Disguised as a Turkish migrant worker in West Germany during the 1980s, Wallraff entered the hidden world of migrant labour for two years, experiencing and exposing the exploitation, racism and the harsh conditions faced by migrant workers. Forty years after the publication of the groundbreaking exposé memoir Ganz Unten (Lowest of the Low), the undercover experience of German investigative journalist Günter Wallraff is transformed into a documentary opera in this UK premiere.
1. The source material is rooted in testimony, data, and lived experience, things that resist aestheticisation. What drew you to opera as the form through which to tell this story, and what do you feel music can do with that kind of documentary reality that straight journalism cannot?
What drew me to opera was not a desire to aestheticise Günther’s experiences, but the possibility of making the human consequences of his testimony audible. Lowest of the Low is more than an account of stark realities; it is also a story of transformation. I doubt that even Günther himself imagined how far that journey would take him. He began with the intention of raising public awareness and helping to transform society, yet I believe that he, too, was profoundly transformed by the very process he set in motion. That transformation alone provides a compelling dramatic foundation for opera.
Journalism can expose facts, structures, and forms of exploitation with tremendous force. What interested me, however, was a deeply Kafkaesque condition: a person is not destroyed only through violence, but also by being gradually reduced to a function, a burden, or a disposable unit within an economic system. Opera does not replace documentary truth; it gives that truth another register. It creates a space where exhaustion, humiliation, fear, resilience, and dignity can exist without being reduced to information alone.
2. Wallraff’s account is largely one of cumulative, grinding institutional cruelty rather than single dramatic events. How do you sustain musical momentum and emotional engagement across that texture without either sensationalising the material or flattening it?
The cruelty in this story is not built around a single dramatic event. It is cumulative, procedural, and embedded in the routines of everyday life. That understanding also shaped one of Mehmet Ergen’s-director/librettist- central dramaturgical decisions. In order to break the fourth wall and draw the audience directly into the story, Librettist/Director Mehmet Ergen divided Günther and Ali into two separate stage figures. Günther functions as the narrator, while Ali is the character who lives through the experience itself.
Ali’s first aria is an “I Want” aria. From there, the opera unfolds in an episodic structure, following the various jobs he undertakes and the people he encounters. The story is told in an unflinching, almost brutally plain language. What happens is already so astonishing and
extraordinary that it requires no additional dramatic embellishment. The action itself carries the narrative.
This was crucial in shaping the musical language. I did not want the score to manufacture artificial climaxes simply to satisfy theatrical expectations. Instead, the music follows the logic of pressure rather than release.
What has always fascinated me in Kafka is precisely this form of violence: a person is not destroyed through a single act of brutality, but by being gradually pushed beyond recognition while everyone continues to behave as though the system is perfectly normal. Musically, momentum comes through accumulation rather than explosion. I wanted the audience to feel the weight increasing almost imperceptibly, until the ordinary world itself begins to sound unbearable.
3. There’s a striking layering of perspectives at the heart of this project, a Turkish migrant experience, mediated through a German journalist, now given a score by a Turkish composer. How conscious were you of that structure, and did it shape the musical choices you made?
It was my idea to bring this story to the operatic stage. My uncle graduated as an engineer from the University of Stuttgart and has lived in Germany for many years, so Germany and what was happening there were always part of our family conversations. I can still vividly remember the first edition of Lowest of the Low. My grandfather had bought it and left it on the table. I was fifteen at the time, and the black-and-white photograph of Günther disguised as a worker—with those piercing, intensely alert eyes—immediately caught my attention. I read the book in a single sitting.
Only five years later, when I found myself in Vienna as a student, I experienced first-hand some of the realities I had read about in the book. So my connection to this story is deeply personal.
I did not want to use Turkish musical material as a decorative marker of identity. For me, the more important question was one of audibility: who is allowed to speak, whose voice is translated, interrupted, or rendered unintelligible, and who controls the frame through which suffering becomes visible.
As I immersed myself in the characters and the narrative during the compositional process, the musical identity of the work emerged organically. Rather than underlining any particular ethnic identity, I chose a contemporary musical language focused on the human situation itself. That became the backbone of the score.
4. The book caused a genuine shock when it was published, but it’s now forty years old. Did composing for it feel like an act of historical excavation, or did the contemporary resonances make it feel like immediate, living material?
It certainly has a historical dimension, but it never felt distant or confined to the past. The work belongs to a particular political and social context: West Germany in the 1980s, migrant labour, racism, industrial discipline, and the vulnerability created by economic dependency. Yet the mechanism it exposes is still very much alive.
A person can be indispensable to an economy while never being fully accepted by the society that depends on their labour. That contradiction lies at the heart of the world Kafka understood with such clarity: the individual is not outside the system, but trapped within its language, routines, and judgements.
While composing, I never approached the book as a historical archive. Rather, I felt I was responding to an unresolved present. Over the past forty years, some of the issues it exposes have undoubtedly improved, yet many of the conditions described in Lowest of the Low continue to exist across the world, sometimes in their original form, sometimes in new and more subtle guises. In that sense, the book has acquired a timeless quality.
Of course, investigative journalism itself has also changed profoundly. The methods available to journalists today—particularly through technological developments—are vastly different from those Wallraff employed. But the ethical questions at the heart of his work remain strikingly relevant.
5. Wallraff’s story is fundamentally about disguise and assumed identity, questions of who has the right to inhabit whose experience. Did that ethical dimension inflect the music at all, or is that territory you left primarily to the libretto and direction?
That ethical question absolutely affected the music. Representation is never neutral, especially when a story reaches us through disguise, mediation, and another person’s body. Music can easily claim too much; it can sentimentalise pain or create emotional closure where none should exist. I wanted the score to remain aware of that danger.
6. This is a UK premiere, and the story is specifically rooted in West German labour politics of the 1980s. How much does context matter for an audience encountering this material without that immediate cultural and political background?
This story emerges from a very specific historical context: West Germany in the 1980s, the Gastarbeiter system, industrial capitalism, and migrant labour. But this is precisely where the power of great art lies. The more deeply rooted a work is in a particular place and time, the more universal it can become.
A British audience may not share the precise historical experience that Wallraff was documenting, but they are unlikely to find its underlying concerns unfamiliar. Books such as Hsiao-Hung Pai’s Chinese Whispers and James Bloodworth’s Hired reveal similar worlds of invisible labour, exploitation, and the people society depends upon while preferring not to see.
Unfortunately, we still experience this conditional acceptance today, sometimes in the most visible public arenas. Even in football, a player can be celebrated as “one of us” after scoring a goal, only to be reminded that they are “the foreigner” the moment they fail. That fragile and conditional sense of belonging tells us that the mechanisms Wallraff exposed have by no means disappeared; they have simply taken new forms.
So this is not simply a German story. Across the world, there are still people whose labour is indispensable to the economy but whose humanity is never fully recognised. That is why Lowest of the Low has become more than a historical document; it has acquired the quality of a timeless work.
This is where music begins its work. My task was not to modernise the story, but to bring it into dialogue with the present while preserving its historical specificity.
For listing and ticketing:
https://www.arcolatheatre.com/event/lowest-of-the-low/