The idea of this article initially stemmed from the apparent gap between Anglo-American theatre and Continental Europe in regard to racial representation. Speaking about Laurence Olivier’s blackface performance as Othello at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 1964, Steven Berkoff argued he was lucky ‘to witness this great event before the fiends of political correctness in all their self-righteousness had struck a no-go zone for white actors on that particular role.… Great drama is colourblind.’Footnote ¹ In Anglo-American theatre, Berkoff deplored the fact that over the past decades most of the actors playing Othello have been Black, while a consensus gradually developed to condemn blacked-up white actors as offensive and racist. Analogously, in 2015, Stanley Wells urged the theatre industry to ‘grow up’ and to allow white actors to play the part of Othello.Footnote ²

There is a significant contrast in the way theatrical embodiment is conceived on stage in the UK and the US, on the one hand, and in Continental Europe on the other hand – a contrast which is directly related to the understanding of race in both geographical areas. Even though Critical Race Theory (CRT) has been developed in the 1990s as a theoretical framework used to address the intricacies of American race relations, it is possible – and necessary – to resort to CRT to address the issue of race in Continental Europe without projecting the American realities onto the European continent and falling into the traps of ‘dehistoricization’, ‘derealization’ and ‘false universalization’. Fatima El-Tayeb points out that Continental Europe does have a specific way of perceiving and constructing race, which should not be regarded as a cultural and social monopoly of the UK or the US. She argues that Europe perceives itself as a continent ‘free of race (and by implication racism)’ and that addressing race in a Continental European context implies ‘violat[ing] the powerful narrative of Europe as a colorblind continent’.Footnote ³ Over the past few years, Continental Europe has thus been struggling to face its inherent systemic racism, mainly because of the myth of a ‘colour-blind’ society. Conceptual tools are therefore crucial to deconstruct both white supremacy and the fantasy of ‘colour-blindness’ in Europe, and CRT is a valuable framework as it engages with race critically and may shed a new light on theatrical practices such as casting.

Thomas Ostermeier’s temporary experimentation with blackface is a striking example of rethinking the representation of race on stage. In his 2010 production of Othello, the German stage-director raised this question by casting a white actor, Sebastian Nakajew, to play the eponymous Black character. Ostermeier’s tradaptation – an adaptation relying on a translation of the dramatic text – premiered during the Hellenic Festival Epidaurus in Greece (August 2010) before opening in Berlin (October 2010). The archival film was shot in the teething phase of this production while Ostermeier was still experimenting to come up with a relevant way to deal with race on stage. Blackface was not used after the shooting of this archival video; it was clearly ruled out by Ostermeier in the following performances. Indeed, Nakajew appears without face or body make-up in photos and videos from Epidaurus, and in all photos on the Schaubühne website and from a touring appearance in Paris in 2011. What does it mean to represent Othello’s race onstage? Is the visual presence of his Blackness essential? The director and actors evidently struggled with these questions long after the production had premiered.

Before devoting a thorough analysis to Ostermeier’s production, a brief state of the field regarding the existing studies on the history of blackface, Othello and theatre in Germany is necessary to comprehend the dynamics at stake in Ostermeier’s case. From the 2010s onward, blackface in Germany has particularly drawn the attention of critics; a series of articles was published on the online platform ‘Textures’ set up by the International Research Center for Advanced Studies on Interweaving Performance Cultures of the Freie Universität Berlin: Joy Kristin Kalu’s ‘On the myth of authentic representation: Blackface as reenactment’; ‘“Ich bin kein Nazi!” – the blackface debate in the German mainstream media’ by Julia Lemmle; Daniela Daude’s ‘Racialization in contemporary German theater’; Sharon Dodua Otoo’s ‘(Ab)using Fadoul and Elisio: unmasking representations of whiteness in German theatre’; and Sandrine Micossé-Aikins’s ‘Not just a Blackened face’.Footnote ⁴ These publications came in the wake of a major scholarly symposium entitled ‘Blackface, Whiteness, and the Power of Definition in German Contemporary Theatre’ and funded by the Freie Universität Berlin in October 2012. Jonathan Wipplinger also contributed to the scholarship on German blackface with his article ‘The racial ruse: on Blackness and Blackface comedy in “fin-de-siècle” Germany’.Footnote ⁵ Somehow, all this research on blackface and race in Germany is always connected to the power – more or less obvious – of white supremacy and its way of influencing our understanding of race and representation.

The issue of Othello’s Blackness and the possibility of resorting to blackface on the German stage has been the focus of many articles published over the past few years as well. In his emblematic chapter ‘How Black must Othello be? Polemical reflections on the representation of cultural foreignness in theatre’, Christopher Balme points out that German theatre prefers a metaphorical aesthetic of representation to deal with race, arguing that it is not uncommon to have a white actor playing a Black character on the German contemporary stage.Footnote ⁶ Likewise, in ‘Who is Othello? On the construction of identity and foreignness in contemporary productions of Shakespeare’s Othello’ (my translation), Miriam Dreysse explores the representation of Othello’s racial identity on the German stage with a focus on Stefan Pucher’s 2004 production of the play with a white Othello in blackface.Footnote ⁷ She claims that, in this performance, blackface is a masquerade, the artificiality of which denounces the racist dimension of the theatrical practice. In 2015, with ‘Race, guilt and “innocence”: facing blackfacing in contemporary German theater’, Katrin Sieg intends to assert that blackface is part of the German cultural tradition in theatre but also that it is not an offensive practice.Footnote ⁸

In this article, I will build my argument on this scholarship, arguing that blackfacing is an artificial metaphor to represent race on stage and that the impact (offensive and abusive) can sometimes be different from the intention (a critique of racism). More recently, Alessandra Bassey published ‘Brown, never Black: Othello on the Nazi stage’, in which she explores the denial of Othello’s dark skin in the Nazi era; and Bettina Boecker addressed the racial difference of Othello in her chapter ‘A tragedy? Othello and The Merchant of Venice in Germany during the 2015–16 refugee crisis’.Footnote ⁹ In 2022, Lawrence Guntner offered a critical overview of the representation of the Moor of Venice on the German stage, from a performance in Dresden in 1661 to Othello, nach Shakespeare (‘Othello, After / According to Shakespeare’) in 2016.Footnote ¹⁰ As Guntner argues, Othello’s visible Blackness as a racial marker was avoided until the late twentieth century, which marks a turning point in the representation of race on the German stage. Towards the end of the twentieth century, race and racism had become the main issues of Othello, which influenced translations and performances of the play.

