Magazine #11 of the Federal Cultural Foundation / Kulturstiftung des Bundes

das magazin der kulturstiftung des bundes

texts by alexander cammann hans magnus enzensberger hans ulrich gumbrecht valzhyna mort burkhard spinnen jáchym topol

spring 2008 german federal cultural foundation

Yevgeny Khaldei, Berlin 1945

Yevgeny Khaldei, Potsdam 1945

Yevgeny Khaldei, Moscow 1938

The history of the Federal Cultural Foundation can be measured in years. All in all, the Foundation is six years old and relatively young. We, however, measure it by the magazines we publish twice a year which present an overview of our current activities. Based on these magazines, the history of the Foundation seems long and eventful. In fact, we go about publishing each issue in much the same way as we plan our projects. We have to agree on the relevance of particular issues and projects, contact and nego tiate terms with writers and artists, we toss out ideas, we hope and fear, and are often surprised and happy with the results. And for this, we wish to thank all the writers who have contributed to our magazine in past years.

Each issue is a momentary reflection of ourselves, cast in the col ours of the diverse activities we are currently supporting. We are dedicated to making our funding decisions and priorities more transparent. And our magazine acts as a kind of litmus test. What does the general public think about what we are doing and what we believe is important? What kind of impression does the Foun dation make on people who are unable to attend all the events held as part of our projects?

Growing readership and our readers’ feedback demonstrate that our magazine is an ideal medium for stimulating curiosity about

our work. The artistic design alone sets it apart from typical busi ness reports and info brochures. And we are proud that many renowned German and foreign writers allow us to be the first to print their written works, all of which are directly or indirectly related to our Foundation’s activities.

We will continue to strive for artistic excellence, even though we have decided that the time has come after ten issues to revise and redesign our magazine. Thanks to your suggestions, we have worked hard to improve the readability of the articles and in crease the magazine’s functionality as an information medium. In this issue you will learn more about the New Music Net work programme, for which we have allocated 12 million euro in the coming years, Yevgeni Khaldei, whose photographic works will be displayed at a major retrospective in Berlin, and the exhi bition The Tropics Equatorial Perspectives to be held at the Martin-Gropius-Bau starting this September. The Czech writer Jáchym Topol has contributed a very moving text about a father-son relationship during the course of the tumultu ous political and social changes that took place in his country’s past. The Federal Cultural Foundation has recently initiated the programme ZIPP German-Czech Cultural Projects . The revolutionary events of 68/89 comprise a central

theme of the programme which is also the focus of an opera project by the young German-Czech writer duo Martin Becker/ Jaroslav Rudisˇ. While our country is currently debating the re percussions of the socially and politically momentous events of 1968, we at the Foundation are already planning a major History Forum in 2009 to commemorate the historic events of 1949 and 1989 a forum that will surely spark a re-evaluation of Germany’s post-war history. 2009 is the theme of this issue, of fering us an unusual perspective. In 2009 a number of outstand ing individuals who influenced German history and actively shaped our divided and reunified country will celebrate their 80th birthdays. Our contributors have varying opinions as to the role this generation played in our history. Hans Magnus Enzens berger, a member of the 1929 generation himself who will also celebrate his 80th in 2009, takes a surprisingly relaxed look at six ty turbulent and arduous years in Germany.

theme: 2009 stephan schlak the 29ers. the german post-war spirit turns 80 7 interview with hans magnus enzensberger the foreign place of the past 8 hans ulrich gumbrecht resilient generation. the germans of 1929 10 alexander cammann 1929 1989. the revolution eats a generation 12

czech republic jáchym topol the father doll 16 martin becker/jaroslav rudiš prague in spring. berlin in autumn. 18 music netzwerk neue musik in accord 22 barbara barthelmes glossary what is new music, actually? 2

exhibitions hortensia völckers giving the gift of shadow. 5th berlin biennial 26 burkhard spinnen history’s long-lost brother 0 peter jahn red flag rising. the photographer yevgeny khaldei  ottmar ette going tropical. 6 poetry valzhyna mort factory of tears 8

column burkhard müller one-word phrases 40 news + ... 44 committees 47

The photos in this magazine were taken by Yevgeny Khaldei (1917 1997) and have been reprinted with the kind permission of the Ernst Volland / Heinz Krimmer Collection in Berlin. Khaldei was one of the outstanding photo journalists who worked for Russian newspapers and news agencies during World War II and were sent to the major theatres of war at the behest of the Red Army’s political department. In this issue we have printed a small selection of Khaldei’s photos which will be displayed in the retrospective Yevgeny Khaldei The Decisive Moment at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin from 9 May to 28 July 2008. We kindly thank the curator Ernst Volland and his team for their helpful expertise and cyan for arranging and designing the photo spreads. You will find more information about Yevgeny Khaldei and the retrospective funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation on page 33

Hortensia Völckers / Executive Board of the Alexander Farenholtz Federal Cultural Foundation

1 Dead soldiers lying along the street, Vienna 1945 2 Fishing boat, Norwegian Sea 1949  Airplanes over the Reichstag (montage), Berlin 1945 4 Over Sevastopol, 1944

the 29ers. the german post-war spirit turns 80

by stephan schlak

The bestseller of the season wore the uniform of war. In January 1929 the Berlin-based publisher Propyläen released Erich Maria Remarque’s war novel All Quiet on the Western Front , clad in a field-grey cover. By the end of the year the un known sports reporter who kept his head above water during the twenties with journalistic odd jobs had sold over a million copies of his work. All Quiet on the Western Front a laconic phrase used in military despatches that typified the tedi um of trench warfare still echoed in people’s minds ten years after the end of the Great War.

Though unknown at the time, 1929 was nearly the midpoint be tween the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second. The peaceful parliamentary illusions, which blossomed in the middle of the golden twenties, slowly began to wilt by 1929 The stock market crash in October sparked the worldwide eco nomic crisis. And although the Great Coalition was still holding onto power in Weimar, the populist-nationalist parties were busy rehearsing the revolution on the streets. It is wonderful to ob serve, noted the national revolutionary Ernst Jünger gleefully in his book Das Abenteuerliche Herz [The Adventurous Heart], how the cities are beginning to fill with armed citizens, and how even the bleakest system, the most boring political approach can no longer avoid taking a militaristic stand

The turning-point character of 1929 is more evident when we call to mind those prominent individuals who died that year. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the favourite of the gods of yore, died in July. Gustav Stresemann, the great statesman of the Weimar Republic, died in October. The art historian Aby Warburg, who devoted his life to researching the afterlife of antiquity, also died that same month. But 1929 was not only a year of farewells and fore boding harbingers of the National Socialistic catastrophe, but also of wonderful intellectual renewal. It was the year the Ger man post-war spirit was born.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Peter Rühmkorf, Ralf Dahren dorf and Jürgen Habermas, Walter Kempowski and Peter Szondi were all born in 1929. Whoever became famous for their rhymes, theories or criticism in the Federal Republic of Germany was most likely a 29 er. And 1929 was not only a fertile year for literature in the West; Heiner Müller, Christa Wolf and Günter Kunert were all born in 1929. On the eve of their 80th birthday, we now look back at this generation the 29ers which so deeply influenced the German post-war spirit.

One of the main reasons the 29ers made such triumphant progress in post-war Germany is because they were born at a relatively advantageous time. Even if they spent their childhoods in a warzone, huddling in tightly packed bomb shelters, they still had

better chances of surviving than their older siblings. Every year of the 1920s was decisive for the war many of the children born in the early twenties perished on the battlefields outside Stalin grad. We were too young, Hans Magnus Enzensberger stated in an interview, to get caught up in the destructive war machinery. Although they were required to participate in the Hitler Youth drills, the 29ers clearly possessed a healthy portion of scepticism, stubborn ness and adroitness at a young age. In the last months of the war, everything came down to the 29ers the Führer’s last heroes were ordered to man the flak for the defence of their country. But the futility of this strategy was already apparent; many had their ci vilian clothes ready even before Germany surrendered. While the war had separated the soldiers at the front from the civilians manning the anti-aircraft guns, the front shifted back home after the war. Now the flak auxiliaries were the ones who had the say. They were often the bread-winners for their families, filling in for those who never came back from the war or their fathers who returned home, broken and weary. There is no other generation with so many self-confessed black market dealers.

