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Sixteen pupils, nine homelands, one stage: For five months, teenagers from Gütersloh moved some of their lessons into a theatre. The result is a play about their experiences as immigrants and their arrivals in Germany.


Maria and Isabel look over the edge of an oversized book. Maria looks at Isabel and asks, “Listen, anonymous – is that something good?” “No idea,” her girlfriend replies. “Do you know what ‘ensemble’ means?” Maria asks. “Uh-uh, but I know what croissants are,” Isabel answers. Absurd? Yes. Theatre? Yes. Samuel Beckett? No.

Actually, it is a play called Treasures of the Heart that is being performed here on the stage of the Theater Gütersloh. Maria and Isabel are 12 and 14 years old and attend the Pestalozzischule in Gütersloh. Maria was born in Poland, Isabel’s family came from Portugal. This is the first time that the girls have been on a stage in front of an audience.

Sixteen pupils from the sixth and seventh grades of the Hauptschule Nord and the Pestalozzischule in Gütersloh have met since November 2010 to work on their play. Each one of them has an immigration background: their parents come from Syria, Turkey, Russia, Iraq, Poland, Kazakhstan, England and Portugal. None of the teens is a native speaker of German, only a few of them were born in Germany. None of the pupils has any acting experience.

Treasures of the Heart is not a play by Beckett, Goethe or Dürrenmatt. No, all of the texts and dialogues were written by the pupils themselves. They come from conversations and discussions they had while they were getting to know one another and rehearsed together. Dietlind Budde from the AlarmTheater in Bielefeld wrote these dialogues down for the play. They are insights on the everyday lives of the youngsters, stories about their experiences as immigrants, their problems, wishes and dreams.

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It took some time, however, before the pupils got the courage to open up to the others or to read aloud, explains Silke Büttner, a social worker at the Pestalozzischule. “The children have trouble concentrating; many of them have poor reading skills. The aim of the project is to teach them to express themselves and thus become more self-confident.”

The pupils approached dramatics together, listened to and told stories, practiced, got to know one another and developed team spirit. Most of all, though, they learned to conquer their fears and to take pleasure in the German language. The next step involved moving their classroom into the Bielefeld AlarmTheater for three weeks, where, with professional support from the directors Dietlind Budde and Harald Otto Schmid, they worked on the play.

During development of the play, joyful moments alternated with accounts of some of their harsh experiences on the way to Germany. They told of dramatic escape attempts and of the difficulties of making friends in a foreign country.

Over the course of the project, the pupils not only dealt with their own stories and learned to develop understanding for one another, but also improved their linguistic and rhetorical skills.

The long rehearsals paid off: in late March Treasures of the Heart premiered at the Theater Gütersloh. The pupils presented their texts, dances, music and – most of all – themselves to a large audience.

The names of the children were changed by the editorial staff.

The theatre education project was part of the Lesespaß (Fun With Reading) initiative – a reading promotion project by Bertelsmann AG, Stiftung Lesen and the Goethe-Institut.

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