Carolin Emcke in Berlin: The expectation, not to be humiliated

As a journalist, writer and peace prize winner Carolin Emcke on Sunday evening in the “Globe”theatre of the Berliner Schaubühne to the easily darkened stage took place in all Black with white sneakers, was not those who heard, quite clearly, what she had expected: A reading? A Performance? A Theater Monologue? A Sermon? “Yes means Yes, and…” was the title of the Evening. Emcke was sitting on a high stool at a Desk, on which the binder was the Text for the evening had written. Beside her, on a second elevated table, was a Laptop, with the recording between the “Miniatures and fragments”, as they called their texts, string Quartet music of Shostakovich and Terry Riley, or songs by Bobby McFerrin, and rapper Young M. A..

Julia Encke

editor in the Feuilleton section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

F. A. Z.

“At the beginning of the doubt,” were the first words she spoke through the Headset-microphone. “At the beginning of the doubt as to what would be said.” That was the high-Carolin-Emcke-sound familiar, anyone who reads your columns in the “süddeutsche Zeitung” and their books. “Against the hatred” is the name of the Essay that you published last, is a diatribe against Democracy and hostility to fanaticism. Your “Lecture Performance” is now the #MeToo-debate – circled name but without the “#MeToo”word too often. Because what says the twist, is that it affects all of us, or surrounds, the should stage the Performance by the presence of bodies in the theatre space and at the same time, reflect. This was meant to be, if Emcke, which is navigated between narrative and analysis, Chan said, that you had these texts during the writing, the feeling that you would have to be spoken, delivered in a Situation in which they delivered themselves to the Gaze of the viewer.

You have to name it

So you spoke to your enlightened and always precisely formulated reflections in the dark room, while on a screen in your back blurry Black-and-White photographs were projected. She wondered why, was told like all other children, on the way to school and on the way home, that she should not talk to Strangers, but what the danger was, it never was named. She recognized that something Complicit, she criticized: “to be able To imagine something, you can name it.”

In another Passage she thought about the Obsession with the “Bathrobe” in the “#MeToo”-stories all the time would be a Bathrobe, the misplaced acting. You asked: “Is clueless, naive, or self-blame, anyone who expects not to be humiliated?” She told of a Situation she had experienced when she worked as a journalist and a call to the publisher, got praised your Text on the phone a lot – and your “dearly beloved head of Department” assured her that, if the publisher you are now home with inviting, he would accompany you. She was not invited. But the Department head knew what would happen to her if she would be invited, like many others before her.