Die Schutzbefohlenen

Early in 2013, sixty asylum seekers occupied the famous Votive Church in Vienna; in the summer of that year the majority of them were extradited by the Austrian government. In October 2013

hundreds of asylum seeking Somalians and Eritreans perished when their boat sunk off the coast of Lampedusa, the Italian island which has become a househould name as the 'gateway to Europe', the principal European entry point for African immigrants. The survivors of the disaster were sent to the Northern European countries. In the meantime, the protests of asylum seekers (and their sympathisers) against their deplorable living conditions and criminalisation have been continuing, in Austria and Germany, but also in the Netherlands, Belgium and other European countries.

The Austrian Nobel Prize winner for Literature Elfriede Jelinek wrote her most recent theatre text Die Schutzbefohlenen in response to these events. As well as giving the asylum seekers a voice, she also connects the current tragedy of the fate of asylum seekers at the outer borders of Europe, the church occupation in Vienna, the catastrophy at Lampedusa, its causes and effects, with motives from Aeschylus' classic Greek tragedy The Suppliants (in German Die Schutzflehenden). In Aeschylus' play 50 women (the daughters of Danaus, the Danaids) escape from Egypt to avoid a forced marriage to their Egyptian cousins and beseech the king of Pelasgos of Argos to grant them asylum.

In late September 2013, Stemann put Elfriede Jelinek's text Die Schutzbefohlenen on stage for the first time. In collaboration with the Thalia Theater he organised a reading of the piece at the St. Pauli Church in Hamburg, where a group of 80 Africans had found refuge.

Stemann is considered one of the most in-demand young directors in contemporary German-language theatre. Over the last few years he has impressed with various productions based on Jelinek's texts and with adaptations of classical texts, in which he espoused new standards and searched for new theatrical forms. Stemann has reworked Jelinek's complex, often sarcastic but also emotional text for Die Schutzbefohlenen into an oratorio with a torrent of text and imagery. The cast, consisting of actors from the Hamburg Thalia Theater and a number of guest actors, confront us with the cynicism and latent racism in European politics when dealing with human rights. For, as Stemann explains, 'these rights are only granted to them who are allowed to take part in Europe.'