The theoretical framework of this article draws from two concepts which emphasize the constructedness of race and the scope of playing in/with the race of the other, and from materialist critical race studies. In the Ostermeier performance of Othello under consideration, blackface involves both cross-racial casting and racial prosthetics, i.e. the production of ‘racecraft’ which refers to the illusion of race produced by racism – which is related to ‘mental terrain and to pervasive belief’.Footnote ¹¹ This article aims to investigate racecraft, or the way Blackness was constructed and designed in Ostermeier’s production, and to examine how it is theatrically invested with the cultural power of white supremacy through the experimental blackface carried out onstage. I will first present blackface as playing in/with the race of the other, having thus a ludic dimension for the white actor in blackface onstage. I argue that blackface is a traumatic, harmful theatrical practice related to play as torture for the BIPOC audience.Footnote ¹² Play can be pleasant but also heinous, for it all depends on perspective. As a result, what is pleasant, harmless play for whiteness may be experienced as torture play for BIPOC people. Aaron Trammel advocates for a rethinking of the phenomenology of play to study ‘the most insidious ways that play has functioned as a tool of subjugation. A tool that hurts as much as it heals and has been complicit in the systemic erasure of BIPOC people from the domain of leisure.’Footnote ¹³ Indeed, as a practice that ‘divide[s] and exclude[s]’, blackface ‘only exacerbate[s] the problem of racist exclusion’.Footnote ¹⁴ Blackface will thus be analysed through the prism of play as torture to emphasize its material effects on the bodies and minds of the BIPOC audience.

I will then examine the theatrical practice of blackface by adopting a materialist approach, thus not limiting myself to theoretical principles but taking into account the material consequences of blackface on both the white body of the actor on stage and the Black body being conjured up by blackface, thereby engaging in a critique of the performative approach to blackface inherited from the linguistic turn. For instance, Susan Gubar argues that blackface is a case in point of ‘racechange’, defined as a way ‘to suggest the traversing of race boundaries, racial imitation or impersonation, cross racial mimicry or mutability, white posing as black or black passing as white, pan racial mutability’.Footnote ¹⁵ Racechange involves ‘test[ing] the boundaries between racially defined identities’ and enhances the power clashes at stake in the representation of race.Footnote ¹⁶ Her performative approach to blackface suggests focusing on the discursive rather than on the material. Talking of racechange is problematic insofar as it denies the authenticity of trans lives experienced by real bodies. By arguing in favour of racial transubstantiation on stage, Gubar ignores the specificities of transness and the materiality of trans bodies through the parallelism she makes between the symbolic, racial ‘transformation’ of the white body in blackface onstage and the real transformation of bodies such as trans ones, thus marked as ‘transitive’ and ‘transversal’ to use Snorton’s concepts.Footnote ¹⁷ Indeed, trans lives cannot be reduced to performances and used symbolically to refer to theatrical practices, for it denies the very authenticity of their bodies by stigmatizing their materiality.

I will explore the ways in which Blackness was represented onstage with a special focus on the black make-up used on Nakajew in the archive performance of the production recorded by the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin. I will put an emphasis on a performance of the play temporarily experimenting with blackface, arguing that it follows the German casting tradition of cross-racial casting, with white actors regularly playing Black characters with or without blackface, but also on the practice of blackface which is deeply rooted in German cultural history. I will discuss the scope of black-up in Ostermeier’s tradaptation of Othello while taking into account the fact that it was a temporary experimentation carried out in a context of theatrical instability. I will also argue that the perspective of white supremacy orients the German perception and conception of race. Blackness is closely linked to whiteness, which means that when one examines blackface – which is a representation of Blackness – whiteness must also be taken into consideration.

In order to fully understand Ostermeier’s view of Othello, one must first gain an understanding of the context in which the play was produced: Germany’s self-perception as a white country and the banality of blackface in German cultural history have had an influence on the depiction of the protagonist. The following pages will offer insights into pre-Ostermeier German productions of Othello with a focus on the representation of the eponymous character’s racial difference, while taking into account the wider theatrical context of the post-Ostermeier German stage to emphasize Germany’s complicated historiography of race in the contemporary theatre. Then, a close analysis of the metatheatrical prologue of the production and its postmodern racial prosthetics will enable me to address the theatrical strategies developed by Ostermeier in this experimental performance of Othello. Eventually, I will discuss the conceptual chiaroscuro of critical whiteness and cosmetic Blackness onstage to spotlight the tensions between the director’s and the creative crew’s intentions, as well as the impact of the performance on the audience.

Immigration or the Great German Denial: Self-Perception and White Supremacy

When he refers to casting politics on the German contemporary stage, the German theatre critic Christopher Balme presents Germany as a country which perceives itself as white and without a significant racial diversity. For him, casting a white actor in a Black role is due to the composition of German theatre companies, thus suggesting that Germany is a country without POC minorities.Footnote ¹⁸ Such directorial decisions were always justified, ‘but nevertheless masked racist operations in German theatre at the institutional level’.Footnote ¹⁹ There seems to be a conflict between policies implemented regarding immigration and the mainstream discourse on national identity, and the German self-perception as white, symptomatic of the myth of Europe being homogeneously white.Footnote ²⁰