The journalist Günter Gaus, also a 29er, summed up the incredi ble luck of his generation with the phrase, the mercy of a late birth Ernst Glaeser’s famous contemporary bestseller Jahrgang 1902 [Born in 1902 ], which somehow got lost in the tumult be tween the world wars, described the youth born shortly before the First World War. In contrast to this earlier generation, the 29ers enthusiastically grasped the opportunities that lay in the rubble of their ruined country. By the end of the 1950s, they were becoming prominent figures of public life and haven’t relin quished the position since. My generation, which received and took advantage of every opportunity following the war, Jürgen Habermas writes, has dominated the intellectual scene for an unusually long time The 29ers shared a pragmatic will to politically and morally re build their country. One can see how enthusiastically and re laxed they went about this task, compared with the younger gen erations, in particular the 68ers, who groaned beneath the his toric-political burden of the past and felt the need to work off their parents’ guilt. The long shadow of the 1929 generation gave rise to many smaller oedipal revolts. Yet they were never sweep ing enough for the 68ers to fully emancipate themselves from the 29ers. In fact, the 29ers themselves provided many of the cues for the revolts. The young revolutionaries would pack their Enzens berger in their rucksacks before going to demonstrations.

Ralf Dahrendorf’s autobiographical premise Über Grenzen [Crossing Borders] was the 29ers’ guiding principle in life. The world was theirs for the taking at an early age; as soon as the war was over, they began travelling and studying abroad. In the fifties

Enzensberger returned to Germany from the back rooms of Paris with the newest, most talked-about modern poets, while Dahrendorf exported the American conflict sociologists to Germany. The 29ers were the model students of westernization. The phi losopher Jürgen Habermas gives his generation the intellectual and political credit for making the country unconditionally open to the culture of the West. Although Remarque’s bestseller of 1929 claimed that all was quiet on the western front, the 29ers were convinced of the opposite. Following the war, everything that was new and exciting came from the West.

Although there has been animosity and quarrelling among them, the 29ers share a common pre-understanding. According to Peter Rühmkorf, there is general camaraderie among all the members of the 1929 generation. Naturally it would be impossible to reduce the wide range of personalities from this generation to one common intellectual profile. And, of course, not all the 29ers were involved in the elevated discourse of the suhrkamp culture, * a term first coined by the literary scholar George Steiner (also born in 1929 ). There were undoubtedly many who made their own significant intellectual contribution, such as the famous writer constellation Günter Grass and Martin Walser, who just missed that heroic year of birth. What we are doing here is consciously trying to identify the German post-war spirit in the reflection of a single year using the stylistic principle which made its major literary de but in Döblin’s novel of 1929 Alexanderplatz the montage.

Almost twenty years have passed since the provisional construct of West Germany came to a happy ending with the reunification. Looking back now, the old Federal Republic with all its ob sessions and neuroses appears like a sunken continent. Remem bering the 29ers brings back that special post-war flavour. The members of this generation, many of whom fortunately survived the war on the home front, have noticeably dwindled in recent years. The deceased of 1929 include the literary scholar Peter Szondi, the playwright Heiner Müller, the entertainer Harald Juhnke, the church congress icon Dorothee Sölle and, most re cently, Walter Kempowski, the archivist of his generation. The strangely distant, unique blend of intellectual asceticism, histori cal pathos, protestant atonement and wonderful Saturday night entertainment that was the old Federal Republic of Germany.

Stephan Schlak (born in 1974) is a historian and journalist and lives in Berlin. His book Wilhelm Hennis. Szenen einer Ideengeschich te der Bundesrepublik [Wilhelm Hennis. Scenes from a History of Ideas of West Germany] will be published by C.H. Beck in 2008

*

This term refers to the edition suhrkamp series published by the Suhrkamp Verlag from 1963 to 1979 , which featured writings from the elite minds of western culture which influenced the cultural debates in Germany during this period.

the foreign place of the past

e:

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

s: Stephan Schlak

s: The year 1929 saw the birth of the German post-war spirit. As the Weimar period was drawing to a close, Hans Magnus En zensberger, son of a telephone specialist, was born on November 11th of that same exciting year. How do you explain the vibrancy of those born in your birth year?

e: I can explain it best with demographics. Those who were older than us were sent to slaughter in World War II . Many very talented people never had their chance to make an impact. They lost their lives on the Russian front or were imprisoned in concentration camps or were forced to emigrate. Those of us born in 1929 generally came out of the war unscathed. As for myself, I can’t say I’m a victim. Of course, I lived through the bombardments and the years of famine, but it would be silly to complain or talk about an unhappy childhood. We were too young to get caught up in the destructive war machinery. A ridiculous uniform made of some sort of wood-wool, a bunch of kids idiotically sent to battle at the last minute who were supposed to persevere for the final victory that was it. And after the war many of the young men who were older than us were imprisoned, went missing, political ly compromised or never returned to Germany. The younger generation had an open country for the taking; we weren’t in timidated by the term job market. It wasn’t a matter of carrying on where we had left off for us, we were just starting out. Of course, after 1945 conflicts quickly flared — also in terms of cultural policy. Obviously, for reasons of political hygiene, it was necessary to rid ourselves of the stigma of the Nazi past. That goes without saying, even in hindsight. But that didn’t guarantee anyone a place on moral high ground. People of my age weren’t subjugated to the scrutiny which the older generation had to endure or failed to withstand. The worst that could have happened to us was to be accused of enthusiastically taking part in the Hitler Youth.

For my part, it would be silly to claim that I resisted the Nazis. At that age my political awareness was far from fully developed. Al though around sixteen, it’s not that far away. I simply found it annoying to be shouted at and ordered about all the time. You could say that I became a skiver out of self-defence, and fortu nately, that’s why I was kicked out of the Hitler Youth. Many of my generation assumed an anti-fascist attitude only later on. But is it necessary to make scrutinizing other people’s past lives one’s profession?

s: During the last century, the intellectual and political ruling classes recruited supporters from the home front. Following World War I, this unconditional generation (Michael Wildt) took a strongly patriotic line, and after 1933 , filled many positions in the Reich Security Main Office. And even the policymakers of the early FRG were members of the home front except they em phasized more the conditional than the unconditional that is, a policy of tolerance and liberal-mindedness.

e: The loss of World War I had a wholly different effect on Germans than that of the Second World War. German milita rism completely disappeared after 1945. Today Germany’s west ern allies constantly accuse us of shying away from war like the devil recoils from holy water. That is why you would have diffi culty today finding people formed by the military like Ernst Jünger, or someone like General von Schleicher or General von

Hammerstein whom I portray in my book. Nobody is interested in struggle as an inner experience anymore and if at all, the un conditional only made a grotesque reappearance in the late, ex treme organizations of the student movement the commune groups and the RAF, for instance. But you’ll hardly find anyone in those groups who belonged to the 1929 generation. Their need for the unconditional was forever satisfied.

s: Let’s return to 1929 for a moment. In your book about Gen eral Hammerstein you sharply criticize cheap nostalgia and the excessive amount of Weimar kitsch. But don’t you think the cul tural achievements of those years deserve some acknowledge ment? Just think about the year you were born the big Bauhaus exhibitions, the release of Döblin’s Alexanderplatz or Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel e: There’s no question that an aesthetically productive force existed during this period. Yet this was the doing of only a tiny minority. People today cannot begin to imagine the political and social misery of the Weimar Republic. College students wouldn’t believe their eyes if they entered a university today controlled by ultra right-extremist nationalistic cliques, or encountered a judi cial system as Wilhelmian and authoritarian as it was after 1919

s: But it’s easy to imagine the young poet and eccentric En zensberger of the 1950s sitting with the greats of the preceding generation, between Gottfried Benn and Bertolt Brecht watch ing Tanz auf dem Vulkan . Have you ever regretted missing out on this culturally significant period?

e: No. But their writings flourished like an orchid on a mound of manure. We are blinded by the memory of the culture of the 1920s. For instance, Benn’s literary works barely paid for his matches. Thank God, he like Döblin had a real bread-win ning occupation. Other writers were forced to pound out lines for Ullstein or write pulp fiction. There’s a lot of talk today about the precariat, but back in those days, precariousness was the norm.

s: Benn and Brecht were the aesthetic fixed stars in the postwar sky. Did you ever send either of them your early angry po ems?

e: No. If you admire a writer, you should read his or her works carefully, study them, take what you can from them, but you shouldn’t seek them out and become their most loyal assistant, otherwise you’ll end up as their student. There are many dread ful examples of this happening to people close to Brecht. The only one who was able to preserve his independence was Heiner Müller. He cut the cord to his master early enough.

s: In contrast to those who were born earlier and who re-en acted the old Weimar battles in post-war Germany, the 29ers re garded the end of the war as a key turning point. Political con sciousness awoke in 1945. Do you feel there is a common bond in your generation, a secret intellectual programme? What links Enzensberger to other famous 29ers for example, Jürgen Hab ermas, Ralf Dahrendorf, Peter Rühmkorf or Heiner Müller?

