Journal der Künste 07 (EN)

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE P. 2

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EDITORIAL

POGROM 1938

Kathrin Röggla

Michael Ruetz

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ENGLISH EDITION

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07

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NEW AQUISITIONS AT THE ARCHIVES

“ALL IS LOST!”: TRUDE HESTERBERG’S WILDE BÜHNE IN BERLIN (1921–23) Maren Horn

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SWAYING IN THE VERTICAL Johannes Odenthal

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CARTE BLANCHE

BEYOND THE VILLAGE OPÉRA Francis Kéré

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S. 6 P. 13

AGAINST A POLICY OF DIVISION Kathrin Röggla

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GERMAN NATURALISATIONS

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GOVERNESS OF THE UTOPIAN: AN EXHIBITION, A SITE, AND A TIMEFRAME: KARIN SANDER P. 13

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ONE MORE QUESTION …

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NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES

“WE’RE WAITING FOR THE PROGRAMME OF THE FUTURE” – VIDEO ART IN THE ACADEMY ARCHIVES Uta Simmons

Christian Bommarius

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WIELAND FÖRSTER “… BECAUSE FROM DOUBT THERE COMES GROWTH”

Eran Schaerf P. 14

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TENTS (excerpt) Manos Tsangaris

Moshe Zimmermann P. 14 P. 7

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“THINKING IS THE OPPOSITE OF POWER AND AGGRESSION”

Helmut Draxler on Adrian Piper P. 23 S. 38

HOLOCAUST AS CULTURE

THE ADDED VALUE OF MARX: WHY HE IS BECOMING EVER MORE RELEVANT

THE SECRET LIFE OF IMRE KERTÉSZ

Mathias Greffrath

László F. Földényi

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THE IMRE KERTÉSZ ARCHIVE Sabine Wolf

JULY 2018

NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES

FINDS: WRITING AS CULTURAL ASSET – FIFTY YEARS OF THE 1968 STANDARDISED SCHOOL HANDWRITING SYSTEM Susanne Nagel

P. 16 S. 18

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STRUCTURES AND REACTIONS

Micha Ullman in conversation with Matthias Flügge

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S. 50

NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES

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BUILT ON SAND, RUN INTO SAND: THE PEACE PROCESS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

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WHAT ARE WE COMING TO P. 13

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P. 20

S. 54

SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

AGAINST THE GRAIN Christina Weiss

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S. 2

EDITORIAL

SWAYING IN THE VERTICAL Johannes Odenthal

Dear Readers, The seventh edition of the Journal der Künste initially seems like a long look back at history. The findings that Marx is not “currently relevant” and that Germany is doing away with itself thus initially appear to be nec­ essary misunderstandings, as does Hotel Auschwitz, which unfortunately is no joke but rather a reality, as Michael Ruetz clarifies in his recollection of the pogrom in 1938 on “Kristallnacht” (“Night of Broken Glass”).

We are being overtaken, not “once again”, but contin­ ually. One way of comprehending this is to become aware of misunderstandings. The Carte Blanche by architect Francis Kéré takes this approach regarding the Opera Village, which was founded by Christoph Schlingensief together with Kéré and had little chance in the precon­ ceived critical view of the public. The indifference Kéré had to face is astonishing, but to a certain extent logi­ cal in the usual warped discourse – who gets to decide “what is good for Africa”? Helmut Draxler’s essay on the work of our Käthe Kollwitz Prize winner Adrian Piper also follows this track, tracing how the lines of conflict between self-reference and external perception are made visible. Whereas Moshe Zimmermann traces the long route of the grain of sand presented by Micha Ullman in April in an exhibition to mark the reopening of the Academy galleries at Pariser Platz. After all, this grain of sand serves not only as a metaphor; it has had direct political consequences in the Middle East peace process.

In an interview with Matthias Flügge, Ullman makes clear to us how this grain of sand can also establish a connection between matter and air, thereby leading right to the heart of dialogue, which we so desperately need.

One focus of this issue is devoted to Imre Kertész.

László Földényi gives us his portrait of the author and delicately presents the function of “atonal” language in this former Academy member’s literature, as a con­ sequence of the absurd displacement of perception that has resulted from the experience of the concentration camp and has become a fundamental condition of our collective perception. Sabine Wolf leads us through the process by which the Nobel Laureate’s extensive archive emerged at our institution.

The fact that the works of designer Renate Tost on the cursive handwriting prescribed for schools in the GDR are also part of this archive gives rise to a differ­ ent way of thinking about handwriting as something to be taught in school than is currently the case in the heated debates on this issue.

In “What are we coming to”, we hear from Karin Sander, who explains her ideas on this workshop for the first time and gets us thinking about the future. In her

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contribution, she pursues the idea of art as the gover­ nor of Utopia – in this respect it is a good thing that we do not get completely lost in Manos Tsangaris’s “Zelte” (“Tents”) and that Eran Schaerf can pose one more question. A question regarding the post-media condi­ tion of radio and the democratisation of this medium – what have we really left behind, and what has emerged as a perceptual space? The fact that we have the priv­ ilege of hearing about Wulf Herzogenrath’s fantastic video art archive, which has been added to the Archives, may help us in these matters.

It is said that, in the end, there are always alterna­ tives. This is not only shown in Mathias Greffrath’s essay, which investigates the relevance of Marx as an issue separate from the general tumult surrounding the 200th anniversary of his birth. This year’s Heinrich Mann Prize winner Christian Bommarius leaps back into the postwar period – which is also when German Basic Law was born – in order to point out that the problems we are facing today not only stem from our future, as is currently the most accepted view, but happened in the past as well. “Germany had to do away with itself, so that the Federal Republic of Germany could come into being […] the AtG – the Alternative to Germany”. This is certainly an idea worth pursuing.

Kathrin Röggla Vice President, Akademie der Künste, Berlin

On Sunday, 27 May, there was a confrontation between two political and cultural camps in Germany at the Brandenburg Gate. While the nationwide demonstra­ tion by the AfD went from the Hauptbahnhof to the Brandenburg Gate and on to Platz des 18. März, the “Shining Demonstration” of the “many” went from Brunnenstrasse to Pariser Platz, on the opposite side of the Brandenburg Gate. In addition to the Akademie der Künste, almost all of the theatres, the Koalition der Freien Szene (coalition of the independent scene), and many other cultural institutions were partners to this public protest.

The other counter-demonstrations included the party initiative by Berlin’s club scene, “AfD wegbassen”, which headed out from the Großer Stern as a kind of Love Parade, drowning out the AfD demonstration. The tenor of the scene was queer, feminist, anti-racist, and inclusive, with diversity as the response to the nation­ alist tone of the right-wing populists.

There is no question about it: The production of fear of refugees, of Islam, of foreigners is splitting society.

However, in the end, there were probably a maximum of 8,000 AfD supporters and at least 25,000 coun­ ter-demonstrators, which was a clear indication of the cultural and political power relations in Berlin. This was a strong signal.

More than 2,000 police officers marshalled the area around Pariser Platz and the city centre became a for­ tress. Against the background of this charged situation, the second symposium on the topic of “Koloniales Erbe / Colonial Repercussions” took place at the Akademie der Künste at Pariser Platz. “Performances of No-thingness”, the title presented by the Afro-German curator Nana Adusei-Poku (based in New York City), addressed the deep traumatisation of the African diaspora, which is still exposed on a daily basis to the ever-effective colo­ nial matrix of racism and power. The slave trade – which was based on colonisation – led to an objectification of the black body, which we still continue on a cultural level to this day, in the form of dehumanisation, discrimina­ tion, and stigmatisation. The fact that there are more African-Americans in prison in the United States than were owned by whites before slavery ended in 1850 is shocking. What strategies are being devised by scien­ tists and artists to break down this history of attitudes?

The lectures and performances by the symposium’s inter­ national guests all revolved around these questions.

Only a few minutes before the “Shining Demonstra­ tion” arrived at Pariser Platz, NIC Kay began his perfor­ mance titled pushit, an exercise in getting well soon! in the centre of Pariser Platz. There is a rope around NIC’s neck, which is held vertically by white balloons.

It creates the impression of a vertical swaying. The

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AGAINST A POLICY OF DIVISION

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GERMAN NATURALISATIONS Christian Bommarius

existential quest, the struggle to find a reason, a foot­ hold, freedom, forms between “hanging” and “going on”.

NIC Kay transforms what Frantz Fanon describes as the white gaze on the black body tearing away one’s own human foundation into a breathtaking moment of eman­ cipation and sensitive self-assertion. The association with the 4,000 African-Americans who were lynched is only the brutal historical factuality of an everyday het­ eronomy of the irrational element in white societies.

In light of the German flag-waving AfD supporters on the other side of the Brandenburg Gate, for a moment this performance shook the hope that we can learn from history. What we need is immense patience.

JOHANNES ODENTHAL is the programme director of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

Excerpts from a speech made by Kathrin Röggla at the “Glänzende Demo” (“Shining Demonstration”) on 27 May 2018 in Berlin The Akademie der Künste joins the demonstration of the “many”. It notes with concern how the right-wing AfD party is pushing a policy of division and carrying out a hate campaign – whether racist, homophobic, misogynistic, or anti-Semitic – against an open society.

This is a contemptuous standpoint. The AfD is also against an understanding of the arts as a place of dif­ ferentiated education and dialogue. Seeing art only as a component part of an identitary cultural struggle and denouncing the so-called “ideology of multicultural­ ism” or the “imported cultural current”, to quote verba­ tim from the party programme, means not only to reduce art in its function but also to attack it at its very roots.

Writers, visual artists, filmmakers, media and theatre artists, architects, composers, performers, and actors have never been interested in an art that stops at national borders; art does not emerge in a single country. This was already the case during the time of Johann Wolf­ gang von Goethe, Miguel de Cervantes, and Erasmus of Rotterdam. The Akademie der Künste has thus con­ sidered an international approach to be part of its mis­ sion since 1696. […]

There is much to say about why this need to overrate one’s own identity as propagated by the AfD exists, why there is this hatred and this furious desire for division – other parties might also be mentioned in this regard.

The fear of one’s own decline, increasing poverty, grow­ ing social inequalities, and the feeling of no longer being represented politically but rather of hearing only empty moralistic catchphrases, did not just appear out of nowhere. The AfD has enough copycats from other par­ ties, not just the CSU. I have even been told that it is so easy to be against the AfD, perhaps too easy. However, this does not mean that the climate of fear and hatred they are creating, which generates very specific viola­ tions, is not real. In this respect, today is about send­ ing a signal that this society does not consist only of angry disruptors but of a large number of extremely het­ erogeneous members, participants, citizens, and artists from every possible genre, who are not interested in a homogenised society. We are many.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 07 – ENGLISH EDITION

The Akademie der Künste Heinrich Mann Prize 2018 was awarded to Christian Bommarius. His “essayistic energy”, according to jurors Steffen Martus, Gustav Seibt, and Gisela von Wysocki, “is directed against the seductive power of simple diagnoses and apparently axiomatic solutions, as well as against those aggres­ sive polemics that threaten controversy. […] With in­ tellectual urbanity [he] draws attention to how unlikely and at risk civil order is.”

Documentation of his speech on 27 March 2018 at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin Germany has been doing away with itself – for seventy years, since 1 July 1948. Back then, the West Germans were subject to the victorious Western powers’ instruc­ tion to found a democracy on German soil for a second time. How does one found a democracy? From 1 Sep­ tember 1948, the Parliamentary Council, a body with sixty-five members, most of them opponents to the Nazi dictatorship and many its victims, met in Bonn and after nine months gave birth to the Basic Law, a provisional constitution for a provisional state fragment. Why the Basic Law and why a state fragment? The West Ger­ mans were hoping that the division of Germany into West and East would only last for a short period of time and feared that the formation of a West German state would mean the end of German unity. Their hopes and fears were unfounded. The division of Germany lasted for forty years – so much for hope. And the Germans had no influence on this either then or in the years that followed – so much for fear. But what were the hopes and fears of the West Germans in comparison to the hopes and fears of the victorious Western powers? Their hope was that a democratic West German state would be part of the “bastion against Bolshevism”, that its democratic institutions could prepare the return of West Germans to Western civilization. Their fear was that, after three years of largely unsuccessful denazification, after three years of successful resistance by most West Germans to the democratisation of schools and univer­ sities, to confronting their guilt, to the abolition of the authoritarian state, to the introduction of democracy as the future dominant culture in Germany, West Germans were hardly to be expected to become democrats in the future either.

Overnight, from 23 to 24 May 1949, West Germany became the Federal Republic of Germany, and the West Germans were to be called federal citizens from then on. That was a lie. In order to truly be federal citizens, they would have had to at least partially identify with the new state. They did not. The new state was a democ­ racy, but the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants

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were not democrats. According to a survey by Der Spiegel, whose most prominent employees included for­ mer leading members of the Gestapo, 60 per cent of the respondents refused to accept the young federal state and would have preferred to live in a unitary state.

In the spring of 1949, 53 per cent outed themselves as anti-Semites, 74 per cent were in favour of the death penalty, 45 per cent gave priority to a decent standard of living over freedom, 64 per cent thought that homo­ sexuality should remain punishable by law forever. And Adolf Hitler? When asked who the greatest statesman of all time was, he came in fourth after Bismarck, Churchill, and Stresemann. In 1948/49, the majority of the inhabitants of the Federal Republic of Germany still lived in Germany – as they had during the Nazi era, the Weimar Republic, and the German Empire – but only very few lived in the young Federal Republic.

That was the second German division. It did not last for quite as long as the division into East and West, though nevertheless for much longer than the Western victorious powers had hoped in 1948/49. It lasted until the Germans began to learn the new language that was not just to become the new official language but also the everyday language of the Federal Republic of Ger­ many. They learned this from a thin little book that could just as well have been called “German for citizens of the Federal Republic”, but was available as the “Basic Law”. The language was German, but the German that the Basic Law spoke to the inhabitants had not previ­ ously been heard in Germany. What was it about? It spoke primarily of the fundamental rights of citizens, of the civil rights of every German, of the human rights of every person (whether German or foreign), and above all, Article 1 spoke of human dignity. As long as West Germans believed that the inviolability of human dig­ nity was the phantasmagoria of do-gooders – today a “red-green muck” is spoken of, but Article 1 was writ­ ten by the liberal Theodor Heuss, Carlo Schmid of the SPD, and Hermann von Mangoldt of the CDU – they were Germans, but they had yet to become federal citi­ zens. In other words: Germany had to do away with itself so that the Federal Republic of Germany could come into being. It is the AtG – the Alternative to Germany!

It was hard work. After the war, more than seven mil­ lion refugees came to the three West zones from the former east of Germany and the East zone, especially to northern Germany. They were accommodated in barns and dug-outs, as well as in emergency camps such as Uelzen-Bohldamm, which was one of the biggest camps but was still too small even though it could accommo­ date 8,000 people. If there’s not enough for everyone, then there’s enough for some, but not for the rest. The Lower Saxon Minister for Refugees decided for whom there was enough: for the displaced persons from the former east of Germany. The refugees from the East zone got nothing. Why? The Minister for Refugees said, because the refugees are lazy and parasitic. He him­ self was a member of the SPD, a Protestant pastor and a displaced person from the bombed-out city of Bre­ slau (now Wrocław). His name was Heinrich Albertz, but back then, eighteen years before Benno Ohnesorg was murdered, the name meant nothing to a German. The inhabitants of Lower Saxony did not care where the

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German foreigners came from, whether from Breslau or from Leipzig. They were foreigners. What did they bring to the table? German culture. What did they want?

Accommodation, food, time to live. If it was not enough for everyone, then it was still enough for some. It was not enough for the German refugees, because it had to be enough for the German inhabitants. The German inhabitants gave the German refugees a popular say­ ing to take with them on their way: “The three great evils of the time – wild boar, Colorado beetles, and refugees.”

Human dignity is inviolable, no question, but the ques­ tion in West Germany during the post-war years was simply whether boar, beetles, and refugees were human beings. That was the language of the West Germans, not the German of the Basic Law. Seventy years separate us from these ancestors, but they seem so foreign, as if an eternity lies between them and us. A refugee who fought for human rights in his country and had to flee to save his life (regardless where he comes from) is probably closer to us than our grand­ parents, who thought of boar and beetles when they spoke of German refugees – even if he is not able to speak German. That he can learn. If, after a few years, he wants to become a German citizen, then he has to know the basic rules of the German language, but it is more important for him to be fluent in Federal German, which means that he respects freedom of opinion, does not denounce German Chancellor Angela Merkel as “Merkelnutte”,1 does not dismiss remembering the six million murder victims of German anti-Semitism as a “cult of guilt’, and that he respects religious freedom – the freedom to believe whatever you want and the free­ dom not to believe if you prefer not to. One who says “Islam is not part of Germany” may be right. But a Fed­ eral German knows that Islam is a part of the Federal Republic of Germany, because more than four million Muslims are part of the Federal Republic.

In other words: If the Germans of seventy years ago were to apply for naturalisation now, their chances would not be good. Because anyone who wants to become a German citizen must not only know how to spell human dignity, democracy, rule of law, and free­ dom, words that are included in the basic vocabulary – these values must also be part of his core principles and the alphabet of his life.

Anyone who is German does not need to apply for naturalisation. Anyone who is German can roar “Aus­ länder raus!” (foreigners out!), can warn of the impend­ ing “Umvolkung” (ethnicity inversion) of Germans, can call for the rehabilitation of the “völkisch” concept,2 and can blame the Islamic Devil. Any idiot can be German.

But a federal citizen would think of the 1948 watch­ words : Germany is doing away with itself. At that time, it was a challenge posed by the world to the Germans after sixty to eighty million casualties of war. Germany had to do away with itself – so the Federal Republic of Germany could come into being. This was initially only hoped for by a few federal citizens, today it is the core belief of the younger and the older generations, or at least of a large majority. There may be a growing minor­ ity of immutable Germans who see this differently, lament about national identity, and warn that: Germany is doing away with itself! The federal citizens know: that

was and is not a threat, of this we are confident, and it shall remain our task in the long run.

With us today we have a Bavarian teacher, not a German, but a Federal German. Jean Pierre Félix-Eyoum is a dear friend and is today’s guest of honour because of this, but above all because he is the great nephew of Manga Bell. The Cameroonian King was hanged in 1914 by the German colonial bureaucracy, because he tried to fight (through legal means) against the illegal expro­ priation of his people by the Germans. Why the expro­ priations? The Germans wanted to build a new port in the coastal city of Duala, the largest city in Cameroon at that time, which was meant to become the largest port in West Africa, a “World Port”. As it turned out, they had to rob the inhabitants of their land to do so – driving them into the nearby swamps. Greed is not suf­ ficient legal justification. That is why some expert testimonies called segregation inevitable, because the black population were too loud, celebrated too much, and smelled unpleasant. One commentator at least soberly spoke the truth: Germans living in the same neighbourhoods as the black population meant de facto that the blacks were on equal footing with the Germans – and that was unacceptable. And so it was more than 100 years ago. What is it like today?

