THIS QUOTE is taken from Putzfrauen, a text by Volker Braun, who stages the Greek debt crisis within the framework of ancient tragedy. The starting point is the layoff of the cleaning women of the Greek Ministry of Finance in the context of the crisis. In September 2013, in fact, 595 cleaners employed in the Ministry, mostly women, were laid off to outsource the service in order to implement the austerity measures that Greece was requested to take. Two years later, in court, the women finally secured their reinstatement and became a symbol of resistance to austerity.

This suggestive event serves as a starting point for assessing the link between debt crisis and tragedy and trying to understand whether it is only an effective artistic and rhetorical tool, or whether it can offer a different understanding of the crisis itself and of the politics that lies beneath it. To analyse the relationship with the tragic, we start from the premise that in the course of the Greek debt crisis, and in the relationships between Greece and Germany, the tragic dimension has often been evoked, by government representatives, by the media and by common sense.