EUROPEAN ALLIANCE OF ACADEMIES

OVERCOMING DIFFERENCES CELEBRATING TOGETHERNESS

Jeanine Meerapfel

The European Alliance of Academies was founded during a threeday conference at the Akademie der Künste at Pariser Platz in Berlin in October 2020. Around seventy representatives of European art academies and cultural institutions came together from almost all countries of the European Union as well as from Norway and the United Kingdom. It was a powerful signal that showed how necessary a transnational alliance borne by solidarity is, especially in view of the Covid-19 pandemic and its political consequences, national border enforcements, and right-wing populist isolationist fantasies. All academies agreed to speak out for the freedom of art – not only in their own countries, but across borders throughout Europe. The founding manifesto, “Open Continent”, dated 9 October 2020, commemorates the anti-Semitic attack on the Jewish community in Halle on Yom Kippur a year earlier on 9 October 2019. It urges us to vigorously confront undemocratic and right-wing populist tendencies.

Solidarity and the defence of the freedom of art are our explicit goals. For this, we need mutual support. The European Alliance of Academies is working in various working groups on the question of how this can be achieved – on all levels of cultural policy and the arts. A digital platform is being developed that creates new spaces for internal and public networking, and formats for artistic exchange aim to bring the institutions into fruitful cooperation. One working group is addressing the rise of anti-Semitism across Europe and how it can be countered. The Alliance of Academies is campaigning on behalf of artists exposed to intimidation and persecution with declarations of solidarity. At the same time, we are also beginning to reappraise, clarify, and partly revise preconceived views of the situations in the countries represented. We’re listening to each other. This is a good first step.

For the current issue of the Journal der Künste, we have received some articles through members of the European Alliance of Academies. In her essay “When Freedom Dies (Centimetre by Centimetre)”, Radka Denemarková outlines the interconnectedness of local specificities and international tensions as well as the conflict between neoliberalism and capitalism on the one hand and human rights, democracy, and freedom of expression on the other. To this end, she traces the historical freedom movements in the Czech Republic (which were “wiped out in 1989”), draws attention to the fate of persecuted authors worldwide – those of the Turkish author Aslı Erdoğan, the Kurdish author and politician Hevrin Khalaf, and the Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo – and reminds us of one thing above all: “Freedom is responsibility”. In an interview conducted by Matthias Krupa (Die Zeit), the issue of how to respond to the instrumentalisation of negative emotions in current political debates is addressed by Dominika Kasprowicz (Villa Decius, Cracow) and historian Philipp Ther. Where does hate come from and what can we do about it?

Matei Bejenaru’s photographs testify to the achievements and decline of the scientific and industrial infrastructure in post-communist Romania since 1989. He shows spaces that once stood for science and technological progress but have been forgotten on society’s transition to capitalism; whose productivity has come to a standstill; and whose protagonists from the fields of science and technology are having to battle for new spaces in the present.

These are examples with the potential to bring each other closer to the realities of our respective lives.

In cooperation with lawyers from the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), the alliance has launched an online petition to the European Parliament and filed a complaint with the UN Special Rapporteur Karima Bennoune. The European Alliance of Academies calls for the violations of the freedom of the arts in Hungary to be countered with the full range of legal instruments available and for enforcement of the legal framework to protect the independence of cultural institutions and cultural workers.

On Europe Day of the European Union (9 May 2021), we discussed this with those responsible for culture and politics – with welcome addresses from Federal Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Sabine Verheyen, and contributions from artists and cultural workers from different European countries. In the coming months, we will intensify the contacts initiated with MEPs.

The work of the European Alliance of Academies is supported by Germany’s Federal Foreign Office, by the Society of Friends of the Akademie der Künste, and also by the Federal Agency for Civic Education – without our autonomy being affected. This is a blessing. And it ought to apply to the whole of Europe. We will work to achieve this together.

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

(from 2009) by Matei Bejenaru. High Voltage Lab at the Technical University in Iași, Romania, 02, 2011

Bank of Plant Genetic Resources in Suceava, Romania, 01, 2019

WHEN FREEDOM DIES

CENTIMETRE BY CENTIMETRE

In times of an economic pragmatism that reduces democracy to “business”, do we have to – as I often hear in Europe today – redefine human rights? Fortunately, human destinies are not guided by the contrivances of politicians or historians. Society is an enigmatic beast with many faces and hidden potentialities. In my view, people are evidently troubled by the question: What am I to do with my life; how am I to come to terms with and endure my existential, ethical, and civic dilemmas? I spent almost three years in China, where the worst manifestations of capitalism and communism have “wedded”, and the economy is whirring away sweetly – but without human rights. In an era of neoliberalism, many quickly forget such concepts as human rights, democracy, and freedom of expression, not even bothered when the Internet is censored. Where money speaks, is truth silent? The importance of culture and art came home to me in China.

