Enter the Ghosts of Europe: Haunting and Contemporary Theatre Elisabeth Tropper (Luxembourg/ Trier) Ever since the beginnings of theatre, the stage has been a ‘ haunted ’ site, populated by spectres of many kinds. Unlike most publications on this subject, this paper explores haunting not as a meta-theatrical concept or as a historiographic metaphor, but as a phenomenon of subalternity, violence and trauma. It, furthermore, discusses haunting as the incursion of someone (or something) that has been excluded from the collective consciousness and/ or the socio-political life of a community or a collective sphere, namely a certain construction called ‘ Europe ’ . By analysing three contemporary theatre productions from Austria/ Germany, Denmark and Germany/ Cameroon as to how they allow certain ‘ ghosts ’ of Europe entry into the theatrical event and thus translate instances of haunting into the aesthetic realm, this paper aims both to fill an academic void and to suggest a decidedly panand trans-European perspective. Introduction: Theatre, Ghosts, and Europe The stage has always been a ‘ haunted ’ site. Ancient Greek tragedians included a variety of revenants in their (pre-)dramatic constellations: In Aeschylus ’ The Persians, Queen Atossa conjures up the ghost of her deceased husband Darius. In The Eumenides by the same author, Clytemnestra returns from the underworld to seek revenge for her assassination through her son Orestes. Euripides even places a revenant at the beginning of his tragedy Hecuba: In the course of the prologue, the ghost of Polydorus predicts the discovery of his own corpse and the sorrow that is going to beset his mother Hecuba. Beyond such concrete representations of the ghostly on stage, which can also be found in more recent plays like those by Caryl Churchill (Cloud Nine, Fen, Hotel) or Roland Schimmelpfennig (Spam, Das fliegende Kind), the invocation of the dead has often been considered a cornerstone of the theatre, if not its origin. 1 Heiner Müller once suggested that “ the invocation of the dead ” may be regarded as a central function of drama, making it necessary to continue “ the dialogue with the dead [. . .] until they have released the future that has been buried with them ” 2 . Despite the multifaceted presence of the ghostly in the realm of theatre, little has been written about the relationship between theatre and haunting. Apart from a handful of anthologies and monographs such as Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996) by Joseph Roach, Ghosts: Death ’ s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre (2006) by Alice Rayner, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (2011) by Marvin Carlson, or the edited volumes Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity (2014) and “ Lernen, mit den Gespenstern zu leben ” : Das Gespenstische als Figur, Metapher und Wahrnehmungsdispositiv in Theorie und Ästhetik (2015), ghosts and haunting have received little attention in the field of theatre studies so far. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this neglected topic by proposing a decidedly panand trans-European perspective on the Forum Modernes Theater, 31/ 1-2 (2020), 175 - 186. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ FMTh-2020-0016 subject. I do not engage with haunting as a meta-theatrical concept or as a historiographic metaphor, but instead seek to understand haunting as a phenomenon of subalternity, violence and trauma, and furthermore as the incursion of someone (or something) that has been excluded from the collective consciousness and/ or the socio-political life of a community or a collective sphere: here, from a certain construction called ‘ Europe ’ . Theatre, then, becomes a site where the presence of a haunting is realised in manifold ways. After offering a theoretical and terminological foundation for the German concept of ‘ Heimsuchung ’ and its English counterpart ‘ haunting ’ as well as of the so-called ‘ spectral metaphor ’ , I will look at three contemporary theatre productions from Austria/ Germany, Denmark, and Cameroon/ Germany, as to how phenomena and figures relating to ghostliness and haunting, which are in turn connected with particular European self-descriptions and geopolitical practices, are produced in them, are staged and/ or are subjected to critical reflection. ‘ Heimsuchung ’ / Haunting and the Spectral Metaphor The German noun ‘ Heimsuchung ’ retains the concept of ‘ Heim ’ or ‘ home ’ , which has the connotations of a friendly, familiar place, a place where one is ‘ at home ’ , a dwelling or dwelling-place, a closed circle or a protected place of assembly. Its English equivalent ‘ haunt ’ probably refers to the Old Norse ‘ heimta ’ , which means ‘ to bring home ’ (but also to ‘ demand ’ or ‘ claim ’ ). 