Kultur Magazine 25: 2014

kultur magazine of the Goethe-Institut in AustraliA 2014 edition 25

MUSEUM of the future 03 : the museum of the 21st century 05 : A dialogue between the cultures of the world 06 : Killing Time World War I 08 : The Great War 10 : Past Traces and Present Legacies 13 : Selling the War: First World War propaganda posters 16 : The impact of World War I on Germans in Australia 20 : First Victory — 1914 ART and culture 22 : They rocked their socks off 24 : ulm school of design 1953–1968 25 : As a weather station in Australia 27 : Complexity of Belonging

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WILLKOMMEN The 25th issue of kultur comes with a threefold very warm welcome: we discuss future museum concepts in Australia and Germany in part one, part two commemorates the beginning of World War I and part three looks at some of our recent and upcoming events.

The Humboldt-Forum in Berlin is Germany’s biggest current cultural undertaking. kultur captures an interview with KlausDieter Lehmann, President of the Goethe-Institut, and Hermann Parzinger, President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation.

Their views are accompanied by a piece by Frank Howarth, President of Museums Australia and David Walsh, funder and founder of MONA. To reflect upon the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I, we invited Bernd Hüppauf of New York University, Anna Haebich of Curtin University, Claire Baddeley of the Australian War Memorial, authors Nadine Helmi and Mike Carlton to contribute brief essays.

German journalist Birgit Heidsiek tells our readers about her experience visiting the 13th edition of our Audi Festival of German Films. The design exhibition Ulmer Modelle presented iconic design to Australians. German author Mirko Bonné reports on his visit to Australia, with a special poem about Melbourne.

Finally, Chunky Move’s amazing dance theatre piece is covered by an interview triptych featuring German choreographer Falk Richter, his Dutch counterpart Anouk Van Dijk, and Melbourne Festival director Josephine Ridge.

We hope you will enjoy this issue of kultur, and we are looking forward to seeing you at one of our many events!

Dr. Arpad A. Sölter

MUSEUM of the future 03 the museum of the 21st century

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Thomas E Schmidt and Adam Soboczynski

A dialogue between the cultures of the world Frank Howarth

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Killing Time

David Walsh

World War I

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08

The Great War

Bernd Hüppauf

Past Traces and Present Legacies

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Anna Haebich

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Selling the War: Australian and German World War I propaganda posters

Claire Baddeley

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The impact of World War I on the German-Australian community

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Nadine Helmi

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First Victory — 1914

Mike Carlton

ART and culture

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They rocked their socks off Birgit Heidsiek

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ulm school of design 1953–1968

ifa

As a ‘weather station’ in Australia

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Dr Arpad-Andreas Sölter Director, Goethe-Institut AustraliA

This issue of kultur is kindly supported by the Federal Foreign Office of Germany:

Gabriele Urban

The making of Complexity of Belonging: A glimpse behind the scenes INTERVIEW WITH FALK RICHTER

kultur magazine of the Goethe-Institut in AustraliA 2014 edition 25

Mirko Bonné

Complexity of Belonging:

A Project by Falk Richter and Anouk van Dijk

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COLLABORATING ACROSS CONTINENTS:

INTERVIEW WITH ANOUK VAN DIJK BRINGING THE PRODUCTION TO MELBOURNE:

INTERVIEW WITH JOSEPHINE RIDGE

Outlook

Upcoming Events

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acknowledgments publisher www.goethe.de/australia • Goethe-Institut Australia SYDNEY 90 Ocean Street, Woollahra NSW 2011 T 02 8356 8333 F 02 8356 8314 Melbourne Level 1, 448 St Kilda Road, Melbourne VIC 3004 T 03 9864 8999 F 03 9864 8988 editor Dr Arpad A Sölter, info@sydney.goethe.org coordinators Dr Arpad A Sölter, Jochen Gutsch, Gabriele Urban • Views expressed by the contributors are not necessarily endorsed by the Goethe-Institut. No responsibility is accepted by the publisher for the accuracy of information contained in the texts and advertisements. design and artwork Torkos Ploetz Design, Melbourne printing Doran Printing Pty Ltd, Melbourne images The Goethe-Institut has taken every possible care to secure clear copyright permission for all images published here. front cover Complexity of Belonging ©Sarah Walker

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Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, President of the Goethe-Institut [Left], and Hermann Parzinger, President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, in front of Germany’s largest cultural construction site.

Museum of the Future

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the museum of the 21st century the Humboldt-Forum is Germany’s most important cultural project of the 21st century.

In order to refine the concept of the Humboldt-Forum within the rebuilt Berlin Palace and its role as a future exhibition centre and venue, Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, President of the Goethe-Institut and Hermann Parzinger, President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, visited Australia, New Zealand, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and Hawaii in 2013.

Accompanied by the curator Martin Heller and Director of the Ethnological Museum, Viola König, the team came to break new ground. The idea was to consult with and learn from the local leading experts, and especially to invite them to participate in the creation of the forum. kultur is continuing this GermanAustralian dialogue.

And what is happening in Berlin in the meantime? The construction of the palace in the heart of Berlin is making visible progress.

The Humboldt-Forum is growing: the Museum of Asian Art and the Ethnological Museum are moving from Dahlem to the Berlin Palace by 2019. The University and the Berlin Central and Regional Library will receive premises of their own. To attract visitors, a special events centre called Agora is planned at the heart of the Humboldt-Forum.

DIE ZEIT: Mr Lehmann, as president of the Prussian

© Photo (cropped): Benno Kraehahn for Die Zeit (Berlin, 05.05.2014)

Cultural Heritage Foundation you were one of the initiators of the Humboldt-Forum in May 2000.

Are you satisfied with the work of your successor?

Klaus-Dieter Lehmann: One can only be satisfied.

Mr Parzinger has adopted this concept in a manner that is, to all intents and purposes, a further development.

DIE ZEIT: Mr Lehmann, you made your proposal in regards

to the Humboldt-Forum at a time when the Berlin Palace was the centre of a lively debate. Everybody was arguing about the shell of the building. And then you came along and talked about the function, the ‘inside’. Why was that aspect never publically discussed in the same manner as the question of the exterior?

Lehmann: Basically there still isn’t anybody who breaks down the pathos of the beginning in stories, in narratives, which fill the whole to an extent that involves the public with the details of the content. Therefore we needed a resource in the sense of an external group which explains what will happen in the

Agora events centre — what kind of theatre, film, music dance pieces will be presented and how the Agora is connected to the collections, how contemporary subject matters relate to ethnographic artefacts.

DIE ZEIT: Prussia, the new ‘Wilhelminism’ — all of that is

off the table. What is the significance of the Berlin Palace today, apart from the fact that it is the biggest culturalpolitical project in the Federal Republic at the moment?

Hermann Parzinger: Indeed, a lot has changed in our country over the past 14 years. It must be our task to inspire people to whom it is not so important whether there is a palace or not.

We have to make it clear to them that these collections are also a part of their history and their traditions. At the same time we want to include them in the programming at the HumboldtForum. The events have to reflect what’s happening in the world: where are the artistic developments? Where do the important socio-political discussions take place?

Lehmann: The origins are one aspect, but we also have to look at new definitions. The strong self-reference of many Germans plays a certain role. They don’t necessarily want to deal with the outside world that intensely. The idea that you add non-European issues to that location, with the background knowledge of your ‘Prussian’ roots, seems a bit bold to some. The canon does include folklore, a certain romanticisation of the tropics, the stereotypes of the primitive and the poor. We would fail if we were not able to break away from this image. Today, the most exciting themes for humanity are coming out of non-European cultures: global migration, urbanisation, domestic rural-urban migration, climate, social upheavals. And these issues are closer to us than some people think!

DIE ZEIT: Why does a culturally and historically presented

collection necessarily need a new narrative imposed upon it?

Lehmann: Because the world has changed! We can’t tell the stories of the 19th century. That was the colonial period, from which the narratives were derived. The artefacts that are exhibited at the Dahlem Museum are like geological layers. They have to be made communicable. We have to offer insights into pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial times, but also look into the future from our present point of view.

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It must be our task to inspire people to whom it is not so important whether there is a palace or not. We have to make it clear to them that these collections are also a part of their history and their traditions. [parzinger]

Parzinger: We have to integrate the perspectives of the cultures of origin and work with indigenous representatives as well as cultural scientists from these countries. How do they present their cultural heritage? How should we present this heritage? In general they don’t want us to present the works of their ancestors solely under aesthetic considerations or as exotica. We have to take that seriously.

Parzinger: Don’t imagine that there are just bookshelves.

The managers of the library are currently developing a science centre themed as a World of Language. This will take up at least half of the area available to them. That fits in very well with the sound archive of the Dahlem museum complex or the sound archive of the Humboldt University.

DIE ZEIT: The Goethe-Institut is obviously looking at an

DIE ZEIT: You have been accused of not having made this

particular exchange, with some voices arguing that the preparation always remained a matter for the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation.

Parzinger: I can only say that this sort of cooperation plays a role in almost every exhibition module by now. We undertook many journeys; we are building networks.

Lehmann: Apart from that, another step has to be taken: German museums have to change their way of curating. They have to include the view from the outside. Art museums, for example in Munich, Dresden or Düsseldorf are already working in this area.

They are for example inviting African curators to curate European collections. This global opening up is the development that creates new horizons and asks new questions. If we don’t follow it, the German museums will remain parochial.

DIE ZEIT: Maybe I want to visit the museum in order

to see something strange and foreign, and don’t want to hear about the lack of water in Africa again?

extensive collaboration with the Humboldt-Forum?

Lehmann: Together with the Humboldt-Forum we are developing a network of experts in the respective countries. The GoetheInstitut directors around the world are encouraged to maintain this network and to provide relevant input. When you enter the phase of the existing Forum, I could imagine that next to these services and the supervision by experts, there will also be room for productions that are known to Goethe-Institut staff overseas and even internal productions. These would constitute participation in actual content production.

DIE ZEIT: Events with international references are not

exactly scarce in Berlin. The House of World Cultures is principally working along the same lines. Should the offering be newly conceptualised?

Parzinger: The House of World Cultures follows a similar concept, but without the background of collections, and is geared towards an artistic and intellectual public. While we are also addressing this audience segment, we are going further and are aiming at a wider audience base.

Parzinger: They are not mutually exclusive. There will also be rooms with works that speak for themselves, where visitors of African art exhibitions can take in the work without being immediately confronted with current political questions.

DIE ZEIT: Does the Berlin Central and Regional Library

have to be part of this project?

Lehmann: I cling to this old idea that it is good to relate cultural sources to each other, and not look at them in isolation. Here we have the chance to do that: archive, library, science and museum.

I love the library idea, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be the Berlin Central and Regional Library. There are also the collections of the Latin-American Institute or the non-European collections at the Berlin Central and Regional Library.

This conversation was conducted by Thomas E Schmidt and Adam Soboczynski. A German-language version was published on 12 June 2014 in Die Zeit . © 2014 PMG Presse-Monitor Deutschland. Topic: Klaus-Dieter Lehmann.

The interview was translated into English by Trudi Latour.

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A dialogue between the cultures of the world Frank Howarth

Imagine a cultural institution that sees itself as “dedicated to a dialogue between the cultures of the world.” talking between people, engagement, involvement, action.

What might such a cultural institution be?