In the post-war era, the western German ‘economic miracle’ increased the need for labour, which became even more urgent with the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961.Footnote ²¹ The Federal Republic of Germany started a recruitment plan to hire ‘guest workers’. The first agreement was made with Italy in 1955, and between 1960 and 1968 others followed suit – Greece, Spain, Turkey, Morocco, Portugal, Tunisia and Yugoslavia. After the 1973 oil crisis, the recruitment of workers from outside the European Economic Community stopped, but 4 million foreigners were already living in Germany at this point. It amounted to about 5 million in 1989. The German Democratic Republic also had a similar recruitment plan from the mid-1960s, but to a much lesser extent.Footnote ²² Foreign nationals mostly came from the European member states of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, and later from Algeria, Cuba, Mozambique, Viet Nam, Mongolia, China and Angola. Until the 1980s, asylum immigration was quantitatively low, and mostly from countries of the former Eastern Bloc. It rose to 438,000 people in 1992, but in 2004, it amounted to about 36,000 individuals. During the 1990s, Germany also granted protection to 345,000 refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina, and, from 1999, 195,000 refugees from Kosovo. However, most of them returned to their native countries afterwards. In the 1990s, the number of Jewish immigrants coming from the states of the former Soviet Union started to increase – in 2004, it amounted to 219,000 applications sent to the Federal Republic of Germany. This meant Germany had the third-largest Jewish community in Europe after France and the UK.Footnote ²³ The 2000 Reform of the Nationality Law changed everything by granting German nationality to foreign children born in Germany. It also introduced new regulations for adult foreigners – reducing, for instance, the time required for naturalization. Moreover, the Green Card Initiative of the Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder encouraged IT-skilled workers to immigrate. New institutions were also created, such as the independent commission ‘Immigration’ by the Federal Minister of the Interior Otto Schily in 2000, and the Federal Office for the Recognition of Foreign Refugees was centralized in 2004.Footnote ²⁴

However, Dietrich Thränhardt points out that Germany is an ‘undeclared immigration country’.Footnote ²⁵ Christian Joppke insists that, according to official declarations, Germany is ‘not a country of immigration’, even though the guilt of the Nazi era made it the world’s first major country to grant asylum: ‘The discrepancy between de facto immigration and its political denial is the single most enduring puzzle in the German immigration debate.’Footnote ²⁶ Germany is not alone in not defining itself as a country of immigrants, but it is the only one ‘that has not become tired of repeating it, elevating the no-immigration maxim to a first principle of public policy [adopted by the federal government in 1977] and national self-definition’.Footnote ²⁷ Joppke argues that immigration was opposed to the ‘ethnocultural mode of German nationhood … in principle delegitimized by its racist aberrations under the Nazi regime’.Footnote ²⁸ This nationhood was actually reinforced and maintained by both the division of Germany and the ‘scattering of huge German diasporas in communist Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union’.Footnote ²⁹ Germany introduced itself as ‘the homeland of all Germans, and it prioritized the immigration of co-ethnics’.Footnote ³⁰ However, Joppke contends that, with the reunification, ‘the grounding of the compulsively reiterated no-immigration maxim in incomplete nationhood is no more’.Footnote ³¹ The 2005 Immigration Act changed German legislation as regards the integration of foreign nationals. It paved the way for the 2007 Residence Act, which put an emphasis on long-term permanent residency for legal immigrants. The opposition from the Christian Democratic Union was clear since they started a cultural debate, or ‘Leitkulturdebatte’, about ‘Ausländerpolitik’ (policy dealing with ‘foreigners’, or immigration policy), integrationism and the jeopardized ‘German national identity’.Footnote ³² This controversial debate focused on the criminalization of immigrants, and particularly the large Turkish community living in Germany. It was followed by a rise of racism and xenophobia, symbolized by Thilo Sarrazin’s Deutschland schafft sich ab – wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen (‘Germany Abolishes Itself: How We’re Putting Our Country in Jeopardy’), published in 2010.

The denial of structural racism in Germany is also encapsulated by the limits of the Erinnerungskultur – that is, the German culture of remembrance. After the reunification, it became one of the most important elements of German nation-building – ‘A highly curious but nevertheless surprisingly successful case of national reprofiling’.Footnote ³³ Erinnerungskultur was used to foster ‘a new national pride’ through a collective acceptance of shame and guilt as regards German previous crimes. The aim of Erinnerungskultur is to remember the past, but above all to shape national identity by ‘internalizing elements of history’.Footnote ³⁴ It is based on a paradox, for it is not about creating a sense of national pride thanks to glorious events of the past, but precisely through the commemoration of past crimes:

If the German government did not skimp on measures to remember the victims of the Holocaust – they enacted state-funded monuments such as the 2005 Holocaust Memorial in the centre of Berlin – other German war crimes have not received the same attention. The remembrance of German colonization results rather from the efforts of activists than from the state itself: many colonial monuments were redefined as anticolonial monuments to fight against ‘colonial amnesia’.Footnote ³⁶ Indeed, remembering colonialism is not part of the official commemoration policy, or ‘at most a marginal one, just as colonialism has not found its way into Germany’s foundational national myths’.Footnote ³⁷ Sieg points out that the Herero genocide in German South-West Africa ‘demands the same labor of mourning’ as the Holocaust.Footnote ³⁸ As Zeller explains, the critical discourse on German colonization is only developed by an academic minority and activists who ‘face a widespread lack of interest among the broader public, if not an enduring nostalgia that goes hand in hand with mechanisms of suppression’.Footnote ³⁹ What is more, these mechanisms operate insidiously within society through the fantasy of a white German national identity, which results in the maintenance of white privileges.

Although race seems to have been erased from the post-war public discourse, it has been part of the construction of white German identity, which contrasts with the country’s traditional immigration history. Discussing race in Germany is complicated because of this contradiction, but also because of a linguistic deficiency: the very word ‘rasse’ has been expunged from the vocabulary during the denazification process of the post-war period. As a result, the notion of race was not addressed at all in Germany, which is also confirmed by the fact that the ‘vocabulary to have the conversation is often missing’, with a view to avoid resorting to the typical national socialist language from the Nazi era.Footnote ⁴⁰ In an attempt to fill this critical gap, Sieg studied the tradition of racial impersonation in twentieth-century Germany, and she coined the phrase ‘Ethnomaskerade’ (‘ethnic drag’) to refer to the theatrical practice of blackface, for instance through racial prosthetics and cross-racial casting.Footnote ⁴¹ In her article ‘Far away so close: race, whiteness, and German identity’, Ulrike Anne Müller focuses on the role of whiteness in the racialization process – which results in a fantasy of German national identity – and shows how institutional racism is deeply rooted in German politics.Footnote ⁴² Racism is indeed far from being merely ‘a concept expressed by right-wing extremists’ as the mainstream German opinion too often believes.Footnote ⁴³ For instance, it appears through the cultural practice of blackface and, above all, its banality in German cultural history.

