous, dreadful, something that changed the country irrevocably. And the way we deal with it still seems too nonchalant to me – when I say ‘we’ I am especially talking about the people who are living in Turkey, and who are pushing this subject aside.”
Yet the play does not only ask about the Turkish and Kurdish role. Many others were involved, and so were German representatives – being not only confidants but assistants.
“To us it was very important to show the German involvement, especially as we were producing this play in Germany, in Berlin. It is commonly assumed that the Germans knew what happened, and that - unfortunately - they could not do anything about it. Now there are many hints that show that Germany was far more involved then just being an eyewitness. German military logistically supported the deportations.”
There is knowledge among very few people about the events at that time; therefore Mıraz wants to gain more attention for this subject and a new willingness to go into it.
“Of course I am interested in what has happened in the past, but I am even more interested in the question: how can we use this knowledge for the future? That means to learn from what has happened. For me there is no difference from a human point of view between, let's sa,y Darfur, Bosnia and what has happened to the Armenian or to the Kurds.
The basic idea that leads to massacres, assassination, nationalism, mania and so on is always the same. And I ask myself: why would somebody living in 2009 feel like defending something that has happened a hundred years ago?”
Mıraz would like to go on tour to different German cities as well as to Armenia and Istanbul. The most important thing would always be to get into dialogue with the audience.
“It's about today, it's about the future.”
Dana Jirous – Peace Dialogue NGO
Photos: Ute Langkafel, MAI.FOTO
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