Journal der Künste 13 (EN)

JOURNAL DER KÃœNSTE 13

AIRBORNE IN SEARCH OF EUROPE 100 YEARS OF RADIO AN UNUSUAL COMEBACK

ENGLISH EDITION JUNE 2020

P. 5

P. 30 CARTE BLANCHE

P. 60 JUNGE AKADEMIE

EDITORIAL

MANOS TSANGARIS

THE VISITOR

Werner Heegewaldt

Anna Weidenholzer P. 36 100 YEARS OF RADIO

P. 6 CRISIS AND CRITIQUE

THIS CRISIS HAS NOT COME FROM NOTHING

P. 62 NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES

BROAD-CAST Oliver Sturm

Wolfgang Kaleck

FINDS LEAP IN TIME – HAIFA, 1947 – BERLIN, 1933 Maren Horn

P. 41 P. 9

AIRBORNE

“WE

LOCALISE OURSELVES THROUGH HEARING”

P. 64

Paul Plamper

AN UNUSUAL COMEBACK PETER LUDWIG LÜTKE’S PAINTING LAGO DI NEMI

P. 44

Werner Heegewaldt

Eva Horn

P. 13

CORONA-DIARY, MARCH 2020 A. L. Kennedy

“GET

THIS CHARLIE, GET THIS CHARLIE!” OR THE CREDIBILITY RESERVES OF RADIO

P. 66

Jochen Meißner

“MAY

I BE SPARED THE VERY WORST!!!”

Katharina Rudolph P. 17

THE CITY OF EXCEPTION Anh-Linh Ngo P. 21

“TRY

UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME/LIVELIHOOD NOW”

P. 48 TOPIC EUROPE

“MIHAELA

AND HER DAUGHTERS AREN’T PLAYING A ROLE; THEY ARE WITCHES ALL DAY LONG”

P. 70

CRISIS AS CHANCE

Johanna-Maria Fritz

Frank Fath, Anja Lüdtke

P. 53

P. 72

PROGRESSIVE WEST AND BACKWARD EAST? AGAINST A POLARISATION OF THE ARTS

“BUT

YOU NEED TO HAVE MONEY” THE PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN EARLY LETTERS FROM THE PAINTER RUDOLF LEVY

Adrienne Goehler

P. 25

Noémi Kiss

RUNNING INTO TIMES

Anke Matelowski

Kathrin Röggla P. 56 JUNGE AKADEMIE P. 74 FREUNDESKREIS

“I HAVE ALWAYS TRIED TO THINK WITHOUT CENSORING MYSELF AND TO REJECT ALL KINDS OF FILTERING” Farhad Delaram

THE ROLE OF BUSINESS IN A CHANGING SOCIETY Andreas Dornbracht

Tegel and Schönefeld airports in late March. The photographs are part of The Void, a video/3D audio installation about empti­ ness and standstill, which is currently being created. It focuses on the very brief moment of shock and paralysis generated by the near-total shutdown of public life in Berlin: A tectonic fault between the overheated pace of life prior to the outbreak of the epidemic and an uncertain future. This “fault in time” was quickly alleviated by the will to live, inventiveness, and desperation, before vanish­i ng into an inverted form of “speeding standstill”.

Julia Baier was actually planning to be in Italy in April. But things turned out differently. She used the time of her personal as well as the general reorganisation to look at the sudden changes taking place around her through the lens of a camera: rapid transformation on the one hand, complete reduction on the other. Her photos reflect the ambivalent feelings of this phase, swinging from slight unease to the powerful clarity of a previously unknown “interim competency”. A blanket lies over Berlin. When it will fall, on whose head, remains to be seen.

MARINA DAFOVA is a Berlin-based artist, designer, and author.

JULIA BAIER lives and works as a photographer in Berlin.

pp. 4, 6, 11, 15, 19, 23

pp. 3, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 29

EDITORIAL Dear Readers, The corona pandemic has us all firmly in its grip – and the Akademie der Künste is no exception. The consequences for the arts and culture are unforeseeable, as is an end to the pandemic. “Running into times” is how Kathrin Röggla titled her thoughts on the crisis. In her piece, she describes the feeling that many of us may have: the helplessness in the face of an invisible danger, the rapid pace of the changes we are confronted with on a daily basis, the sudden unplannability of the near future.

A wholly different and painful thing to witness during the past few months has been the lack of cohesion in Europe. The spread of the virus was followed by reflex-like border closures, national egotisms, and unilateral action. The events have shown once more just how vulnerable the notion of European community and solidarity is. Europe will be one of the focal points of the Academy’s autumn programme this year. The project “European Alliance of Academies” intends to bring fifty European art academies and cultural institutions into dialogue with each other, to explore possibilities of cooperation. One central question will be how the institutions can transcend borders in standing up for the freedom and autonomy of art. Two very different articles in this magazine provide an outlook on this topic. The photographer Johanna-Maria Fritz gives an interview about her unusual work about magic and witches in a Roma community in Romania. As of October, her photographs will be displayed in the exhibition “CONTINENT – In Search of Europe” at Pariser Platz. The exhibition is a collective show of work by members of the agency OSTKREUZ – Agentur der Fotografen in co­operation with the Akademie der Künste. In twenty-two positions, “CONTINENT” tells stories of the lives of people in Europe and asks what connects us and how we coexist. For the Hungarian writer Noémi Kiss, the recognition of Europe’s cultural diversity is a central topic. She takes a position against a polarisation of the arts between Eastern and Western Europe, between the metropolitan centres and the periphery.

Like many other cultural institutions, the Academy has also shifted its programme in recent months to digital formats in its attempts to better reach the public online. In the series “Akadmie-­ Mitglieder im Gespräch” (“Academy Members in Dialogue”), members talk in podcast format about the sociopolitical effects of the corona crisis and the potential of culture during a state of emergency.

An interactive 360-degree tour of the exhibition “John Heartfield – Photography plus Dynamite”, also available at adk.de, will give visitors a virtual experience of the exhibition room and the presen­

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 13

tation “Kosmos Heartfield”, introducing them to the life and oeuvre of the political photomonteur. After the lockdown prevented the opening in March, the exhibition will now finally be accessible in “analogue” form from 2 June to 23 August at Pariser Platz. The 11th Berliner Hörspielfestival (BHF, Berlin Audio Play Festival), held in May in cooperation with the Akademie der Künste, found new forms of presentation. For the first time, instead of being held in the studio on Hanseatenweg, all of the nominated audio plays and live discussions were broadcast as a livestream on YouTube. Listeners had the possibility to listen to the contributions for one week and submit their votes online. To mark the occasion of the 100th anni­ versary of radio, Academy member Oliver Sturm gives his critical appraisal of the current state of the audio play. Changing listener behaviour, budget cuts by the broadcasters, and political pressure have significantly constrained the latitude available to public service radio and television broadcasting. Fixation on the ratings and market viability of the media products entails the risk that the diversity and quality of programming, integral ingredients in the success story of radio and television broadcasting in Germany, could be permanently lost. The contributions of Paul Plamper and Jochen Meißner highlight the creative potential contained in particular in the audio drama.

A find from the archives provides an unusual testimony to the friendship between the psychoanalyst Max Eitingon and the writer Arnold Zweig, who found exile in Palestine after fleeing Germany.

Each of them made use of a small notebook from 1933. For one, it was a patient calendar and a reminiscence of the successful Berlin practice that he was forced to leave behind; for the other it was a cherished memento to a friend, given to him by the friend’s widow after he died in 1943, which he held in honour and continued to use.

Zweig created a literary monument to Eitingon with his novel Traum ist teuer (A Costly Dream). A wholly different story is told by the landscape painting by the Berlin classicist and academic Peter Ludwig Lütke from 1796. It took real investigative effort to facilitate the painting’s “comeback” in the Academy.

We wish you a good read.

Yours, Werner Heegewaldt Director of the Archives of the Akademie der Künste

5

CRISIS AND CRITIQUE In the exceptional situation caused by the corona­virus, art and culture is undergoing major changes, so we have invited members of the Academy and cooperating partners to reflect on the current situation and outline its consequences for society.

International lawyer Wolfgang Kaleck describes this historical moment as an opportunity to find a powerful, joint approach to maintaining civil society and removing ourselves from the gridlock of unresolved crises. Literary scholar and current holder of the Heinrich Mann Prize, Eva Horn, sees a lesson in the pandemic on finding survival strategies for the planet: breath and atmosphere as the basis of life and survival.

Authors A. L. Kennedy and Kathrin Röggla are developing writing as a diary or a language-­ virus into a critical and participatory act of involvement in political and social events.

How can artistic practice appropriate the current changes?

Anh-Linh Ngo, editor-in-chief and publisher of ARCH+ advocates decisively for the preser­ vation of public urban space. The winner of the Art Prize for Architecture 2020 sees a danger that people will only be seen as assemblages of algorithms in the monitoring structures of the future.

Adrienne Goehler analyses the triad of sus­tain­ ability, deceleration, and unconditional basic income as an effective instrument of social transformation. In an interview, she summarises the key thesis of her recently released pub­li­ cation on precisely this topic.

Johannes Odenthal

THIS CRISIS HAS NOT COME FROM NOTHING Wolfgang Kaleck

“We have never known so much about what we don’t know”, says Jürgen Habermas in light of the current crisis. Even though we will continue to face ever-increasing uncertainty in our complex socie­ties, this current existential uncertainty is spreading globally and simultaneously.1 Perhaps this provides an opportunity: We can no longer, for better or worse, avoid the problems or the complexity of the situation, as we have been doing so far.

The pandemic only culminated in a global disaster because of the political opportunity to put a stop to these political criminals in many negative developments of recent times. On the one hand, there advance has been missed. Business was more important. are the reasons why the virus started and the warnings were being If you were to try to assess many a society’s level of civilisaignored: Among others, Mike Davis, in his 2005 book The Monster tion based on how it treats unwelcome minorities, what you would at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, had already begun to find would shock you. This not only concerns migrants whose catwarn of a virus that could potentially cause damage all over the astrophic situation is beyond imagination – particularly those crossworld.2 Based on extensive research, Davis pointed out that the ing at the Greek–Turkish border, many of whom have fled from the proximity of humans and animals, developments in the agro-indus- criminal regime of President Bashar al-Assad and a devastating trial sector, and, in particular, the use of antibiotics and other drugs civil war in Syria – the conditions in prisons, psychiatric instituin livestock production were constantly leading to new virus muta- tions, and even retirement and nursing homes were also already tions. Climate change is also a contributing factor. In order to avert shocking before this crisis. this danger, he concludes, a global, jointly developed vaccine is The fact that surveillance capitalism, as Shoshana Zuboff required, as well as a functional, global healthcare system. accurately describes it, is being discussed as a possible solution – Instead, what we have seen – and what has ultimately led to both in the Orwellian variant of Chinese state capitalism and the social lockdowns and many deaths in some countries – is the “lighter” version in Western Europe and North America – makes it reduction of capacities in the healthcare system and the outsourc- clear that we are sliding from crisis to crisis without seriously dising of drug and personal protection equipment (PPE) production cussing any political solutions whatsoever. This is particularly the due to austerity programmes, in short: capitalism in its ugliest neo- case because civil society, as a possible source of hope for politliberal guise. ical change, is in distress and partially in great danger. It is in greatNone of the imminent crises over the last fifteen years have, est danger where members of the opposition are arrested, tortured, even remotely, been politically resolved. The eurozone crisis is and murdered, which is the case in about a hundred countries becoming more aggravated in the current situation, and the global around the world. But the current crisis is also accelerating disasbanking crisis of 2008 was so inadequately addressed that the trous developments in Germany and Europe, such as the growing economic and social deficits are becoming increasingly evident. inequalities between the social classes in school and university In particular, no political attempts have been made, to any extent, education and increasing digitalisation without social or other conto reign in corporate power – the power of corporations and the trol mechanisms, which not only manifests itself as surveillance but financial sector – as the debate on climate change in 2019 clearly also in changes to culture and communication. demonstrated. So the powerful are still the winners in the current All alternative spaces are under threat, not least due to the crisis. The things society needs, namely medication, PPE, and gentrification of our cities – and not just cultural institutions in the other supplies, are not being produced; pay is not determined by narrower sense, but all spaces where people meet, talk to each the social value of an occupation, otherwise, nurses, caregivers, other, exchange information, and are able to generate ideas withhome-help providers, police officers, supermarket cashiers, ware- out consumerism ruling over everything. house workers, and Amazon.com workers would be paid a lot more What should we do? We have to face up to the big questions! than other professions.

How do we want to live: In solidarity as citizens of the world or tucked A precariat – safeguarded at least to an extent in some wealthy away in our green neighbourhoods and gated communities? Let us countries like Germany – and the impoverished people of the world organise ourselves and stand in the way of those responsible for all are exposed to the current crisis without any protection: an expres- these abuses – as proposed by Noam Chomsky or Achille Mbembe, sion of increasing global economic inequality, as Thomas Piketty who calls for the forced shutdown to be turned into a “voluntary dramatically describes it in his books.3 For example, people all over cessation, a conscious and fully consensual interruption”? 4 the world lack access to essential commodities such as healthcare, clean water, decent housing, and healthy nutrition.

1 Markus Schwering, “Interview mit Jürgen Habermas ‘So viel Wissen über unser Nichtwissen gab es noch nie’” The handling of the current situation, particularly in authori[We have never known so much about what we don’t know], Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger (published online tarian countries, is making a mockery of the problems and suffering 3 Apr. 2020). of many people. All the right-wing populist government leaders are 2 Mike Davis, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2006). being unmasked not only as incompetent but also as criminally 3 See, for example, Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-­ First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, negligent. It is frightening how their simplistic recipes, such as MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). renationalisation and border closures, still work as myths – as does 4 Achille Mbembe, “The Universal Right to Breathe”, trans. Carolyn Shread, Critical Inquiry (published online the belief in the authoritarian state. The trend toward increased 13 Apr. 2020), https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020 /04/13/the-universal-right-to-breathe/ policing and militarisation is clear to see, especially in Eastern Europe and Russia as well as Asia and parts of Latin America. The state of emergency is being used by rulers like Narendra Modi in WOLFGANG KALECK is a lawyer and secretary general of India and Viktor Orbán in Hungary to further increase their power – the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights no surprise for observers of the situation, especially since every (ECCHR e. V.).

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7

AIRBORNE

In Adalbert Stifter’s short story “Granite”, written in the middle of the 19th century, we read of the plague: “No one knows how it came: whether people brought it, whether it came with the mild spring air, Eva Horn or whether the winds and clouds brought it here; it is enough to say that it came and spread over all the places around us.”3 Is it the people or the weather? It was beautiful spring weather in mid-March CORONA, THE AIR, AND THE CLIMATE – WHAT THE CRISIS TEACHES US when coronavirus came to Vienna, the city where I live. In the initial days of the Austrian lockdown, it was seductively warm, the city Since antiquity, it has been the winds which bring disease. Already was in full bloom, and Viennese people swarmed out into the parks in Hippocrates’ writings on epidemics, certain kinds of winds were and forests. Friends shared a Coca-Cola, small groups enjoyed a said to transport certain varieties of fever. According to Hippocratic picnic, young men stood smoking together. No one complied very medicine, the seasons and the particular course they take – whether closely with the order issued by the police to only take walks alone it be a particularly cold or an excessively mild winter, for example or with members of the same household. At the very moment of its – were responsible for the prevalence of certain sicknesses in a disappearance, I realised that being social means sharing the same region. And there was, of course, the widely held belief that the air – even at the risk of becoming infected.

SARS-CoV-2 is an airborne pathogen, as we have learned in local climate could be either beneficial or harmful to one’s health.

For centuries and across many different cultures, the air has been the crash course on epidemiology given to us by the media and polthought to bring disease. In traditional Chinese medicine, fever is iticians.4 It spreads primarily through fine droplets emitted in a called shangfeng, or “injured by the wind”, and in the Indonesian cough or a sneeze and can hover in the air as an aerosol, as recent language, the word for a cold is still masuk angin, or “the wind has studies have shown, for quite some time. Corona is an airborne disease, a sickness that floats through the air. And so, the air, in all of entered”. In Europe, people believed for centuries that the soil, and its variants – as seasonal weather, as a medium of transmission, in particular wet areas like bogs or stagnant waters, were the source of foul and harmful gases. In the cities, sewage canals, cesspools, but also with its suddenly declining level of air pollution – forms a tanneries, or even cemeteries were suspected of spreading dis- kind of omnipresent backdrop to the corona crisis. Over and over we heard epidemiologists – but also non-epidemiologists, like Donald ease with their stench.

And so, even long before the air pollution of today, the air was Trump – pontificate on the question of whether the wave of infecthe subject of the worst health fears. It contains the evaporations tions could wane with the onset of spring.5 Once it gets warmer, the of the earth, and of other bodies, the by-products of putrefaction American president prophesised in early March, the whole thing processes (so-called “miasmas” or “exhalations”), flakes of skin, would be over. Many contagious diseases do in fact have seasonal small stones, plants, sweat, dust, insect larvae, pollen, seeds, fats, rhythms, most famously the flu. But the plague also often arrived other gases, steam, sulphur, salts, ash, and much more. Neither in in spring, being transmitted by fleas that only become active at the city nor in the country were you thought to be safe from these temperatures above 10 degrees Celsius. Epidemics are linked to vapours, which is why there was a flood of advice on how to protect the weather conditions, only that corona – thank God! – is not the yourself from them: the frequent airing out of a room (or precisely plague and has so far, evidently, not kept to the seasonal rule.

On the contrary, pandemics quite often cause the dissolution the opposite), the use of fragrant essences to be held under the nose, not sleeping face-down, allowing the north winds into your of every rule and regularity, including social ones. They are a comflat, but by no means the south winds. The sirocco, it was thought, pletely different type of catastrophe than earthquakes, floods, or can trigger contagious disease, insanity, and outbreaks of violent even war and flight. In these cases, disaster sociology has observed crime. In this regard, the air not only carries diseases from human to that societies often come together in a spirit of spontaneous solihuman (as we know today), the wind itself was seen as a pathogen. darity, which while fragile and often fleeting, can for the moment create an uplifting, productive energy. People survive because they As outdated as these medical theories may sound, they express something that still holds true: Air is not only a medium of the phys- help each other. Rebecca Solnit described this phenomenon as “A ical life of humans, animals, and plants; it is also a medium of soci- paradise built in hell”, a groundswell of social closeness, pragmaety.1 To socialise with someone means not only to breathe the same tism, and individual heroism.6 Contagious diseases, by contrast, air, but also to occupy the same atmosphere as they do. It means affect not only individual bodies, but also the social fabric itself. to share something with each other that consists not only of moods Helping is dangerous, if not deadly for the helper – and often of no and emotions, but is situated somewhere between culture and effect for the patient. With brutal laconicism, Stifter said of the nature, such as aerosols, particulate matter, body odours, CO2, plague: “Children didn’t love their parent any more, nor parents their and of course, germs. This makes air, in the words of Bruno Latour, children, they merely threw the dead into the pit and went away.”7 not simply a “matter of fact”, a factual given, but also – as we have Diseases such as the plague or Ebola hardly allow for taking care discovered since the advent of air pollution and climate change – of the sick (except in massive protective suits), and they prohibit a “matter of concern”, a contentious issue of political debate. Air is taking final leave of the deceased in customary burial rituals.8 Contagious diseases isolate people, as we are all learning these days. society; society is the shared experience of “being in the air”.2

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9

Not only are we not allowed to touch each other, we are not allowed to breathe the same air. That is the essence of social distancing.

It is an irony of history that through the radical reduction of air traffic, automobile, and industrial emissions – and not least of all, the sharp drop in the production of goods of all kinds – air quality has suddenly improved. In China, the levels of harmful particulate matter fell by 25 per cent during the shutdown. Some cities saw blue skies for the first time in twenty years.9 There, the deaths that corona causes are counteracted by the temporary decline in deaths from respiratory and heart diseases that come as a result of heavy air pollution. While you can perceive good or bad air, at least to a certain extent, through the senses, through smell, through the feeling of breathing, or simply by the sight of the greyish-yellow smog, there is another pathology of the air that is completely imperceptible: the share of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, aka climate change. Imperceptibility is what SARS-CoV-2 and climate change have in common: an undetectable component in the air.

Climate change, and the numerous other massive changes to the earth system – species extinction, land use, the hole in the ozone layer, ocean acidification, changes in the phosphorous and nitrogen cycle, toxins in the environment, and much more – which we now summarise under the keyword Anthropocene, is, as I wrote some years ago, an imperceptible catastrophe without event.10 These stealthily create creeping shifts in the factors which make up the highly complex earth system and which contributed to the unusual stability that characterised the Holocene epoch. The corona crisis, by contrast, is a catastrophe as an event per se: the sudden, traumatic collapse of many of the structures that have shaped and defined our social and private life. This means not only our jobs and our workplaces in which we make a living, but also the social networks and activities that determine who we are. Now we are realising: Sharing the air with others was in many respects a defining aspect of our existence.

However, this social and economic existence of ours – as travellers, as workers, consumers, or producers – was one that in turn, by way of climate change, air pollution, and the hole in the ozone layer, affected precisely that medium on which it is based: the air.

The corona crisis disrupts not only economic life, but also the rapidly accelerating, yet imperceptible process of climate change.

Corona forces us to pause, to break through routines and the lack of alternatives. It is – for better or worse – a testing laboratory of political contingency. Now we see: Everything can be different. For a brief and uncanny moment, the imperative of economic growth, the laws of the labour market, the necessity of working to the point of burn out, the inevitability of mass consumption and travel, all of that has proven to be optional; there are alternatives to it. Maybe in this way, corona provides an opportunity for reflection and change and for training our sense of possibility. Before the crisis, any significant carbon tax in Austria and Germany was deemed inconceivable and – as we repeatedly heard with a view to the economy or the transport sector – “impossible to implement”. And this despite the fact that a carbon tax has been successfully implemented in

10

British Columbia and Sweden, for example.11 By now, we have learned that in the event of a grave threat to the population, much heavier things than a simple tax can be implemented, such as lockdowns, massive interventions in the national budget, and a radical transformation in the way people work.

Corona will continue to change our lives long after we all become immune (or die). Perhaps this pandemic is a wicked, bitter ruse, a revenge of the air. It reminds us that it is a medium, a medium of life, but also of being social. The most individual intimate necessity of breathing connects us both to a pandemic and to the planet’s atmosphere. The effects of corona will pale in comparison to the consequences of climate change – but maybe only for our grandchildren. Climate change – despite it being a known fact for forty years – has only marginally managed to become a matter of concern, an occasion for radical measures, and an internationally coordinated political effort, whereas corona has achieved at least this in one brutal, previously unimaginable coup. Corona is teaching us lessons about inadequate disaster protection, the disadvantages of just-in-time production and globalised supply chains, the lack of political foresight, an idiotic scepticism of science, and our fragile healthcare systems. Not only this, corona also reminds us of our political, economic, and individual scope of action. Once we return – and hopefully soon – to the social space of being together in the air, once we are back together at a dining table with friends and discussing with colleagues, we will have to put this lesson into practice. Until then: Hold your breath.

1 Eva Horn, “The Air as Medium”, Grey Room, 73 (Autumn 2018), pp. 6–25.

2 Bruno Latour, “Why has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”, Critical Inquiry, 30 (Winter 2004), pp. 225–48.

3 Adalbert Stifter, “Granite” [1853], in Jeffrey L. Sammons, ed. and trans., German Novellas of Realism I (New York: Continuum, 2003), p. 17.

4 Neeltje van Doremalen, Trenton Bushmaker, and Dylan H. Morris, “Aerosol and Surface Stability of SARS-CoV-2 as Compared with SARS-CoV-1: Letter to the Editor”, New England Journal of Medicine (published online 20 Mar. 2020), https://www.nejm.org/doi/ full/10.1056/NEJMc2004973 5 Andrew Freedman and Jason Samenow, “Corona­v irus may have a seasonal cycle, but that doesn’t mean it will go away this summer, experts warn”, Washington Post (published online 11 Mar. 2020), https://www.washington post.com/weather/2020/03/11/coronavirusmay-have-seasonal-cycle-that-doesnt-meanit-will-go-away-this-summer-experts-warn/ 6 Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell (New York: Viking, 2009).

7 Stifter, “Granite”, p. 17.

8 Amy Maxmen, “How the Fight Against Ebola Tested a Culture’s Traditions”, National Geographic (published online 30 Jan. 2015), https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news /2015/01/150130-ebola-virus-outbreak -epidemic-sierra-leone-funerals/ 9 Lauren Summer, “Why China’s Air Has Been Cleaner During the Coronavirus Outbreak”, NPR (published online 4 Mar. 2020), https:// www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020 /03/04/811019032/why-chinas-air-has-been -cleaner-during-the-coronavirus-outbreak 10 Eva Horn, The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age, trans. Valentine Pakis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). On the Anthropocene see Eva Horn and Hannes Bergthaller, The Anthropocene: Key Issues for the Humanities – Key Issues in Environment and Sustainability (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019).

11 Several concrete examples have long proven that it is possible, and that it even works well.

See, for example, “British Columbia’s Carbon Tax”, Government of British Colombia official website (last accessed 27 Apr. 2020), https:// www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/environment/clim ate-change/planning-and-action/carbon-tax

EVA HORN is professor of German literature and cultural studies at the University of Vienna. She is the founder of the Vienna Anthropocene Network and author of The Future as Catastrophe (2014).

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11

CORONA-DIARY, MARCH 2020 A. L. Kennedy

In my garden the flowers grow as they always have, but are more beautiful now, almost unbearably so. A buzzard kited overhead yesterday in the eerie peace – it felt like a blessing.

Locked at home, I have more time to think. I am becoming someone different quite quickly, but I don’t know who. I hope I will be someone who is built around kindness.

Brexit was always unkind – ignorance, fear, hate – they make us unkind, or else we start with a lack of kindness and descend.

Brexit was always about racism, but it was always about wilful ignorance, too. Racism can’t exist without multiple layers of entwined and increasingly shrill ignorance. Beneath that, of course, is the fear, the inadequacy, the knowledge of obvious and unusual personal ugliness in our leaders and influencers. The endlessly angry man in the corner of the pub, the furious wife-beater, the never-loved public schoolboy, the highly­-placed politician and the propagandist greedy enough to take foreign funding in return for betraying their country – they are ugly at heart. Likewise, the short option buyer happy to benefit from politically-leveraged inside trading and the mediocrities who realise they can find no access to success without duplicity and cruelty. All these are the figures currently triumphant in our media, our public discourse, our government. Cruelty reigns and it is killing us.

