Translator and playwright Petra Kindler moved to Ireland in 2000 right at the start of this country's burgeoning multicultural years.

By Shwetali Sapte

Raising intercultural awareness through entertainment is the goal of German translator and playwright Petra Kindler, recently performed her confessional comedy Seriously Now! at Dublin’s Dolmen Theatre.

Kindler, who moved to Ireland in 2000, is known in her home country for her previous play Wer zuletzt lacht, macht das Licht aus, which won a national award honouring ‘exemplary action for tolerance and democracy’. 

Being a migrant herself in Ireland, Kindler says her work is focused even more on illustrating migrants’ experiences in an insightful and entertaining way.

With Polish and Ukrainian parents who were displaced during the Second World War and migrated to Germany, Kindler felt as though she was “never a part of any community there”.

She related some experience casual racism while growing up, as people picked upon the varied cultural expressions and language she learned from her parents. 

Clashes between cultures

When Kindler first came to Ireland in 1994, she knew it was a place she wanted to return to – and she moved to a vastly more multicultural country in 2000.

Kindler describes the transition as “not difficult but baffling” in terms of interpersonal relationships and social discourse; she thinks of Irish communities as more open and interconnected than German ones. Thus, her migration experience motivated her work on multiculturalism, both in Ireland and back home.

In 2014, Kindler returned to Germany to work with young migrants from countries including Cameroon, Nigeria and Romania on the play Wer zuletzt lacht, macht das Licht aus. She was part of a team of professional writers that wrote individual comedy routines for immigrant actors to perform, based on the racial discrimination and cultural issues they faced during their assimilation into German society.

The main theme became clashes between cultures. For example, many female actors had encountered gender issues as they came from conservative households that were more restrictive than German ones.

Although she has experienced racism herself, Kindler is conscious that Africans and Asians live with added difficulty due to their skin tone. “I was just another white kid growing up [in Germany],” she says.

Personal experience

Seriously Now! – which is Kindler’s latest project, a confessional comedy – provides insight into her cross-cultural creative work and her personal experience migrating to Ireland.

Her performances aim to encourage communication and understanding between different communities in an Ireland with increasing need for this, thanks to immigration causing a significant demographic shift in Irish society. She tries to do this by providing an insight into other cultures, especially the German one she grew up in.

Kindler says that her previous work with migrants was an enriching learning experience that inspired her to create Seriously Now! – and she believes that comedy is one of the best ways to touch on difficult issues across societies.

“People enjoy those who make them laugh and feel at ease,” she says. “If you do that without being too confrontational, [it] brings people together… Everybody is just a person struggling to find their place in the world and do something meaningful.”