Two years ago, the chairman of the right-wing AfD party, Alexander Gauland, said of the black German Football World Champion Jérôme Boateng that people appreciated him as a footballer but would not want him as their neighbour. In saying this, he was expressing what Germans who fear the abolition of Germany feel.

But he was not speaking on behalf of the federal citi­ zens. Some of them might prefer to think of a line by the great Afro-American writer and civil rights activist, James Baldwin: “I am not a nigger. I am a man.” That is what it is all about.

1 “Merkel whore” is a reference to a political scandal that occurred when right-wing AfD politician Peter Boehringer used this term in an e-mail (translator’s note).

2 The term is associated with Nazi philosophy and means “traditionally or indigenously German” (translator’s note).

CHRISTIAN BOMMARIUS journalist and lawyer, worked as a commentator for Frankfurter Rundschau and Berliner Zeitung, among others, until the end of last year. Since then, he has been writing as a freelance author. His new book 1949: Das lange deutsche Jahr (“1949: The long German year”) published in September, examines the problem of founding a democracy without any or at least almost no democrats.

For the reopening of the exhibition rooms of the Aka­ demie der Künste at Pariser Platz in April, Micha Ull­ man exhibited a grain of hamra sand (hamra is red in Arabic) as a sculptural installation. The grain comes from the ground on which he lives not far from Tel Aviv.

The artist has been working with this material for more than forty-five years, in sculpture, drawing, and video.

On the occasion of the opening, historian Moshe Zim­ mermann shared his thoughts on the historical signif­ icance of sand and Micha Ullman spoke with Matthias Flügge about the references and background con­ nected to his work.

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BUILT ON SAND, RUN INTO SAND: THE PEACE PROCESS IN THE MIDDLE EAST Moshe Zimmermann

In Jewish tradition sand plays a metaphorical role – it acts as a boundary to the sea. This is not about the description of a natural phenomenon per se, but the rela­ tionship between Jews and non-Jews. Metaphorically, the people of Israel play the role of the sand, while the goyim, non-Jews, play the role of the sea, according to the Midrash Tanhuma. One wave after another rushes against the sand and is driven back by it. This metaphor is not grappled with by the geologist, but rather by the historian – a metaphor that presupposes the total con­ trast between non-Jews and Jews.

Moreover, in biblical tradition sand is used in another Israel metaphor, in the demographic context: “I will surely do thee good” says the Bible (Genesis 32:12), “and make thy seed as the sand of the sea, which can­ not be numbered for multitude”. “If you make a hole in the sand in the evening, you will find it filled in the morn­ ing,” the Midrash adds. Thus, the Midrash continues, the population decline in the time of King David during the era of Solomon would be offset. If the metaphor is to hold true today, the large hole created by the Shoah could also be “refilled”. Inshallah.

No wonder that a rival of Israel such as Anwar elSadat took up the theme of sand forty-five years ago and insisted that he would reconquer or regain his ter­ ritory, his sand, which had fallen under Israeli rule, down to the last grain. Micha Ullman’s choice of sand as the object of his artistic oeuvre does not just have to do with an artistic style, but also with a symbolic topos from Jewish history, which is highly relevant in the context of the Arab-Israeli or Palestinian-Israeli conflict too.

And yet, Ullman’s grain of sand installation is uncon­ ventional from a Jewish perspective, because individual grains of sand, so crucial to the Israel metaphor, are not mentioned anywhere in the Bible, only the infinite number of these grains (incidentally: in modern Israeli

Hebrew language use, the collective of Israel is pre­ sented as an organism, as a community of people, not as an aggregate of individuals like the individual grains of sand in the metaphor).

So much for virtual sand as a Jewish and Israeli metaphor. What my contribution focuses on is the rele­ vance of the sand metaphor in the peace process between Israel and its neighbours and enemies.

Let us start with the bone or, better yet, the grain of contention. After the Six Day War, Egypt’s President Anwar el-Sadat swore to reconquer all of the territo­ ries conquered by Israel, namely the Sinai Peninsula, down to the very last grain of sand. But it was not so much the Yom Kippur War (1973) that allowed Sadat’s dream to become a reality, rather the peace treaty agreed between Israel and Egypt six years later. How­ ever, it would take another ten years before Israel returned the territory of Taba on the Red Sea to Egypt.

It is a tiny piece of land in comparison to the total area of Sinai, but the dispute over this bagatelle threatened to ruin the ongoing peace process at that time. Follow­ ing international arbitration, Israel conceded. Down to the very last grain of sand? Not necessarily. On the one hand, the dimension of time also played a role in this question of space: Sadat was murdered by opponents of the peace made with Israel and it was now his suc­ cessor, Hosni Mubarak, who was to take over Taba. On the other hand, the arbitration procedure regarding Taba resulted in approximately 250 square metres (!) of the disputed section of land measuring approximately 750 square metres remaining in Israeli possession. So, did Sadat make it to the last grain of sand or not?

In my view, however, a different aspect of the strug­ gle for the sandy area of Taba was more important. Until 1989, the Taba question seemed to represent a kind of “To be or not to be”. The peace treaty was on the verge of collapse. But lo and behold: after 1989, and even though the Taba question actually remained open, pub­ lic debate subsided, until it finally disappeared from collective memory. Israelis could live well without the 500 square metres of Taba, as could the Egyptians with­ out the remaining 250 square metres. There is still no clear answer to the question of where the last grain of sand summoned by Sadat really is today – in Egypt, in Israel, or symbolically in the centre of Berlin. And what is more: the answer is irrelevant. No one asks about it any more or demonstrates a willingness to take up arms because of Taba. The fact that the hotels in the region are Egyptian-owned is also of little interest to the thou­ sands of Israeli tourists who go there.

Irrelevant in practice, but significant in principle: the area of Taba may be as small as a grain of sand compared to Sinai, but it is instructive for the history of the later peace process – in demonstrating the huge difference between the a priori and a posteriori sig­ nificance of a point of dispute in peace talks. What develops into a major stumbling block before and dur­ ing negotiations often loses its significance ex post, because the decisive factor is not in the details but rather in the intention, in the will for or against peace.

If peace is the true objective, some of the major apples of discord lose their meaning. How many Germans, one might ask, would today be prepared to engage in an

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 07 – ENGLISH EDITION

irredentist war for Alsace-Lorraine or East Prussia?

Looking at it like this, I think that even the seemingly insurmountable points of dispute, such as the status of Jerusalem and Temple Mount / Al-Haram Al-Sharif, can be resolved. The story of Sinai’s last grain of sand can be used as an example of how the dispute, not the peace process, can run into sand.

Four years after the retreat from Taba, a quarter of a century ago, the surprising Oslo I Accord (1993) between Israel and the PLO was signed. The stated objective of the Accord was “to establish a Palestinian Interim Self-Government Authority […] for the Palestinian peo­ ple” for a period of five years. During this time, the “per­ manent status” was to be decided upon. In any case, at the end of this five-year period, Israel was to withdraw from the Occupied Territories (the West Bank and Gaza).

At first, 1993 appeared to have been an annus mirabilis: 100 years after the foundation of the Zionist movement that sought to transform the religious con­ gregation of the Jews into a nation and also claimed the Palestinian Territories / Land of Israel for this nation, thus paving the way for the 100-year-old conflict with the Arab inhabitants of this country, an end to the con­ flict was suddenly in sight. The mutual recognition of the right of the other nation to self-determination and the agreement in principle of both parties involved in the conflict – Israel and the PLO – to the two-nations solution had apparently cut through the Gordian knot.

But only “apparently” – as we now know in retro­ spect – because the 1993 Declaration of Principles was in fact implemented in Middle Eastern mode: decisive forces in the Israeli and Palestinian camps stood like a sand boundary against the waves of the agreement, against the peace efforts.

From the moment the agreement was formally signed at the White House, the sand metaphor took on an explo­ sive politically relevant meaning: initially, the beginning of the transitional phase was postponed by about a year, then every single detail was challenged, while in the background, Palestinians who were against the agree­ ment committed terrorist attacks. The implementation of the Palestinian right to national self-determination in the form of a state had not been mentioned in the wording of the agreements, because even Yitzhak Rabin’s government could not allow the logical conse­ quences of recognition of the Palestinian people: That was how strong the nationalist forces in Israel and the settler movement already were in the 1990s. In other words, the peace process had little chance of success right from the start and began to run into sand very early on. No wonder, when you attempt to build peace on the quicksand of the Land of Israel and/or of Palestine.

For two years, the constructive forces who were trying to consolidate the ground on which the peace was to be built, made intensive efforts to continue the peace process and attempted to anchor a settlement in the sandy soil of the region. By the end of the cen­ tury, by 1999, in accordance with the provisions of the agreement – though not specifically named in the Oslo Accord – the Palestinian state should in fact have been founded. Behind the scenes, an agreement was even reached on the final status arrangements, including full

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recognition of the two-state solution, two years after Oslo. The former general Yitzhak Rabin and his coun­ terpart, the former paramilitary Yasser Arafat, rightly received the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of their extremely risky balancing act. In the course of the Oslo efforts, a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan was also signed. And then: the three shots that killed Israeli Prime Minister Rabin on 4 November 1995 represented the death sentence for the entire peace process and for the so-called two-state solution. At that time, nobody wanted to admit this – namely, the failure of the Oslo Accord – and those who had sought to achieve peace acted as though there was still something to res­ cue. Some still act as though the peace process, the Oslo process, were still alive. It can take a long time for the water to run into the sand. At the end of the day, it also depends on the eye of the beholder.

During this time, there was one group that did not build on sand: the Israeli settlers. Stubbornly and cyni­ cally – and all the more intensively after the Oslo Accords – they would build their settlements in the West Bank, mostly on the hills, on solid ground, at the expense of the Arab/Palestinian population. They knew and know still: the increase in the number of settlements and the description of those campaigning for peace as “Oslo criminals” serves the purpose of undermining the peace process or, in other words, extending Israel’s sover­ eignty over the whole Palestinian Territories / Land of Israel. From the very beginning, both the Palestinians and the so-called nationalist camp in Israel (who found themselves in opposition during the brief period around Oslo) understood that the ongoing settlement policy would lead to the failure of the Oslo process, either directly through the gradual seizure of land or indirectly through the attempts of the Palestinians to resist – resistance that would challenge Israel’s military power.

The campaigners for peace built on sand, but its oppo­ nents did not. The political forces interested in peace have not been able to achieve anything more since the nationalists returned to power in Israel – three years after Oslo and shortly after the assassination of Rabin – and have had to stand by and watch the peace efforts be deflected by the resistance of their opponents to this day.

The story of the demise of the Arab-Israeli peace pro­ cess remains incomplete, unless one considers the fact that in the beginning, in the short period between Taba in 1989 and Oslo in 1993, the metaphorical sea of the goyim had been subjected to a radical change. Espe­ cially in Berlin, the global context of the events in the Middle East was clear to see: It was only when the Cold War abruptly came to a non-violent end in 1989 and 1991 that new framework conditions for an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict became apparent. Just as a willingness to enter into dialogue with the enemy fol­ lowed a successful war for the Arab side in relations between Israel and Egypt, so too in the Israeli-Pales­ tinian context: the Intifada, which broke out in 1987, was followed by Palestinian willingness to open a dia­ logue with the enemy at last. In other words, against the background of saving the lost honour of the Egyptians or the Palestinians on the battlefield, the

6

willingness to compromise was no longer considered shameful. On the Israeli side, on the other hand, the high price of armed conflict motivated the search for a pacifying alternative. The fall of the Berlin Wall, two years after the first Intifada began, also encouraged peace efforts in our region. Without the fall of the Ber­ lin Wall, there would not have been a Madrid Middle East Peace Conference in 1991 or the Oslo process.

Without America’s status as a world police force, there would not have been any serious willingness on the Israeli or Arab sides to conduct talks about ending the conflict.

Today, in hindsight, it is clear to us that the IsraeliPalestinian peace process that began after the Cold War had ended did not run into the sand only because of the errors and idiosyncrasies of the parties in direct conflict, but also because the global framework condi­ tions were built on a layer of quicksand. When the pro­ cess began, the foundation of the post-Cold War era, with its notions of the “end of history” (Fukuyama) or the final victory of liberal democracy, seemed to be rock solid. But it took less than a quarter of a century for the counter-currents to win. Since 9/11 and the Iraq War of 2003, the US is no longer the only world power. Presi­ dent Bush Jr. could not even impose his “Road Map” on Israel. History, as we know, does not unfold in a straight line – at the beginning of the Obama era some things seemed to have changed again. Even Bibi Netanyahu was no longer sure whether the flood, meaning the aban­ donment of the vision of Eretz Yisrael Hashlemah (Greater Israel), could be stopped – thus his surprising speech in 2009 paying lip service to the two-state solu­ tion. A posteriori, however, the Obama era only proved to be a “cosmetic flaw”. The world has changed dra­ matically compared to 1990. Since Donald Trump became president, the US is no longer the backbone of universal political liberalism and Netanyahu no longer has to worry about the two-state solution. The trend away from liberal democracy and toward aggressive nationalism has grown stronger in Europe too, even in Germany. The vision of globalised world politics, of greater convergence and togetherness instead of exclu­ sion and permanent struggle against “the other” has become rare and faded.

When the Cold War came to an end, globalisation also seemed to be the answer to traditional feuds between ideologies and states, and the European Union was held up as an example, even for the Middle East.

But it did not take long until two unexpected sandstorms darkened the horizon – ethnocentric nationalism and religious fundamentalism. These worldwide phenom­ ena have had an extremely negative impact in the Mid­ dle East and on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Not only have the national divisions between Israelis and Pales­ tinians become more acute, the religious component has created a new dimension: the dispute over territo­ ries, over land and sand, have turned into a holy war that allows no compromises. Under these circumstances the fight “down to the last grain of sand”, unlike in the case of Taba, can only end with a bloody either/or. Seen in this way, the disputes over Jerusalem or the settle­ ment of Beit El are of an entirely different quality than the disputes over Sinai or Taba. Therefore, the Oslo

project seems to have been a castle in the air – or a castle made of sand – from the very beginning. And the flip side of this development: because these two storms – religious fundamentalism and ethnocentric nationalism – are raging worldwide, the efforts for peace between Palestine and Israel have faded into the back­ ground, if not completely neglected. The matter is becoming marginal, just as the opponents of the peace process want, especially the Israeli government.

About three years ago, a sandstorm darkened the skies over Israel/Palestine for a few days, creating a doomsday mood. Never before had there been a sand­ storm during the summer coming from a northerly direction. Climate researchers offered a scientific explanation for this unprecedented event: the civil wars in Syria and Iraq, in which IS is known to have played a key role, have transformed fertile, cultivated land into desert. The surface had been blown away by the wind.

The Arab Spring has thus added a new dimension to the sand metaphor. Further bad news for the IsraeliPalestinian peace process.

MOSHE ZIMMERMANN historian and expert on German history, was born in Jerusalem in 1943 as the son of Jewish refugees from Germany. From 1982, he was Professor of Modern History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 1986 to 2012, he headed the Koebner Center for German History and was a visiting professor at German universities on many occasions. In 2006 he was awarded the Theodor Lessing Prize for Criticism. He has been living in Kiryat Ono since his retirement.

S. 16

“THINKING IS THE OPPOSITE OF POWER AND AGGRESSION” Micha Ullman in conversation with Matthias Flügge

MU Before we get started, first a big thank you to Jeanine Meerapfel, who invited me to bring the grain of sand here. It was not so easy, because I have made the land of Israel a little smaller without this grain of sand.

But I’m delighted to have been given this opportunity.

And thanks to Moshe Zimmermann, who allowed me to discover that I’m not the last person in Israel who thinks like this. There is a second one. My opinion has dou­ bled, and I think that is a good sign. Thank you very much!

MF I remember, in 2011 at the Israel Museum in Jeru­ salem, the grain of sand installation was new and, if my memory serves me correctly, was a bit lost in the exhi­ bition, positioned quite modestly by the wall. Next to it was a large sand house and close by, the sand books.

You went everywhere else first and only arrived there at the very end, drawn in by just a small lamp … And upon seeing the grain, everything suddenly collapsed; your many years of working with red sand were compressed into this one grain, as it were. Did you also have some­ thing political in mind when you did this, or was it the artistically necessary consequence of foregoing all con­ textual additions?

MU There were about sixty sand sculptures in the exhi­ bition – a retrospective – including some very large pieces. Shortly before the opening, I thought something was still missing: the one, individual grain of sand. The title of the exhibition was “Sanduhr” [“Hourglass”]. And that was, perhaps, the very last grain of sand in this hourglass. If you turn it over, it becomes the first. And I felt that this was absolutely necessary for the overall installation of the exhibition. I created it at the last min­ ute and only then thought about the title. I can’t remem­ ber exactly, but it came quite naturally: “Down to the very last grain of sand”. This phrase refers to the speech

by Anwar Sadat in 1973, of which Moshe Zimmerman spoke, and fits very well. And that is how it came about.

All of my work has political elements in the background, not in the foreground. And this piece of work remained in my studio after the exhibition, until a few weeks ago.

I was delighted that the Akademie der Künste wanted to bring it here: that the smallest of my objects was to be given a new place and background, perhaps even a new meaning … We are here!

MF Maybe we should go back a little further. In a long conversation we had some time ago, you said that you actually wanted to go into farming, which was not sur­ prising in Israel during the first phase of development.

Your family was also active in this field. But in the end, you chose art and studied printmaking. Back then, you were very interested in landscape. There are also early drawings by you, abstract landscape drawings that

focus heavily on form. And then you made etchings, deep etchings using aggressive acids, so that the land­ scape depictions on the plates were left with holes in them. You then had the idea of going directly out into the landscape and digging. This suggests that you have always intuitively taken one step after the other.

Digging has captivated you ever since. How did this attachment to the sand, the soil, come about, which in German eyes – I only have to think of the discussion about Hans Haacke’s Der Bevölkerung installation at the Reichstag – has such a bad reputation. In Israel it is completely different, apparently. Can you say some­ thing about that?

MU What you are describing was the beginning of my first pits. I etched landscapes and holes developed in the plates. I thought that if I had holes in the landscape on the copper plate, what did I still need the copper plate for? I took the holes directly out into the land­ scape. And so, in Ramat Hasharon, where I live – the grain of sand is from there – I began to do these dig­ ging experiments with my own body. The empty space, which is usually opened up by every pit, came later. The larger the hole is or the less soil that remains there, the more air or sky I have above it, if you will. I came to understand this in the course of the work – at first it was pure intuition, touching this critical boundary between above and below. Even the smallest pit in the earth is often at the edge of this boundary already. We know the boundaries between right and left or east and west, less so between above and below. This interested me greatly. And so, the first pit sculptures came about.

