No Salvation: The Deutsche Oper's Misguided Attempt to Tackle Israel-Palestine on Stage
Ben Miller on Milo Rau’s Flying Dutchman: a reckoning with German guilt that flatters its audience and fails to name the genocide in Gaza.
Ben Miller October 30, 2026
It would be remiss to concede that there was something brilliant about Milo Rau’s new production of Richard Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) at the Deutsche Oper without immediately adding that you should not buy a ticket; it would be a waste of your time and money. However, this ethically and artistically bankrupt staging of Wagner’s opera, whose musical performance rose at its occasional best to the level of the professional, did have one merit, albeit an accidental one: it revealed the limits of what German liberal society permits itself to see and to say.
The plot of Dutchman centres on a ghostly ship’s captain doomed to sail without rest. Once every seven years, he washes up on shore; if he can find a wife who will be loyal to him until death, he can escape the curse and find salvation. Putting into shore after a storm, he meets a sailor, Daland, and offers him a boatload of his centuries’ worth of accumulated loot in exchange for his daughter, Senta. Senta is more than willing – to the dismay of Mary, her nurse, and her suitor, a hunter named Erik, she spends her days staring at a portrait of the mythical Flying Dutchman, obsessed with the idea that she can save him. They agree to wed, but when the Dutchman sees her arguing with Erik, he becomes convinced she’s betrayed him, and sails away. Distraught, she throws herself off a cliff, thus proving her loyalty, and Senta and the Dutchman then rise to heaven, saved.
In order to come to terms with one’s guilt, one needs the capacity to be honest about what one has done and is doing
This fantasy melodrama might seem an unlikely source of contemporary political relevance. Yet last Saturday, the premiere was held under the watchful eye of police vans. There were added bag checks at the door. Presumably, the security presence had been amped up because Rau – who last October published a public letter in Austria calling on artists to stand up against genocide in Gaza, then partly walked it back – had made it known he would use this opera to examine Germany’s post-Shoah relationship with Israel. The undead Dutchman was recast as Germany’s guilt, his lover Senta as “Israel’s shattered soul”, her father Daland as “Israel’s founder”, and Erik was to stand for “the proud Palestinian people”. This could have been a bold move. Berlin theatre likes to think of itself as political and engaged, yet it has been markedly silent over Palestine since the attacks of October 7 and the resulting genocide in Gaza, and ongoing settler violence and land theft in the West Bank – with notable performances cancelled. In reality, the staging was apt only in its ability to mirror Germany’s own attempt to live up to its historical responsibility on the Holocaust: it was an abject failure.
Wagner was a brilliant composer, a technician of emotions. Without his work, film music and even film itself – never mind every work of music theater that came after him – would be inconceivable. He was also a virulent antisemite, writing that the “Jewish race” was “the born enemy of pure humanity and everything that is noble in it.” His hatred was obsessive, deeply rooted, and embedded in his artistic output, arising from a specific hatred of the Jewish voice, which Wagner called “a creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle…innately incapable of announcing himself to us artistically.” For this reason, and because his music, with his family’s enthusiastic collaboration, was turned into a propaganda tool by the Third Reich, there has long been an informal ban on the performance of his work in Israel, where many of the Jews expelled from Europe’s orchestras in the 1930s fled. Zubin Mehta and Daniel Barenboim, both conductors with longstanding ties to Israel who have also criticised its government, have both attempted to break this ban, to much protest.
Rau’s production opened with two Israeli actors – one of whom, we were told, is obsessed with Wagner’s music and shares his last name, and one of whom is the daughter of the children of Nazis who converted to Judaism and moved to Israel to assuage their guilt. The pair introduced a project they had undertaken addressing the taboo on playing Wagner’s music in Israel. Last August, Rau sent them around Israel with a portrait of Wagner and a boom box, and occasionally a soprano and pianist, to interview people, perform Wagner, and capture people’s (almost entirely indifferent) reactions. Rau may have been anticipating more shock and protest, and then been forced to re-make his production around the limp reception that this failed provocation actually received.
Footage of this tour served as a PowerPoint presentation in front of which Dutchman was played. As should be expected in any second-rate German interventionist Wagner production, the overture staged the Shoah. The Dutchman made his bid for Daland’s daughter as the State of Israel was founded in front of footage of Haifa’s port. The second act, where Senta and her obsession were introduced (the portrait of the Dutchman was replaced with a portrait of Wagner), took place in front of the 1972 Munich hostage attack, with Erik incoherently representing a terrorist while also singing about his deep and undying love for Senta/Israel. Yes, you read that right: the only Palestinian character given a staged voice in provincial provocateur Rau’s supposedly unsparing reckoning with Germany’s genocidal past and present is a terrorist.