Radka Denemarková

Europe is lugging around the unresolved traumas and stigmatisations of past centuries. For years, the continent has been shaped solely by a web of the burdens from the past, remnants of past injustices, distributions of power, collective guilt, and collective victimhood. Populism is a political stance that adapts to the feelings, prejudices, and fears prevalent among a population, exploiting them to define a political agenda that promises quick and easy solutions to all problems. And the underlying populist sentiment found in many countries around the world today – be it in traditional or newly emerging democracies – is fanned by demagogues and exploited mercilessly. But Europe also has other traditions. As far as the Czech Republic is concerned, I find it hard today to imagine a time when Charter 77, founded by Václav Havel, did not exist. Such a notion conjures up the feeling of a moral vacuum and a total relativity of values. Charter 77 was the first significant act of solidarity in the communist era, and it was the beginning of a civic engagement that brought with it an atmosphere of equality, solidarity, belonging, community, and self-sacrificing commitment to mutual support. But all this was wiped out in 1989, made as if it had never existed. Anyone who has lived as Russia’s vassal in a socialist country and in an occupied regime seems unable to live in any other world. The former “party comrades” are today trying to establish capitalism “with a socialist face” in Bohemia: The elect and the oligarchs are triumphing without contest, and free competition and the rule of law do not exist (just as it was common practice in socialism to wipe the enemy off the board with political persecution). The old mentality has also survived into the present: It is not the gifted and able who are encouraged, but those with lesser talents, on the condition that they excel only in allegiances and ruthlessness. In general, one could say that the Czech Republic physically survived incarceration – six years of National Socialist and forty years of Communist rule – but returned psychologically to the free world as a wreck, with the ability to satisfy

only its own needs. We are a country that had to rehabilitate Kafka after 1989! I find Havel’s polemical disputes with Milan Kundera in 1968 and 1969 highly topical again. Kundera’s a priori scepticism towards all civic acts that aren’t tied to the hope of an immediate effect was not shared by Havel. He felt that something must be done on principle, that something must always be done when people are unjustly imprisoned. With the journalist Ferdinand Peroutka, he also stressed the importance of the years of an industrious, indefatigable battle against windmills, fought by those who never hesitated to petition again and again, emphasising that it makes sense to show civic courage now and then – it even makes sense if one looks ridiculous in the attempt. This also applies to a purely ethical act that has no hope of an instant and visible political effect, one that can only be gradually and indirectly politically evaluated over time. Charter 77 was committed to these sentiments. When the former prisoners returned, they were unanimous in their view that the petition in their favour was a great source of satisfaction. They knew better than those outside that this petition went beyond the question of whether they would be released or not. The awareness that they were not forgotten, that someone was on their side and did not hesitate to stand up for them publicly, even at a time of general indifference and resignation, was of inestimable value – as has been true in our time for the Turkish author Aslı Erdoğan, the Kurdish author and politician Hevrin Khalaf, and the Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo.

FREEDOM IS RESPONSIBILITY

In 2018, I was Graz’s writer-in-residence, where I witnessed the spring of the swallows. When they are there, no one in the world notices them, but they always happen to return. They know when it is time to leave the nest and they know when it is time to come back to it. Here, there is no running away from oneself. They lead their own by-and-large independent lives. Swallows speak only in their movements, telling us that borders do not exist. States do not exist and nationalities do not exist, religions do not exist and superior genders do not exist. The call for modern freedom.

A contrasting image: At the very same time I was in Graz, the “green dacha” of Anna Akhmatova, the great Russian poetess, was at risk of falling prey to the nouveau-riche dacha boom in Komarovo. No one had any intention of building a museum or a house for literature at this location (an Eldorado for any estate agent). Where money speaks, truth is silent. Russia has many tools for “disciplining” artists. But for Akhmatova, the allocation of the summer house in 1955 meant that the worst was behind her. She had survived publication bans under Stalin and smear campaigns. Today, no Kremlin ruler would think of providing a dacha for writers. The Cerrini-Schlössl in Graz, on the other hand, is today dedicated to the encounter of different cultures and has saved the lives of many authors. The essay A Room of One’s Own from 1929 also argues for a new freedom; here, Virginia Woolf, with her vision of female writing, liberates herself from the vicissitudes of fate. Although the text became one of the most quoted of the women’s movement, it describes across gender lines the oppressive conditions under which writers, male and female, have to produce literature. “[And if we] have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think.”