Last year I had the pleasure of being part of a workshop with representatives of the Humboldt-Forum, the very institution that has set itself the laudable goal set out above, now being created in Berlin and due to open in 2019. Some of the Forum representatives set out their reflections on the workshop, and associated travel in Australia and the Pacific, in an article in kultur (edition 24, 2013). My words here are in part a response to that article, in part a reflection on the challenge that is the Humboldt-Forum, and in part a plea for the museum of the future.

A key element of the Humboldt-Forum will be the collections of Berlin’s major ethnographic museums, that is, the material culture and stories of many first peoples of different parts of the world.

The Forum is facing the complex question of how it should speak of and with (and I use those expressions rather than just ‘exhibit’) those many living cultures. And it will be doing this in a country from which none of those cultures originated, and where many are not represented in the community at all.

I’m writing this article from the perspective of Australia, a country with vibrant and complex first peoples, which was invaded by Europeans only a little over 200 years ago. A key characteristic of the museum of the future in Australia will be a very different way of engaging with our first peoples. I can describe the current way of doing this at a typical ‘ethnographic’ museum as “we the authoritative mainly European museum specialists will tell you, the visitor, about them, those very different people”. I’m guessing that this is largely how those cultures are portrayed in the existing museums in Berlin, as they still largely are in Australia. In the museum of the future it will be “we the first peoples of Australia, in the venue that is this museum, will have a conversation with you about us, on our terms”. The museum of the future will use collections from and about first peoples to enable conversations and engagement, rather than the one way communication we have now.

But there is one other big factor in particular that will shape the future of museums, and that is the changing digital world. Given smart phones, social media and the web in general, a person’s engagement with a museum starts well before a physical visit, and increasingly doesn’t involve a physical visit at all. It’s hard to over-emphasise the all pervasive impact of the digital world on museums, and the exploration of how digital will be part of the museum of the future is just beginning. One of my own sayings is that the more the world gets digital, the more people will want to see (and touch!) real things. This yin and yang will be for the good but will force museums to change how they engage visitors with their collections. Full virtual access to collections will in itself answer the questions of many interested people, but for many visitors, virtual access will drive a desire to see the real thing, whether it’s on display or not. I foresee a time when museums will provide ‘on demand’ access to collection items for all, not just specialists and researchers. They will need to be set up very differently to be able to do this.

How will the Humboldt-Forum respond to demands for access to all of its collections and their associated stories, not just by Berliners, but also by the members of the communities that created them?

Digital will also enable museums to shift from a one way monologue with people, to becoming facilitators of conversations, which the museum may or may not be part of. Many museum blogs and websites now contain virtual conversations between interested people; this will become the norm. Visitors will also ‘mash up’ collection items from multiple museums to form their own virtual collections for a whole range of purposes.

Let’s come back directly to the Humboldt-Forum. Clearly there is a very laudable aspiration to engage with creator communities, but in the kultur article there is the statement that “Australian culture at the Humboldt-Forum will have to be addressed as part of what is essentially a faraway world.” I sense an assumption that because

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most of the communities of first people represented in the Forum are indeed on the other side of the world, actual involvement of the communities in telling their stories will be practically impossible. This should not, and need not be the case.

Those very digital tools I mentioned above will enable direct involvement of originating communities in how the Forum tells their stories. In fact, I suspect those cultures will demand access, and involvement, because the Forum is custodian of their heritage. It’s great to see the Forum representatives visiting Australia and Pacific nations, but there must be ongoing involvement of those cultures in the creation of the Forum, in how the now quite old collections are used to tell stories, and in bringing to Berliners the vibrancy of those nations as they are now, and not just as they were at the time of collecting.

The Humboldt-Forum is an opportunity to make a difference, to change the paradigm of museums as passive collectors, cataloguers and observers, so that they become central to societal wellbeing, not a marginal nice-to-have.

Museums need to stop being about things in cases and on pedestals. Museums need to use their collections to create conversations, with audiences now, physical and virtual, and even more importantly, with the creators of the collections, living or their descendants, near and far. The power of the digital world removes the excuse that the creator communities are not physically near the museum — they can engage virtually, and the museum must reach out to them. This means that the role of the curator must change, and no longer be solely a subject matter expert, but become a custodian for someone, a facilitator, a story teller, a catalyst, and broker of true cultural engagement. This is the challenge for the Humboldt-Forum, and one way for it to really bring to life “a dialogue between the cultures of the world”.

Frank Howarth has a geology degree from Macquarie University, and a Master of Science and Society from the University of NSW. He is passionate about arts, culture, science and the natural world.

In 1996 he became Director and Chief Executive of the Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust, before taking up the role of Director of the Australian Museum in 2004. He stepped down as Director in April 2014. He remains a Trustee of the Australian Museum Foundation. He was Chair of ICOM Australia from 2010 to 2013, and was a director of Museums and Galleries NSW from 2005 to 2013. He was also a member of the Council of Australasian Museum Directors from 2004 to 2014. He became President of Museums Australia in 2013.

Killing Time David Walsh

Would you rather watch Jurassic Park or Schindler’s List? Most agree that the director of these movies, Stephen Spielberg, knows what he is doing. A good friend of mine channelled the zeitgeist when he said to me, “I’m glad movies like Schindler’s List are being made, I think they are important, but I don’t want to watch them”.

I suspect that everybody enjoys watching T-rex overturn cars filled with self-satisfied sanctimonious dick-heads, even if they pretend otherwise. And even if the T-rex isn’t graphically accurate, because it is cavorting around the Caribbean sans feathers.* So, do you want your museum to be Jurassic Park or Schindler’s List?

Don’t answer yet, particularly if you’re going to try to weasel your way out of committing by saying, ‘Both’. To understand how one man made such disparate movies one needs a little history. Schindler’s List has its genesis in inhumanity in the war (am I allowed to mention the war?), but also, and perhaps more significantly, in great literature. Jurassic Park has its genesis in science (if a science blown up like a balloon to bursting point), but also in fairytales and fairgrounds. It is no coincidence that it is set in an amusement park.

Did you happen to notice that the theme of these movies is essentially the same? Hubris and self-certainty allows (or compels) the pursuit of utopian ideals, but the utopias reward few and punish many. The evildoers aren’t really evil; they’re just unable to contemplate any goals but their own. And those who resist, they are just average guys, but average guys who seem unconsciously aware of the dictum: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”.

Public museums all have essentially the same theme. And they all tell the same story. But why do they tell it the same way? In my view, it is because they follow the same historical arc. Before there were museums there were Wunderkammer (this might be the only German word I know so, if you are reading this in German don’t be fooled by my apparent erudition. If, on the other hand, you are reading it in English, there is very little chance of you being fooled). Self- and God-appointed rulers — emperors, popes, and serf and slave owners — tried to out-affluent each other by collecting all that was scarce and hard to obtain. ‘Great’ art fitted the bill, particularly commissions such as family portraits. What better way to highlight your obscene wealth than to be in a picture painted by the most famous artist of the day? Mythology was also a verdant field. A roc egg or a unicorn horn had the cachet of unobtainability, by virtue of their nonexistence. Mystery was at a premium: the weirder the better. * http://www.nature.com/news/palaeontology-the-truth-about-t-rex-1.13988

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A museum can be fun — if it allows its many roots to show through. Out the back, that‘s the place for catalogues, and order, and symmetry, and refined sensibilities. On the museum floor, allow some confusion, allow some chaos.

© MONA/Leigh Carmichael Image, Courtesy MONA Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

But eventually the various revolutions came (perhaps when the peasants ran out of cake) and these guys ended up against the wall, and they proved not to be bulletproof. Many of the Wunderkammer ’s contents were trashed, but most treasures found their way into the public coffers. And gradually, the property of the people came to be a metonym for the authority of the state. And that authority was exemplified in pedagogy — these new places of secular worship worshipped enlightenment. They enhanced the state authority by telling you what to think, and by defining good taste. The Louvre was one of the first, opening to the public three days in every ten (since after the revolution time went metric for a while), displaying the pilfered collections of Louis XIV to XIV, and Francis I, who had, in turn, systematically pilfered their collections through conquest and calumny. Soon the New World followed, and in the New World buildings were purpose-built to house collections. “And they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.”

There are other narratives told of museum history, of course.

Museums can be seen as archives as usefully as they can be seen as spectacles. “The idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organising in this a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place,” was attractive, according to Michel Foucault. In this view, a museum is a counterpoint to ephemera, and ephemeral entertainments. At the forefront of these brief distractions was the carnival. In contrast to the modern museum and its imposition of standards from above, pre-modern carnivals were bottom-up, citizen-driven free-for-alls. Masks allowed everyone to play, a bishop who would soon be fasting for Lent might be feasting, gambling and farting (toilet humour and bodily functions are forever celebrated by the hoi polloi and condemned by the aristocracy); a reformer who would soon be raging against indulgences might be cavorting with the underclass, and in the process probably losing his underpants.

making good things hard to see, and featuring the trite, and hiding stuff, and highlighting stuff, and not letting the stuff generate the context. And if you must provide interpretive material (and I fear you must) do it our way, away from the walls, and allow opinions, since they are all you really have. And allow your gallery attendants to have their own opinions, including an opinion that begins, “This thing is ugly, and stupid, and I don’t know why we waste money on it…”. Or perhaps, “This marvellous specimen was collected by our founder, Alexander Von Humboldt, who, when he wasn’t reshaping our view of the world, apparently liked to bang young boys”.

You don’t learn to ride a bike by learning about the physics of twowheeled vehicles. And you don’t learn to ride a bike by thinking about its capacity to see you through to your destination. You learn by doing, because doing is fun. Maybe training wheels help initially, and museums shouldn’t be afraid of being training wheels. I remember learning to ride, and I remember crashing, and falling, and my family cheering, and remounting, and falling again, and laughing, and crying a bit. And laughing. But I don’t remember the time it took.

People go to most museums so they can say they’ve been there.

They are ticking a tourist box. And they are killing time. At the forthcoming Humboldt-Forum visitors should see time fly. And fall.

And die. Maybe you should give them masks at the door.

Incidentally, when I asked you to choose between Schindler’s List museums and Jurassic Park museums, I told you not to say ‘both’. And then I said, ‘both’. If you think that’s cheating don’t build a museum.

David Walsh is the founder of the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania.

The essential juxtaposition here is: modern museums suspend time by denying its ravages. The carnival suspends time by denying its consequences. A museum can be fun — if it allows its many roots to show through. Out the back, that’s the place for catalogues, and order, and symmetry, and refined sensibilities. On the museum floor, allow some confusion, allow some chaos. Your visitors can create their own islands of order. And when they do, they will learn, not by force of will or application of effort, but as a side effect of having fun. Don’t interpret me to mean interactive displays, I don’t. I mean

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The Great War Bernd Hüppauf

The exceptional nature of this war is evident from its name.

It began as the Great War on both sides of the front, then became the European War and, when the USA entered on the side of the Entente Powers, it became a world war. To this day, the military victors still regard it as the Great War.

Prof Dr Bernd HüppauF is Emeritus Professor of German Literature and Literary Theory at New York University.

His research focus is the history of the mentality and culture of the modern age. Transcript published his work Was ist Krieg?

Zur Grundlegung einer Kulturgeschichte des Kriegs (What is War? About the Foundations of the Cultural History of War ).

