PHOTO: © Bülent Kullukcu

TEUTONISTAN

Name: TEUTONISTAN
Start: 2025-11-17T20:00+0100
End: 2025-11-17T21:30+0100
Location: PATHOS theater

Theater

In the organizer's words:

TEUTONISTAN

About a country that is reluctant to remember.

By Bülent Kullukcu & Karnik Gregorian

TEUTONISTAN is seven days of music theater, discourse, film, concert & video installation. What if the history of Germany is told anew - from the perspective of the people who are being ignored? While right-wing parties are making headlines with 'remigration', Teutonistan is taking a stand against it - with empowering stories, angry sounds and memories of solidarity. Teutonistan tells a different German story - from a migrant perspective. An artistic antithesis to the regression of our time. A plea for a new, solidary us.

All events take place at the PATHOS theater.

The center is drifting to the right: Dare more solidarity!

Documentary film (N.N.) followed by a talk*

German society is drifting ever further to the right. Election results and social discourse are becoming increasingly populist. But there is another way! An evening about solidarity and what each individual can do. * Selection of the movie and moderation to be announced.

Guest worker stories: the age of migration

Walk-in video installation by Bülent Kullukcu & Karnik Gregorian

Gastarbeiter*innen-Stories - Zeitalter der Migrationen is a video and sound installation that documents the biographies of people who came to Germany after the Second World War from 1955 onwards: It is both a laboratory and a platform for intergenerational cultural exchange, social education and artistic projects about this German history. Because when the so-called "guest workers" came to Germany (West and East) between 1955 and 1973, they became part of these societies; they helped shape, mold and expand them. This is how a new Germany came into being.

Even today, our society continues to develop through migration; it does not stand still, even if some people still do not want to admit it. The project also includes the people who have immigrated to Germany in recent decades after the recruitment stop in 1973 and who are still coming.

Concept and realization Karnik Gregorian & Bülent Kullukcu | Production Susannah Perdighe | In cooperation with Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, DomiD

Dates: Tue, 18.11. - Sat, 22.11. | from 17:00 until the evening performances and Sun, 23.11. | 12:00 - 17:00
Tickets: Free admission

My father's dishes

Documentary film by Karnik Gregorian

Food is memory: Karnik Gregorian tells the story of his father in the film My Father's Dishes. The Armenian Kevork Gregorian was born in 1932 in what is now eastern Turkey. He lost most of his family in 1938 as a result of the massacre of Armenians by the Turks and was expelled. In 1962, he came to Germany as a so-called "guest worker" and found a new home in Giengen an der Brenz in Swabia. Filmmaker Karnik Gregorian tells the story of his father's life through five dishes that exemplify individual stages of his life.

Cordon bleu, bulgur, bean stew, sulu köfte and bread with garlic yogurt - Kevork Gregorian's cooking skills range from Swabian specialties to old Armenian dishes from his childhood. But cooking always meant more to him. After the death of his wife, the single father of three first had to learn to cook - over the years it became his passion. He expresses his feelings through his dishes and today they serve as guides and answers for his life. Each dish represents a certain era in his life, each one contains his origins, the stories and experiences he has had in the 93 years of his life and thus his identity. In his documentary The Dishes of My Father, Karnik Gregorian tells the story of his father's life, which is characterized by loss and death as well as the unconditional will to live on and accept his fate, in a very personal way, but without ever losing his distance.

The filmmaker embarks on a journey from the small Swabian town of Giengen an der Brenz to the origins of his Armenian father, who was born in a small village in eastern Turkey. It was here that the Turkish military carried out a massacre of the population in 1938, in which Kevork Gregorian lost more than just his mother and two siblings. Only by luck was the then six-year-old able to hide under a stone and escape being murdered. The journey takes the filmmaker to Mount Ararat, the holy mountain of the Armenians, and thus to the origin of his own Armenian ancestry.

The film will be followed by an audience discussion. The movie will be accompanied by two of my father's dishes from the movie.

With Kevork Gregorian | Camera Bernd Fischer | Sound Markus Krämer | Editing Uwe Wrobel | Text & Director Karnik Gregorian | Production Leykauf Film in cooperation with ZDF/3sat | Developed with the support of the MEDIA program of the European Community | Funded by the MfG Filmförderung Baden-Württemberg | Special Mention at the Filmschau Baden-Württemberg 2004 | Armenian Panorama Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival 2005 | Audience Award Armenian Film Festival San Francisco 2006

Are we so foreign to each other?

Migrant feminism and the struggle for visibility

Discussion with Margrit Gregorian, Susannah Perdighe, Özlem Tetik, Şahika Tetik and others.