The artists’ call for modern freedom is not something that can be taken for granted.

I have found and experienced such a room and nest. In Russia, Poland, Hungary, Belarus, China, and Myanmar, these “rooms” are currently open only to the literati loyal to the powerful, not to independent thinkers. The artists’ call for modern freedom never ends, for it is not something that can be taken for granted.

THE DEFENDERS OF FREEDOM ARE NOT INFREQUENTLY THE GREATEST TYRANTS IN THEIR OWN HOUSES

Proclaimed in 1948, Article 19 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” At a time when international broadcasting was still in its infancy, and not even science-fiction writers were capable of conceiving of the Internet, this last phrase, “regardless of frontiers”, broke new ground. That was the starting point. However, an important qualification to freedom of expression is found in Article 20 of the UN Civil Covenant, adopted in 1966, which states: “Any war propaganda [and any] advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred inciting discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.” Once ratified, the Convention is – theoretically – legally binding on the signatory nation state. The state must integrate it into its political and legal system and guarantee the rights it contains. But what happens if it doesn’t? Or worse, if diplomats at endless international conferences pay lip service to freedom of expression while it is suffocated by the torturers at home?

The actual freedom of expression of the citizens today who do not have the benefit of education, wealth, health, time, and access to the Internet is severely limited. Where money speaks, truth is silent. For the rest of us, the most important limits to freedom of expression are imposed by the nation state in which we live or are currently located, and by the corporations and organisations that control our communication media. One’s freedom of speech is a product of the conditions prevailing in the real-life nation state, but also of the conditions imposed by virtual states — such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other platforms, publishers, broadcasters, newspapers, universities, and so on — that are applicable

in one’s own place of residence. It has become accepted that those who relinquish freedoms in order to gain security deserve neither freedom nor security. In the global information and communication system, the struggle for the power of the word is also a struggle for world power.

THE BEST THING IN THE WORLD: PERSONAL COURAGE

We should not only protect monuments, architecture, art, and the like as cultural heritage. We must also protect the personal courage to speak freely and the power to speak truth. Otherwise, freedom, too, will slowly become the “cultural heritage” of the past. There are many examples of stubborn resistance today – in Poland, Hungary, Russia, Belarus, China, Myanmar…. An impressive example is the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. But even more important for me are so-called ordinary people who do extraordinary things. There are already monuments to great personal courage. People like the Hamburg shipyard worker who refused to give the Hitler salute like everyone else at the launch of a naval training ship in 1936. The photo of the ceremony was not widely circulated until sixty years later. It shows him in a forest of outstretched arms, his own crossed in front of his chest, a living portrait of defiant workers’ pride. He had been an NSDAP member but was expelled from the party when he became engaged to a Jewish woman and was imprisoned for “racial shame”. After his release, he was called up for military service in the Second World War and never returned. The above-mentioned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to eleven years in prison in 2009 for “subverting the authority of the state”. Both his written response to the charges against him and his last statement in court were – like his earlier writings – unequivocal and bold pleas for freedom of expression and human rights. He consciously based his response not only on Western traditions. He paid a moving compliment to his wife: “Dearest, since I have your love, I can face my judgement with equanimity, have no regrets and can anticipate tomorrow with optimism”, and he looked forward to the day “when my country will be a land of free speech and on this soil the word of every citizen will be treated equally. To the day when different values, opinions, creeds and political views can compete and peacefully co-exist.” The judge interrupted him before he could finish, but the free-born Xiaobo still managed to say what he wanted: “I sincerely hope that I will be the last victim of the literary inquisition in this country, and that from now on no human being will ever be condemned for his words. Freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights, the root of humanity, the mother of truth. To curtail freedom of speech is to trample on human rights, to stifle humanity and to obstruct the truth.” Xiaobo was already famous by this time, and this speech made him even more so. In 2010, he received the Nobel Prize. On 26 June 2017, he was admitted to hospital with liver cancer, where he remained under strict surveillance. Terminally ill, he was denied treatment outside China. He died on 13 July 2017 at the age of 61. The story of freedom is a story of resistance. Again and again, we are left with the big question that haunts us all: the individual or the masses, a closed society or open democracy, totalitarianism or freedom? This question would appear to be a universal one today. In our world, borders run not so much between ethnic groups, nations, and denominations, as much as between reason and fanaticism, tolerance and hysteria, creativity and censorship. Anti-humanism is often the result, the process leading up to it is called dehumanisation.