The Banality of Blackface in German Cultural History

The way we eat, we laugh, we celebrate and we entertain ourselves may, at first, be considered as non-racial issues, but they are definitely racial in Germany. Blackface pastries, carnival disguise, figures used as shooting targets, and comedy are cultural traditions regarded as harmless, ordinary and socially accepted by the white majority of Germans.Footnote ⁴⁴ They are part and parcel of what Philomena Essed calls ‘everyday racism’ (Alltagsrassismus) that she describes as being ‘infused with familiar practices’ and involving consistently ‘socialized attitudes and behavior’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Everyday racism is indeed ‘transmitted in routine practices that seem “normal,” at least for the dominant group’.Footnote ⁴⁶ However, it is ‘not recognized, not acknowledged – let alone problematized – by the dominant group.… To expose racism in the system, we must analyze ambiguous meanings, expose hidden currents, and generally question what seems normal or acceptable.’Footnote ⁴⁷ All this contributes to normalizing blackface as a commonplace cultural practice, the banality of which makes it a non-issue. Indeed, Tiffany Florvil argues that ‘both overt and subtle forms of anti-Black racism were not purged in postwar West Germany, as evinced by the prevalence of blackface, colonial stereotypes, and the (hyper)sexualization of nonwhite bodies in popular images’.Footnote ⁴⁸ In order to grasp the scope of this phenomenon, we will now see a few examples of ‘practices that may seem mundane and trivial’ that turn out to be ‘instantiations of everyday racism’ in contemporary German cultural history.Footnote ⁴⁹

On 14 February 2020, the German author and columnist Jasmina Kuhnke – a.k.a. ‘@quattromilf’ on Twitter – posted a tweet to denounce blackface pastries sold at the bakery Café Konfiserie Fromme, in Cologne. A friend of hers had sent her a picture of dark chocolate treats featuring thick, red lips and googly eyes. She tweeted the following post (originally in German): ‘I just got a photo from a good friend from a traditional café in Cologne (no, the white ones [white pastries] are not supposed to represent a balance, they represent North Africans): Dear Café Konfiserie Fromme, I dislike your baked goods!’ The bakery called them ‘Funny Carnival Heads’ in its display, but changed the name to ‘Mohrenkopf’ (‘Moor’s Head’) or ‘Othello’ after the carnival. In Germany, the pastry was officially formerly known as ‘Mohrenkopf’ (‘Moor’s Head’), but it has recently officially been renamed ‘Schokoküss’ (‘Chocolate Kiss’). In an interview given to Kendra Stenzel for the newspaper Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, the owner of the bakery stated: ‘We decorate it for carnival in the same way as many carnival costumes were designed in the past.… We have no racist thoughts behind it.’ It is worth noticing the difference between the innocent intent and its racist impact. Kyla Wazana Thompkins argues that the image of the Black body ‘as an edible object is a strong and consistent trope … that carries the weight of many centuries of forced labor, of coercive and violent sexual desire, and of ongoing political struggle’.Footnote ⁵⁰ She shows that eating articulates ‘the dialectical struggles between pleasure and disgust, affect and aesthetics, dominance and resistance, and the interpenetrations of all of the above’, in particular through this trope of the edible Black body.Footnote ⁵¹ Thus, the consumption of blackface pastries by white people reveals the cultural power of German white supremacy through the paradox of a ‘racial indigestion’: the Black body is eaten but not fully digested by whiteness – hence the dialectics of fascination and repulsion towards the Black body itself.Footnote ⁵²

On 4 October 2014, Bernd Kastner wrote an article for the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, exposing the use of blackface figures in a historic shooting range at the Oide Wiesn during the Oktoberfest folk festival in Munich. The 130-year-old blackface figure heads have clay pipes attached to them, and are moving up and down. Florian Pointner, the employee handing out air rifles to the shooters, declared: ‘We also shoot white people here.… Most understand that there are no racist ulterior motives.’ In his article, Kastner opened with a symbolic question: ‘Is that tradition or racism?’ (‘Ist das Tradition oder Rassismus?’). Tradition and racism were opposed as if they were mutually exclusive – as if a cultural tradition could not be racist. This would imply that a cultural heritage cannot be denounced as unethical and offensive because of its longevity.

The same issue is at stake with the ‘Sternsinger’ tradition that refers to young star singers, or Epiphany singers, who dress up as the biblical Three Wise Men visiting the infant Jesus. Some of those carol singers dress up as stereotypical Africans in blackface. The children walk from house to house to collect money for charities. The use of blackface to dress up as an African is not uncommon in Germany, particularly during the ‘Rosemontag’ (‘Rose Monday’) carnival parade. On 7 January 2015, Tom Barfield wrote an article for The Local.de about the apparition of Christian Lindner, the Free Democratic Party leader, on national TV, next to a blacked-up ‘Sternsinger’. Vicky German, a spokesperson for ‘Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland’ (‘Initiative for Black People in Germany’), told Barfield: ‘It objectifies black people in a very racist way with the assumption that blackness is something that can be assumed.’Footnote ⁵³ Asked about the tacit support of Lindner for the charity collectors in blackface, the Free Democratic Party declared on Twitter that they were not ‘responsible for the way they’re dressed or made-up’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The party implied that Lindner could not be held accountable for this decision to appear next to a blacked-up ‘Sternsinger’, even though his presence normalized and legitimized blackface.