A good example of the void in the pit, which became more and more important over the course of time, is the empty library installed at Bebelplatz here in Berlin in 1995. The void in the library certainly plays a more impor­ tant role than the earth around it.

I think there is yet another aspect that for me, I can say, was almost existential: before 1933, the year of the book burning, my father had worked for farmers in Thuringia in order to prepare himself for Israel, the kib­ butz, the soil, farming. He didn’t manage to properly fulfil the dream, but it was this longing for soil, for a piece of land under the feet of the Jews; this people, who for a very long time had no land under their feet at all. And I would also like to put this as a question: What is happening with the soil under our feet from this per­ spective today?

MF Please tell us about one work, which even today still impresses greatly: the exchange of soil between the villages of Messer and Metzer. This was the first time there was a politically current reference in your work – through this act of digging and the metaphori­ cal imagery associated with it.

MU That was interesting. We heard quite a lot from Moshe Zimmermann about 1973, about Sadat’s speech and the negotiations after the Yom Kippur War in Octo­ ber of that year. The work you mentioned was created in October 1972, one year earlier, at a sculpture sym­ posium. I carried out this exchange of soil with young people from two villages – one Arab and one Israeli – that were two kilometres away from each other. And perhaps this already demonstrated what interested me. I can describe it like this: exchange as a form of

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 07 – ENGLISH EDITION

understanding. This dualistic energy, these elements later appear again and again in my works.

MF It has also to do with the fact that you always made reference to the dimensions of your own body in the pits. Man, and in this case you specifically, was always the starting point for the scale. Not only in the figura­ tive sense, but also quite exactly in the physical sense.

MU Yes, that’s true. Man was always the measure of scale for me. The library is also a good example of this.

I don’t know whether you can see it, but it was impor­ tant for me: in all three dimensions, the work uses my height four times. Four times my height: seven metres and six centimetres. Lengthwise and widthwise, seven times seven. Five metres and thirty centimetres upwards, which is three times my height. And accordingly, the fourth time is that of the people standing on the glass plate. These are the dimensions of the empty library and many other works.

MF Perhaps we could now come back to the grain of sand. When the idea emerged to position it here, entirely alone in the room, and we discussed it, we agreed that it would be nice to show some small, minimalist draw­ ings at the end. So you created these six wonderful drawings for the back room, specifically in reference to this work, which is now seven years old. They take the motif of the sand grain and transfer it to another dimen­ sion. What was the concept behind them not having such direct political connotations as the single grain?

MU For me, the drawings are constellations. Perhaps you see a clear reference to the right direction, the north, in the Big Dipper. And the drawing with only two grains of sand: this actually refers back to a bodily dimension – the distance between the two. I think the difference between one and two is very important. One is one, infinity, the limits of the material. The grain of sand, this smallest plot of land, is at the end. A small piece of earth, land, territory … the smallest. One more step, and there is nothing left, only the void. I’m inter­ ested in this boundary, the boundary between the mate­ rial, matter, or substance and the void; this critical moment, which is aesthetic and yet also ethical. When we listen to what Anwar Sadat said: he wanted to recon­ quer Sinai “down to the last grain of sand”, to repos­ sess the earth, regain power and might – that is one side. The other side is the void, maybe the air. And what can you do with this material? It can lead to aggression and power very easily when we think of the earth, of the land. The void, the air – for me, this is not just the space between the two grains in the drawing, but also between “you” and “I” or “I” and “you”. It is the interspace, the empty, free space you need to find a solution in conflict situations. That is the space between these two grains of sand. But it is also the air one needs to speak. As I am doing now: in a beautiful sculptural act, I pass air through my mouth – as in every other language, in every one of their sounds. That is the other side.

MF So one needs the grain of sand in order to under­ stand the metaphorical imagery of the air? Or is it the other way round?

MU I had a very interesting experience in Cairo, or to be more precise, near Cairo. In 1984 I visited Egypt and, like all tourists, was standing before the Pyramids of Giza. Giant objects, we know them well from all the

7

pictures, kitsch images I would almost say. To stand before one of these pyramids was a very special moment for me, this giant square as the base, with the giant granite stones on top of it, tons and tons of them. But in the end, you might say – and I think that I’m not entirely wrong in physical terms – in the end it’s a grain of sand.

Even if it’s part of a stone, it’s this connection that I was trying to describe earlier, between the solid material and the air, in Hebrew Ruach: Ruach is wind, breath, one could say “soul”. This takes me in a totally differ­ ent direction: I knew of this miracle of material and soul from Michelangelo. He achieved it. Then I found myself standing before the pyramids and this miracle happened.

And it goes even further. We were travelling back to Israel by bus, and on the way, there are dunes, endless dunes, hours of nothing but dunes. Suddenly I saw a perfect pyramid in the distance, where there are no pyr­ amids – impossible. For a few seconds, it was a perfect pyramid, and then it turned a little and was a dune again.

I have never read or heard about this, but I think the architects of the great pyramids knew what I had seen.

This experience had a great influence on me. How can a material transform into nothing, in a space between things, and then back to a grain of sand?

MF Breath, soul, as you say, the “sculptural act” of language is the open space in which fixed structures can come loose?

MU Yes. For example drawing A, the title is A. If we look at it, there are five grains of sand in the form of an inverted A. One, two, three, four, five. I know this image from my project for the new library in Jerusalem. I had been working with the language for a few years, the Hebrew language. This inverted A could be the head of an animal, of a bull – with two eyes, two horns, and a mouth. This form appeared about 3,500 years ago in Sinai, in Serabit el-Khadim. This was the very first inven­ tion of an alphabet. Following earlier pictographic sys­ tems – hieroglyphics and the many other characters – this was the first letter to represent a sound as a form or symbol. This first form came from Aluf, Arabic for ox.

This was probably the most important animal at that time. And from this Aluf came the first letter Aleph – A, and the Arabic Alif. This is shown in the drawing by a tiny reference. One needs, perhaps, to know a little, but even without this knowledge, the constellations in the drawings are open to every image or fantasy.

The background to this is the idea of speaking. And for me, that is perhaps the most important connection to the grain of sand or perhaps even more so to its title.

I think Anwar Sadat’s great inspiration was to come to the Knesset, as Moshe described so beautifully. It is known from the history books that he spoke before the Knesset – a beautiful speech. With this speech, he achieved peace with Begin; who would have guessed?

A peace that has lasted to this day, more or less. This “less”, the big problem of Palestine, of Jerusalem – this has not yet been resolved. It may take a little good will, if you like, to find all of these references in this A. The importance of speaking – we often hear – is perhaps also clichéd or banal. But I think speaking is existential.

Let us go back to Egypt: We read the Haggadah just a few days ago; it’s all written there: Passover, Easter,

8

the connections, the freeing of the Israelite slaves from Egypt – this is a well-known, universal story. And I think the model for the quality of Anwar Sadat’s speech is to be found there. Or to put it another way: fifty years have passed since 1967. Moses and his people in Sinai took about forty years – with an interesting stopover on a mountain – to learn to speak. Here, it has already taken fifty years and, in my mind, the big problem is that in Israel we still haven’t learned to speak. All of this is contained in this inverted A, and perhaps in other draw­ ings too, such as the head with the seven holes and what this incorporates. We have numbers and we have letters. What this group of six drawings have in com­ mon is this creative impulse. Take letters, for example: twenty-two Hebrew, twenty-three Latin, or twentyeight Arabic symbols. One can use these in any lan­ guage to grasp the whole world, to describe it, and do so much more. The entire cosmos with twenty-two, twenty-three, or twenty-eight characters, with num­ bers, with the senses … this is done through creative thinking. And this kind of thinking is the exact opposite of power and aggression. We think that power and aggression are the best way to change or resolve some­ thing. It sounds logical: we’re doing this now, we want to do it, and we will follow through on it without think­ ing about it too much. That is one way of thinking. The opposite of this is precisely this impulse seen in the group of drawings. I mean, that’s creative – a completely different way. First and foremost, this way requires patience, especially in complicated conflicts and situ­ ations. And then come the ideas … Oslo is a good exam­ ple, Sadat is a good example. The means of achieving something is speaking; air, not matter. And I think his­ tory has shown that all attempts to solve problems using power or aggression don’t last long. Twelve years in the case of Germany. This doesn’t add up to very many years; it shows that it simply doesn’t work. The other way often offers far greater opportunities, and I hope that all these complex considerations are incorporated somewhere in this one grain of sand.

MICHA ULLMAN born in Tel Aviv in 1939, lives and works in Ramat Hasharon, Israel. He studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem and at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. From 1970 to 1989, he taught at the Bezalel Academy, as well as at the Arts Academy of Düsseldorf and the University of Haifa; followed by a professorship in sculpture at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart from 1991 to 2005. Since 1997 Ullman has been a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

MATTHIAS FLÜGGE born in Demmin in 1952, is a German art historian and curator.

He became an editor at the magazine Bildende Kunst in 1977 and was editor-in-chief from 1990 to 1991. From 1991 to 2000, he was editor-in-chief of neue bildende kunst. Since 1995, he has been a member of the Visual Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and was vice president of the Academy from 1997 to 2006. Since 2012, he has been vice-chancellor of Dresden Academy of Fine Arts.

S. 18

THE ADDED VALUE OF MARX: WHY HE IS BECOMING EVER MORE RELEVANT Mathias Greffrath

I would like to answer in two steps: Why Marx is no longer “currently relevant”; what we can use him for and what we cannot.

Marx is not “currently relevant”, but his thinking is a fixed component of many sciences. The notion that human thinking is shaped by social structures, that moral positions are determined by interests, that the intellectual products of people, even the most subtle ones, grow from their material practice, from their method of working; that there are classes: such basic assumptions of historical materialism are commonly accepted today – right up to linguistics and to studies on the genesis of mathematics or philosophy. Gener­ ally, this is the greatest success any theory can achieve, when its categories become part of general consciousness.

And when we speak of Marx’s current relevance, we do not mean his categorical contributions to economic theory – to quote Professor Hans-Werner Sinn, the chief liberal commentator in the German media – to crisis theory, to growth theory, to the theorem of creative destruction, to the concept of national income or the awareness of “secular stagnation” of developed econ­ omies (if this is not attributed to Marx, it is because of his violation of the dogma of private property; similarly, Darwin had for a long time and in some regions the odds stacked against him fighting the creation myth).

So when we ask about Marx’s current relevance, we generally mean the Communist Manifesto and his major work, Capital. Why are these two texts still relevant?

Firstly, because they predicted our present situation.

Marx is the prophet who has been proven right. From decade to decade, societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails have become more and more like the picture of the future outlined by Marx in the Communist Manifesto. The bourgeoisie (to use the old word) has “through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and con­ sumption in every country. […] In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdepend­ ence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellec­ tual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property.” As do consumer habits and ways of life, along with the demand for a good life, as we are just beginning to see through the Internet and smartphones.

Secondly, Capital is relevant because it not only anticipated globalisation and the emergence of global

monopolies, but also the change to the fabric of soci­ ety. Marx calls capital a “vampire” – and that is more than just a metaphor. Capital, as it were, eats into the world of things and deep into the lives of people. In the world of capital, people are flexible labour force resources, universities are production sites for profit­ able qualifications, nations are economic “locations”, landscapes are raw material for tourism, cultural tra­ ditions are the content of consciousness industries, plants are the genetic reservoir of new industries, and families are breeding sites for “human capital” – as once so unbeatably formulated by Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz: “The children of today are the employ­ ees of tomorrow and the customers of the day after.” In short: For capital, the world and its wealth only come into question insofar as they increase abstract value.

Only what counts, counts. And if all of that makes you sad, that too becomes a growth factor. Depression is the second most common “illness” – and is a new, lucra­ tive field of business. Marx’s early writings and Capital foresee what cultural criticism and critical theory of the 20th century would come to address. And one can learn through him why these forms of criticism do not change anything.

Thirdly, Marx is relevant because he formulates the limits, or rather the limitations, of capitalist production.

The dynamic of developed capitalism increases pros­ perity into something previously unimaginable but, as he writes in Capital, “at the same time undermines the springs of all wealth: the earth and the worker.”

The destruction of the earth: Today, we talk of the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch in which the human species has become the strongest earth-changing force. This applies to the atmosphere, which we are heating up; the seas, where plastic waste and algae are engaging in novel symbioses; and it applies to the groundwater supplies and the fertility of the soil. At the end of capitalism there is The Waste Land.

Anthropocene? The correct name would be Capitalo­ cene, because it is not technology as such, but rather the unlimited production of added value; that is, growth dynamics that overwhelm the capacity of the planet.

Where the point of no return is, we do not know. Marx does not state a limit, and it is, in fact, flexible. Capital is not a theory with a date; this book is about “capital in general”.

Marx looked far ahead, but the assistance he pro­ vided in solving the problems created by capitalism is limited. His recipe for the Anthropocene is as correct as it is banal and general: “govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bring it under collective control [...] accomplish it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate to human nature.”

Marx is the prophet who has been proven right. “govern … in a rational way”: Today we know the book of tasks for the Anthropocene – it is frighteningly comprehensive. It is about nothing less than the

management of the atmosphere and a kind of global administration of the natural and moral legacy of human­ ity, which would be no less than the transition to a new, post-capitalist mode of production. How this is to be done is up to us.

However, Marx mentioned aloud the taboo that is, at best, spoken of today by the radical left, and without this taboo being broken, nothing will succeed – the question of ownership: “From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as pri­ vate ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe.

They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to suc­ ceeding generations in an improved condition.”

So much for the destruction of the earth.

And the other source that Marx sees as threatened with destruction, the workers? Here I see – at least at our latitudes – the most current relevance, in the sense of a necessary but helpful change in political rhetoric.

The history of industry is the open book of human psychology – as the young Marx put it: the tool also produces the people and social relationships. Thus, industrial capitalism generated an anthropological mutation. Steam engines and electricity replace mus­ cles; machines take the place of sight, touch, and expe­ riential knowledge.

Progress frees body and soul from grim drudgery, but it has its anthropological price: according to Orwell, the world has become one that is “safe for little fat men”.

This would be alright, but the social price would be as follows: people who are replaceable are also easier to direct, are more controllable, more pliable.

And now, in the 21st century, information technol­ ogy and the Internet are taking this process to the next level. It is not only skilled handwork that is becoming replaceable; computers are also providing medical diag­ noses or organising complex logistical processes. Algo­ rithms are replacing the discretion of administrative staff and writing attorney pleadings or sports reports.

The big scaremonger today, Industry 4.0, signals the end of this development.

But for Marx, automation was an exhilarating tool of liberation, the lever of his greatest and strongest Uto­ pia. At the end of technological development, it would be possible – as he writes in Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy – for the workers to be in step with the production, as “watchmen and regulators” of a production apparatus to which they are no longer subject but which they now understand and master based on their socialisation and “polytechnical” education. Let me quote this verbatim: It is no longer “the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather [...] his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation stone of production and of wealth.” And further: “The free development of individualities, [...] the general reduction of the nec­ essary labour of society to a minimum, which then

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 07 – ENGLISH EDITION

corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them” – an education that in turn has an effect on production and humanises it.

Under capitalist production conditions, however, this Utopia cannot be realised or even approximated. But with Marx’s categories, with his historicisation of the production concept – and this again makes him politi­ cally interesting – one can, no, one must understand the process of automation as expropriation.

Where the journey under the rule of capital leads to was described in the dystopias of the 20th century.

And so, while the forests, pastures, and paths, which were used as a common resource for all, were fenced off and privatised by the property-owning capitalists at the beginning of modern capitalism, today, informa­ tion technology capital puts up copyright fences around the common ownership of production knowledge and usable scientific findings. The enormous yields of Micro­ soft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook are not generated to add a new dimension to the world but because their algorithms make the existing system of production, cir­ culation, and communication more efficient, faster, and cheaper, and the companies gain a permanent monop­ oly profit from this rationalisation. The Internet speeds up the handling of goods; as a universal communica­ tion machine, it sounds out customers and pushes needs; at the same time, it allows for new forms of exploitation such as crowdwork, in which isolated indi­ viduals carry out elements of work on their computers without limitations on working hours and without trade union support.

Understanding all of these processes as large-scale expropriation is currently the most provocative politi­ cal relevance of Marx. This awareness, which incites and legitimises resistance, has meanwhile come to prominence in the editorial of the Financial Times, where Martin Wolf writes: “Who creates value? Who extracts value? Who destroys value? If we mistake those who do the second or third for those who do the first, or mis­ take those who do the first for those who do the sec­ ond or third, we will end up with impoverished and unhappy societies, in which plunderers rule.” Plunder­ ers are the financial investors who earn from the real estate bubbles that do not create any value; plunder­ ers are the asset speculators of the shareholder econ­ omy; plunderers are the monopoly companies of the pharmaceutical sector; plunderers are the exploiters of our information; plunderers are the patentors of pub­ licly funded knowledge.

So Marx made it into the editorial of the Financial Times. The task remains of creating a political form and a vehicle for these insights.

The old lament was that there is no longer a work­ ing class. And this was regarded as a refutation of Marx. But terraced houses, brand clothing, BMWs, and children in grammar school are not the marks of

9

de-proletarianisation. One is not a member of the pro­ letariat based on cultural characteristics, but solely on economic conditions: on exclusion from the power of disposition over the means of production. Seen in this way, the proletariat has grown immensely. In the glo­ balised economy, it has become global – but not uni­ form and not united.

A German IG Metall trade unionist can still maintain his wage because his colleagues at VW in Hungary work for a pittance – and at the same time, because of this he has to fear for this wage. Migrants, these are the strike-breakers of the world proletariat, the members of the reserve army, who, after the North created the world market for money and goods, are in return glo­ balising the labour market.

Marx’s relevance today: It consists of the fact that his theory describes and at the same time activates the situation in which humanity finds itself, and it does this without any illusions. Because there is no mechanism, no automatism that promises a happy ending.

Marx’s view of capitalist fatality is a ceteris paribus prognosis. If you do not organise yourselves, he said to the workers in his speeches, if you allow yourselves to be treated as the “labour factor”, then you will become an “indiscriminate mass of poor devils that no relief can help”.

Where the journey under the rule of capital leads to was described in the dystopias of the 20th century.

Starting with Döblin’s Berge, Meere und Giganten (“Mountains, Seas, and Giants”) in 1924, at the begin­ ning of which the analysis of Marx is poetically exag­ gerated: “The old states existed only in name. […] Then the political powers smouldered […] One did not need many people for the apparatus […] the political govern­ ments, which were only inhibitory and decorative rudi­ ments, [had] made way for the industrial bodies. Defence systems against the periphery were built, the regula­ tion of immigration set in motion. […] The rulers of the apparatus no longer knew how they were to maintain the appearance of work. […] The majority (of the indus­ try men) combed their enormous plants almost empty of people. They want immigration to be regulated. […]

The city landscapes […] were surrounding themselves […] with a system of defence facilities.” Döblin dated this 2200.

