Journal der Künste 11 (EN)

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE

ENGLISH EDITION NOVEMBER 2019

11

EUROPE JEANINE MEERAPFEL: THOUGHTS ON A EUROPEAN ALLIANCE OF THE ACADEMIES MEMORIES IN MUSIC JULIA GERLACH: POINTS OF RUPTURE IN CONTEMPORARY MUSIC CARTE BLANCHE DORIS DÖRRIE: LIVING AND WRITING HELGA PARIS HEIDI SPECKER: THE AESTHETICS OF THE APRON

P. 5

P. 18

P. 44 NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES

EDITORIAL

“DISCOVERING EUROPEANS OUTSIDE EUROPE WAS NOT A GOOD DISCOVERY”

CREATING PASSAGEWAYS

Kathrin Röggla

Kerstin Hensel

Ingo Schulze P. 6 FOCUS ON EUROPE

P. 46 P. 19

THOUGHTS ON A EUROPEAN ALLIANCE OF THE ACADEMIES Jeanine Meerapfel

JUNGE AKADEMIE

FINDS

STAY BACK

“BUT I DETEST THE OLD THAT THINKS ITSELF ETERNAL.”

Ramy Al-Asheq

Helga Neumann

P. 20

P. 48

COMMENTARY

PATHOS AND PRECISION: ON THE NEW EDITION OF SONATE POUR PIANO BY JEAN BARRAQUÉ

P. 10

EUROPE AS AN AGENDA György Konrád

FIRST ASSANGE, AND THEN ...?

P. 12

Iris ter Schiphorst

SUPRA

P. 24

Heribert Henrich Tobias Kruse

MEMORIES THAT INVOLVE EUROPE P. 14

Julia Gerlach

DIVIDE AND RULE

P. 28

Kathrin Röggla P. 15 JUNGE AKADEMIE

A HOUSE

ON THE CURRENT STATE OF POLISH THEATRE Artur Pełka P. 32 CARTE BLANCHE

Cemile Sahin P. 16

LEBEN, SCHREIBEN, ATMEN (LIVING, WRITING, BREATHING) Doris Dörrie

BAUTZEN OR BABYLON Heiner Müller

P. 38 HELGA PARIS – THE PHOTOGRAPHIC WORK

“BAUTZEN OR BABYLON” THE IDEA OF A EUROPEAN SOCIETY

APRON AWARENESS Heidi Specker

Angela Lammert P. 42

AN ARCHIVE IN BLACK AND WHITE Torsten Musial

P. 50 FREUNDESKREIS

FREEDOM OR BENEFIT? WHO BENEFITS WHEN FOUNDATIONS FUND ART? A guest contribution by Stephan Muschick

EDITORIAL

Dear Interested Readers, Whether the learning human can really be the European heraldic animal, as GYÖRGY KONRÁD put it in 2007, is a notion we want to explore in the 11th issue of the Journal der Künste. At any rate, the European idea is associated with many matters that JEANINE MEERAPFEL intends to address at a joint conference of European academies of the arts. These are matters concerning the possible alliance of European academies and their artists, and concerning common identity and interest in politically sensitive times. Following on from a project by HEINER MÜLLER in 1990, that of a European Society of the Arts, as recalled by ANGELA LAMMERT with an invitation card from the archive, we gather the spirits that come from the future. Müller’s text “Bautzen oder Babylon” concludes with the memorable line: “We need your help”. INGO SCHULZE succeeded in translating this need into concrete political demands in his speech for the Glänzende Demo – Unite & Shine on the occasion of the European elections.

ARTUR PEŁKA reports from Poland on theatre’s thorny ties with a Romantic concept of the nation and on its relations with the current right-wing hegemony in Poland – a special story that could also serve as a model. The secretary of the Music Section, JULIA GERLACH , is investigating the European colonial legacy that the Akademie der Künste, with the aid of three music theatre projects, is transforming into “Memories in Music” at a festival planned for the autumn of 2020, while TOBIAS KRUSE’S photographs evoke the sterile and stylised aura of the international diplomatic scene.

They are taken from the exhibition “KONTINENT” that will be shown at the Academy at Pariser Platz next year – and we are giving you

a foretaste. As a productive contrast, we offer portrait photos by HELGA PARIS , whose work will be woven into texts from multiple perspectives – in relation to a large exhibition taking place at Pariser Platz in the late autumn of this year – for which we were able to obtain the services of the artist HEIDI SPECKER and TORSTEN MUSIAL , the director of our Film and Media Arts Archive. Yes, the future figures very prominently in this issue of the Journal, and we are not least indebted to the composer IRIS TER SCHIPHORST, who reminds us with the “case” of Julian Assange that it is in the present that the future is at stake.

True futurity comes from poetry, and in this respect we attach great importance to being able to combine sharp interjections with tightly packed works on these pages – the JUNGE AKADEMIE is presenting itself with a poetic text by RAMY AL-ASHEQ and a collage-­like work by CEMILE SAHIN on loss of place, on property, and on identity. A trio taken up from a completely different angle

by DORIS DÖRRIE in her Carte blanche. Using this space for reflections in the guise of artistic autofiction, she develops a new genre in passing.

Our “find” from the past (and present of the archive), a letter from THEODOR FONTANE to Carl Hauptmann, supplies details of complicated fraternal relations, especially when it comes to artistic recognition. It is therefore good that there are also ways through, and one passage that has been newly designed in the Brecht House is deemed luminous by the deputy director of the Literature Section, KERSTIN HENSEL . The future is already with us!

Wishing you an inspiring swoop through the Journal, Kathrin Röggla Vice president of the Akademie der Künste

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FOCUS ON EUROPE

THOUGHTS ON A EUROPEAN ALLIANCE OF THE ACADEMIES Jeanine Meerapfel

Culture must lay its cards on the table. And by culture, I mean the cultural workers, artists, and cultural institutions. We are (all) talking about Europe. We (all) want a transnational Europe, a peaceful republic that is made up of many nations.

We (here from a German perspective) – does that also include Chemnitz? Chemnitz, where demonstrations were protected at the end of last year, in which acts of violence and the murder of “foreigners” were called for, where the Hitler salute was given and racist and Nazi slogans were hollered out?

Do we mean a Europe that is no longer ashamed of anti-­Semitic caricatures and attitudes?

Do we have to live with that?

I think not. I – and, I hope, a large majority of the population along with me – want a Europe that is not chauvinistic, not anti-Semitic, not xenophobic. A Europe of tolerance and enlightenment. An open continent where inhuman borders are not set up, a continent that is no better or worse than any other, but rather is prepared to defend human rights and to uphold relations with one another in the spirit of tolerance. A continent that does not forget the historically un­­ precedented situation that the Second World War conjured up – as Hannah Arendt wrote, “Suddenly, there was no longer a place on earth where wanderers could go without being subject to the most stringent restrictions, no country that would assimilate them, no territory where they could build a new community.”1

Fifty years ago, Europe was a utopian idea. Enemies for centuries, countries that had colonised half the world, and fought wars against each other and killed each other, were the ones who came up with the utopian idea that unified them. Some of these countries allowed themselves to be guided by the vision that Europe could only exist politically and economically if it was unified.

It is the most complicated social, political, and economic experiment one can imagine – overcoming the wounds of war and the centuries-old differences between the countries. And yet, these countries decided to form a coalition. That was unique in the history of mankind.

In terms of the economy, many steps have already been taken under what is at least a broadly shared foreign policy. But barriers still exist to accepting and respecting the profound differences between the member states. That is the difficult part.

The various pylons upon which this very complicated and at the same time beautiful idea – Europe – is built, consist of social, political, and economic necessities. And our part as the Akademie der Künste, as artists and intellectuals, is to try – just like the political parties, the governments, and so on – to form alliances and develop networks between the cultural institutions where the idea of building Europe is stronger than the desire to destroy Europe.

It is important to remember what the dream meant. It is important to once again use the language of political and cultural idealism, a language that has too often been disparaged.

We don’t see the glass as half empty but rather as half full.

Art, philosophy, and the intellect know no bounds. And artists are quite experienced in the arduous business of overcoming boundaries. We want to share a few ideas along this line and declare tolerance as the “façon de vivre”.

When I was still a child, in Argentina, Europe was a smell: the smell of my mother’s clothes, the things she carefully kept in boxes over the winter (maybe it was the smell of mothballs). In the suburb of Buenos Aires where I grew up, I heard mysterious German words such as “Spätzle” (from my father), or soft-sung French sounds like “Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot ... Prête-moi ta plume, pour écrire un mot ...” (my mother). Without knowing it, I was already a European. Later, during adolescence, there were the poems that Jorge Luis Borges wrote about European cities and languages. It was a very vague idea of a place to which we belonged and yet didn’t belong.

Later, much later, when I was attending journalism school and was already a staunch Latin American, I was against Europe. Europe had colonised us, forced its culture on Latin America with Bible and sword.

And after that, during the most difficult period of persecution of dissenters by the Argentine military dictatorship, Europe and, in particular, Spain did not want to take in any “sudacas” (Spanish derogatory term for South Americans). And the Federal Republic of Germany closed its eyes, selling weapons to the generals, and didn’t do a thing about the kidnapped citizens of German nationality.

And we (the “we” was a clear feeling at that time) – we Argentines had fed Spain, during and after the Second World War: With-

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 11

out wheat from Argentina, the Spaniards would have starved to death. That was how I felt back then, as did the generation of young people who were fighting injustice.

I had set out on the road to Europe even before the Argentine military dictatorship began. I was able to go to Europe, because I had decided in favour of Germany – the country my family had been driven out of. From then on, I had many homes, was a native in many languages.

In Europe, Ulm was a home to me, where, miraculously, a place existed at which foreigners and Germans studied together: Ulm School of Design, an anti-fascist establishment set up by the Geschwister Scholl Foundation. There, an international utopia of teaching and learning was brought to life.

The disaffection with culture ... was one of the ingredients from which the Nazi pudding was boiled.

Gabriele Tergit describing the 1930s in Berlin 2

Europe seemed to me to be a given at this time. But that always meant Western Europe: France, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Scandinavia ... The big step of spanning the continent, of including the East, came much later. What an opportunity! What an incredible step forward! Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, all the countries that had been behind the Iron Curtain, were now part of the process of European unification, became part of the EU. Europe, where the worst crimes against humanity were committed in the 20th century, where genocide has never been atoned for – a continent that was overrun by shame and horror. In peace, this Europe would finally overcome the insults, differences, and crimes. This Europe wanted to be one, and to never again drown its differences in blood.

But the great dream seems to be stuck. As Jo Lendle and Robert Menasse wrote in 2016: “A common economic area without common economic policy. A monetary union without common financial and fiscal policies. Ultimately, a political union whose members fight against and block political union.”3 Yes, Europe is imperfect, full of faults, and still not a transnational republic. But the dream is still there: the desire of millions of people for the borders to remain open, for war never to break out again …

This became apparent when the Europeans recently voted in droves – it was clear to everyone that it was about a united Europe, about the utopia of Europe, so the people voted. A moment of joy, a sigh of relief.

But lo and behold: The elected politicians were not to be the elected representatives in Brussels at all. The voters had not been

7

informed as to how the election process for the European Parliament worked. There were no transnational lists either, but rather representatives of the parties of the different countries. What happened after that is well known: When the parties could not agree in the European Council, the government representatives called out new names. And soon, hope and joy turned into deep disappointment.

It was as if parents had not told their children the whole truth.

And soon the disaffection was back.

“What a sad paradox, that intellectuals today in the united Europe, in the European Union, which is going through a serious crisis but still works according to democratic principles and believes in the free market, in a Europe they once dreamed of and whose Parliament one can now freely elect, that these intellectuals now seem to be more helpless than they were before, in the bad times”, writes Adam Zagajewski.4 For me, the question is: Are we so helpless? At a moment when the administrative and political dreams of Europe do not seem realistic, do artists have the strength to come together? Can they compose a declaration of mutual tolerance and support, a European alliance of academies and cultural institutions, a declaration of the necessity of cohesion, the clear rejection of nationalism? The declaration of a common language, translated into all the wonderful European languages ...

In addition to the fact that Schengen and a common currency are practical: Can a real sense of curiosity exist among European artists with regard to others? Can there be a serious desire to overcome the social, psychological, and other barriers?

Göran Rosenberg writes, “The modern nation state only became possible because people were capable of expanding their tribal ties to establish socially constituted loyalty toward imaginary communities. What we now understand as the justice of a democratic society – equality before the law – is perhaps just an extended form of loyalty.” 5 This is no small matter. The expanded loyalty toward a real Europe of many homes, as opposed to an imaginary one, is certainly a big step!

What meaning can the cohesion of European cultural workers have in a time when society threatens to become more unequal than ever through biological change and change driven by information technology, as historian Yuval Noah Harari never grows weary of proclaiming? 6 Can artists and intellectuals, despite this threat of inequality – in addition to the existing inequalities – maintain the existence of a shared continent, the idea of cohesion?

Can artists counteract the dangerous “disaffection with culture” that Gabriele Tergit wrote about, with their creativity and work, as well as with a clear attitude? Despite all of the differences, can artists develop a sense of curiosity about each other, agree to cooperate with each other?

Can art and culture workers, representatives of art and research academies and other art institutions find a new identity in a European friendship? Are the cultural representatives of such

8

different societies capable of entering into a commitment, an alliance that we can draw on in the case of an emergency? And that we can also count on in peaceful times? The Akademie der Künste asks these questions. We want an alliance that comes from the desire to uphold peace between the European countries. We want to take the res publica of Europe seriously.

“Right now, nobody knows,” write Ulrike Guérot and Robert Menasse, tireless campaigners for Europe, “how the entirely new, never-before-seen, avant-garde project in terms of world history, namely post-national European democracy, will be institutionally drawn up in specific terms. Discussing this using all the imagination of the dreamers, using all the creativity that this continent is capable of is the task that is facing us today.”7 We want to invite artists and intellectuals from the countries of Europe to a meeting that will serve to uphold the avant-garde project that is Europe – during which we can forge and propagate an alliance of the academies and other European cultural institutions.

1 Hannah Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft, Bd. II Imperialismus (Berlin: 1975).

2 Gabriele Tergit, Etwas Seltenes überhaupt: Erinnerungen (Frankfurt am Main: Schöffling & Co., 2018).

3 Jo Lendle and Robert Menasse, introduction to Europa – Akzente 3 / 2016, ed. Jo Lendle and Robert Menasse (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 2016).

4 Adam Zagajewski, “Die Schließung einer offenen Gesellschaft” (“The closure of an open society”), in Lendle and Menasse, Europa – Akzente 3 / 2016.

5 Göran Rosenberg, “Europas viele Heimaten” (“Europe’s many homes”), Lettre International 118 (Autumn 2017).

6 Cf. Yuval Harari speaking at ETH Lausanne: “Society is threatening to become more unequal than ever before” (SRF Kultur-Aktualität, 11 July 2019), https://www.srf.ch /kultur/gesellschaft-religion/harari-an-der-eth-lausanne -die-gesellschaft-droht-so-ungleich-zu-werden-wie -­n ie-zuvor 7 Ulrike Guérot and Robert Menasse, “Manifest für die Begründung einer Europäischen Republik” (“Manifesto for the foundation of a European Republic”), in Lendle and Menasse, Europa – Akzente 3 / 2016.

JEANINE MEERAPFEL, a filmmaker, is president of the Akademie der Künste.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 11

FOCUS ON EUROPE

EUROPA

EUROPE AS AN AGENDA Gyรถrgy Konrรกd

“Perspectives on Europe”: This was the title of a conference, conceived by Johannes Odenthal, at the Akademie der Künste in June 2007. The participants included Mario Adorf, Assia Djebar, Carlos Fuentes, Imre Kertész, Elias Khoury, György Konrád, Wang Hui, Wole Soyinka, Klaus Staeck, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Andrzej Stasiuk, and Iliya Troyanov. “Within Europe itself,” according to the basic proposition, “modernity is interwoven with a history of human and cultural disasters. And yet, or precisely because of this, there is a European perspective that draws on this cultural memory and faces up to the comprehensive changes of the present day.” In his lecture, György Konrád recalled that a united Europe is both an achievement and a commitment. Here is an extract.

Europe’s coat of arms is the learning human.