Individual citizens acquainted with facts and fond of reality have for years navigated their lives here as if they are forever talking to a madman in the rain. “Why don’t you go indoors? It’s raining.”

“It’s not raining.”

“But look at the sky, look at the wet pavement, look at the rain falling very obviously in the way that rain does.”

“It’s not raining, you bastard.”

“You’re wet. Your clothes are wet. You need to go inside.”

“You don’t love your country. Why don’t you marry a gay refugee if you think it’s raining?”

“I don’t think it’s raining. I know it’s raining.”

“Fake news. I’m going to stand here in the not rain just to own the libtards, you black Muslim gay trans paedophile. We’re watching. We’ll kill you in your house.”

Today I hung out washing in the sunlight. There was nothing but joy in every action. Over the fence, far away, people shouted to each other, keeping a life-saving distance. I spend my days emailing, texting, tweeting, Zooming, using all the modern ways to be sure that friends and strangers are all right. Everyone matters more now they could be dead soon.

But we all, always, could be dead soon. We should always have mattered.

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Around a third of our population has been trained to embrace cognitive dissonance and learned helplessness, to distrust facts and embrace magical thinking, to bring their self-imposed wilderness consolation in fury and hate. This was already a problem before COVID-19. It has destroyed our democracy and was in the process of wrecking our economy as massive financial crimes were hidden beneath the all-encompassing banner of Brexit – that word with no meaning and every meaning. Now the wave of infection is breaking over us. Now ignoring reality is fatal. Reacting quickly and rationally has become a life-and-death issue. Trained to be selfish, to argue with facts, people are dying. The children of Brexit are be­wildered, distrustful of experts, clinging to spurious racial superiority – but their propaganda won’t save them – it could kill them, kill their families. They get infected. They spread the infection. Carefully engineered stupidity has long raced into our democracy – it has always acted like a virus. Now it invites one.

Our government, infected by junk science, cruelty, and eugenicist myths, has actively sought to spread the contagion. We lost at least three weeks in our fight to limit casualties as a result. European experience of the disease, expertise, and supplies have all been avoided – because

A friend with cancer will get no more treatment for months now. Another friend has symptoms. A friend is worried – his whole family works in the NHS. Nobody wants those they love to die alone. No one wants anyone to die alone, drowning on dry land.

Popo’s principle advisor Dominic Cummings, has strong ties to Russia and eugenic junk science; it seems increasingly clear he is undertaking a series of vast, sadistic experiments in population reduction and mass manipulation. Time and money that should have been spent on clear messaging, equipment for NHS staff, financial support for businesses and individuals has instead been poured into online messaging designed to keep our minds on racist talking points, to keep blaming the EU for anything and everything and to keep minimising the effects, or even the existence, of a deadly disease. The more we suffer, the more the hedge funds betting against our economy benefit. Our final Brexit crash has come early for them, and Popo’s financial backers – people like Crispin Odey – are delighted.

I’m not ill, not very, but I have a rage scream caught in my chest. It never goes away.

In my childhood and adolescence Britain was beginning to come to terms with its history of theft, slavery, and destruction – the true legacy of Empire. Our last great crisis – The Second World War – had created a public insistence on having robust infrastructure and many safety nets for the sick, the weak, the troubled.

There was at least a vestigial understanding that these things were necessary for a functional, democratic nation.

During the 1970s our education system was at its best: child-centred, flexible, challenging, detailed, and imaginative. Knowing facts was not problematic, or politically charged – it was celebrated. Social mobility saw as many people as possible thriving, whatever their background.

It became untenable to suggest that some people were born criminal, born failures, born useless, born inferior, or born to rule.

When people are happy, sad, frightened, simply themselves online I am overwhelmed by fellow feeling. The sight of faces generates a gratitude I can taste.

In the 1980s, neoliberalism began the sell-off of everything communal, state-owned, or supportive. Life for all but the richest has been gradually kicked closer to

Around a third of our population has been trained to embrace cognitive dissonance and learned helplessness, to distrust facts and embrace magical thinking …

Europe must continue to be the enemy. Our government hasn’t – at the time of writing – accessed EU procurement of equipment, hasn’t sourced Irish ventilators, because they are European and must never be seen as helpful, even if it kills us.

Our prime minister is a terminally mediocre sociopath unsuited for any kind of leadership. At the time of writing he has been unable to source, remember, or pass on clear public safety messages. In newspaper columns, I used to call him Popo the Murderclown, because he seemed beneath the dignity of a human name and an honour­able title. He has sunk lower since.

Darwin­ian struggle. There were many voices which warned where we would end up if we eviscerated the public good.

Now, here we are with massive child poverty, homelessness, destitution, prostitution, unemployment, inequality, and social and health services not fit for purpose.

In Glasgow a charity feeding the homeless struggles, rallies, gets donations – sanitiser, gloves, chicken, rice – we are becoming organised, responsive, robust. We note the helpers, we note the profiteers.

Over the last few decades, we have increasingly been fed clumsy narratives about Empire pride, sturdy self­re­­­liance, and a fictional Second World War narrative in

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which white English people were the only ones who won the war against Nazism, while also somehow embracing all of its values.

When I walk outside, under the silence there is the noise of ventilators far away, trying to push life into the dying.

Doctors, nurses, succumb every day. They keep on. The people are resilient within a system our leaders have crippled for profit. I watch the lone walkers, the walkers in groups. Who is asymptomatic? Who will be ill next week, dead next week? The authorities are still barely testing, still aren’t tracing contacts. We have only ourselves to help ourselves.

Our Trumpian battle with reality means we are on fire.

Naturally, we have been in escalating pain for decades and it was necessary to find scapegoats while the rape of our country progressed. The poor were made responsible for their poverty, tainted by infectious need. Compassion was weakness, acting morally was “virtue signalling”, common decency was feeble and bland. Black Britons, always a target, began to lose what little ground they had gained while the UK accepted diversity. Christians unfamiliar with churches since their baptism began to revile every other possible religion, with particular focus on Islam and Judaism. Now, inflammatory online rhetoric pits women against the trans community and few have seen this as the emotionally-engineered distraction it is.

And Popo still rules. His face sags, his eyes recoil into his skull as he tries to stay interested in his announcements to the public. Emotionally-damaged, intellectually-­ inadequate, and financially-indulged public schoolboy, he constructed a life around lying – especially lying about the EU. Although Popo was fired repeatedly for lying, he clung on, anxious to practice the tyrannies of the weak, hungry for the power he had never been able to access while there were better and cleverer boys around him, then better and cleverer men. He became a TV clown, a quietly malign buffoon and gathered more wealth, more connections, more power. As other factions embraced EU-hating as their one true creed, Johnson found himself appropriating their power. In 2015/16, Britain swung from being uninterested in the EU to being obsessed by it over the course of a few months.

Amongst my washing is a T-shirt from one of the many demos in favour of the EU. Were our democracy not broken, a rightwing cult would not be in control of my country after an election that won them less than half the votes. Now they’re killing their own – the old, the beguiled, the fact­ deniers. In the strange days reading, pictures, songs, so many forms of creativity roar straight to my heart, stronger than ever – clear in their power.

Our current chaos is what happens when you destroy and undermine the joy of your own arts for decade after decade, leaving no voices to answer dangerous charlatans in government and a toxic media. We are what happens when you hear from fewer and fewer people in your society. We are what happens when you encounter so few narratives of power and beauty that shoddy lies can beguile you. We are what happens when you ignore your heart, never express your interior world, and become afraid of anyone else’s. We are what happens when all the finer human emotions leave the public discourse, when you abandon your own imagination, disable your ability to change anything. We are what happens when the new and old media have bathed you in cynicism, selfpity, selfishness, delusions of supremacy, fantasies of

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triumphant cruelty, when you have been taught to hate and fear your own species. Art failed, the public discourse failed, then politics, then law, now democracy.

But we organise, we volunteer. We have begun – because it consoles and is consoling – to help each other. We are discovering the true and useful things again. I feel calmer than I have in years. The lights on the river are perfect, every one of them perfect, and this is like falling in love but not with a person, with reality. It’s such a relief.

And the air is sweet in China, the water clear in Venice.

We could save this world together. We have changed life to save ourselves: we could do it again, more, better.

The media cycle of fake shock is weaker and more clearly a series of invitations to suicide. Selfishness begets hoarding, fistfights over toilet roll – it looks bad. Need is no longer a contagion: it is binding us to each other.

The low-paid workers – hospital cleaners, van drivers, shelf stackers – they are beginning to appear as valuable as they always were. People are seeking kindness as a necessity, a key to survival. The wide networks of Extinction Rebellion, Remainers, protestors are already used to responding to changing realities – many have switched function to pandemic aid.

Our government is trying to put in place legislation to suppress us while it pushes through the further disaster of Brexit, but we spend our days indoors, watching people all over Europe who are just as scared and funny and wise and human as us, watching them sing from balconies. We know them. We know you. A racist government cuts us off from life-saving help, simply because it is “foreign” and the madness of the Brexit position is clearer than ever. While EU citizens living here work to save us in our NHS, deliver our groceries, help us not die. We will be different when we emerge.

And the air is sweet in China, the water clear in Venice.

We could save this world together. We have changed life to save ourselves: we could do it again, more, better.

Maybe we will remember now how much we can do, how kind we can be, how strong, resourceful, joyful.

Last night online people showed each other Venus – look how bright she is, how covered in women’s names, how lovely. Look up, look up, look up if you can.

A. L. KENNEDY, born in 1965, is one of the most respected women authors in the UK. With her short story collections and novels she has won multiple prizes, including the Somerset Maugham Award. Many of her books have been translated into German: the novel Das Blaue Buch (The Blue Book) in 2012; Süßer Ernst (Serious Sweet) in 2018, both translated

by Ingo Herzke. Kennedy lives as a writer, filmmaker, and playwright in Glasgow. Since 2017, she has been a member of the Akademie der Künste’s Literature Section.

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THE CITY OF EXCEPTION Anh-Linh Ngo

A PLEA FOR SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE IN THE TIMES OF CORONA

The history of cities in the process of modernisation is, above all, a history of medical and technological progress. What we now know as the modern city – with running water and sewage systems, paved roads and pavements, regulated urban density and the comprehensive connection of all households to a municipal utility network – is thanks in large part to the rise of epidemiology and bacteriology. In the 18th century, ever-growing cities were wrought by tuberculosis, and in the 19th century, they were repeatedly hit with major typhoid epidemics and cholera pandemics. Against this backdrop and starting in England, the new discipline of urban studies began to take shape, which was initially closely linked to a medical­-epidemiological interest. Pioneers of epidemiology developed methods of mapping: John Snow, for example, applied these methods in his examinations into London’s cholera outbreak of 1854. By meticulously tracing all known cases of infection and recording their appearance in the urban environment, he was able to narrow the source of the infection to a water pump on Broad Street in Soho, thereby attributing the transfer of the disease to contaminated water, even before the scientific discovery of the pathogen and the establishment of the theory of germs.

Discoveries of this kind had an enormous influence on the face of the city and the spatial configuration of society as a whole. The large-scale infrastructure measures relating to urban hygiene and housing reform instituted since the second half of the 19th century were based on corresponding empirical data collection and evaluations. Urban hygiene and housing reform thus emerged from statistics, a science initially developed as a discipline to serve the interests of dominion. Without statistics, there is no state – and the link is not only the words’ common root. Whoever possesses the demographic data can impose control and taxes. In the course of the great epidemics, however, scientists began to evaluate this data with regard to social conditions. The shaping of a public awareness of the “social question”, however, came less from a socio­romantic impetus than from the realisation that epidemics cannot be spatially confined. It was out of self-interest that the ruling class began to inquire about the connection between the miserable living conditions of the newly emerging working class in the context of industrialisation and contagious diseases.

Further, the etymological relation between the empirical “surveys” and the word “surveillance” is no coincidence. The major studies on poverty – such as the groundbreaking Life and Labour of the People in London by the urban research pioneer Charles Booth – always entailed a moral dimension as well. The evangelical undertone is unmistakable, as one wanted to discover “elements of disorder” and reveal the connection between poverty, sickness, vice,

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and crime, and to eliminate these factors through social reforms.

“From the start, urban studies have thus been entangled in power structures, in the power to observe, to inspect and to record, much in the sense of Michel Foucault’s panopticon”, as Rolf Lindner ex­plains in his seminal work, Walks on the Wild Side. Eine Geschichte der Stadtforschung (“A history of urban research”).1 But not only the city as we know it today, modern architecture too would have been unthinkable if it were not for an intimate relationship with diseases such as tuberculosis. This is pointed out in the recently published book, X-Ray Architecture, by the architectural theorist Beatriz Colomina: “Modernity was driven by illness.

The engine of modern architecture was not a heroic, shiny, functional machine working its way across the globe, but a languid, fragile body suspended outside daily life in a protective cocoon of new techno­ logies and geometries.”2 The coronavirus pandemic reveals these forgotten origins of the contemporary city and of modern architecture: From the start, they were designed for crisis – for the fight against sickness and contagious disease, for containment, and, consequently, for the implementation of measures of control and surveillance. Clearance zones, maximum density limits, and the expansion of public infrastructure turn out to be instruments of social distancing avant la lettre. In a state of exception, the true essence of things is revealed.

How else might we explain the fact that from one day to the next, a new normalcy has come about that just a few weeks ago would have seemed unthinkable: the withdrawal into the private sphere of our houses and apartments, the broad suspension of public and cultural life, the empty streets and abandoned public spaces?

While the medical crises of the 19th century led to a dualtracked expansion of the public sphere (through the building of public infrastructure and spaces) and the private sphere (through the reform of housing and the domestication of sanitary facilities), in this current crisis, both of those achievements are in jeopardy.

Out of fear of infection, public spaces are perceived to be danger zones. Theatres, concert halls, libraries, schools, universities, parks, and public squares are closed or can only be used under restrictive conditions. In the process, architecture is reduced to its protective function. The sense of privacy within our own four walls is deceptive, however. By now at the very latest, we realise that the technological infrastructures, which originally were introduced to ensure privacy, have a bi-directional character. And while this is not a new phenomenon, against the background of Zoom groupchat windows, our living conditions have become visible to the public like never before. The crisis has, without doubt, advanced the process of digitisation.

To avoid any misunderstandings: The measures employed to combat the corona pandemic seem, from a medical-epidemiological standpoint, to be correct. In light of the far-reaching changes that occurred in the city and in society as a result of the sanitary and hygiene measures employed in the 19th century, however, we must ask ourselves what the long-term impact of the current curtailments will be for cities and for society. For we will not emerge from the crisis unchanged. In crisis situations, after all, boundaries

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can be shifted which had previously been deemed immovable. It is data, recognise patterns, and act pre-emptively. From this standnot without reason that the philosopher Dario Gentili recently wrote point, the effort to introduce the corona app reveals what it repreof the “crisis as art of government”: “With its neoliberal design – sents beyond the immediate epidemic: It is one of those projects with the crisis as an art of government – the crisis is employed in whose purpose is “to sensorize the infrastructure; to network with direct fashion in order to govern individual behaviour as well as that residents’ sensor-filled mobile devices and to merge and then intelof the populations: This is the prerequisite that allows the current ligently analyze the various public data sources. The goal is an crisis to be designated essentially as biopolitical.”3 adaptive city, a city that reacts, or even anticipates.”5 All of this is What this means in concrete terms for our present day is illus- now to be implemented through the back door, without democratic trated in the debate surrounding the corona app, intended to track debate, by private companies like Apple and Google.6 After all, there the spread of corona cases. From an epidemiological standpoint, is an imminent risk. As soon as this state of exception has become there may be good reason to introduce the app. Countries like South spatialised, however, there is no turning back.

Korea and Singapore, which made it through the crisis without an What does this mean for urban society, if private companies economic shutdown, are cited as shining examples. Subsequent increasingly take over the responsibilities of the public sector? information, however – that in the high-tech country of Singapore, What happens when cities, as a result, increasingly follow corpolow-wage labourers living in mass housing facilities are once again rate logic and the accompanying technocratic ideals of dataficabeing particularly affected by a second wave of infections, that a tion? “The quantification of people and their living space transforms disproportionately large number of black people die of COVID-19 them into biometric units and streetscores”, as the anthropologist in the United States and Great Britain, or that temporary agency Shannon Mattern warns. In this vision, Mattern continues, city, workers from Eastern Europe get infected in slaughterhouses or society, and people are nothing but “algorithmic assemblages”.7 whilst working as harvesters in Germany – shows how closely inter- The implications thus concern not only social coexistence, but ultirelated epidemiological and social questions are. mately also our self-conception as human beings. Much is at stake.

Nevertheless, the zeal with which our politicians seek to incorporate tracking into a new healthcare infrastructure is suspicious, 1 Rolf Lindner, Walks on the Wild Side. Eine Geschichte der Stadtforschung (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2004), p. 13. and that they initially even considered collaboration with the con2 Beatriz Colomina, X-Ray Architecture (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2019), p. 11. troversial big data company Palantir Technologies, owned by the 3 Translated from the German edition: Dario Gentili, Krise anarcho-capitalist Peter Thiel. The platitude of the “crisis as opporals Regierungskunst, trans. Daniel Creutz (Leipzig: Merve, 2020), p. 22. Forthcoming in English as: Crisis as Art of tunity” now starts to take on sharper contours: In the shadow of Government (New York: Verso, 2021).

4 Hannes Grassegger, “The City as Enemy”, in Arno Brandlthe crisis, the advancing normalisation of surveillance technolohuber, Olaf Grawert, and Anh-Linh Ngo, eds, ARCH+ gies is being accelerated. In this respect, the future of the public English Edition: The Property Issue. Politics of Space and Data (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2020), p. 168. sphere is not necessarily decided in the use of physical spaces, 5 ibid.

6 Curiously, contrary to government proposals, Apple has which, as we can safely assume, will be reclaimed by people as resisted a central solution for tracking, instead implesoon as possible from an epidemiological perspective. This time menting a decentralised tracing approach. Even if, from a data privacy standpoint, this is the better solution, the too, however, there will be a spatialisation of the state of excepend result is that governments are once more becoming dependent on private corporations in a measure that tion. We will have to recalibrate social coexistence until a vaccine has deep implications for privacy law. See, Simon Hurtz, is found. As we have seen in the example of the European city, these “Tagebuch der Kontakte”, Süddeutsche Zeitung (28 Apr. 2020), p. 2. changes extend far beyond individual and societal behaviour. They 7 Shannon Mattern, “Datenkörper in Coderäumen”, ARCH+, no. 236 (Sept. 2019), p. 23. entrench themselves at infrastructure level into our everyday life.

Today, the real “structural transformation of the public sphere” takes place in a more insidious form in the area of the “smart city”. As investigative journalist Hannes Grassegger describes using the example of conflicts in Hong Kong, the smart city lays the groundANH-LINH NGO (*1974 in Kontum, Vietnam) is an author and work for the transition to authoritarian systems; it mutates into the curator, editor at ARCH+ since 2004, and co-publisher enemy of its inhabitants: “This is exactly the fear of the protesters and editor-in-chief since 2016. After studying architecture, he was a research associate in the teaching and research in Hong Kong, that the smart city is being used by a pro-Chinese field of theory of architecture at RWTH Aachen University government against its citizens. And that the smart city is actually from 2002 to 2004. From 2010 to 2016, he was a member of a weapon being directed against its citizens. This is why Hong Kong the Art Advisory Board of the Institute for Foreign Cultural is at war with the smart city. The smart city is the enemy.”4 Relations; and since 2018, he has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the International Building Exhibition (IBA) The smart city is deeply entangled in the complex of power 2027 StadtRegion Stuttgart. In March 2020, ARCH+ was and knowledge, “in the power to observe, to inspect and to record” awarded the Berlin Art Prize in the Architecture Section by – to again use the above-cited quote by Lindner – only that today, the Akademie der Künste. this power is much more comprehensive than anything the urban An extended version of Anh-Linh Ngo‘s contribution will also researchers of the 19th century could ever have dreamed up. It stems appear in the catalogue for the Akademie der Künste from the capacity to collect and analyse infinitely large amounts of exhibition urbainable/stadthaltig.

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“TRY UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME/LIVELIHOOD NOW” Justin Gentzer in conversation with Adrienne Goehler

There is an increasingly urgent need for a triad of basic income/ basic livelihood, deceleration, and sustainability during the corona­ virus pandemic: Adrienne Goehler on the need to seize the coronavirus crisis as an opportunity for creating a fairer society.

JUSTIN GENTZER

In your book, you describe a triangular relationship between the discourses on the Universal Basic Income (UBI), environmental sustainability, and deceleration. In this context you also speak of a basic livelihood. What are the distinctive features of this triad, and why do you believe that a basic livelihood results directly in greater sustainability?

ADRIENNE GOEHLER Breaking out of compartmentalised/departmentalised/expertised thinking has been my guiding principle since the 1980s. This is because I firmly believe that only permeability between disciplines and other (assurance) sectors can give rise to a social relevance that could enable the arts and sciences to become more effective agents against the destruction of the foundations of our existence. Today especially, we have to learn anew from Alexander von Humboldt that everything is interrelated.

From my perspective on this interrelation, first of all, it strikes me that sustainability sciences and movements make no reference to the idea of a UBI, even though hunger and chronic existential fears clearly rule out sustainable living; second, the UBI movements make no reference to the necessary transformation towards sustainability; and finally, just like conventional development policy, migration activists are slow to recognise the direct link between forced migration and the consequences of climate change. And so, all knowledge and action exists more or less in isolation, within the boundaries of disciplines and knowledge practices.

In addition, for years, I have been astonished by the fact that most artists in all disciplines live precarious lives but are afraid to talk about it and to proactively demand a basic income – a state of affairs that also applies to unemployed scientists. So, in my book on a basic income in Germany, I interviewed around fifty people in science, activism, economics, development work, psychology, and art about the above-mentioned triadic relationship – and also about whether and how basic income could be further developed into a basic livelihood and thus into a human right. This triad of perspectives opens our eyes to the possibilities and contradictions of the way we currently do things.

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JG With

public life grinding to a halt and the economy stagnating, we are facing massive uncertainties and fears. On top of that, there are also those who are observing the emergence of a new form of social solidarity. In this context, the understand­ ing of solidarity as the protection of the weakest is changing to solidarity for the benefit of society as a whole. What do you think a UBI can contribute to this new form of post-crisis social solidarity?

AG Solidarity is the new normal, said an Israeli friend. All the evidence suggests that we should now use this asset to try out the UBI. We gain time, strengthen everyone’s purchasing power, and enable people to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. If we use the crisis to change our perception, it does not have a strangle­­hold over us.

A UBI can provide the foundation for thinking radically beyond the status quo and transforming profound individual and collective experiences at almost all levels into social knowledge and action.

We really are facing a situation worldwide that is literally unimaginable. Do we really want to continue living like this?

With this consumer pressure? With this form of agricultural production and factory farming? With this acceptance of blatant social inequality? With closed prosperity boundaries? Without acting on the knowledge that monocultures and the loss of bio­ diversity favour pandemics?

Suddenly, there are loud and clear demands for different circumstances and priorities in terms of health, education, solidarity, livelihood, and the common good. I have become aware for the first time of the public dismay at how miserably paid systemically relevant tasks are, and this now finally includes the arts, small businesses, and local and decentralised producers, all the solo self­employed who do not appear in any unemployment statistics and who worry every month about whether they can afford to pay the rent. Instead of continuing to accept inhumane and environmentally destructive paid work, it is now becoming ever clearer that people need an income, freedom from fear, and time to make the reshaping and transformation of society their business – which is so necessary now at almost every level.

We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.

Volker Pispers, satirist, adapted from Alexander von Humboldt

JG

We are currently living in an age of constant acceleration.

With the help of a UBI, you advocate a radical reversal of this maxim. But isn’t there a danger of even more acceleration through such a UBI, due to less material insecurity, more holidays, and even more time-wasting consumerism?

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AG On

the contrary, a basic livelihood would create a window of opportunity to transform the current forced slowdown into a self-­ determined mode of deceleration in one’s own life. Because this question is being asked out loud as well: Do we still want this frenzied, unbridled, self-optimised lifestyle, with the destructive exploitation of nature and ourselves?

For those with their eyes open, this fact has been clearly visible and blatantly obvious for some time now. We cannot continue with this level of consumption, destruction, and acceleration; we can no longer ignore the victims of globalised capitalist structures.

We simply have to test a variety of avenues out of this system.

For this, we need time to take up the challenge of reinventing society after coronavirus, so that the economy serves the people and creates a different way of doing things and a different distribution of paid and unpaid work. And with a basic income/basic livelihood, women and men would – for the first time in history – have the same financial starting point.

The arts could also slow down if a basic livelihood made them more independent of the market, trade fairs, festivals, bi- and triennials, premiere marathons, visitor records, and project-funding sources, for which they all have to prove that they are able to present “Something! Totally!! New!!!” in order to survive.

Artists have an important part to play in the post-coronavirus process. They have a head start in dealing with uncertainty. What distinguishes them is their ability to improvise, try out and reject, recontextualise, and deal with errors creatively. From this, they derive the innovation skills that we so urgently need in these times, when there is a distinct unease about any notion of back-to-normal.

Isn’t it obvious that the arts are involved in strengthening the societal notion that we need a guaranteed allowance to make a living, in order to transform outdated, superfluous, harmful production methods into a sensible system for the production of everyday goods that does not destroy resources? Perhaps, in completely new constellations, we could try to find out how to use machines, currently only suitable for car production, for the socially relevant and ecologically compatible production of goods.

Despite the coronavirus crisis, we should not forget that we are in the middle of a dramatic change in the world of work due to artificial intelligence (AI), which could be tackled even more fearlessly with a UBI, since AI will put very many people out of gainful employment. Let us also use this crisis to anticipate this reality and see it as an opportunity for other forms of living and working, as well as an opportunity for the sciences to free themselves from their self-chosen, pre-coronavirus action quarantine.