e: I find it problematic to sketch a general physiognomy of my generation. People always refer to a very small list of individuals as representative of that generation. Yet nobody thinks about all

the others and those are the people who comprise the majority. In fact, I find the term generation rather overused. The year of one’s birth says little about the course of one’s life that follows. The only bonds which demographic cohorts have in common are the historic events they’ve experienced. However, each per son deals with these events in very different ways, and for that reason, it’s almost impossible to find a common denominator. If anything, I can say there is a certain pre-knowledge of things on which 75- or 80 -year-olds today tacitly agree for instance, that the wealth of society is not something to be taken for granted.

s: The 29ers haven’t yet finished cleaning up the intellectual flak. They constantly produce bestsellers every season and are involved in all the major national debates. What is the secret be hind the continued success of this generation?

e: I prefer to see it as an accumulation of coincidences. The arts do not develop at a constant rate. There is no continuum. German poetry of the 1880s and 1890s, for instance, was rather pathetic offhand I can only think of Dehmel and Liliencron. But then, suddenly, three poets made their debut and radically changed the scene Hofmannsthal, George, Rilke and soon thereafter, the Expressionists followed. There are times that are simply culturally richer than others. You could call it a stochastic process if you’d prefer it to the word coincidence

s: Hugo von Hofmannsthal died in 1929 the same year En zensberger was born, a new poet and favourite god of the news paper arts section. Don’t you think you are underrating the intel lectual significance of that year?

e: Well, you could say that the 1929 generation has a certain te nacious spirit. And if so, then it’s probably because of the chal lenges, difficulties and predicaments of all kinds which we had to over-come at a young age. After the war, each of us had to over come significant obstacles in our own way and that probably left its mark. But on the other hand, these were wonderful years. The former authorities had disappeared. It wasn’t a matter of be ing able to take the initiative we had to take the initiative. Mon ey didn’t play a major role butter and coal were more impor tant. And even in the dismal years of the early 1950s, we enjoyed a certain degree of independence. As a student, you could decide what and how you wanted to study. Courses of study, limited ad mission, aptitude tests, mid-term exams none of this existed yet. Occasionally we got a whiff of that notorious stale smell under the gowns* but a monster routine like the Bologna Process would have been unthinkable. Students weren’t constantly being told what to do or drilled on how to become economically exploitable.

s: Looking back, you’ve described yourself as a participating observer of the student revolts. However, for one historic moment in 1968, wouldn’t you say you indulged in the unconditional ? Your claim that the political system of Germany could no longer be re paired became one of the most commonly-used battle cries of the movement. Wouldn’t you agree that such apodictic statements harbour an underlying pathos of determination which the 29ers had supposedly left behind them?

e: I’m in no position to judge. You would have to ask the peo ple who were there. In my opinion, I was rather a background fig

an interview with hans magnus enzensberger

ure, never a member of an organization, group or political party. I only played a public role, if at all, as the publisher of the Kurs buch

s: You published the Kursbuch in 1968 together with the editor Karl Markus Michel who was also born in 1929 e: The magazine was quite unique, particularly because we were able to protect our independence against the influence of all the existing factions. We were the exception in a very dogmati cally leftist milieu.

s: The 29ers sympathized with the student movement in very different ways. Jürgen Habermas, for instance, expressed his con cerns regarding the voluntaristic moment and too much action ism. Ralf Dahrendorf spoke with Rudi Dutschke on the roof of a car but generally positioned himself at a liberal distance away. Peter Rühmkorf, on the other hand, participated whole-heartedly in the scene.

e: I would say none of us could fully identify with the move ment, even if we had wanted to. After all we were twenty years older and carried a different set of historic baggage with us than the students of the 60s. As for me, I’m what you would call a 67er A year later things started getting out of hand. I have to admit I’m fed up with the incessant 68er commemorative events which cel ebrate the participants like veterans. I have no nostalgic memo ries to offer. Perhaps we were younger and more beautiful back then. But banalities of this kind are a waste of time. On the other hand, there are people who try to stir up controversy by demoniz ing the events. This also gets tiresome and I can’t imagine gain ing any new insights from them.

s: During the 1970s you spent your winters in the writer’s colo ny in Berlin-Friedenau, writing your grand epic poem Der Un tergang der Titanic [The Sinking of the Titanic] which was published in 1978 a year after the German Autumn. What was your impression of that national state of emergency ? e: Let’s be honest historically speaking, there was never a state of emergency. The RAF was an episode. The power issue was never on the agenda. It was all about blackmail and ransom mon ey. Helmut Schmidt clearly recognized this fact. It was nothing compared to the state of emergency that existed in Germany in the 1920s and 30s. Since the 1950s, the people of western Germany have experienced the most improbable political state nor mality.

s: In the 1980s you started doing intellectual relaxation exer cises with Germany. You tried to reconcile German mentality which still tends to swing to the extremes with the virtue of the happy medium. To me, this seems to be an especially sceptical achievement of your generation taking leave from the intellectual extreme.

e: It’s not as easy as that. In the arts, philosophy and science, the happy medium has never been a good counsellor. This is evi dent in the fact that the majority does not usually have a say in these areas. You cannot vote on whether the solution to Fermat’s last theorem is correct or incorrect, or who paints the better pic tures. In a democratic system, however, compromise is the guid

ing principle. This is when politicians are called to defend the happy medium from the more extreme solutions, even if this re sults in a certain degree of boredom. For instance, the endless de bates about health reform are pretty tedious. Most of us zap to a different channel when we hear politicians praising the reform of the reform of the reform. Nonetheless, there is something com forting about this routine, especially in view of the problems in other societies on this planet.

s: In 1961 you concluded your essay for the short book Die Alternative [The Alternative] edited by Martin Walser with the words: I do not wish to live dangerously. However, you have sought adventures of every kind. Following the student move ment in 1968, we saw Hans Magnus Enzensberger in Cuba… e: Reminiscing about the past is not really my thing. I mean, who cares about what I experienced in Habana? I suppose that when it comes to adventures, you should at least choose them yourself. The ideologists offer nothing but adventures à la carte

s: Your provocative essays of the 1980s take issue with a general angst fomented by the leftists who painted apocalyptic scenarios almost every day ranging from nuclear meltdowns to wald sterben.

e: I don’t know whether that’s a German specialty. But appar ently there’s a great demand in this country for reasons to be frightened, and accordingly, the media provides us with an evergrowing supply of them: obesity, toxic toys, genetically altered corn, fine dust, tainted foods, bird flu, dangerous toothpaste, not to speak of the worst enemy threatening humankind, nicotine. It’s only logical, therefore, that Germans are over-insured and that every Minister of the Interior raves about the newest threats to our safety. This addiction to fear can attach to anything and often takes on a hysterical quality. This leads to a kind of Dar winism of fear, a competition of suppression in which the latest events win the day. Which explains the brevity of these cam paigns. The long-term risks are generally of little interest. Further more, our prognostic ability as futurologists of the past have shown us is poorly developed, especially with regard to ex tremely complex processes, such as climate change, for which even the world’s best experts find it difficult to develop accurate models.

s: But don’t we have to acknowledge greater historic evidence of fear in lieu of the terror attacks since 9 /11? Or let’s take the ex ample of global warming. Doesn’t it seem that those supposedly hysterical, apocalyptic warnings of the 1980s were actually quite perceptive in hindsight?

e: Whoever falls for any of those predicted scenarios has only himself to blame. Whatever happened to the nuclear winter that had everyone panicking in the 1980s, or what about the waldster ben or the depletion of all our natural resources by the year 2000 ? A little probability theory can be quite helpful. For example, sta tistically speaking, we are more likely to die in car accident than in a terrorist attack. Most fears in our society are based on empiri cally shaky data. I am not talking about playing down or laugh ing off the dangers but taking a sober look at the facts can help us more than becoming hysterical.

s: Your well-developed sense of our current times makes you an exception among others of your generation who seem obsessed with history.

e: Is that so? After the war, I was also obsessed with the Ger man catastrophe and the crimes we committed. Every writer has obsessions they are his capital. Just think of a writer like Einar Schleef. Nothing in the world could make him cast off his obses sions voluntarily. Heiner Müller once said that he owed his life’s work to Hitler and Stalin. As for myself, I didn’t want to be at tached to an idée fixe my entire life. After all, being German is not a profession. That’s why I packed my bags and lived abroad for twelve years in Norway, in Italy, Cuba, Russia and the United States. I believe in order to truly understand your home country you have to view it from afar for a certain period of time. For me, at least, I always need some distance from the things I write about. It’s almost an epistemological principle with me.