But if we in Eastern Europe demand of people in the West not to solely consider their own particular interests and to behave as everyone should behave, or as if they were responsible for the fate of the whole of Europe, why should we not demand the same of people in the Eastern European states themselves. The catch is that, in the long periods between explosions of solidarity and eagerness to help, we usually live in a world that is, irrevocably it seems, divided into “us” and “them”. What does it actually mean to be moral and not to lose hope? In essence, it means knowing the difference between good and evil and where the boundary lies. In a broader sense, it means recognising and embracing your own responsibility for promoting good and resisting evil. It is not acceptable to exclude certain groups of people from the scope of one’s own moral obligation. Dehumanisation paves the way for exclusion from the community of legitimate bearers of human rights and results in a shift in the problem from an ethical to a criminal one.

With the likes of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Miloš Zeman, and the former president of the Czech Republic, Václav Klaus, our predilection for factional favour has also survived. The position of the president is that of a monarch, a czar; it is the germ that has infected us, the fear of civil society, and the innate tendency to take advantage of the other. Pretending that we are not part of Europe, that Europe is elsewhere, as if it can be ridiculed with impunity. The Czech encapsulation is dangerous, a self-centredness that shows no interest in knowing what is happening on its own doorstep. There is a lack of humility, curiosity, and humanity. Where money speaks, truth is silent.

Yet, before the Second World War, almost three million Germans lived in Bohemia and Moravia. We expelled three million people. We can now take in three million people. After the Second World War, indiscriminate, hateful anti-German sentiments gained the upper hand. Proceeding from the principle of collective guilt, these were absurdly mixed with traditional Czech anti-Semitism and culminated in the expulsion of the Germans. Franz Kafka can be “glad” to have died young: He was neither gassed nor expelled. The expulsion of the Germans created an atmosphere in which it became possible to eliminate the political opponent without much of a fuss, an atmosphere that makes life without justice, outside the law, possible. These are the moral consequences of mass expulsion: If it is possible to punish a person for belonging to a certain nation,

it is also possible to punish him for belonging to a certain social class or political party. After the communist takeover of 1948 and the Soviet occupation of 1968, the valid legal status of hundreds of thousands more was abolished. And it is not only the current Czech version of capitalism that has brought back the law of the jungle, the rule of the strong over the weak. But the law of democracy is a protection of the weak by the strong. We must do something against fear, against endemic “totalitarianism”, and not merely flee from it.

WHERE DO YOU COME FROM?

Today, too, many people withdraw into themselves and stop taking an interest in general matters. But this is how an era of apathy and comprehensive demoralisation begins. An era of grey, totalitarian consumerist banality. Society is atomised, tiny nuclei of defiance fall prey to obliteration, the disillusioned and weary public feigns obliviousness to any problems, and freethinking and creativity retreat into the trenches of deepest privacy. Power needs precisely this climate; in this, it unwittingly betrays its very own intention: to make life totally uniform, to excise anything that is just a little different, that is idiosyncratic, independent, or defies classification. And in the background, modern man’s proud anthropocentrism reveals itself – he is convinced of his ability to identify and classify everything. For the world to change for the better, something must change in human consciousness above all, in the humanity of today’s human individual. An individual must come to their senses and free themself from this terrible entanglement in the obvious and hidden mechanisms of the totality: from consumerism, repression, bureaucracy, and advertising to manipulation with the aid of digitisation, new technologies, and media. Humankind must again rebel against the role of the powerless cog in a gigantic machine and find a deeper responsibility for the world in itself.

When my acquaintance, an excellent writer, moved into a new flat in Berlin, she went into a flower shop. “And where do you come from? From France?” – “No, from Romania.” – “Oh well, not to worry.”

I experience the same reactions. “And where do you come from?” – “From the Czech Republic, from Eastern Europe? Oh well, not to worry.” At home and at school, adults teach children to classify individuals and peoples in this way; this vicious circle cannot be broken.

It is part of human nature to regard one’s perception of the world as the only possible and correct one. Even our first president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, however, emphasised a different point of view for the whole of his life: If our national destiny depends on anything, it depends first and foremost on how we perform our human tasks.

Society is atomised, tiny nuclei of defiance fall prey to obliteration ...

