It is his 18th birthday and Arda Yilmaz plays the record of his life back, while chilling with his friends on a bench at the train station. The A-side of this record recounts a present with no prospects, a present of Nazis, cops and dealers – rewind back-spin. It is his 18th birthday and Arda Yilmaz plays the record of his life back, while standing, furious, at the grave of his father in Konya. The B-side chronicles a failed revolution, escape and life in exile.
Get Deutsch or Die Tryin’ is music for mothers keen on RTL and vodka, for fathers whose revolution failed, for friends deported to countries that no longer exist, for kebab shop owners whose engineering degrees fade away in grease, for birthdays in the corridors of the Foreigners' Registration Office, for an adolescence on the park bench, which waits for life to begin tomorrow, which waits for its parents’ German Dream to finally pay off. Get Deutsch or Die Tryin’ is hip-hop and rage, soul and humility, is the zero hour of the second generation of guest workers, is the remix of migrant struggles.
Over six years after the play’s premiere, author Necati Öziri takes to the stage in a staged reading directed by Isabella Sedlak and, together with Elmira Bahrami, Linda Vaher and Kinan Hmeidan, tells of a life in a language of the disobedient, disregarded and those who do not belong. What does the record of a life sound like, whose lines once begun – incomplete – are modified? Whose rhythm upbeat – tactless – restless interrupts one’s own voice, one’s own self?
What is the sound of the chorus of those who flee for an eternity and never arrive? What is the beat of the disintegrated?
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.