In April 2021, the cabaret artist Helmut Schleich performed in blackface to play the role of Maxwell Strauss, a fictional character introduced as the head of the fictitious state of Mbongalo. It was intended to be a parody of Franz Josef Strauss, a former member of the Christian Social Union, who was well known for his coarse pronunciation. Schleich gave advice to the German people on how to cope with the current pandemic and stated that he would be an excellent chancellor, the first Black chancellor of Germany, as he was waving a stuffed animal. The TV show SchleichFernsehen was aired by a public service broadcaster, Bayerischer Rundfunk, which defended Schleich’s use of blackface and, consequently, his stigmatization of African people, on Twitter: ‘The character of “Maxwell Strauss” which has been created by Helmut Schleich is explicitly a caricature of Franz Josef Strauss and in no way aimed at POCs.’ Again, the discrepancy between the innocent intent and the racist impact is striking.

With all these examples, it becomes obvious that the practice of blackface is well rooted in the German cultural tradition, without it being seen as racist or unethical, except by a ‘woke’ minority. It is necessary to acknowledge blackface as a stereotypical representation of Blackness and to redraw ‘the linkages between the historical development of imagery, colonialism and our contemporary moment – linkages that belie the idea that Blackface could exist in total isolation and neutrality on a German stage’.Footnote ⁵⁵ We must therefore bear in mind that this cultural practice does conjure up offensive and humiliating images and representations of Blackness with a political dimension, regardless of intent, for ‘all cultural statements occur in a political and social situation and therefore have a political dimension’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Those who think that blackface is just an aesthetic fact of life need to realize that ‘nowadays in Germany it is a politically used instrument to deny white responsibility’.Footnote ⁵⁷ One might argue that there is a difference between a naive critical inquiry into the nature of systemic racism and an active praise of white supremacy. However, this claim downplays the insidious power of white supremacy in the delineation of Blackness as a prescriptive racialized identity. Blackface is part of what Mark Terkessidis calls ‘racist knowledge’, which he defines as follows: ‘A form of societal knowledge generally widespread and often reinforced across politics and the media. Whether consciously or unconsciously, this racist knowledge legitimizes the differences and inequalities between “us” and “them” even though democratic principles forbid discrimination of this kind.’Footnote ⁵⁸ Thus, resorting to blackface in Germany – or elsewhere – contributes to the normalization of a racist practice that legitimizes a certain representation of Blackness through an offensive stereotype. In this, I strongly disagree with Julia Lemmle: even if she acknowledges that blackface is ‘a racist practice with the capacity to offend’, she also argues that it is a cultural practice which should not be avoided, for ‘its repetition enables the production of new and entirely different meanings’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Theatrical aesthetics is always political and always contextual. If the intent may differ and suggests a wide variety of justifications, it seems to be that the impact – or part of the reception – always comes down to the same conclusion: that is, the dissemination and maintaining of the cultural power of white supremacy to control the representation of race through the imposition of prescriptive racialized identities, and yet another experience of racial violence, terror and torture for a BIPOC audience.

Germany’s Complicated Historiography of Race on the Contemporary Stage

From the mid twentieth century onwards, East and West German directors built a reputation of developing a politically and aesthetically radical body of work, in particular through Verfremdung, used in the representation of race onstage. This theatrical anti-naturalistic practice (Verfremdung), emerging from Bertolt Brecht’s work on theatre, has been ‘a valuable tool for many theatre practitioners in the Federal Republic of Germany and beyond who are interested in exposing race as a construct’.Footnote ⁶⁰ This deconstruction of race through the V-effekt onstage is, however, not the way Brecht himself used it. It is worth noticing how Brechtian stagecraft inspired German directors to develop a characteristic racecraft to construct blackface onstage. According to the Brechtian theory of acting, the actor must not make the audience believe that they are their character – the point is to debunk the dramatic illusion fooling spectators. Precisely, the actor has the responsibility to break this illusion to emphasize the discrepancy between the actor and the character. Sieg argues that the rationale behind this is that ‘[a] “naturalistic” mimetic style of representation … always reproduces the operations of racial ideology, whereas cross-racial masquerade contests or even transforms social relations organized around race’.Footnote ⁶¹ Cross-racial acting and blackface have thus been two ways to engage with race critically on the German contemporary stage when it comes to defining race as a social and cultural construct.

The most significant German production of Othello in the post-war period is undoubtedly that of Peter Zadek, who staged the play in 1976 at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. He decided to have Ulrich Wildgruber – a white actor in blackface – impersonate Othello to create ‘a cartoon caricature of a cannibal’.Footnote ⁶² Zadek also resorted to paralinguistic features to convey a caricatural racist imagery – Wildgruber mimicked ‘a King Kong figure, scratching for lice’.Footnote ⁶³ Throughout the performance, Othello’s black make-up came off on Desdemona, which highlighted the artificiality of blackface and made it look like ‘a postmodern parody’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Zadek emphasized the racism of the play in the embodiment of Othello on stage, but also in his body language, which polarized both the audience and critics. Resorting to blackface was a way to prevent the audience from suspending their disbelief: racial prosthetics was here introduced onstage as a tool to achieve the V-effekt in order to define race as an external projection of stereotypes. The audience was therefore encouraged to see the constructedness of race through Othello’s blackface, instead of passively looking at a mimetic cosmetic Blackness.

In 2003, Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Spenkel translated and adapted Shakespeare’s Othello to produce a new playtext staged by Luk Perceval at the Munich Kammerspiele. In this production, Othello was played by Thomas Thieme, a white actor. Commenting on this production, Gad Kaynar argues that Othello’s whiteness ‘is but a histrionic mask for the part that he acts on … stage’, and he adds that Othello is incapable ‘of internalizing the “white” mask that he himself has grafted onto his face’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Kaynar introduced whiteness as a theatrical mask that Othello uses to play ‘white’ in the play. In addition, Christian M. Billing underlined the ‘unashamedly overt expressions of intolerance’ and the ‘succession of commonplace jibes and taunts’ employed to echo ‘the prejudicial vocabularies of the Nazi era’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Billing insisted on the stigmatization of the white Othello through verbal violence with racist undertones. Othello was also played by a white actor, Alexander Scheer, in Stefan Pucher’s 2005 Othello at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus (Hamburg). Pucher had his lead white actor play in blackface, with disproportionately huge red lips. In Jette Steckel’s 2009 Othello at Deutsches Theater in Berlin, the eponymous character was performed by a white actress, Susanne Wolff. She repeatedly changed her appearance throughout the performance: having long, then short, hair; appearing in a gorilla costume, and later a red dress. Steckel addressed both racism and sexism in a production that played with racial and gender stereotypes. The Brechtian Verfremdung has thus been used to represent race with critical distance through blackface and cross-racial casting in pre-Ostermeier productions of the play: ‘The near-standard practice of casting white Othellos in German productions even throughout the 1990s and early 2000s often seems to have entailed minimal efforts to avoid racial caricature.’Footnote ⁶⁷ It seems relevant to point out that this influenced the audience’s expectations as regards the representation of Othello’s race onstage: ‘The present experience is always ghosted by previous experiences and associations while these ghosts are simultaneously shifted and modified by the process of recycling and recollection.’Footnote ⁶⁸ It was therefore not uncommon for the German audience to face a blacked-up white Othello onstage when Ostermeier started to work on the play, and it does not seem unreasonable to think that Ostermeier was aware of it and took it into account in his experimental performance. The issue at stake is to examine Othello’s blackface to see whether the racecraft used produces a ‘racial caricature’ that recycles and recollects the cosmetic Blackness of previous German Othello productions.

