Schiller Goes Transnational: Julie Paucker and Robert Schuster's ‘Malalai – Die Afghanische Jungfrau Von Orleans’ (2017)

Abstract

This article focuses on Julie Paucker and Robert Schuster's ‘MALALAI – Die afghanische Jungfrau von Orléans’ (2017), paying special attention to the constructions and contestations of gender and nation in this recent re‐working of Schiller's Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1801). Paucker radically re‐configures Schiller's play, whose engagement with the concept of nation allowed subsequent interpretations to view it as a nationalist text depicting a symbolic figure for a German nation that did not as yet exist, by centring on nineteenth‐century Afghan folk hero Malalai of Maiwand and placing her in dialogue with her Franco‐German counterpart. Set against past and present conflict in Afghanistan, migration to Europe, and the ‘refugee crisis’ in Germany, ‘MALALAI’ engages two geographically and culturally disparate myths. Whilst Paucker's version of Schiller's text elaborates an intertextual negotiation with the past, her transnational adaptation of a national narrative undermines and transcends the nationalism and Eurocentrism which have marked much of modern Jeanne d'Arc‐reception to date. Through its multilingual and multinational politics of performance, ‘MALALAI’ resists re‐writing Schiller's Jungfrau as an example of a major literature, positing instead a centre/periphery shift as a way of attending to historical and political development on a global level.