© Goethe-Institut Australia, 2014

The losers have avoided that name since the end of the war, because they had to come to terms with the greatest loss — in terms of deployment numbers — previously known in the history of war.

World War I

It was a matter of survival The European nations were convinced when the war broke out that it was being waged to preserve their own identity and purely as a matter of survival. No previous war had aroused emotions in such a way and triggered such public debate. The agitation died down during the war, but flared up again after 1918, particularly in Germany. World War II was then superimposed on it. However, even today, World War I is still more alive in the collective memory than any other war in Europe.

Radical change This war brought about the end of the monarchies in Austria and Germany and changed the political map of Europe, shifting the balance of world power to the disadvantage of the losers. It also led to radical changes in culture and the lifeworld. This first, and, in the broad sense of the term, modern war of the industrial age created problems in terms of the connection between war and civil society. These problems led to an extensive literature, to philosophical attempts and to myths and theories about the war.

The point of view became fragmented: ordinary soldiers, frontline officers, staff-officers, aircraft pilots and U-Boat commanders, women, children, conscientious objectors and patriots developed very different images of this war which were made public via the new media. Extremely subjective images emerged and could be conveyed only partially to some sectors of the public; a new, militant pacifism accompanied hitherto unknown militancy.

A society developed that soon came to be called ‘war in peace’.

The psychological effects of this war were a veneration of technology, yet at the same time, a deep-seated fear of military technology, of gas and airplanes.

The question of responsibility for the war National Socialism and World War II have been interpreted, not without justification, as a continuation of World War I; Enzo Traverso speaks of the ‘European civil war 1914–1918’ (2007).

Responsibility for the war was a problem that did not exist in earlier history. It was discussed vehemently from August 1914 onwards and, after the Treaty of Versailles, with warlike doggedness in European societies. The answer to the question of responsibility for the war led to virtual wars, between parties in Germany and between Germany and the victor nations. It is one of the reasons that there is no European history of this war to the present day and is responsible for the fact that national differences dominate, even in the age of globalisation.

Diverse views A new book, Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers (2013), returns to a position in this debate that was once representative. Lloyd George wrote in his war memories (1934) that Europe had slithered into this war: the nations slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of

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war. Even a hundred years after the outbreak of the war, this thesis developed from politics and diplomacy has enabled Clark’s book to make it into the review sections of newspapers and onto the nonfiction bestseller lists. Given the conditions today, if this view were to gain acceptance again, it would be a good basis for the overdue internationalisation of the view of World War I. From a supranational viewpoint, George F. Kennan once called this war the seminal catastrophe of the 20th century, thus supplying a catchword for the ongoing debate. This view is dubious and cannot be supported by evidence. Not just one war is encoded: it is broken down into many different wars that have not merged into a cohesive (catastrophic) image to this day.

Australia Australia, as a dominion of the United Kingdom, was involved in the war, and sent troops that fought under the British High Command that suffered heavy losses. Australia experienced the war not as a seminal catastrophe, but as the birth of the nation, in the same way that the new small nations of Central and Eastern Europe owed their origin to this war. In 1917, Australia, a country on the periphery, sent an official war photographer to the Western Front. His photographic work is representative of the fundamental problem of a cultural history of this war: its unrepresentability.

Can there be a unified image of the war of the modern age, given the participation of completely heterogeneous societies? Frank Hurley experimented with simple composite prints in order to create an image of the war. He regarded his composite images as authentic, since the monstrous violence and sheer size exceeded the limits of conventional pictorial representation. However, the High Command considered them to be fakes and removed him from the position of war photographer after a few months. Since then, the portrayal of war has been struggling with the problem of representation that originated in World War I.

What is war?

During the war, after 1914, the question was asked: what is war?

The present has inherited and radicalised the question. Herfried Münkler calls symmetrical and representable war a ‘discontinued model’. He argues that we live in post-heroic societies that are founded on work, commerce and exchange, but not on sacrifice and values such as honour and pride. However, that does not mean the end of war as a means of international conflict resolution. The centre of world history is shifting towards Asia, where the continuation of the symmetrical war of nations is not unlikely. Moreover, war has always created new technologies to preserve itself. New forms of war, Infowar, Cyberwar or drone wars could lead to the end of the 3,000-year old war and image of war. The Great War was symptomatic. It was the time of eclipse, darkening and a radical new beginning, the rupture of civilisation and the dawn of a new age of technical civilisation, which we are witnessing now.

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Past Traces and Present Legacies Anna Haebich

In April 2014 Anna Haebich was invited to fly to Brisbane from Perth to speak about the experiences of German-Australians during World War I. The occasion was the QANZAC 100: Memories for a New Generation Heritage Leaders’ Workshop at the State Library of Queensland.

With 150 visitors present and sessions being streamed out to blogging, tweeting and messaging people all over Queensland we were a state-wide conversation packed with creative ideas, deeply felt emotions, respect for the past and goodwill and humour.

The QANZAC 100: Memories for a New Generation This was active history — history as a verb! We teased out creative ways to renew understanding of the war and its legacies and how to involve all generations and communities and we agreed on the power of story telling from history and living memories. We identified major themes: Queensland’s war effort; local unity and dissent; experiences on the war and home fronts; and the ‘forgotten histories’ of women, Indigenous soldiers during and after the war and ethnic groups, in particular the state’s large German population.

There were also many specific topics such as medicine, technology, the environment, memorialisation, women, soldier settlements and many more. The QANZAC 100 workshops expanded everyone’s understanding and knowledge of those few momentous years.

Gathering my thoughts about German experiences of the war was very emotional. Australia’s German ‘enemy within’ were people like my family, old people I grew up with and pastors and elders of the Lutheran Church that my father served as a pastor. Rereading the published histories about those days I was reminded that the living memoires of our German Queensland communities remain largely untold. So I was thrilled by the passion expressed in the QANZAC 100 workshops to collect these stories. I also welcomed the strong enthusiasm for stories of the Aboriginal diggers, women and other ethnic groups forgotten for so long.

Queensland had the nation’s largest German population At the outbreak of World War I, Queensland had the nation’s largest German population — over 30,000 people, most of them farming families living in the state’s southeast corner. They were law abiding and conservative and proud of their German language and culture. Most were Lutherans who followed the teachings of

Luther’s Bible and the advice of their pastors, the ‘good shepherds of their flocks’. There was also a small urban elite of educated professionals and businessmen living mainly in Brisbane who actively promoted German culture and values, some as office bearers in the German Club.

Treasuring German customs — faithful to the English king Whether rural or urban they all faced the balancing act of being German and Australian. One church official spoke of the church ‘remaining true to its history, doctrines, and principles [and putting] on an English dress in its English environment’. German Consul Hugo Muecke in Adelaide advised that ‘to remain strong genuine Germans means to treasure the richness of the German language, the language of poets and thinkers, as well as German customs and good habits, but at the same time to remain faithful to the English King.’ During the early 1900s families were achieving this balance as they prospered financially and involved themselves in local politics, professions and businesses. But there were some Queenslanders who were envious of their success and anxious about the growing economic and political presence of the German nation in the Pacific region.

My parents were born during the war. Dad’s family had lived in Hahndorf in South Australia for seventy years but he would go on to work in Queensland as a pastor. Mum’s family came to Queensland in 1864. They didn’t leave us memories of the war.

Instead of stories from the front, there was silence. Dad just said that Germans were treated badly during the war and that was that.

His reticence struck a chord that stayed with me. It was only later that I recognised that he had also left a gift of hints and traces that led me to insights into what our people experienced during the war.

I had the honour to share my story of following this research trail with participants at the heritage workshops. I hoped that my experience would help others to see that what seemed like gaps and silences could be vital traces left by our elders of important stories still to be told.

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“No German can be trusted” One of Dad’s big clues was admonishing us that ‘we are not Huns.’

Mysterious at the time this was in fact a signpost to the scandalous official wartime propaganda used to demonize German-Australians.

Various reasons have been given for this injustice, principally the need for Australians to have ‘an enemy within’ to bring them closer to the theatre of war in distant Europe. German-born UNSW historian Gerhard Fischer explains that ‘attacking [Germans] made the distant war seem real and immediate; Australians could feel they were “fighting the war at home.”

Our dear old people were suddenly transformed into the archetypal barbaric marauding hordes of the Western imagination — whether they were enlisted soldiers at the front or respectable naturalised British subjects back home. Escalating hysteria was further inflamed by Prime Minister ‘Billy’ Hughes who told Australians, “No German can be trusted” and made extremist, vitriolic attacks against them in the press. Here was another of my father’s hints answered — his surprising anger directed at a long gone Prime Minister!

Progressive erasure of rights Racial vilification goes hand in hand with discriminatory treatment.

During the war many German-Australians were treated with ‘violent fanaticism and unrestrained vehemence’ in their home country. There was a progressive erasure of their natural rights by state and federal governments across all areas — political, economic, employment, cultural and religious. There were unprovoked physical attacks on individuals and destruction of German property. Then for some came incarceration in interment camps away from their families and homes and finally, for many of them, deportation to Germany following the war. The repercussions of prohibitions on practicing professions and businesses, of dismissal from political positions, sackings of workers and embargoes on produce were disastrous for entire communities.

It was through my research on Aboriginal history that I understood how such discriminatory laws could be introduced for people who were Australian born, even naturalised, or had been born in Germany but lived here for many years and identified as Australians. More than just fanatical public support, the explanation lay in the nature of the Australian Constitution that had no defining clauses clarifying and protecting citizen rights. That this enabled the progressive passage of discriminatory legislation against Aboriginal people is recognised but less considered has been the relevance to German-Australians in World War I.

Maintaining Germanness behind closed doors My family left lots of hints about the repression of German culture.

Dad told us he didn’t learn German as a boy because his parents only spoke it secretly and the government had closed the local German school. Still he managed to speak fluent German throughout

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his life. My mother’s family had a sketchy story about the official renaming of their home at the base of the Bunyah Mountains, called Bismarck by my great-great-grandfather to honor the Prussian war leader. I found the full story in a letter in the Queensland archives written by the local post office master. He complained that no one in Brisbane or Britain would buy local dairy products stamped ‘Bismarck’ and he proposed that the name be changed to Maclagan to honour the British General in Gallipoli where his son was serving.

The legacy of this decision was a sharp break in history. When Maclagan celebrated its centenary it had no local naming history to honour. We were told that organisers found a Mr and Mrs Maclagan of Mooney Ponds in the phone book and invited them to officiate, not knowing that our great uncle was alive and well with lots of stories to tell about the town’s early beginnings.

My family was fortunate not to be interned or deported but many Queenslanders were. The tragic experiences of prominent Brisbane residents Eugen Hirschfeld and Carl Zoeller have been researched and written about, but many more stories remain to be told of survival as well as the incidence of chronic mental health.

There are also many untold stories of German-Australian soldiers, contributions by Germans on the home front and good relations between Germans and other settlers. Still largely under-explored are memories of how German families responded after the war.

Some historians concluded that they simply assimilated into the mainstream and many did but there were others like my family who maintained their Germanness behind closed doors.

Then came the Depression years and World War II and the waves of new post-war German migrants. We lived with these new German families in the Lutheran parish in Wollongong where Mum and Dad, primed by their own experiences, ran our house as a one-stop welfare haven. Also largely forgotten is the formal apology made by the then Governor-General, Sir William Deane, for the ‘shameful discrimination against Australians of German origin fostered during the world wars’ and acknowledging the legacy of ‘emotional scars of injustice’ in the German community.