A Close Analysis of the Metatheatrical Prologue and Postmodern Racial Prosthetics in Ostermeier’s Othello

Ostermeier’s experimental performance began with an extradiegetic, metatheatrical sequence showing the intimacy of the couple of Othello and Desdemona, standing in front of what was probably the nuptial bed. While Desdemona was heading towards Othello, he got naked. It was not a love scene, but an erotic moment. Othello was a white man, and he was being painted black by Desdemona, who used a black, mud-like substance. She stroked Othello’s body with a light, sensual touch as she smeared the dark make-up all over his body and face – a rather strong theatrical gesture thus emphasizing the artificiality of the racialization process which benefits from the metaphorical potential of theatre.Footnote ⁶⁹ Blacking-up Othello’s body seemed to be a source of erotic desire for her. It was a scene of fetishization of Blackness that turned the blacked-up body into an erotic commodity. One might observe that Desdemona experienced some kind of transgressive pleasure from this blackface, while she was preparing Nakajew to impersonate Othello as a Black man. Using her own fingers instead of a brush, Desdemona was dominating him while pleasuring herself, asserting her white privilege through the monopoly of racial definition. In this iconic scene, Ostermeier was constructing Blackness from his white perspective, and, by doing so, was universalizing whiteness impacting the process of reception. The audience may therefore adopt the white gaze on Blackness or adopt an ‘oppositional gaze’ rejecting this universalization of whiteness through the very act of racial marking.Footnote ⁷⁰ Ostermeier argued that, in this prologue, he intended to show Othello’s body as a canvas on which to project one’s perception of the other, ‘the projection of what I see in the other, what the others see in him others’ (my translation).Footnote ⁷¹ Moreover, he points out that it is a way to show that Othello’s ‘soul is much more white’ for he is ‘a very assimilated Black man in white society’ (my translation).Footnote ⁷² Here, he reflects on what it means to play this part in a play by a white playwright who wrote a Black role for a white actor.

This scene showed the complexity of blackface that interweaves ‘abomination and adoration’.Footnote ⁷³ On the one hand, Desdemona defiled Othello’s body with the black mud that threatened his whiteness – she was creating an ‘abomination’ by turning white into Black. On the other hand, she also adored it, brushing against it voluptuously. She denigrated Othello’s body by sullying him with dark paint, but she was also mesmerized by this body that became, through her gaze, a fetishized commodity. Precisely, Trammel explains that that play – here, theatrical play – may include and provide pleasure, or exclude and cause torture.Footnote ⁷⁴ Drawing on Trammel’s Black phenomenology of play, I argue that blackface, in this archival version, is ‘a form of play that focuses on exploring the deep, painful, and … traumatic depths’ of BIPOC lives also ‘contributing to the cultural erasure of BIPOC today’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Desdemona’s white gesture of blacking-up Othello’s body is a ‘coercive’ technique through which she subjugates him and denies him agency.Footnote ⁷⁶ As Desdemona painted him black, Othello stood perfectly still, looking ahead. He was turned into a racial stereotype, an image that relies on ‘a kind of “living death,” the zombie-like condition of the borderline between the animate and the inanimate’.Footnote ⁷⁷ This in-between state characterized Othello’s body onstage, for the inanimate black paint came to life when being put on Nakajew’s animated body. Othello’s cosmetic Blackness was simultaneously both a material object – a racial prosthesis – and a living embodiment through the actor’s corporeal presence. Throughout the production, Ostermeier gave in to interracial temptation by blacking-up his lead actor, which went beyond mimesis. As the performance unfolded, the black make-up of Othello started to fade out and smudge because of the contact with the water onstage and with the other characters. Gradually, Othello thus became whiter and whiter; he was undergoing a Mohrenwäsche – that is, being washed white.Footnote ⁷⁸ Nonetheless, in the end, he remained in a racial in-between whiteness and a cosmetic Blackness. Neither white nor Black, this experimental Othello appears as of mixed race.

Ostermeier’s racecraft in this performance does not seem to be part of an agenda to deconstruct race. Rather, it aims to reconstruct race through the representation of fetishized, gendered, cosmetic Blackness onstage. This directorial choice is reminiscent of Ostermeier’s own words when he shared his theatrical aesthetics with Gerhard Jörder:

Thus, in this experimental performance, we may infer that Ostermeier’s goal is not to avoid racial caricature, but precisely to engage with it critically, head on. However, Ostermeier does not define his work as postdramatic as most of the contemporary German directors do, but as a ‘politically engaged, realistic theatre’ – to quote Jörder’s words that Ostermeier approved in the interview.Footnote ⁸⁰ One may therefore wonder how blackface and cross-racial casting contribute to a realistic theatrical aesthetics. To be exact, he does not define his realist perspective as naturalistic:

Ostermeier’s definition of his directorial choices as ‘realist’ implies that his theatre will challenge clichéd human behaviour through a process of research with the creative crew, as he did for the experimental performance we are focusing on:

Paradoxically, it is by resorting to blackface that Ostermeier seems to intend to make a critique of this stereotypical cosmetic Blackness, and thus to construct a ‘realist’ blackface onstage for his white actor, Sebastian Nakajew. Ostermeier’s iconoclastic aesthetics, intended to challenge clichés and stereotypes, seems to be intrinsically postmodern in the sense that it questions the doxa’s representations, or fantasies: ‘Those metanarratives or “grand” narratives are, broadly speaking, the supposedly transcendent and universal truths that underpin western civilization and that function to give that civilization objective legitimization.’Footnote ⁸³ The postmodern racial prosthetics utilized onstage to create the necessary racecraft in order to make Nakajew blacked-up onstage appear to conjure up a theatrical practice to (paradoxically) challenge it. In this experimental performance with blackface, Ostermeier’s Othello is embodying a stereotyped representation of race while challenging its very legitimacy. However, if Ostermeier’s intent was to resort to Brechtian, postmodern racial prosthetics to create a ‘realist’ representation of Blackness onstage, its impact seems rather different. Conjuring up a tradition in order to challenge its very existence is always risky for it may confirm this tradition’s validity instead of discrediting it. If Ostermeier’s intent is to reconstruct blackface onstage to engage critically with race, the impact may not be received by everyone as an antiracist critique, but rather as a new repetition onstage of a theatrical practice recapitulating racialization and structural violence – a practice which maintains, and gives even more visibility to, a German cultural practice whose banality defuses it and contributes to getting rid of its offensive, racist and humiliating dimension. Joy Kristin Kalu rightfully argues that:

The neutrality of blackface, or its being completely defused and deprived of its racist content, seems to be a fantasy which overlooks the cultural power of whiteness and the way it controls the racial narrative onstage – through the blackface of Nakajew, to have him perform Othello.

The Conceptual Chiaroscuro of White Supremacy and Cosmetic Blackness

In the rest of the performance, the audience may connect the Chechen-sounding name of Nakajew and his working-class East German accent as a way to represent Othello’s otherness onstage through an invisible cultural marker of difference. This intersection of class and race suggests a complex process of marginalization to construct Othello’s otherness with an allusion to the hierarchy of the German cultural and class system related to the specificity and complexity of German whiteness.

In an interview given to Jikta Pelechová, Ostermeier explained that the use of racial prosthetics in the metatheatrical prologue was not a scene that was part of the first performances of the play: ‘And even now, I am not entirely convinced by the solution we found. It might still evolve. We play this version only for the sixth time; before, it was different.’Footnote ⁸⁵ The German director went on to justify the choice of cross-racial casting by arguing that it was due to the lack of racial diversity in Germany: ‘It is true that today, it [Othello’s Blackness] raises an entirely different issue; not only on the racism of our society, but also on the fact that there aren’t many black actors in German theatre. This debate is very topical in Germany’ (my translation).Footnote ⁸⁶ With this statement, Ostermeier somehow denied any ethical responsibility in his casting choice, virtually blaming Black Germans for being invisible on the German stage, instead of blaming white supremacy for keeping Black Germans – particularly Black German actors – invisible. Other German directors followed suit, resorting to the same excuse to justify the blackface.

By contributing to the invisibility of Black German bodies on the contemporary stage, Ostermeier admits his ignorance of the historical presence of Black people in Germany, and to a lesser extent the very existence of Black Europe.Footnote ⁸⁷ In Mobilizing Black Germany (2020), Tiffany N. Florvil successfully manages to uncover the overlooked history of the modern Black German movement of the 1980s to the 2000s with a focus on the two main Black German organizations: Initiative Schwarze Deutsche (‘Initiative for Black Germans’, ISD) founded in 1985, and Afrodeutsche Frauen (‘Afro-German Women’, ADEFRA) founded in 1986. Florvil shows that both organizations made ‘Black Germanness visible in a majority-white nation that failed to acknowledge its colonial past and its afterlife, its long-standing multiracial and multicultural populations, and the persistence of racism and racial violence after the fall of the Third Reich’.Footnote ⁸⁸ They also enabled the emergence of Black German StudiesFootnote ⁸⁹ (BGS) which also took part in the destabilization of white supremacy, the debunking of the myth of a ‘colour-blind’, anti-racist Germany, as well as in the normalization of Black German identity in order to redefine Germanness and fight the ‘epistemology of ignorance’ which also impacts Ostermeier.Footnote ⁹⁰ Notwithstanding, the time of ‘white ignorance’ has long passed and cannot remain a relevant excuse to deny the unethical dimension of blackface on the German contemporary stage.Footnote ⁹¹

Barely two years later, in an interview given to the German website The Local.de, Tahar Della, a spokesperson for Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland said such a justification was ‘idiotic’, for ‘There are more than enough black actors in Germany, especially in Berlin.’Footnote ⁹² Della made this statement while talking about Thomas Schendel’s 2012 production of Ich bin nicht Rappaport (‘I am not Rappaport’) at the Schlosspark Theater in Berlin in which the white actor Joachim Bliese performed in blackface to play Midge. In this play by the American playwright Herb Gardner (1985), Midge Carter, an old Black man from Harlem, meets Nat Moyer, an old Communist Jew, on a Central Park bench in New York. Since 1987, the play had been performed over forty times on the German stage, but the role of Midge was only played twice by a Black actor. In the productions, the performance of Blackness had mainly been the domain of white German actors. A few days after the production started, thousands of comments about the offensive character of blackface surged on the Facebook page of the Schlosspark Theater. In an interview given to Jessica Ware, Schendel explained that ‘Many older black actors come from the music industry, and that wasn’t a fit for the play as it isn’t a musical. When we couldn’t find an elderly black actor who fit the role and could speak with a perfect German accent, we opted for blackface make-up.’Footnote ⁹³ He added that, in Germany, ‘blackface is part of a theater tradition that was never intended to be racist’, and he confessed not to understand the anti-racist pushback against blackface; as he pointed out, ‘I tried to make a play about racism and ended up being called a racist.’Footnote ⁹⁴ Apparently, both Schendel and Ostermeier have used blackfacing onstage in order to challenge its very validity, to act as a racial theatrical marker, but they overlooked the risk that racial prosthetics and cross-racial casting may instead maintain the cultural power of white supremacy in German theatre. Contrary to their justifications based on the lack of racial diversity in German contemporary theatre, Black German actors do exist. Two years after Ostermeier’s Othello, they started to fight more openly against their being confined to invisibility.