s: But now shortly before your eightieth birthday, you have come out with a book about the last commander of the Weimar Army of the Reich, General Kurt von Hammerstein and his fam ily, a story lodged deep in the realm of the past.

e: It’s an old story which has fascinated me since the 1950s. But back then it wasn’t possible to tell it because of a lack of source material. Hammerstein provides us an important example of how someone could survive Hitler’s rule without surrendering, with out ideological guidelines and without any consideration of the rules of one’s milieu. This man didn’t regard himself as a hero, but he did put his faith in his inner compass. He was unswerving in this respect. When writing about such an individual, it is es sential to keep one’s affective energy at a minimum and mobilize one’s historic imagination as much as possible. It’s not enough to simply study the documents and learn the Grosser Ploetz ** by heart. As a writer, I can allow myself more liberty with the material. For example, a professional historian wouldn’t be able to use a form like conversing with the dead as I do. On the other hand, I don’t tell the story as a novelist, either. The readers can rest assured that I stick to the facts. I am not an autobiographical writer. I prefer to tell the life stories of others, because, in the end, you can never fully rely on your own memory. Moreover, history is probably the last exotic place left in the world. You can travel to Thailand or Indonesia but you won’t discover much that you haven’t heard about before. The past is truly the only foreign place there is. Interview by Stephan Schlak

* **

A term coined during the 1960s student movement for the authoritarian, conservative thinking prevalent in German universities at the time. A standard reference work of world history, edited by Carl Ploetz

resilient generation. the germans of 1929

by hans ulrich gumbrecht

If we look closely and compare the lives, achievements and weak nesses of every single person born in any year, we will probably find that the differences between them are relatively small. As my dear mother used to say in her self-assured voice of wisdom, There are poor and rich, good and bad, smart and stupid people every where. Yet the intellectual game of historic generations is fascinat ing. As soon as we learn, for example, that such well-admired in dividuals such as Dorothee Sölle, Liselotte Pulver, Christian Meier, Jürgen Habermas, Ralf Dahrendorf, Walter Kempowski and Hans Magnus Enzensberger were born in 1929, we have to ask ourselves how these individuals encountered the events, prob lems and opportunities which coincidentally converged with the course of their lives. In this generation game, we disregard, of course, all the contemporaries who failed or actually died in their attempt to survive these convergent coincidences. Anne Frank was also born in 1929, but counting her as one of Lilo Pul ver’s generation would be tactless.

The 1929 generation, regardless of where its members were born, was either directly or indirectly influenced by the largest eco nomic crisis of the 20th century. However, we cannot justifiably speak of an international generation of 1929 because the historic events that followed impacted each person very differently de pending on the country of their birth. Even with a constellation of illustrious figures like Martin Luther King Jr., whose passion became a monument of memory in the United States, Imre Kertész, the Jewish-Hungarian chronicler of the Holocaust, and the terminology-heavy media theorist Jean Baudrillard, the as sociative dynamics of the generation game remains sluggish. Yet if we consider the most famous Germans of 1929, among whom only Habermas achieved international fame, then we could say they share a common generational bond, though it wouldn’t be easy to classify them under one all-encompassing heading or phrase. Perhaps this impression of unity and the difficulty to de scribe it is due to the fact that the 29ers were always still or just with regard to the historically significant turning points of their lifetime. This historic signature characterized their behaviour without burdening them with an identity containing a common denominator.

In 1989, when they were all turning sixty, German reunification suddenly shifted from a normative idea in the preamble of the constitution to a concrete political process. They still belonged to the active group of working professionals and were in a posi tion to influence the formation of the new-old nation based on the prevailing ideological perspectives. At the same time, they were just old enough to be regarded as authorities with a lifetime of experience in whom people could trust. For instance, shortly following reunification, federal committees were established to convert and integrate the former East German universities into the West German university system. If someone today were to research the names of those committee members, they would surely find a good number of professors and cultural policy mak ers who were born in 1929. It was then in those committees that they became elder statesmen with an incredibly good conscience.

The challenges of reunification which must have come as a sur prise so close to their retirement blew fresh wind in the sails of the 29ers. This might explain why they are having such a hard time making room for the new generation of 60 -year-olds who are seemingly damned to eternal youth by the 80 -year-olds who are happy to stay where they are. Born just late enough to partici pate in the process of reunification, the 80 -year-olds today are al so the first generation of retirees to benefit from the life-prolong ing achievements of modern medicine. Instead of being doomed to a vegetative existence in nursing homes, medical progress has enabled them to dominate curatorial panels, expert committees and award nomination juries with remarkable sprightliness. They humbly consent to participate in such committees with the words seventy-nine is not too old or I felt an obligation to accept this challenge Of course, for the East Germans born in 1929, reunification came just a little too late for them to completely realign their lives. Per haps this is why the plays and texts by Heiner Müller, the only truly great German literary artist of 1929, never attracted an international readership. Following the final victory of capitalism, his leftist rage against state socialism dissipated for lack of an ad versary.

At the other chronological end of their lives, the German 29ers were just young enough at the end of World War II to be exonerated in public debates from any responsibility for the Third Reich and its repercussions. This is when their enormously good conscience was formed. The pimpfs * in their uniforms, standing at attention as Adolf Hitler, shrunken with old age, paces along their line just days before he committed suicide even today, when we see this famous photograph, we feel shock and sympa thy for those young boys, but no reproach. The 1929 generation, however, was still young enough to quickly finish their secondary schooling after the war. Dressed in their uniform jackets or rag ged flannel shirts, they were the first to attend lectures at the new ly reopened German universities and enter the working world even before the economic miracle became a coined term. Some where between the still and just, the Germans of 1929 became un arguably the most resilient generation in our recent national his tory. It is no exaggeration to assert that within their lifetime between the end of the war and our present day their influence has spread like a land-staking process, leaving no space for any oth er generation. Because German history after 1945 is nationally and internationally regarded as a success story, later generations cannot even turn the 29er’s resilience into an accusation. The 68 generation, which specialized in mini oedipal revolts, will most likely never come to terms with this.

In 1968, Sölle, Dahrendorf, Enzensberger and Habermas were still young enough to be associated with the dynamics of a protest movement which they didn’t initiate. In hindsight, however, they were credited with arguing certain points of criticism. While Josch ka Fischer was playing practical jokes on the Frankfurt police and my SDS friends were throwing stones at the American consulate on Munich’s Prinzregentenstrasse in protest of the Vietnam War, the 29ers were just a bit too old to be swept away by the vehemence

and the charm of communes, teach-ins and actions. In those constantly reprinted photos of such events in the late 1960s, Jürgen Habermas resembles an older brother who clearly wants to dem onstrate solidarity with his siblings, yet cannot fully conceal his embarrassment, and ultimately doesn’t wish to in light of their growing juvenile silliness. In another photo, Habermas, who had just turned forty, must have felt even more embarrassed standing next to Adorno and Horkheimer in public. These former godfa thers of the student revolts quickly lost their divine status in the eyes of the pretend revolutionaries, because they could neither endorse the provocative actions held in their good name, nor smile condescendingly at what they believe heralded the end of education as they knew it.

Because they behaved in such statesman-like fashion in touch with the zeitgeist, yet always a bit aloof and because they never had anything to be ashamed of, the grandfathers of 1929 continue to be highly admired by the successfully rational yuppies who effortlessly set themselves apart from their own fathers who had never reached old age, as well as the disinherited generation of grandchildren who have educated themselves into intellectual paralysis. The setback suffered by the 68ers is an historic and na tional setback that played an integral role for the 29ers because it almost unexpectedly made them father and grandfather figures and offered them an enormous advantage in their position be tween the generations. Sloterdijk has no recourse but to launch his missiles at Habermas’s social-democratic monument, but Habermas neither intercepts them nor launches his own because the very rational-minded youth are quick to defend him. When Americans meet for their class reunions, they usually collect do nations to establish a foundation. When the 29ers meet for their class reunion next year, we can be certain they will not collect donations for a political party or a museum, but rather a Task Force to Preserve One’s Resilience . For they remain a generation of the ever-extending present, and definitely not the generation of a programmatic idea.