There is so much more for us to learn about World War I and its legacies. One outcome of the QANZAC 100 workshops is the beginning of a network of people keen to explore ways to research the stories and memorabilia of Queensland communities of German heritage. We welcome readers to join us in our quest.

John Curtin Distinguished Professor Anna Haebich is an historian known for her interdisciplinary research into Australia’s recent past. Anna’s books on Aboriginal history have become classics in the field and include the multi-award winning book Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000, the first history of Australia’s Stolen Generations, and the Noongar history For Their Own Good: Aborigines and Government in the Southwest of Western Australia. Her latest book written with Steve Mickler is A Boy’s Short Life: The Story of Warren Braedon/Louis Johnson (2013). Her current research as Senior Research Fellow at Curtin University is recording the history of Aboriginal performing arts in Western Australia.

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Selling the War: Australian and German World War I propaganda posters Claire Baddeley

World War I was the first conflict in which powerful propaganda was created by the state in a complex blend of technological innovation, traditional high art and commercial advertising style. By the start of the twentieth century, the poster, an often anonymous medium, had reached its zenith as a communication tool.

Propaganda posters achieved considerable public consent and support for the war effort, but at a deeper level helped to construct a pictorial rhetoric and national identity. Australia’s and Germany’s World War I posters inspired individuals to act, but they did so within particular social, economic and cultural contexts. Drawing upon iconography and traditions unique to each nation, they were instruments of unity and a means of vilifying the enemy.

In Australia, after the initial surge of volunteers for the Australian Imperial Force, new methods of recruitment were adopted to encourage more men to enlist. Australia has Promised Britain 50,000 More Men [A] reflected the initial enthusiasm for the war and the scale required in a nation that lacked conscription.

Nationalistic images of the kangaroo are combined with a call for support for the Empire. Australian posters promoted war as a sport and ‘U’ are Wanted in the Sport’s Unit [B] utilised this terminology. The nation’s love of sport was exploited to urge men to do their patriotic duty in It is Nice in the Surf, but what about the Men in the Trenches? [opposite page].

As the war dragged on, the death toll rose and an increasingly desperate need for men led to government recruitment campaigns.

The focus shifted to a duty to family and country and a strong demonisation of the enemy. This resulted in the dramatic visual imagery employed in The Last Call [C]. Moral persuasion was further sanctioned through depictions of vulnerable women in Defend your Homes, your Women and Children. Enlist now! [D]. Women similarly served as embodiments of the nation and its virtues, while barbarous acts committed against them signified the bestiality of the enemy.

Many Australian propaganda posters were either adapted or copied from British and US designs. German World War I posters, simple, graphic and modern in their design, encouraged citizens to buy war bonds in a nation relying heavily on public investment to finance its military operations. Posters conveyed a modern Germany, yet paradoxically they highlighted elements of a prewar world. Wollt ihr dieses? Schützt Euer Land (Do you want this?

Defend your Land ) [E] epitomised this. Maintaining unity amongst the community and defending the nation’s borders were values expressed through German propaganda posters.

German poster designers relied on high levels of public literacy and frequently incorporated text into their designs. From 1917 propaganda posters called for further public support for war loans, coupled with greater appeals for national sacrifice.

Zeichnet Kriegsanleihe (Subscribe to the War Loan ) [F] appealed to subscribers for the eighth war loan. Images of knights and warriors proliferated, such as Das ist der Weg zum Frieden (This is the Way to Peace ) [G] with its tightly clenched fist clad in armour — a clear allusion to ‘Götz of the iron hand’, from Goethe’s drama Götz von Berlichingen (1773) — symbolising the nation’s ‘sombre resolve’. Contemporary warrior soldiers in steel helmets took on mystical qualities, which linked trench warfare to

A

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a morally cleansing act, thereby purifying and strengthening society, in Helft uns Siegen! (Help us Win! Subscribe to the War Loan ) [H].

In German propaganda posters the notion of defending the nation was combined with that of defending the family.

Zeichnet die Neunte! (Subscribe to the Ninth War Loan! ) [I] equates men’s wartime service with women’s childbearing contribution. Beyond motherhood, women in Germany during World War I served in roles such as voluntary Red Cross nurses, with Rote Kreuz-Sammlung (Red Cross Collection ) [J], with its strong modernist style, gaining support for this cause. German national pride was conveyed through images of advanced technology and industrialisation and submarines epitomised the dual strengths of man and machine. Zeichnet Kriegsanleihe (Subscribe to the War Loan ) [K] features a surfacing U-Boat with the Imperial flag. U-Boat propaganda was widely publicised and aimed to raise morale, as well as funds.

By the end of the war, both Germany and Australia had used propaganda posters to persuade their nations to undertake whatever was necessary to win the war. The relationship between culture and nationhood expressed in these posters from the Australian War Memorial’s collection, achieved widespread appeal, garnering support for the war effort.

In Australia they were largely produced by printers and lithographers, with only a few artists employed to create the designs. Overall, the propaganda that emerged from World War I would set the standard for all wars to come.

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Dr Claire Baddeley has worked in a number of museums, galleries and cultural institutions in Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory. This has included curatorial, public programs, visitor services and management positions at the Museum of Australian Democracy, Melbourne Museum, Arts Access and Ballarat Fine Art Gallery. Claire is currently Senior Curator of Art at the Australian War Memorial. In 2011 she was the Australian National Maritime Museum Movable Heritage Fellow at the Australian National Maritime Museum and Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. She completed a PhD in the School of Business and Government at the University of Canberra in 2012 and has previous tertiary qualifications in art history, curatorship, museum studies and management.

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The impact of World War I on the German-Australian community Nadine Helmi

Even though World War I is considered one of the most important episodes in Australian history, dramatic events occurred during this time which have all but disappeared from the collective memory.

They are unlikely to be remembered as part of the centenary commemorations between 2014 and 2018. Called ‘ANZACCentenary’ in Australia, the main focus will be on the overseas military operations. Nonetheless, what happened on the so-called ‘homefront’ deeply affected the social fabric of the Australian nation and represents a significant legacy of World War I.

reputation as skilled artisans. By the end of the century several big migrant waves — taking off after the onset of the gold rush in 1851 — had led to the establishment of sizeable German communities in most Australian colonies. Until World War I it was the third largest non-British-Irish ethnic community with particular strongholds in South Australia and Queensland.

From the outbreak of the war the Australian Government instigated a campaign against the members of the GermanAustralian community. Anti-German propaganda and legislation led to racial vilification, discrimination and mass internment of German-Australians. German place names were anglicised, businesses targeted and German institutions closed. The previously highly visible and well-respected German-Australian community did not recover from this episode; by the end of the war it had all but disappeared.

In their book Australia, Willkommen, Jürgen Tamke and Colin Doxford sum up the significant contribution of Germans until World War I. “German settlers played a big part in the development of two Australian states, South Australia and Queensland, as well as in the exploitation of the resources of the Victorian and New South Wales hinterland. German explorers and scientists were among the pioneers who opened up the continent and Germans abound in the lists of Australian creative artists and professional people.

Many German missionaries established settlements in the outback.”

Perceived as hard-working and resourceful the German-Australians were respected as valuable members of the colonial society.

The German-Australian community during the 19th century— a success story Discrimination and internment in World War I marked the end of an otherwise positive and mutually enriching relationship between Germans and Australians. Germans were involved from the very beginning of white settlement in Australia. Captain Arthur Phillip, commander of the First Fleet and first governor of New South Wales, was half-German. His father was born in Frankfurt, Hessia.

The first Surveyor-General of NSW, Augustus T Alt, also came from a Hessian family.

German settlement on a large scale took off in 1839 with the migration of German Lutherans to South-Australia. They had fled religious persecution in Prussia. Opening up the land for agriculture they created thriving communities which enticed more German migrants to seek a new life in the colony. Throughout the 19th century the Germans remained the only non-English speaking settlers of influence in Australia. They were specifically targeted for immigration by colonial government agents because of their agricultural expertise, in particular in viticulture, as well as their

By the same token, the German settlers usually showed a strong commitment for their adopted country and loyalty to its political representatives and institutions. They appreciated the relatively liberal and egalitarian conditions in the colony where they experienced an individual freedom and economic opportunities unheard of where they had come from. Nonetheless, to uphold the links to their German language and culture they established their own churches, schools, newspapers and clubs.

The rise of the German Empire and its repercussions The positive attitude towards the members of the GermanAustralian community started to change when the relationship between Britain and Imperial Germany deteriorated around the turn of the century. Since its foundation in 1871 the German Empire had become a major industrial and political power with imperialistic ambitions and was threatening British supremacy.

Alarmed by the developments in Europe the leaders of the

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German community were quick to confirm their loyalty to the British Crown as the constitutional head of Australia.

Nevertheless, the conflict of loyalties perceived on the side of the German-Australian community resulted in rising tensions between German-Australians and Australians of British descent.

Creating the ‘enemy at home’ When on 4 August 1914 Australia entered the war against Germany to fight on Britain’s side, every person with German and Austrian background had to register as an ‘enemy alien’. It marked the start of restrictions imposed on people previously considered Australian citizens. Two months later the War Precautions Act of October 1914 provided regulations aimed at destroying the prosperous German business and social networks operating in Australia. When in 1915 Billy Hughes became Prime Minister he stepped up the anti-German campaign. German schools, newspapers and clubs were closed. In 1916 the main German newspaper of South-Australia the Australische Zeitung, was shut down. Its forerunner the Süd-Australische Zeitung, founded in 1849, had been the first ethnic newspaper in Australia.

The demonising of German-Australians as dangerous enemies was designed to establish a tangible ‘enemy at home’ in the minds of Australians fighting a war halfway around the world. It gave the geographically removed nation the illusion of participating in the war on the so-called ‘home front’. It also became a crucial ideological tool in Billy Hughes’ propaganda campaigns promoting conscription in the referenda of 1916 and 1917. Advocating the necessity for conscription of young Australian men, propaganda posters and films warned that a victorious German Empire would eventually also reach out for dominance over Australia.

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Behind the barbed wire — The Holsworthy internment camp The main internment facility was established at Holsworthy near Liverpool, west of Sydney, where 6,000 men were imprisoned under primitive conditions. Squeezed together in rows of wooden huts the majority of the internees were immigrants from Germany or the Austro-Hungarian Empire who had settled in Australia.

Often second or even third generation Australians, 70 of them were ‘Native Born British Subjects’ and approximately 700 were “Naturalised British Subjects’, who had become Australian citizens through naturalisation. Amongst them was beer baron Eduard Resch. Resch had emigrated from Germany to Australia at the age of 16. Naturalised in 1889 he had established a brewery five years later. Even though Resch’s Brewery was managed by two of Edmund’s Australian-born sons and had actively contributed to war loans and patriotic funds, it was considered a German brewery. At the age of 71 the wealthy and respected business man was driven by his son to the Holsworthy camp, where the old man had his mug shot taken as he was interned until the end of the war.