Containment of global capitalism today requires the development of institutions driven by – and this is where this wonderful term from Marx’s early philosophical writings comes into play – species consciousness. “We reclaim the content of history,” the young Engels wrote.

And Marxist theory, or more precisely, our social prac­ tice, calls upon us to determine whom this “we” includes and whom it excludes. When this “we” comprised the industrial workers of Europe, this was still a tangible size; the world revolution of Soviet recollection, less so.

And today, the “totality of global workers” is an entirely unmanageable category, and certainly not a political subject.

Marx’s relevance: He formulates a possibility. The pref­ ace to Grundrisse contains the famous formulation: “No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed,

10

and new superior production relations never replace older ones before the material conditions for their exist­ ence have matured within the framework of the old soci­ ety. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the mate­ rial conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the process of formation.”

The material conditions are there – certainly not least the Internet. Whether the ability of "humanity" to find solutions will suffice is in question. Pierre Bourdieu used to say: “You ask me about the political subject?

Well, yes, those are the ones who make it …”

MATHIAS GREFFRATH born in 1945, studied sociology and psychology. He was an editor for radio, Zeit, and Wochenpost. For twenty years, he has been writing articles and radio plays as a freelance author. In recent years, in addition to economic issues, he has mainly been addressing the history of the Enlightenment, the future of labour, and the human image of brain research.

On the occasion of the 150th Anniversary of Karl Marx’s Capital, he published the anthology RE: Das Kapital. Politische Ökonomie im 21. Jahrhundert (“RE: Capital: Political Economy in the 21st Century”) in 2017.

He gave the lecture reproduced here at the 51st Members’ Assembly of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, on 5 May 2018.

S. 24

POGROM 1938 Michael Ruetz

PATHS TO OŚWIĘCIM The basis for this book is an event which took place in Germany in 1938, and in Ger­ many alone. This was the pogrom in the autumn of 1938.

It was a well-organised, controlled civil war, a breach of public order across the entire country. The pogrom occurred in around two thousand places, in other words right across Germany, even in the smallest backwater.

It was ordered and committed by the state authorities, who were supposed to prevent such occurrences.

“Pogrom” is a Russian word. Its first recorded use in West­ ern Europe is in the Times of London on 17 March 1882.

The OED defines the word as “devastation, destruction” and limits it geographically: “An organized massacre in Russia for the destruction or annihilation of any body or class: orig. and esp. applied to those directed against the Jews.”

In Russia, pogroms were almost a regular occurrence, presumably depending on the need for money. It was the same afterwards in the Soviet Union: the elimination of the kulaks, decreed by Stalin in 1933, was the biggest pogrom in world history, five years before Hitler’s. In Western and Southern Europe, pogroms were not the rule.

The orchestrators of the German pogrom embellished it with the trivialising official term “Kristallnacht”. The word suggested: “Nothing really happened … just a cou­ ple of windows broken” – a trifle, in other words. But what was broken was infinitely more than just glass.

The German pogrom was a large-scale manoeuvre, even if not a military one. Civilians instead of soldiers.

A test of the mood, a test run for the murder machinery.

It went surprisingly well. If the Germans had resisted what was done in 1938 to the Jews – still their compa­ triots and fellow citizens – then the Shoah might never have happened. It began with burnt-down synagogues.

It ended with ovens and burnt people. The 1938 pogrom smoothed the path towards Auschwitz and the Holocaust.

The pogrom of 1938 was the first spark that lit the flames of the Holocaust. From then on, grand terror was acceptable. “The Holocaust was the inevitable end, the logical conclusion of the pogroms, the Mosley marches, the hatred,” wrote Brian Glanville in 1962.

My first visit to Auschwitz, in 1966, lasted two weeks.

I had previously visited the other camps. I stayed in SS accommodation, a stable clinker construction that was still comfortable. Disquietingly, the building was now called Hotel Auschwitz. I had free access to all parts of the camp. I was not regarded as “foreign press”; they had no prejudices against me. I made use of this: I could look at documents, enter all the rooms, move around with complete freedom. The camp was in open coun­ tryside, and visibly deteriorating. One wished for it to become run-down and forgotten.

An elderly gentleman from France, at one time an inmate, led me through the Nazi henchmen’s personal effects store, which they called “Canada”. Bags, hair, teeth, spectacles, suitcases, brushes, combs, shoes, clothes … mountains of them. If I had wanted to, and been able to bring myself to do it: I could have touched everything. To have done that would have been a sacri­ lege. The stickers on the suitcases already told me a great deal. They bore the names of popular holiday desti­ nations in Europe: Biarritz, Cannes, Rimini, Deauville …

The labels referred to beaches, sunshades, children playing ball. They had been there once; here they met their end.

This is why Auschwitz – as the final destination of the pogrom – although still not formulated in 1938, is also a basis for this book. The word “Auschwitz” stands as a synecdoche for a whole lexicon of terms, as well as for the other camps, for Treblinka and Majdanek, for Chelmno and Gross-Rosen. For what Timothy Snyder calls “bloodlands”, for the inconceivable murder of fif­ teen million people between Berlin and Moscow. For the annihilation of the Jewish people and the Galician culture. For the murder factories that, like turbines, guaranteed efficient throughput. Auschwitz: the nadir of history and the epitome of evil; Ice-cold and hot as hellfire.

At times one is tempted to say: “All roads lead to Auschwitz”. Until 1945, it was Eichmann’s trains. Today it is the pilgrimage of the tourist industry, in its own way pitiless and inert. Auschwitz today is an attractive holi­ day destination. Auschwitz, indeed, has much to offer: fifty-one hotels and other accommodation sites, wellkept hiking trails, swimming pools, and bikes for hire.

Just as the torture chamber was the highlight of a German castle tour, so in Oświęcim the concentration camp is the “torture chamber”. You can and must book in good time, you’re given a time slot, you’re taken on a tour, you can really enjoy a good shudder … “my most pleasant holiday experience”. Presumably the number of visitors has already long overtaken the number of those murdered.

THE LONG MARCH TOWARDS 1968 In 1955 I saw Alain Resnais’ film Nuit et brouillard at the Maison de France. It shows the Auschwitz prisoners as the Eng­ lish war journalists found them in Bergen-Belsen. A deeply disturbing film. Horrifying images. Their effect on me was absolutely devastating. It exceeded my pow­ ers of comprehension. I had expected too much of myself.

At the age of 15, no one can spiritually process such immeasurable horror.

Knowledge of what had happened at Auschwitz was hardly widely disseminated in those days. One did not speak of it, not privately, and not at all in public.

Auschwitz was taboo. Nevertheless, my mother spoke not infrequently about Auschwitz – but in such a way as to suggest that it still lay ahead of us. The fate hung above us like a black cloud: one day it would pass over us and burn us without trace.

After Resnais’ film I saw every adult German as a culprit, as one of those who stood on the ramp at Auschwitz, taking the last possessions from the halfdestroyed and leading them “to the delousing chamber”.

Every German might be one of these unpunished mass murderers, waiting to strike again. In the end, this led to the impression that I was growing up in a country full of unpunished hardened criminals. And what I learnt, lit­ tle by little, seemed to confirm this thoroughly. When you’re young, the impression is enough. One doesn’t enquire about the background.

My impression was that the murderers were running around everywhere, all unchallenged. Around this time, Wolfgang Staudte made his film Die Mörder sind unter uns [“The Murderers are Among Us”]. The lives of the murderers he was referring to were exceedingly com­ fortable. A good lifestyle, good provision, high positions and pensions. They placed their totally undisturbed con­ sciences on display, quite unabashed. They always talked their way out.

From the judiciary they received an unusually large measure of understanding and accommodation. They were offered an excuse: “I was only obeying orders”.

According to this, the culprits were in a distressful sit­ uation, not their victims. German judges had no under­ standing for the victims. Whatever they reported was regarded as exaggerated, impossible to prove, or invented. That was not surprising: the post-war German judiciary was composed of Third Reich war criminals.

The perpetrators were almost never sentenced.

If one were to divide the total duration of the penal sentences then handed out by the number of plaintiffs, the result would amount to minutes at the most. Two minutes’ imprisonment per murder. For the most part the attempts at punishment – half-hearted in any case – fell through. This filled my generation with deep bitter­ ness and anger. It demonstrated that in the West – although not in the GDR – justice was tempered with mercy. Or to put it another way: there was unspoken agreement.

In the sixties, the floodgates that the culprit gener­ ation had erected for their protection broke at last. It was this, and nothing else, that initiated the events of the sixties to which we apply the label ’68. Its trigger was the rage of the early post-war years.

The highlight of 1968 was Beate Klarsfeld’s bold act of derring-do. Courageous Beate did what the children of the culprits still lacked the courage to do, plainly and simply: to strike a blow at the representative of the Ger­ mans in effigy (not Herr K.). Quite simple, and yet so hard. And so effective …

people said nothing. That was the power of quiet sounds.

The German mass media also remained silent, but in a different way: they concealed the fact that the day the Wall fell was also the day of the 1938 pogrom.

Why ever must we still concern ourselves with that heinous crime, nearly 100 years later? There are many answers; here is one of mine. I live in Charlottenburg. I was born there. The Synagogue stands only eight min­ utes away from us in the Pestalozzistrasse. You can spot it if you look for it. In 1938, it too was set alight.

For once, the fire service – all too often the profes­ sional arsonists at the pogrom – did what they had to do: they put the fire out. Not to protect the Synagogue, but to spare surrounding houses. Reconsecrated in 1947, today the Synagogue is protected by police, barbed wire, and a wall. The wall hasn’t come down here.

This scene makes me think how, in Germany, some­ thing still isn’t quite right. Unfortunately, there are still no signs that the grounds for remembrance are disap­ pearing or even decreasing with the increasing distance in time. No: at present they are multiplying. Despite conclusive evidence, the idea of an “Auschwitz lie” con­ tinues to be asserted. After reading this book, a “pogrom lie” will no longer be possible. The black cloud still hov­ ers over us today.

MICHAEL RUETZ photographer, is a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Film and Media Arts Section. His Pogrom 1938. Das Gesicht in der Menge (“Pogrom 1938: The Face in the Crowd”), from which this preview is taken, will appear this autumn from Nimbus Verlag in cooperation with the Akademie der Künste, edited by Michael Ruetz and Astrid Köppe. The volume will be presented to the public on 9 November 2018, during an evening to commemorate the pogram. Kindly supported by the Society of Friends of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

MEMORY: OF WHAT, FOR WHAT The stimulus for this book came from the present day, from my observations on the celebrations to mark the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Wall. The event managers had an idea: per­ formed with great solemnity at the Brandenburg Gate, under light domes à la Albert Speer, they fed the audi­ ence a cry of jubilation: “We are the happiest people on earth!” Everyone roared back. I was probably not the only one to whom the reciprocal analogy gave food for thought. Too happy? Now, perhaps. Yet had not this very same people made another people the unhappiest on earth?

How different it was on the same day in Charlotten­ burg. Candles were burning quietly on all the pavement memorial stones. There was embarrassed silence;

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 07 – ENGLISH EDITION

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S.26 CARTE BLANCHE

BEYOND THE VILLAGE OPÉRA An account by Francis Kéré

When I think of the Opera Village, the following voices come to mind: “Francis, what you are building in Gando is what Joseph Beuys described as social sculpture!

You’ve got to create something unique for me! It should be built by the people themselves, almost like in your village of Gando! People should be enthusiastic about it, be inspired by it and their senses aroused by it!”

(Christoph Schlingensief) “Schlingensief builds opera in the bush!”

“Schlingensief’s architect comes from Africa! And they want to build an opera in the savanna together!”

“What Africa needs is schools, and not loony ideas like this!”

“No, I am not an aid worker!” (Christoph Schlingensief) “Mr Kéré, you and your modesty! Why are you working with this monster! He just wants to bring disgrace on Germany!”

“It’s really important dear Francis! You definitely must talk to this filmmaker! He’s very, very bright!”

(Christoph Schlingensief) “Dear Francis, it’s extremely urgent; you have to go to Hanover tomorrow morning to explain how things are going with the installation of the Opera Village model in the gardens of the manor houses!”

(Christoph Schlingensief) “My dear, I’ve just landed at Niamey airport en route to Ouagadougou, where I’ll get everything ready for Köhler’s arrival.

So I can’t possibly be in Hanover tomorrow morning.

The ambassador has been in a panic for days about the visit and wants to go through all the minutes with me tomorrow” (Francis Kéré) “Mr Kéré, you have to stop working with them right now; Mr Schlingensief is seriously ill and will die and take you with him if you don’t!”

(This person was looking for me in the office and claimed to be part of the team of doctors treating him.)

“Your friend is not interested in other people! He just wants to take centre stage. He wants to build a copy of

12

Bayreuth and find a green hill in the savanna desert for it. And you’re helping him make this nonsense come true!”

“And that’s something you’re proud of?!” (an aid worker and others) “Good morning, I am a neighbour and colleague of yours.

I’ve been an architect for over fifty years and just wanted to pop in and see if Kéré really exists. Or if he is actu­ ally just part of the performance that Schlingensief is putting on?” (old gentleman who was suddenly standing there in my office) “Dear Mr Architect, I am an artist and have found out that you have designed a spiral shape for Christoph Schlingensief’s project. I must warn you that if you draw the spiral in the wrong direction, it will suck up the entire energy of the world!” (letter from a concerned artist) “Francis my dear, you must be wary of this person. She’s a woman who just exploits artists and then discards them like rubbish!” (Christoph Schlingensief) “These know-it-alls that keep poking their noses in just ruin my good relationship with Francis. I’ve had enough if it!” (Christoph Schlingensief) THE OPERA VILLAGE Christoph tells me about his epiphany: “I was in such a bad state during my last trip to Cameroon, and could hardly sleep at all. Then somebody picked me up and took me to this place. And it was a restaurant. We walked off the tracks into the thick of the night. It was incredi­ bly dark, so you couldn’t see a thing. We walked uphill and down, left and right, until we suddenly got there. The restaurant itself was a very simple place, yet the route there, the darkness, gave the whole thing an incredible drama! It felt like a reward. I forgot my previous state of mind, and it made such an impression on me that I wanted to go back to this magical place the very next day. But what welcomed me then? Well, a really dull place, with iron all over, and not at all inviting!

You should create the Opera Village so that it pro­ duces the same effect as this place does at night. Make it simple, yet moving and inspiring, and not just by night, but at any hour of the day.”

The Opera Village developed by the late theatre and film critic Christoph Schlingensief represents far more than an architectural or development aid project. It has opened up the debate on development cooperation as well as on cultural exchange between Germany, with its National Socialist past, and the Dark Continent – and last but not least on dramaturgy as an element of architecture.

And what’s more, it has led to much controversy about the work of the diligent artist Christoph, whose creativ­ ity knew no boundaries.

This project makes us consider the ways in which the­ atre can be used to move and awaken the senses.

The initial idea was to view theatre as a social event for all classes of society, and bring this to life in Africa.

The theatre planned for Burkina Faso is intended to foster the cultural potential there and offer it to the rest

of the world. In the Opera Village, children should be lib­ erated from any sense of cultural isolation that makes them reluctant to capture their world in photos and films.

In Christoph’s vision you can already hear the cries of “theatre” being reborn. His intention was to inspire art­ ists and anyone else interested from across Africa and the rest of the world to engage in inner reflection and achieve the most visionary creativity in an isolated place in the savanna, remote from the comfort of any modern conveniences. Artists from the West in particular would have to overcome their prejudices about Africa and be willing to embrace the continent and its people. Only thus would they be capable of discovering something new and revitalising the world of art, and theatre espe­ cially. He wanted us all to look beyond ourselves.

It was the Goethe Institute that brought me together with Christoph Schlingensief. I believe a debate should be encouraged on how Germany should envisage its polit­ ical role in promoting culture in Africa, whilst not forget­ ting its own Nazi history.

This project, which has attracted a great deal of crit­ icism, reveals just how difficult it is to influence dialogue between European powers on the subject of Africa. As far as many aid workers are concerned, Africa needs first and foremost schools and not theatre or other such cul­ tural amenities. Yet this way of understanding develop­ ment clouds our view of Africa as a significant cultural centre in the world. For decades now Burkina Faso has in fact been considered the heart of African film (FES­ PACO) and theatre (Festival du Theâtre), which is some­ thing many are unaware of. This cultural background means that Christoph’s personal vision of the opera is a fitting addition to the cultural offerings of Burkina Faso.

But despite this, Christoph and I were described as naive dreamers, who didn’t know what was good for Africa.

They even went so far as to presume that Christoph actually wanted to build a second Bayreuth Festival The­ atre in the Burkinabè bush. I constantly had to defend him and the project and battle against this negativity.

FINANCING Sponsored by public institutions and private donations, the project often lacked funding.

State development funds that had already been promised were suddenly blocked for unfathomable party-political reasons. It was absolutely unbelievable for me as an architect and as a citizen to witness all this happening. And the fact that people and institu­ tions unexpectedly refused me money due to my involve­ ment in the Opera Village project, although these same people knew about and valued my work in Gando, was also hard to accept.

This all goes to reveal just how much the Western world persists in its fixed ideas of what is good for Africa’s development and what isn’t. As soon as you stray from well-worn paths, criticism hails down from all sides.

It was fortunate that there were just as many people who understood the potential and vision behind the pro­ ject, and that art can act as a catalyst for development in the region.

Former federal president Horst Köhler was a strong advocate of the project, one who right from its inception

never hesitated to offer support in his official role, and later on privately.

FASCINATION As the foundation stone was being laid, I realised that something which may seem quite bizarre to people can fascinate them at the same time.

For instance, so many people offered their help with this event. They simply ventured off in buses from Oua­ gadougou in the rough direction of the Opera Village.

Initially, the buses arrived by the usual main road.

When I saw this, it reminded me of an idea that Chris­ toph had had a few weeks earlier. He asked me to lead future visitors to the Opera Village across the open plain and not on the paved roads. They should drive through the savannah first, and then suddenly see the village standing before them. This would have a very powerful effect. People should discover the place so that it fas­ cinates them just as it did Christoph.

So I decided to encourage the driver of the last bus, which still had some way to go to the village, to take the route as Christoph had described it. The driver pro­ tested, but I didn’t give in. And so quite unnoticed by his passengers, he drove off the main road. The trip ended in front of a huge rock formation. The passen­ gers, rather taken aback, had to get off the bus and walk the rest of the way over the rocks. I watched how peo­ ple from the surrounding villages shook their heads in disbelief at all this climbing going on, and with the wounds on the visitors’ feet and legs. Why had no one shown these people from Germany the right route? But the incredulous visitors, who had just been so pitied for their walking injuries, were soon overcome by great astonishment. They were all of a sudden rooted to the ground, their mouths agape and stunned with joy. My friends and the driver looked at me and smiled. It was a magical moment for them. That was when I under­ stood what Christoph meant. He was a master at stag­ ing a performance.