3 Thus, both Heimsuchung and haunting can be traced back to the Old Norse word for ‘ home ’ , heimr. The home, as an inner space that is protected and worth protecting, is by definition something that is threatened. There is always the danger that its borders will be violated, or that its threshold will be crossed without permission - as in the case of trespassing or of ‘ Heimsuchung ’ , haunting. It is no coincidence that there are legal resonances here: ‘ Heimsuchung ’ was originally a legal term for ‘ im Hause aufsuchen ’ , or ‘ seeking in the home ’ , that is, the assault on one ’ s home, ‘ Hausfriedensbruch ’ (literally ‘ breaking the peace of the house ’ ). 4 Thus, ‘ Heimsuchung ’ can, first of all, be regarded as an act of transgression. Somebody or something from outside penetrates into some kind of closed interior and spreads fear and panic, or at least makes their presence felt in an undesirable manner. The actual appearance is preceded by something that manifests itself in the process: haunting always contains an element of repetition in the sense of a return of some kind. In Les spectres de Marx, Derrida points to the paradoxical coincidence of primacy and repetition: “ A question of repetition: a specter is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back. ” 5 The figure of the ghost, in which phenomena associated with haunting are frequently concretised, is itself part of a larger set of spectral imagery. In recent decades the ‘ spectral metaphor ’ has become increasingly accepted in the humanities and social sciences as both a figure of thought and an experiential model, first and foremost due to the transgressive and ambiguous qualities of the ghost. It is a liminal creature, breaking through both temporal and spatial boundaries. Manifest and disembodied, dead and alive at the same time, it belongs to thresholds and transitions, or, in other words, to a third position that transcends the binary order. The ghost ’ s ‘ in-betweenness ’ places it potentially outside hegemonic control. However, this liminal status is doubleedged: located between different time frames, between life and death, between materiality and immateriality, the ghost 176 Elisabeth Tropper finds itself at the same time beyond the structures in which it attempts to take effective action. Thus, the status of ghost is always a precarious one, threatened by exorcism and domestication, by invisibility and dispossession. 6 This is all the more true for those to whom the spectral metaphor is attributed. Due to its liminal qualities, the ghost has become a cipher for marginalised groups of people and subordinate positions, that is, for so-called “ living ” or “ present ghosts ” who “ already in their lifetime, resemble dispossessed ghosts in that they are ignored and considered expendable, or, sometimes at the same time, become objects of intense fear and violent attempts at extermination ” . 7 These ‘ spectralised ’ and often demonised subjects are forced to the social margins, into spaces outside the social network - while, at the same time, remaining tied to the inner order since their exclusion is constitutive of it. They are the “ homines sacri ” Giorgio Agamben speaks of, caught in a paradoxical status of “ inclusive exclusion ” 8 . Among the groups of people to whom the spectral metaphor is repeatedly applied are refugees and the so-called ‘ illegal immigrants ’ 9 . Keeping marginalised individuals in mind, the ghost, thus, represents a figure of (socio-political) invisibility, of dispossession and of non-agency. At the same time, it bears the potentiality of empowerment, since it remains, after all, a creature that can “ go from being overlooked to demanding attention by coming to haunt “ 10 , that is to say, by returning to the realm from which it has been ejected. Obviously, haunting is generally depicted from the perspective of the person who is haunted. But if we turn to the second part of the compound noun ‘ Heimsuchung ’ , those who do the haunting come into focus. As Elisabeth Bronfen emphasises, ‘ Heimsuchung ’ also means that something is ‘ seeking a home ’ . 