It is like the House of Windsor. The Queen holds the reigns tight ly in her hands as a grandmother until William and Harry’s time has come. The flower-laden hats and the passion for horses are not as much an emblem of Elisabeth II ’s resilience as the unhap py countenance of her oldest son, the Prince of Wales. The com parison is uncanny, except for the fact that the Queen was born in 1926

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht was born in Würzburg in 1948, three days before the currency reform. Although he joined the SDS in 1968 and was one of the Munich students who enthusiastically threw stones of protest, he became a professor of literature at Stanford University in 1989 and became a naturalized US citizen in 2000. His book In 1926: Living on the Edge of Time was published by the Suhrkamp Verlag in 2001

*

The official title for 10 to 14-year old boys who belonged to the Deutsches Jungvolk, one of the Hitler Youth organizations.

1929 —1989. the revolution eats a generation

by alexander cammann

I drank vodka and waited, bewildered. The playwright Heiner Müller was about to speak to the masses who had gathered on Alexanderplatz in East Berlin on November 4 , 1989. It was the largest public demonstration in German history, a gathering of be tween 500,000 and 1 million people. The euphoria of that day is unforgettable a combination of relaxed cheer, newly gained self-confidence and optimism in view of an uncertain future. It was one of the climaxes of the revolution of 1989 and a crowning moment for East German intellectuals. For one illusive moment, it seemed as if the writers, actors and human rights activists who spoke to the demonstrators were truly the mouthpiece of the people.

This historic occasion on Alexanderplatz signified something else, however it was the first and last major symbolic moment in the limelight for a generation that had become the most influ ential in German history in past decades. Born in 1929 Jürgen Habermas, Hans Magnus Enzensberger or Ralf Dahrendorf are not the only ones who wear this magical label. There are a number of prominent East German comrades who were also born that year. Three of the speakers at the Alexanderplatz demonstration on November 4th were born in 1929 the playwright Heiner Müller, the writer Christa Wolf and the SED Politburo member Günter Schabowski. Once again, the generation of 1929 found it self at a turning point of history.

Though he was known as a whisky drinker, here was Heiner Müller drinking vodka. In his memoires Krieg ohne Schlacht [War without Slaughter], he recalled the bizarre moments as he addressed hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. Speaking in a monotone voice, he read a flyer by the Action Group for Independent Unions which three young people had shoved in his hand earlier. The flyer called for a new worker interest group to counter the SED -controlled universal FDGB union and fight against new, looming economic dangers. Catcalls came from the audience. It wasn’t a text for 500,000 people who wanted to be happy.

However, the playwright’s inability to connect with the audience had other reasons. Müller, who was rehearsing his Hamletma chine at the Deutsches Theater at the time, was overcome with the disturbing feeling that he himself was watching a theatre piece called Liberation from a State That No Longer Exists. In front of all those people, he suddenly felt uncomfortable kicking a sick lion which would have certainly garnered rousing applause. After all, the lion, a.k.a. the SED regime, which Müller had so often attacked in the past, had constantly fed him all his material for decades. Ob sessed with German history his whole life, Müller now intuitively felt that an era his era was coming to an end. He was wit nessing the conclusion of something. Therefore, up there on the rostrum, the playwright did not play the victor, but rather that of

an old-fashioned prophet portending the social conflicts that lie ahead for the self-liberating proletariat. The only applause he re ceived came with his closing words which now seem merely nos talgic. Should the government relinquish its power in the coming weeks, dancing will be allowed at demonstrations. Müller was referring, of course, to the Paris dances of May 1968, though there were only a handful of demonstrators in autumn 1989 who understood what he was talking about. Afterwards, one of the marshals said to Müller: That was cheap.

Günter Schabowski, only five days his elder, received a fulllength concert of whistles and catcalls during his speech. With the audience continually chanting Shut Up, the head of the SED Berlin constituency could barely finish his prepared speech. His attempt to demonstrate solidarity with the protesters failed mis erably. A powerful member of the Politburo, booed by hundreds of thousands this was definitely a revolution. Christa Wolf, on the other hand, was enthusiastically received as she stepped onto the rostrum and her trembling voice echoed across the plaza. The crowds listened intently, only to erupt with cheering again and again. Her language mirrored the spirit of the hour also her use of the unifying we We do not sleep, or very little. She spoke of an incredible change and revolutionary renewal No one had ever spoken so freely. These weeks, these opportunities, come once in a lifetime we have given them to ourselves. She used emotionally evocative words, such as dream And, therefore, we dream with our senses wide awake. After the speech, which Christa Wolf had tweaked well into the night so as to avoid any kind of provocation, an unknown woman stepped out of the crowd and embraced her.

There is a story behind Christa Wolf’s rapturous reception. She suffered a minor, unnoticed heart attack during her speech. The paramedics immediately brought her to the hospital where they gave her an injection to slow down her racing pulse. Vodka and a heart attack. This hour of triumph was not exactly a strong moment for the powerful 1929 generation, which symbolically makes sense. For them, an era was ending. Like their West Ger man comrades, the East German 29ers were not the founding generation of their society, but rather its critical interior design ers. Their dreams, desires and nightmares were all related to the GDR . Their strange symbiosis with the state their rejection of it and identification with it lasted decades. In July 1989, Chris ta Wolf cancelled her forty-year membership in the SED. In 1989, Heiner Müller accepted the National Award First Class from Erich Honecker personally. In 1992 , when asked about this politi cal event, Müller replied I wouldn’t do anything differently today. It’s important that my work makes an impact, not that I play the noble knight. And this GDR which provided them the field for their bat

tles of identity, perished before their eyes in 1989, paradoxically as a result of their own efforts.

In the 1960s the young Werner Bräunig, whose alcohol addiction prematurely ended his life, wrote a great novel about the early dreams and illusions of the 1929 generation. State officials never allowed Rummelplatz [Fairground] to be published in the GDR , but in 2007, the book suddenly rocketed to the top of the bestseller list. Peter Loose, one of the main characters, offers a fitting metaphor to describe the members of his generation: We are all sitting in the same train and we’re moving together and heading in the same direction. And yet each of us has a different destination and gets off at a different stop. And each of us has come from somewhere else. They were a community of survivors. They experienced a child hood in the years of National Socialism, and with a little luck, survived the chaotic end of the war when everything died around them and they woke up in a country that was literally blasted open In the following years, they continued in that mode of survival which they had mastered as children in a dictatorship, be tween East and West, in the age of the Cold War and the threat of atomic annihilation.

Some East Germans who were born in 1929 headed west. Walter Kempowski went to Rostock early in his life after spending the previous eight years in Bautzen. The poet Günter Kunert left East Germany in 1979 and settled in Schleswig-Holstein. Togeth er with Wolf and Müller, he was one of the first to sign the peti tion protesting Wolf Biermann’s expatriation. However, there were some who headed the other way. After finishing his studies in Göttingen in 1954 , Wolfgang Ullmann returned to Saxony to work as a pastor. Later he lectured on church history in Naum burg and at the East Berlin Language Seminar, and eventually became one of the most influential intellectual father figures of the opposition movement in the GDR . He co-founded the group Democracy Now in autumn 1989, became a member of the East German parliament, and went on to join the European Par liament as a representative of the Green Party. The 1929 genera tion was never really divided into East and West German catego ries. Christa Wolf, for example, was honoured with the most im portant award of German language literature, the Georg Büchner Prize, in Darmstadt in 1980 and Heiner Müller received it in 1985. Meanwhile, Müller’s former classmate from 1946 in Waren an der Müritz was putting a classical touch to the last radiant years of West Germany. Klausjürgen Wussow, also born in 1929, starred as head doctor Professor Brinkmann in the popular ZDF televi sion series The Black Forest Clinic . Episode for episode, he embodied that practice of communicative action, the theo retical considerations of which Jürgen Habermas (born in 1929 ) had published as a two-volume treatise several years earlier. The

fictional Glottertal in the TV series was the Eastern-Western uto pia of that era, upon which the 1929 generation put its mark.

For all of them, the past has always been a divine power. They have always confronted it, but never rid themselves of it, both in West and East. In her early forties, Christa Wolf wrote a major novel titled A Model Childhood (1976 ) in which she de picted many of her personal childhood impressions of National Socialism. Heiner Müller’s dramatic obsessions addressed the German-Russian, capitalist-communist, revolutionary-reaction ary constellations from antiquity to the 20th century, especially in his plays Germania Death in Berlin (1956 /71), Gundling’s Life (1976 ), The Road of Tanks i–v (1984 1988 ) and Germania 3. Ghosts at Dead Man (1995). Perhaps the greatest manifestation of the continued power of history, however, can be seen in a work of art which impressively and con troversially portrayed the historical dream of this generation and will remain visible for many generations to come. In the small Thuringian town of Bad Frankenhausen, the painter Werner Tüb ke, born in 1929, painted the masterpiece Frühbürgerliche Revolution in Deutschland [Early Bourgeois Revolu tion in Germany] between 1976 and 1987. The 1,700 square-meter panorama depicting 16th-century Germany, Luther’s Reforma tion and the religious wars, became a metaphor of the war-rav aged 20th century between heaven and hell, power and impo tence, life on earth and life hereafter.