JG

If one follows current affairs, one cannot help but notice that, despite all international solidarity, nation-states regularly reassert themselves. The question then arises as to what this means for the organisation of a UBI. Is it a nationally limited project, or can there be a community-wide UBI, and if so, how?

AG In many countries there is quite a commotion in this regard – with petitions, webinars, and interviews on social media everywhere meeting with a huge response. Whether in Brexit-Britain or

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South Africa, in Spain or in the Pope’s embassies, wherever you look, the issue is on the agenda – in more than eighty countries around the world, a South African activist recently mentioned in a lecture I attended.

In Kenya, the impressive pilot project – currently the largest in the world, initiated by the US NGO Give Directly – has been running since the end of 2017; with funds from an unprecedented crowdfunding campaign, a UBI will be tested in about 200 villages for twelve years, with the aim of achieving a completely different and far more cost-effective development policy. And even the editor of the Berliner Tagesspiegel is arguing that the question of a UBI could dominate the next coalition negotiations. Avanti!

ADRIENNE GOEHLER, graduate psychologist, curator, and writer is an affiliate scholar at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS), Potsdam. From 1989 to 2001, she was president of the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg; from 2001 to 2002, senator for science, research, and culture in Berlin; and from 2002 to 2006, curator of the Capital Cultural Fund, Berlin. In March 2020, Parthas Verlag Berlin published her book, Nachhaltigkeit braucht Entschleuni­gung braucht Grundein/auskommen ermöglicht Entschleunigung ermöglicht Nachhaltigkeit (“Sustainability needs deceleration needs a basic income/basic livelihood enables deceleration enables sustainability”).

JUSTIN GENTZER works in the office of the director of programming of the Akademie der Künste.

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RUNNING INTO TIMES Something is happening now. Right now. Really. A US nurse holds up a sign that reads: “We risk our lives to save yours. This is happening now.” Everything that is happening now is unstoppable; it is a flood of the NOW. For some it means dying, while for others it means being glued to the news ticker and listening to a huge, scary, global narrative. An unstoppable Now of the crisis in which some are worked off their feet, while others are left with time on their hands. In which some slide into loneliness while others experience collective cabin fever. Blaise Pascal’s proposition that all human misfortune stems from the inability to sit quietly in a room takes on a whole new meaning in these weeks of quarantine.

Kathrin Röggla

However, by the time you read this, we will already be somewhere else or, as they also say now, to some extent somewhere else, because anything we say these days comes with caveats, precautions, and reservations. Now, at the time of writing this, we are finally running into a situation that you may have already left behind; we are experiencing the lull before the storm, we are already driving in poor visibility (yes, driving, because we are an automotive nation!) and we are convinced that nothing will stay the same. These are the metaphors that surround us. One moment, the sages of the economy * (the “savages” of the economy?) gave us a little hope, only for it to be dashed by another economist of a more pessimistic or realistic bent. And then, in rush the mathematicians – who can be termed neither the one nor the other, since, of course, they have always been in a camp beyond hope. Everyone has long since grasped what an exponential curve is, and yet it is explained over and over again. We also listen over and over again; you could call it, if you wanted to, communicative stagnation in a state of frenzy.

The greatest storytellers at the moment are the statisticians, no matter how nonsensical their statistics are. They seem to us to be more believable than ever before, which is something we have learnt at lightning speed, even if they are founded on inconclusive, implausible, or unrobust data. But never before has the rightness of mathematics been so painful.

Anyone who wanted to say that this has been brewing for a long time, that it was a time bomb waiting to go off, “we could have”, “one could have”, “the health system”, and if one did say so, it would sound pretty feeble – just as feeble as the phrase, “Let’s hope mankind has learned its lesson.” But the tendency is to look ahead and, whether I like it or not, I do the same. What must or can we do to prevent what is looming? It is the turn of the health ministers now to have their say, as is it the chief virologists, and it is the public health officers who are now deciding? The collective “we” of lis-

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teners and followers is a community of not-yet-properly-sick patients, who at best are isolating themselves at home and sewing their own face masks. Intellectuals do well to drop their pens and hand out coffee to the homeless, and the work of artists looks to be so pointless that Amazon wants to stop delivering books and goods that are not “systemically important” the week I write this text. Social and political issues are entwined with this supposedly purely biological crisis situation, although we pretend at the same time that there really is such a thing as a natural disaster. But, as we know from the sociology of disasters, even natural disasters are never natural, for disasters are always social; and decisions are never purely scientific, for there are always “interests” involved.

In addition, the rule of the experts is always one that does not need political legitimation. It is slowly dawning on us that we are exposed to situational distinctions; the “we” lives on the street, in houses, on social security benefits, in public service, or as soon-to-go-bust self-employed. The “we” lives in the country and in the city. Yes, the biggest differences seem to be where you live. With surprising speed we have got used to (or have we?) the fact that the collective “we” is being squeezed back into the confines of the nationstate. Also, that history has gained a spatial dimension. Italy is a few weeks ahead of us, China as much as two months, while the USA, recently behind us, has overtaken us, and some countries we are no longer able to precisely place. Heading the field – what will that actually be?

The “we” could soon be a thing of the past, but as long as we are still running into a situation that is a few weeks ahead of us, it will remain. From the present moment I am sending a greeting for the time in the future when this edition of Journal der Künste appears, imitating Kurt Tucholsky, who admittedly set himself a much longer time span for his own Gruß nach vorn (“Greeting to the future”) of 1926, taking a long run-up to the year 1985. At the time he wrote in

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the weekly journal Die Weltbühne (“The world stage”) about not wanting to hand out flattery to the inhabitant of a time to come, the reader of the future, because “of course”, he continues, “you have not solved the question of ‘the League of Nations or Pan-Europe?’; questions are not solved by mankind, but abandoned.” 1985 is already some time ago, and today one would call it the year before Chernobyl or year twenty-three before the financial crisis or thirty-­ five years before corona, because our chronology has also changed in this present situation. The milestones are now biopolitical crises or even disasters, situations with mass impact. This is how it will look in my brief greeting to the future, which normally would not be a salute to the future if I lived in other times, but simply a greeting to the reader. But now epochs lie between us, it seems. Between us lies the viral rift in time. And a huge gap in political imagination.

Because who could have dreamed all this just eight weeks ago?! At least I’m now surprised that I could not have imagined it. Why on earth not? What kind of world did I think I was living in?

And if I am to look five or six months further ahead from today, even beyond you, I can see relatively little: a grainy image, blurred outlines. I find it hard to imagine what state you are in, the issues that concern you, and certainly not what has happened to the person picking up the Journal again two months later, to look back on the good old days. Are we then still divided into health regions and health plans? Do we live in a contingency economy or a planned economy? Perhaps you will be surprised in six weeks’ time that a Journal der Künste will still be published at all, and you will be even more surprised six months later. But rest assured, I imagine TODAY that you will breathe a sigh of relief and simply want to be outside, leaving cabin fever behind you, sweep aside all the oppressive images and the laboriously acquired realisation that we go mad without public space, and breathe a hearty sigh of relief. You have pulled yourself together, I imagine – at least to some extent. You can put the state of emergency behind you a little, as if I did not know better that the state of emergency will never leave us completely and that we can no longer return to business as usual, either way. You see, I do worry about you quite a lot, just as if my life depended on it. This is where I differ from Tucholsky, who had more equanimity to draw on, or could at least claim to. He probably had more political imagination as well.

What we still have in common with him and what is particularly striking about the situation is its linguistic constitution. We experience the most vehement rhetoric – calls for calm, efforts to downplay as well as appeals, speculation, denials, and all the controlling movements of language that call on me in my profession to constantly take notes. In the meantime, this state of affairs has also taken a firm hold of reporting and there are reactions to it, depending on the political situation. In Turkmenistan, people are even banned from uttering the word “corona” at all, and risk a prison sentence for mentioning the pandemic. But in Europe, too, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is now determining by decree, on pain of severe punishment, the “truth” from “fake news”. And that is the way it goes in many countries. At the moment only Brazil’s president in laissez-faire mode jokes about it, but this will soon

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be forgotten when the going gets tough. Jokes have never aged faster, and never been more quickly forgotten than today. Language itself has become highly dangerous in this pandemic, and in recourse to the essayist Susan Sontag and the media scientist Brigitte Weingart, I can say that this was to be expected and has always been so. Be it AIDS, cancer, cholera, or tuberculosis, there has always been a catch with language. There was always the problem of stigma or glory (Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, 1924) as well as the equating of the two. Again we have everything before us, not only medically, but also linguistically: the fear of infection and the fear of mutation, the rules of hygiene and the hygiene of language. The dangerousness of rumour comes close to the dangerousness of transmission. Everything that can be contagious adds up, contrary to all scientific evidence, and sometimes everything overlays everything else. “If the virus mutates, couldn’t it also kill healthy people and children?” I also ask myself, as if it would then come closer, as if the fact that the virus targets the old and sick would make the whole thing more bearable. “What kind of person have you become?” is a question I ask myself, occurring to me not for the first time. You see, future readers, I have been struck by fear and, like Albert Camus’ Dr Bernard Rieux of The Plague, it has crept up on me.1 I suddenly start imagining things. In fact, until now I had 1 “Throughout the day the doctor felt growing inside him the slight sense of dizziness that he got whenever he thought about the plague. Eventually he admitted that he was afraid.” See Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Robin Buss (London: Penguin Classics, 2001), p. 45. I have to admit that I find a kind of comfort in (how original!) Camus’ novel, quite simply because I can read in it something of our present that has become so foreign to me. His description of the city of Oran, Algeria, in the 1940s holds true here: one always works just to be rich; the notion of anything else is missing – the notion of what makes it a modern city, a city that requires good health and where the sick seem to be very much alone. “So just think of one who is about to die, trapped behind hundreds of walls sizzling with heat, while at the same time there are all those people, on the telephone or in cafés, talking of drafts, of bills of lading and of discounts” (p. 6f.). The narrator, Camus writes, would not have been entitled to tell this story if he had not necessarily been involved in everything he hoped to report on. But what fictional character can necessarily be involved in all aspects of this global narrative? We cannot build a model for a pandemic, for it is too all-encompassing. I am also on the lookout for an alter ego figure. I am not yet ready to judge whether the figure of Joseph Grand is that of Camus.

It would be mine. That minor official secretary who cannot find words and does not dare to utter words like “right” or “promise” accompanies me all day long. He has trouble finding the right words, so he asks Dr Rieux for help, who as a doctor obviously has to find words, especially the right ones, doesn’t he? But there is no doctor here, only silence on the move. As the “perceived” Joseph Grand, I also find myself at my first Zoom-controlled Academy managers’ meeting, learning to be mainly quiet at first, because any interruption becomes too much. I experience the whole thing as an exercise in listening, which is at the same time a showcasing of listening.

How does it feel to be just a face for more than two hours? One finds one’s own face in a row with six other faces and tries to establish the right eye level in a video conference, following the advice of the provincial newspaper, by sliding one’s Camus, preferably the complete works, under the notebook laptop, and not paying any further attention to oneself. Which does not work at all, because, after all, this is the first time one is seeing oneself in a democratic line-up, screen by screen.

Of course, there are constant comments on whose screen has frozen again, who cannot hear anything again, and whose connection is wonky. Highly amusing, if we were not concerned with things that we actually have to discuss.

Camus’ novel is called dystopian. It is hard to make sense of the term at the moment.

simply not been gripped by the idea of my own death and that of my immediate circle, as it is now so aptly called. I was still unobsessed. Now I am beginning to turn to magical thinking, as if I had ever fully abandoned it, while speculating that if the virus really does function like a language and it constantly renews its coding with each duplication, then it would have to break down into many language families and strands, so that in the end the search for a vaccine might be in vain – and our herd immunity would be of no use, because we are constantly confronted with variants, and advanced primary medicine will ultimately achieve nothing. Who will get me out of the speculative universe, the forecasting hotbed that I am stuck in; and what is this sinister storm of predictions whose credibility always hinges on the image of doom? What kind of thinking is this that has gripped everything like a strange disease of the future? Wasn’t the end of the world predicted for 2020 anyway? Suddenly I experience myself – all-inclined to listen to seers – opening my ample ear, so far kept carefully closed, to counter-­ enlightenment. The virus is a language, and language a virus. The latter is the famous William Burroughs equation, which, applied here, does not get us out either.2 In his day, he rewrote the history 2 If language is a disease, as Burroughs suggests, what would be health? Silence?

And isn’t precisely this the current fantasy of interruption, of suspension, of healthy silence, which in our societies can only take the form of enactment, especially today, when, of course, people are talking on all channels more than ever.

The drastic surge in digitisation with the attempt to replace public space with digital space creates interesting confusion between public and private.

The latter is always a much more rapid space of control: the supposedly fixed Zoom conferences with their data leaks and screen windows around which home and office back-walls are wrapped, following the digital rules.

Hello? Can you hear me? No, there’s something wrong with the connection!

You have to click on the camera box. Is your camera on? No, you need the mic as well of course. How is it now? I still can’t hear anything. Move closer to your computer. Yes, I can see you now. But the picture’s blurred. Maybe there’s something on the lens. Yes, that’s better. Can you check this? I can hardly recognise your voice. And that clicking sound. It must be you, because there’s nothing here. Is there anyone else in the room? Your connection isn’t ideal. Do you have another room where it might work better? No. Hmm, let’s carry on. Right.

Is there really a silence virus capable of countering the language virus, as Burroughs insinuates? This is a question of symmetry, and in matters of symmetry things soon get very complicated.

I remember Silvia Bovenschen repeatedly referring to the asymmetry of the concepts of health and disease. Disease can be defined precisely, whereas health is an abstract concept, which we have increasingly elevated to something absolute. Yet we still do not know what it means to be completely healthy (after all, it is not the same as fitness), for we only know what it means to be free of specific diseases. There is, if you like, no concretely definable thing called “health”.

In an unfolding pandemic, it naturally becomes normative. Anyone who is ill is a threat to the social fabric, and there is an obvious danger of finding sick people guilty, even if we as a society as a whole have been given a pretty aw­ful diagnosis. Consequently, in a newspaper article (www.zeit.de/zeitmagazin/leben/2020-04/covid-19-recovery­patient-coronavirus-pandemic) a “survivor” has spoken of his initial shame at having contracted the disease.

of creation and transformed the destructive power of a virus into a productive power that is eternally linked to the issue of guilt. “The

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virus knows no morality”, the filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim would now add, but we sit on it all the same.

How unfortunate that our knowledge simultaneously dissolves into statistics, following our intellectual lip service that we as humanity can no longer abandon questions, because otherwise we will destroy ourselves (which Tucholsky of course already knew).

Mathematics notwithstanding, prediction has become an error machine (especially yesterday’s predictions). And as much as we cultural workers may be content with the productivity of error, in this inflationary way it only supplies us with old familiar things, leading us into the political terrain, into the production of ideology. But the question is: Where are we allowed to make errors? Errors are never without context, and that is what makes them so dangerous.

Usually we forget about illnesses when they are over, which is part of the process. Pandemics leave deep marks on society, but we may suddenly remember that there are other diseases.

There are other deaths, other ways to die. How many deaths are we willing to accept here or there, and what types of death? Are we indifferent to them; where is quantification at all possible; and what picture do we paint of them? I observe my astonishment at the ethical evaluations that have to be made. Starting with doctors’ triage decisions and extending to residency orders for people who only have a short time left to live. The discussion about the proportionality of the measures.3 I observe my unease at the trade-offs 3 From which side do you enter the discussion? Is it the side from which you step out of the discussion? Presumably. The positions have been clarified.

“Enough for now.”

There is the side of the single parents, the elderly, and prisoners who cannot participate in discussions anyway. There is the side of the entrepreneurs, the insolvent, and refugees who cannot participate in discussions anyway.

“Come on, stop it!”

The side of the lonely self-employed, practised editors, and nurses who have no time for discussions? The side of experts, virologists, infants, and older children? I don’t need to say anything more about racialisation and social issues in nursing, as you will be reading about this in a few weeks’ time.

“We’ve got the message, got it long ago. This must now finally stop, because we’ve already moved on”, you will say.

“Well, you’re right – but I’ve just got to tell you this one story ...”

between the social, human, and economic costs, and I ask myself once again: Where did I assume I would live? In an age of “the only brief suspension of rights”? In that country blamed by the so-called Southeast Asian countries who are already used to things supposedly beneficial to public health and who voluntarily renounce their civil rights? Do I live in the country where I must always stress that “I consider the measures to be appropriate”? Tucholsky would not have it easy in a second greeting to the future either. He would certainly make a mockery of the fact that the beneficiaries are precisely those politicians who were previously involved in dismantling the pension systems and privatising healthcare. But this

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statement would not be good as a line to end with; on the contrary, it would also be left with him as a fuse that trails into the future.

For art, everything is open. What kind of economy will emerge?

In the long run it cannot be the bursts of free art and video, all those living-room productions that yesterday seemed astonishing, today somewhat inflationary, and tomorrow perhaps superfluous.4

5 A nyone who stumbles across the oddly positive final formulations: This symptom of a disease form in the text was recognised and sent to quarantine. What you are reading here is just a harmless copy.

* The Sachverständigenrat zur Begutachtung der gesamtwirtschaftlichen Entwicklung (German council of economic experts) is a group set up in 1963 to evaluate the economic policies of the German government. The German media often refers to them as the “Five sages of the economy” or just “Five sages”.

4 E ven if interesting phenomena arise, such as the raising of awareness of the historicity of the theatre by opening the archives and streaming online.

Psssssst!

No more chitchat, all right?

“Okay – and what now?”

We’re worlds apart, this is now. You’re talking about the theatre – And all you’ve got in your head is your new vocabulary: zero patient, reproductive factor R, epidemic socialism, chloroquine, coronary, declaration of war.

That vocabulary’s old. Or semi-old. And if new, only ever three-quarters new. There’s always erosion in times like these. Words wear out fast.

And, speaking of vocabulary, what happened to the past perfect?

What past perfect?

At the end there’s always a past perfect that wraps everything up.

Something like:

The line’s dead –

I haven’t used the phone for a long time –

But you still live on in your friends-of-friends stories, in which young 30-year-olds always die, you live on in stories of “no pre-­ existing conditions”, you live on in “shadow on the lung” stories, and “functional reduction” stories, and in the many reinfections you hear about from any doctors on duty. Yes, the on-call doctors are still coming in to see you.

There’s no one here any more. I’m talking to myself. … The line’s dead.

Told you so! Past perfect!

All the unstaged intimacy that suddenly comes into it, which is actually hostile to art – authentic, yes, we know that, but please with an awareness of its scenic character onstage! How else can we pursue this principle? The big question is, when will art finally be accorded systemic importance? And the awareness that one cannot just keep putting it off. All the stranded productions, all the lost books, films, and exhibitions, which are now disappearing during the long break and cannot simply re-emerge afterwards, cannot be subsumed under the sign of the necessary – some cynics would even add – “healing” silence, which is so noisy. How much public space do we need in order to not go crazy, because that is what it will be about? And this brings me to you, kind readers, whose picture I, unlike Tucholsky, just cannot imagine. He was not hoping for a pat on the back from his readers, and I shall be satisfied if they even understand my Morse code message across time.

Summoning the positive forces would be their secret message.5

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KATHRIN RÖGGLA, a writer, is vice president of the Akademie der Künste.

CARTE BLANCHE

MANOS TSANGARIS All the unstaged intimacy …

Extracts from the photo diary of 2016–20 between Taiwan, Hong Kong, Athens, and the Bergisches Land: Images of transnational artistic research.

The texts are based on a lecture entitled “Unusual Observing” about transdisciplinarity, held (via Zoom) on 6 May 2020 at the Zurich University of the Arts. Scenic anthropology – as a working method of the composer Manos Tsangaris – places people at the centre of aesthetic experience, inside and outside of art spaces.

MANOS TSANGARIS is director of the Music Section of the Akademie der Künste.

an attempt to arrive in the film, in which we are situated. creating spaces, relating to spaces, setting spaces in motion, relating to movement in space, setting relationships in motion, moving spaces …

die menschliche gestalt = the human form?

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the trans is also the necessary, blind spot of the composer. what we need to see and cannot or may not look at in order not to hamper seeing..

and here?

I think in small stanzas: scenic memory. scenic precognition. a test of existence. too few tests are carried out. we see only what we know or think we know. (art of concealment) creating stories like traces, though not to deceive but rather to remember.

theory is entirely included in artistic practice, which is entirely included in theory. what should a composer do in the face of and in front of the emptiness of a blank sheet or an empty screen? (and both are already so full.)

or to guess. empathy here, attentiveness there.

“Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul.”

– Nicolas Malebranche (allegedly) after Paul Celan after Walter Benjamin

“Everything that is and arises – arises from a spiritual touch.”

– Novalis

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zelte schalte humanität (Middle High German schalte “a pole to push a boat off”) the tents (“Zelte”) are defined by their borders and legato, by difference and breath – continuity, repetition of the breath, its interruptions at the endpoints of in and out, the idea of it ending the ending of the present …

now both: substance and movement of the tent form the scene, scenic prescience, scenic memory of: right now (knockknockknock at the screen of the terminal device), it is also but not just the hard, smooth glass screen of the monitor, it is also the progression of the legato and the differentiation of the progression of my *langue

composing means developing models of existence and putting them to the test: an intensive test! in germany ( europe) “… more testing must be carried out”. modulating the film … trying out different push poles.

even and especially if these tents, circuits, scenes appear light and playful, each one of them poses an existential question. it is the question of their end and their special endlessness.

“The microcosmos is the ultimate for humans. /we are also cosmometers./” and: “Nothing is more achievable for the spirit than the infinite.”

– Novalis

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manageable experimental arrangements!

“There is only shape for us, where we can oversee.”

– Karoline von Günderrode

“I”, however, is a scenic I here. composition is thought of differently: no symphonies, no laptop artist, no film music, etc., but rather exploring space-and-motion as an exploration of existence. (time: movement – space: substance.) o perhaps … it is about the whole! (in both senses of the phrase.)

this by through about … beyond the trans initially also has something of a perforation, if you want to imagine it in the physically plastic or even sculptural sense. carrying across. transport or meta phorein.

“The human being: Metaphor” – Novalis

nothing puts us in as much danger of leaving our house than beauty. (the sharpness of the blade, daring to make the cut, stripping apart the cut itself.) it is the only terrible, peaceful weapon.

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I don’t think at all of different fields, works of existence, disciplines of a kind of synthesis of transgression, but rather it is the permanent given transition, the natural centre of existence as it were, which is only permanently disturbed when the opposing, even conflicting spaces, spheres of our discussion – intersect (and are fought for) … where we are, how we invent ourselves, how we fight for that, where we want to go, what stops us?

want to try to concentrate on this moment (to move around it), where we try to understand our present. particularly with and in art, and especially in performative, scenic composition … skené = tent

… and to what extent that plays out and occurs between our finiteness (finiteness in general) and our infinity of inner experience. the point of penetration from inside to outside.

“The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. Where they penetrate each other, it is in every point of penetration.”

– Novalis

trans, if the composition succeeds, is the normal (flow) state, so to speak. but if this occurs, it is, of course, all the more difficult to look at it from the outside and break it down. it is not sortable. inter is much clearer to see. those there, we here. and now we are trying it out. models of existence subjected to intensive testing.

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It is nice to be so small.

GO! TO THE DEVICES!!

“Our spirit is a link between elements that are utterly different.”

– Novalis

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100 YEARS OF RADIO One hundred years ago, the first public radio feature was broadcast from the Funkerberg (“Signal Hill”) in Königs Wusterhausen. Starting in the mid-1920s, the predominantly musical programmes were expanded to include the early original radio plays. One of the first of its kind in Europe was Richard Hughes’ A Comedy of Danger, initially broadcast by the BBC in 1924 and then broadcast the following year in German under the title Gefahr (“Danger”). The play is about three people who find themselves stuck in a mine shaft, groping in the dark. They can only hear acoustic signals – much like the listeners sitting by the radio …

Today’s audio drama is characterised by transgression and deconstruction: spatially, acoustic­ ally, and linguistically. From 21 to 24 May, the Akademie der Künste on Hanseatenweg was going to host the 11th Berliner Hörspielfestival (BHF, Berlin Audio Play Festival), meant as a demonstration of the array of media variations of independent audio plays. Within a short period of time, however, the festival had to face the challenge of streaming parts of the planned programme – the competitions – live and in real time on the YouTube channels of the Academy and the BHF. The contributions here summarise the audio play from various perspectives: Oliver Sturm discusses the status of public service broadcasting between market conformity and supply of basic services; Paul Plamper in conversation with Thomas Irmer reflects on aspects of public space in his audio drama work; and Jochen Meißner summarises the credibility reserves of radio, from Orson Welles’ production of The War of the Worlds to the present day.

Cornelia Klauß

BROAD-CAST Oliver Sturm

Millions were listening. Millions were turning at the dial; to the left, the roar of chaos, to the right: the whistling of devils.

Only a narrow line in the middle resounded. Millions were waiting: dismal the day, tough the times, stale the bread, ominous the future. Arnolt Bronnen, Kampf im Aether In the beginning was the Radio, and the Radio was part of broad-­ casting, and broad-casting was the word, and the word was sent unto all. At least to everyone who owned a radio-receiver. And that was soon the masses, if not to say, nearly Everyone. The radio-­ programme soon replaced the vinyl-record, and now Everyone could listen to the dance-music at home, even if they could not afford a record-player. For it was the year 1923, and there was hyperinflation. Broad-casting, however, was a part of the Reichs-­ Post-Ministerium, the ministry in charge of postal services and telecommunications.

Even art could be heard, orchestral music, singing, recitations, and the newly invented radio play, otherwise known as audio drama or audio theatre. The tele-vision came later, and for that, one needed a different device for play-back than the radio device: the tele-vision receiver. But tele-vision was also part of broad-casting. At the time, however, broad-casting was no longer located within the ministry, but was a public service institution. Then when tele-vision arrived, and was incorporated into the broad-casting system, it became clear that Radio and broad-casting were not one and the same thing.

Wonderful words, akin to a vocabulary invented by children. It is surprising to observe how such simple and illustrative children’s language was used to identify the most state-of-the-art media of the time, the technological mass media of the 20th century.