In the 2012 John von Düffel’s production of Unschuld (‘Innocence’) at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, white actors Andreas Dönler and Peter Moltzen performed in blackface. Written by the German playwright Dea Loher (2003), the play tells the story of two illegal, Black asylum-seekers, Elisis and Fadoul. Onstage, Dönler’s and Moltzen’s faces were painted black with disproportionately big lips drawn with strawberry-red make-up. At the same time, German anti-racist activists joined forces and founded Bündis Bühnenwatch (‘Alliance Stage Watch’) to deal with the blackface tradition in German theatre (Bruce-Jones 54).Footnote ⁹⁵ During one of the first performances of Unschuld, forty-two activists left the auditorium at the same time, as the two actors in blackface entered the stage. Members of Bündis Bühnenwatch waited at the entrance of the Deutsches Theater to hand out flyers retracing the performance history of blackface, and explained why it was offensive, with a view to exposing systemic racism in German theatre. After a discussion with the Deutsches Theater, the play was performed with Dönler and Moltzen in whiteface instead of blackface for the rest of the season. Düffel seemed to have become sufficiently aware of the problem raised by Bündis Bühnenwatch, as he agreed to stop having blacked-up actors onstage for this play. However, the actors in blackface still appeared in the photos and promotional videos of the production on the theatre’s website.

Sieg explained that members of Bündis Bühnenwatch ‘forcefully asserted that the meanings and effects of racialized symbolic practices cannot be determined by (white) artistic intent alone, but must take the context of reception and the responses of audiences of color into account as well’, while defenders of blackfacing invoked innocent pragmatism by arguing that there were ‘neither enough qualified actors of color, nor enough roles to warrant their permanent employment in stable ensembles’.Footnote ⁹⁶ The issue of the representation of race on the German contemporary stage as a symptom of white supremacy was addressed at a panel discussion called ‘Facing Black People’ hosted in May 2012 by the Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, a theatre in Berlin-Kreuzberg. This conversation between Black German writers and performers as well as anti-racist activists led to raising the question of theatrical embodiment and blackface, as well as ‘the larger problem with the roles assigned to people of color in German theatre, and with the institution’s reluctance to address colonialism and race relations as part of its larger project of historical remembering, reckoning, and democratization’.Footnote ⁹⁷ This panel discussion witnesses how institutional racism deeply affects German contemporary theatre, which turns a blind eye – apart from a few exceptions such as the Ballhaus Naunynstrasse – to the consequences of having a white actor in blackface for actors of colour.

As Kalu puts it, in blackface performances, ‘The hierarchy, not merely represented but created […] extends beyond the stage and unfolds its offensive potential there.’Footnote ⁹⁸ She explained that the use of blackface onstage defines power relationships in favour of whiteness, and that the white supremacy onstage is closely linked to the white supremacy offstage. In the experimental Othello performance under consideration, racial hierarchy was first re-presented through the use of racial prosthetics in the prologue, and then re-produced onstage through cross-racial casting, with the white Sebastian Nakajew playing the Black Othello. If the intent of German contemporary directors using Brechtian, postmodern racecraft is to highlight the constructedness of race and to promote anti-racism, one must also take into account the impact, or ‘the paradoxical effect its usage can have on propagating structures of exclusion and racialised ways of viewing within the theatre in Germany’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Through the use of such racecraft on the contemporary stage, German actors of colour are excluded ‘both from unmarked roles and from those where the character to be played is a person of Colour’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ They are too Black to play white characters or racially ‘unmarked’ roles, and too Black to play Black characters for directors not interested in a naturalistic, mimetic representation of race onstage. In the end, ‘inevitably the preference for whiteness and Germany’s understanding of itself as white is what often excludes People of Colour from the theatre, whether or not they are fluent in German’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The development of racecraft that involves the white actor in blackface on the grounds that the German theatre is lacking racial diversity seems to be an epitome of what Ayanna Thompson calls ‘the inherent white supremacist logic of white innocence’.Footnote ¹⁰² Indeed, the very presence of white bodies performing Black characters reflects the cultural weight of white supremacy by acting as an instrument of established hegemonic power. Through blackface, whiteness appears as the racial, invisible norm imposing itself with a universal, infinite potential of representation, and ‘minoritized people are made to act as “killjoys” when they describe their play experiences as torturous’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Denouncing the unethical dimension of blackface thus means to kill the white joy of playing in/with the race of the other by asserting the agency of BIPOC people and the material consequences of such theatrical practices on their own bodies.

To conclude, the cross-racial casting and racial prosthetics used in this experimental performance of Othello reflect Germany’s self-perception as white and the cultural power of white supremacy on the German contemporary stage. Indeed, blacking-up a white actor to play a Black character is a commonplace theatrical practice which is part of German cultural history. Set in the context of Germany’s complicated historiography of race on the contemporary stage, Ostermeier’s experimental performance of Othello explores the theatrical phenomenon of blackface through the use of postmodern racial prosthetics as it is staged in the metatheatrical prologue. Even if Ostermeier’s use of cosmetic Blackness may have aimed to emphasize race as a cultural and social construct, and to denounce blackface as a racist practice, it nevertheless has a different impact and promotes white supremacy under the cover of white innocence. This article attempted to show the extent to which the racecraft developed by Ostermeier onstage contributes – consciously or unconsciously – to give white actors the monopoly on the performance of Blackness, thereby confining actors of colour to invisibility by choosing cosmetic Blackness over the material bodies of actors of colour. In this performance, blackface suggests the power dynamics at stake in systemic racism which favours whiteness over Blackness. Even though the very corporeality of Black actors onstage may run the risk of reinforcing racist stereotypes, it also decolonizes the stage by offering both visibility and agency to actors of colour, which would show that Black bodies – and lives – do matter.Footnote ¹⁰⁴