11 Hence, haunting is not only a phenomenon of transgression and border violation, but essentially one of insistence: To haunt is to seek a home, to demand a reaction, to insist on a recognition that has hitherto been denied. “ [T]hat which haunts like a ghost [. . .] demands justice, or at least a response. ” 12 Enter the Ghosts of Europe If haunting implies the incursion of something that was previously excluded (or, in more psychoanalytical terms, was repressed or abjected) from the space into which the incursion takes place, we must conclude that what haunts Europe today fundamentally belongs to it, to its history, to its selfdescriptions and to its self-conceptions. When I use the word ‘ Europe ’ I am of course aware that I am not dealing with a clearly defined and demarcated entity. It is, however, precisely the fault lines around certain constructions of Europe that I am interested in, the thresholds and blind spots from which the ghosts of the present day, the ‘ present ’ or ‘ living ghosts ’ , emerge. I am referring here, first of all, to an understanding of Europe that subtends the European Union as a reference framework and as a foundational myth, based on a sequence of supposedly universal notions which are declared to be common European heritage: humanism, human rights, freedom of movement, democracy - despite the consistent negation of their universality in political praxis. Furthermore, I am referring to a European self-conception from which particular historical facts have been omitted, such as Europe ’ s fundamental involvement with colonialism and slavery as well as with neo-colonial practices and policies of the present day. Finally, despite its commitment to processes of internal de-bordering, the Europe I am addressing here is increasingly sealing itself off, both spatially and ideolo- 177 Enter the Ghosts of Europe: Haunting and Contemporary Theatre gically, thereby turning itself into, to put it drastically, “ a continental camp where non- Europeans are ‘ included by exclusion ’ and ‘ excluded by inclusion ’” 13 . It is, therefore, my opinion that through its eclectic understanding of itself, its selective memory and, not least, its increasingly rigid border and asylum policies, contemporary Europe has allowed a variety of ghosts to emerge. The aesthetic and discursive strategies through which theatre may allow the ghosts of Europe entry into the theatrical event and thus potentially into public consciousness, can be regarded as “ counter-(re)presentations ” 14 , or, more generally, can be subsumed under the German term ‘ Vergegenwärtigung ’ , that is to say, ‘ manifestations ’ or ‘ enactments in the present ’ . Their objective is, in Derrida ’ s words, “ to let something arrive in the present (faire arriver quelque chose au présent) ” 15 , by utilising the totality of symbolic practices and means of communication available to theatre. The following reflections refer to theatrical representations of two hauntings of Europe which, ultimately, are scarcely imaginable without each other: on the one hand, the European history of imperialism as well as colonialism and their continuation in the present, and on the other hand, the so-called ‘ refugee crisis ’ , which has turned the Mediterranean into “ the largest mass grave of contemporary migration ” 16 . As performance artist Tania El Khoury notes: “ One can no longer write, think or reflect about the Mediterranean Sea without imagining it as a death trap for refugees of war. ” 17 The Mediterranean Ghosts of Elfriede Jelinek/ Nicolas Stemann (2013/ 14) and Christian Lollike (2016) The starting-point for Elfriede Jelinek ’ s Die Schutzbefohlenen (The Charges) are the events surrounding the journey of a group of asylum-seekers who marched from the Traiskirchen refugee camp to the centre of Vienna and set up a protest camp in front of the Votive Church in November 2012. In addition, it reflects upon the refugee catastrophes off of the island of Lampedusa as well as upon Austrian and European migration and border policies in general. The intertextual reference for Die Schutzbefohlenen is Aeschylus ’ tragedy Hiketides (The Suppliants), the only surviving part of the Danaid Tetralogy. The suppliants are Danaus ’ fifty daughters, who land on the coast of Argos and beg King Pelasgus for asylum. They are fleeing the fifty sons of their uncle Aegyptus, who want to force them into marriage. Pelasgus faces a dilemma that is developed discursively in the dialogue between him as protagonist and the women as chorus: on the one hand, there is the divine commandment of hospitality and, on the other, the danger of military conflict with the rejected suitors. The women begging