Inventions: telegraph 1809, photography 1822, telephone 1872, phonograph 1877, film 1895, radio 1918, television 1928, Internet 1960/70.

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For years the devices held their own, fulfilling their duty as fixtures of everyday life, until suddenly, at the beginning of the 21st century, they merged into a single platform, and the Internet became a universal platform for everything. The digital revolution and Internet have led to a re-melding process in which all of these media inventions are undergoing a metamorphosis. Not only the devices themselves are being re-melded – radio receivers, televisions, telephones – but also the associated words. Interestingly, for some years now, the “cultural-minded” person will have encountered the term “radio” in a wide range of metaphorical manifestations. Music albums, for example, frequently take the title Radio so-and-so, and events in the club scene often use the attribute to promote their product. Radio is hip. Yet for the most part, Internet radio is not radio at all, but rather a playlist, while actual radio is more of a radio programme! The metaphorisation of the terminology corresponds to the dissolution of the form. Ovid, your Metamorphoses are the now!

The terms are not only associated with notions of the devices and the forms of reception, but also with concepts of what they are expected to do. For at least twenty years now, public service broadcasting in Germany has been struggling with the transformation of the media landscape and the simultaneous high demands that are placed on the broadcasting system. Meanwhile, that system is struggling with its audience numbers, now referred to in terms of “quotas”, “ratings”, or “clicks”. The “listener” has also undergone a transformation and is referred to by broadcast consulting companies as the “customer”. Radio frequencies are called “brands”, shows have become “products”, and artists are now “producers”. Public service broadcasting has entered the market, competing with companies such as Audible, iTunes, Disney+, Netflix, and others.

Does public broadcasting really need to do this?

Looking at the market for audio books, a comparison between the ARD media centre (ARD Mediathek), and Audible, for example, produces some odd results. If, because of the current COVID-19 situation, you enter into the search mask of ARD “Camus: The Plague”, you get three results, none of which are the original text, while at Audible you get 56 results. Most of those 56 productions, however, turn out to be former ARD productions, many of which were sold to Audible by circuitous routes. If I were to purchase the old Westdeutscher Rundfunk (West German Broadcasting, or WDR) production of The Plague for €13.95 at Audible, I would in fact be paying double: the price that I already paid via my broadcasting license fee, and the retail price I would be paying today. This means that the ARD is essentially competing with itself. And this even though the treasures in its archives are hundreds of times greater than all the Amazons and Netflixes together, based on numbers and inner diversity. Why don’t they hold onto them and make them accessible to the public themselves?

As a matter of fact, the public-service broadcasting system in Germany is losing its younger listener groups, even to a degree in those formats which were specifically designed for them. For them, radio and television no longer play a role as platforms where content can be “played”. Hardly anyone consumes live radio on the

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Internet anymore. As a blogger explained to me, with life being as Excerpt from the Interstate Broadcasting Treaty dated 1 May 2019, tightly scheduled as it is, you can only listen “independent of time”, Section 11: that is, in the form of podcasts. A listener identity, which was once formed through the recurring trusted programming based on a radio Under their remit, the public-service broadcasting corporafrequency and with its radio hosts, now comes about, even among tions are to act as a medium and factor in the process of the the well-educated social strata, in the form of a kind of tribal comformation of free individual and public opinion through the munity via social media, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, and based production and transmission of their offers, thereby serving on specific topics: films, games, gender issues, Fridays for Future, the democratic, social, and cultural needs of society. In their clubs, psychology, sports, and spirituality packaged in podcasts offers, the public-service broadcasting corporations must that are more “approachable” than a passively received radio proprovide a comprehensive overview of international, European, gramme. Comments allow the listener to participate directly in the national, and regional events in all major areas of life. In so content, thus allowing recipient to become author: Self-efficacy doing, they shall further international understanding, European becomes a predominant principle. integration, and the social cohesion at the federal and state Can radio even continue to exist as a “programme” in the conlevels. Their offers shall serve education, information, advice, ventional sense? and entertainment. They must in particular provide contribuThat is the question. The key question for German public sertions on culture. Entertainment should also be provided in line vice broadcasting is: How can it fulfil its cultural mandate as prowith a public service profile of offers. vided for under the Interstate Broadcasting Treaty (RStV, 2013) if there is no longer a programme, if only single products (podcasts) The term “culture”, however, becomes in itself a fluid notion. If you are made available in unmoderated form and devoid of all con­ turn on the ARD cultural programme at any given time, the probabiltextualisation? ity is high that you might come across a Dvořák, Haydn, or Beethoven.

The answer should be to create platforms and possibilities for As if culture = classical music. The essence of a discerning cultural the web that would be similar to programmes, which would be able programme, however, lies in particular in the presence of the word to moderate and contextualise the atomised single products. The “culture”.

German public-service broadcasting system is reacting, and with And at the same time, “culture” now has a place on all freits media centres (“Mediathek”) and podcasts, is actually genera- quencies. The regional Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (Berlin­ting an overwhelming amount of culturally valuable stand-alone Branden­burg Broadcasting, or rbb) station, Radioeins, broadcasts content – indeed, “products”. The Internet, though, being the great high-calibre journalistic cultural pieces, such as the special show catalyst that it is, acts as an accelerator for all kinds of products, in “Medienmagazin” on the 100th anniversary of radio broadcasting. which are in danger of swimming aimlessly in the vast online ocean. Another rbb station, Inforadio, is almost better in some theatre, film, By no means antiquated, but rather highly controversial, in this or book reviews than the features found on rbbKultur. In this way, context, is the question: What has become of the essential com- a simultaneous movement of degradation – cultural broadcasting ponent of radio: the editorial, the programme, the context, the … aha! shifting more and more to classical music broad­casting – and build­… “Spirit” of the radio waves?! up – culture becoming more diversified on other frequencies – is Currently the focus of critique is trained on so-called Kultur- taking place. radio, or cultural radio stations, which in nearly all ARD institutions This is reminiscent of the beginnings of broadcasting in 1923, are undergoing a fundamental transformation. This critique – when there was still a full programme, or a “unified programme”, “regrettably” – falls under the heading of “compulsory savings”, and everything that was broadcast had to find a place on one frealthough in better times it is referred to as “digital convergence”. quency. Interestingly, the early years of radio saw the clear emerIn Berlin, we are talking about one million euros less in the pro- gence of some of the same lines of conflict that are so virulently gramming budget. And the Akademie der Künste asks, with con- evident today, at the end of conventional radio. In particular when cern, whether the planned programming reforms, like the ones it comes to politics. Arnolt Bronnen’s questionably dark and at the facing hr2-Kultur or rbbKultur for example, will allow the preser- same time so insightful 1935 radio broadcast novel Kampf im Aether vation of the essence of what public service broadcasting is meant oder die Unsichtbaren (“Struggle in the ether or the invisible ones”) to be in Germany, or whether, with the ratings in mind, that essence is perhaps the most poignant testimony to this. Perhaps the only is not meant to be sold as well. The responsible parties at ARD are novel in which radio broadcasting itself is the hero. in the not-so-enviable position of having to satisfy all the forces “Attention … Berlin. … Dear listeners, I greet you at home in that are pulling at the broadcasting system: programme mandate / front of your radio receiver!” legitimisation of the broadcast fee vis-à-vis the citizens and visEther, transmission, the miracle. The phenomena that allowed à­­­-­­­vis the Kommission zur Ermittlung des Finanzbedarfs der Rund- a voice from the distance to be heard in one’s own living room, was funkanstalten (Commission to determine the finance requirements initially considered to be something of a spiritual experience, which of broadcasting corporations, or KEF) / profitability / media trans- electrified listeners. At first, broadcasts were limited to only one formation. hour per day, although it quickly became more. On 15 May 1925,

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the Reich Broadcasting Corporation was founded. Bronnen proclaimed: “Meanwhile, listener numbers quickly reached the first million; the growth curve was already an indication of the millions to come; the trajectory was clear: radio broadcasting, by way of the technological avant-garde, goes straight to the people; radio became people’s radio.”1 Soon broadcasts were being aired all day.

BOTT Shit.

NARRATOR

... sighed Bott.

BOTT As director of this cultural institution that is growing by the hour, I stand here defenceless, naked as it were, facing my brilliant yet unrestrained artists.

MODERATOR, SPEAKING FROM HEAVEN We just have to create more administration.

NARRATOR Bott understood this. Two general managers were hired, three management offices emerged from the wastepaper bins. One head of personnel began to fulfil his duties.

BOTT Within a short period of time, the share of administrative personnel for one hour of broadcasting was seventy out of a hundred.

NARRATOR And the administration followed the general preference of all administrations: It administered, preferentially, itself.

‘Six o’clock to eight o’clock, and in thirteen three quarter minutes each: Experiences with film stars, radio about animals, Is the handyman too expensive?, German history in a quarter of an hour, discussion of theses: Rise or fall of the bourgeoisie, story of the week, interview of the week – announced, cancelled, recited, forecasted, repeated, proclaimed, passed on, mentioned in passing – nothing prohibited, anything may be There are more serious sources that could help in understanding said. It rattles and hums out into the ether, rumbles and bum- the beginnings of broadcasting, for example the writings of Hans bles into the people’s houses.’2 Bredow, Friedrich Bischoff, Rudolf Arnheim, or Walter Benjamin.

And what does the programme director, Bott, from Bron- But if you want to learn about the political forces pulling at broadnen’s novel say in the audio play, which we produced in 2007 casting, in all their abysmal depths, there is hardly a more eloquent for the Hessischer Rundfunk: testimony to be found. The founders, in those times of economic hardship, conceived of the broadcasting system purely in terms of BOTT And thus the programme, once our problem child, is now the entertainment, as a mass medium. Then, once Hitler triumphed, it source of satisfaction, for us and for the listeners. was at his mercy and without defences. In 1923, radio broadcasting REPORTER What are your thoughts with regard to the future pro- seemed to be a liberating force, whereas ten years later, in 1933, gramme structure? it was oppressive. The Weimar Republic’s broadcasting system had BOTT You know, between us, as long as music comes out of the failed to foster a democratic political awareness among its listeners. box, everything is fine. (laughs loudly) In his seminal study Das Radio, the media theorist Wolfgang Hagen identifies precisely this as the capital flaw of early radio broadThat was written in 1934 by someone who seriously intended with casting in Germany.3 his book to make inroads with the Nazis. By the way: In the late When the broadcasting system was reconstituted after 1945 1920s Bronnen and his wife, Olga, were engaged in a ménage à as an (a) federal and (b) a fee-based broadcasting system, state trois with her lover Joseph Goebbels. Bronnen uses at times dras- neutrality and plurality were established as its guiding principles, tic expressionistic images to depict how Jewish newspaper pub- along with an educational and cultural mandate. The federal aspect lishers, Communist associations, and Brownshirt thugs attempted came in part from the American occupying forces, the licence fee-­ to infiltrate and manipulate radio broadcasting. But like nearly financing from the English, thus creating a structure whose aim everything undertaken by Bronnen, who among all the German was to serve democratic and cultural education purposes. This authors was perhaps the most twisted dog, the novel did not suc- worked so well that in the European context, the German broadceed, at least not as an entrance ticket to National Socialism, casting system has become a rock-solid example of public service because all the forces depicted in it get their just deserts in equal broadcasting that has an exemplary degree of plurality in its promeasure. What Bronnen delivered with Kampf im Aether was – gramming – in contrast to broadcasters with a nationally centraldespite being a dramaturgic mishap (for clearly, the “radio broad- ised structure, such as the Italian broadcasting corporation RAI or cast” is not an ideal protagonist for a novel) – a highly informative the Hungarian broadcasting corporation that has mutated into an depiction of the most powerful mass medium of the 20th century organ of the state. Even the British Broadcasting Company, the in Germany, and as such, so poignantly formulated that the book BBC, known colloquially as “Auntie Beeb”, has had to defend itself was retroactively banned by Alfred Rosenberg, and Bronnen was against the attacks of Prime Minister Boris Johnson. kicked out of Goebbel’s Reich Chamber of Literature. The book But the model is in crisis, the responsible parties are under would never be published again. In 1943, Bronnen, who had hoped constant pressure to justify themselves to populist forces from the with his broadcast novel to curry favour with the Nazis, left for outside – see the German AfD Party – and pressure from the inside Austria and went into the Communist underground. In 1955, the to reform, let’s call it, to put it nicely, “slightly sclerotic conditions”.

GDR’s first Minister of Culture, Johannes R. Becher, brought him And unfortunately, the new path seems to be: broadcasting as a back to East Germany, where he worked at the Berliner Ensemble, business model. In internal meetings, coached by consultancy firms among other places. and media scientists, ARD employees are being prepared for the new

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 13

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age of broadcasting as a manufacturer of culture. Certain terms have become public. The programme should, as it is formulated at the broadcaster hr2-Kultur, be oriented to “easy listenability” and be served in small portions, in line with the principle of snackability.

Ideally the term “culture” should be avoided, as it is seen as a source of irritation; the same goes for “literature” – the word “book” should be used in its place. Cultural radio as mood management, as WDR put it several years ago. From dramaturgists of radio plays, who answer to their programme directors, we audio-play people sometimes hear things like “Nowadays, Oliver, you can forget about experimental radio drama. What we need are solid mainstream productions, literature adaptations, series, consumable narrative formats.”

That, of course, is a fundamental misunderstanding. As if, in order to remain true above all to our standards of contemporaneity, we always focus on the dreaded “experimental” or, even worse, the artfully dodgy aspects of our trade. And thus we look with some measure of concern upon a generation of dramaturgists who have taken on the thinking of radio managers.

In the institutions of the ARD, culture has a difficult standing, and is often not least of all played off against news formats. At rbb they plan to build a giant media centre with a focus on news, while at the same time savings of a million euros are to be attained in cultural radio. Yet everyone knows just how little fact and number checks say about his or her actual societal existence, and how empty we are left by consuming nothing but news. “Meaning” – to speak for once on such an elevated-philosophical level – comes from an in-depth exploration reached by those cultural and psychological layers that in our existence radiate in the background; in other words, meaning comes from anthropology, philosophy, religion, and art.

If the broadcaster, however, reacts according to the market and mutates into a business model, what does that business consist of, even if still financed through fees? What becomes of its public-service character, and its mandate? Does it come in the delivery of proof each day that it is legitimate to charge for a broadcast? Is it in providing evidence that the ratings legitimise the fee through customer retention?

While writing this, the world around me is under threat from the COVID-19 pandemic. Suddenly, it becomes clear what supplying basic and functioning “public-service” means. All of a sudden, the centring power of broadcasting becomes visible in its inner plurality and in its ability to bundle things and transmit orientation and knowledge. Official statements from the government, the Minister of Health, or the Robert Koch Institute are made via the broadcasting system – and are critically commented upon. The virologist Christian Drosten does a daily coronavirus podcast on Northern German Radio, or NDR. Even the criticism expressed on the Internet, that the ARD is relying on too few experts, is presented as a debate and documented on ARD and Deutschlandfunk. The Federal Commissioner for Culture and Media, Monika Grütters, appeals via broadcast to artists, and the broadcasters report about alternative performance formats, emergency shortages, and new financing ideas for artists in this time of the pandemic. Suddenly, the centring power of public service broadcasting and its ability to provide

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orien­ta­­­tion becomes tangible, and for the time being the populists seem – not only in Germany – to have lost their appeal.

“Centring” – to counter this reflex from the start, is not meant in the sense of a “centralised organ of state”, but rather as a manifestation of diversity and at the same time of a bundling of hetero­ geneous forces through moderation – which was always one of the fortes of broadcasting, in the midst of the bubbles and echo chambers of hotly irritable Internet communities. And when we hear of freelancers being let go due to budget cuts, we are concerned about this potential – for the freelancers are precisely the ones who make up the plurality of the programme. And one asks oneself if public service broadcasting really has to present itself as part of the culture industry, or whether instead it should return to its original qualities, namely: the representation of cultural diversity and in-depth focus. STRONG-MINDEDNESS. “In another age,” writes Herbert Kapfer, former audio play director at Bayerischer Rundfunk, “radio was a medium of surprise.” He goes on to make a call for the broadcasting industry to “once again recall its own inner media freedom”.4 The click numbers of the ARD Mediathek show that strong-­ mindedness and inner media freedom are qualities that the audience wants. The formats with the highest click numbers are big audio plays and features. In other words, productions that do not fit into the uniformly spun, mass-compatible programming of thrillers, action, and mystery films showing on Netflix and Amazon, but rather productions that present independent artistic positions. The desire to compete with the even greater click numbers of Amazon would mean only producing that which those substantial click counts are generating: mainstream. The greatest treasure of the ARD, however, consists of its own archives. Not to mention broadcasting as the producer of culture, with its ensembles, composition events, features, audio plays, and lectures. The expression of the pluralist forces of artistic production in Germany, Europe, and the world, the representation or reflection of the work of authors, composers, actors, filmmakers, singers, architects, or visual artists, in the end, is less a question about the canon of what is considered worthy of culture, and more a question of the intellectual approach to that material.

In particular, here in Berlin and Brandenburg – where artistic creativity is more densely concentrated than anywhere else in Germany, where all these creative forces could be recruited for broadcasting, not just for reporting on them, but also on the active level of creation – is where it would be possible to shape the public ­service cultural programme that we dream of.

1

A. H. Schelle-Noetzel (Arnolt Bronnen), Kampf im Aether oder die Unsichtbaren (Berlin: Rowohlt Berlin Verlag, 1935), p. 230.

2 Ibid., p. 378.

3 Wolfgang Hagen, Das Radio: Zur Geschichte und Theorie des Hörfunks— Deutschland/USA (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2005).

4 Herbert Kapfer, “Diskursmedium”, Neue Rundschau, 3: Himmel Hörspiel (2019), p. 90.

OLIVER STURM, a director, is a member of the Film and Media Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste.

“WE LOCALISE OURSELVES THROUGH HEARING” PAUL PLAMPER IN CONVERSATION WITH THOMAS IRMER ON THE DIMENSIONS OF PUBLIC SPACE IN HIS RADIO PLAYS

Paul Plamper, Der Absprung (“The jump”), Soundseeing Festival, Munster, 2019.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 13

THOMAS IRMER In your radio plays, you have repeatedly addressed the themes of the public sphere and public space, and you have gone into public spaces with some of these works as sound installations. Now, in our state of emergency, public spaces are largely closed. What are your observations?

PAUL PLAMPER Acoustically, public space isn’t closed off. When in the evening applause for nurses and doctors echoes through the streets, sound becomes a connecting element. The silence that otherwise pervades the streets doesn’t actually do justice to the scope that’s acoustically available for dealing with the isolation and lockdown.

I’m surprised I don’t hear more shouting. That was totally different in our project Release (West German Radio (WDR) and Northern German Radio (NDR), 2004), when we composed songs with young prisoners in two Berlin prisons. Back then I was really surprised how noisy it is in prison. Probably because it’s natural for everyone to shout to each other across the yard and the corridors when they’re locked up. In prison you can also sense what a catalyst for conflict the ambient noise can be. You can close the door behind you, but acoustically it’s very difficult to keep the others at bay. I imagine this also plays a role in the increase in domestic violence during the corona crisis.

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What also strikes me in the current situation is this mixture of isolation and simultaneous collective experience.

A radio show experienced by listeners in many individual, very different situations is not dissimilar.

TI In Ruhe 1 (“Silence 1”) (2008) and most recently Der Absprung (“The jump”) (2018), you deal with situations of public life or in public. The recordings were made outside the studio as well. On the other hand, you have also developed new forms of reception for the radio play transcending radio, for example when Der Kauf (“The purchase”) (2013), with its theme of home ownership on urban wasteland, was staged for the public as an acoustic environment. How did this idea of the public sphere evolve?

PP The idea of going into the public space with radio plays came from the subject of Ruhe 1 (WDR/Museum Ludwig). In the broadest sense I was concerned with something like a “collective failure to render assistance” in a violent incident I witnessed as a bystander. In the street, a man was scuffling with a woman and suddenly dragged her away from my group before any of us intervened. A very brief moment that was over before you realised it. It felt like a house of cards where we all leaned against each other in our non-reaction – social psychology calls this the “diffusion of responsibility”. I wanted to reproduce this herd behaviour and make it palpable with simultaneous polyphony. This resulted in a multi­channel installation at Museum Ludwig. We designed an abstract café situation with twelve tables and loudspeakers on top of them. From each loudspeaker comes the voice of a guest, and the conversations run in parallel and in loops. Every five minutes the voices suddenly fall silent, when the couple outside thuds loudly against the window. While the incident is happening, everyone just gawks. This moment of calm is followed by a hesitant resumption of conversation, a slow crescendo until everyone’s back to operating temperature. At some point, the conversations imperceptibly return to their starting point, like a kind of Möbius strip. And then the installation goes on its next lap as if nothing had happened, until the next moment of violence followed by silence, and so on.

Visitors can move freely through the maze of voices, listen to the individual conversations at the respective tables, and compose their own audio play. They’re an active part of the installation, because they bend over the loudspeakers to zoom into the conversations acoustically. In this way, they also visually stand in for the guests at the tables. In the best case, visitors become aware of their own inability to respond, because they cannot actively intervene in what’s happening. This form of walk-in audio play evolved quite organically, perhaps because hearing in general has a lot to do with space.

We localise ourselves through hearing. Our ear constantly reassures us by picking up the resonances of the kind of space we’re occupying and where we’re standing in it.

This kind of stand-in function for the audience recurred repeatedly later – in Die Schlange (“The queue”) (n.b.k.

Berlin, 2016), for example.

For Das Akustische Kleist Denkmal (“The acoustic Kleist monument”, produced by the Federal Cultural Foundation/Maxim Gorki Theatre in 2011), we took it a step further. The monument at Kleiner Wannsee doesn’t exist without visitors. It’s made not of stone or metal, but of people with headphones preoccupied with visiting the gravesite of the poet Heinrich von Kleist and his lover

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Paul Plamper, Die Schlange (“The queue”), n.b.k., Berlin, 2016.

Henriette Vogel. Visitors become the monument through their act of commemoration.

In Der Kauf (WDR/Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR)/ Deutschlandfunk (DLF)/Schauspiel Cologne, 2013), too, listeners played a physical role by temporarily “occupying” an urban wasteland. The performance venues in various cities were often contested urban wastelands targeted by investors. We worked with the dummy head technique, that is, with surround recordings for headphones. The hyperrealistic spatiality sketched a neighbourhood onto the wasteland and sought to encourage listeners to imagine a future for the empty space. For this audio play is about projections of happiness onto property and the question of whether we own property or property owns us.

TI You vary the links between acoustic space and the social public sphere and subsequently extend them in the “Fremde & Geister-Trilogie” (“Strangers & ghosts trilogy”) about the construction of the alien, your last project extending over several years, various materials, and even different ways of working.

PP The trilogy opened with a satyr game, the audio installation Future Dealers (TONSPUR_passage/MQ, 2016). In the six loudspeakers of the “soundtrack” passage in the Museum Quarter in Vienna, a spectacularly sound-designed spaceship dropped off two “Afronauts”.

Their voices echoed through the passage and addressed passers-by. The futuristic historians are more highly developed beings from the future. “Colour-blind” to skin colour, they take a look at the backward Europeans of the 21st century. As blacks in a pedestrian passage, they’re of course immediately mistaken for drug dealers, which interests them all the more – is racial discrimination in this prehistoric society a fetish or part of a primitive cult?

The main part, Dienstbare Geister (“Servant spirits”) (WDR/BR/DLF Kultur/Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR)/ Ruhrtriennale, 2017), applies the perspective of today to the colonial historical past. In 1905, Sandra Hüller, an impoverished young German, seeks her fortune in the German colony of Cameroon. Through her emigration alone, she rises there to become a mistress of servants, whom she calls her “servant spirits”. Their present-day revenant is Olivier Djommou, who as a young migrant from Cameroon tries to gain a foothold in Germany in 2015 in a story told in parallel. One learns how Europe is still profiting from the power differential established with structural violence at the time, and how it continues to uphold the economic imbalance that drives young Cameroonians into migration. Europe, which has been harming Cameroon for 130 years, holds great promise of salvation for many and seems to have no alternative as a destination – as if the only option is to try to switch to the winning side.

At the Ruhrtriennale, the two time levels could be heard in two adjacent rooms. The audience was split up and, historically speaking, listened in two directions: from the colonial past to the present or vice versa. The installation upheld the time level running concurrently next door; one could hear, for example, how the colonial era extends from the adjacent room as a kind of poltergeist into the present.

With Der Absprung (WDR/DLF Kultur/BR/Schloßund Kulturbetrieb Altenburg, 2018), the trilogy then lands on our doorstep, in the cultural sector. The story is about an actor from Cameroon who has come to Leerstadt with an international theatre ensemble to perform in the shrinking town. This goes well for a few years, until the so-called refugee crisis, and then things turn uncomfortable for him as an African in the German urban environment.

Finally, a new-right demagogue calls for a boycott of the

theatre. The installation tries to make the social mix of the small town tangible in all its complexity and fragmentation. The various positions and fronts unfold and move around the audience. Voices distance themselves, or they “jump” from a springboard down to the audience in the circle of loudspeakers, which is intended as a forum accessible from all sides. We’re touring with it through different towns. So far it has worked best in public places – for example in Münster, where passers-by joined in and stayed for the subsequent discussion with the audience.

TI For your productions, you use methods that together make up a complete aesthetic approach: getting away from the fully prepared text, getting out of the studio, using improvisation and even chance, important decisions only at the editing stage – all this contributes to the authentic character of the public sphere in your pieces.

PP In Hüttenkäse (“Cottage cheese”) (WDR, 1999) and Stopper (WDR, 2000), the first of the more musical radio plays featuring rappers, I had a weakness for the improvisations that they often do as a warm-up before their actual performance. The microphone’s often already switched on. A gem or two from these sessions will sometimes become a skit on the final record, but usually they just get cut away. In my case, almost all of these moments ended up in my plays. I found the rappers in these “preludes” so relaxed and inventive. They did things that they held back in the subsequent takes.

