Flowers for Otello

<b>A powerful performance text that illuminates incidents of anti-immigrant violence in contemporary Germany.</b> <p/> Between 1998 and 2007 a series of killings in Germany disdainfully styled doner murders by the media were attributed by German police to internecine rivalries among immigrants. The victims included eight citizens of Turkish origin a Greek citizen and a German policewoman. Not until 2011 did the German public learn not only that the police had ignored signs pointing to the real perpetrators a neo-Nazi group called the National Socialist Underground but also that important files possibly containing evidence implicating state agencies had disappeared from the archives of Federal Police and intelligence organizations. <p/> Esther Dischereit one of the preeminent German-Jewish voices of the post-Holocaust generation takes that failure of the state to protect its citizens from racist violence as the core of her performance text <i>Flowers for Otello: On the Crimes That Came Out of Jena</i>. Seeking an appropriate language with which to meet the bereaved she also finds a way to raise the blanket of silence that is used by those who would prefer that we forget. Combining witness testimony myth and incidents from a history of violence against minorities <i>Flowers for Otello</i> in Iain Galbraith's translation refuses chaos instead revealing the chilling patterned order of tragedy while bringing a great writer's humanism to the fore.