Internees sharing a tiny barrack in Holsworthy [Top] Internee posing in front of a self-built hut at Trial Bay [bottom]

The German Internment Camps Already at the beginning of the war camps to house prisoners of war and resident ‘enemy aliens’ were set up by the Defence Department in all five military districts. Initially they mainly housed the crews arrested from German commercial ships confiscated in Australian ports at the outbreak of the war. By the end of 1914 the military began to arrest and intern ‘enemy subjects with whose conduct they were not satisfied’. The first to be targeted by the Government’s internment policy were business and community leaders. The intention was to destroy German business networks and deprive the German-Australian community of their spokesmen and representatives in the Australian society.

Due to the growing numbers of internees the regional camps were closed and re-located to three camps in New South Wales, which eventually held a total of 6890 internees. As the war dragged on, the internees, who came from all walks of life, resigned themselves to extended imprisonment, but not to a prolonged state of idleness.

They transformed their situation in detention through ingenuity and determination, creating intricate societies with cafés, clubs, newspapers, theatres, schools and an array of small businesses.

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The elite camps — Trial Bay and Berrima Two smaller camps for privileged prisoners were established in former goal buildings at Trial Bay near Kempsey and at Berrima, a small town in the Southern Highlands, 140km from Sydney. At Bourke a small family camp, the only one to include women and children, housed about 200 internees and their families who had been transported from overseas. Overlooking the ocean, Trial Bay Goal accommodated about 580 mostly wealthy business men arrested in various British and German territories in South East Asia and the Pacific as well as a number of high ranking leaders of the German-Australian community.

Amongst the latter was German-born Dr Max Herz, a naturalised Australian married to an Australian woman. Herz was the first fully trained orthopaedic surgeon to work in Australia, earning both the respect, but also the resentment of his colleagues. A campaign driven by the British Medical Association led to his internment from 1915 to 1920. During his time at the Trial Bay camp Dr Max Herz became the resident theatre director for the ‘German Theatre Trial Bay’.

The men housed at Berrima gaol were also members of the upper class. This elite camp held over 300 captains and officers of German shipping lines, amongst them the prominent ‘Norddeutsche Lloyd’.

In Trial Bay and Berrima the internees were allowed to move freely during the day outside the gaols within a restricted area.

Splendidly resourceful due to their good education and financial means they made the most of their imprisonment. Little huts erected by the internees sprung up in the vicinity of the gaol buildings — reminiscent of the German ‘Schrebergärten’ (allotment gardens). The Berrima inmates organised spectacular water regattas racing miniature ships on the Wingecarribbee River.

Deportation — the final chapter Well after the war had ended, the Australian government adopted a summary deportation policy and 6150 interned ‘enemy aliens’ — German nationals as well as naturalised Australians — were shipped back to Germany from May 1919. For Australian residents it often meant leaving their families behind. One of them was the boxer Frank Bungardy who had came to Australia aged 14. He had lived here for ten years when he was interned at Holsworthy. After the war Bungardy made a desperate plea to remain in Australia for ‘family reasons’ as his Australian wife and children spoke only English. However he was deported in October 1919, returning to boxing in Germany. The fate of his Australian family is unknown.

The deportation was the final chapter in the destruction of the German-Australian community as a socio-cultural entity within the Australian society. As many German place names had been anglicised and German social institutions shut down, most visible traces of the German-Australian community had vanished. At the same time people of German descent avoided to be identified as such. They changed their names, pretended to be Swiss, Belgian or even French and avoided to speak German to their children.

Acrobatic performance by Holsworthy internees [main] [from left to right] Australian propaganda postcard (Image kindly supplied by the Australian War Memorial); Dr Max Herz rehearses Minna von Barnhelm; Boxing instructor Frank Bungardy

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The forgotten heritage Since the events of World War I reluctance grew amongst Australian families to pass on information about their German heritage to following generations. German-Australians continued to keep a low profile until well after World War II when, understandably, Anti-Germanism resurged and led once again to internments.

Although almost 900,000 Australians reported to have German ancestry in the 2011 census, interest for the nation’s German heritage had faded. Today, not much is known about the significant contribution German settlers made to this country nor about the fate of their communities after the so-called ‘Great War’.

Back in 1919, German internees at Holsworthy — in a letter imploring authorities to save them from deportation — had pleaded for this not to happen: “Australia know and should remember this also now, that she is indebted to her German citizens, proportionally, more than to the citizens of any other foreign race. This is a fact which no propaganda of whatever tendency will blot out. For you can not separate from the book of your country’s history the chapters testifying to the pioneer-work done by Germans in the far-back countries, making blades of grass grow, where none grew before, creating districts like the Riverina, the Darling Downs and the vineyards and orchards of South Australia and Tasmania.”

Appeal against Deportation Order: Non-naturalised Internees, 25 July 1919 Australian Archives (Victoria), MP 367, Item 567/8/2239

The pleas of the internees were all but ignored, and one might argue that today, much of their story is left out of Australia’s history books. Another legacy of World War I.

German born Nadine Helmi graduated from the University of Heidelberg and worked as a theatre director and playwright in Germany and, since 1988, in Australia. In 2004 Nadine worked as a research assistant to Dr Gerhard Fischer at Trial Bay Gaol. During her work she discovered a photo collection of more than 1,000 photos relating to the World War I internment period.

In 2011 this led to her curating an exhibition called Enemy at Home — German Internees in World War I Australia at the Museum of Sydney.

She is also the co-author of a book of the same title, published by NewSouth Publishing.

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First Victory — 1914 Mike Carlton

In First Victory, Mike Carlton, one of Australia’s best known broadcasters and journalists, tells the stirring story of the perilous opening months of the Great War and the deadly sea battle that destroyed the legendary German cruiser Emden.

The little cruiser Emden was dying. Before the war she had been admired as The Swan of the East, a sailor’s tribute to her elegant lines and gleaming white peacetime paint. But now this proud daughter of the Kaiserliche Marine was ablaze and shattered, writhing in mortal agony. Her twisted and blackened decks were running with the blood of the dead and wounded.

Shells from her opponent, the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney, hammered into her, bringing still more carnage. Yet somehow she kept going. The Kaiserliche Werft of Danzig had built her well.

In his ship’s armoured conning tower, Fregattenkapitän Karl Friedrich Max von Müller — miraculously uninjured — made his last command decision afloat: an order to the engine room.

It was unthinkable that he should strike the Imperial ensign and surrender his beautiful Emden to the enemy while she still had life in her. Beyond her bows he could see the surf foaming onto the coral reef of a small island.

‘Volle Kraft voraus. Gib ihr alles!” he shouted. With one last convulsive lunge, Emden rammed herself onto the coral, still burning and bloodied. A scattering of small, rusted remains can be seen there to this day.

It was the 9th of November, 1914. The last act, the final scene of this noble but tragic Götterdämmerung was a world away from the Heimat. The Cocos (Keeling) Islands are a small speck in the Indian Ocean roughly halfway between Perth in Western Australia and Sri Lanka, and now Australian territory. This coming November, a century later, descendants of Emden ’s crew will journey there to honour their forbears. They will be welcomed, with respect and friendship, by the Royal Australian Navy.

The battle resonates in the naval history of each country for reasons that meet but then diverge. For Australia, a newly federated nation formed from a collection of colonies only in 1901, the victory was proud proof that its fledgling navy was a worthy instrument and its sailors were fine sons of the greatest empire the world had seen. It was a triumph of race and blood. “The breed is alright,” wrote the Australian High Commissioner in London to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. Britannia still ruled the waves. Unspoken was the tremendously pleasing

thought that a nation founded by colonial convicts had come through triumphant.

The German impulse to memory is more complex. At the end of World War I the Kaiserliche Marine lay broken and humiliated. Its sailors had mutinied at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, refusing to put to sea and demanding the overthrow of the Hohenzollerns. The pride of the Kaiser himself, the Hochseeflotte, lay disarmed and rusting in northern Scotland.

But through this fog of painful German memory the story of Emden and her crew gleams like a lighthouse, a beacon radiating the pride of skill and honour, of duty and chivalry. Much of this was due to Karl von Müller himself, who rightly goes down in maritime history as a fighting captain of which any navy might be proud.

Alone in the Indian Ocean for three months, he and his men caused havoc. They hunted and sank 18 merchant ships, a massive blow to the commerce of the British empire and its conduct of the war. Yet not one British seaman’s life was lost. The crews were treated with care and compassion and set free. Emden bombarded the Indian colonial city of Madras and in a daring raid on the port of Penang, in modern-day Malaysia, she sank a Russian cruiser and a French destroyer.

By any standard, these were remarkable deeds of naval warfare.

But they were more. They were pure courage. Von Müller and his ship’s company must have known that their chances of returning safely home were slender at best. As their successes mounted, so too did the British Royal Navy’s determination to hunt them down. And if they somehow managed to evade their pursuers in the southern hemisphere, their chances of scraping past the British blockade of the North Sea and home into Wilhelmshaven or the Baltic were almost nil. Duty carried them on. They lived on their wits.

This was recognised by the foe. The victorious signal from Sydney’s captain, John Glossop, electrified the world. ‘EMDEN BEACHED AND DONE FOR.’ As the news got out, London’s Daily Telegraph newspaper paid a remarkable tribute:

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“It is almost in our heart to regret that the Emden has been captured and destroyed” it said. “We certainly hope that Commander von Müller, her commander, has not been killed for, as the phrase goes, he has shown himself an officer and a gentleman… there is no survivor who does not speak well of this young German, the officers under him, and the crew obedient to his orders.”

Fair comment. Equally remarkable was the story of the 50 Emden seamen who went ashore on the Cocos under the command of the ship’s Erste Offizier, Kapitänleutnant Hellmuth von Mücke. Their six month odyssey — it is the best word — from the Indian Ocean to safety in Constantinople is one of the truly great sea stories of any nation at any time.

After the battle, a wounded Emden sailor was taken to the wardroom of Sydney to be treated for a shrapnel hole in his back.

He wrote about it in his memoir: “We were at once properly bandaged, and well treated as far as circumstances allowed… Next to me lay a sailor of the Sydney.

He had his right foot blown away. He bent himself towards me and gave me his hand.”

The two men lay there, side by side, German and Australian, together in silent affirmation of their humanity and the obscenity thrust upon them and the world.

Writing my book, First Victory, was a rich pleasure. Curiously, most of the published work over the years has been not Australian but German, British or American. Of varying quality.

I flatter myself that this is the first, comprehensive Australian attempt at the story.

There is an enormous mine of sources to excavate. So much is now on the internet — and in English — from the Kaiser’s speeches to the diaries, memoirs and letters of the men of both sides who fought the battle. Karl von Müller himself wrote a detailed account for Der Krieg Zur See, the offical German history compiled by none other than Erich Raeder, who would come to command Hitler’s Kriegsmarine. The Australian War Memorial in Canberra and the NSW State Library have a tremendous resource of documents.

The association of Emden’s descendants, Die Emdenfamilie, and its energetic leader, Flotillenadmiral a.D Henning Bess, were unstinting in their help, for which I am truly grateful. The best and most absorbing account of all is by a former German naval officer, R.D. Lochner, published in English as The Last Gentleman of War and in German as Die Kaperfahrten des Kleinen Kreuzers Emden (Heyne-Press, München, 1979.)

The tragedy and the infinite sorrow is that these young men, Australians and Germans, should never have fought each other.

They were the victims of the kings and emperors ; the politicians and bankers and arms makers; the sabre-rattling media who engendered a public thirst for war which, in the event, no side won. Or ever could.