When it comes to migration or "guest workers", most of the talk has been and still is about men. Women are only mentioned in passing or are portrayed in clichés. Migrant feminism was and still is often perceived exclusively as an expression of those affected. But since the 1970s, migrant women, black women and women of color have been fighting for their rights - not only against patriarchal structures, but also against racism and exclusion. And what about today?

At our feminist discourse evening, women with migrant biographies will talk about their experiences, visibility, self-determination, discrimination and equal rights in German society. How can the voices of migrant women and women of color finally be heard in debates? How can a social discourse be conducted that includes all women - without hierarchies, without appropriation, without ignoring the invisible work of migrant women?

As early as the 1970s and 1980s, women with a so-called "migration background" organized themselves independently, as they were often ignored in the German women's movement or reduced to the role of "those in need of help". From March 23-25, 1984, the first joint women's congress took place in Frankfurt am Main. Over 1000 women came together to make the particular oppression of foreign girls and women their main topic. This was explained in a joint congress communiqué as follows:

"We came together because even among opponents of xenophobia, the situation of women is only discussed as a marginal problem. However, not only in established parties, political organizations and the movement against xenophobia, but even in the women's movement, foreign women are excluded. When they are talked about, they are stereotyped as "brave heroines" or particularly "unfortunate victims". Again and again, their own path to emancipation becomes the unbroken standard by which all foreign women are judged and evaluated.

The first joint congress of foreign and German women in Frankfurt in 1984 was a key moment: here, migrant women demanded an end to discrimination, addressed racism within the movement and developed their own political strategies. They founded associations, advice centers and networks to defend themselves against multiple discrimination - through racism, sexism and classist structures. Despite resistance and a lack of solidarity from German feminists, they created spaces for exchange, empowerment and political work. Their demands for equality, an intersectional perspective and recognition of their theoretical and activist contributions had a lasting impact on the debate about feminism in Germany. To this day, however, their commitment is often marginalized or perceived as "concern" rather than as a theoretical and political achievement.

The women wanted to change this back in 1984 and it is still relevant today:

"It is high time for us foreign women to break the silence against social discrimination. In exchange with each other, but also in exchange with German women. However, we do not want to make their standards the basis of our emancipatory path.

Date: Thu, 20.11. | 20:00
Tickets: Free admission

TEUTONISTAN

Music theater / Interdisciplinary stage project by Bülent Kullukcu & Karnik Gregorian

TEUTONISTAN is music theater that retells migrant history in Germany - empowering, poetic, radical. Live music meets harsh noise, spoken word meets documentary texts, political interventions meet poetic fiction.

Interviews, social media clips and historical sources merge with literature and composition to create a score of archive, concert, performance and protest - a polyphonic, vibrant archive of memory. The result is a scenic collage that makes migration, language, everyday life and the continued effects of racism visible and audible - from arrival in a foreign country to language barriers and the continuities of racist violence and right-wing ideologies in the present.

At the center of the play is Turgut Özben - cultural mediator and son of the second generation, child of Turkish 'guest workers', who is searching for the lost manuscript of his aunt Selma Aydin. Selma, a fictional character linked to real life stories of first-generation women, was a factory worker, a writer in hiding and a chronicler of the invisible. But in her, the voices of thousands of people who came back then - and who still have to prove today that they belong here - come together. Turgut encounters a web of forgotten biographies, struggles and collective memories.

Inspired by Oğuz Atay's cult novel Die Haltlosen and musically inspired by the award-winning project Songs of Gastarbeiter, a scenic collage is created that makes migration and language, everyday life and exclusion, violence and community visible - from arriving in a foreign country to language barriers and the continuities of racism and right-wing ideology in the present.

Director & Video Bülent Kullukcu & Karnik Gregorian | Text & Music Bülent Kullukcu | Interviews Karnik Gregorian | Actors Anne-Isabelle Zils, Murali Perumal | Musicians Anton Kaun, Josip Pavlov, Bülent Kullukcu | Experts Helena Gregorian, Marco Perra, Margrit Gregorian, Özlen Sönmezler, Özlem Tetik, Şahika Tetik, Susannah Perdighe, Zakar Gregorian

Concert evening

by Ippio Payo aka Josip Pavlov

Munich-based multi-instrumentalist Josip Pavlov, who is known from bands such as Majmoon, Das Weiße Pferd, Grexits and Zwinkelmann and as co-organizer of the Maj Musical Monday series and the Noise Mobility Festival, is giving a surprise concert.

This content has been machine translated.

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