I would like the members of my generation to be among the people who bid farewell to prejudices and uniformity of thought, to the chronicle of Czech small-mindedness, to the fear of anything that is non-Czech, to the feeling that we are only a buffer between West and East. We are Europeans. We are human beings. And literature should oppose any debasement of human dignity; it is able to show that there are countless ways of seeing things, that we can “wash off” the words we think with and use them “differently”, that we can live “differently”, that creative freedom is boundless. In my life, literature is the totality of all forms of bravery, art, love, friendship, and thought that allow a person to be less of a slave – to live literature in this way is the purest form of love. The struggle for freedom and liberal critical thinking is always difficult and never ends. But freedom is to society what health is to the individual. The terms “collective guilt” and “collective victory” are monstrous. And nationalism today takes on even more monstrous forms because it only spews out one question: “And where do you come from?” Let’s ask ourselves another, more important question: “Who are we?” That’s what it’s all about. National literature cannot say much now: The time of world literature has come. After all, there is only one boundary – that between one person and another.

No one develops in a vacuum, outside all epochs and systems. The time in which a person grows up and matures colours his or her thinking. So, it’s more about the ways in which humanity has allowed itself to be influenced. Let’s stop just waiting for the world to get better. Let’s acknowledge our right to intervene and take a stand. History does not take place elsewhere. It is here. We all make it. Life is not outside of history, and history is not outside of life.

The problem of the 20th century is that of victims. The illusion that misfortune humanises man was shattered for good. A totalitarianism in which the mediocre gang up and criminalise any otherness is repressive in the extreme. Only the swallows continue to fly, their wisdom arises merely from profound doubts, and as long as they live, they remain true to their kind.

A PERSON’S VALUE DEPENDS ON THEIR FREEDOM: THE FREEDOM THEY HAVE AND THE FREEDOM THEY GRANT

The present is characterised by a dramatic political shift: Racism and contempt for humanity are becoming socially acceptable. What was unthinkable and considered unspeakable yesterday is already reality. Humanity and human rights, religious freedom, and the rule of law are openly under attack. It is an attack that is aimed at us all. Not only is education the sole sound foundation, it is also the necessary precondition of freedom and the best safeguard against the return of the politics of stultification. Education in the 20th and 21st centuries requires, first and foremost, instinctive resistance to information overload. Thanks to the Internet, no one knows what is real and what is orchestrated, and lies are dumped into life like

oil into the sea. We not only need a thorough education, we also need moral instruction because, as Karl Kraus put it: “A comprehensive education is a well-stocked medicine chest. But there is still no certainty that cyanide will not be administered for a cold.”

The measure of our provocative hope is the measure of our ability to strive for something because it is moral, not just because it ensures success. The young, I have learned, are fed up with Europe being talked about only by those who denigrate it. They don’t want their hope, their future, to be robbed by populists or lost through lethargy. A united Europe is the successful answer to our history and our geography. If we do not make Europe a fully-fledged player on the world stage, then we will all individually become the plaything of other powers. We need cool heads, sharp minds, and creative thinking. And the protection of human rights. Lying has become so common that one cannot recognise the obscured truth unless one loves it.

Art is an oasis of humanism, with heightened importance in a time dominated by consumerism, luxury, and widespread indifference. A place where people can be themselves and develop the best in themselves. This kind of authentic, unsentimental humanism is of huge importance today. A place for humanity without political classification. And literature is timeless humanism. It is the humanism of lived hope. An oasis of the independent manifestation of existence. This is where concepts like trust, creativity, compassion, and mercy live. Things that modern, meritocratic society almost equates with suicide. An oasis of morality that comes from being alive and sharing this planet with others. This is not limited to the fact that the forces that shape the conditions of our lives today operate in the global arena, leaving the institutions of political action basically as they were before: local. The fact that others disagree with us is not an obstacle on the way to a human community. And we all know that the politics of a common humanity is about to take the most fateful of fateful steps.

RADKA DENEMARKOVÁ is a prose writer, playwright, screenwriter, and essayist, she translates German literature, and teaches creative writing. She is the only Czech author to be a four-time winner of the Magnesia Litera Award. She worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences and as a dramaturgical advisor at the Divadlo Na zábradlí theatre in Prague. Her most important books include Money from Hitler (2009), A Contribution to the History of Joy (2016), and Hours of Lead (2018). Her works have been translated into around twenty languages.