Because the times were so difficult to tame, the 20th century has demanded remarkable achievements from the 1929 generation. In the obituary Christa Wolf wrote for Heiner Müller in 1995 , she claims the contradiction of time was the basis and the thorn of his life. The same holds true for her and others of their generation. The era of the 1929 generation ended on November 9, 1989 both in East and West Germany. And it is truly a twist of fate that a member of this generation would ultimately fire the ringing shot that ended the era on live television at 6 : 57 pm: That comes into ef fect…according to my information, immediately…without delay […] Well…um, yes… via all border crossings from the GDR to the FRG and West Berlin, respectively. […] I haven’t heard anything to the contrary. I’m expressing myself so carefully because I’m not up to date on this ques tion, but just before I came over here I was given this information. In a historic moment of bumbling and stuttering, Günter Schabowski fulfilled the mission of his generation of 1929. He was sixty years old when his time came to an end. From there on his after life began.

Alexander Cammann, born in Rostock in 1973 , was editor-in-chief of the socio-political magazine vorgänge . He now lives in Berlin and works as a freelance critic and journalist. On November 4 , 1989 , he was one of the 500,000 demonstrators on Berlin Alexanderplatz who were puzzled about Heiner Müller, listened to Christa Wolf and booed Günter Schabowski.

the federal cultural foundation is funding the following commem orative year projects in 2009:

history forum berlin 2009 The Revolution of 89 Clos ing the chapter on German and European division In cooperation with the German Federal Agency of Civic Education, the Federal Cultural Foundation, the Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship, the Institute of Contemporary History Munich-Berlin, the Centre for Contempo rary History Research Potsdam and the Association Against Forgetting For Democracy

The first History Forum Berlin in 1999 addressed the is sue 1949–1989–1999 Separate Past Common His tory? Now ten years later, citizens, scholars, artists, politicians and media representatives are invited to participate in the second international History Forum Berlin in 2009. The year 1989 will be examined as a turning point of European history in a series of contemporary history lectures, discussion forums and artistic presentations that address the historic and cultural changes that resulted from the events of 1989. In a year when the citizens of East Germany and Central Europe chose freedom over dictatorship, the events of 1989 represented the beginning of the end of German and European division that existed for over fifty years since the end World War II . Cultural, educational and research organizations, civic-interest groups and artists from all around Europe are invited to participate in a programme featur ing three main thematic areas: the history of communist dicta torships in Germany and Central/Eastern Europe, the parallel history of the divided German states and the history of their rela tionship, and the development of Germany and Europe since 1989. The conference will not only address the difficulty of com ing to terms with Europe’s dictatorial past and creating a com mon European awareness of its history, but also the hopes and fears which Europeans harbour in regard to the future of their continent.

28 31 May 09 Venues: Humboldt-Universität, German Historical Muse um and the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin

film retrospective portents of change? Cinematic works from Central and Eastern Europe and East and West Ger many in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the peaceful revolution A retrospective comprised of 15 feature-length films based on whether there were PORTENTS OF CHANGE in cinematic works before 1989 Initiated by the Federal Cultural Foundation and produced in cooperation with the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, VISION KINO and the Fédération Inter nationale des Archives du Film [FIAF ].

The project Portents of Change? will examine films from Eastern Europe and East and West Germany which were pro duced before the major political upheaval of 1989. The project’s organizers will select films from this body of work including feature, documentary, experimental and underground films which articulate the presentiment that the prevailing circum stances were about to end, or at least, were no longer viable. The project will produce cinema-ready film copies and add them to the collection at the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, thereby making this cultural legacy available to the public for years to come. Furthermore, the project will highlight the achievements of the filmmakers who dared to objectively portray the social re ality of their home countries and authentically depict the situa tion there while living under a dictatorship.

The programme will be presented at a variety of venues in 2009 : film festivals: The project hopes to premiere the programme at a major German film festival. The film series will also be offered to partners of the FIAF, in whose countries the events of 1989 made a significant impact.

community and repertory cinemas: These cinemas can apply to show the film programme. Furthermore, they can also create programmes of their own based on the Filmpool film series, comprised of at least ten films from the retrospective and supple mented by a maximum of five films of their own choosing.

schools: In cooperation with local and regional partners, a selec tion of films from the retrospective will be presented at school movie events in all sixteen German states from spring to autumn 2009. The film programmes will be specially tailored for class room instruction and will include an interesting combination of feature, documentary and experimental films suitable for young audiences.

The film list for the retrospective will be published in October 2008. For more information, please contact the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek: www.deutsche-kinemathek.de

1 Nuremberg 1946 2 Nuremberg Trials, Hermann Göring with his defence lawyer Otto Stahmer, 1946

The first newspapers ( Tägliche Rundschau ) are handed out, Berlin 15 May 1945

History is a long river sometimes flowing calmly and sometimes rushing through rapids. To understand history, it is necessary to look for markings years and events which can be interpreted as turning points in time. The years 1968 and 1989 are two such markers in post-war Europe. While the historic-scientific portrayals of the course of his tory and its ruptures Prague Spring, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the student protests and the collapse of communism have straightened the river banks of theories and hypotheses, there are numerous meanders of personal stories that tell of individual and social experiences. This issue of our magazine is the first to present a series of pieces that focus on family memories that flow along and throughout the soci

etal transformation processes in Central and Eastern Eu rope. Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the rising and passing of generations and the conflicts between them these themes are mutually relevant in stories about 1968 and 1989. The first piece is by the Czech writer Jáchym Topol, the son of the playwright Josef Topol. Though their approaches were different, both father and son strived to change their country which ultimately proved crucial to changing the face of Europe. Forty years following Prague Spring and twenty years following the fall of the Iron Cur tain, Topol writes an original, touching piece of literature about two opponents of the regime and the question as to whether the heartbreak was worth it.

the father doll by jáchym topol

I’m sitting in an Irish pub beneath Prague Castle, at my feet a huddle of plastic bags. Because of them my arms are half-way out of their sockets, since I’ve had to lug them shopping for my dad all the way from Smíchov. Round here the convenience stores have all gone. Everything is tailored to the tourist trade. This part of town has long been unfit for oldies. Today they took Dad into hospital. He’s long stopped killing time by enumerating all his ail ments. His condition has been one of translucent hands and muddled thoughts. Before I go off to see him, I’ve come in here for a rest. I couldn’t have made a worse choice if I’d tried. The pub is awash with a noisy crowd of idiot football fans from England. It’s on the cheap pub-crawling route, past the Castle, that they take as they look for whores. There was no point in my going anywhere else instead. The pizzeria, Greek taverna, Mexican diner, or this revolting place, it makes no odds. Here, beneath the Cas tle, they’re all just tourist traps. When I used to come here for lunch with my dad, mum and sis ters, it served just the old boys and old biddies from hereabouts.

Now don’t start drowning in nostalgia, I tell my self. It must be better here now than then. In those days, the barracks across the street with the red star on the frontage was where Soviet sol diers used to take their meals. The Soviets with their tanks and rockets held their Czech gu bernium on a tight rein, and with it one-sixth of the world, and that was horrendous; while this globalised tat well, it’s Freedom. The Godawful tackiness of city centres is evidence of the freedom to travel, I reassure myself. It’s the same here as in Florence, Kyoto or Lisbon. People want to be alike, since difference only breeds misun derstanding and violence. And it’s hardly over stating it to say that that year, 1989, when Eastern

Europe rose in revolt, we shot straight out of Or well into Huxley. But which is better? Above all, creature of nostalgia, don’t go forget ting that plenty of those local old boys and old biddies were hand-in-glove with the secret police and that they would report every bit of claptrap that passed between Dad and his pals. For this place is where he would hang out with dissidents, opponents of the regime. Now and again, one of them would get locked up. Not Dad though. At the time, we, the whole family, were quite trou bled by that; it didn’t look good not to have at least your father inside. Later I understood how he escaped prison. Unlike other dissidents, he didn’t write about how woefully inadequate the regime was, but about his own inadequacy. This is why the things he wrote can still be read today. The few pages that survive. He burned the rest. He might have railed against the regime much like the others, but for him a worthier opponent was the ineffable universe, the bewildering fact of man’s mortality, and also depression, that life long coating of ice on his brain. Many people are born like that.

