IN THIS ESSAY I CONSIDER how political urgency can be embodied within the theater space during postdramatic performances, and how the resulting experience encourages audience members’ perspective-taking and the tender gaze in a way that may also spark prosocial action beyond the theater walls. I expand the concept of the tender gaze slightly from the way it is most commonly considered in this volume, as a literal gaze occurring when characters look at each other in an altruistic, humanizing, and compassionate manner, or as a narrative perspective taken by a text's narrator or by a film's camera to convey similar non-voyeuristic, non-sexist, and non-racist stances. In the case of live theater productions, the more literal type of tender gaze mentioned above can also happen between people on stage (perhaps while they are in character) as well as between audience members and performers during the show. More figurative tender gazes can arise as well from people occupying the theater's seats and from the people on the stage, all of whom work together during a defined time span to co-create meaning and to embody a political urgency or impulse. This may not involve a direct gaze at all but is more of a “mind's eye” gaze that can be cast upon historical and contemporary figures or groups that are represented or alluded to during the performance. The basic tenets of the compassionate and ethical tender gaze as theorized in this volume's introduction and in Muriel Cormican's foundational essay still hold true in these cases. A “mind's eye” type of tender gaze can also ensue from watching a film or reading a text. In live performance, audience members can influence each other's perceptual experience—and this can also happen when films are viewed or texts are read aloud in public settings—and thus the same show may come across quite differently with each separate performance, depending on exactly what happens within the physical space each time. The following is an outline of the way certain techniques employed in postdramatic theater styles invite perspective-taking and thus offer a receptive experience for the audience that oscillates between an affective and cognitive focus of attention.

IN THE 2011 FILM Almanya—Willkommen in Deutschland (Almanya— Welcome to Germany), Yasemin Şamdereli depicts a spectrum of complex human emotions in a fundamentally compassionate film that emphasizes gentle decencies among a diverse array of people. The film tells the story of a Turkish immigrant couple, Huseyin and Fatma: their life between Turkey and Germany, their struggles raising four children, and their ultimate success in building a close-knit family despite many obstacles. In an important scene, Fatma (Demet Gul) enters a German store intending to buy bread and milk. The camera adopts her perspective, panning up over a dizzying array of unfamiliar products—cans of corned beef, jars of cured meat in gelatin—then cutting to a medium shot of her looking toward the source of an indiscernible spoken gibberish. A reverse shot shows a German male shopkeeper speaking to Fatma, ostensibly in German. A further series of shot/reverse shots show the two trying to communicate and ultimately failing when instead of the bread she asks for, Fatma is offered an enormous roll of salami, but not before her eyes come to rest on a figurine of a pig that is situated on the counter to her right, slightly above her eyeline. A second exchange about milk proves successful, and Fatma and the shopkeeper celebrate. During the exchange, Fatma, supposedly speaking in her native Turkish, uses nativespeaker German while the German shopkeeper, supposedly speaking German, uses invented words and sounds. Anyone who speaks German will understand everything she says but will be flummoxed by the sounds coming from the shopkeeper's mouth.

The camera work and the use of German and gibberish in this scene align viewers with Fatma and alienate them from the shopkeeper. Her words are fully comprehensible to what must be the anticipated viewers of a film made in German to be released in Germany. So what does it mean that both camera and language function here to distance many presumed viewers from representations of “themselves” and to invite them to identify with the very often othered Turkish immigrant who does not speak the language of the country in which she lives? What affect might the filmmaker be aiming for?

Seghers's Prose of Stasis and Motion

THE WORKS OF ANNA SEGHERS are so richly varied, and so numerous, that sweeping generalizations about them prove futile. At the same time, a number of thematic, stylistic, and linguistic patterns emerge quite clearly across her oeuvre. For instance, much of her prose is characterized by a rhythmic quality that parallels the motions of the wind, the sea, the rolling fog, and other natural elements that not only serve as her physical backdrops but also contribute to her “mythic topographies.” Seghers's language often reflects the stasis and motion that her characters experience as they find themselves dealing with frustrating, challenging, and sometimes seemingly hopeless situations. Examples of this contrast of stasis and motion are abundant in Seghers's work, with the degree of movement often changing noticeably from one sentence to the next, as in the opening chapter of Aufstand der Fischer von St. Barbara (Revolt of the Fisherman of Santa Barbara, 1928), with its juxtaposition of verbs that indicate motion or momentary inactivity: gehen/zögern; rennen/gähnen (to go/to hesitate; to run/to yawn). Seghers creates a powerful sense of rhythm and an often lyrical style through a combination of techniques, such as repetition, onomatopoeia, alliteration, assonance, and evocative lexical choices (particularly verbs). Her style is one of simplicity, not overdone or forced. Yet Seghers's writing is by no means apolitical. Her stories often feature humans coping with natural forces such as the wind and the sea but are also very much about humans coping with other humans, struggling to coexist amidst stark ideological difference.

On the whole, despite taking a critical stance toward depicted political events and their ramifications, Seghers's writing conveys a certain— while neither blatant nor naïve—optimism. Although this optimism is grounded partly in a socialist belief in progress, it also marks Seghers's unrelenting belief in humanity. She demonstrated time and again through her stories how seemingly small actions can make a large positive impact. Taking a cognitive-literary approach, in my essay I elaborate how her use of conceptual-metaphorical language skillfully highlights humankind's potential to fill the inherent emptiness of human existence with meaning.

THIS VOLUME's TITLE QUOTATION, ”… for once, telling it all from the beginning” (einmal alles von Anfang an erzählen), stems from Anna Seghers's exile novel Transit, in which the author told not only her own story but that of countless others who faced political, personal, and bureaucratic obstacles in their attempts to escape peril during the Nazi era. While sitting in a café in the old harbor of Marseilles, the unnamed narrator of Transit spins the quintessential tale of exile in 1940s France: “Which view do you prefer? The pizza baking over the open fire? Then you'll have to sit beside me. The Old Harbor? Then you'd better sit opposite. You can see the sun go down behind Fort Saint-Nicolas. That won't bore you, I'm sure.” Transit, completed by the prolific Seghers in 1942 and first published in English in 1944, and in German in 1948, is a political novel that shows the author's acute awareness of human compassion. It also makes clear that without the vitality of storytelling, the experience of exile becomes more of a fleeting historical moment, too easily left in the past. Storytelling forms the basis of a lasting and powerful historical chronicle.

In Transit and so many other literary works in the twentieth century, storytelling is thematized and put forth not only as a way to chronicle events but also as a means of processing the dire situation in which the exiles found themselves—indeed, as a means of psychological survival. Michel de Certeau, in his The Practice of Everyday Life, argues that the practice of storytelling defines our society, and that without stories, societies break down. This is pertinent when considering how fiction can define a society, or help in redefining one. Writers such as Seghers, who experienced the harsh and alienating effects of exile and persecution firsthand, created characters with similar backgrounds who also engage in various forms of storytelling about their trials and triumphs. The resulting mise-en-abyme, story-in-a-story structure highlights the enduring tenacity of both oral and written narrative through the ages.

Certeau is not alone in his view of stories as the backbone of our contemporary existence.