Natural Science Museum in Iași, Romania, 01, 2015

EUROPEAN ALLIANCE OF ACADEMIES BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

AN ARCHIVE OF ABSENCE

ON THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF MATEI BEJENARU

Cristina Stoenescu

Matei Bejenaru has been documenting spaces of industrial production and technological knowledge in Romania for over two decades. Since 2009, the artist’s ongoing archive of analogue photography has delved into a space of memory and loss, in between utopia-building and forgetfulness.

During the late 1940s, the apparatus of the communist regime in Romania imposed a complex process of forced industrialisation and urbanisation. Almost four decades later, a whole infrastructure was designed surrounding cities across the country: factories and production facilities alongside vocational high schools, higher education institutions, science and technical museums, and research facilities. The new industrial platform seemed to herald a new age, rapidly reorganising and transforming the once overwhelmingly agrarian society in Romania. Although the majority of the workers earned a higher social status, the unstable, absurd, and harsh political environment failed to fully deliver on the promises of the socialist dream.

Even the euphoric hope of the 1989 Romanian Revolution was not to last, as a slow and lengthy transition to capitalism turned out to be a road built on forgetting and dismantling the old world and its emblematic institutions. Due to a lack of investment and a fast privatisation process, many factories and facilities were sold for their plant and machinery assets, closed down, or simply went bankrupt. The educational infrastructure collapsed as well, with little regard for preserving the spaces of scientific knowledge, themselves perceived as part of a traumatic and dogmatic past. During the last decades, the Romanian economy has almost completely shifted towards performing outsourced IT services or work migration in either agriculture or homecare for the West.

Matei Bejenaru is especially empathic with the fate of the workers, scientists, and engineers – the losing parties in both versions of the industrial and post-industrial Romania. There is a sense of nostalgia in the images he captures in large-format film photography, as if exploring every detail of the last moments of abandoned sites of memory. In that respect, the artist connects with key concepts of the Dusseldorf School of Photography, especially with later generations of German artists, such as Andreas Gursky or Thomas Struth. His ongoing dedication to the visual poetics of analogue photography adds another layer of artistic involvement. The time of the industrial or scientific sites and objects Bejenaru photographs – the 1960s and the 1970s, when they were built – coincides with the apex of analogue image making; in parallel, the artist is intent on printing all of the images from the archive by himself, in his darkroom laboratory. In this way, Bejenaru connects the history of photography with the history of the technological sites, in a conceptual transfer of the past to a present of absence.

MATEI BEJENARU’s (b. 1963, Romania) artistic practice focuses on photography, performance, and film, with more recent projects developed on the poetics of visuality in analogue photography and filmmaking. Recent exhibitions presented his work at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest in 2021, BOZAR in Brussels in 2019–20, The New York Foundation for the Arts in 2019, and in the travelling exhibition “Orient” in 2018. The artist has previously exhibited in important institutions such as Museum Europäischer Kulturen in 2015 and Tate Modern (Drawing Room, 2010 and Level 2 Gallery, 2007), and he participated at the Taipei Biennial in 2008 and the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001. Matei Bejenaru is represented by Anca Poterasu Gallery, Bucharest.

CRISTINA STOENESCU is a curator and art writer currently living and working in Romania. She graduated from Political Sciences at the University of Bucharest with an in-depth thesis on the institutional changes in the Union of Visual Artists in Romania. She continued to study contemporary art in two consecutive master programmes in Bucharest and Maastricht with a focus on curatorial studies. Cristina Stoenescu is currently coordinating the curatorial programme of the Romanian Association of Contemporary Art and is working closely with Anca Poterasu Gallery in Bucharest.

EUROPEAN ALLIANCE OF ACADEMIES Where do negative emotions in the political debate come from? And how can they be combated? The director of the Villa Decius in Cracow, Dominika Kasprowicz, and the Viennese historian Philipp Ther, in conversation with Matthias Krupa.

ON THE VALUE OF BEAUTY

IN THE FIGHT AGAINST HATE

Dominika, Philipp, you both support the European Alliance of Academies. This alliance sees itself as a Europewide campaign for the freedom of the arts, and as against any form of social division. In many countries, this division has been accompanied by an increasing emotionalisation of public debate. How is it that emotions have become so important in politics today?

DOMINIKA KASPROWICZ Theoretical notions of how feelings are used by political powers to exercise influence go back to the 16th century. Today, it is not only populist or radical right-wing governments that try to gain control of the population by appealing to emotions. And this is a fundamental trend that has been reinforced by the pandemic. In this context, extreme emotions such as fear and hatred are paramount. There is, in addition, a deepening gulf between politics and ethics. Noble motives, such as selflessness, respect, and tolerance, have thus lost currency.