CURRENT SITUATION Around two hundred children attend the school in the Opera Village today. People from the surrounding vil­ lages are treated in the infirmary. The school’s teach­ ing staff and the infirmary’s medical team live in the vil­ lage’s houses alongside artists from Europe and Africa.

Numerous cultural and artistic workshops, seminars, and events are held in cooperation with the Goethe Insti­ tute and the Burkina Faso Ministry of Culture. The large foundation ditch for the theatre is still in the middle of the site. Yet it’s still not uncommon that visitors to the village are startled by the cry of a newborn baby.

So the Opera Village lives on!

FRANCIS KÉRÉ architect, member of the Akademie der Künste, Architecture Section, since 2016

S. 32

WHAT ARE WE COMING TO Preparatory notes on a project by Manos Tsangaris (Music Section), Kathrin Röggla (Literature Section), and Karin Sander (Visual Arts Section)

GOVERNESS OF THE UTOPIAN: AN EXHIBITION, A SITE, AND A TIMEFRAME: KARIN SANDER “Art,” as Max Frisch once expressed it in conversa­ tion, “is the governor of Utopia”. This remark is all the more valid in times as remote from Utopia as our own, when modernism seems to be losing its perspective on the future. Or at least, such a conclusion might be drawn from contemporary phenomena such as the construc­ tion of replica castles and city centres that is taking place in Berlin, Potsdam, Hanover, and Frankfurt; the extremely short-sighted orientation of economics and politics; or the consumerism that is centred entirely on the present. When modern society has parted company with the future, when it gives up planning forward and transcending the present, then it is all the more neces­ sary for art to tackle these issues. An exhibition, a period of collaborative work, and a series of events have been designed to explore art in relation to the question “What are we coming to” and in its role as “governess of the future” – so that not only genuine artistic strategies, but also desires, dreams, and hopes are brought together as productive forces for the future. Here it is not just a question of sketching trivial images of the future, but rather of seeking out points of contact between the desires and dreams of different players, so as to air such issues as what the desires of the pres­ ent consist of, where they are directed, and how they express themselves – and how these can be brought into a productive relationship with art as Utopia. The medium for this is an exhibition that brings together genuinely artistic potential for future-mindedness with the Sections of the AdK, and with design and advertis­ ing, as well as with everyday dreams. And this is pre­ cisely where we want to go from here.

The basic material for these issues is related, for example, to a research project by Harald Welzer and Futurzwei, in which a series of conversations with var­ ious groups of young people – ranging from gun clubs to queer activists – leads them towards the question of what they dream of, how they imagine the future, and what they wish from it. The results of these conversa­ tions form the starting point for answering questions regarding the value of Utopia, how it can be given expression, and what artistic formulation might give it shape.

In this way, the exhibition project connects with a long tradition of artistic strategies on the one hand, and links them with the current social phenomena of the disappearance of Utopia or, indeed, of the future, on

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 07 – ENGLISH EDITION

the other. The questions are oriented towards the poten­ tial for the utopian in art and in everyday life and, there­ fore, towards the possible rediscovery of a forgotten connection.

These questions become particularly interesting if considered in relationship to the history and function of the Akademie der Künste as a place of encounter that was set up to give artistic creators the opportunity “to converse with one another about their art in an ami­ cable manner, to communicate their experiments, insights, and experiences, and to learn from one another, to seek to come closer to perfection with one another” (Daniel Chodowiecki, 1783). Today, in the age of filter bubbles and narrowed future horizons, creating anal­ ogous opportunities to exchange “experiments, insights, and experiences” from different perspectives is per­ haps more necessary than ever. To that extent, the approach taken by the “Governess of the Utopian” events/exhibitions under the collective title “What are we coming to” also provides an occasion to update the Academy’s self-image and practice, which is repeat­ edly a question of working out how it can claim greater social significance as an institute for forward thinking.

In this respect, the title “Governess of the Utopian” can be understood in a dual sense – both in relation to the potential for recovering the utopian in art, and to the Academy as the preordained location for it.

KARIN SANDER figurative artist, is a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Visual Arts Section. The exhibition is in cooperation with Harald Welzer, Marius Babias, Ayşe Erkmen, et al.

ONE MORE QUESTION …

Eran Schaerf In a roundtable conversation at the end of the confer­ ence “Radiophonic Cultures – Sonic Environments and Archives in Hybrid Media Systems” in Basel, Bernhard Siegert referred to Rosalind Krauss when he said that radio found itself in a “post-medium condition”. Prompt­ ing Colin Lang to ask: If radio finds itself in a postmedium condition, what was it before, that is, before it got itself into a post-medium condition? I liked his question, and not because it brought the idea of radio as an isolated medium into play. Rather, it situated “ The Futures of Radio?” – the topic hovering above the table – within the context of its future pasts, its unre­ alised potential. Back here in Berlin, I still hear Ute Holl’s interjection in the panel discussion “Radiophonic Realities: Fieldwork and Sonic Fictions”, proposing the switching between topics or media as a characteristic feature of radiophonic space. What is such switching in a post-medium condition, what was it before? Before, radio – unlike the arts – was nationally institutional­ ised, and here in Germany, as elsewhere, it was the only voice that could be heard legally over the ether. This voice, with its unspoken and yet clearly audible author­ ity, suggested a space that was apparently public. More­ over, in national institutionalised radio switching between topics provides the dramaturgical concept

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behind programmes – a pop song follows the news about demonstrators in Gaza shot by the Israeli military, then greetings are sent to a grandmother in Hoyerswerda in a phone-in programme, and this is followed by a science fiction radio drama (though obviously not quite like this, but rather verbally cushioned by the voice of an announcer). This “around the world in eighty seconds” drama allows listeners to cross national boundaries in their minds and, in the very act of doing so, repeatedly reconfirm them.

In its post-medium condition, radio has become multi-voiced – through community radio projects, inter­ net radio, and the civic journalism that goes with these.

This polyphony of voices is certainly connected with the democratisation of the medium, but this democracy no longer has at its disposal the common site where these many voices can converse with or even just listen to one another. Rather, through this process the national insti­ tutionalised radio model, along with its dramaturgy, has multiplied into a vast number of parallel concepts of society, each of which composes a daily acoustic nar­ rative for its own target audience, identified by means of data acquisition. At the other end of this broadcasterrecipient model, topic switching has been placed in the hands of the listener. The station search button, that prop that enabled listeners to perform the switch is, however, no longer there. Technology has swept away this search button and along with it the chance process that allowed one to stumble on unknown, foreign voices without intentionally seeking them. Searching with a pushbutton is no longer “searching” but pre-programmed “finding”. Or to put it more precisely: rediscovering what one had previously identified and saved as one’s per­ sonal choice.

This means that topic switching as a form of openended searching must be rediscovered. If we begin this process, the broadcaster-recipient model, along with its unspoken authority that only apparently sug­ gests a public space, cannot remain intact. This was demonstrated by Ole Frahm’s contribution “Dispersed capacity for action”, concerning the listening situations created by the LIGNA group. Dispersed in urban space, participants simultaneously carry out instructions for action that they receive through wireless connection.

In their double role as broadcasters and recipients, these participants in urban space are exposed to an audience who encounter this performance without having pre-programmed it. This audience is not neces­ sarily “the public”; rather it is a public produced by unpredictable actions. In a fully programmed world, encountering such actions depends on switching one’s own mode of perception. I can imagine myself walking purposefully along as a passer-by, only registering signs that help me towards my destination – and then sud­ denly experiencing a switch in my mode of perception that allows me to receive the unforeseen. Switching in a post-medium condition would create a radiophonic space to the extent that this occurred through inter­ actions between media. It is no longer a question of pressing the station search button, but of a cultural technique for perception, through which it becomes possible to imagine a public space that unexpectedly includes what cannot be nationally institutionalised.

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This space is not to be confused with any specific loca­ tion. It can also be manufactured at a distance, but only on a temporary basis. It cannot be constructed, only performed – in a rehearsal for the inclusion of the unpre­ dictable that is endlessly repeated. The boundaries of this space vary during rehearsal, which makes commu­ nication more difficult. One cannot speak of inside and outside. What is excluded from the space can be there like the elephant in the room – which is not standing in the room but is nevertheless in the room – both unpre­ dictable and invisible. Like a lizard that adapts to the colours of its environment, the elephant adapts to the changing contents projected onto it – waiting silently to be included.

The conference took place between 7 and 9 May 2018 at the Museum Tinguely in Basel. For more information, visit www.radiophonic-cultures.ch.

ERAN SCHAERF artist, is a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Visual Arts Section. He is taking part in the project “What are we coming to”.

S. 34

STRUCTURES AND REACTIONS Helmut Draxler

Berlin-based American artist Adrian Piper is to be awarded the Käthe Kollwitz Prize 2018 on 31 August.

To mark the occasion, the essay titled “Structures of Response: Adrian Piper’s Transformation of Minimal­ ism” by art historian and curator Helmut Draxler is to appear in the publication accompanying the exhibition at the Akademie der Künste at Pariser Platz. We are publishing an excerpt in advance, with the kind permis­ sion of the author. This text explores Adrian Piper’s artistic approach, which is manifested in image- and identity-critical works of the 1970s, in performances, installations, and image series, and is rooted in the Minimalism and Conceptualism of the late 1960s.

TENTS (excerpt) Manos Tsangaris he is getting bored now. they have a child. he sits slightly apart and smokes. the child is lying in the pram. they’d imagined this would be different. the child didn’t imagine anything. she is now somewhat slovenlier than before. he has had a head tattooed on his thigh. perhaps he laughs when he stretches his thigh. he is hot, he is wearing short trousers. she keeps one hand in the pram. time. we wait for the S-Bahn train. he leans backwards. she bends over the pram. the child is sleeping. youth has not yet begun. it is ended. poplars stand at the station perimeter, trembling in the wind. the platform fills up with people.

MANOS TSANGARIS composer, is a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Music Section. Since 2012 he has been director of the section.

“Classical” minimalism remains important, not because Piper’s work embodied it, but rather as a background from which she seems to have taken the next steps. This becomes clear, especially in reference to the first clear “turn” of the work towards performance in 1970.1 The choice of performance did not per se represent a break with the avant-garde logic of minimalism and concep­ tualism. Performance represents another avant-garde, that of body-accentuated activism. And despite these fundamental changes in the artistic medium, decisive conceptual strategies remain the same. The early per­ formances, I believe, are again about situative place­ ment and temporal concretization.2 What is missing, however, is the gridded or temporally structured frame to indicate the layer of the “general”. This “general” is replaced by the confrontation of the performing person with the concrete physical and social environment. The confrontation happens in everyday situations, for exam­ ple in the “Catalysis” series (1970), where Piper is walk­ ing through crowded streets holding a “wet paint” sign, or blowing a bubble with bubble gum, and in specific locations of the art world, for example, in the Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City (1970), where Piper loiters amongst figures of the art scene, wearing an eye mask. Compared to minimalism and its assertion of the receptive act of viewing as being based on a bodily expe­ rience within a “theatrical” arrangement of “specific” ob-jects, in Piper’s performances it is the body of the artist herself that becomes the trigger of a situative event. If the aforementioned minimalism was concerned with the reflective reception of one’s own phenomenalexistential situation while in the state of viewing, then in Piper’s works of the early 1970s, the unmediated response to the often barely perceptible performance of the artist is up for discussion. One might conjecture that it is more the minimalist performances of the 1960s, those of artists like Yvonne Rainer, Deborah Hay, Simone

Forti, Lucinda Childs, and others, that were influential to Piper’s work. This insistence on the direct or immediate response,3 which Piper would call “indexical present”,4 is decisive for the further unfolding of her work. In lieu of a focus on structural interrelation and mediation that the earlier conceptual works show, the immediate and confrontational aspects of the perfor­ mances provoke no less direct irritation from the view­ ers. A sort of behavioristic stimulus-response scheme is discernable, which again can become the starting point of a reflexive reception, however mostly on the basis of photographic documentation of the respective performance.

In Piper’s performances it is the body of the artist herself that becomes the trigger of a situative event.

Accordingly, the photographic documentation and its graphic or narrative handling becomes increasingly important in the following years. With the “Mythic Being” series from 1973–76, the performance turns into a graphic novel, thus not only generating an increasingly political acumination of the zones of conflict, but also a further displacement in the way the public finds itself addressed. Here, Piper mimes a male third-world per­ sona, who, for example, in one episode accompanies a white man into a park and mugs him there in full day­ light.5 This is not a mute confrontation with the public, as were the earlier performances, but one in which there is a very direct involvement of the viewers, imagined as victims of the “mugging” or addressed in their anxie­ ties: “I embody everything you most hate and fear”. In the narrative expansion of the “Mythic Being” perfor­ mance, the serial principles of minimalism are increas­ ingly transformed into the narrative structure of sequen­ tial images, whereby these narrations do not create a closed world, but rather one that addresses the inter­ action between image and observer, founded in certain aesthetic and social expectations. An image sequence of manipulated machine-made photographs shows for example the transformation from “nice girl” into the threatening Mythic Being (The Mythic Being: I/You(Her), 1974), whereby the observer is addressed in large speech-bubbles like a bygone lover. This doubled rela­ tionship crisis navigates between intimate emotional categories and the largely gender-specific, normaliz­ ing appearances of set social expectations, as well as between the initial self-depreciation and increasing self-assertion of the artist, which comes out through the process of the transformation. The image-observer relationship appears thereby less as a field of grand possibility for interactive experience, than as a network of relations determined in many ways by social and psy­ chical factors. By abolishing the expected aesthetic distance, the direct address via psychological and social relations generates a certain discomfort in the obser­ vation. The safe position of the viewer gets lost, expos­ ing her or him to dynamic patterns of interactions

between one’s self and the other, between projection and introjection, between fear and discrimination.

In these works the horizon of the general or univer­ sal seems to recede to the background in favor of the concrete, unmediated, and direct. This does not mean that it disappears completely, rather that it continues to motivate the concrete aesthetic stakes as a sort of regulatory principle. Meaningful in this respect are cer­ tainly the intense Kant readings and the study of phi­ losophy that the artist began at this time, and out of which her own philosophy would later emerge. In con­ trast to the artist-philosopher associated with concep­ tualism, most notoriously articulated in Joseph Kosuth’s claim of his “Art as Philosophy”, Piper largely separates her philosophical work from her artistic work, at least formally, and thus maintains a tension between both.

With Kant, above all the motivational aspects of social value horizons are worked out against the individualis­ tic and mainly utilitarian “drive theory” of Hume. From this viewpoint, Kant’s simultaneously social and auton­ omous conception of the self seems to be indispensi­ ble for any moralist practice and the understanding of xenophobia and racism - precisely in his universal rationalism.6 Because only when starting from such a universal horizon, could criteria be discerned, for exam­ ple of why unusual appearance or behavior should not be directly rejected or sanctioned, and why the self as the counterpart to the other can be understood as prin­ cipally open and interested in experience and exchange.

This argument is thoroughly positioned against the rad­ ical deconstruction of all universalisms. The decentered subject of the postmodern seems to Piper to be a priv­ ilege of a dominant culture,7 who for once would play­ fully like to relinquish its anyway all-too-secure status.

From a socially marginalized position, however, the claim for universal criteria is indispensable in order to first generate a subject position from which to be able to struggle for social visibility and recognition.

2 See Meat into Meat (1968), or Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City (1970).

3 On the concept of response, see David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

4 For the term “indexical present” see Maurice Berger, “Styles of Radical Will: Adrian Piper and the Indexical Present”, in Adrian Piper: A Retrospective (Baltimore: Fine Arts Gallery, University of Maryland, 1999), p. 12–32.

5 See The Mythic Being: Getting Back, # 1–5 (1975), reproduction in Adrian Piper: A Retrospective, p. 143.

6 See Adrian Piper, “Xenophobia and Kantian Rationalism” (1991), http://www. adrianpiper.com/docs/WebsiteXen& KantRat(1991).pdf 7 See Maurice Berger, “The Critique of Pure Racism: An Interview with Adrian Piper”, in Adrian Piper: A Retrospective, p. 76–98.

Preprint from Adrian Piper – Käthe-Kollwitz-Preis 2018 (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 2018). First published in Helmut Draxler, Structures of Response: Adrian Piper’s Transformation of Minimalism (Berlin: S*I*G, 2018), translation: R. Winters.

By kind permission of the author.

HELMUT DRAXLER born in Graz in 1956, lives in Berlin. As an art historian and cultural theorist, he publishes regularly on the theory and practice of contemporary art. He is a professor of art theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

The decentered subject of the postmodern seems to Piper to be a privilege of a dominant culture.

Nevertheless, a tension arises between artistic particu­ larism on one side, and philosophical universalism on the other. Sometimes, this universalism can be read rather concretely in singular works: in another episode of the “Mythic Being” series, the character is sitting at a typewriter, typing out some Kantian sentences (A 108 (Kant), 1975). It remains more important, however, that universalism acts as a “motivational” horizon for all works. To a certain extent it directs the singular actions, the specific situations, the confrontations, and the insistent presence towards a shared horizon of possi­ ble understanding and change.

1 I am leaving aside here the previous turn from the very early representational paintings to the minimalistconceptual work.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 07 – ENGLISH EDITION

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S. 38

HOLOCAUST AS CULTURE “Actor Ulrich Matthes reads the almost thirty pages of these records in the great hall of the Akademie der Künste slowly, with wonderful permeability, trusting in every word. During seventy minutes of nothing but inner action, he holds the audience under his spell. It is not simply about the creation of a major novel, but rather about the discovery of a collapsing world view.”

Paul Ingendaay, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Whether speaking of the “luck of the concentration camps” or the “value” of the Holocaust, of the “Holo­ caust as culture”, of the “longing” for “beautiful” Buchenwald, these are all conscious gestures by the great writer and Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertész, who passed away in 2016 – paradoxes or provocations that only a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald could formulate.

In his Kertész-Wörterbuch (“Kertész Dictionary”), Hun­ garian essayist László F. Földényi calls this procedure “atonal voice”, which determines the fundamental tone of all Imre Kertész’s work. It was very fortunate for us that Földényi, both an expert on and friend of Kertész, accepted our invitation to give the opening lecture at the symposium “Holocaust als Kultur. Zur Poetik von Imre Kertész” (“Holocaust as Culture: On the Poetics of Imre Kertész”) (12–14 April 2018) at Pariser Platz. In his lecture published here, he reflected on Kertész’s poetry as a whole and in the light of personal memories, before his individual works and “elective affinities” (to music, Thomas Mann, Nietzsche, Camus, Jean Améry, and Jorge Semprún) were addressed in detail in sixteen lectures over the days that followed – as well as the currently very relevant question of his legacy. The “cen­ tre and high point” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ) of the three-day event was Ulrich Matthes reading from the unpublished work journals from 1959 to 1962, in which Kertész discusses the idea and concept of his later major work, the novel Fatelessness.