However, we’ve only used improvisations deliberately as a method at original locations in Top Hit leicht gemacht (“Top Hit made easy”) (WDR/NDR, 2002). The radio play is based on the 1998 Manual Das Handbuch. Der schnelle Weg zum Nummer 1 Hit (How to Have a Number One Hit the Easy Way) by the British ’80s pop icons The KLF. They guarantee that if you follow all the instructions precisely but don’t achieve a number one hit within three months, you get your money back for the book. All jobless people are called upon to claim their slice of the music business cake – a sarcastic and at the same time highly entertaining media criticism. In the radio play you can always hear what the instruction book says, and this is contrasted with improvisations in which Milan Peschel playfully tries out the instructions in reality. With this documentary approach we slipped some fiction into the reality and of course let our anti-hero get his number one hit.

TI The “hit” arising from the radio play in fact reached thirty-seven in the German singles charts, not quite as proposed in the book, but with the mutual interpenetration of radio play and reality – and compelling particularly due to the improvisation.

PP In my opinion, improvisation is above all a sensitive indicator of communication. You can hear immediately whether you’re really interacting or adopting a routine speaking voice, which can actually only be heard on the radio. A studio recording excludes the muck, the many minor disturbances and background noises, although they’re elementary for my ear. The acoustic environment plays a role like an additional actor, because our voice adapts to the space and the ambient noise more than we’re aware of. If an actor in a neutral studio room pretends to turn on a water tap, for example, you can hear the difference – perhaps because, unlike with other media, there’s no image to divert attention from phoney sounds and to corrupt perception.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 13

Improvisation becomes really interesting when professional actors perform with non-professionals. Various experiences and languages become incorporated en passant and, from the professionals, often fragments of other techniques, roles, and dramaturgies.

At the same time, even the best actors are challenged not to sound as if they’re acting when they work alongside a non-professional who’s precisely cast and totally at ease with himself.

Since Top Hit, we have often improvised on the basis of a narrative framework, dialogue sketches, and character profiles. It’s good when my scenes serve as a stimulus for further development by the actors, for things they invent themselves. I then learn more about my original idea than if I staged and recorded what I wrote directly. It doesn’t stop at what I originally thought up.

The editing is then a continuation of the writing. For months, we condense the various recorded versions of the scenes into a kind of essence and make music with the material and, in the best case, content and musical decisions coincide. It’s important to me for the final result to retain something of the searching.

The most honest form for me is the sketch. Perhaps because I come from the theatre, I am still reluctant somehow to have to freeze everything into a definitive result, into zeros and ones. That’s why the editing always revolves around the question of how to preserve the vitality in the digital form, how to create a kind of energy imprint from the recordings that stays alive in the listener’s mind and continues to work in their imagination.

PAUL PLAMPER is a writer, director, radio play producer, and audio artist. His theatre work includes productions at the Berliner Ensemble and the Istanbul City Theatre besides others. Since 1999, he has been writing and producing radio plays, mainly for WDR. For his works he has received, among others, the Prix Europa for Tacet in 2011 and the Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden (War Blinded Audio Play Prize) for Ruhe 1 in 2009. Since 2005, Plamper has been creating works in the urban space, such as Das Akustische Kleist Denkmal at Kleiner Wannsee (since 2011), as well as audio installations, staged inter alia at Museum Ludwig in Cologne, ZKM Karlsruhe, MQ Vienna, and at the Ruhrtriennale.

THOMAS IRMER is a literary scholar and writer at Theater der Zeit and has been a member of the jury for the Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden since 2004.

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“GET THIS CHARLIE,

GET THIS CHARLIE!”

Jochen Meißner

OR THE CREDIBILITY RESERVES OF RADIO

cast from the Chicago radio station. The NBC network also used the recording, for the first time allowing the broadcast of pre-recorded material. The American radio historian Michael Biel reports that the number of recordings knowingly or unknowingly broadcast by The 31-year-old radio reporter Herbert Morrison from station WLS NBC until the middle of the Second World War could be counted and his sound engineer Charles Nehlsen had flown in all the way on his fingers.1 Radio was a medium based on the principle of live from Chicago to report on the landing of the airship LZ 127 Hinden­ broadcast.

Ironically, however, this iconic moment of radio was not a live burg in Lakehurst. Nehlsen will record the news bulletin using a portable record cutting lathe. After the Zeppelin’s catastrophic moment in the first place, but rather a live-on-tape moment. What crash, they leave the lathe behind and return to Chicago with four mattered was not the immediacy of the moment, but rather the “Presto Direct Discs”. The aluminium plates coated with a cellu- authentic sense of shock that was expressed by journalist Herbert lose nitrate lacquer were the industry standard for radio at the time. Morrison, as he shouts out, at around minute 9 of his news report: The following morning, segments of the 39-minute story are broad- “It’s burst into flames, it’s burst into flames and it’s falling, it’s crashOne of the few iconic moments of radio history is based on an event that took place on 6 May 1937, in the US state of New Jersey.

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ing. […] Get this Charlie, get this Charlie! It’s cra… and it’s crashing, it’s crashing, terrible.”2 The hydrogen-filled airship goes up in flames and crashes near the landing mast. Morrison watches as, in his own words, one of the worst catastrophes in the world unfolds.

The horror is inscribed in his voice, as is his grief: “Oh, the humanity.” The shock wave of the explosion is also visibly and audibly evident as a groove left in the disc as it is being cut on site. Thanks to sound engineer Charles Nehlsen, the cutting head and graver did not destroy the recording discs, which are now stored in the National Archives of the United States.3 But even at the moment of being overwhelmed, Morrison continues to do his job. The call addressed to his sound engineer and first listener, “Get this Charlie, get this Charlie!” ensures not only that there is something to be broadcast the next day, but also that the message he records of this historical event is preserved. The explosion itself is not audible on the recording. The high pitch of Morrison’s emotional voice, however, is all the more evident. This is due to the fact that original recordings are always played around 3 per cent too fast, as Michael Biel found4 – likely an effect of the multiple transfers of the original discs cut on site to the wax master discs with 33 revolutions per minute and shellac plates with 78 rpm.

In terms of media history, the following can be said about the media “coverage” of this event: The notion of radio as an exclusively live medium, as it started out due to a lack of suitable recording equipment, continued far into the period of professional audio recording. This also illustrates that the live principle is always a category of intermediation – in other words, it is never “immediate” and in very few cases singular. The authentic sound, after all, is not least of all a question of the equipment used for recording, of transmission, and of broadcasting the information. Not to mention the receivers and the media context in which they are situated. A Volksempfänger (“people’s receiver”), identified by the model name “VE 301” – a reference to the date the Nazis assumed power on 30 January 1933 – naturally has a different media status than a television set seemingly endlessly looping the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on 11 September 2001. Terminal devices, which in addition to all the other streams of information also receive data packets with audio information, come close in their disembodiment to what amplitude-modulated waves (AM) on the medium-wave broadcasting band were able to do in the early days of radio. They brought enough energy themselves and – using headphones and something that served as an antenna – could basically be received without an amplifying terminal device: “From mouth to ear on the beam of electric power …”.

What is it then that distinguishes radio, and the art of radio, beneath the vast firmament brimming with frequencies and a network full of data packets? Even today, in times of crisis, it is the sense of experiencing an event live and direct as it unfolds. But this experience of the world, not only in acoustic terms, is also framed by the forms that the stories or narratives take. This already held true in the early years of radio. Were it not for the crash of the Hinden­ burg, Orson Welles’ audio drama The War of the Worlds, presented live on Mercury Theatre on the Air, would not have had the effect

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it did.5 Even eighty years after its premiere broadcast on 30 October 1938, the fictitious news story about an invasion from Mars is still the most famous audio drama in the world. And the small town of Grover’s Mill (located like Lakehurst in the state of New Jersey) got a monument to mark the landing of extraterrestrials on the radio.

Its effects played out in particular in the newspaper industry, which stood in competition with the new medium of radio, and which criticised the radio drama for allegedly triggering a mass panic.

“The reality of radio is the reality of radio ...”, warned WDR audio play dramaturg Klaus Schöning in 1977, as he was producing a German adaptation of the Orson Welles’ radio drama,6 before continuing, “… or otherwise the Martians will come.”7 That amounted to a warning to listeners and an appeal to the makers to treat media narratives in a responsible way. When the radio drama was repeated one year after the original broadcast, on WDR 2’s daily show Mittags­ magazin, 158 listeners inquired with the Westdeutscher Rundfunk about the Martians8 – despite the fact that Schöning made every effort to avoid the impression of a live newscast. The confusion may have been compounded by the fact that the host of the Mittagsmagazin show, Lothar Dombrowski, one of the station’s characteristic voices, also had a role in the audio drama. One could surely lament the insufficient media competency of the listeners, but what is also apparent is the high level of credibility that public service radio enjoyed. At the time, there were no private radio stations in Germany.

The resources that Orson Welles exploited – namely the radio reportage, with its live hand-offs to correspondents on the ground, the fluid format transitions from information to musical entertainment and back – all concealed the madness that was unfolding within the extremely compacted narrative. Within just one radio hour, rockets were said to have been launched from Mars, the in­­ vaders reached Earth and subjugated it, only to succumb shortly thereafter to enemies that this superior technological civilisation had not anticipated: earthly viruses and bacteria. The media scholar Wolfgang Hagen points to a phenomenon that he calls Hörvergessenheit (“listening forgetfulness”), by which one “forgets what it heard by forgetting that it heard, thereby being all the more convinced of the presence and factuality of what is heard”.9 This listening – or general media-forgetfulness – accurately describes the moment when the monsters emerge from the closet, the Martians arrive from outer space, or a virus comes from Wuhan.

Even more than any media fiction that tickles the aesthetic awareness of each media consumer as a playful exercise in competence building, the greater danger lies in the delegitimisation of media-based information itself that is propagated by interested parties. Because if everything is just a “story”, if the framing determines the perspective, in the process impeding any attributions related to identity politics, as well as any discussion or discourse, then reality can be denied, until – or despite the fact that – actual corpses start piling up in the refrigerated trucks.

Once the subversive strategies of the arts have become strategies of power used by the ruling forces, the media makers react in a variety of ways. Firstly, in the attempt to reclaim the credibility

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resources of the radio (in whatever channel it is shared) in journalistic formats. Podcasts, like the one by German virologist Christian Drosten on the public service broadcasting channels, reactivate what has been denigrated (and eliminated) by the broadcasters for years as “Schulfunk” (“School radio”), because “storytelling” is so much cooler.

The main characteristic of the underlying principle of the podcast, however, is not primarily expertise, but rather the certification of its contents with the expert’s own voice. There have never been so many first-person singular narrators as there are today.

Rarely does the author take a step behind the story that is being told. The capacity for abstraction that ensures every sound bite, every interview snippet is the result of a thorough process of vetting, is something that is expected from listeners less and less nowadays. Instead, we often get to hear hours of unedited talk. Who would have thought that boredom is an exceptional feature of authenticity? Not every interviewer is as interesting as the person they are talking to, and not every question serves to advance a deeper understanding of the subject at hand. Instead, meticulous attention is paid to ensuring that the journalist’s own perspective – complete with its blind spots and distortions of perception – is transparent at all times.

In radio drama, the certification of the art work through the voice (of the speaker) is much more difficult. It functions best when author and presenter are identical. Franz Mon and Gerhard Rühm, for example, act both as explainers and as performers in their experimental language pieces. Carlfriedrich Claus turned his physicality itself, or to be more precise: his articulation apparatus, into the subject of his work. And in Christoph Schlingensief’s voice, artist and artistic character blended into each other – as was clearly evident in his audio dramas.

At the moment, according to the criticism of radio drama producer Ulrich Bassenge in the Neue Rundschau,10 the radio industry is deaf “to the music of words, the subtle nuances of metalanguage: The Austrianisms of Ernst Jandl, the Bavarianisms of those providing Paul Wühr’s sound bites, the riparian oscillations in the lecture of Michael Lentz.” For this reason, he calls on the audio drama departments to forgo the use of trained speakers for one year in order to heighten the overall sensitivity to sound. At the same time, he warns against using the word “authentic”. In addition, Bassenge demands that “for one year (and clearly it would be the same year), no literature adaptations and no form of a secondary exploitation of literature” should be broadcast.

At the same time, it is evident that radio art formats such as audio drama, artistic documentary, or narrative sound-art pieces are currently moving away from the long-term trend toward documentary formats. What began with the O-Ton-Stücken / Original sound pieces of the 1970s and authors like Erika Runge (Bottroper Protokolle / “Bottrop protocols”)11 or Peter O. Chotjewitz (Die Falle oder Die Studenten sind nicht an allem schuld / “The trap, or, the students are not to blame for everything”)12 and continued with the stage formats of the theatre performance groups Rimini Proto­ koll (Karl Marx: Das Kapital, Erster Band / “Karl Marx: Capital,

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The War of the Worlds monument in Grover’s Mill.

volume one”)13 or She She Pop (Testament)14 is giving way to an increasing fictionalisation. Incidentally, both groups were awarded the still most prestigious German audio play prize, the Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden (War Blinded Audio Play Prize)15 for the audio play adaptations of their pieces. Both groups conceive of their audio drama from the perspective of the radio and create awareness among listeners of the possibilities and credibility reserves of the medium. Lisa Lucassen of the theatre collective She She Pop learned from radio “that audio drama is namely not theatre without image, but rather that theatre is a kind of audio drama with suboptimal timing, too many breathers, not enough sounds and no sound effects”.16 One can think of audio drama not only in terms of production aesthetics, but also in terms of the communicative effects. This is precisely what Schorsch Kamerun does, singer of the punk band Die goldenen Zitronen. He too is a recipient of the Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden, for his piece Ein Menschenbild, das in seiner Summe null ergibt (“An image of humanity that adds up to zero”).17 As a fan of inauthentic speaking – preferably with a megaphone – he dismantles the aporia of the by-now stale state of subversive speech in his “extra-theatrical audio play about the end of diversity” entitled Kreiskolbenmotorhase (“Circular piston engine hare”).18 Having been socialised in a “dissident discursive pop culture”, Kamerun takes on the role of the “Tailwagger” in his audio drama, who jumps over every stick that is held out for him. As a “circular piston engine hare”, Kamerun rotates between the hedgehogs, who

always get there quicker and who define the limits of the communicative spaces. Because sovereignty is held by whomever determines the framing. However and herein lies the point: In his hounded panting, work is being done – mechanical work, like in the combustion chamber of the circular piston engine, and aesthetic and political work in the audio play. The title of the audio play, Kreiskolbenmotorhase, “circular piston engine hare”, literally makes sense.

“Get this Charlie, get this Charlie!” we hear Herbert Morrison calling out from the distance.

It cannot be the primary task of the arts to react to simplistic, contradictory, and destructive media messages with fact checks.

Just as Schorsch Kamerun reacts to complexity-reducing malignancies by increasing the level of complexity, for example by pondering an expression “that is not suitable for H&M advertising or the next original slogan by [the FDP politician] Christian Lindner”,19 so too does visual artist and audio play producer Eran Schaerf attempt to increase the level of complexity.

In his audio drama Die Stimme des Hörers (The Listener’s Voice) from 2002, he employed a term used in 2017 by Kellyanne Conway, advisor to US President Donald Trump, to cover up a particularly blatant lie.20 She called it an “alternative fact”. In the automated talk radio station Die Stimme des Hörers, featured in Schaerf’s audio play by the same name, computer software ensures that information such as the names of people, places, and wars are occasionally replaced by “alternatives”.

In 2017, Eran Schaerf’s audio play Ich hatte das Radio an (“I had the radio on”), was aired for the first time.21 The title refers to a suggestive one-liner uttered by Marilyn Monroe. When asked by a reporter whether she was naked during the photo shoot for a calendar, she protested: “It’s not true that I had nothing on. I had the radio on.” Schaerf’s piece, like the production before it, is set in a fictional radio station. This time it is a super-station formed through a merger of all the German-speaking broadcasting institutions of the 2030s. News reports are “randomly-automatically” distributed to the listeners. Topicality plays only a subordinate role here. The news bulletins that Schaerf broadcasts in his audio drama reflect – on a highly abstract level – the media-related implications of canonical audio dramas. Der Lindberghflug / Ozeanflug (Lindbergh’s Flight / The Flight across the Ocean) by Bertolt Brecht is cited, as is Der Tribun (“The tribune”) by Mauricio Kagel and the previously mentioned Falle by Peter O. Chotjewitz. And of course, Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds is not missing either.

The media-theory significance of radio for Marilyn Monroe is that of the interplay of the meaning of coverage, as in clothing, and news coverage, as in reporting. Monroe’s remark, as we learn in Schaerf’s audio drama, thus has less of a consequence for the fashion industry than it does for media theory: “Monroe is saying what we already know, namely that every news report also covers up something at the same time – a detail, a perspective, an occurrence on the side-lines of events.” Revealing and concealing are the two sides of a media-based representation (also reception) of the world – an aporia that cannot be escaped. The disclosure of this insight is also part of the credibility reserve of a medium that

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reflects on itself. When, as is the case in Eran Schaerf’s audio drama(s), thesis, argument, proof, and example converge, and become audible in their execution, then it becomes clear what radio, what audio drama, is capable of. Get this, Charlie.

1 Michael Biel, correspondence: “The Hindenburg Broadcast”, History of American Broadcasting (last updated 21 Nov. 2019), http:// jeff560.tripod.com/hindenburg. html 2 The complete recording of Herbert Morrison’s commentary (uploaded 20 Feb. 2017) can be found at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=tm36oLQzbQ0 3 Entry on “Herbert Morrison – Hindenburg Disaster, 1937”, Eye­ witness: American Originals from the National Archives, https://www. archives.gov/exhibits/eyewitness/ html.php?section=5 4 Biel, “The Hindenburg Broadcast”.

5 Orson Welles, The War of the Worlds. Based on the novel of the same name by H. G. Wells, radio drama version by Howard Koch, directed by Orson Welles. First broadcast on CBS, 30 October 1938.

6 H. G. Wells, Der Krieg der Welten (based on the radio drama by Orson Welles), translated into German by Robert Schnorr, directed and adapted by Klaus Schöning. First broadcast on WDR, 18 April 1977.

7 Klaus Schöning, Die Wirklichkeit des Radios ist die Wirklichkeit des Radios oder Die Marsmenschen kommen. Feature, first broadcast on WDR, 18 April 1977. Print edition in Klaus Schöning, ed., Hörspielmacher – Autorenporträts und Essays (Königstein im Taunus: Athenaum, 1983), pp. 123–34.

8 Werner Faulstich, Radiotheorie.

Eine Studie zum Hörspiel “The War of the Worlds” (1938) von Orson Welles (Tübingen: Günter Narr, 1981).

9 Wolfgang Hagen, “Der Radioruf. Zu Diskurs und Geschichte des Hörfunks”, in Martin Stingelin and Wolfgang Scherer, eds, HardWar / SoftWar. Krieg und Medien 1914 bis 1945 (Munich: Fink, 1991), pp.

243–74, here p. 271.

10 Ulrich Bassenge, “Hoerspiel my ass.

Eine Geschichte der Verachtung”, Neue Rundschau, 3: Himmel Horspiel (2019), pp. 28–32.

11 Erika Runge, Bottroper Protokolle, directed by Peter Schulze-Rohr, produced by SDR. First broadcast on SDR, 11 June 1969.

12 Peter O. Chotjewitz, Die Falle oder Die Studenten sind nicht an allem schuld, directed by Richard Hey, produced by SDR/SR/WDR. First broadcast on 20 January 1969.

13 Rimini Protokoll, Karl Marx: Das Kapital, Erster Band, directed by Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel, produced by DLF/WDR. First broadcast on 20 November 2007.

14 She She Pop, Testament – Verspätete Vorbereitungen zum Generationswechsel nach Lear, audio drama based on the performance of the same name by She She Pop and their fathers, music composed by Max Knoth and Christopher Uhe, directed by She She Pop. First broadcast on Deutschlandradio Kultur, 19 September 2011.

15 The prize was established in 1950 by the Bund der Kriegsblinden (Federation of the War Blind) and has since been awarded frequently for radio plays representative of “state-of-the-art” radio drama.

16 Lisa Lucassen on the occasion of receiving the Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden prize for the audio drama Testament – Verspätete Vorbereitungen zum Generationswechsel nach Lear on 12 June 2012 in the small broadcast hall of Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne.

17 Schorsch Kamerun, Ein Menschenbild, das in seiner Summe null ergibt, directed by Schorsch Kamerun, produced by WDR. First broadcast on 25 September 2006.

18 Schorsch Kamerun, Kreiskolbenmotorhase, directed by Schorsch Kamerun, produced by WDR. First broadcast on 14 November 2017.

19 Schorsch Kamerun, “Die Hamburger hätten gegen G20 gestimmt” [“Hamburg had voted against G20”], interview with Stephan Lebert, Die Zeit Online, 4 July 2017.

20 Eran Schaerf, Die Stimme des Hörers, directed by Eran Schaerf, produced by BR/ZKM/Intermedium 2. First broadcast on 23 March 2002.

21 Eran Schaerf, Ich hatte das Radio an, directed by Eran Schaerf, produced by BR. First broadcast: on 7 April 2017.

JOCHEN MEISSNER is an audio drama critic for the trade publication Medienkorrespondenz and author of radio features (most recently: Voyager 3: Eine Reise durch den radiophonen Raum / “Voyager 3: A journey through radiophonic space”). From 2006 to 2010, he was artistic director of the Hörspielsymposion an der Eider (Radio play symposium at the Eider) at the Nordkolleg Rendsburg.

He is co-organiser of the independent audio drama festival Berliner Hörspielfestival der freien Szene (Berlin independent audio play festival), and has operated the website hoerspielkritik.de since 2012.

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“MIHAELA AND HER DAUGHTERS AREN’T PLAYING A ROLE;

TOPIC EUROPE

Johanna-Maria Fritz, born in 1994, studied photography at the Ostkreuzschule in Berlin and has been a member of OSTKREUZ – Agentur der Fotografen since 2019.

Her photographs have been published in Spiegel, Die Zeit, and National Geographic.

Having exhibited in France, Australia, China, and the US, she has been awarded the Inge Morath Prize and the Lotto Brandenburg Prize. In the exhibition “CONTINENT – In Search of Europe”, put on by OSTKREUZ – Agentur der Fotografen and the Aka­ demie der Künste and due to open in October on Pariser Platz, she presents a work about witches in a Roma community in Romania.

THEY ARE WITCHES ALL DAY LONG” Johanna-Maria Fritz in conversation with Anja Maier and Thomas Winkler

ANJA MAIER / THOMAS WINKLER Johanna-Maria, for your recent photographic work you travelled to Romania. What were you looking for there?

JOHANNA-MARIA FRITZ Magic.

AM/TW And … Did you find it?

J-MF I found Mihaela Minca, at least. Mihaela is a witch – the country’s most powerful witch. I visited her for the first time in April 2019. Although many different kinds of magic exist in Romania, I really wanted to accompany a Roma witch. Magic has a long tradition in the Roma community and still plays a very important role.

AM/TW How did you come across the topic?

J-MF For years, I took photos of the circus; I travelled to Iceland, Palestine, Afghanistan, all the way to Senegal, accompanying the circus. After finishing with that topic, “magic” was an obvious next choice. I started doing research, and came across a lot of exciting stories to do with magic in the process – and one of them dealt with the witches of the Roma communities. When this part of the project is finished, I want to stick with the topic and take photos of other magic-related stories.

AM/TW What does the everyday life of a witch look like?

J-MF Mihaela works alongside her two daughters and her daughter-in-law. In the daughter-in-law’s family as well, the mother and grandmother also work as witches.

With the exception of one daughter, they all live together under one roof. Customers often come to their house, so something is always going on at Mihaela’s place. One time, two young men came over with a dead pigeon, which is what you need for the love potion they wanted. Nowadays, though, a lot of it takes place over the internet.

The rituals stream live on Facebook and Instagram, with either one of the daughters or one of their husbands doing the filming. People are watching, and requests for rituals come in from all over the world. There is a love potion and a fire potion, you can wish for wealth, put a curse on someone – and of course you can have your future read.

AM/TW Is there a price list for all of those?

J-MF There is no set price list. Mihaela sets the prices.

She looks at the customer’s Facebook profile or asks them what they earn, and she sets the prices accordingly. If someone has a problem but doesn’t have enough money, she’ll even do a treatment for free. She can afford it; business is good and Mihaela is always busy, even if communication

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 13

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with international customers is not always easy. Mihaela doesn’t speak English, but the two daughters do – and for the rest, there’s always Google Translate.

AM/TW Your photos show witches at work, and sometimes it gets pretty bloody. One of your pictures shows a heart.

J-MF Yes, an ox heart.

AM/TW Or burning brooms …

J-MF As a witch, of course you play with a lot clichés.

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There are little witch figures hanging everywhere in Mihaela’s house. The broom, as everyone knows, is one of the central witch clichés. I only recently found out what its meaning is: When you placed a broom in front of your door, it supposedly meant that you didn’t want any travellers or witches coming in – so it’s actually a racist symbol.

AM/TW Is that also something you focus on?

J-MF Yes, it was important to me to accompany a woman – and a woman from the Roma community. The Roma society is known for its patriarchal organisation, so I

wanted to show how a strong woman could turn the tables in a society like that. Out of all her extended family, she is the one who earns the most money by far, so she gets to call the shots.

AM/TW She looks quite bossy in the photographs.

J-MF And she is, definitely.

AM/TW How do you get close to a woman like that?

Was it hard?

J-MF Not so hard. Mihaela is very open, and there are usually journalists around, because for her, press coverage means free publicity. There are of course certain limits, but right now, the only one I can think of is Mihaela’s love of sleeping in, which means that nothing can happen before noon. Other than that? I celebrated Christmas with the family; I could have spent New Year’s with them as well.

AM/TW One thing that stands out when looking at your photos is how integrated these quite mysterious rituals are in everyday life, in a very matterof-fact way. Is “the witch” a role that Mihaela plays, whilst another Mihaela takes off her headscarf in the evening after work?

J-MF It isn’t a job. Mihaela and her daughters aren’t playing a role; they are witches all day long. In a way, I was expecting that maybe the mood would change when a ritual was about to happen, that the whole thing would be staged. That isn’t how it is. The way Mihaela does magic is the same way she drives: haphazardly, like a rowdy 19-year-old who just got his driver’s license. You expect it to be a cliché of mysticism. It ends up being mystical too, but in a completely different and particular way.

AM/TW Have you made use of her services as well?