PHILIPP THER In my view, we’re confronted with a confused, contradictory situation. On the one hand, factual information with substance is in big demand. One need only look at the growing proportion of non-fiction literature on the book market. On the other hand, our societies are increasingly being driven by emotions, and politicians are trying harder and harder to operate with emotional messages. This is also because our public sphere is divided. We have the old public sphere in the Habermasian sense – which is committed to enlightenment and rationality – but alongside it, there is a new segment of the public sphere that has constituted itself above all on social media. Here, we can firstly see the domination of capitalist interests and secondly, the emergence of self-reinforcing, public-sphere bubbles – niches for people with a similar view. Emotional messages are important in luring people into these niches and keeping them there.

Obviously, it is predominantly negative emotions that are stirred up and appealed to; fear and hatred have already been mentioned. Why is that?

DK Politicians take the same shortcuts that people do in their everyday lives. Those who appeal to negative emotions often accomplish their aims faster. It is a way to achieve spectacular effects, even if they do not often last long. We can get an impression of the typical state of mind in our divided societies if we take a look at current surveys. A study by the University of Warsaw at the end of 2020 found that the general mental state of about 50 per cent of adult Poles has deteriorated lastingly over the past two years. They not only feel tired and exhausted, but often powerless, intimidated, and, in some cases, paralysed by fear. To some extent, this is a consequence of the pandemic, and obviously, it is not without consequences for the political and public spheres.

Of course, negative feelings do not necessarily have to have negative consequences. At the beginning of the peaceful revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe, there was also anger, rage, and frustration – very similar feelings to those we experience today. What is the difference between 1989 and 2021?

DK At that time, anger and rage culminated in a huge upheaval in freedom, democracy, and pluralism. But what are the prerequisites for such an upheaval? First, it is not enough for someone to have strong convictions and for him or her to take to the streets. Rather, it is essential that the values underlying these convictions are shared by other people. Additionally, a certain social threshold has to be breached. One must be willing to be nudged, swept along, and inspired by others in order to commit to actions like protesting and demonstrating. Now, when I compare the situation thirty years ago with today, I am not sure there is a coherent corpus of values

PT To understand the difference between the 1980s and today, we have to come back to the question of where current negative emotions come from. They are very much a consequence of neoliberal economic policies based on negative mobilisation. Welfare benefits have been cut, and the pressure on the unemployed and the less welleducated in particular has been growing. The consequence is that, even in wealthy countries like Germany and Austria, more people than before feel threatened by social decline. In poorer countries like Poland, neoliberal economic policies are having much more dramatic consequences. There, not only do many people feel threatened by poverty, but there are also many who are threatened by poverty. It may be that some degree of economic success has been achieved with these neoliberal policies, such as the German “job-market miracle” starting in 2009; but, more importantly, they have stirred up fear.

Another negative emotion – envy – is also widespread in materialistic societies. Even if I am well off and have a car and can afford to go on holiday, I still envy my neighbour for driving a bigger car or going on holiday more often. This means that so long as people and societies are on the rise, they are usually happy. But when they have reached a certain standard of living, the level of satisfaction reverses. The greater the prosperity, the greater the negative emotions – that is, the envy and the fear of losing what one has.

Are we faced with the same negative emotions in all European countries, or are there differences in the balance of emotions between Western and Middle and Eastern Europe?

DK Transformations have their own dynamics. The developments Philipp has described were certainly particularly pronounced in Central and Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, I don’t think the differences are that great. There are two sides to the politics of emotions: the attitudes and feelings prevalent in a society on the one hand, and the respective political elites – in terms of who is on offer and their quality – on the other. The success of populist radical-right parties depends, to great extent, on how the other parties respond to this challenge.

If one considers this side of the coin, there are of course differences. Political institutions are less stable in societies undergoing transformation, and the quality of political leadership first must evolve. Such transitional societies are therefore more susceptible to destructive processes and emotions. Seen in this light, Central and Eastern European countries may be different, but I would be very surprised if the people themselves and their emotions were different.

