Falk Richter's I Am Europe: Challenging German Identity and Eurocentric Elitism in the Era of Mass Migration
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Date
2020-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
This case study explores _I Am Europe_ (2016), a collection of recent works by German playwright, Falk Richter. These particular plays take on the fraught atmosphere in Germany and Europe in the face of increasing migration from the global South. Richter, one of the most prominent and innovative contemporary playwrights in the twenty-first century German theater, found initial success writing about key social issues of the new millennium, such as increased state surveillance and the public’s mistrust after the economic crisis of 2009. He shifted his artistic focus in the 2010s to address the influx of Middle Eastern refugees after the Arab Spring and the Germans’ reaction to it. Richter now concentrates his dramatic works on the culture and tension of Germany's contemporary social instability, targeting especially the behavior, psychology, and Eurocentric outlook of skeptical ethnic Germans. Richter uses his homeland Germany as center stage for the fundamentally changing European continent, setting up the Germany state as a political, cultural, and demographic representation of the unrest of Europe’s refugee crisis.
In _I Am Europe_, Richter rejects conventional narrative. He instead weaponizes an avant-garde assembly of different soliloquies, dialogues, recycled talking points, multimedia clips, and interviews from protests, drawn largely from the right-wing. His abstract and fragmented text defamiliarizes conventional notions of a single "European identity" and therefore dislodges self-certainty of arguments that spread fear of the rapidly diversifying European continent. My analysis of _I Am Europe_ shows Richter’s critique to be equally concerned with an elitist worldview that assumes Europe to be the wellspring of tolerance and peace. The collection _I Am Europe_ reveals Richter’s view that the hidden assumption of a white, Christian European identity is the true endangering factor on the continent that drives people to reject changing societies, fear immigrants, mindlessly consume media, and spiral towards right-wing extremism.
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First Place in "Human Experiences" at the Denman Undergraduate Research Forum