In a 40-year career, Mike Carlton has been a radio and television news and current affairs reporter, foreign correspondent, radio host and newspaper columnist. He has had a life-long passion for naval history and is the author of Cruiser (2011) and this, his most recent book, First Victory, published by Random House Books Australia.

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They rocked their socks off Birgit Heidsiek

In May 2014, the Goethe-Institut Australia and German Films showcased the 13th Audi Festival of German Films in Australia.

The film Banklady won the audience award: the Golden Gnome.

More than 18,000 Australians attended screenings of Germanlanguage films in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Canberra.

“Banklady really rocked”, explains Arpad Sölter, Director of the Goethe-Institut Australia, which hosted the festival in cooperation with German Films. “During the screenings we had cheering crowds and standing ovations.” The film has a good chance of finding a distributor in Australia.

Banklady was initiated by the film’s principal actress, Nadeshda Brennicke, who was able to interest the Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) as well as the director Christian Alvart in the subject matter.

“Banklady was my dream project”, confirms Brennicke, who attended the Australian festival and had long been fascinated by the story of Germany’s first female bank robber, Gisela Werler.

In her book Directory of World Cinema: Germany Vol. 2, the Australian film scholar Michelle Langford looks at the highlights of the German film industry over the years. Her book, which she presented as part of the festival program, deals with German cinema from the silent movie era all the way up to the latest contemporary productions.

German filmmaker Constanze Knoche and her co-author Leis Bagdach introduced their first movie The Visitors and engaged in interesting Q&A sessions with audiences in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. As Knoche sums up, “the festival offers an exciting mix of entertainment and in-depth content”.

For the 13th time, the Audi Festival of German Films managed to establish an exchange between filmmakers and audiences — last but not least because of the diverse mix of Australians and visitors with German backgrounds.

With her convincing portrayal of this colourful figure, which earned her the Best Actress award at the International Film Festival in Chicago, Brennicke conquered the hearts of the Australian public.

“Audiences are extremely friendly and open-minded here, across all age groups,” reported the actress. Brennicke has plans to switch sides soon and to start directing movies herself.

A more extensive German version of this article was first published in German in Filmecho Filmwoche, May 2014. Translated by Trudi Latour.

Special events like Fall of the Wall Day, Moonlight Mania, Oriental Night or World War I Day triggered the strongest audience responses. Arpad Sölter points out that “Australians are very interested in World War I”. Within this focal point, the Austrian actor and director Justus Neumann presented a reading from the Karl Kraus satire The Last Days of Mankind, which deals with the absurdity of war.

Birgit Heidsiek is a German journalist who works as correspondent for the German film trade magazine Filmecho Filmwoche, the European online platform Cineuropa and various other publications. Besides teaching classes on cinema and TV at a college in Cologne, she is also the editor of the program booklet for the Berlin International Film Festival and publisher of the independent magazine Green Film Shooting.

Thanks to great demand, the festival screened Berengar Pfahl’s historical World War I drama Odyssey of Heroes for the second year in a row, resulting in more sold-out performances. Altogether there were fifty-nine movies, documentaries and short films in the program, among them several family dramas.

© Goethe-Institut

The program included more than fifty titles, including Oh Boy, Home from Home — Chronicle of a Vision, Exit Marrakech and The Little Ghost. In the end, the opening film Banklady

by Christian Alvart emerged as the audience’s favourite.

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Sydney Chauvel Cinema Palace Norton Street

Melbourne Palace Cinema Como Kino Cinemas

Brisbane Palace Centro

Canberra Palace Electric Cinema

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ulm models — models after ulm ulm school of design 1953–1968

The Ulm School of Design (HfG) operated from 1953 to 1968 and became one of the most important design academies worldwide.

The Ulm Model and its special methods have continued to influence international design education to this day and have fundamentally shaped the profession of the industrial designer. The exhibition ulm models — models after ulm was curated by Dagmar Rinker and Marcela Quijano (both from the HfG Archive in Ulm) on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the HfG. Cooperation between ifa and the HfG Archive has made it possible for this exhibition to be shown to great acclaim around the world, on the road since 2007 as an ifa touring exhibition on loan from the HfG Archive. It has been shown at more than twenty venues, presenting the pioneering work of the HfG to more than half a million visitors all over the world, and finally celebrated its last presentation at the RMIT Gallery in Melbourne.

ulm models — models after ulm focused on contemporary research and presentation of the Ulm Model, the HfG’s own rational methodology of design, and its great influence around the world to this day. It presented large-scale photographs, texts, videos, literature, models, prints and graphic works, and not least the many products that were created on the basis of the HfG’s diverse and pioneering ideas, methods and results.

The exhibition has toured Latin America, India, Europe, the Philippines and South Korea. Each show was accompanied by active dialogue with local design discourses and methods.

The curators of the exhibition, the director and other experts from the HfG Archive in Ulm held local workshops, lectures and guided tours, and debated with local students. The exhibition had its final showing in Melbourne and was accompanied by an extensive programme of events.

RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, Australia www.rmit.edu.au/rmitgallery In cooperation with the Goethe-Institut Australia www.goethe.de/australia A German-English exhibition catalogue is available through the ifa shop: ulmer modelle — modelle nach ulm. hochschule für gestaltung ulm: 1953–1968.

The ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen/Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations) is committed to the peaceful and enriching coexistence of people and cultures worldwide. It promotes art and cultural exchange in exhibitions, dialogue and conference programs. As a competence centre for foreign cultural diplomacy, the ifa connects civil societies, cultural practices, art, media and science.

The ifa has a global network and counts on long-term cooperation. It is supported by the Federal Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany, the state of BadenWürttemberg and its capital Stuttgart. www.ifa.de

Photo Wolfgang Adler, Ulm City Archive © Ulm Museum/HfG Archive

the ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) touring exhibition from 31 July to 30 august 2014 at the RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, Australia

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As a ‘weather station’ in Australia Mirko Bonné I flew from spring to autumn; starting in Hamburg, flying to Düsseldorf and then across Budapest, Bucharest, Ankara, Beirut, Baghdad, Kuwait and Bahrain. In Abu Dhabi at night I stood on the desert sand. And I continued, flying across Sri Lanka, the Indian Ocean, passing Perth and Adelaide. For more than three weeks in April and May, I was a guest of the Goethe-Institut Australia and the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne. Together with one author each from London, Dublin, Melbourne and Warsaw, I participated in the international project Weather Stations which explores climate change from a literary perspective.

We were — and still are, since the project is running until September 2015 — living weather stations. Each of us, in their respective home station, is in contact with one ‘substation’, a school in which we discuss climate change and its literary portrayal with the students. I was invited by the Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin to take part in the Weather Station project; my substation is the Sophie Scholl school in the Schönberg district of Berlin.

Mirko Bonné, a German poet and prose writer, was born in Tegernsee in Germany in 1965. His debut novel Der junge Fordt (The young Fordt ) was published in 1999 and was followed by several novels and works of poetry. Bonnés’ literary works have been honoured with numerous awards. Environment and nature play an important role in Mirko’s work making him the ideal candidate for his current residency-project: Weather Stations, in which he explores the field of climate change alongside fellow authors Tony Birch, Xiaolu Guo, Oisín McGann and Jaś Kapela. This unique project, which is supported by the Culture Programme of the European Union, deals with climate change and its environmental impact through the literary work of authors from Australia, Germany, Ireland, Poland and the UK. The Weather Stations project can be followed at: www.globalweatherstations.com

In Melbourne, I had conversations with authors, artists and publicists, talked to journalists, researchers and scientists, and visited the permanent exhibition at Melbourne Museum that addresses the history of the Aboriginal people in Victoria that dates back many thousands of years. I went on trips to the countryside which took me to the museum in Lilydale with the Black Saturday bushfires exhibition, the national park in Healesville, and to the headland at Point Nepean, where I had a look at the old quarantine station and the remains of the military base. In Sydney I was a guest of the marine research institute SIMS, Greenpeace Australia Pacific and the university before spending one week in Port Douglas finding out about the impact of climate change on the Daintree Rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef.

© Sabine Bonné

It was my first visit to Australia. Since then my thoughts and writing have been occupied by a great deal of impressions, stories, landscapes and faces from this time. My Australian journal Tell it to the bees gives, I hope, an idea of my astonishment, my sorrow, my hope and my admiration of what I saw there.

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Tell it to the bees Climate seems to me a much larger, more complex and sweeping story than the one which I follow, which I have read ever since I can remember. I am probably a hopeless empiricist, certainly an incorrigible altruist. I read the weather, following it daily, more or less happy with rain, rain, rain; in Hamburg, after all, three hundred days of rain at a stretch are no cause for despair. In my writing, in my characters’ thoughts, feelings and actions and in the images, allusions and music of my poetry, the weather plays at least as important a role as psychology, morals, doubt or imagination. Weather for me is a constitutive factor. Climate, to be perfectly honest, does not exist for me. I couldn’t even say what is meant by the word. For me, climate is to weather much as religion is to faith. The religious is beyond my knowledge, my comprehension, my interest. Faith is of existential significance for me, a dialogue, a test, a foothold, a framework for life.

this so-called climate change. For no dialogue is taking place.

All we hear and hold are monologues.

In this sense, for me talking about climate change means talking about the reasons for this absence of dialogue among the spheres of research, science, politics, art and society. Here is a situation in which people are incapable of communicating, though all of us face a common peril: losing the basis of our own existence and that of our children and their children. How can this be? I believe that talking about climate change means first of all talking about a climate of fear. It seems to me that only narratives, stories of individuals’ experiences and visions can enable us to achieve an understanding of something as all-encompassing, as unfathomable as this transformation of the world into an inhospitable and unreal place.

Am I a climate sceptic, then? Yes. Yes and no. Or actually no, I think not, only that the climate-change-sceptic climate makes me skeptical. Doubts are barely permitted any more, and yet they are only appropriate. Doubts are necessary — not, however, doubts in the fact that the earth’s climates, the life in rivers and seas, the air and the forests, the life of plants and animals, the lives of peoples in cities and in the countryside is at the brink of a sweeping and, it is to be feared, long-since unstoppable upheaval. Rather, I have my doubts in the way in which we have grown used to speaking of it,

‘Tell it to the bees’ is an old Australian proverb. When you have something on your mind, and you try to share it with someone who has no inclination, no time, no patience for it, he’ll tell you to tell it to the bees, who seem to understand everything magically and fly off at once to make honey from your secret.

Elizabeth Street

Elizabeth Street

Don’t give up. Tell it to the bees.

The above is an excerpt from the Australian journal.

Mirko Bonné (April 2014 in Melbourne) Es ist schwer, wenn die Abschiede beginnen, denn alles sagt es, Verschwindenmüssen, Wiederkehr möglich, doch nie mehr so.

It is hard when the farewells begin because everything says you have to leave, returning is possible, but it will never be the same.

Darum dräng ihn zurück, den nächtlichen Himmel, in den du hineinfliegen wirst. Geh, zwischen herbstlichen Wohntürmen, und in Gedanken nimm die Tram zur Bucht.

So push it away, the nightly sky, into which you will fly. Walk, between the autumnal high-rise flats, and, in your thoughts, take the tram to the bay.

Red dir ruhig ein, dass es gut war, besser, du sagst dir, es ist gut. Behalt keinen Kiesel.