Dad never really fitted in with the dissidents, be cause he was a country lad. He never learned how to use the phone properly or cross on a red light, but he was good with his hands. Of course, I became an underground activist. Once they’d locked me up and let me out again for the first time, I was grown up. For most of my friends their first spell in prison was a rite of passage. My mother and sisters would have the neighbours round for tea, which was all right and proper. They would lay on biscuits out of their rations and sing my praises: Hit him and he won’t even blink! He’ll never testify. Yes, he’s a fine lad, the old folk would acknowledge, then helped them selves to another biscuit… With the local girls my stock rocketed. And Dad? He would slink

off somewhere. Probably embarrassed. They had not locked him up. He was not worth their trou ble! It was around that time that he started dis appearing into the wilderness. Stiffening his sinews, practising for his own spell inside. He be lieved that it would come. He would sleep out in the woods. It was allegedly my spell in prison that inspired him to write the cycle of poems on the inadequacy of fatherhood. Poems that sprang from the terrible realisation that it is im possible to protect one’s own child he would scratch out drafts in the snow with a twig, then practise self-control by obliterating them. And that is said to be the origin of a collection of po ems that has never been read by anyone, Inad equate Snowflakes

My gaze roams round the pub. Yep, we liked coming here. Before the family broke up. The first to break away were my sisters. Iveta and Klára lacked the fibre to resist the secret police recruiters at secondary school and started hav ing sex with foreigners. Their task in bed was to find out whatever they could about the strategic plans of NATO armed forces, the defence capacity and economy of the West, and suchlike. I think the little jades just enjoyed the hygiene aspect of those Western or Arabic men, with all their creams and shampoos, and it got them out of school… and they would bring home food parcels. I was still growing up and I went for the goodies in a big way. To this day I’m grateful to my dear sisters. I pray for their souls. Klára be came an officer in the secret police. She moved into the barracks. And Iveta married away to some far-flung foreign place. I have a sense that what they wanted most was not to be living with Dad. Sometimes he would wake them tearfully in the night, and explain that he couldn’t get one line of some poem… and he would ask them where he had failed as a father, since they

had turned into vile sluts and informers… they would just snap back at him and off he would trot to finish his poem. My sisters’ bedfellows military advisers and arms tycoons never be lieved that the bags under their eyes and their legs all wobbly from lack of sleep were because of their versifying parent. So now and again their jealous lovers would give them a good thumping. And having complained to their se cret police minders, they sometimes got an extra beating from them. How glad I was not a girl! My sisters left home at the earliest opportunity, though they still provided Dad with ample ma terial on the topic of inadequacy. Klára was one of the first victims of the riots in 1989. She was in charge when the police moved in against the students on National Avenue. A crowd of stu dents said to be from the Faculty of Mathe matics and Physics dragged her out of a trans porter and strung her up on a lamp-post, and underneath her a couple of jokers even lit a fire. In effect, Iveta ended up similarly. She died dur ing the bombing of Baghdad. At the time she was the eleventh wife of Caliph Umar Barzhagi, into whose bed she had once been propelled by the Party. Today there’s a square named after her in Baghdad. Right opposite the Royal Palace, yes, Iveta Square, now that’s something!

Mum, who had long since determined that she could take almost anything that came her way, wept buckets and she hung feeders outside the window for their souls. It’s an old Czech cus tom. Neither Christians, nor communists ever managed to kill it off. All it takes is bacon fat, some bread and, above all, clean water. The souls of the dead descend on the feeder like the shades of little birds. If you speak to them, and if they take the food, you feel your grief gradually ebb ing away. Souls may appear up to nine months after death. After that, they don’t need your care.

Dad never put a single crumb on the feeder. And although both little avian shades hovered pa tiently at the feeder, sometimes during the se verest of frosts, and turned their little heads to wards his window, he never spoke a word to them. He didn’t have the time, he was writing. It was then that he wrote Grasping at Straws , a play that gives vent to his profound suffering at his inability to shed his fatherly love for the dead daughters whom he cared sod-all for in their lifetime. Their deaths left him so drugged up that the transition to Degeneration came smoothly. This time he projected the heartache wrought by the chill indifference of the universe into his immediate environment, which inevi tably made it partly descriptive. And that was taken as being critical of the regime. The Prague of late socialism was beginning to disintegrate. The poem sang of the descent of all living organ isms towards death, comparing the dissolution of the state to the fate of any superannuated or ganism; Dad’s words reeked of prolapsed drains, putrefying plasterwork, marasmic air rippling to the limp flapping of Bolshevik banners above police stations and torture chambers. Stink ing Brain was what he called this poem. This time it looked as if he’d made a mark. A modest company of his dissident friends, the rest being inside at the time, hailed him at last. And Dad was even taken in for questioning. But they didn’t lock him up. The investigators didn’t declare his verse dangerous, merely stupid. For the regime had just changed tactics. It no longer sought to create martyrs of those whose verse might stir up a subject people. So Dad was slung out of the police station, declared publicly to be soft in the head, and as such he was granted a (corrupt!) pension by the regime. Mum and I rejoiced at the extra cash. But Dad went about like a body without a soul. To crown his misery, the things he wrote unlike the works of many dissidents were not being translated and published in the West; they were too depressing. So the an nuity that he got as his sole honorarium came as manna from heaven. However, Mum’s enjoy ment of it was shortlived.

Dad and I used to row even while Mum was alive. Despite being capable of focussing solely on himself, which is not uncommon in people with depression, it didn’t escape him that after becoming an underground activist I quit work ing. I dined off the pension he’d got for being crazy. Of course, this was not what he had imag ined life with his remaining child would be like. He urged me to get a decent job. He kept on at me for not working towards a pension of my own. He also resented it when my peers, fellow underground activists, met at our flat. Late into the night we would debate about how to over throw the regime and Dad would make out that it got in the way of his writing. By then he was getting on, the wrong side of forty, so I think he couldn’t really tell us younger ones apart. You’re a herd, with your long hair and ridiculous pamphlets…, this individualist and loner would knock our movement.

Without so much as a by-your-leave, Dad would take himself off for the winter to the Giant Moun tains somewhere, usually to hole up in some ru in left behind by Germans expelled after the war. Sometimes he took us with him. Mountain cottages would be lent him by one or other of his more successful dissident colleagues, whose books were published in the West or who secret ly wrote socialist television soap operas. Dad would promise to renovate the place, and that’s indeed what he spent the winter doing. But also so as not to freeze to death. The place we hap pened to be in had no stove. So he couldn’t write; he could only think his poems. In those days he was of the view that it was for the best that his poems just happened. I’ve said he was good with his hands. He could make a floor, repair rotten beams, clean out a well. He laid traps, set snares for hares and on a couple of occasions even hunt ed a hind down by tractor. He taught me how to skin animals, and insofar as I had the skill I could make the pelts into some luxury item like swimming trunks. Such things were scarce under socialism. Sometimes Dad got fed up with working, so he took his axe and some matches and went into the forest to hibernate. One time he left Mum and me to our own devices in the hovel. We didn’t do badly though; we picked some larvae out of the beams before the brook froze over and even feasted on fish. It was bitter ly cold, but we didn’t have the nerve to use as firewood the beams Dad had repaired or the floor he’d made. We waited for spring to come and took turns at checking the traps. During one round, Mum missed her footing and got her leg trapped. She had to prove to the world how brave she was, so she didn’t shout for help and tried to release the trap with a penknife. If she were a she-wolf, she’d have gnawed her leg off. Fortunately, I set out soon after her, with a screwjack in my pocket; the leg was already turning blue. She lay wrapped in blankets on the floor with a high temperature, and I burned the beams first. Then I pulled up the floor all round her and burned that too. I knew she needed to be taken to the hospital. But how? There was no relying on Dad.

We had a fantastic stroke of luck. The dissident who’d lent Dad the cottage had just escaped from prison. And he was headed straight for this dump to hide. He wasn’t its registered owner, so the secret police didn’t know about it. He ar rived on a sleigh pulled by a pony. They reached us by a roundabout way, through the forests. But we had to get to the hospital as fast as possible. The dissident, one of the best brains in the inter nal resistance, made up a brilliant rescue plan. We dressed up as yokels in the loft we found some ragged tracksuits, greasy caps and mousechewed fur coats then we knocked back a bottle or two of vodka and started staggering and shouting… police patrols at crossroads just waved us by… in the guise of a pair of ordinary, inconspicuous country bumpkins we got Mum into hospital a couple of days later. This kindly dissident uncle took a very great risk that time,

and I am grateful to him. One day, after the Iron Curtain came down and I had my first book published, he made me swear on my life that I would never write about him. I cannot go back on my word. So I may not reveal the name of that brave man, who was later to rise as high as the presidency. At the hospital they saved Mum. But during a summer demonstration against the Warsaw Pact manoeuvres she was run over by a tank. I know she was only run over because she wasn’t brisk enough on her feet after having that leg damaged by the trap, while Dad was wallow ing in his solitude somewhere. For a long time after Mum died, he and I had no dealings.

