MEDIATHEK

“May I be Sacrificed” – Thus begins Sarah Nemtsov’s opera, which had its world premiere in Halle, Germany in March 2017. The words are taken from an Afghan poem (attributed to the Taliban) which conjures up the beauty, grandeur and dignity of the homeland – including the deaths of people who live for this country. In the opera Sacrifice, however, it is not some distant Taliban who invoke their own death for a higher religious or patriotic cause. It is two German girls from Sangerhausen, who in 2014, aged 15 and 18, left behind German majority society and made their way to Syria to wage jihad. Their story, graspable only in fragments, is the realistic basis of the opera. Dramatist Dirk Laucke brings in an ensemble of additional characters whose varying situations fluctuate between fleeing and fighting, resistance and self-Sacrifice. A man and his wife torn between leftist and nationalistic ideology, three journalists at an european external border, a young Syrian waiting in Istanbul for his German visa.

These are “not realistic characters but projection surfaces”, comments Sarah Nemtsov – surfaces on which to project the search for meaning in one’s own life within a society’s conflicting forces. Sacrifice is a work that plays out in the present and deals with events from the recent past. Seldom has a music-theatre work responded to our present-day reality as this one does. Opera can and must turn to the real world when radicalization and marginalization tear a society apart.