Why do we need European unification? So that we Europeans no longer crumble into nations and their alliances, and no longer continue the millennia-old tradition of bloody struggles. So that it is impossible for any European state to become embroiled in war with the others, because the union imposes discipline on them all. Collectively, we are now getting to know our new identity. Learning what it means to be a citizen not only of our own state but also of the European community. What’s new about this condition? Perhaps the recognised plurality of identities. The union brings with it growing diversity. Since the European association unites such diverse elements, it is understandable that it should practise the art of mediation between strength and understanding, effectiveness and dignity, and material and spiritual values. We choose, invent, and compose ourselves. The history of values is a contest between the debating self-determinations. Can we say that the European Union is developing into a new type of nation? Does Europe exist as a many-headed, thinking subject searching for its own face and determining values? This question, I feel, we can answer with “yes”. […]

The Second World War cost Hungary a million lives. Half a million Jewish and half a million Christian compatriots. The 1956 revolution claimed about ten thousand lives. 1989 and what emerged from it, the process of democratic evolution, did not cost Hungary a single human life. Instead, we had to learn. Behind the proud facade of national sovereignty, the people were at the mercy of Hitler’s and Stalin’s states. I would be delighted if the European association were to cut the power of the national political classes from both above and below. I do not want the name of one or other person of history to imprint his or her seal of approval on my homeland. Since I have only limited confidence in the local, national political class, I consider its limitation desirable. For the most part, my experience of my own state with its National Socialist and Communist extremism has been unpleasant. The fact is that this was

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 11

expected from first the German and then the Soviet leadership.

Nevertheless, national rulers were granted a great deal of autonomy in causing inconvenience. There is not too much choice about in whose name we can be oppressed, that of the nation, the international working class, or any religion. The currents of ideas flowing through Europe can drive this or that country mad. But not all twenty-seven. […]

Europe’s coat of arms, and, if you will, its identity, is the learning human. Research also means learning and the critical preservation, correction, and further development of all that exists. The learner learns to respect the other as well as himself as a self-­ directed subject. Our history is the persistent and arduous history of our learning. Our common biography an educational or, better still, self-educating novel. Those countries in which human rights are more or less respected form a society, a community whose principle is a global alliance of democracies. Someone who instead of learning seeks conflict has struggle as his ideal. In holy war in the name of religion, nation, or world revolution, where wearing field uniforms and carrying machine guns is fashionable, learning is out of fashion. Rather than school, waving flags is the norm.

What is bad? Auschwitz and other atrocities. The deliberate annihilation of human lives. What is good? Opposition to Auschwitz and other atrocities. The creation of a home in which human integrity is upheld. Europe is the difficult school of living together. We can regard citizenship as the essence of modern European developments, in the course of which the elite and the people become the equally entitled citizen who takes trade and treaties seriously.

Instead of a religious state, a secular state based on the rule of law is the European and North American model, the prerequisite for the peaceful coexistence of numerous denominations and for religious belief to be subject to neither prohibition nor compulsion.

Translated from the Hungarian by Hans-Henning Paetzke.

In 2013, Suhrkamp Verlag published the book Europa und die Nationalstaaten, in which Konrád further developed these ideas into a wide-ranging essay.

GYÖRGY KONRÁD, a writer and essayist, was a member of the Akademie der Künste from 1991 and its president from 1993 to 2003. He died on 13 September 2019. Texts in his memory will be published in the next issue.

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SUPRA Photographs by Tobias Kruse (p. 3–13) TOBIAS KRUSE addresses the European Union and its structures and institutions (the European Council, European Commission, and European Parliament) in a series of photographs titled “SUPRA”. He visits the places where the supra-national union materialises. In his scenic and seemingly theatrical photographs, the contradictions of the construct of the EU become as tangible as the lengthy and complex processes it is made up of.

The series is part of the “KONTINENT” exhibition, which will be on show from October 2020 at the Akademie der Künste. “KONTINENT” is the main exhibition of EMOP (European Month of Photography), Berlin, 2020.

KONTINENT is the current joint project of all the members of OSTKREUZ. It marks the 30th anniversary of the agency, which was founded in East Berlin in 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in a Germany that was yet to be reunited.

As an artistic and political statement, this fifth thematic group exhibition by OSTKREUZ, for which all the photographers are working on a current, collectively chosen subject, focuses on Europe’s present and illuminates it critically from twenty-one points of view.

For the exhibition and publication, the OSTKREUZ photographers are exploring various aspects of European coexistence in free art projects and shedding light on personal, social, and political phenomena along with fundamental structures and historical developments that are of significance to them as authors. In doing so, they repeatedly gain access to complex themes through images of individuals and their surroundings.

The spectrum of topics extends from issues of identity and security, renationalisation, migration, and integration to a fundamental understanding of humanism, democracy, and freedom of expression. “KONTINENT” aims to position itself clearly against a supposedly objective or simplistic presentation of current circumstances and supplies constructive inspiration for discourse on Europe, asking: How do we actually live together? What is it that unites us? Who is meant by “we” when we speak of “we” in Europe?

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FOCUS ON EUROPE

DI

IDE AND

RULE Kathrin Röggla

To open on a positive note, it is astonishing how much power is still attributed worldwide to poetry (in times when poetry is said to scarcely find an audience), when one considers the efforts made to strictly forbid it, imprison its authors (often without official charges), threaten their publishers, and destroy venues. But that is as far as the supposedly positive goes, because year after year the PEN club publishes the number of authors affected, and these facts and figures are disturbing.

In the so-called case lists, one can read about the various forms of persecution. Kidnappings, murders, rapes, and intimidation are mentioned: the “means” used to silence people are many. If I confine myself in this respect to the German-speaking countries – leaving aside the Turkey of the publisher Osman Kavala, the Russia of the theatre director Kirill Serebrennikov or of the Ukrainian film director Oleg Sentsov, the Slovakia of the journalist Ján Kuciak, the Bulgaria of the journalist Victoria Marinova, and the Malta of the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, with some anxious side glances to our immediate neighbours Poland and Hungary and the shrinking space in their civil societies – I also discover in Germany and Austria numerous points of contact with such persecution. Artistic freedom and freedom of expression are things that have to be repeatedly demanded. They cannot be taken for granted, nor are they protected by borders. Many of my colleagues have a fearful premonition that in our country a change of government could lead to conditions such as those in Poland and Hungary, where theatre directors are deposed, museum curators fired, festivals starved of funding, and entire institutions such as the Soros Foundation in Hungary are criminalised! After all, we have seen often enough how quickly it can happen. What is more, we not only maintain political and economic ties with the most diverse countries (with China, Russia, and the USA, but also with those within the EU, which actually has clear standards), but art is by its very nature international and does not stop at borders, and what happens in Poland, Russia, or China

14

concerns us artistically as well. However, regardless of whether the Federal Government in foreign diplomatic talks or the EU as a commu­ nity of countries is capable of effectively influen­ cing the violation of rights by its opposite numbers – or whether they fail to because of other interests or their efforts are unsuccessful – there is also a new phase of threat here in Germany.

Where does censorship begin in our country, what is censorship, and what is not? This is a question that has recently been the subject of heated debate on the podiums of many cultural institutions. From the internalisation of censorship (self-censorship) to “soft” influence through to criminalisation, as was the case with the “Centre for Political Beauty” in Thuringia, and from the Chemnitz Declaration by civil rights activists and former East German opposition activists to statements of cultural policy (against the AfD’s running of the Foreign Cultural Committee), there has been an increase in public statements by PEN, the Cultural Council, the Akademie der Künste, and the Association of German Writers (VS). And rightly so! Germany, which has so far had freedom of expression and freedom of art enshrined in its Basic Law, with Article 5 still being frequently invoked in the courts, is currently experiencing the fierce phase of a cultural struggle in which precisely the freedom of art is strangely up for grabs and thus seems to be particularly vulnerable. Suddenly, in political rhetoric, we are witnessing claims that we live in a dictatorship of opinions that must be destroyed. The right-wing populists’ commonly used vocabulary of “legally defined convictions”, “enforced convictions”, and “corridor of convictions” is used to attack the guarantors of the rule of law and minority rights. By asserting that we live in an unjust state (as if the Federal Republic were an East German Communist Party regime), that is, in an actual dictatorship that ought to be crushed along with its instruments of propaganda, the rhetoric of freedom can be used to undermine freedom. This shows that the debate is fraught and is readily exploited as a political instrument.

It is a somewhat topsy-turvy world, similar to the currently often witnessed reversal that makes victims into perpetrators and perpetrators into victims. My impression is that we have been watching and analysing for almost too long now, and that we would do better to counter such tendencies more vigorously in a country in which there are a number of theatre activists and authors who feel threatened, who receive death threats and intimidation with which one shouldn’t have to learn to live, on the principle of “if you can throw a punch, you’ve got to be able to take one”, as Marc Jongen put it with reference to the enmity towards Falk Richter over his play FEAR, as if there were a symmetry. It is the perfidious symmetry of action and counter-action that is repeatedly turned on its head: Where “politically correct” people express themselves, there are suddenly rightwing extremists, and where “short skirts” are worn in public, there will also be rapists. The concept of censorship is also often gladly usurped at this point. For it is not yet necessarily censorship if an article fails to appear in a newspaper, or even when someone expresses a contrary opinion and one’s own opinion fails to gain traction.

The decisive step will be what happens when rightwing populists are given government responsibility, because there is a difference between the covert tolerance of right-wing extremist statements and their public mandate, as has been experienced in part in Austria in recent years. And anyone who now says that the Burgtheater has not been closed under the ÖVP-FPÖ government should also point out that funding has been drying up for the cultural institutions that stand for diversity in society and the arts and are against identitarian and right-wing ideas. Civil society, in this case the cultural scene, is being divided into the educated middle­class and the actively engaged, into those who tend towards the concept of autonomous art and those who advocate social sculpture – and once that has been achieved, the next round of division will start. The first danger, however, is that of compliance through fear, the fear of threats and reprisals, a climate that can be rapidly established linguistically. It is a toxin that is extremely potent, and everyone involved in the arts, and this is perhaps the sad truth, has a suspicion of how it works.

KATHRIN RÖGGLA, a writer, is vice-president of the Akademie der Künste. This article comes from a speech she gave at the conference “Zensiert & Verfolgt: Kultur unter Druck” (6−8 September 2019) at the Evangelische Akademie Tutzing.

JUNGE AKADEMIE CEMILE SAHIN

JOURNAL DER KĂœNSTE 11

15

addresses the question of how and where history occurs and how it is portrayed. Found images, archive materials, and texts serve as starting points that she re-stages in her work.

In October 2019, she published her debut novel TAXI, which is

CEMILE SAHIN studied fine art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London and at Berlin University of the Arts as a student of Mark Lammert. Her works move between film, photography, sculpture, sound, and text. She

Akademie der KĂźnste.

for her lost son. Cemile Sahin is a 2019 fellow of the

about a mother who chooses a young man as a replacement

FOCUS ON EUROPE

BAUTZEN

OR

BABYLON

THE IDEA OF A EUROPEAN SOCIETY Angela Lammert

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“Can Europe still be saved?” 1 – that is the question posed in a handwritten note penned by Heiner Müller for his text “Bautzen oder Babylon,” the call to establish a European Society.2 This idea, while never implemented, is part of an exciting chapter in the history of the post-’89 Academy.

In October 1990, soon after Müller was elected president of the Akademie der Künste in (East) Berlin, the Academy decided to establish a European Society of Artists.

He made this a condition of his consent to become president. On the one hand, there were already several prominent supporters among members who were in contact with one another – including Pierre Boulez and Giorgio Strehler.3 On the other hand, controversial discussions

were taking place in October 1990, both in the Academy East and in the Academy West, culminating in the initial reaction of Walter Jens, who stated that, “apparently, the Volkskammer [the ‘People’s Chamber’ of the GDR] intends to become the Council of Europe.”4 The founding act of the European Society was to take place in the context of an artists’ forum. In April 1991, to mark the occasion, the text “Bautzen oder Babylon” is sent out to artists from various countries as an invitation. Within a short period of time, the first letters of commitment have arrived, including from Claudio Abbado, Jean-Luc Godard, and Daniil Granin.

Heiner Müller understood his initiative to be a process of transforming existing structures. By contrast, the Berlin Senator for Cultural Affairs, who, as Müller put it, “strode in cowboy boots through the cultural landscape of the (perhaps) future metropolis,”5 interpreted

repression of the Nazi past corresponds to and furthers the demonisation of the GDR past. Forty years of Bautzen lead to forgetting ten years of Auschwitz.”11 A Society of Artists has an insurance-like ring to it – this too is part of the proposal for a transformation.

“Bautzen oder Babylon” is a think tank for an international orientation of “Academy”. In the context of the discussion on the European Society, the following Bertolt Brecht quote can be found in Heiner Müller’s Fatzer fragment, which he staged in 1993 at the Berliner Ensemble together with other texts, as a montage entitled DuellTraktor-Fatzer.12 In this performance, it is used to tell the story of history taking place backwards: “In the past, ghosts came from the past / Now from the future as well.”13 1 Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin, AdK-O, no. 3658, no date.

2 Heiner Müller became president on 16 July 1990.

3 Plenary Session of 24 October 1990 and Executive Session of 30 October 1990, “Resolution for the Reconstitution of the East Berlin Academy for the spring of 1991 as a European Society of Artists,” in Akademie der Künste, Historisches Archiv, ZAA 1703.

4 Plenary Session of 24 October 1990, in ibid.

ZAA 1577.

5 Heiner Müller in a talk with Alexander Weigel: “Was wird aus dem größeren Deutschland?” (“What will become of the larger Germany?”), Sinn und Form 4 (1991), p. 668.

6

U lrich Roloff-Momin, letter to Heiner Müller, 19 April 1991, in Akademie der Künste, Historisches Archiv, ZAA 1748. “The winners write history, but I am afraid they are illiterate when it comes to the European lesson,” as Müller summarises in “What will become of the larger Germany?”, p. 668.

7

lrich Roloff-Momin, letter to Heiner Müller, U 24 July 1991: “Heiner Müller arrived with a finished proposal and asked the Academy West to take part in this artists’ forum. Walter Jens decided not to participate due to insufficient preparation time, instead suggesting to hold the artists’ forum in the spring of 1992.” Angela Lammert, private archive.

8 Plenary session of 25 September 1991, in Akademie der Künste, Historisches Archiv, ZAA 1677, p. 579.

9 Ibid.

10 “What will become of the larger Germany?”, see note 5, p. 667.

English version of Heiner Müller’s call for a European Society in 1991.

it as a newly founded entity and threatened to withdraw funding.6 With that, the project seemed doomed to failure. Nevertheless, Müller continues to pursue the idea of a European Society of Artists – even after, in late July 1991, the invitation to the artists’ forum is once again postponed, this time to March 1992, due to “financial and organisational reasons,” according to the official statement.7 The underlying idea behind the European Society was to dissolve both of the chapters of the Academy founded after 1945 and to conceive of something new, shaped by a predominantly non-German and young Academy membership. But things turned out differently.

“Bautzen oder Babylon” thus not only marks a critical moment in the complicated history of the unification of the two chapters of the Academy; in its potential for an internationalisation of the Akademie der Künste, it also foresaw future developments.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 11

“Hold open the division between East and West” 8 To be able to build bridges, it is necessary that the abyss, or the difference, not be blurred. In the plenary session of 25 September 1991, Heiner Müller states the following: “It should be the task of this new Academy to hold open the division between East and West, not least by working through our own history, and not just from the perspective of two generations, until it can be closed in the process of dealing with a Europe of differences that is to come.” 9 He illustrates this utopian task with a talking picture. After four decades of applying hypnotic treatment, the snake finally swallows the rabbit, only to discover that the rabbit was actually a hedgehog – hedgehogs being known for their ability to go into long periods of hibernation.10 In this context, Müller sees the differences within Germany as embedded in a global process of international transformation: “The

11 Ibid.

12 Duell-Traktor-Fatzer, Berlin Ensemble, 1993, directed by Heiner Müller, room design by Mark Lammert, orig. “Germania 2” [Bertolt Brecht, Der Untergang des Egoisten Johann Fatzer (stage version by Heiner Müller), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994, p. 73].

13 “What will become of the larger Germany?”, see note 5, p. 669.

ANGELA LAMMERT is head of interdisciplinary projects at the Akademie der Künste. Her forthcoming book Bilderkeller, which will be published together with Carolin Schönemann at the end of 2019, is on the wall paintings created by master students of the Academy for Carnival in 1957 and 1958 in the cellar of the premises at Pariser Platz. The volume is to be published in German and English on behalf of the Akademie der Künste. The final chapter is devoted to the initiative of Heiner Müller described here.

17

FOCUS ON EUROPE

DISCOVERING EUROPEANS OUTSIDE EUROPE Ingo Schulze

Dear fellow campaigners,

On 19 May 2019, the writer Ingo Schulze gave a speech at the Berliner Volksbühne in the “Glänzende Demonstration – Unite & Shine”, organised by “Die Vielen” (The Many). The Akademie der Künste is one of more than 140 cultural institutions that has signed the “Berliner Erklärung der Vielen” (Berlin Declaration of the Many) and thus takes a clear stance against right-wing populism and nationalist propaganda.

