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Bringing her Turkish background to german theater

When Shermin Langhoff took over the Maxim Gorki Theater, in 2013, she became not only the first female artistic director of a state theater here since the 1970s but the first of Turkish origin in German history.

But she has also challenged the notion of integration as it is propagated by German politics.

In 2016, the theater created the Exil-Ensemble as a platform for professional actors forced to live in exile, as opposed to refugees, from Afghanistan, Syria and Palestine. Under the motto “De-Integrate Yourselves!,” Langhoff last November curated her third “Berlin Autumn Salon,” featuring 100 visual and performance artists at historic locations around the Gorki, which sits off the Boulevard Unter den Linden in former East Berlin.

The theater’s bold programs have attracted both a larger and younger audience. The number of viewers rose from 80,000 in 2012 to 112,000 last year, and almost half of current visitors are under 40.

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Although Langhoff coined the term “post-migrant” theater when Berlin’s Ballhaus Naunynstrasse reopened under her direction in 2008, she explained that her interest never lay in creating theater for and about immigrants but, rather, bringing new narratives onstage.

The arts, she said, had a duty to reflect critically on social issues. “In the best scenario, a theater is a democratic space, where society comes to affirm a sense of self.”

The agenda has drawn accolades from both politicians and critics. Last year, on International Women’s Day, Langhoff won a Federal Cross of Merit for bringing topics onstage that help “determine social cohesion.” In 2016, the Gorki was named theater of the year by the magazine Theater heute for the second time. That same year, she and her co-director Jens Hillje won the Berlin Theater Prize for “representing the city’s population in its diversity.”

The smallest of the city’s five state theaters, the Gorki has not shied away from exploring cultural conflicts at a time when the German capital is attracting immigrants from all over the world.

In “The Situation,” actors of Syrian, Israeli and Palestinian origin come together for a German lesson in Berlin’s Neukölln district, exploring questions of assimilation in both Europe and the Middle East. The multilingual production, staged by Israeli native Yael Ronen — one of the Gorki’s four in-house directors — was named play of the year by “Theater heute” in 2016 and returns on March 18.

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“Her first ambition was to turn the German system on its head,” said Elmar Engels, a visitor to the theater since 1976 and a member of its Circle of Friends, calling productions “a constant challenge to engage with social problems which otherwise wouldn’t be noticed.”

The theater, founded in 1952 in the name of Marxist writer Maxim Gorki, also cast a critical light on the political system in the years of the German Democratic Republic through the writings of Soviet authors. But the Gorki has defined itself along political lines even more strongly under Langhoff.

Novelist Olga Grjasnowa — whose “Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt” (“All Russians Love Birch Trees”), about a soul-searching Russian-Jewish émigré, was adapted for stage by the theater in 2013 and remains in repertoire — said that the house has had an effect on cultural politics by sheer force of its diverse ensemble and topics. “At the beginning, it was as if the future belonged to us,” she said.

Comparing German public theater to a “feudal system,” Grjasnowa called the ability “to introduce a new structure and fight one’s way to the top” a “huge achievement,” but also expressed hopes that artistic planning “won’t stagnate.”

Langhoff immigrated to Germany as a child and made her start in the film industry, working as an assistant to the now international director Fatih Akin.

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She considers herself indebted to a postwar German school of thought that arose in the aftermath of the Holocaust, pointing to a tradition of “female Jewish author theater” that the Gorki has cultivated through the work of Grjasnowa, Ronen and Sasha Marianna Salzmann, artistic director of the side stage “Studio R.” Langhoff was also shaped, however, by the political activism and stories “about loss and injustice” to which she was exposed in Turkey and in circles of immigrants in Germany.

Langhoff — who bears the surname of a German theater dynasty through her ex-husband, director Lukas Langhoff — called the situation for women in German theaters “catastrophic” given that only 22 percent of artistic directors are female. “It is mostly men who sit on the councils that make decisions about who will be hired for a position,” she said. “It is time that we address such structural issues.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

REBECCA SCHMID © 2018 The New York Times

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