JÖRG FESSMANN Secretary of the Literature Section, Akademie der Künste, Berlin

S. 39

THE SECRET LIFE OF IMRE KERTÉSZ László F. Földényi

We were actually close friends. Although I use the word “actually’ with a certain hesitation here – because, even though everyone who knew us always regarded us as friends, and we ourselves would never have described

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our relationship in any other terms, there were always locked doors in front of which I had to stop short. For the most part he seemed open-hearted and hungry for reciprocal openness; he unlocked all his inner doors, revealed episodes from his life that I would rather have forgotten. And yet, over and over again, I came up against a border and remained stuck there. There was a hard core which, for me, remained forever alien. He had no secrets, and yet I often had the feeling that there was a secret hidden in his innermost depths – like a cancer that he could not get rid of. Without a doubt, it made him suffer. We talked about many things, but never exchanged a single word about this.

We got to know one another when his name was still virtually unknown in Hungary: in 1982. Tankred Dorst, whose Merlin Kertész had translated into Hungarian, was staying in Budapest at the time. Kertész and I met for the first time at a PEN Club meeting held in Dorst’s honour. It struck me that he positioned himself in a spe­ cific way so that he could remain in the background as far as possible, but also step forward at any moment.

He came across as pleasant, but he also tried to remain inconspicuous. It is difficult to reconcile these two. This also meant his constant laughter seemed like a mask beyond which he did not permit one to inspect much deeper, neither then nor later. As though he were bear­ ing a secret within himself that he would never betray to anyone. “I always had a secret life, and that was always the real one,” he noted in his so-called “Exit Diary” on 18 July 2009 – one of the last sentences of his to have appeared in print. However, the first sen­ tence of his entire oeuvre might very well have been exactly the same.

Dorst remained in Budapest for several days on that occasion. Yuri Lyubimov, the Russian director, was then staging Don Giovanni at the Budapest Opera, and invited him to the dress rehearsal. Dorst was accompanied by Kertész, who was not only his translator but his inter­ preter as well. In the auditorium, translation took place on multiple levels: the Ministry’s official RussianHungarian interpreter sat alongside Kertész as GermanHungarian interpreter. At this point I will let Kertész tell the story: “Dorst praised the production in glowing terms.

While I was translating, I suddenly had the insane idea that I too had been present, and so added: ‘Please tell Mr Lyubimov that I congratulate him as well.’ At which the lady gave me a crushing glance and said: ‘You are supposed to translate. Not congratulate.’”

There, in the darkened auditorium, Kertész had sud­ denly opened up; for a moment, his “secret life” had become visible. By this time, seven years had already passed since the first Hungarian edition of Fatelessness appeared. Although in 1982 the novel had still failed to create any impact, Kertész had a certain right to con­ sider himself a colleague of equal status to the others as he sat in the auditorium. That is, until he was “cor­ rected” by a bureaucrat. The Ministry translator proba­ bly thought he was confusing his role. Kertész’s assess­ ment of the situation was far more serious: “Voilà! The story of another loss of my alias. At that time – six, seven years ago – I still suffered from confusion about my iden­ tity quite often. Sometimes I suddenly didn’t know what form my non-existence should choose as an alias.”

Kertész may well have experienced a feeling of dis­ enfranchisement at the Don Giovanni rehearsal. It is an episode that fitted seamlessly into the chain of his life experiences up to that date. He was born in 1929, into a non-practising, petty-bourgeois Jewish family in Budapest, and not exactly under a favourable star con­ stellation. As he writes in his “Galley Diary”: “When I came into this world, the sun was in the sign of the big­ gest international economic crisis of all times […]; a party leader called Adolf Hitler was peering at me with a terrifyingly unfriendly face from out of the pages of his Mein Kampf; and at the zenith of my constellation, there was the first Hungarian Jewish legislation, the so-called numerus clausus.” In 1940 he was enrolled in the newly established Jewish class of a grammar school; in 1944 he was deported to Auschwitz, then to Buchenwald, and finally to the Zeitz concentration camp.

Nine months later, in July 1945, he returned to Hungary, completed his school education, and became a jour­ nalist for various newspapers. In 1950 he lost his job and worked first as a factory worker, before being con­ scripted into the army in 1951 and released again in 1953. After that he led a double life on the margins of the literary world: on the one hand he wrote libretti for musical comedies, on the other he made the decision to become a writer. Only after repeated flops did he hit upon the idea for Fatelessness at the end of the 1950s and, as he acknowledged in an interview, immediately began writing the novel almost as a form of “selfchastisement” for his previous failures. After a year he made a draft on the basis of the material he had com­ pleted to date, which he then worked on for thirteen years. Fatelessness was at first rejected, and then appeared in 1975, without attracting any particular attention from the critics. Around this time, Kertész began translating from the German, including works by Nietzsche, Freud, Canetti, and Wittgenstein. When the second edition of Fatelessness appeared in the 1980s, he began to attract attention as a writer. From this point on he gained increasing literary recognition both in Hun­ gary and Germany – a development which reached its apogee in 2002, with the award of the Nobel Prize.

Kertész experienced both extremes of the 20th cen­ tury at first hand: Auschwitz and the Nobel Prize. But he experienced them as radical variants of the same “fatelessness”. He described the Holocaust as a “long, dark shadow” that fell upon all of us, inescapable. Later, he viewed the Nobel Prize as a similar long, dark shadow which, not without a certain coquetry, he called a “happy disaster” that had befallen him, and which he would like to escape as well. To step outside, to a place where he was permitted to be himself, where he could hide from those who were lying in wait, where he did not have to meet any expectations, where people weren’t watch­ ing his every step in order to exploit his fame for their own purposes. Where he could liberate himself from his ossified role, and no longer had to be a monument to his own self. Where he could live his secret life in freedom.

This sovereign core of personality, which cannot be traced back to anything, this secret life, if it wishes to express itself in words, and is placed under the spotlight, must destroy language itself. In classical,

realistic prose, the sentences suggest in advance that the abyss between public life and the private life of the ego can still be bridged without difficulty. In classical realism, the ego must feel very much like the king in his own castle. By contrast, Kertész’s sentence construc­ tions bear witness to the disenfranchisement of the ego.

It is disenfranchised from language – to be more pre­ cise, from the language of that total dictatorship that had not only been perfected by both the great totali­ tarian systems of the 20th century, but also, in Kertész’s view, had been introduced with the enthusiastic coop­ eration of the entire 20th century. After Auschwitz, this has changed profoundly. Adorno’s famous prophecy that it would be impossible to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz has not been fulfilled – presumably because he did not express himself precisely here. Even though he is no expert in musical aesthetics, Kertész has for­ mulated what Adorno may have had in mind more pre­ cisely by using a technical term from Adorno’s favour­ ite composer, Schoenberg: After Auschwitz it is only possible to write authentically in an atonal language.

“Atonality [is a declaration of] the invalidity of consen­ sus, of tradition,” writes Kertész in an essay whose title is already revealing, “The Exiled Language”. This lan­ guage, he writes, does not attempt to reconstruct Auschwitz in pre-Auschwitz language, but instead in a language whose prime objective is declaring the inva­ lidity of consensus, of tradition. A language that depicts the secret life of the ego, without betraying it to the general public. Kertész remains faithful to literature, and yet renounces it. Marisa Siguan expresses this elo­ quently in her book Lager überleben, Lager erschreiben (“Surviving Camps, Writing Camps”); with regard to Kertész she writes: “The literary tradition is present as a foil and is indispensable – a dream image […] which, however, is hopelessly lost.”

How does this “foil” of literary tradition appear – and, at the same time, dissolve? Here’s an example. The nar­ rator of Fiasco – the “old man” – is sitting in his room, sifting through his notes on writing his novel and the ensuing odyssey of getting it published. And then he muses on the difficulties of writing. “The more vivid […] my memories were, the more pathetic they looked on paper. As long as I used my memories, I wasn’t able to work on the novel; and when I began to write the novel, I stopped remembering. It wasn’t as though my memo­ ries had suddenly been lost; they just changed. […] My work […] basically consisted of nothing except consist­ ently attenuating my memories in the interests of an artificial – if you prefer, more ‘artistic’ – formulation that I could accept as equivalent to my memories on paper – and only on paper. […] There was just one thing I hadn’t considered (perhaps naturally enough): one cannot ever communicate one’s own self.” And then he arrives at the conclusion: “It was not the train in the novel that brought me to Auschwitz, but the real one.”

Is it possible to depict this “real” train with the resources of literature? Does that not mean that the secret life, placed under the spotlight, forfeits its exclusivity? When you read Kertész, you are immedi­ ately confronted by the question of whether it is possi­ ble to describe the indescribable at all. When Péter Nádas asked Kertész this question, he replied without

hesitation: “Yes, of course.” Knowing well enough that he frequently hides behind a cloak of irony, this can mean nothing other than: “Of course not.” Or, more pre­ cisely: “Yes and no.” It means running headfirst against the wall of literature, breaking through it, and penetrat­ ing into something that is more than literature. Kertész did this, as did a Russian writer of equal stature, Var­ lam Shalamov. Both were passionately concerned with the question of “describability”. How could they suc­ ceed in preserving the vividness of experience? And both quickly arrived at the conclusion that they must question the tool they were using itself: literature. As Kertész puts it: “If I am looking for writing, for the most part I seek it outside literature; if I were trying to write, I would probably protect myself from literary writing, because […] literature has become suspect. There is a fear that a form dipped into the solvent of literature will never regain its density and vividness.”

What is it about literature that would damage it? The so-called “humanism” of that type of classical litera­ ture that diminishes or even trivialises the secret life of the “I” in the name of the public “we”. For Kertész the “professional humanists” were his true opponents, because “their wishes strove for my annihilation: they want to deny my experiences their validity”. Shalamov expressed it even more succinctly: “As soon as I hear the expression ‘the good’, I take my cap and leave.” What was it about humanism that they criticised? The fact that it views history as an unceasing triumphal proces­ sion towards the good, and therefore presents evil in such a light as to suggest that it is an accident, a mere operational breakdown. By contrast, Kertész extends the concept of “fatelessness” to cover the entire his­ tory of modern times – it even appears to him to be an essential characteristic of liberal democracies. For him, what he describes as “state-run mass destiny” is no operational breakdown, but rather a “negative experi­ ence” from which no one is spared.

In Fatelessness an apparently harmless pleasure – football – provides a bizarre example of the subtle man­ ner in which one might be granted such a “negative experience”. The young protagonist is totally crazed with joy to discover that there is a football pitch in Auschwitz. Kertész said later that, during his work on the novel, he was beset by doubts as to whether his memory might be deceiving him, but the thought seemed too irrelevant. When, later, he read Tadeusz Borowski’s story “The People Who Walked On”, in which the young boys in Auschwitz set up a football pitch near the barbed wire fence behind the hospital barracks, he felt relieved. In his powerful monograph on Theresienstadt (Theresienstadt 1941–1945: The Face of a Coerced Community, 1955), Hans G. Adler also writes that not only had a playground been erected there for the chil­ dren who were later to be murdered, but that teams of prisoners and guards competed against each other in football matches. A game which, like every game, was under supervision, and yet was different, as though it were being played outside.

This “negative experience” of the inversion of real­ ity also became clear in the experience of the fictional, of theatre, as Adler describes with reference to the opera performances held in the concentration camp.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 07 – ENGLISH EDITION

Normality was play-acted in an exceptional situation, which resulted in a highly refined form of humiliation and abasement of the prisoners. They were enticed into a trap and spiritually humiliated – which was not nec­ essarily the case with physical torture. In Theresien­ stadt, which was a kind of “model camp” or alternatively “show camp” for the SS, regular opera performances were organised, and indeed many of the operas were written by the composers incarcerated there themselves.

One such was Hans Krása’s children’s opera Brundibár, which was performed by children detained there – all of whom, along with the composer, were subsequently murdered. They also rehearsed classical operas and plays, making their own costumes and sets. Sometimes the pieces were performed in their entirety, at other times only as excerpts. If, for example, the International Red Cross Commission arrived – in other words, a wit­ ness – “the actors were standing by” in the theatres, “and at the moment the Commission entered, they began performing in the middle of an opera or play. After five minutes the Commission continued on its way, and the performance was interrupted […] Almost all the men – artists, actors, composers, singers, conductors, instru­ mentalists – lost their lives.” This theatre is an illusory world in the most precise sense of the word. On the one hand it reminds one of the “real” theatre outside, which is already an illusion in itself, a showplace for the “as if”. On the other hand it is situated in the world “inside”, which may indeed be real, but is however not identical with the reality outside. As a result, the illusion “inside” differs from that “outside”. Everything is topsy-turvy: reality awakens the impression of an illusion (a night­ mare); illusion gives the impression of reality. The the­ atre becomes a pseudo-theatre. Or, as Adler accurately expresses it: “In the truest sense of the term, reality had become ‘de-ranged’.”

This “derangement” of reality and non-reality did not leave the camp internees unscathed. They had been robbed of the existential experience of their lives, in other words their fates, so that they no longer lived their own reality. This is why, for both Kertész and Shalamov, literature had become suspect. Because it is suspect if a writer wants to make the deranged “reality” of the fateless tangible through the logic of conventional expe­ riences. The difference between free human beings and camp internees does not simply consist in the fact that one is locked up and the other is not, but rather in the fact that the personality of one has been destroyed, and that of the other has not. When writing about the camps, many authors commit the error of continuing to depict the internees as healthy personalities who see the world in a similar way to free human beings, just from the other side of the fence. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for example, does this in one of the most famous prison camp novels, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. His hero, Shukhov, seems to have leapt straight out of a story by Tolstoy: his thoughts, reactions, deeds, and judgements testify to a spiritually undamaged person, who more­ over is a good person. That is literature as it has come down to us from the realism of the nineteenth century.

Shalamov balked even at the smallest details: a cat, he thought, could not possibly creep amongst the prison­ ers, because they would long since have eaten it. And

17

how could Shukhov possibly wash his hands in cold water? For twenty-five years, Shalamov had no longer been able to put his hands in cold water, since in those days they had been frozen. And so on. The conclusion?

Solzhenitsyn “does not know or understand the camps”.

Not because he hadn’t been a prisoner himself, but rather because he coats with the gloss of literature something that can no longer be depicted through con­ ventional literature. For him, too, Kertész’s words apply: “Perhaps it is not some talent or other that makes a per­ son a writer, but rather the fact that they do not accept language and ready-made ideas.” And why shouldn’t one accept them? Because language is a totality, which “even ex[cludes] them from their own inner lives”. A new language is required to describe the deranged world of the camps – the language that Kertész describes as “atonal language”.

With the aid of this language, he was able to cast the protagonist of his Fatelessness into the abyss that lies between reality and unreality. The hero of Kertész’s novel undergoes a journey which totally drains any con­ sensus of meaning until, finally, he appears before us as a being without identity. We become witnesses to a quite extraordinary process. Kertész reduces and strips the so-called “ego” further and further, unpeels more and more of the onion rings of history. First the young­ ster is robbed of his name, which is replaced by a num­ ber. Later, his body also leaves him in the lurch. By the end, as a result of his constant hunger, he is aware of himself only as a hole; instead of the “ego” a metaphys­ ical void yawns open within him. “I transformed myself into a hole, into emptiness, and all my efforts, all my strivings, were directed towards relieving, stuffing, silencing this bottomless emptiness with its incessant demands.” His loss of identity reaches a climax in the cement-carrying episode. While dragging the cement he lets a sack fall and, although he is already lying on the floor, the guard still savages him with kicks. From then on the guard always keeps an eye on him, and the young man does a deal with him, as though he were his accomplice: as though he wanted to prove that he really could still carry the load. “At the end we were already almost playing into each other’s hands, we already knew each other, I could almost read something like satis­ faction, encouragement, if not even pride on his face – in which respect, I had to admit, he was even in the right if viewed from a certain angle: even if I was staggering and bent, and sometimes everything went black before my eyes, I still bore it, I came and went, I carried and dragged, and indeed without dropping a single sack any more; and all in all – this I had to confess – this was a confirmation for him.” It is as though the youth has assumed the guard’s point of view, while increasingly ceasing to be himself.

And when, at the end of the novel, the hero returns to Budapest, his loneliness takes on cosmic propor­ tions. It is in this loneliness that he finds himself – he remains outside any human community. His lost ego re-emerges where he least expects it: in cosmic lone­ liness. The French philosopher Simone Weil character­ ised this state as “saintly”. Perhaps it is. But Kertész’s hero not only reminds us of a saint: he is also like an insect that has wormed its way into human form. He

18

moves like a human being, but has little to do with humans. He is an anti-Gregor Samsa.

Kertész’s novels depict a world in which, on one hand, transcendent relations have lost their validity, but on the other, the legacy of the Enlightenment has been reduced to nothing. Instead of being able to influence the progress of their fate in some way, human beings have been reduced to cogs in a mechanism. The con­ dition of “fatelessness” cannot therefore be reduced to existence in a concentration camp. For Kertész, “fate­ lessness” is not an exceptional condition which begins with captivity and ends with liberation, but a global state of affairs. The loss of an “alias”, already alluded to, is one of the most important themes in Kertész’s work. It is connected with the question of the freedom to deter­ mine the self. Are human beings free to determine them­ selves, or must they be pulverised between the mill­ stones of collectivism and ideologies? The Enlightenment bequeathed us this question, and Kertész believes that Europe has been badly served by this legacy, and that the freedom of the individual has been sacrificed on the altar of collectivism. “One might say that the charac­ teristic property of 20th century history is that it com­ pletely eliminates the individual and the personality,” he writes in his 1995 essay “The Unlucky Century”. For him this phenomenon, referred to in his “Galley Diary” as “state-run mass destiny”, is a product neither of the dictatorship described as “socialism” nor of the Third Reich. These systems only brought to a perverse degree of perfection what was characteristic of modern his­ tory as a whole: the passion for collectivism, which in his view led logically to the invention and construction of things like Auschwitz. Unlike many others, Kertész does not trace Auschwitz back to any anti-Semitic or even primordial Germanic mindset, but rather sees it as a thoroughly modern, thoroughly European, and thor­ oughly contemporary phenomenon. To quote what is perhaps the sentence with the least illusions in his entire work, from his diary “I – An Other”: “Let us not forget that Auschwitz was not liquidated because of Auschwitz, but because the fortunes of war changed direction.”

