Contemporary Satire in Fiction of Migration and the Question of Intersectionality

Satire, by its very nature and history, has always been a voice for the disenfranchised. In my presentation, I am asking, however, what happens when one disenfranchised group employs the oppression of another disenfranchised group to advance their own social standing. In September 2011, German satirist Martin Sonneborn made national and international news, when he impersonated U.S. President Barack Obama, in blackface, for a campaign poster of his parodistic political party “Die Partei für Arbeit, Rechtsstaat, Tierschutz, Elitenförderung und basisdemokratische Initiative” (Party for Labor, Rule of Law, Animal Protection, Promotion of Elites and Grassroots Democratic Initiatives). Commentators supporting Sonneborn’s choice of using blackface argued that he was commenting critically on Germans’ obsession with Obama. Critics on the other hand pointed out the problematic racist implications of Sonneborn’s blackface, arguing that he completely neglected to account for the oppressive historical context of this practice. In my presentation, I will bring into dialogue Sonneborn’s political satire with Nurkan Erpulat and Jens Hillje’s play Verrücktes Blut (Crazy Blood, 2010) to comment on the importance of intersectionality in contemporary German satire. I will argue that only satire that is mindful of intersectional implications can truly be subversive of hegemonic power discourses. By extension, my paper will demonstrate how especially contemporary theater of migration overtly engages with questions of national identity by challenging the history of its own genre—that is, what do we mean by “German theater” and what does it tell us about our understanding of “German(y)” writ-large within a transnational European context.