The very question of what the community leaves to the market and what it takes control of itself is increasingly becoming the crucial point regarding a credible social policy, as the debate over the expropriations of housing “Die Vielen” is one of the initiatives against racism and companies has shown. There are areas of life where marnationalism that are not willing to accept paternalism or ket economy criteria are inapplicable or may only play a insults or attacks.

The call at today’s demonstration states: subordinate role: in health and pension insurance, edu“Together, we say: The EU must change if it wants to cation, transport and traffic, water, and energy and gas have a future. We are fighting for our vision of a differ- supply, as well as housing. Anyone who wants to have a serious debate about these questions must also bring ent Europe.”

The two belong together: resistance against nation- the EU treaties back into the discussion.

More than two hundred years ago, Georg Christoph alism and racism and the fight for a more just world, where it is not maximum profit and shareholder value but rather Lichtenberg wrote, “The American who first discovered social justice and sustainable economic practices that Columbus made a bad discovery.”

Discovering Europeans outside Europe really wasn’t determine our lives and work. a good discovery. A few days ago, a young man from Mali It is not enough to present oneself as open-minded said to me in German: “Europe brings us the problems.” and colourful and to wave the EU flag. Glorifying the EU in its present structure and functioning is just as narrow-­ The European States share responsibility for the conminded and wrong as returning to the nation state. sequences of colonialism and the Cold War, and pracIt would be a serious mistake to think that we might tise tacit forms of neocolonialism.

If we demonstrate today, we’re probably doing it be satisfied with defending the status quo and hoping that the new unpleasant parties and groupings will dis- wearing clothes and trainers and carrying smartphones in our bags that are mostly manufactured under conappear into thin air. We only have a chance at success if we also understand them as symptoms of a reality that ditions that reproduce those relationships we rightly we need to fundamentally change. condemn and which are the cause of many people havFor example, in terms of participation. I only really have ing to flee to Europe, but from which we benefit. As engaged citizens and conscious consumers, we can do a sense of shared responsibility if I can also have a say. quite a bit. But on the whole, political solutions are (I lived in a small town south of Leipzig for a long time. needed here. Legally binding controls on supply chains There was an exhibition there a few years ago with the title “Altenberg – Province in Europe”. For me, the title and social standards would be a start. embodies European self-awareness and self-underAn issue that should be relatively easy to solve, standing. In everyday life, this self-understanding only because it is within the EU, is EU agricultural subsidies, the so-called area payments that make exports possihas a chance if I have as much of a say in EU affairs as ble at prices African producers cannot compete with. For I do at the national level.) The Parliament we are going to elect in one week’s time is still far from that aspira- instance, in 2017, 42 per cent of EU poultry exports went tion. The EU must be democratised, the Parliament must to countries south of the Sahara. Instead of investing in finally leave its larval stage behind. sustainable agriculture here in the EU, soil and ground But the EU treaties, which have been raised to the water are being contaminated, while local agriculture in developing countries is being crushed. rank of a constitution, are, in individual points, unfit for I’m not even talking about climate change or the the future. They are tailored for a neo-liberal economic export of weapons, but the causes of migration and our policy. A few years ago, constitutional law expert Dieter Grimm wrote: “Since the ECJ’s prohibition of market-­ way of life are two sides of the same coin. The fight distorting state aid to companies was extended to pub- against the causes of migration begins with us. (The national cannot be separated from the international.) lic institutions serving general social interests, member There is no globe for Germany and none for Europe either. states can no longer decide for themselves what they No organisation can fight the causes of migration want to leave to the market and what they want to take more effectively than the European Union. But not even into their own hands.”

18

WAS NOT A GOOD DISCOVERY

emergency rescue at sea is a given in the Mediterranean anymore. What is the use of open borders if, at the same time, billions of euros are spent on preventing migrants from reaching the borders of the EU. Anyone who has made it this far is almost without exception traumatised.

It would be more honest to demand that humanitarian visas be issued. But that would make the problem obvious. Migration is an emergency measure. If we do not want to become even more deeply entrenched in a fortress called Europe, we have to finally take the fight against the causes of migration seriously.

One hopeful sign, though it is no more than that, comes from the museums, in particular those in France. Provenance research that strives to discover the conditions under which cultural assets came to be at museums, in order to return them if appropriate, could be a model for all areas of society. We have to ask: Where do the things that make our lives comfortable come from and under what conditions are they made? We must insist on transparency and information. This self-enlightenment is necessary if we want to take a serious stand against nationalism, racism, and neocolonialism.

But instead of providing money for this purpose, not only are the defence budgets of the individual countries drastically increasing – the EU itself intends to spend nearly seven billion per year on arms from 2021. The combined expenditure on arms by Germany and France already exceeds that of Russia by a third. Weapons do not resolve conflicts; we should have learned this lesson by now.

I will stop at this point, even though I would like to add that I would like EU-initiated equivalents to Facebook and Google that are subject to public law. We must not forget Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, they have our solidarity.

Almost thirty years ago, I experienced (and participated in) the pushing aside of a system which appeared to be prepared for any scenario, but whose language and thinking was so entrenched that it no longer perceived or could react to reality. Anyone who has experienced how the world can be changed also believes this is possible a second time. In this regard: Wir sind das Volk! We are the people!

INGO SCHULZE, a writer, is a member of the Literature Section of the Akademie der Künste.

JUNGE AKADEMIE RAMY AL-ASHEQ

Everything suggests you have no need to worry.

Routine. Routine. Routine. Paper. Paper. Paper. Routine. Paper. You’re here now. You must learn the language. You’re here now. You must learn the language.

You’re here now. Our taxpayers’ money. Bei uns in Deutschland. Integration. Integration. Crisis. Crisis.

ISIS. You must learn the language. Go back to your countries. You’re here now. ISIS. Dictator. Orient.

Desert. War. ISIS. Civil war. Oh, you poor things. You’re here now. Integration. A welcoming culture. Go back to your countries. Go back to your countries. Es­capees.

Everything suggests you have no need to worry.

Routine. Integration. Paper. I’m here. I’m there. I’m here. I’m there. I’m (t)here.

• “You’re here. You’ve got to turn your back on the disaster.”

• “I’m Angelus Novus.”1 • “You’ve got to turn your back on the disaster.”

• “If only Walter Benjamin could hear you!”

• “You’ve got to turn your back.”

• “What do you know about feeling guilty?”

(3)

Cold starts in the head. As if the blood pouring out behind me was being pulled out of a womb in front of me. It’s as if the war that passed by here − as wars pass − never did.

(2)

launched the German-Arabic culture magazine FANN. He is co-founder of the German-Arabic Literature Days Berlin.

Since 2018 he has been a curator for Literaturhaus Berlin and a scholar of the JUNGE AKADEMIE of the Akademie der

RAMY AL-ASHEQ is a Syrian-Palestinian poet, journalist, Arabic. His texts have been translated into Bosnian, English, French, German, Kurdish, Spanish, and Polish. In 2017 he

How can I tell you “I love you” in your language? There’s something missing, the letters’ places of articulation aren’t exact enough. “I love you” in my foreign accent seems vague. How can I explain to you what I mean by “vague”? Hmm … I’ll say it like Herta Müller did, “The word doesn’t lie directly on the thing it means.”2 Hmm … seems like it’s more complicated than that now! What I mean is when poems become less valuable than new shoes, and songs become mere noise, and jokes mute walls, and I become illiterate and cold, I’ll say to strangers, “I love in Berlin. Ich liebe in Berlin,” and they’ll laugh. I’ll tell you, “I live you. Ich lebe dich.” And you’ll answer, “Welch ein Dichter du doch bist! What a poet you are!”

(9)

Cold starts in the head.

When shadows get two extra shadows dancing, time sleeps. When I kiss you, cold lashes me with memory’s whip. I fall down, holding onto your waist until you drain away. I sleep on my back and fall down from the heights of memory into a bottomless grave.

(8)

I’m your monkey. You can watch me jump in front of you and shriek in my terrifying language. I haven’t yet learnt how to tell you, in your language, that I’ve become bored. Let’s speak in a neutral language. I’ll talk about the flatlands and the sea, love and songs, and none of you will ask me about my story.

• “Tell us how you arrived.”

• “I haven’t arrived there yet.”

(7)

and curator. He has published five poetry collections in

When they designed backpacks, they made them so you would put them behind yourself, on the back, or so people would drag them behind. They zipped them up so that no one would have to see what was inside.

That’s where memories live. What if someone were able to put them in an open shopping trolley and push them around?

(6)

Cold starts in the head. Languages explode. Your name becomes strange and brittle. Nicknames explode in front of you the way things that explode do. The names rain down upon you like things that rain down do not.

(5)

I’m thinking about what I’ll be like in my eighties.

A boring man. My skin like the bark of an olive tree that life has carved its memories into. My head a haybale.

My mouth a forest guarded by spiderwebs. My eyes a dry lake that fish commit suicide in while they sing to water, love, and friends.

Hunchbacked in the hunchbacks’ Berlin.

Single, except for my enduring relationship with smoking.

Alone, a village the lovers abandoned.

Many, of both names and wars.

Cranky, children chasing after me with their shoes and my memories.

I look in the mirror like a man looking at a massacre, and I escape to women stacked up in the archive. I wipe the dust off of their faces, leaving some of it on their hair so they can grow old with me.

I talk to them about the army of children and quarrels I’ve had with a passionate young wife.

They stir up anger and jealousy, so I leave them all there together and sleep alone in a night filled with corpses.

(1)

I’ve arrived. The place seems greener than necessary.

It’s as if the faces are ghostly phantoms and the cities have escaped from an undubbed cartoon. I sleep in a stranger’s bed. I rest my head on my worries and throw my body on my memories. Time passes as if I’m having a long dream from which escaping is itself a dream.

(4)

STAY BACK

19

collection of micro-fiction texts.

I Didn’t Die, will be published by Seagull books. It is a

Künste. In 2020, his first book in English, titled Ever Since

2 Herta Müller, Der König verneigt sich und tötet (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 2003).

1 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelten Schriften, 1:2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974).

Translation from Arabic: Dr. Levi Thompson

• “Everything is worry.”

• “You’ve got to turn your back on the disaster.”

Cold starts in the head. Languages explode. Your name becomes strange and brittle. Nicknames explode in front of you the way things that explode do. The names rain down upon you like things that rain down do not.

Cold starts in the head. Cold starts in the head … I pull out a mechanical voice from the machine, “Stay back, please. Zurückbleiben bitte.”

(11)

Everything suggests you have no need to worry.

Cold starts in the head.

Here I am, taking what you all want to see out of a backpack. Tears that invite pity. Compassion disappears as a tear does, memories of oppression and subjugation, and previously prepared talking points about “culture shock.” I tell you about the paradise I’ve made it to, about my heartfelt thanks to you all for opening your door to me in a way you wouldn’t to strangers, about my deep admiration for equality between men and women, about my sheer happiness for your tremendous ability to manufacture weapons. Maybe without these weapons we wouldn’t be able to have that great honour called “reaching paradise.”

(10)

COMMENTARY

FIRST ASSANGE,

Information is the currency of democracy.

Iris ter Schiphorst

AND THEN …?

Thomas Jefferson

Is information common property to which everyone is sector: Because with the provision of an anonymous, entitled in a democracy? Who owns data? When does access-protected, digital mailbox − such as WikiLeaks “leaking” information threaten “national security”, when has been offering since 2006 − the disclosure of sensiare wars prevented? Who is spying for whom and why? tive data has been made significantly easier and the We know, at least since the big leaks from whistle-­ sources of the information are largely protected. This blowers like Chelsea M. (then Bradley) Manning or significantly changed the face of journalism and drew Edward Snowden, and publications on platforms such huge attention to the importance of whistle-blowers. as WikiLeaks, how Western nations wage war (on our WikiLeaks is a digital mailbox and website in one: the behalf), how tax havens work, and how much governments platform makes the leaked information available to the lose because of this.1 We have received information about public as quickly as possible following an authenticity Guantanamo and secret drafts of controversial trade and relevance check. WikiLeaks has never been proven agreements. We have had to take note of how intelli- to have published a single false report over the course gence agencies and large companies, in conjunction with of its history. The successes of WikiLeaks have inspired social media, monitor us and abuse our data, and how media activists everywhere to create similar platforms, private companies (e.g. Cambridge Analytica) use this thus triggering a culture of leak activism.2 In the meannot only to do business but also to manipulate elections time, traditional media outlets such as the New York (Trump, Brexit).

Times, the Guardian, and Al Jazeera also provide digital But hardly anyone cares about these facts. A strange mailboxes where information can be anonymously passed kind of lethargy seems to have engulfed us. Despite the on to journalists. fact that we are in the midst of an information war in The fact that this trend runs counter to many governwhich data and information become the decisive politi- ments is reflected in the restrictions and harsh punishments cal weapons, in which fake news and manipulation dom- whistle-blowers, investigative journalists, and WikiLeaks inate the political agendas, in which whistle-blowers employees all over the world are increasingly exposed to. are hunted like criminals, and journalists and publicists The sharpest “official” and sometimes even deadly are intimidated, persecuted, threatened, imprisoned, or weapon is the accusation of “endangering national secueven murdered. Not just in the Arab countries, China, rity” or “treason”. In the case of the United States against or Russia, but also in democratic countries in the West- Assange, the Espionage Act is being applied, a relic from ern world. the First World War created in order to punish “traitors” In this war, Julian Assange has become an example as severely as possible. of how the handling of freedom of the press, journalism, whistle-blowers, and publicists is developing worldwide.

THE INDICTMENT

THE CASE OF ASSANGE Assange is an Australian citizen, a multi-award-winning journalist, author, and computer scientist. With his Wiki­ Leaks revelation platform, he revolutionised the media

20

The core accusation against Assange is as follows: acquisition and publication of secret military and diplomatic documents to the detriment of the United States and its allies.

The full extent of the indictment was published in May 2019 and consists of eighteen charges.3 In the event of

When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals!

Edward Snowden

a conviction, Assange potentially faces 175 years of imprisonment or even the death penalty, if further charges are added.

A central pillar of the accusation appears to be a chat log between Manning and Assange from 2010 that was passed on to the FBI by an informant, probably in the same year, which apparently reveals Manning as a whistle-­ blower, according to the investigative journalist Erich Moechel.4 He analysed the charges against Assange that are decisive for the Espionage Act and applied this to the traditional media world. In doing so, he concludes that an encrypted upload mechanism for documents, which has in the meantime become common practice, amounts to incitement of an offence. Contacts with informants, a matter of course in journalism, are being turned into “conspiracy to commit espionage” and “betrayal of state secrets”.

If the indictment is successful based on these “reinterpretations”, in the future journalists all over the world could be convicted for common journalistic practices. A free press, as set out in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, would thus be undermined.

That is why it is crucial that media and art workers – all of us! – take a stance now. Because it is nothing less than the future of investigative journalism and freedom

ASSANGE’S ROOM (2014) !MEDIENGRUPPE BITNIK Assange’s Room is a detailed reconstruction of the working space of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. From 2012 until his arrest at the embassy in April 2019, this room was Assange’s “world”. The installation follows the multi-day online performance in which the !Mediengruppe Bitnik sent a hidden camera package to Julian Assange on January 16, which recorded the postal route to the Ecuadorian embassy in London in real time. Assange’s Room came about after several visits to the embassy and was recreated from memory. !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Assange’s Room, exhibition view: Helmhaus Zürich (2014)

of the press that are at stake. If Assange is convicted under the Espionage Act, the floodgates will open for unwanted journalists to be silenced in the same way.

A fair trial for Assange can be virtually ruled out under these circumstances in the United States. However, Donald Trump is not the first US president to have had Assange in his sights. WikiLeaks had already been classified as a threat by counter-intelligence under George W. Bush. And Barack Obama also considered indicting Assange under the Espionage Act. There are facts to support this, some of which are listed in brief in the following: • On 15 March 2010, even before the publication of the famous “Collateral Murder” videos that would later captivate the whole world, WikiLeaks had already shown the dark side of American warfare in Iraq by publishing a secret dossier by the US secret service dating from 2008.5 Among other things, the document contained proposals as to how to proceed against whistle-blowers and Wiki­ Leaks employees in order to destroy social confidence in WikiLeaks.

