Nathan Death

«Oh please, not the ring parable again», Rachel interrupts her father Nathan, whose wealth places him in the position of a king in Jerusalem, as he is about to lecture the young German Muslim Omar on his idea of tolerance. Omar has just saved Rachel from a burning building. Shortly afterwards, Rachel meets the US-American Christian Aaron and shows him the city that is her home. Two good examples to show that peace between competing religions is very much possible. The reality, however, is very different. Both Omar and Aaron are being secretly directed by radicals waging war in the name of their faith: Aaron is steered by an evangelical bishop and Omar by a sheik who supports ISIS. Among the Jews, too, more and more fundamentalists clamour for segregation. Old, deep-rooted conflicts as well as concrete crimes committed in the past - from the crusades to the Holocaust and 9/11 - are still very much present in Jerusalem, rendering it a powder-keg.

Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel create a darkly pessimistic picture to counter Lessing’s famous idealistic notion of a peaceful coexistence of the three great monotheistic religions, infused with quotations from the Bible and the Qur’an and accompanied by a wealth of historical documents. In their account, religion - regardless which one - turns out to be a tool for pursuing power, for totalitarian claims on truth that have direct political effects, and by no means peaceful ones.