J-MF No, not while working with her, I think I’ll avoid that. That would be a bit too spooky for me; after I’ve wrapped up the work, then I might make a wish.

AM/TW Your work deals with strong women in a patriarchal society. Is it feminist?

J-MF Yes, in some respects it certainly is. Of course, Mihaela is a positive example for others, because as a woman she has attained a powerful position in a patriarchal society – and because she uses this position to stand up for the rights of homosexuals, for example. Of course, the work is also feminist merely because a woman is taking photographs of other women – and not a man taking pictures of a woman, as has always been the case.

To me, though, more important than the feminist aspect is the mysticism, the essence of magic, how it works. It isn’t so much about the wishes coming true, or about the future unfolding just as Mihaela forecast it, it’s much more about the fact someone is taking on your problem.

You could also go to church, say ten Hail Marys, you could go to a therapist, or you can go to Mihaela. She has a talent for making you feel that you and your problem are in safe hands, that she is listening and doing something about it. Her husband once put it this way: Customers fall in love with Mihaela as they would with a mother.

AM/TW Your work will be part of the exhibition “CONTINENT – In Search of Europe”. What does your work tell us about Europe?

J-MF It tells one of the millions of different stories that are taking place in this Europe. It tells of a Europe that people don’t have on their radar in this form. This is not about Brussels, Berlin, or Paris, it’s about one of the many fringe areas of Europe, where there are still surprising, mystical things to be discovered. Of course, it tells equally of a continent where Roma people still suffer persecution and discrimination, nearly everywhere, despite the fact that the services of a witch like Mihaela are in demand all over the world.

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AM/TW What comes to mind when you hear the term “Europe”?

J-MF Of course it’s a good thing that there are virtually no more passport controls in Europe, that we can move about freely and live wherever we want to. Yet that does not hold true for everyone. When I hear the term Europe, I think of the remote external borders, of the misery that exists in refugee camps like Moria in Greece. When I think of Europe, quite honestly, I get quite angry.

AM/TW Can you imagine Europe breaking apart?

J-MF I can imagine anything. Nor am I afraid of it. It would be interesting to see what would come about and what our world would look like if that were to happen.

AM/TW You are one of the youngest photographers in the OSTKREUZ agency. When and how did you get into photography?

J-MF I was 12 or 13 years old when I started taking pictures of all my friends. Back then, in Baden-Baden where I grew up, we used to break into old castles and villas.

Often, people inhabited them for only one week out of the year, and so we would break in and take photos. It was an adventure, and it was about the thrill. I guess that was a formative experience: Already back then, I wanted to capture that special moment with the camera.

AM/TW Is that why you became a photographer?

J-MF I never made a conscious decision to become a photographer, it just happened. I can’t envisage doing anything else now.

AM/TW Looking at your previous work, one thing is striking: To this day, the focus is on people – people in motion, people in conflicts, in war. What is it that fascinates you about those situations?

J-MF There are as many stories in the world as there are people. I want to use my photos to tell those stories.

Ever since I started studying, I’ve actually always taken photographs of people, but I never actively decided to do so, it just happened that way. Those were just the stories that interested me the most, the ones that moved me the most. Even though my work often includes landscapes, the focus always is on people.

AM/TW Is there anything you wouldn’t photograph?

J-MF No, actually, I find everything interesting. Fashion photography perhaps. During my studies, I did some product photography, and I’d do that again if I ever needed the money. In the end, I think I have too much respect for the craft: I once watched a commercial photographer arrange the lighting for a single necklace using forty mirrors and lamps. That’s a science in itself – fascinating – but it wouldn’t be my passion, it’s too finicky.

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AM/TW What do you get out of being a member of an agency like OSTKREUZ? J-MF First, there’s less paperwork, they take care of that for you. Of course, it provides you with more opportunities as well. On my own, never would I have had an exhibition at the Akademie der Künste. Above all, of course, having so many experienced colleagues whom you can ask anything, at any time, is a huge bonus. The monthly meetings where everyone presents their new photos for discussion among the group are great as well.

You get your fair share of criticism, naturally, but the exchange is very helpful.

ANJA MAIER, born in 1965 in East Berlin, is a journalist and author. She reports for the newspaper taz. die tageszeitung as parliamentary correspondent on the CDU and CSU parties and the German chancellery. She has published several books, writes the taz column “Bauernfrühstück”, and has been a contributing author in various photographic publications.

THOMAS WINKLER was born in 1965 in Nuremberg.

For years, he has written for many different media outlets – including taz, Zeit, and Spiegel Online – on the topics of culture, sports, and whatever else is going on. Since 2011, he has worked as music editor for the Berlin city magazines Zitty and tipBerlin.

The interview printed here is an excerpt from a podcast that accompanies the exhibition “CONTINENT”. Thirty-minute Podcasts with all the OSTKREUZ photographers will be available at adk.de, ostkreuz.de, and on Spotify.

“CONTINENT – IN SEARCH OF EUROPE”

“CONTINENT – IN SEARCH OF EUROPE” 2 October 2020–10 January 2021

An exhibition by OSTKREUZ – AGENTUR DER FOTOGRAFEN and Akademie der Künste Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz 4, 10117 Berlin Opening: 1 October together with the EMOP Opening Days EMOP Berlin, 1–31 October 2020, in Berlin and Potsdam

“CONTINENT – In Search of Europe” is the new thematic, joint exhibition put on by all members of OSTKREUZ – Agentur der Fotografen, in cooperation with the Akademie der Künste. It kicks off on 1 October 2020, with the European Month of Photography (EMOP) and the EMOP Opening Days.

The exhibition in the Akademie der Künste on Pariser Platz is conceived of as an artistic and political statement with a focus on the present state of Europe, which will be critically examined from twenty-two perspectives.

In a series of independent artistic projects, the OSTKREUZ photographers explore various aspects of coexistence in Europe, shedding light on personal, societal,

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and political phenomena, as well as on underlying structures and historical developments.

Through their pictures of people and the environments they live in, these photographers gain access to complex topics – ranging from questions of identity and security to renationalisation, migration, and integration – gaining a fundamental understanding of humanism, democracy, and freedom of expression.

Participating artists: Jörg Brüggemann, Espen Eichhöfer, Sibylle Fendt, Johanna-Maria Fritz, Annette Hauschild, Harald Hauswald, Heinrich Holtgreve, Tobias Kruse, Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler, Dawin Meckel, Thomas Meyer, Frank Schinski, Jordis Antonia Schlösser, Ina Schoenenburg, Anne Schönharting, Linn Schröder, Stephanie Steinkopf, Mila Teshaieva, Heinrich Völkel, Maurice Weiss, Sebastian Wells, and Sibylle Bergemann (1941–2010) Curator: Ingo Taubhorn

“CONTINENT” hopes to provide fruitful catalysts for the current discourse on Europe, asking questions such as: What is it that connects us? How do we coexist? Who is included when people speak of Europeans?

The exhibition is supported by the European Fund for Regional Development (ERDF), the Senate Department for Culture and Europe, and the Society of Friends of the Akademie der Künste.

TOPIC EUROPE

AGAINST A POLARISATION OF THE ARTS

Noémi Kiss

Depending on where we stand and to where we turn out attention: PROGRESSIVE WEST The Arts are in flux. Art is not a game of chance, whereby artists the proceeds of their work based on a lottery. Nevertheless, AND BACKWARD winthere are societies that are more fortunate, in which art is less polarised than in Hungary or in other Central and Eastern EAST? European countries, societies in which political forces

NOÉMI KISS (born in 1974 in Gödöllő) is a Hungarian author, critic, and essayist whose works have been translated into English, German, Polish, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Serbian. The German press regards Kiss as one of the most promising writers of her generation. Kiss studied comparative literature, sociology, and Hungarian studies at the University of Konstanz in Germany and at the University of Miskolc in Hungary, where she has been a lecturer since 2000. Kiss regularly publishes short stories, fictitious travelogues about Eastern Europe, as well as essays on photography and literature. She is actively committed to the recognition of cultural diversity on the periphery of Europe – as it exists outside of the centres and the predominant discourse that is shaped there – as well as to a European civil society, in particular in the field of art and culture. Publications in German (selection): Was geschah, während wir schliefen [“What happened while we were sleeping”] (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2008); Schäbiges Schmuckkästchen. Reise in den Osten Europas.

Bukowina – Czernowitz – Galizien – Gödöllő – Lemberg – Siebenbürgen – Vojvodina [“Shabby jewellery box: Travel to Eastern Europe. Bukowina – Czernowitz – Galicia – Gödöllő – Lemberg – Transylvania – Vojvodina”] (Munich: Europa Verlag, 2015); Dürre Engel [“Thin angels”] (Munich: Europa Verlag, 2018).

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do not regard the institutional system of art as an object of the cultural struggle. The hierarchies that come to the fore in the field of cultural struggle should not be of direct importance to the individual artist anyway, for art is not a privilege of the centre. It must also not only constitute the wealth of the centres, which are responsible for distributing the funds and awarding the prizes. At the same time, the autonomy of art is increasingly being called into question, especially since people’s trust in artistic institutions is on the decline; this applies in particular to the middle-aged and younger generations. With regard to art at the European level, access to funding (as well as to art itself) is highly asymmetrical. Nowadays, I experience art as a daily treadmill – or like quarantine in times of corona­ virus: as isolation, as avoidance.

Suddenly, I see it clearly in front of me: It makes no difference at all whether we are living before or after the pandemic. For some (politically chosen) artists who receive regular state funding, it is a phase of great creativity. Someone will always (even after seismic upheavals) give them a “helping hand”. At the same time, the so-called independent artists are suddenly standing completely naked on the online stages. They are back to square one. It is of no matter to the art system whether they use this time creatively or do nothing at all. For artists living from one day to the next, who cannot afford cushy memberships in important circles, this time of lockdown is tough and will be difficult to survive. They cannot enjoy the quiet time of creative isolation, on the contrary: In my home of Hungary, for example, there is no society of independent artists.

Literature has found itself in the captivity of the closed society of the literature market and state-sponsored awards. These systems are even more polarising during a pandemic.

The cultural spaces of Europe are divided. There is an obvious divide between EU member states and the neighbouring states towards the East, but there is a major divide between the core EU states and the entire post-Soviet realm as well. In this essay, I tend to refer to this internally fragmented post-Soviet sphere outside Russia as “the East”, because the general nature of the problems outlined here are the same on both sides of the EU’s Eastern borders. Economic inequality, which is notable both across the former states once separated by the iron curtain and those on the EU’s

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borders, often goes hand in hand with cultural inequality. This does not mean, however, that culture is not developing in the East or in the “provinces” – it just reflects on European existence in a very different way. Why this is, and what it is that the “Eastern European” (“non-progressive”, that which is labelled as conservative, closed, introverted, homogeneous, fearing what is foreign, etc.) cultural sphere says / where its focus is – that is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting questions today. This provides the backdrop for the exploration of topics such as alienation from the landscape, emigration, poverty, de-/nationalisation, walls and borders, ghettos, diseases, the trauma of 1989, new intra-European colonisation, and life in rural regions. More on that later.

it is poor, because it does not have a solvent social class, because it is too remote, too hard to reach, or too busy working out strategies for survival. Instead, it adapts its behaviour and dons “Western” identities, imposing these on itself because it is deemed necessary for success.

Although this is loosened up somewhat by an Internet-based subculture in the areas of music, literature, film, and visual arts, the culture of Europe is still not recognised in all of its (regional) diversity, but only in the form of certain Western values and identities. Local culture and subculture have been steered toward consumption and gentrification. If this continues, the borders between East and West, between urban and rural, and between the centre and the provinces will harden even more. This despite the fact that CENTRE AND PERIPHERY the opposite is necessary.

On the periphery, the long-term promotion of local culture is The ideas encountered in the centres often turn at least one blind even more important than in the centre. This is especially true in eye to things on the periphery, whilst the other eye is rigidly trained Eastern regions that have a vibrant cultural life. This could ensure on the (major) cities and their urban culture. From the point of view that certain rural areas and regions in the East bordering the EU of its actors, however, culture is very complex, and the creative cul- are no longer left behind. tural scenes and consumers found in the inside and outside of the Where economic and cultural capital is available, cultural cities are very different. It should be the task of the institutional- “identity” also gets organised in a comprehensive manner; where ised art system to show up – and to eliminate – these differences, such capital is not available, however, where there is a border, this dividing lines, and borders. cultural identity dies off or turns inwards. As many intellectuals To provide just one Hungarian example: A central yet so far have been saying for years – in sharp criticism of today’s neolibunsolved problem for us here in Hungary is the incorporation into eral and market-oriented cultural outlook – without economic and the cultural and social sphere of the people, towns, and cities cultural capital, cultural identity will seal itself off, give up, become beyond the eastern Hungarian border – those regions populated introverted, frustrated, and incapable of action. (When it comes to

by Ukrainians, Romanians, Ruthenians, Spiš, etc. In Budapest, culture, such an isolation can, on the other hand, also be very promeanwhile, people – and in the case of the literature industry, that ductive, and can under certain circumstances take a creative turn. means primarily men – are sitting inside their bubbles, controlling Precisely for this reason, it is important to incorporate the exprestheir mutual reward systems from there. sion of this process in music, literature, or theatre into the centre’s canonised field of culture.)

TRANSNATIONALISM IN THE BORDER SITUATION CULTURE AND POLITICS IN EASTERN EUROPE TODAY How can it be that a city which is traditionally culturally diverse gets pushed to the periphery – as is the case with the Ukrainian city of In the political and economic sphere, the lines of demarcation are Uzhhorod on the Hungarian–Slovakian border, Debrecen in Hungary no less clear than they are with regard to cultural preferences. The on the border with Romania, the Romanian cities of Cluj-Napoca hallmark of the Eastern peripheries of Europe is emigration. And and Brașov in Transylvania, or Oradea on the Hungarian border, and the “migrants” take their cultural capital with them to the “West”. the western Ukrainian cities of Lviv and Chernivtsi – and that cerAnd yet, it has been so clearly shown in Hungary, Poland, tain population groups have a completely different perception of the Romania, and Ukraine how people’s politics are reflected not only European, transnationalist existence and the blurring of the borders in election results, but also in the way that its art (theatre, literature, than those who live in the centres, the capitals of Europe? and the visual art traditions) develops and reflects social tensions.

Why should someone who lives close to the border be more Or to put it another way: how it does not reflect them. For the inclined to think that the border is important than someone who centre does not take any notice of the problems going on in the lives in the centre? periphery. On the contrary, it does not even speak the language of The dichotomies of the centre and the periphery, of West and the people living in the countryside / in the East / on the periphery.

East, shape today’s cultural and multicultural, idealistically glob­al­ It does not pay attention to the local (also European, even pro-­ ised map, while at the same time they are a cause of the intellec- European) civil society. Art in particular would be a well suited tual inflexibility. Those who are able to enjoy culture are the con- medium in which to prevent the gap from opening any wider – and sumers. The production site of culture, the place where it originates, to ensure instead that certain groups and spaces are not pushed into and above all where it is canonised, however, is the centre. The an alienated and passive position: into a situation that, rather than periphery relinquishes any participation in this process – because fulfilling the notion of a desired cultural space, is only associated

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with renovated bureaucratic offices, newly laid pavements, and concrete buildings built with public money. And the need to promote culture is even greater where the financial support of the European Union is limited solely to projects cast in concrete.

But if the cultural sphere is not shaped by local life, but rather by the verbose “texts” from the centre, then those new concrete buildings will have been erected in vain, then they will remain empty walls. Then the impulse that comes from the West loses all meaning and remains nothing but a grotesque symbol. Then the orientation to the West, and the expectations that are tied to this orientation, will not be fulfilled. And at the same time, the proven practice of the East, namely that of emigration, is not helpful whatsoever.

As recent research in the field of cultural sociology has shown, today the provinces have no choice but to participate in the tendering competition of those who have been left behind (forced to express some deficient identity or deficient form of democracy). This competition stems from the hegemony of the centres that distribute the funds; at the same time, it exists in the centre as well, that is, it exhausts itself in the uncritical acceptance of the West on the part of eastern or Eastern European regions, distorting itself in the trap of orientation to the so-called West. The ideals propagated by the centre are only hot air in the East, while in the centre itself, they are a bubble that hampers the view to the outside. For the existing population of the provinces, however, such altered and superimposed identities are endless gimmicks which lead, sooner or later, to (profit-­ oriented) culture factories, which in these regions lead to no signi­ ficant results (of openness, self-expression, or liberation).

expression, resistance, open-mindedness, reflection, free of profit-oriented thinking?

-M igration to Eastern Europe – a call to turn the tables: Let us go from the centre to the periphery, from Western to Eastern Europe. Who is migrating, and why?

ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SYSTEM CHANGE AND CULTURE TODAY

Politically, in 1989/90, it was not democracy per se which was transposed onto the geopolitical, historical, and societal circumstances in the East, but rather a variant of democracy, guaranteed by institutions and based on the principle of checks and balances.

What was created was a liberal elite democracy. For a few years, the artistic and cultural space was the vacated space of the impoverished post-socialist class. At the same time, the elitist model of democracy is primarily focused on the limitation of power, and revolves only secondarily around the question of whether the people can participate in power structures at all, and if so, in what form.

Who consumes culture, and is there even anything to consume?

By the end of the 1980s at the very latest, in the West – which served as a model for the East – the parts of the democratic system that were embedded in civil society, which represented class interests and were based on mass political parties, found itself in a precarious position. In subsequent years, growingly media-­ dependant political forces played an increasingly important role in the media. Even if that decade represented the heyday of civil society in Hungary, the political transition of 1989/90 brought a THE PROVINCES CAN ALSO BE THE CENTRE new political elite that took over the neo-populist system of media­ tised politics as a kind of franchise, as the only possible model – in Today’s “provinces” – or, in other words, the periphery – are by no the process sweeping away any societal alternative. means based on an established identity, and even with regard to The economic gap became a cultural one. In certain places, their own identity, the thinking is not that the die is cast. Rather, access to culture no longer exists. There are social groups – espethis relationship between the periphery and the centre, in which all cially in the provinces – that are completely excluded from culture. the wealth and diversity of the periphery is nullified, should be ques- The same holds true on the economic level: Of the different possitioned. Most artists want to express their own culture in the local ble variants of capitalism, the experts at the end of 1989 deemed economic and political sphere and reflect on that sphere at a cul- the predominant neoliberal model to be the only viable one, and it tural level. There are enough wide-ranging topics to go around: was with that model that the new elite brought about the economic transition according to the Washington consensus. Meanwhile, the - Progressive Western and backward Eastern Europe? post-1990 art market, which many had longed for, was not expanded - The provinces can also be the centre / how can they come with the appropriate pace and efficiency. As a result, it did not into their own, and how does the centre intervene in the soci- provide the artists, musicians, and art-school graduates with a real etal changes in the periphery? solution to their problems. The system of competitions and – increas- The culture and voice of the provinces / the creative and ingly commonly today – residency programmes, as well as the comself-reflective role of art. missions from the cultural capitals, are only a provisional solution.

- Culture in the city and in the countryside. How is the conservBut precisely because the cultural space within a country has ative cultural sphere structured nowadays? What is it saying, obviously polarised the situation, the time has come to openly address and what does it mean? the problems of hierarchies touched upon here – as well as the dis- Where is the border? When do we cross it? What about city torted or veiled perceptions of the periphery and centre – and to borders / state borders / religious and intellectual borders work out proposals for common European solutions. between the generations?

- Is culture depoliticised? Does culture channel itself? Is it fixated on profit, and is it gentrifying itself? Or, is it self­-

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JUNGE AKADEMIE

“I HAVE ALWAYS TRIED TO THINK WITHOUT CENSORING MYSELF

AND TO REJECT ALL KINDS OF FILTERING” Farhad Delaram in conversation with Clara Herrmann

Farhad Delaram, Away from Home, 2017.

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As an independent filmmaker, Farhad Delaram had already produced six short films when his Tattoo (2019) was awarded the Crystal Bear for the Best Short Film at the 69th Berlinale in the Generation 14plus section. The following year in February, the month of the 2020 Berlinale, he returned to Berlin to start his residency. Again, Iranian film had a clear presence at the festival, and a range of strong political voices could be discerned – an ideal occasion, to talk about the Iranian film scene and its own approach.

CLARA HERRMANN Farhad,

your films mostly deal with political topics. What are the circumstances under which you can produce films that are openly critical of the current conditions in Iran?

FARHAD DELARAM I do not consider my films to be political; I try to insert my personal view of society into my films. In Iran, whatever topic we choose for a film inevitably becomes political.

Before I answer how we can make regime-critical films, we must bear in mind that the circumstances are different for short and for feature films. For a feature film, censorship happens in the process of getting permits, even before the film is in production. Then, once the film is ready for release, a different group will censor it again. The group doing the final censorship stage will have different opinions than the first, which means that a film can have been given a permit in the first instance and then fail at the screening!

In the process of making a short film, we don’t encounter such strict rules. For instance, we are freer to do what we want, and we can get the necessary permits with just a touch of courage and astuteness. Therefore, you can make what you want with a short film and then the censorship follows. Because all the film festivals are governmental, you can find your film practically boycotted, so not many people will see it. The film is nipped in the bud, and the filmmaker is silenced at an early stage. That is because, despite the existence of streaming media, short films are made primarily for film festivals. In addition to that, releasing a film after being boycotted by governmental festivals – for example on a streaming website – can create trouble for the filmmaker, for instance, when making their first feature film.

Filming Farhad Delaram’s Tattoo.

certain group of filmmakers is also effective, because it provides an enormous chunk of the film budget in Iran, and has a clear-cut definition of insiders and outsiders. This is a very general overview of the cinema in today’s Iran. Although, of course, there are still a few filmmakers who try hard to find their voice and to look at the world from their unique perspective, even in these hard times.

Answering your question about where I stand in contemporary Iranian cinema is truly difficult, because I am still making short films, and despite the success of my last film, Tattoo, I consider myself to be in constant search of my own view in the world of cinema. I have always tried to think without censoring myself and to reject all kinds of filtering. That means I do not want to make films for festivals, just as I do not want to go along with the censorship at home. I could have ended my last film without taking sides, but I refused to do that, so I clearly expressed my viewpoint about the problem. Or else, I could go with the conventional form that is more acceptable in Iran, but I chose a very personal form. I try to find a way to follow my favourite cinema, whilst being aware that this is getting harder day after day.

Could you describe the contemporary cinema scene in Iran? How would you locate yourself in it?

FD Just like every other period in every other country, contemporary cinema in Iran can be divided into two general types: blockbusters, which are the main part of the industry, and films that are more inclined towards art film. Second-rate comedies have occupied the first type for a long time, while the second has gained CH After you studied film at the University of Tehran, before you increasing success on the international scene for the past twenty started to direct, you worked as a scriptwriter for Iranian state years. However, in mine and many others’ opinion, it has also been television.

How did this experience influence your practice? struggling with a problem for a long time: It follows – and in some cases blindly imitates – successful international filmmaking. For FD I always loved storytelling, so I decided to enter the world of instance, when Abbas Kiarostami was internationally well-known, cinema by writing stories. After completing screenwriting courses many Iranian filmmakers tried to imitate him, and none of them and coming top of my class, my instructor invited me to join his became successful. And for the last eleven years – after Asghar scriptwriting workshop. He believed in encouraging audiences to Farhadi gained significant recognition in top festivals such as Ber- develop an active mind, so his view was that we should be writing higher quality pieces for national television, neither using themes linale and Cannes and promotional platforms like the Golden Globes and Oscars – films in Iran shifted their attention from Kiarostami of poor quality nor loading them with slogans. That sort of a view to Farhadi, to the point that each year a couple of films are made was valuable for me, and I considered it a way of fighting, although, practically speaking, we didn’t get far. Over forty of my synopses in imitation of his work.

The reason for this insane imitation is, in my opinion, the growth and scripts were rejected. Had I complied with the demands of the of cyberspace and film festivals. The desire to be successful is TV supervisory councils, however, nothing would be left of my own increasing everyday among filmmakers – among all artists in gen- way of thinking.

I learned a lot during this time – beyond only the types of ceneral – and this leads them to make films that stand a better chance of winning awards. Of course, the regime’s disregard towards a sorship that exist in the system. I became more determined. I tasted CH

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humiliation many times, but it taught me not to give up. I also flourished there in terms of screenwriting. For a short period, I worked as a freelance playwright for the radio, where I found I could write what I wanted more easily. But a year after the events of the presi­ dential election in 2008, the clearing began on the radio, and they stopped working with me.

Your short film, Tattoo, is about a young girl who wants to renew her driver’s license and has to undergo psychological approval by the police hospital because of her tattoos. The plot shows the perfidy of the power system: humiliating unadjusted citizens, leaving them helpless in seemingly never-ending spirals of suspicion and false attribution. How did you write the story? How did you work on finding your own language?

FD First, I must paraphrase Sidney Lumet. Lumet tells us that, before writing a script, we must always ask ourselves why we should make this script. I ask myself this, and if I can find an answer, I start to write.

Tattoo is my only script (both short and feature) the original idea of which was not the product of my imagination. Once, an acquaintance of mine called me crying. She explained that when she went to renew her license – in Iran your driving license must be renewed every ten years – she got the third-degree. This did not catch my attention at first; it sounded like dozens of bad things that happen in Iranian society every day. Another thing was that having or not having a tattoo was not an issue for me. Then I did some research and realised that this had happened to other people as well. I started to think about how similar this situation was to my own experience of having my scripts censored: if I want them to agree to a simple demand, I should do something in a certain way, I was told. I used to tell my friends that your small yeses will become part of the larger system that makes us all suffer. That is when this idea became a personal concern for me, so I started to write.

It is hard to explain how I find my writing language. First, the subject, character, or story needs to touch me. Then, if it does, the original reality no longer matters to me. I will just look for the most effective way to express the idea. My goal is never to recreate a narrative reality but to create a visual reality. It matters to me that I don’t write for an audience (producers, festivals, the public, or educated audiences).

I can answer this question more easily in terms of directing, because I think I have found my cinematic language. According to the people around me, I am not a likable person, and I do not try to seem happy. I do not feel optimistic about the future of my society, but I will not stop trying to change it. This kind of viewpoint is evident in every single mise en scène and frame of my films. When I am writing a script, I am simultaneously portraying it in my mind, and all of these moments pass through the filter of my personality.

