Lena Simanjuntak puts those at the bottom of society up on

Lena Simanjuntak puts those at the bottom of society up on stage - By Anett Keller

Meddling is the only way to stay relevant." German writer and Nobel Prize laureate Heinrich Böll once said, expressing his objection in 1973 to the constraints that supposedly prevented pragmatic politicians from tackling human oppression. Lena Simanjuntak not only lives on the same street in Cologne that Böll lived on - she has also adopted his motto.
Lena's way of meddling is theater. For 10 years, the Indonesian theater director has been dividing her time between Cologne and the land of her birth. She stages plays with amateur actors, depicting their own situations and thereby making audiences more aware of problems that most people try to ignore - homelessness, prostitution, prison life, child slavery and HIV/AIDS.
Lena was born in Bandung. In the late 1970s, she studied theater directing in Jakarta, and at the start of the 1980s, she came to Germany. "For love," she says, and laughs. She met her husband, Karl Mertes, while studying in Jakarta. Mertes, a journalist, has worked on media projects in Indonesia for many years and is president of the DIG, the German-Indonesian society in Cologne.
Lena says the idea of making a new home in Germany did not seem particularly strange to her back then. She had watched lots of Western movies during her studies - she knew the work of directors like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog. When she arrived in Germany, she continually compared the reality with the world of film. Throwing herself enthusiastically into theater work, she studied under Milan Sladek, one of the world's best-known mime artists. Lena was delighted by the rich selection the German theater world had to offer, including street theater.
At the same time, she was affected by the political involvement of the peace and civil rights movements of the early 1980s. She lives a short distance away from the grounds of what was once Cologne's main fire station. The city planned to turn it into a shopping center but a citizens' action group called for a community center instead.
Lena, who had come from the then-dictatorship Indonesia, found she could identify with the civil disobedience that was suddenly all around her. "At first I could hardly believe it," she said. "People could just demonstrate, could publicly criticize the government and nobody was arrested." The citizens' group won. And later, Lena became the first Asian member of the committee of the "Alte Feuerwache" community center.
There she founded the "Bunte Frauennetzwerk," a network of German and immigrant women, because she was annoyed by the multicultural events at which the newcomers "performed" their cultural activities and the Germans merely watched. Lena organized political discussions, culture evenings and markets − and she did theater.
Her first solo performance - one she is still proud of today - was "The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum or: How violence can arise and where it can lead" by Böll. It is the story of a socially accepted woman who becomes an outcast because she falls in love for a terrorist.
Today, Lena's concern is still for those on the fringes of society. Ten years ago, it started with a call from a friend in Indonesia. He was working with a social project for prostitutes in Surabaya. Prostitution was thriving in the port city - with all it entails: violence, human trafficking, disease and social discrimination.
Lena left her husband and two daughters at home in Germany and went to Surabaya for several months. She went into the health center in the red light district and tried to make contact with the women. "The hardest thing was battling my own clichés," Lena recalled. Though she had never had direct contact with prostitutes, she had many prejudices.
Slowly, she gained their trust and together, they developed a play. The women spent weeks rehearsing in the mornings and well into the afternoons. In the evenings, they saw their clients. And then they gathered their courage and put their experiences up on stage.  Almost every one of them had been raped at one time. Every one of them had experienced poverty and alienation. Some of them had to look on as their own daughters turned to prostitution.
The premiere turned into a small revolution. It was the first time that prostitutes appeared publicly, talking about things society is all too willing to shut its eyes to. Hundreds of people went to see the play. One performance took place in the crowded hall of the Jakarta Goethe Institute. Eventually, it came to Germany.
Further theater projects followed. Lena  worked with homeless people in Jakarta, with prison inmates in the German city of Wuppertal. Long before the tsunami swept over Aceh and the world suddenly took an interest in the Indonesian province torn by civil war, Lena was already listening to what the women there had to say - and putting it on stage.
But Lena would not be who she is if her work ended when the audience goes home. Her plays are meant to be the first step of a process that turns victims into active agents. That is why she always collaborates with organizations that have been working  with women for a long time. "The least we can do is make it clear to them that their situation at the moment is not their entire destiny," Lena says. In Surabaya, six women from the theater group have given up prostitution and have become social workers.