Calmly convince yourself that it was good, or better still, that it is good. Don’t keep any gravel.

Du vergisst bloß, wo er mal lag, auf dem Dach eines dunklen Hotels, die Nacht, wie sie roch, und im Regen die Ufer der Elizabeth Street.

You’ll simply forget where it came from, on the roof of a dark hotel, the night, how it smelled and in the rain, the riverbanks of Elizabeth Street.

Es wird Zeit. Bye bye pride! Es ist gut.

It is time. Bye bye pride! It is good.

Nimm sie mit — jetzt ist es soweit —, das große Licht, die Freundlichkeit.

Take them with you — now is the time —, the great light, the kindness.

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Complexity of Belonging: A Project by Falk Richter and Anouk van Dijk Gabriele Urban

THIS YEAR, THE WORLD PREMIERE OF COMPLEXITY OF BELONGING IS PRESENTED

BY MELBOURNE FESTIVAL. TOGETHER WITH BRISBANE FESTIVAL, CHUNKY MOVE, MELBOURNE THEATRE COMPANY AND THE SUPPORT OF THE GOETHE-INSTITUT. THIS EXTRAORDINARY CHOREOGRAPHIC THEATRE UNITES THE POTENT CHOREOGRAPHY OF CHUNKY MOVE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR ANOUK VAN DIJK AND THE TEXT AND DIRECTION OF SCHAUBÜHNE BERLIN DIRECTOR-IN-RESIDENCE FALK RICHTER. Complexity of Belonging Monday 6 October – Saturday 1 November 2014 Southbank Theatre, Melbourne www.melbournefestival.com.au Artist talk with Falk Richter 6.30pm Friday 10 October Level 2 Function Rooms, Southbank Theatre 140 Southbank Boulevard, Southbank

© Sarah Walker

Bookings required by 5 October 2014 gabriele.urban@melbourne.goethe.org A darkly humorous exploration of identity in the age of social media, Complexity of Belonging peers into the lives of nine interconnected individuals — combining five Chunky Move dancers with four of Melbourne’s best young actors — as they grapple with an essential question: How and where do I belong?

Nationality, gender, sexuality and history collide in this audacious, theatrical exposé of the daily trials of surviving in a hyperconnected, globalised society. Complexity of Belonging combines Richter’s razor sharp social observation with van Dijk’s bold choreographic language.

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The making of Complexity of Belonging: A glimpse behind the scenes INTERVIEW WITH FALK RICHTER, Rejkjavic, Iceland, July 2014 Gabriele Urban: What is Complexity of Belonging about?

Falk Richter: The question of identity and belonging is becoming more and more important in our Western global societies where traditional forms of relationships and national identities are dissolving. I am incresasingly interested in the question “How do individuals define their very personal sense of belonging?” So together with Anouk van Dijk, I cast a group of dancers and actors who — apart from being great performers — would be interested in sharing their personal stories with me and the audience: how they define ‘home’, how they define ‘family’ for themselves? Do they live in one, two or three countries and travel back and forth? How do they keep up long distance relationships? How do you express your feelings via Skype, via email, via text messages, to someone you love that is far away? How important is heritage to them, how would they define their own ‘nation’? What does ‘a real Australian man’ look like and how does he act? How does the fact that some of the performers might not fit into the category ‘white, male, heterosexual’ affect their lives and the way they look at their society? Australia has been an immigrant country for over 200 years with people coming from all over the world to start again, to re-define themselves, find a new identity, a new home for themselves. Germany has just recently acknowledged the fact that it is an immigrant society and we are slowly starting to realise that there are Germans of Turkish, of Bosnian, of African heritage — to name a few — that are shaping a new and more complex society. Both countries have a traumatic history of genocide that is still affecting the here and now of everyday politics.

Complexity of Belonging is about the very personal, individual stories of people whose lives are shaped by all these influences and questions.

Gabriele Urban: ‘Choreographic theatre’.

What exactly does that mean?

Falk Richter: Anouk and I are working with an ensemble of actors and dancers, but in our work all of them use both text and movement as a means of expression. During the rehearsal process, we always work together in one large studio — the actors do the ‘warm up’ with the dancers and work physically, while the dancers take part in all the discussions about the content of the piece and engage in the more in-depth theoretical discussions with the

dramaturgs and me, just as the actors do. Sometimes, a scene is triggered by a physical action, sometimes it is a text that inspires the movement in the sequence. When it is all working perfectly in performance, you can no longer tell who is a dancer and who is an actor, and hopefully you don’t care anymore about where the acting stops and the dancing begins; it is all one. This creates a style where you can be more invested in the character, in his or her story; you see the performer in all of their individual ‘complexity’, what they have to tell.

Gabriele Urban: Could you please explain how

Complexity of Belonging was created? What was the inspiration and what came first, the text or the choreography?

Falk Richter: I think Anouk and I were both interested in the question of belonging. In my recent work in Berlin, I have been dealing with what we call ‘Übergangsgesellschaft’ in German — a society which is shifting its fundamental paradigms. I see Germany as a society that is facing profound changes at the moment. We are re-defining what it means to be German. As more and more Germans with a migrant background or with a queer background push forward into prominent positions in politics or in the arts, they start to speak up about their idea of a modern German society. They speak from their point of view, about their rights, their needs, their identity, their heritage, their lives. As I said before, this makes our society more complex and profoundly richer, and much more interesting. At the same time, many people are scared by this new complexity, they want things to be simple, simple definitions and a clear hierarchical structure when it comes to race, gender and sexual preferences. Since the last election for the European parliament, we are facing a massive drift towards right-wing extremism and neo-fascist parties. Globalisation somehow goes hand-in-hand with this new rise of fascism, which is also alarming. So I guess all of this combined for us around the subject, ‘complexity of belonging’. And I think for Anouk, it was a very personal question. She has just arrived from Holland — also a country that was taken hostage by a neo-fascist party around the extremist Geerd Wilders — and was living the ‘Australian dream’ of arriving here and re-defining yourself far, far away from your own home.

Art and Culture

The question of whether movement or text leads the process ceases to have any meaning when we come together in the studio. Dance and text develop at the same time. We really work as a team — we make these shows together and in the end it is difficult to tell who made what. I comment on the choreography or sometimes work with the dancers and Anouk works with the actors or gives feed-back on the texts.

So it is hard to say what was first — we were always there together.

Gabriele Urban: You have worked with many German ensembles. What were the differences in working with an Australian team?

Falk Richter: I was overwhelmed by the way the actors and dancers improvise here in Australia. It comes very naturally, and I just need to give a few cue-words, describe what I am looking for, and minutes later, I see a whole scene unfolding in front of me. So yes, I think there is an incredible talent when it comes to working without a fixed script, the ability to develop a scene and a character in an open process.

It’s in their training, but it’s also a general openness and curiosity. All the actors also seem to be really skilled in both stage work and film work. In Germany film and stage are worlds apart. Oh yes, and the humour. As you know, Berlin is not exactly known as the world capital of comedy. Aussies are really funny. The humour is pretty rough and in your face. I really enjoyed that!

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Gabriele Urban: For Complexity of Belonging, you have once again cooperated with Anouk van Dijk.

What is special about working with her?

Falk Richter: We first met when I was still a student and Anouk was a young dancer and we immediately started exchanging ideas about what we would do if we had the chance to create our own shows. Now we’ve been friends for almost 20 years and started our artistic collaboration in 1998 when we created our first show Nothing Hurts which turned out to be a big success in Germany and Holland and we were invited to the prestigious Theatertreffen in Berlin as the first dance/ theatre cross over show ever. We have a lot of mutual interest in each other’s work and we have a lot of trust in each other which allows us to always try out new things and progress far with them. We stay pretty experimental every time we go into the studio together. It is the perfect match. I wouldn’t want to miss one day of rehearsals with Anouk. We get into a flow and we inspire each other, and we always create something we could not create on our own.

© Esra Rotthoff

Gabriele Urban: How important is Complexity of Belonging compared to your other productions?

Falk Richter: This is the first time I have written a piece in a foreign language. At the beginning of the rehearsal process, I was still writing in German, and Daniel Schlusser was translating. I soon gave that up and decided that I wanted to write all the texts directly in English. So I switched into English, except for maybe one or two phrases here and there that I kept in German because I wasn’t certain of the best way to express them. Another difference from my other works is that I have kept much more of the text that has been derived from improvisation. During the rehearsal process I asked the actors and dancers to improvise on certain issues or talk very personally about their sense of belonging, or improvise on certain ideas for characters and stories that I had invented. I edited those improvisations or re-wrote them or re-mixed them with my own text.

Later, I asked Daniel Schlusser to look over all these scenes I had compiled and written and to make them sound like an Australian writer had written them. I wanted them to sound Australian, so this is actually my first Australian piece, written in Australian — with a little help from my friends.

Falk Richter began collaborating with choreographer Anouk van Dijk over ten years ago, creating the production Nothing Hurts (Kampnagel 1999, Berlin 2000). Their shared fascination for each other’s multi-layered way of working led to later collaborations in Trust (2009), Protect Me (2010) and Rausch (2012).

Richter’s plays have been translated into more than 25 languages and are produced all over the world. Richter has been director in residence at the Schaubühne in Berlin since 2000, and has also freelanced at the Burgtheater in Vienna, Schauspielhaus Hamburg, Schauspielhaus Zurich, Salzburger Festspiele, Vienna State Opera, Ruhrtriennale, Theatre National Brussels, Royal National Theatre Oslo, Frankfurt Opera and the Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin.

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COLLABORATING ACROSS CONTINENTS: INTERVIEW WITH ANOUK VAN DIJK, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR, CHUNKY MOVE

Anouk van Dijk: Falk and I have created four works together, Nothing Hurts (1999), Trust (2009), which was presented at Perth International Arts Festival in 2011, Protect Me (2010) and Rausch (2012). Complexity of Belonging will be our fifth collaboration. We start all our collaborations by looking at what is happening in our lives, and what’s happening in society. How does that affect us, and what topics are relevant for our respective art forms? From this shared interest we set out the parameters for a new work. We start from improvisation tasks, and out of these, Falk starts to write and I create movement; we direct it together. Falk has a great way of writing about the human condition, in a direct manner that is poetic and complex. His writing can be extremely funny, but also dark and intense, combining personal and political concerns. We share a strong interest in communicating energy. When we work together, Falk’s language and my choreographic eye meet as equals. We need one another to express what moves us. This chemistry is always enriching for both of us, so we love collaborating.

Gabriele Urban: A collaboration across two continents — how has that been working?

Anouk van Dijk: Falk and I both knew we would continue collaborating, following my appointment as the new Artistic Director of Chunky Move and move to Australia. We immediately started to form ideas for an Australian work, and via Skype, email, and meetings, our plans started to take shape. The joint forces of Melbourne Festival, Brisbane Festival, Melbourne Theatre Company and Chunky Move enabled us to realise a unique Australian production. We were also supported by our co-producing partners in Europe — Schaubühne Berlin and Theatre Chaillot in Paris.

Working in an Australian context informs our work from a very different perspective.

Gabriele Urban: You have a personal connection to three countries — the Netherlands, Australia and Germany — in what way does that influence your work and what is the difference between working in Australia and Europe?