CH

The interrogation scene in Tattoo – with four men questioning and intimidating the young woman – is hard to watch.

Although you don’t only show men in powerful roles, was it important to you that the main character be a woman?

CH

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Farhad Delaram, Tattoo, 2019.

I’m glad that, from my first screening at Berlinale, everyone had a similar feeling about this scene, because from the practice sessions through to the final editing, my goal was to trigger that reaction. It didn’t matter to me whether or not my character was female.

Even the fact that a woman had first given me the idea did not affect me. I went with this based on the film’s dramatic need. As Michelangelo Antonioni says, female characters add more depth and complexity to a film. Now, imagine living in a country where being a woman could be the primary reason to say “no” to the existing situation. That made me think it would be more effective if the film’s final act of saying “no” comes from a woman. I also believe that if a major change is going to come about in our society, it will start with women. As you pointed out, I put in another female character who is opposed to the protagonist, who is in power, and who starts the chain of oppression.

CH The very symbolic, almost mystical film you produced before Tattoo, Away from Home (2017), is a lot less direct in its criticism, but still more dangerous, as you once explained during a screening. Indeed, the Iranian authorities banned it. Why? You also describe the film as healing. In what way?

FD Away from Home is about the wounds inflicted on people and relationships in the post-revolution cleansing. This part of history is the red line of the government. The film may not seem to comment clearly on that time, but uses Surrealist symbolism and images, so it will take the well-informed audience there, whether they lived it or only heard or read about it. I was born ten years after the revolution, in September 1988 – the worst month in that tragic era. By the time I was old enough to realise what happened, I knew that the day and month of my birth was as dark as it can get. I was born at a time when many people were being deprived of the right to life because of their beliefs; the lives of their families were ruined forever. Many people do not even know where their loved ones are buried, and, if they are still living in Iran, they do not have the right to mourn them. I felt a kind of guilt that I was born on that date when I was a child. The main idea of the film comes from a dream I had in which my late grandmother’s dog was in her house eating her corpse. When I started writing the screenplay based on this dream, I wanted to tell the survivors of Black September that, although it is difficult, after thirty years they have to leave it behind and return to life. Somehow, this began a healing process for the feelings of guilt I’d held onto.

FD

of the cinematic image. Four of the best films in Iranian film history are either written by him or adapted from one of his stories. I wrote Away from Home in the Azeri language, I am also originally from an Azeri-speaking region. I should add that censorship often leads filmmakers towards symbolism and even Surrealism, so that was another reason. Sometimes as a joke, my friends and I talk about how it seems that we are living in a surreal time. Things that are happening in our country often do not seem to be real, and it feels as if we are in a dream.

CH

You are currently working on your first feature film. What is it about?

FD Yes. First, I plan to make a short screenplay in Berlin, then I wish to make my first feature film with a script I’m already writing. I have a couple of complete feature-film screenplays, but I prefer to debut with a personal film that is more in line with the current situation in my country. The film tells the story of a young man who, despite a successful career, gives up everything and works with a friend on the night shift in a hospital, and even lives between the hospital and his car. The hospital is full of people who are suffering more than he is, which makes him feel better, until he meets a middle-­ aged woman in the psychiatric ward one night. He feels they are so much alike, and this takes his life in a new direction.

CLARA HERRMANN is the director of the Junge Akademie of the Akademie der Künste.

How does the Surrealist touch of the film refer to Iran’s literature and culture?

FD When you talk about Iranian cinema with film experts from all over the world, they would most probably only mention realistic and social films. This is because we barely have films that aren’t realistic, and in most of the ones we do have, it’s clear the filmmaker has merely imitated successful international models. In literature, however, we have many prominent Surrealist writers, such as Sadegh Hedayat, Houshang Golshiri, and Gholām-Hossein Sā‘edi.

They have always been my favourite authors. Amongst all of them, Sā‘edi – who has an Azeri background – writes in a way reminiscent CH

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THE VISITOR Anna Weidenholzer

The first thing I noticed was the way she walked. If you work here, of course, a quick pace is conspicuous in and of itself, but it wasn’t that. No, she had an unusually striking gait. Looking at the left leg only, everything seemed normal, but she walked on the outer edge of her right foot in a way that made it seem like her ankle might snap at every step. When she gets old, I thought to myself, that’s sure to give her trouble. I walked behind her for a while, I didn’t know this visitor. That, too, does occasionally happen. There are people who only visit their relatives once a year; in some families that can be a very good thing. I remember them all, but if I’m on duty on a different day, there’s no chance of knowing anyone. At first glance, that might not seem important in a place where oblivion is constantly gaining ground.

But here of all places, there’s a need for stability and for people who remember every detail. First you have to move the soul, and then the body – that’s our motto here.

So I stayed behind the visitor, she didn’t notice me. After a brief pause, she headed for the blue wingback armchair in the kitchen-­ diner: “Frau Schneeweiß, is that you?”

Schneeweiß looked up and held the doll in her lap with both hands. “Most welcome”, she answered, and the visitor nodded.

It was just after lunch, people were mainly in their rooms, just a few were dozing in their chairs in the kitchen-diner. Please don’t get the wrong impression: The atmosphere here is usually good, we don’t miss any opportunity for a party, because you never know, but after meals, they’re mostly tired. After eating you should either rest or take a thousand steps, as the saying goes, and it stands to reason that they all choose the former.

The visitor pulled up a chair and sat down, not right next to Schneeweiß, she kept her distance, a metre or more. I began unloading the dishwasher; that way I had a good view of her. She acted as if she hadn’t noticed me. We’re used to some people looking right through us, as long as they have nothing to complain about.

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Some, not all. Most are very friendly towards us, especially the clients, who are all women, except for Herr Seifried who moved in two months ago.

So I was unloading the glasses when I heard the visitor clear her throat. “I’d like to play for the cows”, she said quietly and tried to make eye contact with Frau Schneeweiß, who was now busy with her doll’s left arm. It took a while, finally she nodded.

“They told me to calm down,” the visitor went on, “to take it easy, to let it go, but it doesn’t go away. I tried meditation like my co-worker recommended, I counted clouds like my husband when he – every­ thing, I tried everything, and believe me, there’s not a single place I haven’t searched. Nothing, not a trace, nothing.”

With her right hand, Frau Schneeweiß slowly stroked the doll’s hairless head and brought it into a horizontal position, its eyes closed.

“In all the years I never missed it,” said the visitor, “and then I was standing in the pedestrian zone in Timișoara, and I felt a hole in my chest, Temeschwar.” Now Schneeweiß looked up. The visitor crossed her legs.

“The conference wasn’t due to start again for another hour; I was walking aimlessly though the city. And suddenly there was this elderly man, he was playing without an audience, I wanted to walk past, but I stopped. He seemed to be somewhere else entirely as he drew the bow across the strings. I’ve always preferred the word fiddle to violin. My grandfather was a tavern fiddler, he played people into their stupor and sometimes he played them out again, into their wishes and crazy ideas. The men would put mice in each other’s boots and laugh when one of them noticed too late, they would keep sliding along on the tavern bench until the least popular sat right on the end, my grandmother told me about it, and then they would shove him onto the floor, mostly just as he was drinking from his beer glass.

They laughed a lot, but it wasn’t friendly laughter. The tavern is not an amiable place, grandmother often spoke about that.

“When grandfather played, he was safe from mice and shoving, which is one reason why he played, but not the only one. He was a taciturn, melancholy type, that’s how I’d describe him today.

When things got too much for him, he’d take his bike from the shed and ride to the pasture. Past the tavern, along the lines of trees that bordered the country roads. He’d lean his bike against a tree, take out his fiddle, tighten the bow and then play, sometimes for hours. The cows were a good audience. It seemed to lighten his load, said my grandmother. But what am I talking about ….”

“Most welcome”, said Frau Schneeweiß when the visitor didn’t carry “It’s easier like this.” She left her blouse alone; I handed her the liton speaking. She was now holding the doll pressed against her tle bottle. “Is it not too hot?” she asked, and held it against her wrist, upper body. I closed the dishwasher and poured concentrate and the same as every time. “No, she’ll be fine with it.” water into the jugs. Then the visitor scooted forward on her chair, The visitor looked out of the window, suddenly she got up and she put both feet on the floor. fetched her handbag from the table. “Goodbye,” she said, bowing “I was thinking of all this as I stood there with this feeling in very slightly, “thank you for taking the time.” my chest in the pedestrian zone in Timișoara. When you play fid“Most welcome”, replied Frau Schneeweiß and squirted water dle, it’s like laying your heart on your shoulder and it can speak, into her doll’s mouth. sometimes it falters, sometimes it comes easy. ‘Remember that,’ Then the visitor left without saying goodbye to me. I stayed grandfather said the first time I played in front of him, ‘it’s always with Schneeweiß until the doll had been fed – sometimes she pulls what comes out of you.’ I was 7, maybe 8 years old, and I didn’t the little bottle out of its mouth and sprays water into her blouse if want to have a heart on my shoulder. The fiddler of Timișoara played you take your eyes off her. I thought of the station in Linz where and played. I looked at the time and threw all the coins I had into they play Vivaldi at night to get rid of the teenagers and homeless his hat. He gave a brief bow, without laying his fiddle aside. people. I can’t listen to Vivaldi any more without seeing the station.

“But the feeling stayed with me. I’m not a melancholy person, What’s happening with those people now I don’t know. In any case, grandfather passed that trait on to my sister, but the fiddle he gave a few hours after the visitor had left, I was laying the table for supto me. On the journey back I imagined how I would start taking les- per with Frau Huber. Where the visitor’s bag had been, I found a sons again, I saw myself at recital evenings among teenagers, at handwritten note she’d left behind. Katharina Schneeweiß, it said, Christmas with the family; I saw myself riding to play for the cows. friendly apprentice girl in grandfather’s tavern, keep trying.

At home, I immediately started looking, but found nothing. I looked She must have known what was going to happen. She was our everywhere, really everywhere. I emptied out every cupboard at last visitor that day; after her no one else came. The next day, the least three times. Nothing. It’s gone. The children claim they’ve ban on visits came into force. Some remember, others don’t, some never seen a fiddle, my husband says he remembers we took the notice nothing at all. Frau Huber talks more about the Russians, case with us when we last moved, but he hasn’t come across it how they appeared in the village and slaughtered the last cow, over since. He had no explanation, but he also didn’t understand why I and over: “We didn’t get much. We take it with humour”, she also suddenly missed something I’d shown no interest in for years.” says. “We take it with humour. We hope it passes quicker. We lived Frau Schneeweiß laid the doll back into her lap and began fin- through worse in our childhood, we’ll survive this, too.” gering at her blouse. I knew it wouldn’t be long now, I hurried with Frau Schneeweiß laughs more. Anyone who didn’t know her the jugs. The visitor seemed not to notice anything. “I am the fid- might suppose she was happy there are no more visits. dle, grandfather said that too”, she whispered.

Translation from German: Nicholas Grindell At this point Schneeweiß started up, “Every summer, the swallows used to come and nest in the upper floor of our house, we couldn’t shut the window, so once my husband put the eggs in the fridge, we wanted to put them back in the nest but we forgot them ANNA WEIDENHOLZER, a writer, was a scholarship holder there and at some point they were gone, it must – after that sumof the JUNGE AKADEMIE in 2019. In 2013, she was on the mer, the swallows never returned. They never came again. We really shortlist for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize with her first novel, Der Winter tut den Fischen gut (“Winter is good for the fish”) were very sorry. They’d always brought us good luck.” and in 2016 she was on the long list for the German Book What I’d been expecting happened, Schneeweiß tried to unbutPrize with the novel Weshalb die Herren Seesterne tragen ton her blouse. “Frau Schneeweiß, I’ll be with you in a second”, I (“Why the gentlemen wear starfish”). Finde einem Schwan said quickly and filled the doll’s bottle with lukewarm water. ein Boot (“Find a swan a boat”) was published in 2019.

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NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES

FINDS LEAP IN TIME HAIFA, 1947– –BERLIN, 1933 Maren Horn

Two years, two countries, two lives – this is how the content of the compact booklet presented here can be outlined.1 The high-quality presentation, with its leather cover and the word “Appointments” embossed in gold, stands out from within writer Arnold Zweig’s estate of nearly ninety appointment calendars. The use of such an intimate document by two people is rather unusual, but this is exactly what the two adjacent handwritings reveal. First, you notice the name of the original owner, noted in his distinctive, fine handwriting: “M. Eitingon B[erlin] 1933”. As you leaf through the calendar, it becomes clear that it is the patient calendar of the founder of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, Max Eitingon. The doctor used it to record the names of the people who came to him to be analysed, an average of four to six per day, including: Gebert, Holländer, Horowitz, Kayser, Richards, Rosenfeld, Stern, Wolff. Eitingon began his analysis sessions on Friday 6 January 1933, but had to end them eight months later, on Wednesday 6 September.

That was the day on which, apparently, he went to his institute, his life’s work, for the last time. On 31 December 1933, he left Germany forever and immigrated to Palestine. Ten days previously, Arnold Zweig had found a safe haven there from the Nazi regime, having travelled via Prague, Vienna, Sanary-sur-Mer, and other stops along the way.

The fact that Max Eitingon took his 1933 patient calendar with him when he fled into exile – and kept it safe until he died, even though it would have been a painful reminder of what he had to leave behind in Germany – shows how important this document was to him. His friend, Arnold Zweig, became its second owner when it

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was given to him as a personal gift a year after Eitingon’s death by his widow, Mirra. The calendar also matched 1944, in that the days of the week coincided with the calendar days, which Zweig himself mentioned in it, although he only actually used it three years later according to his note “1947, Haifa”. You can sense a certain timidity on the part of Zweig as he writes: The personal records of letters sent or submitted, appointments, and occasionally of works therein, are sparse. On the other hand, his “Pocket Diary 1947”,2 which he kept in parallel, is densely packed with detailed notes and drafts.

A number of indications suggest that the friendship between Max Eitingon and Arnold Zweig had already begun in Berlin in the 1920s. Alongside several personal appointments, for example regarding travel, Eitingon’s calendar records a meeting with Zweig on 17 January 1933.

In exile, Eitingon became a close confidante of Zweig’s, as evidenced by the surviving correspondence from 1935.

The hugely influential 20th-century thinker and founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, provides a fixed reference point for their relationship. Both men were in constant contact with Freud by letter and telephone, however Eitingon was able to visit Freud more often, thus representing for Zweig an additional connection to the great scholar. When Austria was occupied by the Nazis, concerns for Freud’s safety grew, and even his friends in Palestine feared for his life. Freud was able to forward them his new address in London on 21 May 1938, though with the addendum: “uncertain when, hopefully before the end of May”.3 On the evening of 3 June, Eitingon phoned Zweig and informed him of Freud’s imminent

departure with relief. Even though Freud could be sure that the message would reach Zweig immediately, he wrote a postcard to his poet friend on the day of his departure, in which the tension in this moment of salvation is still tangible in the sober formulation: “Leaving today for Elsworthy Road, London N. W. 3. Affect. greetings Freud.”4 Both the founder of psychoanalysis and his first and most loyal follower, Max Eitingon, died in exile.5 In 1948, Arnold Zweig returned to what was by then a fundamentally changed Germany. He brought with him documents belonging to his deceased friends, including Eitingon’s therapy calendar and letters, as well as sixty-two original letters from Sigmund Freud. Zweig created a literary monument to his comrades in Berlin, and at the same time processed his personal loss by completing his manu­ scripts for Freundschaft mit Freud (“Friendship with Freud”) and Traum ist teuer (A Costly Dream), which he had begun in exile. In the latter, it is easy for an informed reader to see Max Eitingon behind the character of Manfred Jacobs. The first-person narrator, also a psychoanalyst, describes a visit to the apartment of the late Dr Jacobs and wistfully recalls “a reunion with the specialised section of his library! Every edition of our journals was there, properly bound, every book from the three or four publishers, in which our International Psychoanalytic Society has set out the results of their research”.6 It is also quite possible that Zweig was thinking of the selfless support he received from Eitingon during the difficult years writing in exile. His friend had helped him to earn a living by arranging lectures on his behalf. In addition to this, the Eitingons either had the Zweigs stay with them when they were in Jerusalem or they would arrange free accommodation for them. There is also evidence that Eitingon advocated to Georg Landauer, the head of the German Department of the Jewish Agency, for a monthly grant, which Zweig received from 1940 until his time in exile ended.

Max Eitingon, Sigmund Freud, and Arnold Zweig were bound by an extraordinary friendship; their paths crossed time and time again. Not only can this be traced in the calendar presented here, but also in other papers left behind by Arnold Zweig.

1 “Appointments Book”, Arnold Zweig Archive (AZA, Akademie der Künste, Berlin), no. 2637.

2 “Pocket Diary 1947”, AZA, no. 2638.

3 Postcard from Sigmund Freud to Arnold Zweig, Vienna, 21/05/1938, in Ernst L. Freud, ed., Sigmund Freud, Arnold Zweig: Briefwechsel (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1968), p. 169. Available in English as: Ernst L. Freud, ed., The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Arnold Zweig, trans. Professor and Mrs W. D. Robson-­ Scott (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970). The handwritten original is held in the AZA, no. 7389.

4 Postcard from Sigmund Freud to Arnold Zweig, Vienna, 04/06/1938, ibid., p. 169. The handwritten original is held in the AZA, no. 7390.

5 Sigmund Freud died on 23 September 1939 in London, and Max Eitingon died on 30 July 1943 in Jerusalem.

6 Arnold Zweig, Traum ist teuer (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1963), p. 267.

MAREN HORN is a research associate at the Literature Archives of the Akademie der Künste.

Detail of the diary.

Overlay projection of a photo from 1906 with today’s image detail.

AN UNUSUAL COMEBACK PETER LUDWIG LÜTKE’S PAINTING LAGO DI NEMI Werner Heegewaldt

In October 2019, the art collection of the Academy received an unexpected tip from a private collector: An auction house in Düsseldorf was offering a painting that supposedly came from the holdings of the Prussian Academy of Arts. An oil painting by Berlin landscape painter Peter Ludwig Lütke (1759–1831) was for sale, described in the catalogue as “Lago di Nemi, 1790. Monogrammed.

Titled and dated. Oil on canvas/relined, 51.5 x 83.5 cm.”

It showed a view of Lake Nemi in the Alban Hills to the south-east of Rome, which was not only a popular excursion destination for the city’s inhabitants but was also frequently used as a subject by landscape painters in the 18th and 19th centuries. The description of the picture suggested that it was a painting registered as belonging to the Berlin Academy in the “Lost Art Database” of the Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste

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(German Lost Art Foundation). What was striking looking in the Lost Art Database, however, was the different dimensions it recorded of the painting (124.5 x 170 cm), that it was on a different base (oil on wood), and the fact that it was deemed to have been destroyed or irreversibly war damaged. A comparison between the unusual section of the work shown in the auction catalogue and the black-and-white photograph of the Berlin painting provided a clue. In the painting for sale, the water of Lake Nemi reflects the little town of Genzano and the mountain range to the south, but the mountains themselves are not visible, because they are beyond the edges of the painting. This form of composition is at least idiosyncratic for the classical period, if not downright unusual. Could the painting being sold be a section of the Berlin work, having ended up on the art market via unknown paths?

We had to act fast as the auction was imminent. In order to substantiate the theory and register an ownership claim, the art collection’s provenance researcher, Carolin FaudeNagel, quickly found the necessary information. The sources were full of gaps, but the few pieces of the puzzle that were available soon began to suggest a cohesive picture: The painting was shown for the first time at the Academy’s Annual Exhibition in Berlin in 1797. The catalogue contains a detailed description: “One can see everywhere a mixture of vineyards, bosquets, fields, meadows, summer houses and country houses […], which are interrupted by two lovely little towns. The one on the left of the picture is Nemi, from which the lake gets its name, and the one on the other side is Gensano [sic]. Across the lake, one sees the flatlands of old Lazio with the town of Civita la Vigna on a hilltop and the Mediterranean Sea on the horizon.”

Lütke’s work was the fruit of a two-year trip to Italy. In 1785, he travelled via Switzerland to Rome, Naples, and Sicily and became a student of the successful landscape painter Jakob Philipp Hackert. He accompanied him on his excursions and practised studies of nature, and his sketches formed the templates for later works. His teacher probably gave him the idea for this subject too, as in 1784, Hackert had already painted a very similar picture of Lake Nemi, which is now kept at the Szépművészeti Múzeum in Budapest. Peter Ludwig Lütke had close ties to the Akademie der Künste. After returning from Italy, he was made an honorary member and a member of the senate, and two years later was appointed as the first professor of landscape painting.

Exactly when Lago di Nemi came into the possession of the Academy’s collection is unknown due to a lack of older inventories. A note in the painter’s personnel file, however, shows that the classical landscape painting had been there since 1831 at least. In 1906, it was shown in the exhibition “A Century of German Art: From the Period 1775–1875” at the Berlin National Gallery. The catalogue of this exhibition is to thank for the only blackand-white image of the full-size Lago di Nemi that still exists today. Having long adorned the meeting hall of the Music Section on Pariser Platz, the large-format work was loaned to the Berlin Academy of Music in 1939 after the Academy had moved out. There is evidence that it was still there in the mid-1950s, but had been partially destroyed by the war. As “restoration is impossible”, the competent Berlin Senator for National Education ordered that the painting be destroyed on 23 May 1955. The letter contains the hand-written note: “Deleted from the art inventory 9.XI.56.” Then the trail vanishes.

The assumption that the image was not destroyed, but rather “saved” by an unknown hand, drastically cut down, relined, and illegally offered for sale was quickly corroborated by other evidence. A matching, true-to-scale projection of the image in the auction catalogue onto the

photograph from 1906 clearly demonstrated that both were identical in every detail and that the Düsseldorf painting was in fact a cut-out section. Another piece of evidence was the name of the work, which has been retained at the bottom edge: “Lago di Nemi. 18 m[iglia] d[a] Roma. P.L. [ligated monogram of Peter Ludwig Lütke].” The unusual distance specification (18 miles from Rome) in the inscription is also to be found on the Akademie der Künste inventory label from 1938.

The researchers were also able to clear up two mistakes: The date given in the catalogue would have to be changed from 1790 to 1796, as the enlargement clearly shows that the signature had been slightly war damaged, and the upper part of the last digit, “6”, can no longer be made out. The indication “oil on wood” turned out to be a transcription error from the inventory. However, the interesting question as to who had stolen the painting and how it had ended up on the art market could not be answered. Research into a Canadian auction house, whose sticker is on the back of the relined painting, brought no results. Maybe it was just a feint by a previous owner who wanted to conceal its origin and used an old stretcher frame.

The time of the theft was well chosen. In the mid1950s, very few people remained who knew about the holdings of the Prussian Academy and could have effectively represented its interests. Even though the society had not been formally dissolved, in reality it no longer existed. And the new Akademie der Künste founded in West Berlin was only just being set up.

Armed with this evidence, the Academy managed to ensure that the Lütke painting was sold subject to reservation. Thanks to the negotiations that followed through an art attorney, the art collection got the painting back, but it did have to pay compensation to the former owner. This is not an unusual procedure, as the legal approach involves many uncertainties and is usually expensive. For the Akademie der Künste, the return of

Detail with the artist’s signature.

the painting is a win in several respects: On the one hand, it once again possesses one of what were originally four oil paintings by Peter Ludwig Lütke, who established landscape painting as a field of study at the Academy and whose students included Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Carl Blechen, among others. On the other hand, the case once again documents how effective it is when the Akademie der Künste strives to research and recover the lost art treasures of its predecessor, the Prussian Academy.

An exhibition in which the Lütke painting is to be shown alongside other prominent “returnees” to the art collection at Pariser Platz is currently being planned.

WERNER HEEGEWALDT is the director of the Archives of the Akademie der Künste.

Lago di Nemi is not an isolated case. The Prussian Academy of Arts lost many of its art holdings as a result of the Second World War, through removal, looting, and confiscation by the Red Army’s Trophy Commission. A printed catalogue of losses from 2005 cites 2,188 items, including sculptures, paintings, drawings, and medals. Offers from private individuals and finds in the successor states to the former Soviet Union show that important pieces have been preserved. The Archives of the Akademie der Künste have been endeavouring for years to research and restitute the art treasures.

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“MAY I BE SPARED THE VERY WORST!!!”

Katharina Rudolph

Leonhard Frank in Paris, c. 1939.

It is the end of May 1940, and the writer Leonhard Frank is living in exile in Paris in poverty. He does not speak French and feels alone and isolated. He has been on the run for seven years. The Nazis in Germany have burned his books and, after his departure from Berlin in 1933 and his initial stay in Switzerland, expatriated him and confiscated his assets. “Leonhard Frank is suffering particularly acutely from exile, which he has chosen as if it were the most natural course of action”, write Klaus and Erika Mann.

Then he has to flee again. Many of his staging posts and the details of his flight, which led him from Paris via Brittany, Marseilles, Spain, and Portugal to the safety of America, remained obscure for a long time. Now, however, light is being shed on them by the autobiographies and memoirs of fellow writers (such as Leo Lania, Soma Morgenstern, Balder Olden, Hertha Pauli, Hans Natonek, and Walter

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Mehring) who accompanied Frank on his journey, and by a collection of some sixty letters and telegrams, mainly from 1939 to 1942, which were in private hands and have since been added to the archive of the Akademie der Künste. “[...] I have been here since the 25th”, Frank wrote on 30 May 1940 in one of these letters sent to his partner Maria Meinen in Switzerland. He had been living with her in Paris for almost three years, before she returned – temporarily, as both believed – to Switzerland in March 1940. “[...] I do not yet know how long we will stay here and where we will go and what will happen to us”, writes Frank. “I do not want to abandon the hope yet that I may see you again.” Where was he and what had happened? The letterhead reveals that he had arrived at an internment camp, the Buffalo sports stadium, in Montrouge, a small town south of Paris.