“Fatelessness” made its entry on the world-historical stage at the moment when European civilisation began to forget that there was something more powerful than human beings, and that even what we describe as “life” is only a tiny part of something that towers above it and dwarfs it. “There is no doubt that, on the threshold of the 21st century, we are thrown back on our own resources where ethical matters are concerned,” writes Kertész. “We have been abandoned by a universal god, abandoned by universal myths, and also abandoned by a universal truth […] There are neither heavenly nor earthly signposts to show us the way.”

This experience of an absence of transcendence runs through Kertész’s entire oeuvre. I think it is important to stress here that he was not concerned with any religious quest or search for God. I would even go so far as to say that Kertész had no faith in God – which alters nothing about his firm conviction that there must be some kind of transcendence, because without it human beings would indeed be reduced to fateless automata. “Transcendent reality encloses us like a mother’s womb,” he writes in “Galley Diary”, which I would

place alongside Fatelessness as one of the enduring books amongst his life’s work. “It is the unique certainty; everything that we regard as material certainty is a thou­ sand times less certain.”

When I read Kertész, I often have the feeling that I am listening to the representative of a lost world who has different horizons to those of people today, whose attention is focused on issues other than those of his contemporaries. With our entry into the 21st century, what is traditionally described as a “European intellec­ tual” has ceased to exist. Despite the differences between their motivations, the critical intellectuals that entered the scene in the 18th century were all convinced that the intellect could indeed achieve something, that words could indeed become deeds. For decades now, Europe has had less and less need of such intellectu­ als. Their place has been taken by others who do not want to change the world (in Kertész’s words, the world “of economism, of capitalism, of unidealistic pragma­ tism”) but at most to describe its modus operandi – or, even better, to serve it. Even the world of the spirit functions according to the laws of the entertainment industry. It is precisely because it runs counter to this entertainment industry that Kertész’s life work often seems anachronistic and uncomfortable. Even though he does nothing except take our age at its word when it loudly proclaims itself the global heir of Christianity and the Enlightenment and, precisely by so doing, unmasks the seriousness of that claim.

It is because of his X-ray vision that I regard Kertész as a classical European intellectual – and one of the last. He conjures up the image of a great breaker of taboos. Is it any wonder if, despite all our admiration for him, we secretly regard him as a stranger, a type of human threatened with extinction? That, at any rate, is how I regard him. And, at the same time, he amuses himself looking at us. Whenever I heard his character­ istic laughter, which even from a distance penetrated everything else – and which sounded so liberated, as though it were coming from someone who kept nothing bottled up – I always had the feeling that this incom­ parable sound echoed from a distance I would proba­ bly no longer reach. Laughing? Laughter? “That’s not grinning, but it’s something more than laughing,” wrote Péter Esterházy of Kertész. “Its father is whinnying, its mother resounding laughter. We ought to talk about this grandiose, laughter-like ‘something’ – about its sim­ plicity and its cosmic nature, its power, its joviality, its despair, its blessedness, its loneliness.” This laughter is a cry for help from a human being outcast from fate, distorted into a laugh. According to Kertész, human beings invented humour because of God’s inadequacy: if God were perfect, there would be no humour. Indeed – but what happens when there’s no longer any God? “If God is dead, who has the last laugh?”

LÁSZLÓ F. FÖLDÉNYI born in Debrecen, Hungary, in 1952. Art theorist, literary critic, and essayist, he is one of the most important Hungarian intellectuals, and holds a chair in art theory as a professor at the Academy for Theatre and Film in Budapest. He is the editor of the complete works of Heinrich von Kleist in Hungarian and, among other things, a winner of the Friedrich Gundolf Prize. Since 2009 he has been a member of the German Academy for Language and Literature.

THE IMRE KERTÉSZ ARCHIVE

S. 43

Sabine Wolf

NEW AQUISITIONS AT THE ARCHIVES

Three suitcases and five banana cartons of work doc­ uments formed the basis of the Imre Kertész Archive at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, in October 2001.

Kertész sent his archive to Berlin as a precursor, because from 2002 he was to live in this city, where by his own admission he spent his happiest years and where he was elected as a member of the Academy in 2013.

The Academy received a second major addition meas­ uring approximately four running metres in 2012, when Kertész was preparing to return to Budapest due to illness and Magda Kertész was clearing out their Berlin apartment. A purchase agreement had been concluded for the entire archive in 2011 and was realised in 2012 with the support of the Federal Government Commis­ sioner for Culture and the Media, the Cultural Founda­ tion of the Federal States, and the Friede-Springer Foundation. In November 2012, the Imre Kertész Archive was opened during a ceremony at the Academy. In his speech, Government Commissioner for Culture Bernd Neumann acknowledged this transfer as a “moving ges­ ture of trust and reconciliation, for Imre Kertész, as a survivor of the Holocaust, to have permanently handed this unique oeuvre over to an academy in Germany’s capital city”. With a further large addition in 2016 after the writer passed away, there are now approximately 70,000 pages of documents from the life and works of Kertész in the Academy Archives in Berlin. The hand­ written and typed manuscripts of nearly every novel, story, essay, and autobiographical work by Kertész pub­ lished since 1975 have survived, from the original texts to the final versions and proofs, most of which contain autographic corrections, deletions, and additions – including the drafts, versions, and manuscripts for his major novels, such as Fatelessness, Fiasco, “Galley Diary”, and Kaddish for an Unborn Child. Key findings and statements that significantly expand upon and fur­ ther explore Kertész’s previously known life’s work as a writer are to be found in the complete series of jour­ nals, which he kept consistently from 1961. In addition to this, extensive and above all professional correspond­ ence from about 1988 provides insights into the author’s literary existence. The approximately sixty original let­ ters from Kertész to Eva Haldimann, which came back into his possession in connection with their publication in 2009 and came to Berlin as part of his estate, are a particular treasure. Finally, further personal documents, photos, certificates, and medals – including the 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature gold medal – audio-visual materials, posters, and a wealth of reception documents complete the Imre Kertész Archive, which can be viewed using the following link: https://archiv.adk.de/bigobjekt/9512 SABINE WOLF is the vice director of the Archives of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

“ALL IS LOST!”: TRUDE HESTERBERG’S WILDE BÜHNE IN BERLIN (1921–23) A HIDDEN TREASURE Maren Horn

When, on 16 November 1923, a fire completely destroyed the sheet music, documents, stage sets, posters, and even the piano – in short, the whole premises – of the Wilde Bühne cabaret, Trude Hesterberg was on a guest tour in Switzerland. Two years earlier, on 15 Septem­ ber 1921, Hesterberg – who had just turned 29 – had founded the theatre in the basement of the Theater des Westens at no. 12 Kantstrasse. Its name was its mani­ festo: Trude Hesterberg (1892–1967) made a decisive contribution towards establishing the modern literarypolitical cabaret. The scandal surrounding Bertolt Brecht’s appearance in 1922 became the stuff of leg­ end. He had just recited two songs; after the “Ballad of the Dead Soldier” uproar broke out, and Walter Mehring shouted at the jeering audience: “Ladies and gentle­ men! That was a total disgrace – not for the poet, but for you. And yet one day you will be able to boast that you were actually here to see it!”

Hesterberg was young, carefree, courageous, charm­ ing, critical, temperamental, funny, full of wit, and burst­ ing with ideas – and she had an infallible flair for talent spotting. Besides Brecht, she also brought Joachim Ringelnatz, Klabund, Max Herrmann-Neisse, Kate Kühl, Annemarie Hase, Margo Lion, and Wilhelm Bendow to her stage – to name but a few. Well-known authors such as Kurt Tucholsky and Walter Mehring (who also took over the cabaret’s literary direction), plus musical direc­ tor Werner Richard Heymann and composers Friedrich Hollaender and Mischa Spoliansky, guaranteed the suc­ cess of the 127-seater cabaret with their mix of high artistic challenges, rich variety, and an appropriate dash of provocation. Hesterberg – fascinated by the world of theatre from her earliest years and with a solid vocal training she had wrested from her unwilling father – appeared on stage herself, and often her own stage. A multi-talented cabarettiste, chansonnière, soubrette, speaker, and operetta singer, she was as at home on stage as she was in film. Engaging, entertaining, and artistically demanding programmes guaranteed the suc­ cess of her cabaret stage.

But it was not just in her mastery of artistic matters that Hesterberg demonstrated her talent: in a perfor­ mance venue of this kind, management and organi­ sational tasks also formed part of a director’s role. All the conditions for “professional production of musical plays and theatrical performances” – such as lighting,

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 07 – ENGLISH EDITION

seating, and even the appearance of performers solely in “streetwear or formal dress” – were set out in the form of ten individual points by the municipal commit­ tee of Charlottenburg. The certificate of approval had to be presented again within two weeks “for final stamping”.

Everything was fulfilled according to the regulations, but this did not prevent the theatre from coming to an abrupt end when someone forgot to switch off the mas­ ter power switch and, as a result, during the night, an overheated ventilator triggered the disaster. Moreover, because of the rampant inflation at that time, restora­ tion work was out of the question. The most recent bills, such as those for newspaper insertions and an illumi­ nated advertisement on the Kurfürstendamm, already ran into billions of marks. Money had now become so worthless that Hesterberg paid her colleagues in stalls seats at the current price. This was even prescribed in contracts, as can be seen from the agreement con­ cluded with Walter Mehring on 1 November 1923. Other documents also bear witness to the stormy years of the Wilde Bühne and those stormy years of Hesterberg’s life.

These testimonial writings may be regarded as the most significant part of the artist’s legacy. Seven archive boxes are filled with Wilde Bühne documents, includ­ ing contracts, programmes, and business papers. There are also biographical documents, texts by Hesterberg, and music scores, some of which include her perfor­ mance annotations. A few letters, numerous photo­ graphs, and newspaper articles from the 1920s up to her death uncover the story of the artist’s entire life.

After the demise of the Wilde Bühne, she accepted oper­ etta engagements again and appeared in films. In 1933 she founded another theatre of her own in Berlin, the Musenschaukel [“Muses’ Swing”], which was, however, banned within a few weeks, in February 1934. After the war Hesterberg moved to Munich, where she remained faithful both to stage and to screen.

The archive documents also provide information on tragic events little known to date: Hesterberg’s hus­ band, Dr Fritz Schönherr, was shot by the SS in the last days of the war, on 30 April 1945. Hesterberg and Schönherr had married in June 1936 in Charlottenburg, Berlin; from 1939 the academically qualified business­ man had run a firm dealing in furniture and confection­ ery, the Berthold Feder company on Rosenthaler Platz.

It is thanks to Helga Bemmann – one of the most knowledgeable experts on the cabaret and variety scene of the 1920s and 1930s – that these documents can now be viewed by the general public for the first time, a good fifty years after Hesterberg’s death. Bemmann was a journalist, book author, and from 1958 to 1969, editor for entertainment arts at the Henschel Verlag publishing house. Over a period of decades she com­ piled a wealth of working materials and photographs relating to arts personalities from this period (authors, composers, actors, singers, artists, etc.), and exchanged letters with prominent figures or their associates (including Blandine Ebinger, Erika Mann, Walter Mehring, Muschelkalk Ringelnatz, and Mary Tucholsky). Thanks to her friendship with Hesterberg, the original Wilde Bühne documents finally found their way to Bemmann’s

19

home in the Märkisch region and now constitute a hid­ den stock, as a result of the generous donation of her entire archive to the Akademie der Künste. The way in which Bemmann’s collections of materials, photographs, and notes have been assembled is unusual, since they are devoted to a “marginal” (though not insignificant) topic, and supply important biographical information about both prominent personalities and others who, today, are partly forgotten. The quality and extent of the photographic archive seems of particular value.

Moreover, in every part of the collection one repeatedly comes across originals and rare prints.

And so it’s not a question of “All is lost!”, as Hester­ berg wrote in her memoirs – because a small part of the Wilde Bühne has survived the decades in paper form, and has now found a permanent place in the Archives alongside Bertolt Brecht, Annemarie Hase, Werner Rich­ ard Heymann, Heinrich Mann, Alfred Kerr, Klabund, Wal­ ter Mehring, Kurt Tucholsky, Erich Weinert, Marcellus Schiffer, Margo Lion, and may others.

MAREN HORN is an academic assistant in the Literature Archives of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

S. 46 NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES

“WE’RE WAITING FOR THE PROGRAMME OF THE FUTURE” – VIDEO ART IN THE ACADEMY ARCHIVES Uta Simmons

How can analogue video art be archived in a way ap­ propriate to the medium? This question presented itself in 2012, when the Archives accepted 540 video volumes donated by Wulf Herzogenrath. As a curator, he made a key contribution towards enabling video to establish itself as a new artistic medium in Germany, so that by the 1980s at the latest it was being pre­ sented at international exhibitions on an equal footing with painted and photographed images.

In 1977, for the first time, documenta 6 gave video art its own separate department, which was curated by Herzogenrath and provided a systematic overview of this still young artistic genre. This was followed by further special exhibitions and publications during his period of activity at the Kölnischer Kunstverein (1973–89) and as director of the Kunsthalle Bremen (1994–2011). In 2006 Herzogenrath became a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, where he continued his commit­ ment to contemporary art as director of the Visual Arts Section.

The emergence of video art had its origins in the polit­ ically charged atmosphere of the late 1960s, when key players seeking contemporary forms of expression developed extraordinary creativity in handling new tech­ nology. While the priority for American artists, besides experimentation with image technology, was initially confrontation with the mass medium of television, in Germany the new technology was predominantly used as a multimedia design element in connection with live performances, in order to dismantle the established con­ ception of art in the tradition of happenings and Fluxus.

With its portable cameras and monitors, video technol­ ogy facilitated experimentation with moving images in a form that had never previously existed, since it per­ mitted artists to make live recordings of ephemeral actions such as their own performances in a gallery space (Dieter Roth) or interventions in a pedestrian zone (Valie Export) and then control or distort the recording even while they were filming, thus creating a “second reality”. Moreover the involvement and reactions of the audience were an integral part of the concept.

In works such as his legendary Global Groove (1972), Nam June Paik – regarded as the founder of video art – promulgated his vision of a universal artists’ television.

Using special effects such as superimposition and lack of focus, he not only prefigured the visual language of music videos, but also influenced contemporary

20

painting. Paik is represented by over ninety volumes in Herzogenrath’s archive collection, taking the form of documentaries, interviews, and numerous original works.

These include unique rarities such as Cathedral as Medium (1980), in which Paik made a collage combin­ ing shots of a woman roller skating in front of the back­ drop of Cologne Cathedral with dance scenes from Global Groove – a procedure that was typical for him.

The video was restored in 2012 for a presentation in the “Long Night of the Museums” in Cologne and shown in the installation that Paik originally envisaged for it, behind an aquarium.

The artistic possibilities for the application of video technology are manifold, and range from works critical of the media – such as those of Jochen Hiltmann, who uses the black box of the tube monitor as an object from which the artist attempts a virtual escape – to experi­ mental applications for visualising sounds with the help of synthesisers, documentation of Conceptual art or live performances, video sculptures (Friederike Pezold), and room installations in which viewers themselves become actors with the help of monitoring cameras (Bruce Naumann). When archiving video art, therefore, several perspectives must be taken into account: the creative application of the electronic medium, which justifies placing the piece within the category of art­ work; the contents and spatial layout of the context in which the videos were shown (e.g. multi-channel instal­ lations); and – above all – the technical format, which plays a fundamental role in preservation and presenta­ tion, since suitable playback devices for digitalisation are disappearing from the market and will soon only be found as museum pieces.1 This is where the work of the archive begins, with such basic questions as: Is the character of the work altered by transfer from the ana­ logue original to a digital format? Is it worth securing analogue copies digitally, or would it be better to ask the artist for the master tapes? Does the analogue video cassette have the status of an original, or is it only a question of preserving its contents?

Besides signed artists’ videos, the 540 video vol­ umes of the Herzogenrath Archive also include numer­ ous specimen and working copies of tapes used in exhi­ bitions, recordings of television programmes with interviews and reports on exhibitions, and also artists’ demo tapes that have never been shown in public. The collection, therefore, not only contains the so-called highlights of video art that can be found in any collec­ tion specialising in media arts, but also covers the entire spectrum of artistic production and, therefore, the his­ tory of video art itself. In addition, the Academy has received the entire written archive, including corre­ spondence, photographs, sketches for installations, and other documents, as well as an extensive specialist library on video art. It is precisely this combination of videotapes and accompanying material that constitute the unique and special feature of the Herzogenrath Archive, whose rich study materials are regularly con­ sulted by both academics and museum professionals.

Only recently the American artist Joan Jonas sent a request to the Archives for a digital working copy of her 1977 performance Mirage (documenta 6), because she had no video documentation of it herself and the

recording was needed to restage her performance in a new exhibition at the Tate Modern in London.

The Academy is using the “Videoart at Midnight” fes­ tival in December 2018 to present this unique study col­ lection on the history of video art in conjunction with an exhibition on the opening of the Herzogenrath Archive.

The exhibition will focus on certain early projects that had a major impact on the development and proliferation of video art in Germany, such as the Cologne exhibition “Projekt ’74” featuring the world’s first electronic video catalogue, the video section of documenta 6 in 1977, and some representative video projects from the 1980s.

The exhibition will also present, for the first time on public display, a collection of guest books in Walter Herzogenrath’s possession, with original dedications by artists, a testimony to his numerous professional and private encounters between 1967 and 2018. The entries by approximately 1,400 artists range from simple ded­ icatory texts to pasted-in photographs, collages of materials, and pop-up 3D images. The entries in the synopsis read like an international who’s who of the modern art scene, and include not only video artists such as Marina Abramović, Bill Viola, or Nam June Paik, but also representatives of other genres like Joseph Beuys, Robert Wilson, William Kentridge, or Ai Weiwei.

In its presentation of these exhibits the Academy is breaking new ground: Ivo Wessel has individually pro­ grammed a guestbook app, a multimedia application which, for the first time, gives visitors the opportunity to search the diverse references in Herzogenrath’s web of personal relationships and professional connections with contemporary artistic projects. Besides descrip­ tive texts on the artists’ contributions, the supplemen­ tary commentaries and memories of Herzogenrath afford lively insights into the nature of their collaboration.

In the face of the rapid technological development since the 1990s, Paik’s 1965 prediction for the devel­ opment of art seems more topical than ever: “One day artists will work with electronic apparatuses in the same way that, today, they work with paintbrush, violin, or pieces of rubbish.”2

S. 50 NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES

WIELAND FÖRSTER “… BECAUSE FROM DOUBT THERE COMES GROWTH” Preview of Wieland Förster, „… weil aus dem Zweifel das Wachstum entsteht“. Aus den Tagebüchern von 1958 bis 1974 (“Wieland Förster, ‘… because from doubt there comes growth’: From the diaries, 1958–1974”) (“Archiv-Blätter” no. 24).