for asylum find themselves in a precarious intermediary state, reduced to their bare lives - no longer belonging to one world, not yet belonging to the other. This uncertain state between different worlds and legal systems also characterises the suppliants in Jelinek ’ s text: “ And it is happening now, it might already have happened when you are watching this, what fate imposed on us, that is, the end. The disappearance. [. . .] We are not here. We have come, but we are not here at all. ” 18 These are the words of the living dead, the homines sacri, trapped in a liminal state between life and death, but also between departure and arrival, echoing the status of “ frozen movement ” 19 which is regarded as typical of the situation of contemporary migrants. Moreover, the identity of both the enunciator and the addressee in the ancient Greek ritual of hiketeia (i. e. the formalised plea for religious and political protection preceding 178 Elisabeth Tropper the asylia) remain unclear: In Die Schutzbefohlenen, voices and fragments of discourse merge imperceptibly into each other, such that there is never a final answer as to who is actually speaking or as to who is addressed by the generalised and generalising ‘ we ’ of the text. In Die Schutzbefohlenen ‘ Vergegenwärtigung ’ - enactment in the present, ‘ faire arriver quelque chose au present ’ - is thus realised first and foremost through a kind of ‘ present absence ’ , that is, a notion of absence and not-belonging made accessible through the linguistic and structural characteristics of the text, most notably through the permanent withdrawal of a coherent speaker position. While reproducing, to a certain extent, the marginalised status of refugees through their textual representation, Jelinek employs language as a means to uncover the mechanisms through which the ‘ ghosting ’ of people functions in language. By allowing the everyday talk of a ‘ flood ’ or ‘ wave ’ of refugees to tip over into an image of their physical erasure, she reveals the potentially lethal element inherent in the dehumanising imagery of the public discourse surrounding refugees. “ The people are already in the fluids and are being dissolved there, yes, we are being dissolved like packet soups, we don ’ t have to worry anymore, that ’ s the best part of it [. . .] we are being dissolved, just no one who wants to drink us, that wouldn ’ t be a good idea, the countries wouldn ’ t stomach that anymore, and more they cannot stomach. More of us is not possible. ” 20 Nicolas Stemann ’ s original production for the Theater der Welt festival in Mannheim (in cooperation with the Thalia Theater Hamburg) in 2014 has been the subject of a heated debate which I do not intend to discuss here. Suffice it to say that the dispute was sparked first and foremost by the presence of ‘ genuine ’ refugees on stage, whom the director had report on their experiences, occupy the theatre space as silent witnesses or speak passages from Jelinek ’ s text, as well as by the use of blackface in one particular scene. 21 Stemann ’ s staging of Die Schutzbefohlenen relies on theatre performance as a shared experience in time and space, where the ghosts of contemporary Europe can be made to appear. Here, ‘ Vergegenwärtigung ’ refers, first of all, to the sheer physical presence of those who are (at least in part) the subjects of Jelinek ’ s text. Still, visibility must not be confused with recognition, and the mise en scène, as committed as it may be, is by no means immune to the reproduction of stereotypes and ethno-somatic stratification. As for Stemann ’ s staging, the refugees remain ‘ the Others ’ of the scenic constellation. The deconstructive gesture, which is employed by the protagonists (four members of the Thalia Theater and two freelance actors) and realised through alternating roles, cross-dressing, parody, hyperbole, ironic songs and constant shifts in attitude towards the text as well as towards its contents, contrasts strongly with the status of the refugees, who are presented as ‘ authentic ’ witnesses of the events to which Jelinek refers. For them, no change of role is intended. Nevertheless, by allowing refugees access to the stage - a site where they are often talked about, but supposedly do not belong - Stemann, in my opinion, attempts to transcend the spectral metaphor and the status of present-absent in Jelinek ’ s text. For the albeit liminal and ephemeral period of the theatrical event, the refugees involved in the performance assert their presence, their arrival