GET DEUTSCH OR DIE TRYIN'

There are moments in which everything comes together. Arda's 18th birthday, for example. Without a plan but with his friends Bojan, Danny and Savas. On a park bench without a park at the train station, skinheads to the right, cops to the left, and music in the middle. There are moments in which you're sure that someone understands your language without you having to tell them too much. Moments in which that point on your tattered biographical map comes up, in which you spend your last childhood summer, right before your friends disappear and you realize: You are alone in a country that calls you a foreigner. So get up! Run as fast as you can and then faster. Because that's the way it is: if no one wants to know who you are, you have to find out yourself. Out of breath, Arda Yilmaz searches for the fragments of a language that recalls memories of childhood in Almanya and a German-Turkish family history amidst the turmoil of »guest« work and the Turkish putsch. Above all else Arda is searching for an unknown father, to whose failed revolution he is somehow related, without ever having dreamt of it. Where is the land of the de-integrated? Who sings the songs of the mothers who fight alone? How does the chorus sound, the chorus of those who eternally flee and never arrive? There are moments in which all these questions flare up before they disappear, as in a fade-out on the last track of the record of your life.

Premiere 20 May 2017
 
Invited to the 2018 Heidelberger Stückemarkt festival for new plays
 
Necati Öziri, born in 1988, is an author and dramaturg and was the artistic director of Studio Я until the beginning of the 2017/18 season. His debut play Vorhaut (Foreskin), created together with Tunçay Kulaoğlu and Miraz Bezar was premiered in 2014 at the Ballhaus Naunynstraße. His play GET DEUTSCH OR DIE TRYIN' is an album with an A- and B-side that tells of mothers who are keen on Columbo and vodka, of absent fathers, of deported friends, of birthdays in the corridors of the Foreigners' Registration Office, of hip hop, soul, violence and life in a language that does not belong to you.

The text of the play was created within the framework of the literature workshop Flucht, die mich bedingt (Flight that determines me) from the Neue Instituts für dramatisches Schreiben (New Institute for Dramatic Writing, NIDS) in collaboration with Gorki and Studio Я.
 
Photo: Esra Rotthoff

Production photos: Ute Langkafel

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