The situation of the many émigrés in France had just changed dramatically again. Although the country had been at war with Germany for over eight months, it had only been marginally affected during this time. There had been practically no fighting; the German army had invaded Poland in the east and then Denmark and Norway in the north, but in the west it had remained quiet. For France, it was the time that has gone down in history and in the memories of many writers as the “drôle de guerre”, the “Phoney War”, or “Sitzkrieg”. On 10 May 1940, however, a new phase began. When German soldiers also invaded Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg and directly threatened France, the government in Paris responded as it had done at the beginning of the war by ordering their internment of émigrés. And this time, as was to be expected, it would be much worse. In autumn 1939, Frank and many other émigrés and opponents of the Nazis had only been detained for a few weeks. In the meantime, however, hostility towards foreigners had continued to grow, and a “great xenophobic psychosis” broke out, as the writer Soma Morgenstern wrote, stoked by fears of an alleged fifth column, of enemy agents, saboteurs, and warmongers who were working underground against their host country, as repeatedly suggested in the press.

In his autobiography, with the telling title Links wo das Herz ist / Heart on the Left, Frank reports that he had just been sitting in bed writing his novel when police officers turned up and told him “that he had to be at a camp the following morning. He took his manuscript with him.” In the Buffalo stadium where he reported and from where he wrote his letter to Maria Meinen on 30 May, Soma Morgenstern, who was also interned there, said that fear of the Wehrmacht “poisoned one’s sleep at night and the food during the day”. The German soldiers had overrun Holland and Belgium and were now advancing irresistibly in France as well. Everyone was “preoccupied with the same single question: Can we get out of here in time?” Or would they have to stay “until the Germans come and slaughter us?”

“I am more satisfied with my work than I have been in years.

And now I’ve got to kill myself ...”

At the beginning of June, when bombs were dropped on Paris and German soldiers had already advanced to within about 200 kilometres, Frank was taken with other prisoners to the Atlantic coast, to a camp near the fishing village of Audierne. Meinen was not to hear from her lover again until early July. On 14 June 1940, ten days after Frank’s arrival, the inmates were shaken by the news that Paris had been taken. Desperation broke out, and “terror crept through the camp like a hideous monster with a thousand arms”, said journalist and author Leo Lania. “From morning to night” the internees “wandered about the barracks, lost and helpless”, embroiled in endless discussions about what would happen when the Germans arrived.

Letter from Leonhard Frank to Maria Meinen, Montrouge, 30 May 1940.

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After a failed escape, Frank toyed with the idea of suicide. He had “Oh, my beloved Maria [...], I have so many indescribable things to started a new novel, he told Morgenstern. “I am more satisfied with tell you that I don’t know how to put them into words. [...] What fate my work than I have been in years. And now I’ve got to kill myself ...”. has in store for me is impossible to tell at the moment. May I be Morgenstern was not particularly surprised, since he and others spared the very worst!!!” were also considering suicide. The novel Frank mentioned, which In the following weeks he sent “letter after letter to his girlhe had been working on since 1939, tells the story of a nature-lov- friend, the heroine of his novel”, as the Austrian writer Hertha Pauli ing girl from a remote Swiss mountain valley who gradually becomes later recalled. Together with Frank, Walter Mehring, Hans Natonek, a young woman, marries, whose marriage fails, and who then falls Emil Julius Gumbel, and a few others, she had found refuge above in love with an English historian. As with almost all of his works, a small bistro. All of Frank’s letters to Meinen, now in the Archives Frank took his models and inspiration directly from his own life. He of the Akademie der Künste, document the desperation, the émihad given the Englishman some of his own traits, while Mathilde, grés’ state of uncertainty, the confusing situation in Marseille, the the story’s heroine, was based on Maria Meinen, whom he longed struggle for visas and emigration permits, and his unstillable desire for constantly, as many of the newly discovered letters reveal. Even to see his lover again. Occasionally he read to his companions in during his first internment in 1939, he had dreamt himself in his their hiding place from his new novel, which was to be called “Ein writing out of the depressing reality of a prison camp and into the langes Leben mit dir” / “A long life with you” – a title expressing world of his novel. Work had a directly salutary effect on him. Even Frank’s wishes and hopes. now it anchored him: He would sew the manuscript of his novel into After weeks of continual worry about whether he would ever his coat for the coming weeks and use the small package “as a pil- receive an entry visa for the US, he finally succeeded, partly through low”, as he later wrote in his autobiography. the agency of Thomas Mann. Frank boarded a ship in Lisbon on 9 When the German soldiers did indeed arrive and were only a October 1940 that was to take him to the USA, “with a heavy heart”, few minutes away, Frank and Lania, like many others, fled. “It wasn’t as he wrote, for “what was a German writer to do in America?” The easy to vault over the back of the smooth and high wall embedded love story between him and Meinen found a sad end: He tried with shards of glass and covered in barbed wire”, reports Morgen- tirelessly to bring her to the United States, but events had eroded stern, who didn’t make it. His fellow writer Balder Olden fared bet- Maria’s feelings. They never saw each other again. The dream of ter: “Pushed from below and pulled from above, you flew up onto “a long life” with his lover had shattered. Frank’s novel, his faithful the wall,” he wrote, “helped to pull up the next man and jumped companion on the run, was later published under the simple onto soft farmland.” About twenty to thirty men escaped this way. title Mathilde.

They knew they were not in safety and could be arrested at any time, but “the sensation of freedom gave us confidence”, Lania KATHARINA RUDOLPH is the author of the book Rebell im noted. With him and another companion, a lawyer from Prague, Maßanzug.

Leonhard Frank. Die Biographie / Rebel in a Frank went on an odyssey to the still-unoccupied zone in the south Tailored Suit. Leonhard Frank: The Biography, which is due for of the country in the coming weeks. On 3 July, Meinen finally publication in August 2020 by Aufbau Verlag. The present received news: “I’m on the road (by bicycle!)” he let her know briefly. text is based on this book. It was she who tracked down the collection of letters in private hands. Previously unknown Frank and his companions covered 1,500 kilometres by car, bus, to research, the letters are now in the Archives of the train, on foot, and by bicycle – always in danger of losing their lives, Akademie der Künste. The author was the first to be granted until they finally reached Marseille in mid-July. Only from there was access to these documents and permission to use them for it still possible to leave Europe. Frank, relieved, but like everyone her book. Rudolph works as a freelance journalist, among other things for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. else terrified of being turned over to the Germans, wrote to Meinen:

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“I WOULDN’T WANT TO FALL VICTIM TO ANY OTHER PROFESSION” ON THE WORK OF LEONHARD FRANK AND HIS ARCHIVE AT THE AKADEMIE DER KÜNSTE

Maria Meinen, undated.

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Leonhard Frank (1882–1961) was one of the most important authors of the Weimar Republic. Growing up in acute poverty, he fought his way to the top of the cultural scene with no secondary school education. In 1928, he became a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts, his novels and stories were translated into many languages and some of them filmed, and he wrote successful plays and film scripts. He consistently stood up for his political convictions, and was one of very few German authors to go into exile twice – during the First World War and during the Nazi era. In 1933, his books were burned in Germany, and in 1934 he was expatriated along with Klaus Mann, Erwin Piscator, Wieland Herzfelde, Alfred Kantorowicz, and many others. Frank first fled to Switzerland, where he met and fell in love with Maria Meinen (1905–92), more than twenty years his junior. In 1937, she obtained a divorce and went with him to Paris, where she worked as an expressive dancer. In 1939, Frank started writing his novel Mathilde, which was modelled on her. Accompanying him on his escape, the novel was only completed in Los Angeles after the end of the Second World War. The “tender [...] novel of a woman’s life” – as Thomas Mann described the work – was published in 1948 by Querido in Amsterdam, one of the most important publishers for German-speaking exiles, and also in translations in Britain and the USA. In the year of publication however, only 1,300 copies of the Querido edition made it over the counter, and in 1949 it was around 390. The book, which was about a war that everyone wanted to forget, was not very successful.

Frank wrote works of social criticism and love stories.

His most famous books are Die Räuberbande / The Robber Band (London: Peter Davies, 1928, originally 1914); Die Ursache / The Cause of the Crime (London: P. Davies, 1928, originally 1915); Der Mensch ist gut (1917) (“Man is Good”); Karl und Anna / Carl and Anna (London: P. Davies, 1930, originally 1927); and Links wo das Herz ist / Heart on the Left (London: A. Barker, 1954, originally 1952). He was a staunch socialist, but never joined a party – he was too much of an individualist and outsider for that. As he summed it up in his autobiographical novel Heart on the Left, “His life during the historic upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century had been that of a fighting German novelist. His Books were portraits of his mind. From youth onward he had always been involved in matters that were not his personal concern, and he believed that a man who refuses to be thus involved loses his self-respect and commits moral suicide.”

Throughout his life, Frank was committed to peace, social justice, and humane living and working conditions.

Strongly autobiographical, the strengths of his novels and

short stories lie in their precise description of psychological processes and nuanced moods and atmospheres, as well as in the literary treatment of social conditions warranting criticism. “Art is omission”, was Frank’s maxim, to the effect that a writer must avoid all redundancy and only present the essential, the characteristic features of scenes and situations. He compared his activity with that of a craftsman. The author had to “bolt himself to the desk, and slave away like any other worker. I truly and literally work anywhere and in any situation [...] to the point of contracting meningitis. A gruelling job! I wouldn’t want to fall victim to any other profession.”

In 1960, Frank donated his archive to the Akademie der Künste in East Berlin, of which he had been a corresponding member since 1956. With a few exceptions, records only begin in 1940, after he had reached a safe haven from the Nazis in the USA. The gap is particularly noticeable in the manuscripts of his works. There are no original manuscripts from more than twenty years of writing, and only fragments have survived of even the novels Die Jünger Jesu (“The disciples of Jesus”), Heart on the Left, and Mathilde. Although manuscripts of short

The book, which was about a war that everyone wanted to forget stories and journalistic texts are available in large numbers, the early texts are usually only extant in more recent versions executed after the war. Essay manuscripts, autobiographical works, tributes, and speeches attest to Frank’s commitment against nuclear armament and war. His dramatic works form an extensive corpus, consisting mainly of published theatre plays, radio plays, and film scripts, some of which are available in several versions, either handwritten or typed.

Thick bundles of correspondence contain personal letters from friends, acquaintances, and family. Of particular note are letters from Arnolt Bronnen, Theodor Brugsch, Oskar Maria Graf, Elisabeth Hauptmann, Franz Hammer, Lotte and Walter Janka, Alfred Kantorowicz, Katia Mann, Robert Neumann, Nico Rost, and Eva Siao.

Numerous business letters afford insight into the commercial side of his work. Letters to the editor and those of congratulation bear witness to the appreciation of his work, as do scholarly works and reviews of his books, which have been preserved mainly as authors’ copies from newspapers and magazines.

Amounting to approximately 20,000 written or printed sheets of paper, the archive comprises four running metres of written material and is available to researchers and the interested public.

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CRISIS AS CHANCE Is the call to see the crisis as a chance more than a mere platitude? In writing, the ambivalence of the term can at least be expressed. The Chinese character for crisis consists of two parts: danger and opportunity. This ambiguity can also be found in the word krísis, which comes from the Greek and means turning point and climax of a dangerous conflict. Frank Fath and Anja Lüdtke, two artists whose work is part of the Berlin Calligraphy Collection of the Akademie der Künste, have interpreted the term in their own way:

“For me, the term crisis is closely related to a scene from Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. In it, the son Bazarov is in his father’s house, fighting for his life. The father, himself a doctor, clings to the crisis in the hope of the recovery that would then ensue. The change is a matter of course. The crisis, heavy and unassailable, will diffusely bring forth a change. And what good might possibly come of it, this is not immediately clear.”

– Frank Fath

Frank Fath, Chance, 2020. Gouache, Hahnenmühle paper, quill and automatic pen.

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“The meaning of the two-part Chinese character for crisis includes both danger and opportunity. At best, this creates a chance. I wanted to put the three elements of the equation: Danger + Opportunity = Chance into a graphic correlation with each other. When entering and passing through the danger, the word “chance” shows a way out of the crisis. The opportunity is the ingredient without which the process would hardly be possible.”

– Anja Lüdtke

Anja Lüdtke, Chance, 2020. Gouache, Sumi ink, graphite on Hahnemühle “Burgund”, flat brush and pencil.

SUSANNE NAGEL is a library research associate and in charge of the Berlin Calligraphy Collection of the Akademie der Künste.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 13

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“BUT YOU NEED TO HAVE MONEY” Anke Matelowski

T HE PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN EARLY LETTERS FROM THE PAINTER RUDOLF LEVY

Rudolf Levy, Genia Levy, c. first half of the 1920s, detail.

Letter from Rudolf Levy to his father Julius Levy, Paris, 21 October 1905, detail.

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Today, only a few art aficionados know of Rudolf Levy (1875–1944). This is despite the fact that, during his lifetime, he was respected and revered as the founder of the Parisian artist circle Café du Dôme, as well as for being a painter and a poet. Born in Stettin, Poland, and raised in Danzig, he attended the School of Applied Arts in Karlsruhe before studying painting in Munich. In late 1903, Levy went to Paris, where together with the painter Walter Bondy, he discovered the initially unassuming Café du Dôme in the Montparnasse district. It soon became an important centre for a circle of German artists made up not only of painters and sculptors, but also of authors, critics, and art dealers. During the day, they went about their work or visited exhibitions, while in the evenings they met at the café to discuss the Impressionists and Cézanne. Hans Purrmann, Levy’s friend from their early years at university, recalled that in Paris, as was the case in Munich, Levy quickly found himself at the centre of the artist circle. He was sharp-minded and quick-witted, and his opinions were accepted almost without contradiction.

From his early Parisian period, we have some surviving Impressionist open-air studies. Central to Levy’s artistic development, however, was his encounter with Henri Matisse. From 1908 to the spring of 1912, he was a member of the Académie Matisse, even serving as its director for several months beginning in late 1911.

In 1911, the art dealer Alfred Flechtheim began to cultivate a relationship with the circle of artists in Paris. It was apparently at his initiative that Levy took part in the legendary 1912 “Sonderbund” exhibition, the systematic and comprehensive showcase of European modern art, taking place in Cologne. Shortly thereafter, Flechtheim took on Levy under contract. Following the First World War, during which Levy was stationed in France, Flechtheim presented the first solo exhibition of Levy’s work in 1922.

The gallery also published a private edition of Levy’s poems and verses entitled Die Lieder des alten Morelli (“The songs of old Morelli”).

Beginning in early 1927, Rudolf Levy lived in Berlin, along with many other artists of the Dôme circle. He was admitted to the Berlin Secession, where for several years he served on its jury and on its commission. Levy’s circle

of friends included Erika and Klaus Mann, the director Erik Charell, the sculptress Renée Sintenis, and Joachim Ringelnatz.

In the course of the 1920s, Levy found his personal painting style, which moved between Expressionism and Realism. Still-life became a predominant visual form for him, although southern European landscapes and striking portraits can also be found in his work. Levy took part in numerous exhibitions, and his works were purchased by private collectors and museums. He also exhibited his work regularly at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, and Max Pechstein proposed him as a member in 1930 and 1932. He was not elected, however.

Because of his Jewish background, Levy was forced to leave Germany in April 1933. This was the start of a dramatic odyssey that took him from France to Majorca, then to the United States, and back to Europe again. For a time, he lived in Yugoslavia, later in Ischia and Rome, before arriving in Florence in 1940. There, he was arrested in December of 1943, and it is thought that he died in early February 1944, while being deported to Auschwitz.

Until now, only some of Rudolf Levy’s personal papers from exile were known. That material was saved in Florence and today is housed at the Bargheer Museum in Hamburg.

In 2018, a Berlin exile researcher discovered an as yet unknown collection of Rudolf Levy’s documents from the early period up to around 1920 and conveyed it to the Akademie der Künste.

The collection centres around letters which he wrote from Paris between 1905 and 1907 to his father Julius Levy in Danzig. The letters provide a very personal and sober view of the development of the young artist, whose life was accompanied by constant financial worries. Again and again, Levy asks for the transfer of money or confirms such transfers, shares his plans, or tries to explain his artistic progress to his father. On 21 October 1905, for example, he writes: “Many thanks for the transfer of the 400 fr[ancs]. I have used them as stated, and have rented a studio with a room for 1000 fr[ancs] per year.

This I absolutely need, as I intend to start on something bigger. Attached you will find the receipt for the quarterly rent. In addition, the signed borrower’s note.”

In October 1905, the 30-year-old was, for the first time, able to exhibit a painting in the Salon d’Automne in Paris; the letter received by Levy from the Société du Salon d’Automne is contained in the collection. But, as he writes to his father, the painting is “poorly hung”, and he is not sure if the critics will give it mention. But Levy does not allow himself to be discouraged and continues to work toward his goal: “On Monday I get back to decent work at the new studio. By spring I hope to exhibit a painting in Berlin and become a famous man. But you need to have money. Without money, it’s all so hard. Just once I’d like to have 1000 fr[ancs] in my hands here, none of which is needed to repay any debts, but which I could use solely for my work.” It was not uncommon for young artists in particular to have such financial worries. Hans Purrmann tells us that most of the time they spent in the “‘Dôme’ was devoted to waiting for money from home or waiting for someone else they could borrow money from.”1 In his letters, Levy also reports about his acquaintances, about daily life, visiting the synagogue for example, or about his work on new paintings: “On Monday I will start on the portrait of a Mr. Uhde, a quite well-known author.”

The person in question is the author and art dealer Wilhelm Uhde, who ran a famous gallery in the Montparnasse dis-

trict and also belonged to the Café du Dôme circle of artists. The painting Levy mentions is not yet recorded in his catalogue of works and is likely to be unknown.

The letters express hopes and doubts alternatingly and make his conflicts with his father clear. In early November 1905, Levy writes about the prospect of selling a painting: “As I said, I am in good spirits and confident that I will soon reach a point where other circles will also be interested in what I am creating. I hope that already by winter I will be represented in the Salon des Independants with a larger number of paintings, and that I will also have monetary success.” But by the next letter, he writes how extremely disappointed he is at his father’s reaction, and how he misses “above all a recognition and understanding of the situation”.

In the Autumn Salon of 1905, it was the paintings of Matisse and the Fauves which had the greatest impact.

They also leave an impression on Levy’s own development, and a year later he is again admitted to the Salon with a painting. Full of expectation, he writes to his father in September of 1906: “Perhaps with my painting I will have success at the Salon. I think that the critics will take more notice of me this time than in the previous year. Firstly, because of the size of the paintings alone. Secondly, because of the significance of the direction taken in them.”

And in fact, he is mentioned by a French critic; the newspaper clipping is included in the collection.

And although the letters do not contain extensive references to the Café du Dôme circle, these documents are first-hand sources, in contrast to the previously known memoires of the various artists of the group. They give us an insight into the early development of Rudolf Levy, as well as into the overall situation of artists in Paris during this period.

A second focus of the acquired collection are the letters written by Rudolf Levy’s father and siblings during the First World War. They contain further biographical details – as does the Soldbuch (pay-book), which is also included.

The letters also show how his relationship with his father was apparently improving. Levy’s father welcomes his son’s participation in the war and expresses his expectation that he will “bring joy and honour to the Levy family and to all of Israel”. When Rudolf Levy is awarded the Iron Cross in October of 1915, his father is so overjoyed that he immediately sends him money. Unlike during his son’s time in Paris, Julius Levy is now very much interested in his son’s experiences.

After the end of the war, Rudolf Levy meets Eugenie (Genia) Schindler (1894–1953) in Munich in 1919. They get married, and Genia Levy goes on to become a wellknown photographer in Berlin in the 1920s. She also frequently photographs the artworks and exhibition preparations for the Berlin Secession, which are published in catalogues and in the press. A few family letters to her, as well as one photo of them together, have been preserved. Although Genia and Rudolf Levy later divorced, they remained friends. After the Second World War, Genia Koppold, as she became, tries together with other early acquaintances to keep the memory of the painter alive.

She is the person who preserved the collection for posterity.

1

Barbara Gopel and Erhard Gopel, eds, Leben und Meinungen des Malers Hans Purrmann (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1961), p. 59.

ANKE MATELOWSKI is a research associate in the Visual Arts Archives of the Akademie der Künste.

Rudolf Levy, Portrait of Hans Purrmann, oil on canvas, 92.5 × 73 cm, 1930/31, Cologne, Museum Ludwig.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 13

73

FREUNDESKREIS

THE ROLE OF BUSINESS IN A CHANGING SOCIETY GUEST ARTICLE BY ANDREAS DORNBRACHT MANAGING PARTNER OF ALOYS F. DORNBRACHT GMBH & CO. KG

These days, everything seems to have fallen apart. Hardly a plan or expectation, hardly a concept or idea – things we firmly believed in two months ago when the year was still young – has the same meaning today. The present weeks feel leaden.

It’s not as if there’s nothing to do. Those who bear a lot of responsibility, for health and well-being and the jobs of employees, for example, as well as for the companies and organisations they work for, are currently facing enormous challenges.

Never before has health been such a priority. Dornbracht has been spotlighting this issue for many years.

The company’s vision is to shape and enhance quality of life, vital energy, and joie de vivre within inhabited spaces.

Our emphasis is on water applications and experiences, and we try to use design and new technical configurations to permanently improve daily bathroom use. Current events shine a totally new light on this. At the same time, whether the effects of this on the company will turn out to be positive or negative is practically impossible to gauge at present.

Ours is just one example illustrating how entrepreneurs are having to concern themselves with the purpose and objectives of their businesses within society, especially thinking of the time after COVID-19.

There is hardly any time for this right now, and our minds are not free to think ahead creatively either. And even though we admonish ourselves to look further ahead, many of us are only planning for the immediate future.

The challenges in day-to-day business are so unusual and call for so much flexibility and strength that there is no breathing space for anything else.

Can we as individuals, can our companies and organi­ sations, can our society, survive this situation? And if so, for how long and with what effects?

There are two schools of thought governing the way we deal with the consequences of this crisis, two ways in which we can direct our attention to “the post-COVID period”. We can devise dystopian scenarios that are ultimately likely to plunge us into a deep psychological

74

depression. Or, we can believe in ourselves as individuals, as a community, and as a society that is currently learning that we cannot go on “post-COVID” as before.

There are many things we have always done quite well.

Others – contrary to our better judgement – we have nevertheless kept unchanged. Some new things we have quickly adopted because they have simplified our lives.

And there are still other things we have rejected, although they seem to make sense. As in a cloze test, you can insert the words here that suit your situation best. Given honest and decent self-reflection, none of us will have trouble finding enough examples for this.

This crisis is unprecedented. It is not confined to a single nation, gender, ethnicity, political party, particular orientation, or religious community. It does not stop at borders, and it does not care much whether we are rich or poor, or whether we live unfree lives in dictatorships or free lives in democracies. And because it simply threatens us as human organisms, it has the potential to affect us all equally.

It is precisely this that gives us a chance to enter the post-crisis period with a collectively changed consciousness. Societies are cultures in which many “players” with very different affiliations and motivations interact. Due to the pandemic’s overarching and interconnecting rami­ fications, the chances of a common goal, of striving for a fairer, safer, and more worthwhile existence, are greater for all of us “after” than “before” – greater than ever before in recent history.

Therein also lies a collective obligation: As individuals, as partners, as family members, as colleagues, as members of associations – whatever our social role – we should be more open than ever to new viewpoints and ideas.

In their position, entrepreneurs have a special responsibility to help shape and develop society. The fact that they have to think entrepreneurially and keep the business purpose in mind is not a drawback, because we can all only enrich the debate and opinion-forming process in our own specific roles and with our associated skills and interests.

Art can bring in a particularly valuable and, for many companies, brand new, meaningful perspective. The way in which artists approach a question, a social issue, task, or challenge, a certain materiality or a specific medium, is very special. Although artists and companies may share similar goals, art and business differ above all in their approaches.

The approach in artistic creative processes is, above all, much more open and much less distracted by vanities.

It focuses on the essence of the issue at hand and is driven by the desire to really get to the heart of something. The artist’s absolute determination and often merciless honesty sometimes brings them to the extreme of putting their own psychological and physical integrity at risk. The outcome is accordingly profound and deeply moving.

Entrepreneurs who have already gained the experience of bringing art projects into their organisations will confirm this: They offer meaningful added value and are a blessing for both sides. This cooperation between two partners on an equal footing generates new ideas, leads to new insights, and accelerates innovation processes.

In times like these, in which freelance artists in parti­ cular but also art institutions, are finding it particularly difficult to get back on their feet, the appeal to the enterprising spirit of corporate leaders cannot therefore be loud enough. And this applies just as much to small businesses as to large industrial companies: Try something new and offer artists a platform as forward thinkers and initiators of the new.

Dornbracht supports the Society of Friends of the Akademie der Künste.

CREDITS

COLOPHON

pp. 3, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 29 photos Julia Baier | pp. 4, 6, 11, 15, 19, 23 photos Marina Dafova | p. 22 image courtesy Parthas Verlag Berlin | pp. 30–35 photos ­M anos Tsangaris | pp. 36, 37 photo Mareike Maage | p. 41 photo Tilman Meckel, p. 42 photo Hans Broich-Wuttke, p. 43 photo Paul Plamper | p. 44 photo picture alliance / AP Photo, p. 46 photo Ze Wrestler / Wikipedia (public domain) | pp. 48–52 photos Johanna-Maria Fritz / OSTKREUZ | p. 56 photo Saeed Khangheshlaghi, p. 57 photo Mohammad Masoumi, p. 58 film stills courtesy Farhad Delaram | pp. 62, 63 Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Arnold-Zweig-Archiv no. 2637 | pp. 64, 65 (left and right) Akademie der Künste Library, Berlin, sign.

2019 B 622-2 and Kunstsammlung fol. no. MA 468; photo Ilona Ripke | pp. 66, 69 reproduction: archive Katharina Rudolph. Original from private collection, photographer unknown, p. 67 © AufbauVerlag and Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Leonhard-Frank-Archiv, no. 104 | p. 70 © Frank Fath, The Berlin Calligraphy Collection, Akademie der Künste, BSK 707, p. 71 © Anja Lüdtke, The Berlin Calligraphy Collection, Akademie der Künste, BSK 706 | p. 72 (left) Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Rudolf-Levy-Archiv, no. 15, (right) photographer unknown, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Rudolf-LevyArchiv, no. 31, p. 73 Museum Ludwig, Cologne, fol. no. ML 76/2936, photo © Rheinisches Bildarchiv, rba_c005167

Journal der Künste, Edition 13, English issue Berlin, June 2020 Print run: 800

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