• On 12 August 2010, two days before Assange’s alleged sexual misconduct against two Swedish

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 11

women,6 Philip Shenon, an American investigative journalist and long-time Washington correspondent for the New York Times, wrote that Obama urged the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and other allied Western governments to initiate criminal investigations against the WikiLeaks founder and to severely restrict him from travelling across international borders.7 • In December 2010, the US Department of Justice under Barack Obama reviewed whether Assange inci­ ted the alleged whistle-blower Chelsea M. Manning to hand the secret documents over to him and thus could be prosecuted under the Espionage Act.8 As a result, Assange has been in the crosshairs of the United States for more than ten years. Under Trump, what has been threatened for many years is now to be implemented. Obama did not indict Assange under the Espionage Act, because he ultimately feared diluting the First Amendment and thus the freedom of the press.

But Trump seems to have no such concerns. He is thus in line with former CIA head and current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who had already declared in 2017 that WikiLeaks was a “non-state hostile intelligence

service” 9 and that Assange was not a journalist but rather “a narcissist”. In doing so, he had already provided the necessary vocabulary for a conviction under the Espionage Act. If a message at the end of July 2019 had not caused us to sit up and take notice, one might think that the conviction of Assange – at least in the United States – had long been a done deal: The US District Judge for New York, John Koeltl, who was appointed to office by President Clinton, acquitted Assange and WikiLeaks of the charge of interference in the 2016 US election campaign following a suit filed by the Democrats. His justification was that the publication of the Democratic Party’s internal communication gave US voters a look behind the scenes of the presidential election campaign of one of the two main parties in the United States and that this kind of information enjoys the strongest protection offered by the First Amendment to the Constitution.10

THE TRIAL IN ENGLAND It still has not been decided whether Assange can be brought to trial in the United States. Because the

21

English court will only decide on the extradition request in February 2020. Two points are cause for concern.

On the one hand, the challenge for bias submitted

by Assange’s lawyers against Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot, who is to decide on his extradition to the United States in February 2020, has been rejected, even though her husband is known to have appeared in numerous WikiLeaks publications.11 On the other hand, a new version of the Espionage Act of 1917 is being prepared in the United Kingdom. The draft legislation revealed to date stipulates that whistle-­ blowers and journalists are to be punished with the same severity and with the same extended prison sentences as foreign agents, if the “national security” of England is concerned, and that this would also apply for non-­ British nationals, regardless of where the “leak” took place, and regardless of whether it is of far-reaching public interest.12 The new legislative text is to be presented to the public in September 2019. The current formulations do not give cause for journalists or whistle-blowers to expect anything good. Rather, it is to be feared that the Espionage Act will become the preferred instrument against unwanted journalists and whistle-blowers, even in democratic countries of the Western world. In Australia, the newly elected conservative government had raids carried

22

out in June of this year − “in the name of national security” − at the ABC public service TV channel, which two years previously had critically reported on war crimes by Australian armed forces during the war in Afghanistan.

There was no outcry from the international press.13

For journalist Milosz Matuschek, “Assange [embodies] the right of every citizen to unfiltered, real information, which is now becoming a scarce commodity”. Because “either the citizen has the decision-making power on the basis of transparent information, or he is subservient.”15

DEFENDING THE POWER TO DECIDE The Assange case is complex and thus hardly seems to interest the public anymore. The “grubby image” that has surrounded Assange for years has also contributed to the rather indifferent response to his situation. But we must not be influenced by that. Too much is at stake.

Assange and WikiLeaks stand for fact-based journalism and for the belief “that transparency in government activities leads to less corruption, better government, and stronger democracies”.14 This belief has ultimately put Assange in the crosshairs of American counter-­ intelligence. But the principle remains the same, we have to defend it.

There must be no Assange precedent.

Therefore, it is essential that we prevent him from being extradited to the United States. We must ensure that he is released. Last but not least, in order that the investigations of sexual misconduct in Sweden can finally be brought to a conclusion.

IRIS TER SCHIPHORST is a composer and professor of media composition in Vienna. She has been a member of the Music Section of the Akademie der Künste since 2013. Her composition Assange – Fragmente einer Unzeit, for voice, big ensemble, and sampler will be premiered at Muziekgebow Amsterdam by Ensemble Modern and the singer Sarah Maria Sun, conducted by Enno Poppe on 7 November 2019.

Installation views: Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2016)

1 Arne Hintz, “Zwischen Transparenz, Informations­ kontrolle und politischer Kampagne: WikiLeaks und die Rolle des Leaks-Journalismus” (“Between transparency, information control, and political campaign: WikiLeaks and the role of leaks journalism”), Schriftenreihe Medienkompetenz, Bundes­ zentrale für politische Bildung (German Federal Agency for Political Education), 9 October 2017, https://www.bpb.de/lernen/digitale-bildung /medienpaedagogik/medienkompetenz-schriften reihe/257599/wikileaks-und-die-rolle-des-leaks -journalismus 2 Ibid.

3 United States of America v. Julian Paul Assange, United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, May 2019, https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release /file/1165556/download 4 Erich Moechel, “Assange-Anklage als Auftakt zum Generalangriff auf Medien” (“Assange indictment as a prelude to the general attack on the media”), radio FM4, ORF, 26 June 2019, https://fm4.orf.at /stories/2987460 5 “U.S. Intelligence planned to destroy WikiLeaks”, WikiLeaks release, 15 March 2010, https://file .wikileaks.org/file/us-intel-wikileaks.pdf 6 Helmut Scheben, “Assange: Es ging um ungeschützten Verkehr” (“Assange: It’s about unprotected communication”), Infosperber, 27 May 2019, https://www.infosperber.ch/FreiheitRecht/USA -Assange-Es-ging-um-ungeschutzten-Verkehr

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 11

7 Philip Shenon, “U.S. Urges Allies To Crack Down On WikiLeaks”, Countercurrents, 12 August 2010, https://www.countercurrents.org /shenon120810.htm 8 “USA prüfen Verschwörungsvorwurf gegen Assange” (“USA reviews conspiracy accusation against Assange”), Spiegel online, 16 December 2010, https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland /wiki leaks-unter-druck-usa-pruefen -verschwoerungs-vorwurf-gegen-assange-a -­­734943.html 9 Jannis Brühl, “Die Assangesche Weltformel wirkte weiter” (“The Assange-esque world formula continues to work”), Süddeutsche Zeitung online, 11 April 2019, https://www.sueddeutsche.de /digital/wikileaks-assange-haft-festnahme -trump-russland-clinton-bnd-1.4406828 10 Patrick Beuth, “WikiLeaks durfte Mails aus Demokraten-Hack veröffentlichen” (“WikiLeaks allowed to publish mails from Democrat hack”), Spiegel online, 31 July 2019, https://www.spiegel .de/netzwelt/web/wikileaks-durfte-mails-aus -demokraten-hack-veroeffentlichen-a-1279824. html 11 Thomas Scripps, “Richterin Emma Arbuthnot lehnt Rücktritt wegen Befangenheit ab” (“Judge Emma Arbuthnot rejects call to withdraw over bias”), World Socialist Web Site, 15 July 2019, https://www.wsws.org/de/articles/2019/07/15 /assa-j15.html

12

areth Corfield, “UK’s planned Espionage Act will G crack down on Snowden-style Brit whisteblowers, suspected backdoored gear (cough, Huawei)”, The Register, 20 May 2019, https://www.theregister .co.uk/2019/05/20/espionage_act_proposal

13 Urs Wälterlin, “Australien: Mit Razzien den Medien Grenzen zeigen” (“Australia: Showing the media boundaries with raids”), Der Standard online, 7 June 2019, https://www.derstandard.de/story /2000104547566/australien mit-razzien-den -medien-grenzen-zeigen 14 www.wikileaks.org/about (no longer accessible), accessed 27 November 2007 and cited in Michael D. Horvath, “Wikileaks.org: An Online Reference to Foreign Intelligence Services, Insurgents, or Terrorist Groups?”, Special Report, Army Counterintelligence Center, 18 March 2008, published in “U.S. Intelligence planned to destroy WikiLeaks”, WikiLeaks release, 15 March 2010.

15 Milosz Matuschek, “Die Causa Julian Assange: Ist die westliche Wertegemeinschaft von allen guten Geistern verlassen?” (“The case of Julian Assange: Has the Western community of values taken leave of its senses?”), Neue Zürcher Zeitung online, 23 July 2019, https://www.nzz.ch/meinung/kolumnen /die-causa-julian-assange-ist-die-westliche -wertegemeinschaft-von-allen-guten-geistern -verlassen-ld.1497486

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FOCUS ON EUROPE

MEMORIES

Music and sound can carry memories in a special way – and so music creators and composers also contribute to the writing of history. Existing sound and music archives, for their part, offer starting points for new interpretations or the disentanglement of history. As a result of global migration movements, memories, music, and sounds are now increasingly relocated in new aesthetic and social contexts.

THAT INVOLVE EUROPE

Julia Gerlach

It is these three observations that are leading us at the Akademie der Künste, under the title “Memories in Music”, to a musical questioning of European borders and yearnings, and to look at the concept of contemporary music in general.

Where does European contemporary music stand today and how should it be defined in the global context?

Does the German term “Neue Musik” still mean anything or is it obsolete? What contemporary musics are developing on other continents, and is the relationship to Europe and the music cultivated here of any significance there, and should it be? Where are the points of contact, lines of conflict, and opportunities?

In the field of music, unlike in the visual arts, film, or literature, one cannot yet speak of an international contemporary scene whose heterogeneous positions are nourished by the respective complex interwoven histories, current social challenges, and musical habitats.

Composers have always been interested in distant, highly specialised musical languages, yet encounters with sound phenomena such as microtonality or non-diatonic tonal systems, with polyrhythms, long process-like forms, and the frictions of multiphonics have lent significant impetus to Western avant-gardes, such as the work of John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, Claude Debussy, Éliane Radigue, Giacinto Scelsi, and many others. In more recent (Berlin) cultural history, there were lively and respectful aesthetic contacts in the 1980s between the European musical language and musical languages of other regions of the world through the DAAD’s Artists-in-Berlin Programme, the Horizonte Festival, and composers such as Walter Zimmermann, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Johannes Fritsch (Feedback Studio Köln), resulting in countless individual collaborations. Yet no common scene, as familiar from the great art biennials, has grown out of this, and the asymmetry between a personified (authorial), composed, notated, and interpreted music and a non-personified (non-­ authorial), orally transmitted, improvised ritual music still resonates as a classificatory guide in the discourses on music.

But for some years now, there has been an increasingly vociferous demand internationally from musicians

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and curators for a more diverse concept of contemporary music – and with it the certainty of having to adequately reflect the diversity of our societies and the manifold intercultural relations, as well as the reappraisal of colonial structures through music and festival programmes. It comes as no surprise that composers, ensembles, and musicians are committed to an intercultural dialogue “on equal terms”, to postcolonial reappraisal, to a preoccupation with First Nations or indigenous societies, and to an in-depth musical exploration of the relationship between Europe and other regions of the world. This is sharpening the musical and political self-perception on both sides, and all the more so since this inherited relationship is often linked to a history of injustice in which Europe is not infrequently implicated.

At the same time, the philosophies and ways of life of indigenous societies, and particularly the preservation of nature and collectivity, constitute in a utopian sense an obvious counter-model to the excesses of capitalism; a counter-model capable of generating yearnings in an over-satiated Europe.

As in economic contexts and political associations, Europe has long since ceased to be the centre to which music historians relate the music of the world when defining research areas that are relevant to one music or another (music ethnology or musicology). Networks exist and musical developments take place between Asian countries and between Arab countries and have been doing so for a long time in South America, where indigenous, African, and European cultures meet. In few other countries have so-called popular and serious music been so strictly segregated from each other as they are in Germany. In fact, experimental musical forms often develop between these cross-fertilising and invigo­ rating spheres. It is therefore not surprising that exciting contemporary (art) music has emerged from these points of rupture and that postcolonial thinking has advanced further. The treatment of memories, found objects, and archives plays an essential role in these processes of exchange. Many musicians and composers seem to be concerned at present with remembering and memories – not only at the points of rupture outlined here, but in general. Memories are a source of

identity and history, and it is perhaps precisely for this reason that they are gaining in importance in heterogeneous musical societies such as those currently encountered in Berlin. Berlin’s powerful international appeal creates potential for numerous points of contact and musical dialogues.

As a European academy, the Akademie der Künste occupies a pivotal position in this exchange process.

The festival “Memories in Music” serves as a frame for research projects, questionings, European discourses on diversity, a look at the Academy’s own archive, and numerous intercultural musical dialogues that give the issues and memories mentioned here room to unfold.

JULIA GERLACH is secretary of the Music Section of the Akademie der Künste.

With the “Memories in Music” contemporary music festival, the Music Section of the Akademie der Künste is dedicating itself to examining European boundaries and longings. Concerts, a two-day symposium, and an exhibition will present musical projects and archive materials that are based on lengthy research processes, reflecting on Europe’s attitude to postcolonialism, indigenous cultures, and the Arab Mediterranean region.

The Festival will involve numerous international guests and Academy members and will take place from 24 to 27 September 2020 at both Pariser Platz and Hanseatenweg as part of the Akademie der Künste’s focus on Europe in the autumn of 2020.

Information panel on the cave paintings of Namarrkon / Alyurr, Garig Gunak Barlu National Park

FIELD TRIP From 28 July to 4 August 2019, the composer and sound artist KIRSTEN REESE (Berlin), the composer NATASHA ANDERSON (Melbourne), and the artist SARAH PIRRIE (Darwin) made a field trip to visit the failed settlement of Port Essington (1838–49) on the Cobourg Peninsula in northern Australia, a colonial legacy in the Garig Gunak Barlu National Park. They followed, on the one hand, the trail of Brandenburg scientist Ludwig Leichhardt, who in 1845 was the first white “explorer” to map a more than 4,000-kilometre route from what is now Brisbane to Port Essington, north of Darwin and, on the other hand, a British colonisation attempt from the sea under military command, which aimed to create a new port (like Singapore) and to establish supremacy in northern Australia. One of the rea­ sons that the settlement failed was because of an inability to adapt to the environmental conditions. Nevertheless, it contributed to a dramatic decline in the indigenous popu­ lation. Leichhardt’s records were recently used in legal

Map by Ludwig Leichhardt

proceedings over a land claim, as evidence of settlement on the lands in question prior to the arrival of the Europeans.

There is also a dazzling grasshopper named after the natural scientist Leichhardt, who became famous in Australia. In one of the indigenous languages this grasshopper is called Alyurr, in reference to the mythical lightning spirit Namarrkon, who appears in 20,000-year-old cave paintings.

On their field trip, the artists slept under the stars, collected sounds and photographs, and held numerous conversations and interviews. Together with collection objects and insect sounds from archives in Germany, this material forms the starting point for musical and artistic engagement with heri­ tage and knowledge systems from a postcolonial per­ spective in an open performance and installation format.

Colonial remains at Garig Gunak Barlu National Park

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 11

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INFLUENCES AND RESISTANCES In their audio-visual composition Influences and resistances (2019/20), the Bolivian artists CARLOS GUTIERREZ and TATIANA LOPEZ continue their research into indigenous musical culture and colonial history in dialogue with con­ temporary forms of expression. The composition is based on a recording by the ethnologist Robert Lehmann-­N itsche (Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, Ethnological Museum of Berlin), who documented the singing of the indigenous Chiriguano on the border between Argentina and Bolivia in 1908. There is evidence of musical influence from the Aymara culture, which the Chiriguano encountered during their migratory movements in the 15th century. The Aymara, for their part, practise a dance in which they refer to this crossing of the Chiriguano through the Aymara territory. Also of interest is the impact of colonial power in a dance of the Aymara, in which blue-eyed masks and blonde wigs are

Detail of the colonial painting Infierno by José López de los Ríos (1684, church in La Paz), in which indigenous music is associated with the devil

used (see images). The colonial power’s relations with indi­ genous culture are also recorded in numerous historical paintings of festive, musical, and dance events (see images).

At the same time, the indigenous culture of the Aymara has also retained its autonomy – for example, with the special multiphonic flutes that accompany the traditional Paquchis dance, which have nothing in common with European baroque flutes. In response to these influences and resis­t ances and by using archive material and traditional instrumental practice, costumes, dance, and video recordings, the two artists are developing a new audio-visual composition for the chamber ensemble of the Orchestro dos Instrumentos Nativos (on the occasion of its 40th anniversary) and two Berlin composer-performers, Ute Wassermann and Sabine Vogel, who in turn are expanding their vocal capabilities and assortment of flutes.

19th-century depiction of carnival by the Bolivian artist Melchor María Mercado

Dance of the Aymara (with blue eyes and blonde wigs)

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LISTENING In her music-theatre composition listening to Vuntut Gwitchin, ANNESLEY BLACK examines an indigenous (autochthonous) culture located between autonomy and assimilation in northern Canada, a culture whose existence is under massive threat from planned oil drilling. The US government has just opened the US part of the region for the exploitation of oil and natural gas. She illuminates the distant yet interested Western view through her own closeness to and distance from the indigenous culture of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation in a kaleidoscopic collection of information, music, images, and dance.

