Few people have done more to change the way postwar Germany looks at itself than Levent “Ali” Sigirlioğlu. A 1985 bestselling book detailing the inhumane working conditions and everyday racism that the 26-year-old Turkish migrant worker endured at Ruhr valley steel plants, asbestos-infested building sites and fast-food restaurants was the first to expose the dark underbelly of a booming postwar economic revival.
The only catch is that “Ali” was not a young Turk at all, but a then 43-year-old white German.
Günter Wallraff, a journalist famed for his deep-cover investigative journalism, had spent two years living as “guest worker” Ali, hiding his true identity at the workplace with a black wig and darkened contact lenses. “Of course I wasn’t a real Turk,” he wrote in a foreword to Ganz Unten (“Lowest of the Low”), “But sometimes you have to put on a mask to unmask a society.”
Forty years on, a new “docu-opera” considers whether Wallraff’s credo would withstand charges of brownfacing and cultural appropriation today, and investigates what drove the reporter’s transformation.
“There’s something to be asked about why a man of that intelligence spent years with people who were desperate to just stay alive,” says Mehmet Ergen, the show’s Turkish director. “Something inside told him that he should do this.”
The opera premiered at the Weimar Kunstfest festival this week before touring German cities and showing at Ergen’s own Arcola theatre in Dalston, London, next year. It dwells less on the precarious labour conditions that Wallraff’s reportage portrayed in painstaking detail: the temporary employment agencies that acted as de facto human traffickers, demanding inhumane working hours of Ali and his colleagues and offering them irregular pay and insufficient safety equipment in return.
Instead, it discovers miniature Brechtian vignettes in Ali’s everyday encounters, such as with the funeral directors whom he asks to prepare for his imminent demise from exposure to toxic coke oven fumes, or the priests who turn heartless heathens when he asks them for a fast-tracked christening to avert an imminent deportation. And by asking what drove Wallraff to embark on his investigation, it finds universal dramatic themes.
Born three years before the end of the second world war in Burscheid, western Germany, Wallraff was five years old when he was sent to an orphanage, where he was stripped of personal possession and his own clothes.
“It was dehumanising, nothing remained of home,” he recalls in a phone call from his home in Cologne. “When I look back on Ganz Unten after intensive psychotherapy, I wonder whether this early trauma was not the trigger, the driving force and the opportunity to take on other identities later in life, to reinvent myself and assert myself. Lowest of the Low wasn’t a journalistic project for me, but an existential necessity.”
In Ergen’s adaptation, the Anglo-German actor Ryan Wichert plays Günter but his alter ego is impersonated by the Turkish actor Burak Bilgili. The opera opens with a song, written by the composer Sabri Tuluğ Tirpan, that asks “Who am I?”.
Before embarking on Lowest of the Low, Wallraff had made a name for himself with a trilogy of books that exposed the methods of the powerful tabloid Bild, where he had worked for three and a half months under the alias Hans Esser.
He first experimented with his Ali alias in the early 70s, but shelved the project for a decade. A lack of talent for learning languages meant his adopted persona was easily blown. “I broke it off probably because I sensed what was in store for me,” he says. “I was simply afraid.”
Wallraff re-embarked on Lowest of the Low in 1982, this time with an invented half-Greek parentage to explain his faltering Turkish, and soon found it difficult to stop. “I realised that I owed it to my colleagues, who had no choice because they needed the work for financial reasons or were in Germany illegally. Quitting would have felt like a betrayal.”
Ergen, who interviewed Wallraff at length to research the play, said: “At Bild, he experienced a lack of solidarity. But in these terrible conditions at steel factories, he made many friends for life.”
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Lowest of the Low became an instant bestseller after it hit the shelves in 1985, with 2m copies going over the counter within the first five months of publication. The book has been translated for almost 40 territories, including Turkey (though not the US: the publisher Little Brown made its offer dependent on being compensated by his German publisher if they were being sued). A film version, which used covertly filmed material, won a Bafta in 1988.
His success brought Wallraff financial stability and international renown. The word wallraffa, meaning to do investigative journalism under a false identity, has made it into the Swedish Academy’s national dictionary. In 1993, he sheltered Salman Rushdie at his home after the Indian-born British-American writer went into hiding over the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s fatwa.
From a contemporary perspective, there is a potential problem, however. In a foreword to a recent new edition of Lowest of the Low, the Turkish-German author Mely Kiyak asked why Ali’s story had to be written by a German in disguise when approximately a million “original” Alis lived in Germany at the time.
Ultimately, Kiyak defends Wallraff’s decision to don Ali’s mask: “Social reportage is not a ‘safe space’, and must never be,” she writes. But a 2010 investigation into modern German racism, Black on White, for which the journalist sprayed himself with black paint and put on a curly wig to impersonate a Somali migrant, “Kwami Ogonne”, drew less polite criticism. One review described him as a “humourless Borat”.
“Accusations of cultural appropriation, or whatever you want to call it, don’t affect me,” the journalist said. “What I was doing [with Lowest of the Low] was an approach, not appropriation. After publication, I received thousands of letters, especially from immigrants, who told me: ‘Finally, a German has experienced and exposed this. No one listens to us and no one believes us – you are one of us.’”
Composer Tirpan, who lives in Vienna and recalls first encountering Lowest of the Low on his guest worker uncle’s bookshelf in Germany, said identity politics should not blind contemporary theatregoers to the book’s universal themes.
“It’s not only a book about Germany,” Tirpan says. “There are lowest of the low in Turkey, in Britain, in the United States, in China, in Russia. And Günter Wallraff managed to open our eyes to them.”