Anouk van Dijk: My former Dutch company anoukvandijk dc co-produced works internationally with collaborations in Russia, China and other countries. I find this form of exchange opens up different perspectives, and challenges me to rethink what theatre is. I have a connection to Germany through all the works Falk and I have previously created. A German audience is very specific: they are passionate about the theatre, like to think about what they see,

and have strong discussions afterwards. They appreciate artists who expose their souls and expect you as an artist to look for the extremes. This has stretched my horizon time and again. Now creating work in Australia, I love the curiosity and hunger of the audience here. They like spectacle but expect good content as well.

They are more open than European audiences. What I love about working in Australia, is the strong connection to Asia and I find it inspiring to see how artists respond to this influence. It is slowly recalibrating my way of thinking.

Gabriele Urban: Complexity of Belonging deals with identity, and how we form relationships in the era of social media. How does this reflect your own personal experience?

Anouk van Dijk: Social media enables me to stay connected to people who live far away from me. This global lifestyle is exciting but of course very exhausting as well. Sometimes it is hard to stay connected to your immediate environment.

Having relocated to a new part of the world two years ago, it has been an interesting time to recalibrate these values. How do I relate to this new place? Who or what do I belong to? When do you know you have truly arrived in a new place? Is this when you are no longer anonymous, or when you manage to have become one with your environment? In Complexity of Belonging, the performers constantly search for balance with these issues. They have mobile, global life styles, and high expectations of their (future) life partners.

They are hungry for real closeness but need their personal space as well. They want to fit in and stand out. I think that we all struggle to come to terms with those excessive demands that freedom in a digital age has given us. Although confusing and exhausting, this complexity offers new opportunities as well, and in return this generates a lot of energy to look beyond and go full speed ahead.

Anouk van Dijk, Artistic Director of Melbourne based Chunky Move, is a choreographer, dancer and the creator behind the movement system, Countertechnique. Before moving to Australia, Anouk had an extensive career in Europe, touring worldwide with her Dutch company anoukvandijk dc. In October 2012, Anouk premiered her debut work, An Act of Now, for Chunky Move at Melbourne Festival. This was followed in 2013 by 247 Days, as part of Dance Massive, Embodiment 1:1:1 at ACCA and gentle is the power, at SOLO Festival of Dance, in 2014.

© Szilvia Sztankovits

Gabriele Urban: What do you appreciate most about working with Falk Richter?

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Š Sarah Walker

Art and Culture

The cast of Complexity of Belonging in rehearsal.

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BRINGING THE PRODUCTION TO MELBOURNE: INTERVIEW WITH JOSEPHINE RIDGE, CREATIVE DIRECTOR, MELBOURNE FESTIVAL

Josephine Ridge: The German cultural scene is rich, with artists creating work that is bold, contemporary and original which clearly resonates with Australian audiences. This is true whether one considers the major houses such as the Komische Oper where Australia’s Barrie Kosky is presiding over an exciting reinvigoration, equally in terms of repertoire as well as staging, or smaller companies such as Rimini Protokol whose 100% Melbourne — presented by the City of Melbourne — and most recently Situation Rooms for Perth Festival, have made such an impact. In 2006 and 2008 under Brett Sheehy’s direction, Adelaide Festival brought the Schaubühne Berlin to Australia with Thomas Ostermeier’s productions of Nora and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. As director of Sydney Festival in 2010, Lindy Hume brought out Ostermeier’s Hamlet and then, in 2011 and 2012, again at Brett Sheehy’s instigation, the Schaubühne returned with his Hedda Gabler and An Enemy of the People. Without exception, these were stellar productions with a compelling take on their material which each in their own way struck a strong chord with Australian audiences. There are many other examples that one could cite, such as Sasha Waltz’s season of Dido and Aeneas as part of Lieven Bertel’s Sydney Festival this year, where productions from Germany have created a real buzz and generated spirited debate — which surely is one of the functions of the arts in any society.

And the interest isn’t all one-way. Berlin, it seems, now is filled with Australian artists who have decided to soak up the cultural stimulation and intellectual challenges that the city offers.

Gabriele Urban: Why have you selected Falk Richter?

Josephine Ridge: Falk Richter is one of the fast rising stars of German theatre and, as both writer and director, he has developed a unique voice. I had already seen several of his earlier works and I was lucky enough to be in Berlin when For the Disconnected Child was playing at the Schaubühne, where he is a Resident Director.

In this work, for which he received the prestigious Friedrich Luft Award for the Best Theatrical Production in Berlin and the Potsdam area for 2013, Falk demonstrated an even greater depth and ambition than I had witnessed before, particularly in his use of video as well as his trademark integration across theatre, dance and music. Notably for that show, he also worked with singers and musicians of the Berlin State Opera as well as the extraordinary Helgi Hrafn Jónsson, the Icelandic singer-songwriter. One of his collaborators on that production was Malte Beckenbach, a composer with whom he has a close rapport and whose work was last heard in Melbourne by audiences who attended the Schaubühne’s An Enemy of the People. Falk has again invited Malte to work with him to compose the music for Complexity of Belonging and we can be certain his contribution will be impactful and an integral force within the production. Finally, my keen interest in working

with Falk Richter, shared by our co-producers at the Melbourne Theatre Company, is a desire to take advantage of Anouk Van Dijk’s presence in Melbourne, now that she is Artistic Director of contemporary dance company Chunky Move. Complexity marks the fifth time that Anouk and Falk have collaborated together over the past 15 years. Their previous productions: Nothing Hurts (1999, Kampnagel), Trust (2009, Schaubühne Berlin), Protect Me (2010, Schaubühne Berlin), and their most recent collaboration Rausch (2012, Dusseldorf Schauspielhaus) — have pioneered a theatrical and movement based language that is all their own, born of years of intimate professional exploration and understanding.

Gabriele Urban: Why do you believe this production really matters to Australian audiences in Melbourne and beyond?

Josephine Ridge: I strongly believe that one of the functions of an international arts festival such as Melbourne Festival is to make a meaningful contribution to the cultural landscape of our city and to the artists for whom Melbourne is home. What this means is that, when the intensity of the 17 days of each festival are over, there is an ongoing ripple effect that can be felt by students, and emerging and established artists. There are a number of ways in which we do this. We arrange for many masterclasses and workshops by our visiting international artists; we commission work from our local artists to enable them to not only create new theatre, dance, music pieces but also to have them placed within the international context of our program; and we also create opportunities for local and international artists to collaborate.

Complexity of Belonging is the result of just such an opportunity.

The results of all this collaboration, sharing of skills and exchange of experience will not only be seen in Melbourne, but will be seen around the world after Complexity of Belonging has its world premiere at Melbourne Festival this October before being presented at the Schaubühne Berlin in May 2015. It will then tour to other cities before Australian audiences have a second chance to see it at Brisbane Festival, another of our co-producing partners, later in the year.

Josephine Ridge has since 1986 worked in the performing arts across a variety of sectors. She has worked for Playbox Theatre Company, The Malthouse Theatre, Opera Australia, Australian Chamber Orchestra and The Australian Ballet. In 2003 she was appointed as General Manager, later Executive Director, of Sydney Festival where she worked for nearly ten years before her appointment to her current position as Creative Director of Melbourne Festival.

© Prudence Upton

Gabriele Urban: What is your relation to the ‘Cultural Scene’ in Germany and why do you think it is relevant to Australian audiences?

TimeTravel From the distant past to the near future

www.germany.travel/unesco

Details on all the 39 UNESCO World Heritage Sites and their routes are available on our app.

Download at www.germany.travel/unesco

Old town of Regensburg with Stadtamhof Š Getty Images/Steve Daggar Photography

UNESCO World Heritage in Germany

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Goethe-Institut Australia Upcoming Events For more information and program updates please visit goethe.de/australia Keep in touch: facebook.com/goetheinstitut.australien Twitter: @GI_Sydney/@GI_Melbourne our newsletters: www.goethe.de/ins/au/lp/knt/mll/enindex.htm Information correct at time of printing.

OUTLOOK 2014–2015 So… what does Goethe-Institut Australia have in store over the coming months? …plenty!

There’s language, literature, music, visual art, politics, and so much more on our schedule.

In the coming months, we will be presenting the following highlights in cooperation with our friends and partners: 1914–2014: WAR SYMPOSIUM The World War I centenary lets us reflect upon this historic event with all its causes, effects, meanings and implications at a symposium in Sydney

1914–2014: WEB DOSSIER We are commemorating the World War I centenary with exclusive editorial content on our website www.goethe.de/ australia/1914

1914–2014: TORRENS ISLAND Adelaide’s Migration Museum launches an exhibition and publication about internment camps in Australia

1989–2014: UNDERSTANDING THE BERLIN WALL We celebrate the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall with a lecture tour and special events in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra

JEWISH HISTORY SYMPOSIUM An extensive international symposium in Sydney looking at Jewish history, antisemitism and The Holocaust

sound

FILM

AUTOMAT

AUDI FESTIVAL OF GERMAN FILMS

Instrumental kraut-dance trio featuring members of Einstürzende Neubauten and other legends

THOMAS KÖNER German audio-visual artist performs at the Brisbane Institute of Modern Art

TIMO VOLLBRECHT German jazz saxophonist Timo Vollbrecht brings his New York-based quartet to Australia

A celebration of films, events, guests and discussions

Master of the Universe

ART

GENIALE DILLETANTEN An exhibition documenting ideas and practices of the Berlin avant-garde in the early 1980s

HITO STEYERL

One of four German co-productions screened at the Antenna Documentary Film Festival

Exhibition and symposium centred around the work of this extraordinary multi-disciplinary artist

LOCAL FILM SCREENINGS

LANGUAGE

Regular sessions by local film societies such as Newcastle German Kino Society (NGKS)

GERMAN SUMMER SCHOOL Education and enjoyment going hand-in-hand

TANGERINE DREAM Sunday 16 November Melbourne Town Hall Founded in 1967, Tangerine Dream may have undergone many line-up changes but their distinctive and immersive sound remains incredibly potent and enormously influential. As electronic music pioneers Tangerine Dream have been at the forefront of music for more than four decades. Edgar Froese and his collaborators have been central in the development of krautrock, psychedelia, electronic dance and new age music.

Many of the synth-laden tracks have been re-imagined for the acoustic phenomenon that is the Melbourne Town Hall Grand Organ.

Supported by Black Cab, Melbourne’s own kraut inspired, electronic lead-out men.

© ferrantraite / iStock

DEBATE

GERMAN SCHOOL FILM FESTIVAL Students produce films to be screened and awarded prizes

SIAMANI SAMOA

THE SELF AND THE OTHER The German Studies Association of Australia (GSAA) will be holding a conference at the University of Sydney PERFORMANCE

COMPLEXITY OF BELONGING Writer and director Falk Richter combines forces with Chunky Move’s Anouk van Dijk for Melbourne Festival

© tacojim / iStock

New Zealand artist Michel Tuffery explores Germany’s post-colonial heritage in Samoa at Carriageworks

SCHÜLERTAGE Students visit the Goethe-Institut to immerse themselves in language and culture

STUDENT SCREENINGS The Audi Festival of German Films includes special student and children’s screenings

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Sydney 90 Ocean Street, Woollahra P: 02 8356 8366 E: learngerman@sydney.goethe.org Melbourne 448 St Kilda Road, Melbourne P: 03 9864 8917 E: learngerman@melbourne.goethe.org www.goethe.de/australia