One point of access is the website of the Old Crow com­ munity (a settlement of some three hundred people in the northern Yukon area of Canada), where they report on their close relationship with the huge herds of caribou and their long-­d istance migration, and on their elders and musicians. Annesley Black has copied this website in a series of drawings that, like the music recordings, form part of the newly created composition.

Drawings of the Old Crow website by the composer Annesley Black. The images are part of the audio-visual material used by the composer in her 2017 music-theatre composition listening to Vuntut Gwitchin.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 11

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↑ Production scene from The Curse, directed by Oliver Frljić at Teatr Powszechny ↓ Protests by right-wing nationalists in front of Teatr Powszechny

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FOCUS ON EUROPE

ON THE CURRENT STATE Artur Pełka

OF POLISH THEATRE

After the system change, just as after the Second World War, Polish theatre was forced to question its sociopolitical status: How should it or could it be redefined in the context of a new, this time democratic, more differentiated reality?

Up until 1989, this status had resulted from a clear political polarisation, which offered theatre the corresponding opportunity to articulate doubts about the Communist system. Moreover, its status continued to be derived from the Polish national mythology and is, to this extent, to be seen as Romantic. This historically informed mythology, reinforced by Catholicism, with its victim aspect, formed the Polish identity for almost two centuries: The Polish people, driven by a sense of mission, were deemed to have been chosen, and had to atone for the sins of all humanity. This resulted in two important premises of Polish culture: On the one hand, a noticeable proximity to death; on the other hand, a homogeneous cultural model committed to the Romantic paradigm, which required a positive attitude toward national identity and unity, and organised its social life around spiritual, community values defined by Catholicism.

Against this background, art and, in particular, theatre were ultimately given an authoritarian function. Polish theatre from 1945 to 1989 was usually one of (political) allusions, a forum for anti-totalitarian parables and a temple for national dreams of freedom. The March 1968 student revolt (“March events”) was one of the many Polish uprisings that gained its

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 11

more or less pronounced impetus from the theatre. On 30 January 1968, students from Warsaw protested against the decision of the government to cancel Kazimierz Dejmek’s production of Adam Mickiewicz’s Dziady after eleven performances due to alleged anti-Soviet allusions. These protests proved to be the spark for large demonstrations in some major Polish cities, which were however brutally crushed by the milicja (police). The result was an anti-intellectual wave of repression, and finally a forced exodus of Polish Jews, who were being made the scapegoats of the anti-­ socialist revolt.

After 1989 – a sharp interruption in the post-war history of Poland and a symbolic turning point in Polish culture – Polish theatre initially suffered an identity crisis in view of the completely changed sociopolitical conditions, because neither the domestic plays nor the dominant theatre aesthetics fitted the new reality. It was only following the turn of the millennium that the theatre found a new identity, not least thanks to a young generation of theatre-makers whose trademark is an increasingly enlightened critical, political spirit. Criticisms of patriarchal structures and bogus Catholic morality, commitment to the equality of women and sexual minorities, and environmental awareness were increasingly set centre stage with immense courage. The pieces examined the loss of confidence in old authorities, especially the Catholic Church, which often appeared as an outdated institution – preoccupied with itself and unable to adapt to a changing society. The Romantic paradigm also became the subject of deconstructive criticism, but the focus was no longer on a Romantic mystery of victimhood or the memory of our own heroes, but rather on the collective amnesia regarding our own historical guilt, including our involvement in the Holocaust. The myth of an innocent, persecuted people crumbled under this critical onslaught, as did the idea of the nation as an ethnic monolith.

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This transformation of Polish theatre, its opening up to previ- The ideological upheaval in the theatre landscape seems not only ously taboo topics, generated offence from the very beginning, to be the result of a shift to the right under the PiS, but is also not only amongst the conservative section of the audience, but in part supported by opposition politicians who, based on Cathoalso among members of the right wing who were only marginally lic values or political calculations, are influenced by the prevailinterested in theatre. Over the last thirty years, outraged voices, ing anti-liberal climate. An example here might be the action who have often tried to launch scandals, have been heard time against the director of the politically progressive Polish Theatre and time again in reference to critical, liberal theatre projects. in Bydgoszcz, Paweł Wodziński. He lost his position after a scanOne prime example is the scandal that took place at Stary National dal concerning the “blasphemous” guest performance by Croatian Theatre in Krakow in November 2013. An organised group of con- director Oliver Frljić – initiated by, among others, local politicians servative theatre-goers interrupted the performance shouting from the liberal-conservative PO (Platforma Obywatelska).

“Shame! Shame!” during Strindberg’s To Damascus, directed by By and large, Polish theatre is still courageously taking a Jan Klata, because of the supposed obscenity of the production. stance against the desired culture revolt. Although progressive Exactly two years later – and, significantly, one month after the theatre people are exposed to being defamed by politicians and PiS won the election – praying Catholics, in the so-called “Rosary right-wing media (hate speech and death threats on the Internet Crusade”, protested side by side with young members of the right are not uncommon), they are actively opposing the new cultural wing outside the Polish Theatre in Wrocław against the premiere policy by participating in protest marches and civil initiatives to of Elfriede Jelinek’s Death and the Maiden. When it transpired defend democracy. The Powszechny Theatre in Warsaw has that Czech porn actors had been hired for the production by become a symbolic bulwark of artistic freedom. Oliver Frljić’s 2017 Ewelina Marciniak, the newly appointed PiS Culture Minister production of The Curse, which deals critically with the role of Piotr Gliński tried in vain to stop the premiere from going ahead, the church and the PiS, caused a particular scandal amongst the but the fierce protests fuelled by the new government made clear national conservatives. Above all, criticism of the Catholic Church the intentions of the new right-wing power in terms of culture. led to right-wing protests outside the theatre, and these acts, The national-conservative PiS had already relied on the as usual, went hand in hand with religious exorcisms. This was propagation of patriotic and Catholic values during their elec- the most violent attack on the institution of theatre, because the tion campaign, which turned into a sophisticated staffing and Powszechny Theatre was quite literally besieged by mostly young funding policy after their election victory. As at other cultural right-wing extremists and the theatre staff had to physically institutions that were directly controlled by the central govern- defend themselves. Although Paweł Łysak, the theatre’s direcment, there was also a leadership reshuffle at the theatres funded tor, was threatened with a lawsuit for injury to religious sensitivby Warsaw. As a result of politically collusive tenders, Krzysztof ities, his theatre still refuses to give up on politically powerful Mieszkowski lost his directorship of the Polish Theatre in Wrocław productions. Since March 2019, for example, the stage adaptain 2016, and one year later Jan Klata lost his position at the Stary tion of Hitler’s Mein Kampf by Jakub Skrzywanek has been shown Theatre in Krakow. The two renowned directors were replaced by as part of “Anti-fascism Year”, a citizens’ initiative conceived as second-rate, virtually unknown but PiS-approved artists. One of an indictment against growing fascistic tendencies in Poland. the most spectacular dismissals was that of Mieszkowski from And other theatres around the country are also still staging the theatre co-financed by the Ministry of Culture, because on anti-nationalist government-critical content. This is how theatre the one hand, under the new director, the standard at the thea- is once again becoming an anti-totalitarian bastion. tre fell rapidly, and on the other hand, many of the actors who had protested against Mieszkowski’s dismissal were also dismissed. The PiS also triggered a structural revolt at one of Poland’s most important research institutions, the Theatre Institute in Warsaw, where in April 2019, despite strong protests from theatre circles, a government-compliant theatre director was appointed.

Most of the theatres in Poland are municipally funded.

Because they belong to the municipalities, which are usually ARTUR PEŁKA, a Germanist and theatre scholar, is head of the Department of administered by the opposition, they can still defend themselves German-language Media and Austrian Culture at the Institute for German Studies against the restorative cultural policies of the government. In at the University of Łódź, Poland. His research and publications focus on: drama theory, the Warsaw Central Government has little influence. Howin the 20th and 21st centuries, German-language theatre in Poland, Austrian conever, important funding is only allocated to PiS-compliant protemporary literature, physicality and violence, gender and queer studies. He is the editor of various anthologies; most recently, transcript published his monograph: jects, which almost inevitably gives rise to self-censorship. It is Das Spektakel der Gewalt – die Gewalt des Spektakels. Deutschsprachige Theateralso worrying that opposition politicians continually side with the texte zwischen 9/11 und Flüchtlingsdrama (2016) (“The spectacle of violence – The right-wing Culture Minister – as did a state politician from the violence of spectacle: German-language theatre between 9/11 and the refugee Polish People’s Party (PSL) in the case of the Wrocław scandal. drama”).

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↑ Protests by right-wing nationalists in front of Teatr Powszechny ↓ Production scene from The Curse

CARTE BLANCHE

DORIS DÖRRIE

LEBEN SCHREIBEN ATMEN (LIVING, WRITING, BREATHING)

CARTE BLANCHE: In each issue of the Journal der Künste a member of the Akademie der Künste has the opportunity to creatively design multiple pages.

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SHOPPING This book is an invitation to write about yourself. When you write, you always write about yourself. It is alternately wonderful, painful, narcissistic, therapeutic, delightful, liberating, deeply sad, inspiring, depressing, boring, invigorating. I stay alive and survive by writing.

Over and over again, every day. I write to truly appreciate and celebrate this incredible opportunity to be alive.

I write to find meaning, even though there probably isn’t any in the end.

We are all storytellers. Maybe that is what makes us human. Maybe we simply have no idea what great story­ tellers cats or dromedaries are. We can’t stop telling stories. In a never-ending inner monologue, we tell ourselves stories about ourselves. Some of them are true, some just a little, others not at all. We are all fiction, but we don’t believe that because we are right in the middle of it all, like a serialised novel.

I explore the world by writing. My world. What impres­ ses me? What do I notice? What shocks me? What amuses me? What inspires me? What do I remember?

I have no idea how to write something that sells.

There are other books with titles like: How to write a damn good novel. How to write a damn good screenplay.

How to write a damn good series. I just know that if you write about the world you find yourself in, word by word, sentence by sentence, you get a sense of yourself. As we carry on step by step, it is important to pay attention to our surroundings, to the ground beneath our feet, to the sky above us, and to others who are putting one foot in front of the other with us, before we have to say goodbye to it all.

I remember myself by writing. What images and sounds are stored in my mind, what memories of people, places, animals, feelings? Each of us is unique. No one has exactly the same memories of the same event. It’s crazy! Unbelievable! I would like to write it down before it is deleted. Every detail. Everything I have seen, heard, tasted, touched, smelt, felt. The world in me as an echo and an inspiration. “Spirare” – breathe. Writing means to inhale the world. Not just the cool mountain air in the morning but also the smog, the smoke, the fumes.

The beautiful and the ugly.

And sometimes a shopping list suffices as inspiration:

I cycle my bike to the supermarket, always along the same route, often on the pedestrian walkway. I almost cycled into old Mrs B., who always wears colourful, carefully selected clothes, even though she can barely walk or breathe anymore. It takes her almost an hour to get to the supermarket, but she does not want to be helped. This is my adventure, she says every time I offer to do her shopping for her. My daily adventure. And I need adventure.

I always buy the same things. On the right, lettuce hearts, celery, fennel. On the left, apples, pears, berries.

Every day I get annoyed at all the plastic, the plastic trays for the berries, raspberries, bilberries. We called them blueberries.

When I was small, we went picking them in the forest with my mother. My sisters and I have buckets and baskets with us. We silently enter a strange, beautiful, and, at the same time, eerie land. The sunlight tumbles through the tree trunks onto the moss and lights it up green. I know that the deer live here. They sleep on the moss. I stroke it, put my nose to it, it smells musty. Tiny mushrooms grow between the pine needles. We know that we are not allowed to eat them. A girl in kindergarten went to Fasching dressed up as a toadstool in a red skirt with white dots. We sing the children’s nursery rhyme “Ein Männlein steht im Walde ganz still und stumm, Es hat von lauter Purpur ein Mäntlein um. Sagt, wer mag

das Männlein sein …”. I’m humming to myself. I’m still cheerful. The blueberries hang on reddish stalks under shiny green leaves; the berries are small, some have already shrivelled up. Hands and tongues turn purple from nibbling. We show each other our tongues. My little bucket barely fills up. And when it does get a little fuller, I accidentally knock it over. One of us is always knocking our bucket over and howling. All of a sudden, my mother is far away, my sisters scattered everywhere.

They could disappear, we could lose sight of each other forever, suddenly I would be all alone. Alone in the forest, alone in the world. I will always remember this feeling and fear it my whole life.

There is the skeleton of a deer on the wayside. Only the bones remain. I stand before it dumbfounded. I was not aware that, in the end, only the bones remain. It was not clear to me that I also had such bones in me and would also look like that in the end. A fox has killed the deer, they tell me. The fox we sing about, who has stolen a goose, the pretty fox from my picture book, the one with the bushy tail. I can’t explain the process, the transition from a living deer to a pile of bones. The link is missing. The deer, which I can still see in my mind’s eye, must be somewhere. I don’t understand. No one gives me a plausible explanation. Not even my father, who knows everything. There is something like a big black hole you can fall into if you are not careful. My parents speak French or Latin at the dinner table, and I know they are talking about the black hole.

My mother makes blueberry jam in a pressure cooker.

It hisses and spits, she closes the lid tightly with a forceful twist, we’re not allowed to come close. Fortunately, we are far away when it explodes and a purple fountain shoots up to the ceiling. There’s a blue mark there for a long time, like a little piece of sky.

At a writing seminar in Mexico, I tell this story, then a student tells us about his mother’s exploding pressure cooker, then another student tells us about the “olla de presión”, then another, and another. I understand this as “depression pot”, and the whole room erupts in laughter.

Almost everyone has grown up with a pressure cooker; all of a sudden there are loads of exploding pressure cookers in the room, and stories of kitchens and mothers and childhood. My little German memory becomes general, international.

The pressure cooker of writing. La olla de presión.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 11

NONSENSE I sit in bed writing. I prefer to write as soon as I have woken up, cleaned my teeth, and have a mug of coffee next to me. The still slightly somnambular state helps to write nonsense, to write at all. If I get up, wash, and dress myself, it’s over. Only my teeth have to be cleaned, my one concession to the outside world. It wants me to brush my hair, iron my blouse, wear clean socks, not talk nonsense, smile, and be polite, considerate, good-natured, socially acceptable. When I put on my presentable face, I can’t write any more. Shopping lists perhaps, but not much more.

I look out the window, the autumn storm driving the clouds forward, the chestnut tree shedding the last few chestnuts with a shake. Every autumn I collect chestnuts, cannot resist their beauty, put them in my pocket.

I am disappointed when they shrivel up. I want them to stay young and smooth and pretty, their dark brown colour like deeply tanned summer skin. Now everyone still has a tan. They return to the city from their holidays and look so good. They still saunter and smile. Soon, everyone will be pale and in a bad mood again. Me too. I don’t like my winter face. Summer feet. My feet stay brown for a long time.

When we were children, we collected chestnuts in buckets and dragged them to where the wild animals were fed. We got a few pennies per bucket. We had to walk a long way and the buckets were heavy. We took the tram past a tennis club. Gabi from my class went there. She was always tanned, even in winter, and she knew things that I didn’t know yet. I knew that, but I didn’t

know what she knew. That’s why I admired and hated her at the same time; felt silly and childish next to her. She was constantly stroking her long hair smooth, inspecting the ends without saying a single word. She was a bad student, held back twice, but she was superior to us all because she knew so much more about life. I pictured her at her tennis club in a white skirt. I couldn’t imagine further than that because I had no idea what happened at a tennis club, and would never join one either.

I especially like the chestnuts that are completely flat on one side. Or the baby chestnuts. In kindergarten, I try to stick matches into chestnuts to make hedgehogs and chestnut men. There is a small drill for doing this, but the holes are either too small and the matches break, or they are too large and the matches wiggle and fall out.