The main part of this volume comprises excerpts from the unpublished diaries of the former Academy mem­ ber Wieland Förster (he resigned in 1991 during the dis­ putes surrounding the unification of the Academy). Now living in Brandenburg, this artist is one of the most sig­ nificant figurative sculptors in Germany. But his talents are not confined to the field of the plastic arts. Besides his internationally respected statues and portraits, he has created an extensive body of graphic work, draw­ ings, paintings, and writings. Now, for the first time, it is possible to gain insights into his diaries, at present already numbering 200, which in future are to be added to the Wieland Förster Archive, already established by the Akademie der Künste in 2010. These small, unprepossessing notebooks provide new insights into the artist’s biography and the production of his works. They shed light on Förster’s artistic self-image, his struggles with cultural politics, and his self-assertion in difficult times.

The volume was prepared by the Visual Arts Archives for the “Archiv-Blätter” series in collaboration with Eva Förster. It is being published in October 2018 and will be presented at a reading by Ulrich Matthes at 7 p.m. on 13 October 2018 in the Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz, Berlin.

1 The ZKM Karlsruhe has set up its own “laboratory for anti­ quated video systems” for restoration and digitalisation of analogue video material. See also Christoph Blase and Peter Weibel, eds., Record Again! 40 Jahre Videokunst.de Teil 2 (Hatje Cantz: Ostfildern, 2010).

MICHAEL KREJSA Director of the Fine Arts Archives, Akademie der Künste, Berlin

2 Nam June Paik, in his leaflet Electronic Videotape Recorder (New York, 1965), reprinted in the catalogue N.J.P. (Cologne: Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1976).

You may say I’m a dreamer …

UTA SIMMONS is an art historian and director of the Media Archives at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

In December 2018, to mark the 10th anniversary of “Videoart at Midnight”, selected materials from the Herzogenrath Archive will be on public display for the first time. In 2017 the archive was enriched by a donation of twenty-two editions of more recent video productions, which have been shown at the Kino BABYLON in Berlin-Mitte since 2008. At the 2018 festival, prepared by its initiators Olaf Stüber and Ivo Wessel, the Academy will provide the opening event, a retrospective of the early years of video art (12–16 December 2018, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Hanseatenweg). The quotation in the title comes from Herbert Wentscher’s dedication of 29 July 1985 in the artists’ guest book no. 8.

3 February 1964 […] Evening: worked on small nude at Academy. In the evening it was very dark, the dogs were barking in the fire zone by the Wall. They barked at me and jumped high up the fence. Their walkway is on the Eastern, not the Western border. Their barking and howling could still be heard as far as the Potsdamer Platz. Searchlights scanned buildings. All that is very depressing, even more, it is offensive. There you are, working on a nude in a room thirty metres from the fire zone; you come out, still timid and lost in thought, and there is the reality – 8 February 1964 Afternoon: nude at the Academy.

Cremer came to engrave. Yes, baroque! It’s fun for me,

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 07 – ENGLISH EDITION

being baroque. But I should rather say: vital. What more do I want, other than that every form blossoms in a plas­ tic, vital way […] I’ve carried enough suffering and death in my heart. The truth remains […]

12 February 1964 […] Beckmann would have been 80 today. But despite his premature death he still left a vast body of work, a grandiose oeuvre. And he goes on living, for me and many others. Even those ignoramuses, the politicians and philistines, can change nothing about that, they are all runts compared with this titan […]

16 February 1964 […] Etched this evening – nothing.

I find it so hard to work on demand. Leafed through Barlach for a while, am simply too tired for proper read­ ing. How long is it now since I read a single book. Only my music relaxes and refreshes me.

19 February 1964 […] Could get little sleep during the night. Want to […] continue working on my tiny statu­ ette, ‘Myself as Prisoner’. It’s my first faltering step in this direction. It must become my credo – not for me personally, but for all those who were imprisoned some­ where for several years of their lives in this “century of prisoners”. How many billions of hours of suffering have been endured, and yet everything goes on, goes on.

4 March 1964 […] 5 to 11 p.m. at Ebert’s. Pleasant evening, looked at pictures, […] agreed on exchange.

He’s giving me a circular picture, c.3 cm. Cut it out from a worktop, not without fear – of his wife! Quality varia­ ble, but includes very nice things. It is simply solidly “proletarian”, straightforward, and sensible. […] nice evening, you don’t feel attacked or assaulted.

21 March 1964 Back in the studio! Exhibition opened.

Seemed quite well mannered. Several colleagues there, with […] good opinions, even about paintings […] Lang said something very good, spot on with regard to my feelings: “the pictures gaze at you in silence”. To me that’s like a keyword for a certain coolness I like […]

I’d like to make things that don’t “jump out at you” so much. […] Very nice programme for the opening, songs

by Debussy and Schubert. Let’s clear out my stall then, and then tomorrow back to hard work again […] More­ over Lang said: you don’t work for today, but for all time; let’s hope so.

22 March 1964 Lunchtime: brief visit to Academy exhi­ bition with Vent. Such a shame to see what people are showing there […]

15 April 1964 […] Eliasberg from Paris, very friendly.

The dreamer wants to put on an exhibition for me in Paris!

Tolerance must surely be the intellectual achievement of our century 3 June 1964 Early evening. Awful day. Low point, both physically and in terms of work. Have finally sent nude […] packing. It’s bitter and takes me to my limits, this ongoing crisis – or is that my genuine constitution? And

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better times are euphoria. I’m hopelessly unhappy, no, not unhappy […] that’s a condition you can live with. I’m almost forsaken by myself. And the world is doing some­ thing else on top. I shall hide myself away even deeper.

My head is so tired, as though I had been without sleep for weeks. Lamentations ended: I must either go on or hang myself, and there’s time for that.

29 June 1964 […] At noon to Vent on the collective farm, began work on the seated woman. Hidden, undis­ closed mourning.

4 July 1964 In the morning H. Vent here briefly. News from “outside”. Doesn’t interest me […] Everything idyllic here. Memories of Stifter, posterity, the halftimbered house, […] the jaws and the feeling of goaloriented isolation. It is beautiful here. If my strength suffices, it will go better today, because these are happy days […], the lack of connection with the world is calm­ ing in itself. Of course, there are still these moments when my heart freezes, this memory of guilt. I still have my work, that helps.

12 July 1964 […] There’s no naturalism in art. At best in “non-art”, and there’s no need to talk about that.

Thoughts about intolerance. Tolerance must surely be the intellectual achievement of our century. It’s time.

Science has expanded, it has learnt, accumulated knowledge and, if you like, has gone far. And human beings? […] They’re left behind, deep in the past and almost always ignobly subjective, dogmatically stupid.

It is time for great, tolerant thinking, for recognising the rights of others and thus for understanding and, after that, for forgiveness and goodness. After that, the cen­ tury of mercy will come.

18 July 1964 For three days have been in Bergfelde again. Out here, cut off from the world – I’m almost, on an hourly basis, happy. Work and rest. I’m making pro­ gress with the figure. Today’s the ninth day and it’s coming on nicely. Lacking some models. Six drawings made – charcoal. To be sure, not quite what I want, but still it’s a start – and gave me inexpressible delight. How good this kind of tranquillity can be? […]

27 July 1964 […] Slowly, almost imperceptibly the day collapses into itself, the air is motionless, the sky pink from the downward gliding of the sun – heavenly pink, immaterial. It is like a truce. Over and over again the dogs bark and hackle loudly, guard dogs, trained to go for human beings, the border is only 100–200 metres from here. So much for the backdrop. […]

10 September 1964 […] they’re trying to publicise me, but of course there’s nothing to be said. Let Feist describe Felsenstein in ND. Oh please, leave me in peace, I don’t need any success, I need quiet, I want to go away somewhere where I can remain at peace. They hang round my neck. Everything written down is false anyway, I’m only interested in art and my work, I’d do the same in Hamburg or Paris.

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S. 52 NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES

FINDS: WRITING AS CULTURAL ASSET – FIFTY YEARS OF THE 1968 STANDARDISED SCHOOL HANDWRITING SYSTEM Susanne Nagel

Nobody is in any doubt that computers and smartphones have had a palpable impact on the written word: the smaller the medium, the simpler the characters, the more reduced the language, the more informal the mes­ sages. The function of handwriting as the primary means of communicating information has been drastically reduced, and – where it still exists at all – it is predom­ inantly confined to the private sphere: notes, infrequent picture postcards, letters. Who still uses handwriting?

Either an older generation that no longer has any desire to befriend new technology, or a group that has already become almost elitist, using it quite deliberately as an alternative to the digital world, or out of nostalgia.

Whether these technical developments will supplant handwriting, or even make it superfluous, is something no one at present can predict.

One of the key building blocks of day-to-day work in the Archives – deciphering or identifying a person’s handwriting – plays virtually no part in everyday life any more. Only the future can tell what a loss for cultural history this might mean.

Since 1999 the Academy Library has been curating the Berlin Calligraphy Collection. This brings together examples of handwriting in its freest form from the past forty to fifty years, alongside selected typographic works by the most famous calligraphers and font design­ ers from Europe and even further afield. The Archives database at present comprises approximately 1,800 sheets and materials, which can be viewed in the read­ ing room at 4 Pariser Platz.

In 2017 the Dresden-based typeface designer, cal­ ligrapher, and artist Renate Tost (b. 1937) donated a considerable part of her future calligraphic and typo­ graphic legacy to us. One of the special highlights of the collection are the handwriting samples, preliminary drafts, and original version of the alphabet for the stand­ ardised school handwriting system [Schulausgangs­ schrift] that was established as a mandatory first step for schools of the German Democratic Republic in 1968.

The basis for this was the introduction of a new curric­ ulum that was intended to provide a more effective form of written language acquisition and aimed to revise didactic practice in handwriting classes.

The initiative for this came from Albert Kapr. As pro­ fessor of font and book design at the Hochschule für

Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig, for three decades he had a decisive influence on the high quality of font and book design in the GDR, which was recognised inter­ nationally. Spurred on by his international contacts, he campaigned insistently for an improvement and simpli­ fication of school handwriting at the Ministry of National Education, and he delegated the research contract from the Central German Education Institute to his former student Renate Tost. Working together with the edu­ cationist Elisabeth Kaestner, from 1961 Tost developed a number of variants for changing the alphabet, and developed writing templates that were trialled in selected school classes. In 1968 the final draft led to the present mandatory standardised script, created on the basis of the humanist cursive. “The capital letters are simplified, the pattern of movement in lower case letters is […] designed to be easier and tighter. The dis­ tinguishing characteristics emerge more clearly in these simplified forms. This has decisive benefits for legibil­ ity: the capitals are less prone to errors of deformation caused by rapid writing or the individually determined handwriting style. […] Oriented towards utility, the forms provide a neutral starting point for the development of an individually formed handwriting style, because details are less rigidly prescribed than in the previous stand­ ardised system” (“Zur neuen Schulausgangsschrift 1968” [“The new standardised school handwriting system of 1968”], in Kunsterziehung 6 (1968), p. 8).

From the political perspective of the West, the script was seen as a further isolation of the East from the common German spirit. Positive voices praised its brisk and rational writing style and hoped for something sim­ ilar in the West, but also realised, cynically, that reform initiatives would become stalled in federal turf wars.

Since the 1970s there have been two alternatives to substitute the “standardised Latin script” in Germany: the “standardised school handwriting” in the GDR, as already described, and the “simplified standard script” [vereinfachte Ausgangsschrift] in the West. Since the turn of the millennium the “basic script” [Grundschrift] has been in use. Its basic principle is to develop a per­ sonal hand directly from printed writing. At present, every federal state decides for itself how children learn to write – and the pros and cons of handwriting issues are the topic of much highly controversial discussion.

For fifty years now, Renate Tost’s scholarly work has maintained its place in everyday classroom life. Even today, the standardised school handwriting system is taught in some federal states, both East and West.

SUSANNE NAGEL Curator of the Berlin Calligraphy Collection of the Archives in the Library of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin

S. 54 SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

AGAINST THE GRAIN Christina Weiss

In the force field of the arts, we train our ability to accept statements contrary to our own world view, and to expe­ rience the diversity of perspectives, the transitions between different, alien experiences, between zones of perception and thought, as an enriching stimulation.

In our encounter with artworks, we experiment playfully with thinking against the grain.

I can neither flee the familiar nor accept the alien if I cannot mentally accomplish the movement from one space to another, from the known to the unknown. Those who only feel comfortable within the bounds of their everyday experience will stay there, because they are completely unable, or unwilling, to conceive of the alien space in the first place.

In our society, however, we are all confronted with the unexpected, the alien, every day – whether in real life or through the media – so that we need to practise confronting the other, in order neither to encapsulate ourselves nor experience anxiety. We need the energy of a sense of possibility, the strength to prise open our prejudice-filled first impressions.

In The Man without Qualities, Robert Musil writes: “[I]f there is a sense of reality, […] there must also be a sense of possibility. Whoever has it does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise. So the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might just as well be, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not.”1 The sense of possibility fires the imagination, it is the energy field of the arts. Each contemporary artwork is repeatedly breaking with the overfamiliar, seeking an escape into something new as a revolt against the wear­ ing down of perception by familiarity, against indiffer­ ence, but also against a false understanding of taste which only looks for the harmonious, smooth surface that fulfils expectation. The American sociologist Richard Sennett has advocated the need for an “art of self-surrender” for modern city dwellers. By this he means developing an attitude that makes it possible to encounter the alien and unusual with open-minded sym­ pathy – which is precisely what everyday life demands of city people to an increasing degree.

I maintain that the arts provide the ideal training ground for this ability. The arts open up spaces for manoeuvre in the formation of feelings; ingrained per­ ceptual patterns are irritated, prejudices unmasked, everyday indifference shattered. This can occur because works of art directly stimulate the sense of possibility.

Unambiguousness is not their semantic field. To under-

stand an artwork means to enter into a relationship with it, to submit to a process that focuses and changes per­ ception, emotion, reflection, and self-reflection. It is a question of grasping this reciprocal relationship between the work and the perceiving subject – straight­ forward understanding and knowledge are not the basis of artistic reception.

This is where the arts differ from scientific research, with which they nevertheless have many points of con­ nection. Artists, too, are researchers: they look for new relationships, for discoveries, for new knowledge. They feel the limits of their own and their society’s way of thinking and assault those limits in order to transcend them, to expand the horizons of thought as they had previously been imagined. The method of transcending these limits differs between the arts and sciences. While science aims towards a form of progress in which each new discovery supplants the validity of its predecessor and sets new coordinates for knowledge, the arts tempt us towards new experiences that, nevertheless, leave the validity of our early experiences fully intact.

The artwork entices us under its spell. If we are seized by the appearance perceptible to our senses – its acous­ tic or visual stimuli – it unleashes amazement, irrita­ tion, provokes new ways of seeing, new insights. The elements of everyday reality appear to be capable of variable arrangement and can be reassessed. In short, the artwork finds its echo in the recipient; we set it in vibration and thereby set ourselves in vibration – though of course, only if we are prepared to open ourselves up to its stimulus.

Whether the encounter moves us, makes us laugh or cry, whether it repels us, bewildered or shocked, whether it awakens the joy of discovery or – figuratively speak­ ing – grabs us by our coattails and shakes us, because something unexpected and outside our experience has befallen us: in each case, the artistic summons to self-abandon is coupled with the challenge to try some­ thing out. Approaching works of arts inquisitively and playfully means experimenting: running through vari­ ant modes of perception, testing the changing rules, and surrendering to the multitude of possible meanings with delight. The communication game that an artwork sets in motion can therefore be repeatedly experienced anew in different times and the most varied contexts.

The exchange of energy between the perceiver and the object is always new and can be recharged in dif­ ferent ways. The language of artworks constitutes a foreign language in which we can reformulate our own thinking. We are confronted by our own limits and prej­ udices so that we might repeatedly shift the bounda­ ries of our mental horizon and extend the radius of our feelings.

Anarchic enjoyment of free imagination, stimulated by the open-endedness of artistic semiology, is one of the paths to subjective maturity, towards the ability to oppose everyday opinions and judgements and develop confidence in one’s own thinking.

It was in this sense that for Friedrich Schiller, too, play – aesthetic play – was the principle of the great­ est possible freedom for humanity. The play that an art­ work stimulates cannot allow itself to be determined from outside or coerced.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 07 – ENGLISH EDITION

Anyone who truly engages with an artwork is changed by the intensity of this encounter. It leaves a lasting trace on the peculiarities of subjectivity, the inner world of emotions and reason. Training on the playing fields of artistic experience permanently changes reactions to the circumstances of everyday reality. Through it, we become able to meet the alien, the disconcerting, and the unexpected with curiosity and sympathy, and to repeatedly be astonished by ourselves instead, so that we wish enthusiastically for our own transformation.

The poet Helmut Heissenbüttel describes the event of artistic experience very poetically in a single line of poetry: “Something cracks inside the brain and spills colour inward.” 2 A society that grants artistic endeavour and encoun­ ters with contemporary art breathing space and recog­ nition thereby gives itself a chance to be capable of freedom and peace.

For the artist, art means the courage to shape and articulate one’s own view of society; for its recipients, art develops the courage to form and express one’s own opinion, even when it diverges from the social consen­ sus. Art strengthens the courage to accept diversity. It unlocks the energy field of our imaginations by trigger­ ing free mind games with our reactions to what we read, hear, or see. It is here that we find the freedom that makes peace possible at all, because open debate in a democratic society is the sole means of preventing hatred and the rejection of otherness. A learning soci­ ety is in a constant dialogue with the opinions of the conformists, the courageous, the obstructionists. Most of all, artists can draw their strength to create peace in a society from the exactitude of their perceptions and the courage to express their own opinions – on the con­ dition that it is permitted to read, listen to, and look at them.

1 Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1958), p. 16; for a translated English excerpt see http://www.robertmusil.net/musil/works/If%20there%20 is%20a%20sense%20of%20reality.pdf 2 Helmut Heissenbüttel, Textbuch 8: 1981–1985 (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1985), p. 53.

CHRISTINA WEISS former Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, publicist, adviser, and professor, is a member of the Society of Friends of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

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COLOPHON Journal der Künste, Edition 7, English Supplement, July 2018 Print run: 2,000 Journal der Künste is published four times a year and is available at all Academy locations.

Members of the Akademie der Künste are sent a copy. © Akademie der Künste 2018 © for the texts with the authors © for the artworks with the artists Responsible for the contents Werner Heegewaldt Johannes Odenthal (V.i.S.d.P.) Kathrin Röggla Editorial team Martin Hager Marie Altenhofen Anneka Metzger Translations (if not otherwise noted) Laura Noonan, Sprachwerkstatt Berlin Toptranslation GmbH Copy-editing Joy Beecroft Design Heimann + Schwantes, Berlin www.heimannundschwantes.de Printing Druckerei Conrad GmbH, Berlin If you would like a single edition or a subscription, please contact info@adk.de.

ISSN (Print) 2510-5221 The views offered in this journal reflect the opinions of the individual authors and do not necessarily represent the opinion of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

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