The Latest at Goethe

Perfectionism meets grass skirts: Hamburg’s theatre manager Karin Beier is producing her own play in Brazil about German emigrants. Originally, it was to be called Pfeffersäcke im Zuckerland (Moneybags in Sugarland). But then the director topped that. By Josef Oehrlein

Germans are everywhere, even in Brazil. They made the land arable, overcame thousands of hardships and are still there in the sixth generation. The south of Brazil is full of Germans and somehow the region is very German. When the German theatre-maker Karin Beier started searching for multinational plays for her start in the job as theatre manager of the Hamburg Schauspielhaus, she discovered the Colonisations-Verein von 1849 in Hamburg, which attracted German settlers to the region of the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina in the mid-nineteenth century. Karin Beier travelled to Brazil and all of a sudden had plenty of authentic material: hours-long recordings of conversations with the descendants of German immigrants who remain very German.

Immigration the other way round for a change: Not Turks having to bend to the dictates of German thoroughness and integrate as quickly as possible with some difficulty. But Brazilians who say they are German and who – after six generations – have still not adapted themselves completely to the foreign environment. They are just as thorough, perfectionist and hard working as Germans should or imagine themselves to be. This fascinated Karin Beier during her research journey funded by the Goethe-Institut and, she admits, also shocked her. Originally, her play was entitled Moneybags in Sugarland, but now it’s merely called Brazil. 13 Boxes. The stage designer Johannes Schütz built a museum-like landscape of display cases in which the world of Germans in Brazil is presented as a bizarre collection of curios.


The characters, played by German and Brazilian actors, narrate episodes from the lives of their ancestors and report on their own experiences; they describe how hard it was to arduously transform untamed nature into arable land and establish orderly lives. In addition to the battle with the hostile environment, diseases and vermin, dealing with the caboclos was unavoidable. They included all non-Germans in this category; blacks, indigenous people, mixed races of all kinds, although in Portuguese use the word describes only those of mixed indigenous and European descent.

German arrogance

The term, which sounded disrespectful to German ears, was perfectly suited for characterizing the cohabitants – who were often kept as slaves – as subhuman beings. But the caboclos “quickly learned to fear the Germans, because they had to acknowledge their supremacy for better or worse,” in the words given by Karin Beier to the character of the German settler Hermann Schucher (Yorck Dippe). She even spans an arc to the Brazilian dictatorship (1964-1985), when Robert Kranz (Markus John) who projects the image of advisor to the generals, ascribes his “superiority over other peoples” to “German intelligence.”

The play, which was just launched at the Sesc Pompéia cultural centre in São Paulo in a sort of trial run for the premiere on 11 January in Hamburg, is the most original, definitely the most profound contribution to the German-Brazilian Year. Most of the performers also went on the research journey along with the Brazilian documentary filmmaker Jorge Bodansky. He provided films to accompany the production. If Karin Beier had left it at the depictions that demonstrate less superiority than arrogance, it would have become either a denunciatory farce or a vulgar melodrama. Instead she asked Elfriede Jelinek to provide a sort of commentary on the authentic statements made by Germans in Brazil.


This resulted in an entirely differently devised second part of the play. One must, however, like Jelinek’s writing as much as Karin Beier to be able to appreciate the coarsely meshed and whirled reflection on Germans as “set above all people.” “In Brazil, a German is more than a Brazilian, which he never did become. Being German, that’s enough for him; one is more, one is noticed.” That is how things are then with Germans in Brazil and “elsewhere” according to Jelinek – but not quite entirely: In São Paulo only part of the innuendo transcribed cryptically as Radiant Pursuer could be shown because Hamburg owns the premiere performance rights.

In the Portuguese translation (by George Bernard Sperber) the writing seems less aggressive than it was probably intended by Jelinek. With Mariana Senne, however, Karin Beier had a fantastic Brazilian actress at her disposal. In Hamburg, a German will take on this role and the part will possibly be distributed among a number of persons since the complete version will be performed. Mariana Senne effortlessly transmuted from the great-granddaughter of German immigrants who feels so German that she lets nothing Brazilian come close to her into a museum attendant and finally into a black woman, a caboclo character in a grass skirt who literally climbs onto the Germans’ roof and tells them where to get off in Jelinek’s words.

That actually would have sufficed to get to grips with German arrogance. But the Germans still had to demonstrate how they stick together through thick and thin and how they barricade themselves with the props in the boxes they brought along with them from the “homeland” – crocheted tablecloths, postcards, posters, pamphlets, pictures and plants – in order to keep their world idyllic. Finally, a throng of children then entered and viewed the museum curios of the exotic immigrants from far-away Germany with astonishment. Aha, while there’s life, there’s hope.

Courtesy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in which this article was published on 9 July 2013.