My hedgehogs and little men come to nothing. I’m too dumb, too stupid, I can’t do anything. But I talk a lot and get a plaster over my mouth. Everyone stares at me and falls silent. All I can feel is this enormous plaster over my mouth. It grows and grows, I’m just a plaster without a body. My friend in kindergarten is German-Chinese. He makes perfect hedgehogs, one after another. He hardly ever speaks and never gets a plaster over his mouth. His parents have a Chinese restaurant. My parents go there after the theatre. My parents are at the Chinese, it sounds secretive and fantastic, as if they have gone on a quick trip to China. They eat shark fin soup, which later becomes available in tins. Now and then, my father opens a tin of shark fin soup at night. In later years, I sail to the Galapa­ gos Islands on a fishing boat because of this soup. The

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boat is tiny and the sea is wild. I hadn’t known of such seas and am afraid every single minute. The sharks they catch are hung up by the tail fin to suffocate. The captain and his crew fry fish and bananas every day; that’s all there is. I am sick most of the time. I lie in a very narrow berth and cry in silence. Everything is strange, even the moon lies on its back in the sky. One day, the Captain shoos me out of the berth and shouts excitedly that I should secure myself with a rope immediately. I see panic in his eyes. Up on deck, he ties a thick rope around my belly. The next moment, a black mountain rises up from the water right next to the boat. I look up in disbelief and watch it grow and grow until I finally understand: It’s a whale! A sperm whale, the whale of my childhood, the one I marvelled at dead and stuffed on a truck at the market square in Hanover. Which I couldn’t get over for months, and kept me awake at night. But that’s another story.

Nonsense or not? Marcel Proust didn’t work any differently, he called it “mémoire involontaire”, involuntary memory. Everything is a reminder. Where does it lead to?

How deep can you dive? Writing is an underwater activity. I didn’t know when I started to write that I would end up at the whale. I hardly knew any more than that I had travelled to the Galapagos Islands on a shark fishing boat.

That I really was that close to a whale once in my life. Suddenly it was back again, as if it were here, surfacing right next to the bed in which I sit and write.

So, emulating Proust? Go on! Why not? It’s not about writing something usable, manufacturing a product that sells, or winning literary prizes, but about looking at and listening to your own mind attentively and without prejudice. Writing down what wildly flares up there. In all its banality and complexity, because they belong together.

What is stored in the huge labyrinth of my brain? What associations slumber there? How winding are the paths from one memory to another? How can I follow them in writing?

To do this, I have to block out all of the thoughts that want to distract me from it. There are many, and they are quite boring and always the same. A few examples:

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1.

I’m too stupid.

2.

I’m too uninspired.

3.

I’m not original enough.

4.

My life isn’t interesting enough.

5.

Who is going to be interested in it?

6.

I simply can’t write and never could.

7.

I’m afraid others will think that what I write is stupid.

8.

I’m afraid to embarrass myself.

9.

I’m afraid to step on other people’s toes, to hurt or insult them.

10.

I can’t think of anything anyway.

11.

And what will my mother say when she reads this?

And so on, and so on. The list is endless. But I don’t want to be particularly great, inspired, or original, rather to open my own treasure chest, to pull out memories, bring them to light, dust them off, and examine them. Therefore, it is useful to continue writing without stopping, not to chew on the pen, otherwise other thoughts push their way into the foreground – and then I’m on my way to the fridge, the telephone, on the internet. Instead of producing something, I am stuffing myself. Consumption fills me up but does not fulfil me. Consumption and creativity are natural antagonists. Is there such a thing as creative consumption? I doubt it (but if so, bring it on! I love shopping, to tell the truth). A trick that helps to curb the impulse to consume is to keep the pen moving, let it wander over the paper, to hear the noise it makes, to watch your own hand as it writes – that alone is a sensual experience and something of a wonder.

THE GROUND BENEATH MY FEET I wake up deep in the night. My nightshirt is soft and fluffy with a blue and white pattern. I traipse across the hall and my shoes clatter on the wooden floor. I wear corrective shoes at night, small wooden soles with wooden ridges between my toes to correct their position. I am ashamed of these shoes, I hate them, I cry and don’t want to wear them. My parents try everything, really everything to make us prettier. I have to put on white gloves with a long plastic nipple on each finger, which I am to nibble on in the future instead of sucking my thumb and ruining my teeth forever. My sisters’ protruding ears are stuck to their heads with plasters so they won’t be teased for their jug ears later on. My father wiggles his ears to amuse us; they stick out so much that the sun shines through them and turns them orange. I go along the wooden floor, the shoes are slippery, I’m afraid of falling. Over there, my parents are sleeping. I don’t like it when they are asleep, it’s scary. They are not there anymore when they sleep, but where are they then? I push my mother’s eyelids up.

Where are you right now? I hear my father snoring. He has to snore to protect the family from wild animals, he says. His chin is scratchy when he kisses us. His beard is black, and he shaves several times a day. He gives us butterfly kisses at night before going to sleep. He touches our cheeks with his eyelashes. I can’t get enough of these kisses. The floor of our nursery is as green as grass. I sit on it as though it is a meadow. I stand in the hallway at night with nobody watching me. It is a strange feeling when no one is looking, as someone is usually always looking, because we are a big family. I’m not entirely sure who I am when no one is looking. It makes me uneasy. I experience this feeling again many years later in Japan, within a Zen koan: Who are you if no one is watching you?

And I come across the shoes there again too: Japanese wooden getas − they make a very similar sound.

I’m ashamed of my funny corrective shoes. Nobody else in the whole world wears such shoes, I’m sure of it.

I’m a different person to who I am by day. It’s scary and exciting to be all alone in the hallway by night. I could just go away, across the hallway to the apartment door and out. On the right is the kitchen, where one of my sisters would fall against a heating valve during a wild game and bleed so much that the linoleum flooring would turn red.

We are older, I sleep on the top bunk, my siblings beside and below me. They push their feet against the mattress and lift me up a few centimetres. I let my hand dangle down and sometimes they grab it. My sisters suck their thumbs and the bed covers. With time, all beautification attempts fell by the wayside. I have crooked toes forever.

The corridor is not long; the apartment is not big. During the day my parents’ beds are folded away behind silvery-­ green curtains. We hide behind the curtains, the bed springs at our backs. At night, when the beds are folded out, the bed springs creek and squeak, you can’t see what they were during the day. My father is a different person in pyjamas; everything is different at night. An

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orange-coloured dinosaur lives on the bookshelf. He lives in the book Mein erstes Wissen [“My first book of knowledge”], and on the left side of the page he opens his huge mouth. I am afraid of him and hide the book, but I can’t forget where I have hidden it, so I know where the dinosaur is. There is no way out of this dilemma except to sleep, to fall asleep really quickly, but sometimes my legs twitch with excitement and want to carry on walking, running, jumping: they don’t want to rest. I climb out of bed and stand alone in the dark hallway like the Star Money girl in the dark forest. This being alone is frightening, but also a little bit wonderful: I could, I could experience something I had no idea about before, and then suddenly here comes my father. He takes my hand and brings me back to bed, back into the room with my sisters, like a slightly smelly, cosy fox’s den, and everything is good – and a tiny little bit boring.

CARRYING ON We carry on and have no idea how we are supposed to carry on. We get up in the morning, brush our teeth, wash our tired faces, play with our child, make coffee, feed the child, have breakfast. What did we have for breakfast? I can’t remember. Before our child was born, we would just drink coffee and smoke cigarettes early in the morning. Smoked in bed before even getting up. Utterly incomprehensible to me now. How could we? No sooner have we started a healthy life than it is already over. He is given strong medication and can’t eat anymore, everything only tastes of chemicals now. I spray rose perfume about because I have read that the scent of roses lifts the spirits. My whole body trembles, and I can’t do anything about it. Like an aspen leaf. Not a birch leaf or a beech leaf, an aspen leaf. What is an aspen? I find it hard to breathe and believe it to be sudden asthma, but it is fear. Pure fear. We play with our child. She loves her Barbie dolls, which I had in fact banned; we search for Barbie’s tiny red high heels all day. In America they are called fuck me shoes. I have a pair of red stilettos I only wore a few times because I wasn’t used to walking in them and they hurt. My husband liked those shoes, he liked me in those shoes, but it was all the same to him if I only wore trainers. Or cowboy boots, like at our wedding. His were made of snakeskin; mine of black-andwhite cowhide. I walked differently in them, it seemed to me, was more challenging, upright.

I was amazed that he wanted to marry me. I wasn’t his type at all. He had a reputation as a ladies’ man. In the first few weeks after our wedding, the phone kept ringing, a different woman every time. He said to each one in a friendly tone: I’m married now. And then he hung up.

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worry the child, I laugh. I say that I am a beetle who lives under the bed in this hotel room and has crawled out to play. Thankfully, the child believes the story. She brings me a knife and butter from the breakfast tray and rubs butter on the soles of my feet, which is what the beetle absolutely must have in order to be able to walk, as the story goes. But the beetle can’t walk, he remains lying down. Everything is OK, I say, everything is OK. Yes, says the child, everything is OK, and doesn’t believe a word I say.

Writing means venturing out from the little tidy garden with the mowed lawn and flowerbeds into the jungle every day. Where wild plants grow and dangerous animals roam. Where the stories are no longer nice and tidy, but rather dazzling, toxic, painful, and desolate. A description of our best day on holiday is never interesting, but the worst one is. We bond over the worst stories, not the nice ones. Over the ones in which we do not look good, have not acted morally, have failed, been hurt, been unsuccessful.

The child constantly brings her Barbie to my husband, sits down on his bed. She plays with him, entertains him, cheers him up. They put Barbie’s stilettos on and take them off together. I stand in the kitchen and can’t breathe.

I keep having terrible palpitations. Can hardly make it up the stairs.

I make sushi for him, because he loves sushi so much.

Sushi restaurants are still very rare, Japan still so far away − the flight takes twenty-three hours. I tediously get the ingredients together, the right rice, nori (seaweed), wasabi (horseradish), and gari (ginger). We bought a low Japanese table, Japanese crockery, even tatami mats: a small Japanese island in the middle of our apartment. I proudly serve the sushi; they have turned out really well, they look perfect. We sit around the table on the floor, on the carpet, and the child is happy. She loves it when we sit on the floor. He starts to cry. The only time I see him crying. He simply can’t eat, no matter how much he wants to.

The child catches whooping cough at kindergarten. In order not to infect my husband, we both move to a hotel.

There is a swimming pool, the child splashes about happily, I’m afraid of being submerged because the weight of my fear is dragging me under the water. The child likes being at the hotel, she likes that I have breakfast brought up to the room and allow her to watch TV in the morning.

She laughs and is happy, and yet I have a suspicion that she is only doing it to make me happy. One morning without warning my back gives in. I fall on the orange-red, blotchy hotel carpet and can’t stand up. In order not to

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LONELINESS AND FISH A goldfish alone in a bowl is a really lonely sight. The child wants a pet. She gets a fish. How did we come up with this cruel idea? The fish, bright orange, swims around the big round bowl in circles. His name is Mr Fish. Perhaps it was because of a beloved picture book, in which a child is told to feed a fish in a fish tank, but never too much. But the inevitable eventually happens: the fish is given too much to eat and it gets bigger and bigger; at some point, it no longer even fits in the bathtub. Our lonely Mr Fish is also fed too much, but he doesn’t get bigger, he just dies. One morning he is floating with his pale belly facing upward. I carry him carefully to the loo and, as I am flushing him away, he seems more alive than ever before in the water vortex. In order to avoid the lamentations and sorrow of the child, I secretly buy a new fish. Mr Fish lives on for a little while longer in his reincarnation − no one notices anything. We watch him as he appears to swim happily in a circle, and I am a little bit ashamed of myself for my deception. Just a very little bit, to be honest.

Mr Fish reminds me of all the fish I saw when I went snorkelling and diving as a child. I was always afraid of the underwater world before I submerged. I was afraid of the sound of my own breath, the eerie sounds, and said to myself with every breath that I would only live as long as I breathed in. That someday there would be an exhale without an inhale.

The fish look with mild curiosity at this strange creature gently floating down to them. They cautiously nibble the strange human skin. Like the last survivor from the world above water, I swim among them. My body looks different, whiter and bigger than on land. I glide along as if in a dream, the reflections of the sun above me, below me the ever darker blue. The Big Blue. What would it be like to sink deeper and deeper? A diffuse but not

unpleasant loneliness surrounds me. Communication with the fish is impossible. Mutual incomprehension. How do you survive underwater forever like them? Above water, I often think of the underwater world. I buy recordings of whale songs and listen to them before I go to sleep. They sound like I feel underwater, a little melancholic. The fish and I both live in this one moment simultaneously.

As a child, I would wonder whether we exist independently of each other at all? After a while, I don’t want to resurface and return to the world above water, which is restless and noisy and where I often feel like an outsider and don’t understand what the hell it is that makes me an outsider.

My father absolutely loves to dive, because he is colour blind and, he says, he experiences colours more intensely underwater. Above water, he cannot distinguish between red and green, and when we are at the traffic lights my mother often shouts at him: Red! Green!

Underwater he is happy, as he says, not just because of the colours but also because his all-female, otherwise constantly chattering family swims around him silently.

He starts to film underwater, builds complicated plexiglass enclosures for the camera that often leak. After the holidays, there are elaborate Super-8 film evenings.

In truth, you can only ever see grey fish in milky-blue water, but my parents call out enthusiastically: Can you remember this fish there and there?

After my husband dies, I actually fall in love again. I cannot believe it myself for a long time. My new partner is also wonderful but is a completely different person, who does not remind me of my first husband in any way.

Maybe that’s why it works. Or maybe because a great love ended through death and not through fatigue, break-­up, disappointment. I know hardly anyone my age who is not separated or divorced, and nobody who was widowed so young. I hate this word: widow. I never mark it on forms, but choose single instead. I don’t want to wear a verbal widow’s veil.

We travel far away with my new partner, to a small town in the Philippines. We go diving. I never wanted this.

I don’t want to go diving at all. I only remember the horrible taste of the rubber snorkel, the numb feeling on my teeth, the wheezing sound of breathing underwater, the diffuse fear of submersion. I jump into the water from the boat – and suddenly everything is just as it was back then.

So quiet, so colourful, so peaceful. The fish swim tamely toward me, as if they hadn’t seen me for a long time; they nibble at me, swim away, impassive, unmoved, indifferent, nothing is good, nothing is bad, everything moves to the rhythm of the waves. I see my little family underwater. They are there, within reach. I hear myself breathing.

I’m still breathing. Amazing. In and out and in and out. I listen to myself breathing and notice that my goggles are filling up with water. I cry underwater, and have to laugh at this. I swallow water and have to resurface, panting and coughing. I’m pulled out of the water onto the boat,

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 11

and those onboard lean over me worried. I can’t stop laughing. I’m lying on the bottom of the boat, doubled over with laughing. She crazy, the boat owner says.

Yes, my new wonderful partner says, she very crazy.

And he laughs. All is well. In this moment, all is well.

Writing is an underwater activity, a dive into regions that are unknown to you or that you have forgotten. You remove yourself from the world above water and cannot descend into panic. You dive into your own life. Into the life you really have, not the one you might wish for. All at once you are in a place where no one is watching. All on your own. Quietly carry on breathing! Carry on writing.

Carry on. Every day is a good day. Ha!

DORIS DÖRRIE, a director and writer, has been a member of the Film and Media Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste since 1994. The text contains excerpts from her latest book, leben schreiben atmen, which was released in August 2019.

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HELGA PARIS – THE PHOTOGRAPHIC WORK Helga Paris (born 1938) began photographing the people in her neighbourhood in Berlin’s Prenzlaur Berg in the late 1960s. She finds her motifs in flats, pubs, break rooms, at work benches, on the streets, and at railway stations. She portrays workers and punks, in the textile factory as well as at illegal poetry readings. She is thus considered a chronicler of Prenzlauer Berg. Later, however, her gaze widens − to Halle, Leipzig, Transylvania, Georgia, Moscow, Volgograd, Rome, or New York. The special poetic closeness of her imagery is due to the rejection of any ideologisation − her gaze is always deeply solidary.

APRON

From 8 November 2019 to 12 January 2020, the Akademie der Künste will present the photographic work of Helga Paris from 1968 to 2011 at its exhibition halls at Pariser Platz. Featuring around 275 works, including many individual images and series that are to be shown for the first time, this will be her most comprehensive exhibition to date, and the first retrospective of the artist in her home city of Berlin in twenty-five years. Excerpts from the extensive Leipzig, Hauptbahnhof (1981), Moscow (1991/92), and Mein Alex (2011) series will be among those on show for the first time.

AWARENESS I am especially fond of Helga Paris’s pictures of the women in the “Treffmodelle” garment factory. I feel a particular affinity. For the photos, and for the models wearing the apron dresses. They speak to me, and they remind me of something. I recognise myself as a photographer, and I see myself as a child. I write this text while I am taking pictures in Damme, my hometown in the Oldenburger Münsterland, which is one more reason why my views are biographically enlarged.

MOTHER

Both images: Helga Paris, Untitled, 1984. From the series “Frauen im Bekleidungswerk VEB Treffmodelle Berlin”

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As long as I can remember, my mother wore an apron during midsummer. Sleeveless, and with two practical insert pockets, where she kept clothes pins, the house key, and, of course, a handkerchief. Buttoned in the front, and in a wide range of different patterns. Flowered, with flowers big and small. Polka-dotted, with small dots and large ones. Fanciful, with small and large abstract designs. Only on Sundays, when we had visitors, did she ever wear a white apron. The day-to-day outfit was a colourful apron, as colourful as the garden behind the house.