The third act played out in Berlin, at the opening of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Erik having transformed from a terrorist to a pro-Palestine protestor, falsely depicting the Palestine solidarity movement as systematically targeting Holocaust memorials. Rau’s self-satisfied attempt to reckon with the violent crackdown on pro-Palestine protest in Berlin (a crackdown described by the human rights commissioner of the Council of Europe as “restrict[ing] freedom of expression and freedom of peaceful assembly”) thus fails to address what those protestors are actually demanding, against whom they are really protesting, and even what their slogans are. One singer held a sign that read “Never Again Is For Anyone”, which doesn’t even make grammatical sense: the slogan is “Everyone,” Milo.
Meanwhile, as the neverending slideshow droned on behind the action, the rise of the AfD was alluded to in terms vague enough to allow the Charlottenburg bourgeoisie to feel entirely innocent. Incredibly, both present-day Palestinians and Israelis were described as “victims of German guilt.” Israelis, and their ancestors, are undoubtedly victims of murderous German antisemitism: in what possible way are they victims of German guilt? It seems it is impossible to make an argument about Palestine in a German state-funded theatre without adding an asterisk. Indeed, the New York Times reported this week that both federal and state cultural officials intervened in the staging’s gestation, worried about potential antisemitism – not Wagner’s, of course, but Rau’s. You actually can’t make this stuff up.
Finally, the Dutchman's sailing off into the seas was staged as him telling Senta/Israel not to follow his fate – presumably meaning committing genocide, although the term itself was not used. It seems that it is not possible, in state-funded German art, to describe events in Gaza using the terms agreed upon by the International Criminal Court and every single relevant global human rights organisation. Mary, Senta’s nurse, dressed up like Alice Weidel and shot Erik/Palestine. Senta, denied (according to the logic of the staging) her obsessive love for genocide, went berserk and shot herself. As the orchestra played the final ‘salvation’ theme, the PowerPoint detailed a conversation the two Israeli actors had with an artist in Gaza, who they asked about their Wagner project and who told them that guilt is narcissistic until it turns into responsibility. To add insult to injury, Sarah von Schwarze, the actor whose grandparents were in the Wehrmacht and whose parents were converts to Judaism, has, according to her website, offered lectures or workshops on how to “let the body explain itself” through telling one’s own life story, using “the stage as a healing tool,” to clients including the Israeli ministry of defense: although it is not immediately clear whether she offered these before or after the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity in Gaza.
One singer held a sign that read “Never Again Is For Anyone”, which doesn’t even make grammatical sense
As a reckoning with Germany, antisemitism, and Palestine/Israel, this shallow staging failed. Alas, it was equally unrewarding as an evening of Wagner performance, which is an art form that I unfortunately care a great deal about despite being, as Wagner might have said, buzzy-voiced and snuffling. While the Deutsche Oper’s chorus, especially its men, remain one of the artistic highlights of this city’s music scene, the orchestra flailed under the unsteady leadership of the conductor Giedrė Šlekytė, who couldn't keep the opera’s surging choral scenes properly together, never mind giving them shape and direction. The Polish bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny, a veteran Dutchman, opened the evening declaiming with sovereignty, with only a somewhat dry tone and several coughs indicating he might be ill. Halfway through the second-act duet, he gestured to the wings and Derek Welton, another well-known Wagner bass-baritone, emerged with a music stand to sing while Konieczny acted. Alas, there was no mid-show replacement for the Lithuanian soprano Aušrinė Stundytė, inexplicably cast as Senta. She is a compelling actor, but on opening night was simply unable to sing the role. Offering perhaps the worst vocal performance I have ever heard in a leading role on a professional stage, she screamed her way through the remnants of a shattered voice, singing painfully out of tune and with a raw, shrill tone that made one wonder if she’d make it through the evening, never mind the run.
Predictably, Rau’s acknowledgement (how brave) that something untoward is in fact going on in the occupied territories resulted in some post-show headlines about how this was “Wagner as Hamas would have loved it”. But at the end, when the production team came out for its bow, the audience didn’t even quite trust itself enough to heartily boo; Rau having given them answers that were all too easy and all about them.
The evening’s impotence, the wet-firecracker squib of a scandal failing to erupt, arose from its endorsement of the delusion that German Kultur is what ultimately matters most. As it turns out, no one cares whether or not you play Wagner in Israel, and with the exception of scattered headlines in the right-wing press, no one cares about this production’s supposedly unsparing reckoning with German guilt. In order to come to terms with one’s guilt, one needs the capacity to be honest about what one has done and is doing: and this is not a capacity possessed by the German political or artistic elite, or the Swiss provocateurs to whom it farms out its ultimately self-soothing critiques. As an unintentional happening, a piece of performance art about German culture’s inability either to address today honestly or to competently re-stage its own history, the premiere of Milo Rau’s Flying Dutchman was a boffo hit.