PT According to surveys, people in Scandinavian countries are happier than those in Eastern Europe, for example. The common denominator of all social-scientific studies is that people in relatively egalitarian societies are happier than those in less egalitarian ones. But this explanation has its limits – otherwise people in the former East Germany would have been particularly happy, which they were not. But material well-being certainly is not the only factor affecting the degree of satisfaction. Life expectancy plays an important indicator because it is based, among other things, on the quality of education, health systems, and opportunities for social advancement. And it is known to be comparatively low wherever there is a large low-wage sector and high unemployment. This correlation can be observed in all Western industrialised countries, including the USA.

But perhaps we should take the opportunity not to talk exclusively about negative emotions and their causes. Within the framework of the Alliance of Academies in particular, we should also ask ourselves what we can do to oppose these negative feelings.

What do you have in mind?

PT There are also good examples of this in Central and Eastern Europe. Take, for example, the events in Slovakia after the terrible murder of the journalist Ján Kuciak and his girlfriend a few years ago. In the aftermath, Zuzana Čaputová, a hitherto little-known and politically inexperienced woman, was elected President of the Republic. She fought her election campaign with an emphatically positive message: “Yes, we can fight inequality and corruption! Slovakia is different!”. Her example shows that it is possible to break out of the vicious circle of negative emotions.

DK I’d put the question a little differently. We’ve already talked about the fact that negative emotions do not necessarily have to trigger negative processes. But negative emotions are the strongest incentives to get people to act. Instead of investing all our energy in trying to stimulate positive emotions as efficiently as possible, we should rather look for the shared basic convictions behind them. In Poland, both political camps work with positive values; nobody says “Let’s wreck our country!”. But, for as long as there are no common convictions, a single nasty remark is enough to set off further hatred.

That is why the Villa Decius has joined the European Alliance of Academies – because we are committed to certain values that unite us. I find the idea of this alliance particularly attractive, because there are no political stakeholders behind it, but rather cultural institutions and art academies that create a shared, protected space in which all kinds of emotions can be expressed, questioned, and thought through.

The Villa Decius is a meeting place for cultural and social exchange. Has it become more difficult for you to reach people from different backgrounds and bring them together?

DK Perhaps I should briefly explain the circumstances under which we work. Poland is a centralised country, but much of culture and cultural patronage falls under the responsibility of local governments. The municipal government in Warsaw openly opposes the national government led by the Law and Justice Party (PiS) on many issues. So, we’re not having as hard a time as cultural institutions in smaller towns or in rural areas where the PiS dominates. Nevertheless, as a pro-European institution campaigning for the freedom of artists, minorities, and refugees, it has become harder for us to obtain funding, but for an interesting reason: There’s more competition. This is a paradoxical situation, because actually, Philipp, you pointed out that something must be done to oppose the radical, populist forces. What role can art and culture play in this?

PT Resistance is a task, first of all, for political activists. The weakness of the political left and the willingness of conservatives to collaborate with the radical right are big problems. But art and culture can contribute to change, and they can do so – even if it sounds naïve – with beauty. I know beauty is a controversial concept and a still life with a bouquet of flowers is not necessarily art. But a village or a small town that spruces itself up with flowers or invites street artists can fire the imagination. If we want to overcome black-and-white thinking, it’s no use going for grey. We must add colour.

It would be presumptuous of me to advise artists or cultural institutions. But I believe that it is worth occupying public space, especially in the smaller towns and in rural areas, with mobile exhibitions – art events in buses or similar projects, for example. Another space that can be put to much better use is the space of social media, mentioned at the beginning. Negative emotions often hold sway there, becoming reinforced and contributing to radicalisation. But I am certain that many people there are also waiting to be hauled out of this negativity.

DOMINIKA KASPROWICZ has a PhD in Political Science, and is an associate professor at the Jagiellonian University, Cracow, and the executive director of the Villa Decius. Housed in a historic estate, the organisation is focused on fostering international exchange of culture, education, and research; promoting human rights – convening human rights-focused programmes; furnishing a vibrant space for experimentation with the arts and technology, and promotion of democracy and civil liberties through varied means, such as the Computer Game Scriptwriting Academy and courses on political discourse through art.

PHILIPP THER is professor of Central European History at the University of Vienna. His research fields are European contemporary history, social history, migration history, and music history. Two of his monographs The Outsiders: Refugees in Europe since 1492 (2019) and Europe since 1989: A History (2017) were published by Princeton University Press. In 2019, he was awarded the Wittgenstein Prize of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). In 2020, he founded the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET).

MATTHIAS KRUPA is a journalist at the weekly newspaper Die Zeit. Soon to be reporting as a correspondent from France, he has been Europe Editor since 2016, and was previously the European correspondent based in Brussels.