When it was hot outside, she wore nothing, or next to nothing, underneath. The apron was a kind of uniform that she always wore, like all the women among our relatives and in our neighbourhood. The women, whom I called aunt, carried the same rank in front of their names.

Aunt Maria, Aunt Trude, Aunt Agnes, Aunt Liesbeth. They all wore an apron and, depending on their body and age, a bra or a corset underneath.

Heidi Specker

As a child, I looked with great curiosity, but also with a slightly furtive glance, at this interim space between apron fabric, undergarments, and naked skin. It had much to do with eroticism, and yet was still closely associated with work and everyday life. I was not spying secretively through the keyhole of my parents’ bedroom; instead I gazed with wonder at the armpit hair that became visible when the laundry was being hung, at the space between the buttons, where the patterns went taut and yet did not reveal anything, or when my mother bent over. She ex­erted a kind of female attraction on me, which I later discovered in neo-realistic films that featured the Italian as mother, as woman, as fighter.

“[They wear] the vestaglietta, literally translated as ‘little dressing gown’, which in its essence was an inter­twining of kitchen and bed. And the neo­realismo, which aimed to bring the day-to-day life of the simple people in front of the camera, and in the process was inevitably confronted with the apron (Luchino Visconti’s costume designer, in the case of the 1951 film ‘Bellissima’ with Anna Magnani, was able to recruit his aproned extras straight off the street), profited from both its popular appeal and its erotic possibilities. A lightweight fabric, only a few buttons, and easily opened from the front.”

Andrea Dernbach, “Der Hausfrauenreport”, Der Tagesspiegel, 28 March 2009

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FATHER

CONSCIOUSNESS

I’m thinking of when I was approximately the same age as the children in the pictures that Helga Paris took in Hellersdorf. The girls and boys in the pictures are all 13 years old. My father worked as long as he could, and then, after his retirement, he began a part-time job as janitor in an apron factory: Bahlmann & Leiber in Damme. We would often ride our bikes to work together in the morning, until we reached a pedestrian crossing, at which I would turn left to head to school, and he would turn right to go to the apron factory.

I imagined the women who worked at Bahlmann & Leiber to be just like those at the VEB Bekleidungswerk Treffmodelle (a publically-owned clothing factory). I assumed that the seamstresses in the photographs also wore the aprons they sewed. In other words, that they wore precisely what they produced while they produced it. While this was the case at Bahlmann & Leiber, at VEB Treffmodelle they produced heavy fabric for coats.

Helga Paris wanted to take photos of the women’s faces in a calm state. Interesting, because “calm” means not so much away from the rattling of the sewing machines; what Helga Paris meant by that was: at ease with themselves.

This state creates the incredible density in the picture itself. Being at ease with yourself means being yourself, being self-reliant, being independent of others. And of the photographer as well. Helga Paris told me of an unbelievable sense of solidarity among the women, and of the sense of community that existed within the brigade.

My eyes are on the aprons. I ask the photographer whether an awareness of clothing – in the sense of what Virginia Woolf referred to as “frock consciousness” – played a role in taking the photos. No, she tells me, that did not cross her mind. But when she looks at the portrait of the blonde woman, Helga Paris always imagines this model speaking with a thick Berlin dialect. Weeste wat? [Know what?]

PHOTOGRAPHER

LA CLASSE OPARAIA VA IN PARADISO

To avoid more speculation, I called Helga Paris and met her at her old Berlin flat. The street she lives on is right around the corner from the former VEB Treffmodelle factory. She gives me a warm welcome – we know each other – and she tells me that she first came to notice the wo­­ men’s faces while shopping at the department store. The women went shopping in the area where they worked, and the clothing factory was right next door. Helga Paris was already familiar with the VEB, because she had done an internship there during her studies, working on the assembly line for back section and centre seam.

It is a group of women whom she has taken photographs of. What is striking is that older women are also part of the work brigade. Many of them wear an apron.

My favourite photo depicts a woman in a sleeveless apron made out of polka-dotted material. She has both hands in her pockets, the left one slightly in motion. She is either just putting it into her apron pocket, or pulling it out at that moment. Around her waist, a loose bow is tied. At the shoulders, the apron is offset with a white edging seam.

An open face with a tiny smile on the lips looks straight out of the picture; the woman is standing right across from me.

There is a second picture – a woman in a flowered apron, the pattern made of roses. Both hands are lying on a cutting table. In her right hand she holds a pencil the wrong way around, and she too looks out at you frontally, with a slight smile, her body also leaning slightly toward the camera. Both women have the same hairdo. The first one brunette, the second blonde. The small difference, the variation, lies in the individual structure of their hair.

My hairdresser at Vokuhila on Kastanienallee in Prenz­ lauer Berg did her vocational training at PGH Neuer Weg (a skilled crafts and trade production cooperative) in Weimar. She told me about it. They may have also had their own company hairdresser at VEB Treffmodelle.

Either the hairdresser of these two women was particularly good at that haircut – short in the front, long in the back – or it was simply modern. And somewhat unisex, because as a girl, as a teenager, I can remember men with haircuts … hair uniforms … that were similar to the cuts worn by those women.

In his film The Working Class Goes to Heaven, Elio Petri, a director and author and member of the Italian Communist Party, tells the story of a factory worker who toils away in an exhausting, poorly paid assembly line job. He thinks of his body as a machine, always in pursuit of higher production numbers, until an accident on the job throws him off track. The strike movement that he joins, however, also leads to disillusionment and despair. The interests he is encouraged to support change over time – in the end, however, he remains a cog in the machine.

Although his wife, a hairdresser by vocation, does at least do away with her wig in the course of the story. The film, which in 1972 won the Golden Palm in Cannes, was never shown in West German cinemas; the only version dubbed into German comes from the GDR. The working class no longer exists as such, we now find ourselves in a service-based society. The apron has been replaced by sweatpants and a T-shirt. They have lost value and form, and are now produced in distant lowwage countries. My parents share a grave; they lie together in the ground. But as devout Catholics and upstanding workers, they most certainly made it to heaven. The 13-year-old girls and boys are by now 34.

Today the women of the sewing brigade VEB Treffmo­ delle might be working in a GmbH & Co KG company, or in a grocery chain, or not at all. Where is the way to heaven?

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HEIDI SPECKER (* 1962 Damme) lives in Berlin. In her mostly serial photographic works, Specker moves from the subject of architecture to objects to human beings. Her groups of works have been shown at the Sprengel Museum Hannover (“IM GARTEN”), the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich (“REPRISE”), the Mies van der Rohe Haus in Berlin (“SAAT SEED”), and most recently at Kunstmuseum Bonn in an exhibition titled “Heidi Specker: Photographer”. Heidi Specker is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig and was a fellow at Villa Massimo in Rome in 2010. While writing this text, she was taking photographs in Damme, her hometown,

To mark the occasion of the exhibition, Spector Books

for an exhibition in February 2020 at the Oldenburger

Leipzig will release the photography book Helga Paris:

Kunstverein.

Leipzig Hauptbahnhof 1981/82.

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HELGA PARIS

AN ARCHIVE IN BLACK AND WHITE

Helga Paris, Self-portrait, 1980

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Helga Paris kept her negatives in an old pharmacist’s cabinet, photo: Robert Paris

Helga Paris’s old account book, photo: Jenny Paris

Torsten Musial

A thick, heavy, linen-bound office book from the beginning of the last century. Lined pages, already slightly yellowed, with narrowly spaced handwriting. On the left, a series of numbers, and next to them names, places, and abbreviations, in a hand not always easy to read, in some places annotated and then crossed out again. In this journal, the photographer Helga Paris wrote notes on her work, notes that have been of great help to her until very recently. But this book is more than just an aide-memoire or a record of her work. It is the key to her archive of negatives, while also being a diary, but is above all an eloquent expression of her way of working.

Paris has now donated her archive to the Akademie der Künste. With 6,300 films and almost 230,000 negatives, it is a rich, subjective chronicle of four decades of Berlin and German history.

Paris insisted from the outset that all the negatives should be archived, in contrast to photo archives that preserve only the best-quality negatives or those selected by the artists. This coincided with the interests of the archive, because this is the only way to document her way of working and how the individual photos came about.

Changes in perspective or lighting, exposure or picture composition can be traced, as can the assignment of individual images to image series.

But it soon became apparent that the notes in her journal were not easy for outsiders to decipher and that some details were insufficient. By no means all the persons depicted were named, and many only with first names or nicknames. Often, the places and dates were missing or the circumstances of the picture were not noted. In

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addition, only two thirds of the films had contact sheets, which would have made it much easier to fill in the gaps in the information.

At great personal effort, Paris succeeded in persuading the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung and the Stiftung Kulturwerk, the cultural foundation of VG Bild-Kunst, to support a project to contextualise the notes. Thanks to their generous support, the Helga Paris Archive has now been made fully accessible. Within two years, her son, the photographer Robert Paris, transferred the films to archival sleeves and folders: until then, they had been stored in ordinary glassine film envelopes in the brimming drawers of an old pharmacist’s cabinet.

At the light table he sorted numerous loose and not yet marked films. All films have been logged in the archive database and missing contact prints have been made, while incomplete ones have been rendered complete.

The greatest difficulty proved to be the reconstruction of dates and places. Despite her phenomenal memory, Helga Paris was not able to do this alone. Since her children Jenny and Robert grew up in the midst of her everyday work and came regularly into contact with the taking and use of the photos, Paris requested their help. Both were able to successfully contribute their memories of people, dates, places, and contexts.

In some cases, however, investigative instinct was needed to determine the missing dates. For this they guessed the age of children they were friends with, deciphered the years given on posters glued to advertising pillars appearing by chance in the pictures, or deduced the period when the photos were taken from the clothing

fashions. In their research, however, the two of them were able to fall back on a whole network of friends and acquaintances. They even asked some of the people pictured about their memories of the shots. This crowdsourcing project enabled them to add numerous details. But completion is still ongoing and will continue even beyond the end of the project. In addition, a keyword catalogue has been established, which makes it possible not only to bring different image series together virtually, but also to research specific topics.

As a result, one of the most important and substantial contemporary photo archives is now becoming accessible. And not only that, for the vast amount of information obtained now makes it possible to search for people, places, or series of pictures from a wide variety of points of view. An invaluable advantage for the archive is that the excellent preparatory work means that the collection is joining our institution in a highly organised state and will be available for research relatively soon.

TORSTEN MUSIAL is head of the Film and Media Arts Archives of the Akademie der Künste.

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NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES

CREATING

In December 2018, the inauguration of the newly designed entrance area of the Brecht House coincided with the renaming of the previous museum as the Brecht-Weigel Museum.

The opening speech was given by the writer KERSTIN HENSEL. Her subtle observations about the location and its changing significance are documented here in excerpts.

PASSAGEWAYS Kerstin Hensel

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We are probably the only ones in Berlin right now who are celebrating the renewal of a cultural landmark in a small but fine passageway. Earlier on, I passed through Edison Höfe and then went on to the new School of Drama that has been built next to the Federal Intelligence Service, all around the corner from here – gigantic building complexes with super expensive spaces for representation, commercial, office, and residential purposes; capital city hybrids, seemingly standing around unshake­ able in time and space, as if they could grow beyond themselves. In the Brecht House, on the other hand, it is almost cosy, in the historic residential area where Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel lived, namely Chaussee­strasse 125 – surely one of the most chronicled addresses in Berlin. “My windows all face onto the cemetery park, it is not without cheer,” Brecht wrote in a letter to Suhrkamp from the back room of his last place of residence.

“Dauerten wir unendlich / so wandelte sich alles / Da wir aber endlich sind / bleibt vieles beim alten.” (“If we were to last infinitely / everything would change / But as we are finite / much remains the same.”) These verses, which are illuminated today using modern technology, were written

by Brecht in 1955. Today we read them, a life­time later, in the converted entrance area of the Brecht House – and recognise our mirror image. In both the truest and the figurative sense of the word. What a clever dialectic, some

might think, in light of the entanglement of infinity and change, which the poet offers for us to think of with playfully precise strictness. Brecht, materialist and con­fessor of human finiteness, does not, of course, call for resigna­ tion in his verses; does not want to give in to the expected behaviour of welcoming the immutable as comfortable constancy. The all-too-constant, he reminds us, is what causes problems, and finiteness may not serve as an excuse for wanting to leave everything as it is.

Neither did we, nor do we intend to. The Brecht House is an example of this: Museums always have to be intellectually well ventilated; archives should not only preserve but also be places of living understanding; and literature houses should rouse old and young audiences to new and extraordinary things in readings, lectures, and discussions. The fulfilment of these tasks was and is not in question. We are as solidly as we are changeably situated in a place of the utmost significance, only this place seems inviting in comparison to its spatially expansive neighbours. And, with the new entrance area, even more so than ever before.

Now visitors no longer simply rush by a few yellowed photographs, but can find out more than they could in the past about the three institutions that are at home here, and find the way with ease thanks to the new guidance system: to the Brecht-Weigel Museum, the Bertolt

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 11

Brecht Archive, and the Literature Forum. More than ever, the house can be understood as a unit of joint work. The place has also become more international – there are English translations now.

The Brecht House has long been established and has proved itself as a cultural highlight of the Mitte district in East Berlin. Brecht’s engaging thinking is implemented in reality here. Visitors do not seek, they find. I dare to hope, with Brechtian confidence in the changeable, that perhaps someday light shall return to the former cellar restaurant too. And where cuisine no longer appears to find a place, intellect should shine. On this note, I would like to quote Brecht once more: “Alles wandelt sich. Neu beginnen / kannst du mit dem letzten Atemzug.” (“Everything changes. / You can make a fresh start with your final breath.”)

In the former workspaces and living rooms at the Brecht-­ Weigel Museum at Chausseestraße 125 – which is shaped by the spirit and taste of its former inhabitants – collectibles and memorabilia, including two Chinese scroll paintings and three masks from Japanese Noh theatre, have survived alongside the original furniture and everyday objects. The museum contains most of the poet and playwright’s appro­x i­ mately 4,000-volume estate library, which serves research

KERSTIN HENSEL is the deputy director of the Literature

purposes. The location is also home to the Bertolt Brecht

Section of the Akademie der Künste and chairperson of the

Archive of the Akademie der Künste and the Literature Forum

Gesellschaft für Sinn und Form e. V. non-profit organisation,

at the Brecht House. Regular guided tours provide interested

the sponsoring association for the Literature Forum at the

visitors with an insight into the living and working spaces of

Brecht House.

Helene Weigel and Bertolt Brecht. No pre-booking is required.

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NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES

FINDS “BUT I DETEST THE OLD THAT THINKS ITSELF ETERNAL.” THEODOR FONTANE, THE AKADEMIE DER KÜNSTE, AND CARL HAUPTMANN Helga Neumann

Carl Hauptmann (1900)

With this commitment to change, Theodor Fontane ends a letter to his friend Karl Zöllner on 18 September 1894.

He is referring to an article in the Vossische Zeitung about the “Great Berlin Art Exhibition,” which ended on 16 September. The article criticises the fact that a list of the works of art that were to receive awards had not so far been published, and that Prussian art lacked the “freedom of movement” that existed in Munich, for example.

It is the political dimension that interests Fontane: “[I]t is an article more on politics than on art.”

Almost twenty years earlier, in 1876, Fontane had put himself in a situation that made him acutely aware of the structures of Prussian art politics. He had successfully applied for the position of First Permanent Secretary of the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. He became a civil servant, highly salaried but exposed to personal

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tensions within the Academy, subject to its bureaucratic regulations, and with no room for manoeuvre of his own.

Fontane endured this for only a few months, to the displeasure of his wife, who would have greatly appreciated the income from this position, not to mention the associated standing in society. Fontane explained his decision to her several times, summing up his views on 15 August: “I long for the moment when I will be out of this vacuous pomposity, out of this nothingness garbed in solemnity. [...] I have no place in such idiocy.”

Fontane’s qualities as a journalist, author, and critic truly counted for little at the Academy at the time – the Literature Section was only established in 1926. After the unhappy intermezzo from March to October 1876, he returned to his literary work and resumed his duties as a theatre critic for the liberal Vossische Zeitung. There he discussed the first Berlin performance of Ibsen’s Ghosts in January 1887 with great interest. In October 1889 he responded so positively to the premiere of Gerhart Hauptmann’s play Before Dawn, which largely scandalised the audience, that the editor-in-chief of the Vossische Zeitung felt compelled to disassociate himself from the writer.