within Europe, and they are given a forum - as limited as it may be - in which they can articulate their desires and demands. Accordingly, at one point the members of the chorus proclaim with the conjoint force of their voices, and as if to counter the concluding sentence of the main text of Die 179 Enter the Ghosts of Europe: Haunting and Contemporary Theatre Schutzbefohlenen, “ We are not here. We have come, but we are not here at all ” 22 : “ WE ARE HERE! ” The refugees ’ status within the performance remains, however, as unresolved as their legal status outside the theatrical sphere. The logic of exclusion inherent in the public discourse on refugees and the aspects of haunting that follow from it, as well as the anxious fantasies of European societies regarding the eruption of the supposed Other into their protected area, is also a central point of reference for Living Dead by Danish author and theatre director Christian Lollike. This becomes especially evident in Lollike ’ s own staging of the play at Pakhus Theatre in Copenhagen in 2016. The set of Living Dead is a realistic reproduction of a kitchen. This realism, though, is immediately disrupted by the visual appearance and acting style of the performers. A, B and C, as the text refers to them, traverse the stage in slow-motion, as if spellbound by fear or fighting an inner resistance. When they speak, their words are stretched and decelerated in a similarly unnatural manner. Their irises are entirely black, giving them an uncanny and fearful look, their skin has an unnatural shine to it. In Living Dead, the simplifying and demonising aspects of discourses regarding refugees are exhibited not through language, but through means of figurative realisation. By letting the objects of such discourses virtually appear as the undead - both in the mediated minds of the protagonists and in concrete scenic images - Living Dead stages the anxious waiting for, literally, a “ black, Islamist mass of zombies ” ( “ den der sorte islamistiske zombiemasse ” 23 ). B claims to have heard of refugees rising out of the sea, half-eaten by fish, and of a virus spreading from the reception camps. The dramaturgical arc unfolds mainly through character C, embodied by Özlem Saglanmak. While A and B are essentially interchangeable, C has an individual position within the ensemble. Fig. 1: Die Schutzbefohlenen, Thalia Theater Hamburg, © Krafft Angerer 180 Elisabeth Tropper Her flatmates accuse her of having infected herself with the zombie virus, regarding her increasingly as a threat to the community. Eventually, C mutates into a zombie indeed, going through a painful transformation in the course of which her body gradually disintegrates while, at the same time, she regains her human features. Towards the end of the performance, in a scene reminiscent of the visual aesthetic of splatter movies, C is executed over and over again. Overall, Living Dead exhibits a drastic visual language, which itself performs a kind of transgression insofar as it repeatedly exceeds the comfort zone of the audience. It overwhelms its viewers through elements of horror, shock and violence, as well as by creating a permanent atmosphere of anticipatory anxiety which is reinforced by the underlying musical score. The zombie, in which Lollike concretises the idea of haunting, originally derives from the religious practices of the Haitian religion of Vodou and has been endowed with all kinds of frightening features by western popular culture, such as the habit of forming hordes, insatiability and the danger of infection. Lollike takes up these elements and interweaves them with the imagery found in public discourse. Like Jelinek, he takes certain images implicit in the European public discourse on refugees literally. The recurring language describing a wave of refugees swamping Europe (often combined further with the idea of a (bio-)political agenda, namely the ‘ islamisation ’ of Europe) corresponds to the image of a relentless horde of zombies as introduced by contemporary zombie films. However, Lollike employs the zombie metaphor in its full semantic spectrum. His characters look and behave like the undead themselves: with their slow movements and weirdly extended pupils, they appear to be members of a zombielike affluent society, dominated by fatigue, fear, and a neoliberal work ethic that relies Fig 2: Still from a filmed version of Living Dead by Sort/ Hvid and Aarhus Teater, © Søren Meisner 181 Enter the Ghosts of Europe: Haunting and Contemporary Theatre on