“Whether with gas or with a loving hug – the potatoes ultimately just want to suffocate you.” Moritz Kienemann hits the audience with difficult-to-digest sentences at short intervals. In a furious solo, he plays a first-person narrator who identifies himself as Jewish and, from this perspective, takes the piss out of the German majority society. And at the same time, with every sentence that concerns his own family history, he unmasks himself more and more until the grand finale, when it turns out that his Jewish identity was purely an assertion.
Noam Brusilovsky builds direct references in his text on the case of the journalist Fabian Wolff one who claimed to report from a decidedly Jewish perspective and so on, among other things Spiegel and at time online succeeded. Until research revealed that he had simply made up his Jewish background.
Wolff is not the first, not the only and probably will not be the last who wants to gain a competitive advantage through this route. There has long been a category for this in psychology: Wilkomirski syndrome, named after one of the first cases discovered. And the term Fake Jews.
„Fake Jews“, German Theater Berlin. Again on February 4th and 16th. as well as on March 10th, 21st and 22nd.
Brusilovsky calls his evening in the box of the Deutsches Theater Berlin exactly that. He supports his own text with recorded audio interviews that illuminate this phenomenon from different perspectives. And reference to specific people like the blogger Marie Sophie Hingst, who took her own life in 2019 after it became known that she had falsified her victim biography.
Merciless in all directions
These clips are informative islands of calm in a fast-paced game in which Moritz Kienemann embodies not only the Fake Jew but also his friend Daniel, who, as a non-Jewish actor, has zeroed in on the “Jewish role”. Brusilovsky’s text is merciless in all directions. As a director, he lets Kienemann flood the box with smug irony and a love of situational comedy. Kienemann throws himself into the cabaret-like scenes, switches like a rubber ball between the first person character and Daniel and likes to pounce on the audience with his tirades.
It is the knife-point of humor in the text, direction and acting that makes this evening soar despite the tough inventory analysis. Broken down precisely into a picture of a visit to the Jewish Cemetery in Berlin-Weissensee. The way Kienemann’s Daniel tries to kneel down Brandt is hilarious and at the same time exposes an entire “commemorative culture”.
The biting social analysis regarding the German-Jewish relationship remains independent of the deconstruction of the fake identity. At the end, Kienemann’s Fake Jew lies in the retro armchair as if he had taken his own life. The record player in the corner is rotating and “Mütterlein” by Georg Kreisler is playing quietly: “It was your silent custom to steal what was needed – and what wasn’t needed, too.”
And the short scene comes back to mind in which Kienemann’s first-person narrator manipulates his own mother to the point that she imagines Jewish ancestors. Although Kienemann speeds up this unequal dialogue with two stand microphones, there is enough time to sense the lostness of the first-person character and his search for identity. The marginalized can enhance themselves by belonging to Judaism – internally and externally. And he is stunned when that is taken away from him: “Everyone writes about me on Twitter. I’m an impostor. They call me a costume Jew. Fake Jew. Then I suddenly understand – I’m a fucking goy. I won’t be able to write a word anymore.”
In the program note, Noam Brusilovsky describes how, as an Israeli, he felt like a “monkey in the stronghold of the directing theater while he was studying at the HfS Ernst Busch, constantly failing to imitate his fellow students.” He soon found out that he was in good company: Maximilian Goldmann, who changed his name to Max Reinhardt, sends his regards, and so does Alexander Granach. He is interested in adaptation processes from both sides. He has already staged Oskar Panizza’s grotesque “The Operated Jew” from 1893. Salomo Friedlaender’s satirical replica “The Operated Goj” from 1922 would be another starting point.