Fontane, almost 70 at the time, was enthusiastic about Hauptmann, the “true robber captain of the gang of black realists”, and about the naturalistic plays in which he saw a “de-phrased Ibsen” at work. He became the – albeit not uncritical – advocate of the “Free Stage” and its young playwrights.

Gerhart Hauptmann had long been known on the Berlin cultural scene when his older brother Carl, already in his mid-thirties, also entered the public arena as a literary author. At the beginning of 1896, Carl sent his play Waldleute, premiered in Vienna the previous October, to a number of people from whom he hoped for feedback and encouragement. The writer and later psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé thanked him by postcard. Following this up, Carl Hauptmann apparently asked her directly for her opinion about his play, a drama set in Silesia and mainly written in Silesian dialect about a couple of lovers whose union is almost thwarted but is saved at the last moment.

The young woman’s father is a forester who shoots a poacher, her lover’s father. When the poacher’s son fatally injures the forester in revenge, the latter, on the verge of death, insists that he has accidentally shot himself.

This conciliatory (albeit not too realistic) ending would have been unthinkable in Fontane’s poacher novel Quitt, set in Silesia and the United States and published in 1890, and it did not go down well with contemporary critics either.

Andreas-Salomé replied to Carl in detail on 16 April 1896: “I don’t think [the ‘forest folk’ of Waldleute] are as ‘dull guests’ as you called them in your cover letter, but what

made them alien to me at first was the fact that I couldn’t imagine them in an intimate relationship with you – or, to put it another way: [I could not] find you in it, but that could simply be because I only know a very small part of you.”

Carl Hauptmann also sent Waldleute to Theodor Fontane, being undoubtedly aware of his brother’s contacts with Fontane, and he received an immediate reply (see opposite).

Did Fontane find the tone that Andreas-Salomé had missed in the play, if he read it at all? And how might Carl Hauptmann have felt on reading Fontane’s short letter?

At Christmas 1896 Carl sent him his new volume Sonnenwanderer, for which Fontane thanked him again, but that is all.

Carl Hauptmann tried to establish himself as an independent author, as distinct from his younger brother who was more successful from the outset. His efforts proved futile throughout his life. In 1896, he may still have had hopes. But Fontane’s letter of 12 February, which lumps Carl and Gerhart together as two “Hauptleute” and then asks Carl to convey regards to his rival brother, certainly did nothing to foster these hopes. On the contrary, it gave a foretaste of what was to come: on 8 January 1905, for example, a “Hauptmann Evening” organised by the Verein zur Förderung der Kunst (Association for the Advancement of Art) in Berlin gave lectures, readings, and musical settings of texts by the two Hauptmann brothers. In obituaries for Carl Hauptmann, who died in 1921, and in later articles, he is rarely mentioned without comparison to his brother. However, they had one thing in common: the urgent desire to find new themes, new forms of expression. Gerhart Hauptmann was promoted by Fontane as an exponent of modern literature and appreciated not only as an author, as testified by letters and private invitations.

Carl’s attempt to also win the support of the influential critic, on the other hand, failed. This is documented by the letter shown here, one of Fontane’s few autographs in the Archives of the Akademie der Künste, if we disregard the documents issued by Fontane as part of his loathsome duties as secretary that are preserved in the Academy’s Historical Archive.

HELGA NEUMANN works as an archivist in the Literature Archives of the Akademie der Künste.

Berlin, 12 Feb 96.

Potsdamerstr. 134.c.

Honoured Sir, Thank you very much for your “Waldleute”, which you were kind enough to send to me. I am looking forward to reading it and from today on I will include two “Hauptleute” in my prayers [in the double sense of the family name Hauptmann meaning literally “captain” and Hauptleute meaning important people].

When you see your brother, my best regards.

Your obedient servant, Th. Fontane

Theodor Fontane to Carl Hauptmann, Berlin, 12 February 1896. The estate of Carl Hauptmann is spread among several German and Polish archives. In the Carl Hauptmann Archive of the Akademie der Künste only the letter shown here is available, while the second, dated 25 December 1896, belongs to a further, smaller part of the estate in the German Literature Archive in Marbach.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 11

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NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES 1

PATHOS AND PRECISION

ON THE NEW EDITION OF SONATE POUR PIANO

BY JEAN BARRAQUÉ Heribert Henrich

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“Music is drama, pathos, death. It is full risk, shock up to the point of suicide. If it isn’t, if it is not the exceeding of all limits, it is nothing.” With these words, Jean Barraqué (1928−1973) summed up, towards the end of his short life, the motto of his work as a composer.

Such “grandiloquence” elevated to the status of a manifesto can already be felt in Barraqué’s debut work, Sonate pour piano, composed between 1950 and 1952.

Through lessons with Olivier Messiaen and his friendship with Karel Goeyvaerts and Pierre Boulez, Barraqué was at the centre of the serial movement at an early stage. However, his Sonate, created in this context, differed substantially from the works of its environment.

Barraqué was not interested in the seamless implementation of a serial calculation in a correspondingly small experimental study; rather, the new technology was to make it possible to breathe new life into the thoroughly Romantic idea of the universal appeal of a “great work” without having to come into contact with moments of the discarded and trivial. He rethought the concept of the sonata from scratch, no longer in the sense of a formal scheme but rather as a composition principle based on neutralising all established contradictions – between free and strict organisation, horizontal and vertical structure, fast and slow tempos, sound and silence – in the course of a single, gigantic process.

Just how complex and multilayered Barraqué’s conception of works was is shown not only in the countless sketches – tables of twelve-tone rows and octave register specifications, rhythmic schemes, and course plans

1 Jean Barraqué, Sonate pour piano, rhythmic scheme for T. 247 et seq., autograph Jean Barraqué, Sonate pour piano, bar 526[1] 2 a first edition / 2 b new edition There are often extremely small distances between the tones of the different parts in the complex rhythmic formations and their layering in the Sonate. In the face of such sparse evidence of the rhythmic relationships, the notes were often incorrectly positioned in the first edition and had to be repositioned in the new edition based on exact calculations.

2 a

2 b

3 a

3 b

Jean Barraqué, Sonate pour piano, bar 563[1] 3 a first edition / 3 b new edition Regarding pitches, corrections were necessary in particular when deviations from the dodecaphonic structure were discovered. The objective in doing so was to carefully examine whether the serial deviations were made erroneously, for example as transfer errors when transitioning from one stage to the next, or whether they were based on a compositional intention, such as avoiding unwanted octaves.

– but, above all, in a draft score, in which the parts constituting the texture are individually notated in up to five staves. Getting from here to usable piano notation proved to be a difficult task. And it is not surprising that the composer was repeatedly prone to inconsistencies and errors. Moreover, the fact that the work was first published by Florentine publisher Aldo Bruzzichelli almost one and a half decades after it had been composed, at a time when Barraqué was increasingly affected by illness and depression, did not contribute to reducing in the printed edition problems that already existed in the manuscripts. Many pianists have long wrestled with this musical text before performing the work; some even refused to play it from the Bruzzichelli edition altogether, regardless of how eager they were to perform the Sonate.

Therefore, a critical new edition was essential on both scientific and practical grounds. The recently completed edition thus realised as a joint project between the Aka­ demie der Künste and Bärenreiter Verlag in the context of the establishment of a Jean Barraqué Archive at the Academy contributes to making the work more accessible. It is a pilot project, as this is the first time a musical text from the heyday of serial music has been subjected to critical edition practices. In view of the specific style of the Sonate, it wasn’t enough to rely on evaluating the numerous existing sources, as is common editorial practice; rather, it also required considerable analytical effort, as responsible editorial decisions could often only be made in reference to the work’s constructive foundations. Difficulties had to be overcome that went above and beyond those that occur in the context of publishing

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 11

classical twelve-tone music. Due to their many complex entanglements, the various organisational areas of serial music are subject to an almost hermetic “encryption” that defies musical analysis in a very particular way. Thus the edition not only had to navigate within the delicate field of predetermined order and compositional decision-making, but also had to address the phenomenon of the interaction between often conflicting structural layers. This made it necessary to ponder a variety of solutions with great argumentative effort in order to find ways out of the often intricate constellation of problems.

“Drama” and “pathos” – one could perhaps conclude – do not come into their own by themselves in the musical work, but rather require a precise and reflected foundation in the musical text.

HERIBERT HENRICH is a research associate at the Music Archives of the Akademie der Künste.

Heribert Henrich, ed., Jean Barraqué: Sonate pour piano, 2 vols. (score, 53 pages / commentary Ger./Eng., 132 pages, 2 facsimiles) (Berlin: Akademie der Künste; Kassel: Bärenreiter Verlag, 2019).

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FREUNDESKREIS

FREEDOM OR BENEFIT? WHO BENEFITS WHEN FOUNDATIONS FUND ART?

A guest contribution by Stephan Muschick, Managing Director of innogy Stiftung für Energie und Gesellschaft

Sponsoring vs funding Cultural sponsorship is a business relationship where the benefit to both partners is not only clearly defined but usually quantified as well: A certain number of tickets or free concerts for employees or customers, free guided tours, or even a shuttle service as an equivalent value for a specified amount of money – along with an undertaking to feature the company logo in all kinds of publications according to the logic of “money for advertising space”. Cultural sponsorship is a marketing measure and is particularly popular with some sponsors because, in addition to the points listed, they also get to bask in the glory of their partner – be it a time-honoured cultural institution or a famous artist. Some call this brand transfer, others call it “added symbolic value”. Content intersec­ tions are desirable, but in-depth examinations of content occur less frequently.

Non-profit cultural funding as practised by many foun­ da­tions follows different objectives and principles. The term “common good” describes the focus not only being on the relationship between the two partners but also with a view to and a promise of benefiting society as a whole.

I shall explain this in greater detail using the example of innogy Stiftung für Energie und Gesellschaft, which has included art and culture as one of its funding areas since 2009.

Helping to shape the energy system of the future The overarching aspiration of the innogy foundation is to help shape the energy system of the future. The energy system of the future will work differently to that of yester­day. And it must be different and work better than what exists today – technologically, economically, and above all socially. The energy system of the future – in contrast to the centralised structures of the past – will be predomi­n antly decentralised and decarbonised.

Whether digita­li­sation, which is also a controversial field, will help in this joint effort is by no means guaranteed.

The only sure thing is that the transformation of the energy supply system can only succeed with and not against digitalisation.

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But what exactly does the road to a decarbonised, digi­ talised, and decentralised energy system look like? Politics and society are currently arguing over this: in Germany, Europe, and all over the world. But one thing is becoming increasingly clear in the discussions: Successful energy transformations and effective climate protection can only succeed if people feel involved in this huge social transformation.

And this is where art comes into play. The innogy foundation takes its mission of positioning energy and society at the centre of its non-profit work very seriously.

Discourses that build on artistic work help the foundation: through positions that differ fundamentally from those of other stakeholders in terms of their radicalism or ambiguity; through a degree of creativity that can provide impulses to other, sometimes ossified areas of society; through addressing the foundation’s emerging need to build bridges between different stakeholder groups, and to provide platforms and create spaces for reflection and experimentation.

The sponsor’s hidden claim over the design is significant. If a foundation considers art to be of such importance, there is always the danger of overloading the funded artists or cultural institutions. The funding body might even give the impression of wanting to instrumentalise them. So the primary rule must always be: Freedom for art first!

Freedom for the resident artists!

The innogy foundation’s VISIT artist-in-residence programme – the core of its funding activities in the area of culture – follows these basic principles. Since 2010, the foundation has provided project grants for at least two fellows per year. The only condition: The submitted project, which is assessed by an independent panel of judges, must be on the topic of “energy”. And the growing number of applications submitted each year shows that: The topic is relevant and multifaceted, sometimes controversial, and simply inexhaustible. The spectrum ranges from photography and sculptural works to large-scale installations to comprehensive research projects and

narrative video works. For example, Axel Braun: The artist, born in 1983, conducted research on the topic of hydropower – in the corporate archives and locations of the RWE Group, among other places. He came up against numerous ambiguities on the subject of a supposedly “clean” renewable source of power, which he categorised under the heading “Die Technik muss grausam sein, wenn sie sich durchsetzen will” (“Technology has to be brutal if it wants to assert itself”). This was the core of an exhibition that not only found its audience in the foyer of the company’s headquarters in 2011 but also provided the impetus for several events on the relationship between humans and technology. The fact that this led to some, in part, highly controversial discussions between the artist and the company representatives during the course of the artistic process did not diminish the value of the programme; on the contrary, it showed how valuable bringing free artistic work into contact with corporate and social logics is.

Further examples: Andreas Greiner (fellow 2017) worked with his photobioreactor on the future of energy conversion using algae; Céline Berger (special prize 2017) intervened directly in the everyday work of employees at the Helgoland Offshore Wind Farm; and Yvon Chabrowski (fellow 2019) is currently asking how the old and new energies make their mark in the body of work. These are just three artistic approaches of more than twenty over ten years of VISIT funding. The list of these “dangerous encounters” – a term introduced by sociologist Heinz Bude, who imposed an obligation on cultural institutions to engage in dialogue across borders and milieus – goes on.

More light!

But VISIT is not the only example of cultural funding that focuses on pressing social issues such as climate change and the transformation of the energy system. The logic behind focusing the foundation’s involvement on the diverse field of light art is as follows: Art is always a reflective space for the changes that are taking place in society – and the question of what that means for us humans.

The International Light Art Award (ILAA) ceremony – organised in 2019 for the third time in partnership with the Centre for International Light Art, Unna – is more than a gala and the promotion of young artists. Light and light art are the starting point for a broad discourse on the question as to what energies hold our society together at the very core. In 2015, Peter Sloterdijk provided the philosophical kick-off for the first ILLA at Haus der Berliner Festspiele in the International Year of Light. Interdisciplinary symposia and discussions in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Essen, and Unna were to follow.

In order to credibly live up to this aspiration in the future, the innogy foundation is always on the lookout for other like-minded souls, partners at any rate, with whom they can develop a platform for art, working their way into society in the process. innogy Stiftung für Energie und Gesellschaft gGmbH supports the Society of Friends of the Akademie der Künste.

CREDITS

COLOPHON

pp. 3–13 photos Tobias Kruse/ OSTKREUZ | p. 15 collage Cemile Sahin | pp. 16/17 Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin, AdK-O, no. 6248 | p. 21 photo FBM Studio Zurich/Helmhaus Zurich, pp. 22/23 photos Laura Fiorio | p. 25 photos Sarah Pirrie, p. 26 photos Carlos Gutierrez, p. 27 drawings Annesley Black | pp. 28 (top) / 31 (bottom): photos Magda Hueckel, pp. 28 (bottom) / 31 (top): photos Robert Kuszyński / JohnBoB & Sophie art | pp. 32–37 drawings Doris Dörrie, text taken from: Doris Dörrie, Leben, schreiben, atmen © 2019 Diogenes Verlag, Zurich | pp. 38/41 photos Helga Paris, source: ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen), p. 42 photo Helga Paris, p. 43 photo (left) Robert Paris, photo (right) Jenny Paris | p. 44/45 photos P. Lutz | p. 46 photo Max Glauer, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Carl-Hauptmann-­A rchiv, no. 458, p. 47 Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Carl-­ Hauptmann-Archiv, no. 178 | p. 48 Aka­ demie der Künste, Berlin, Jean-­Barraqué-­ Archiv, no. 11 © Association Jean Barraqué, p. 49 © Bärenreiter-­Verlag, Kassel

Journal der Künste, Edition 11, English issue Berlin, November 2019 Print run: 1,000

We thank all owners of image usage rights for kindly approving the publication. If, despite intensive research, a copyright holder has not been considered, justified claims will be compensated within the scope of customary agreements.

The views offered in this journal reflect the opinions of the individual authors and do not necessarily represent the opi­ nion of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

Journal der Künste is published three times a year and is available at all Academy locations. Members of the Academy, the Society of Friends of the Academy, and subscribers will receive a copy.

If you would like a single edition, the German edition, or a subscription, please contact info@adk.de. © 2019 Akademie der Künste © 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 Nora Kronemeyer & Martin Hager (edition8) Marie Altenhofen Anneka Metzger Assistance Justin Gentzer Translations, if not otherwise noted Laura Noonan / Sprachwerkstatt Berlin, Tim Chafer, Peter Rigney Copy-editing Joy Beecroft Design Heimann + Schwantes, Berlin www.heimannundschwantes.de Lithography Max Color, Berlin Printing Ruksaldruck, Berlin English edition ISSN (Print) 2627-2490 ISSN (Online) 2627-5198 Digital edition https://issuu.com/journalderkuenste Akademie der Künste Pariser Platz 4 10117 Berlin T 030 200 57-1000 info@adk.de, www.adk.de akademiederkuenste

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