the production of “ dead men [and women] working ” 24 . Living Dead is not a play about refugees, but about Europe. By taking the zombie metaphor literally, Lollike translates the anxieties of postcolonial European societies of a takeover of their protected inner spheres through an external ‘ Other ’ into the theatrical constellation and mirrors them back to his audience in the shape of an unsettlingly twisted and grotesque mimicry (unsettling not least in its deliberate reproduction of racist stereotypes). In one scene, uncanny figures in niqabs circumambulate the room and gradually come to occupy the space. In another, a grotesque dance of the undead, who are represented as racist archetypes of people of colour, turns into a more and more aggressive gesture of begging, thus crossing the boundaries between stage and audience in an uncomfortable manner. The staged images of Living Dead are clearly intended to make the audience uneasy and to provoke further engagement with the events witnessed. Invoking Europe ’ s Blind Spot: Fin de Mission (2016) The third and last theatrical work I wish to discuss here can be regarded as a postcolonial project in the sense described by Leela Gandhi, namely as an endeavour “ devoted to the [. . .] task of revisiting, remembering and, crucially, interrogating the colonial past ” 25 , with the further objective of excavating its ties to the present. FIN DE MISSION. Ohne Auftrag Leben. Die erste deutsch-kamerunische Oper(ation) über das Gedächtnis der Sklaverei (FIN DE MISSION. Living without a mission. The first German-Cameroon opera (tion) on the memory of slavery) was produced in 2016 in a collaboration between the German group Kainkollektiv (namely Fabian Lettow and Mirjam Schmuck) and Fig 3: Still from a filmed version of Living Dead by Sort/ Hvid and Aarhus Teater, © Søren Meisner 182 Elisabeth Tropper Martin Ambara from the Cameroon Laboratoire de Théâtre de Yaoundé OTHNI. It is a theatrical reflection on colonialism as the ghostly background to modern age - the ‘ repressed obverse ’ of European identity, as the production ’ s programme note puts it. In Fin de Mission, whose title alludes, of course, to Heiner Müller ’ s Der Auftrag (The Mission) from 1979, diverse manifestations of cultural performance are woven into each other without any hierarchy of status: European and African musical traditions, forms of song, dance and theatre, as well as ritual practices - resulting in a truly “ syncretic performance ” 26 , which exhibits both the features of Western ‘ postdramatic ’ theatre and the “ total theatre paradigm ” of African performance cultures. 27 Inevitably, for audiences both in Europe and Cameroon, where the production was performed as well, some unintelligibility remains, be it on grounds of language (the performance itself is multilingual), be it due to an encounter with unknown aesthetics, practices, and references. Quotations from texts, film and sound recordings are treated in a similar nonhierarchical manner, provoking a visual synchronicity and polyphony which, at times, takes the audience to the limits of what they can process, both in terms of cognitive and sensational impressions. The layering and intermingling of traditions from different sources extends as far as to the costumes. Already in the opening scene, the female performers are dressed in clothes combining African fabrics with shapes that evoke European court dress from the 17 th century, such as corsages and farthingales, thereby translating the fundamental entanglement of European and African histories into a simple visual sign. The theatrical space explicitly becomes a site where spirits are evoked. Shortly after the beginning of the performance, a ritual is initiated, a séance to call up the dead and to articulate the starting-point for the theatrical endeavour, investigating who is responsible for the injustice that has taken place. The spirits of the victims do not respond, however. It is other ghosts that are conjured up, namely the ‘ evil spirits ’ of the west: colonialism, imperialism, racism, and slavery. Fig. 4 and 5: Fin de Mission, Ringlokschuppen Mühlheim, © Michael Wolke While Fin the Mission relies to a considerable extent on techniques from documentary theatre and provides its audience with vast information about the colonial history of Cameroon, it remains, at the same time, a theatrical reflection on absence. A variety of dramaturgical and staging devices are employed in order to keep the absence of Europe ’ s ‘ forgotten ’ (repressed, abjected) colonial ‘ others ’ explicit, whether through silhouettes projected onto the rear of the stage performing a dance of the dead, or whether through dozens of chairs from Cameroon (the central element of the stage 183 Enter the Ghosts of Europe: Haunting and Contemporary Theatre design) which, in their nakedness, inevitably point to a ‘ present absence ’ . As metonymic objects, they receive a ghostly status themselves, since chairs, after all, “ are among those basic human objects that echo the human body ” 28 . In one scene, the dancer Catherine Jodoin throws herself from chair to chair in a wild choreography, as if the invisible spirits were taking possession of her body. History as haunting does not only “ bite back ” , as Michel de Certeau has stated 29 , it also latches on. In one scene, David Guy Kono and Madeleine Pélagie Nga Alima point to the irresolvably interwoven African and European histories and the incessant presence of Europe ’ s post-colonial ghosts in a statement similar to the self-assertion inherent in the “ WE ARE HERE ” of Stemann ’ s chorus of refugees. “ Whatever border is being built, it will never be possible to prevent people from coming to Europe. Because they are already there! [. . .] Yes, because we have already consumed each other. We have eaten the other and the other has eaten us. Now we are digesting each other. ” 30 Conclusion The concept of haunting (or ‘ Heimsuchung ’ ) points to both constraints and potentials, to a lack of agency and to a subversive and transformative force. “ Haunting always harbors the violence, the witchcraft and denial that made it, and the exile of our longing, the Utopian. ” 31 Given this ambivalence, haunting, as I have tried to show here, can be a fruitful concept when looking at works of contemporary theatre which permit Europe ’ s excluded ‘ Other(s) ’ into the presence of the performance. A ‘ theatre of haunting ’ thus necessarily combines the aesthetic with the ethical and the political, as it sets out to counter the structures that turn people into ‘ living ghosts ’ , whether through discursive and/ or spatial presence, or through evoking the wounds and lacunae in which the ghostly develops its force as something that has not been atoned for and where there has been no closure. Of course, such theatrical endeavours are constantly burdened with the threat of reproducing stereotypes and creating new forms of spectralisation and misappropriation, especially when based on unequal power relations “ between the knowing investigator and the (un)knowing subject of subaltern histories ” 32 . Furthermore, being itself a “ site of exclusion and demarcation ” 33 , European theatre ’ s own blind spots and fault lines, as well as those of its creators and scholars, should be kept in mind. Thus, ‘ haunting ’ could also serve as an analytical key for modes of self-reflection and introspection as well as for detecting the intratheatrical revenants of contemporary European theatre. That, however, begs a paper in its own right. Notes 1 Cf. e. g. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, New York 1981, p. 31: “ We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead ” . 2 “ Ein Gespräch zwischen Wolfgang Heise und Heiner Müller ” , in: Heiner Müller, Gesammelte Irrtümer 2: Interviews und Gespräche, Frankfurt a. M. 1990, pp. 50 - 70, here p. 64. 3 Cf. Merriam-Webster Dictionary: https: / / www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/ hau nt [accessed 30 August 2019]. 4 Cf. “ Heimsuchung ” , in: KLUGE: Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, Berlin/ New York 2002, p. 402. 5 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the 184 Elisabeth Tropper New International, New York/ London 1994, p. 11. 6 Cf. Esther Peeren, Feared yet Disposable: The Spectral Lives of Undocumented Migrants, talk given at the University of Luxembourg (March 18, 2016). 7 Esther Peeren, The Spectral Metaphor. Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility, London 2014, p. 14. 8 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford 1998, p. 8. 9 Cf. Peeren, The Spectral Metaphor, p. 187. 10 Ibid., p. 8 [emphasis E. T.]. 11 Elisabeth Bronfen, “ Vorwort ” , in: Gisbert Haefs (ed.): Ambrose Bierce: Werke in vier Bänden, vol. 3, Zürich 2015, pp. 7 - 29, here p. 10. 12 María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, “ Introduction: Conceptualizing Spectralities ” , in: María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren (eds.): The Spectralities Reader. Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, New York 2013, pp. 1 - 27, here p. 9. 13 Mekonnen Tesfahuney and Magnus Dahlstedt, “ Maze of Camps. (Im)mobilities, Racism and Spaces of Exception ” , in: Maria Holmgren Troy and Elisabeth Wennö (eds.): Space, Haunting, Discourse, Cambridge 2008, pp. 170 - 199, here p. 173. 14 I am borrowing this term from Rieke Bolte who introduced it in her dissertation about medial and aesthetic procedures confronting the disappearance of tens of thousands of people during the Argentinian dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. Cf. https: / / edoc.huberlin.de/ handle/ 18452/ 17559 [accessed 30 August 2019]. 15 Jacques Derrida, “ Marx, das ist jemand ” , in: e-Journal Zäsuren - Cesures - Incisions 1 (2000), pp. 58 - 70, here p. 65. 16 Paolo Cuttitta et al., “ Die Grenze demokratisieren ” , in: Kritische Justiz 3 (2011), pp. 244 - 252, here p. 248. 17 Tania El Khoury, “ Swimming in Sewage ” , in: Performance Research 21/ 2 (2016), pp. 138 - 40, here p. 140. 18 Elfriede Jelinek, Die Schutzbefohlenen, in: Elfriede Jelinek, Die Schutzbefohlenen. Wut. Unseres, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2018, pp. 7 - 225, here p. 97. ( “ Und es geschieht jetzt, ist vielleicht schon geschehn, wenn Sie dies sehn, was verhängt uns vom Geschick war, nämlich das Ende. Das Verschwinden. [. . .] Wir sind gar nicht da. Wir sind gekommen, doch wir sind gar nicht da. ” ) 19 Tom Holert and Mark Terkessidis, Fliehkraft. Gesellschaft in Bewegung - von Migranten und Touristen, Köln 2006, p. 46. 20 Jelinek, Die Schutzbefohlenen, pp. 63 - 64. ( “ Die Menschen sind schon im Flüssigen und werden dort aufgelöst, ja, wir werden aufgelöst wie Tütensuppen, wir müssen uns keine Sorgen mehr machen, das ist überhaupt das Beste dran [. . .] wir werden aufgelöst, bloß trinken tut uns keiner, das wäre nicht gut, das vertragen die Länder nicht mehr, und mehr vertragen sie nicht. Mehr von uns geht nicht. ” ) 21 As representative for the protests surrounding the use of blackface in Die Schutzbefohlenen cf. Wagner Carvalho, “‘ Geht ’ s noch? ’ - Ein Zwischenruf von Wagner Carvalho ” : https: / / theatertreffen-blog.de/ tt15/ gehts-no ch-ein-zwischenruf-von-wagner-carvalho [accessed 30 August 2019]; Matthias Dell, “ Unser Problem ” , in: Theater der Zeit 10 (2014), pp. 15 - 17. I would argue, though, that blackface is deployed as a critical and meta-theatrical means here, that is, a demonstration rather than a reproduction of racist stereotypes. 22 Jelinek, Die Schutzbefohlenen, p. 97. 23 Christian Lollike, Living Dead, unpublished script, September 2016, p. 21. 24 Cf. Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming, Dead Man Working, Winchester 2012. 25 Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory. A Critical Introduction, New York 1998, p. 4. 26 According to Christopher Balme, “ theatrical syncretism ” can be regarded as “ a conscious, programmatic strategy to fashion a new form of theatre in the light of colonial or post-colonial experience. It is very often written and performed in a europhone language, but almost always manifests varying degrees of bior multilingualism. Syncretic theatre is one of the most effective means of decolonizing the stage, because it utilizes the performance forms of both European and indigenous cultures in a creative recombina- 185 Enter the Ghosts of Europe: Haunting and Contemporary Theatre tion of their respective elements, without slavish adherence to one tradition or the other. ” Christopher Balme, Decolonizing the Stage: Theatrical Syncretism and Postcolonial Drama, Oxford 1999, p. 2. 27 Cf. Praise Zenenga, “ The Total Theatre Aesthetic Paradigm in African Theatre ” , in: Nadine George-Graves (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater. Oxford 2015, pp. 236 - 51. 28 Alice Rayner, Ghosts. Death's Double and the Phenomena of Theatre, Minneapolis, London 2006, p. 110. 29 Cf. Michel de Certeau, Histoire et psychanalyse entre science et fiction, Paris 1987, p. 85. 30 Kainkollektiv/ OTHNI, Fin the Mission: Ohne Auftrag Leben, unpublished script, p. 40. The original passage is in French and German. 31 Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Minneapolis, London, 2008, p. 207. 32 Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, p. 2. 33 Jan Deck, “ Politisch Theater machen - Eine Einleitung ” , in: Jan Deck and Angelika Sieburg (eds.): Politisch Theater machen. Neue Artikulationsformen des Politischen in den Darstellenden Künsten, Bielefeld 2011, pp. 11 - 28, p. 24. 186 Elisabeth Tropper