After 1989, during those tense moments when the former Soviet fiefdoms switched from Orwell’s Law to the Huxley Imperative, Dad became the concierge of a town house in the Little Quarter beneath the Castle. This erstwhile house of torture had passed, as a quid pro quo for being left alone by the secret police, to the only dissi dent Czech poet ever to win the Nobel Prize. For Dad, as a totally unsuccessful author, being in effect in service to a highly esteemed poet af forded a unique orgy of inadequacy. How he rel ished it! He was rising sixty, he started burning his work, and, fingers blackened with ash, he messed about with the house’s floors and beams, cleaned the well and suchlike.The country’s lib eration brought nothing to the distinctly offkey relationship between us. On the contrary. I’m inclined to think that Dad would have been glad if, following the deaths of my sisters and mother, I too were to die, so that he could be quite alone in the world and savour it to the full. Fancy surviving the entire family! his whing ing poems would be bound to proliferate in such pain, like maggots in a wound. He would stoke his stove. But I didn’t give him that pleasure. To spite him, after squandering the first years of freedom in euphoria, I began to abstain from drugs and alcohol. Yep, that got to him. When ever we met, you could hear the creak of knifeblades opening in our respective pockets.

Almost two decades have passed and I go to visit Dad almost daily. Sometimes he pretends not to see me. Nowadays I help him. He’s in poor shape. Translucent hands with fingers corroded by ash. Thoughts muddled. A lion’s head with long grey hair. He’s one of the last old folk still a few hundred of them in the Little Quarter to live on here beneath the Castle. And this part of town has long been unfit for oldies. Here and there among the crowds of visitors that clog up these streets, the last ageing denizens of the Little Quarter still shuffle along. The unhy gienic dissidents of Huxley’s world, the graceless evidence of disease and old age, throwbacks to the Iron Curtain. And the tourists take pictures of them, as they do of the Grim Reaper on the astronomical clock in Old Town Square. Mrs Tucˇková, already old when I was born, comes by daily in her red headscarf, as if it were a gift from Stalin himself, on her way to feed the gulls on the river. Stout old Mr Horyna, who daily press

es his ghastly face, red as a boiled morello cherry, against a ground-floor window in Bridge Street and frightens the tourists. And his neighbour, old Mrs Mocková, who sometimes empties a chamber pot on their heads. It doesn’t matter that they’re old, says councillor Kosˇtálová, defending the idea that these and similar subversives should be packed off to a sanatorium somewhere, But they’re so… odd! she squeaks into the quiet of the crisis meeting, horrified at how non-PC she’s be come. Like my father, all those old people passed their childhood during the Great War. Most of them though not my father! had a hard working life. Many of them still think that holes in clothes should be mended, socks darned, that the food on one’s plate should be eaten up and that waste paper should go for recycling. Thus they are of interest not only to funeral parlours, but also to ethnographers. Yes, our contact with these ancients is like an encounter between an Amazon expedition and the local savages. Both will have disappeared before long. So Council lor Kosˇtálová and I are concocting a proposal by which to immortalise a few select specimens of the old generation. We intend to model automa ta on the last survivors. Nothing too spooky, but contrived to be fairly realistic, a memento of the twentieth century. Obviously, I want one such model to take the place of my father. I shall pre serve your inadequacy, Dad, spellbound inside a robot, for ever and aye. So that passing school children might shiver in shock at this how it used to be thing. And the shock will be so great, Dad, that it won’t even occur to them, blind as they are to the chill of their own universe, to think how inadequate they are themselves. And that blindness, that’s the real inadequacy, isn’t it? Yep, Dad, I reckon you’d like that.

The hospital beneath the Castle. In the geriatric ward a handful of wrecks attached to tubes gur gle away. Dad has shrunk in on himself, shriv elled up. And where are his hands? I see, he’s tethered. He’s just a large head on a pillow. A head with a mane of dirty, grey hair. He opens his eyes. And attempts a grin. So! If he’d thought it was the end and has suddenly spotted me, he must be a bit annoyed. I measure the circumfer ence of his head with a folding ruler. At the tem ples. And I whisper to him about the automaton. The ghastly remnant of him will be made eternal. Inadequacy perpetuated. He smiles. Yep, I always wanted my dad to smile at me on his deathbed. Just to make sure, I re-measure his head. The ruler keeps sliding about against his hair. I want my measurement to be exact.

Translated by David Short Jáchym Topol , son of the Czech playwright Josef Topol, was born in Prague in 1962 . He signed the Charta 77 when he was sixteen and became a cult figure of the literary and musical underground in Czechoslovakia prior to the political upheaval of 1989. Today he is one of the most famous Czech writers of his generation. Two of his novels, Nachtarbeit (2001) and Zirkuszone (2007) have been published by Suhrkamp.

prague in spring. berlin

In 2006 the writers Martin Becker and Jaroslav Rudisˇ met each other at a pub where wonderful friendships almost always begin in the Czech Republic. As leg end has it, during their first pub-crawl, both writers were asked by the Prague theatre Divadlo Archa whether they would co-write a libretto for a cham ber opera piece about the year 1968. The opera piece, one of the many ZIPP German-Czech Cultural Projects * with the theme 68 /89, is set to premiere in autumn 2008. Both writers spontaneously agreed to participate in the adventure of a German-Czech text co-production. In the following spring, summer, autumn and winter, they travelled back and forth between Bohemia, Berlin and the Sauerland to complete their libretto. Of course, only in pubs. The following is a transcript of their working process.

first. prague in spring. The first beer comes. The second beer comes. Several hours pass.

OK , how do we want to do this?

The Bohemian way!

And how does that go?

We order beer, look at the scenery, talk about God and the world, and tomorrow morning we’ll have our first draft.

What do Czechs drink during the day?

Alcohol-free beer in the morning. A small beer at noon. An alcohol-free beer in the afternoon. A big beer in the evening. And then cheap Czech rum as a nightcap.

It’s already getting dark! Isn’t it dangerous to be out in Z ˇ izˇkov in the middle of the night?

Aww, come on, you Germans are way too scared. Anyway, I can write better at night. Order another beer. Old Bohemian cure for fear.

And then we’ll start?

Then we’ll start! A few hours later.

postcard to the prague opera director. Dear Opera Director, We are here in Praha and are spending most of our time at our desks. But it’s paying off. The operatic form is exactly our forte. In just one night, we were able to finish two drafts. But, of course, we would like to sleep on it again before we show you what we have. We hope you understand. Yours very sincerely, JR and MB

Why did it have to be opera?! Between you and me, I’d rather write a play. Or only a short opera. You Czechs always want everything as easy as possible. And you Germans have to make a mathematical equation out of everything!

But just think of the music. That’s what makes it so fascinat ing. Every note is a little victory. Over death. What we need is an opera where no one expects it.

The fifth beer comes. The sixth beer comes. Night. The next morning both writers wake up from anxious dreams. On the night table they discover a Pilsner beer coaster, on which the following is written in very small print: notes I PLACE : DIRTY. AND RUN DOWN. NOT WENZELSPLATZ. NOT BRANDENBURG GATE. RATHER A REST AREA. SOMEWHERE ON THE AUTOBAHN BETWEEN BRANDEN BURG AND BRNO. /// EFFECT: AN OPERA WHERE NO ONE EXPECTS IT. /// TIME : IN THE MIDDLE OF NOW. AND IN THE NIGHT A MIRACLE. OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT. /// ELEMENTS : CLASSICAL AND MODERN SONGS. ALSO ARI AS. AND MONOLOGUES. AND TALKING. /// CHARACTERS : THEY HAVE TO BE MELANCHOLY. THEY HAVE TO BE DE FEATED. THEY HAVE TO HAVE COME 40 YEARS TOO LATE TO SAVE THE WORLD.

SONG TEXT FIRST ATTEMPT: /// THE AGE OF HARD DRINKING IS OVER / WE’VE SOBERED UP FOR FORTY YEARS / WE LIVE IN THE AGE OF THE HANGOVER / THE RED FLAG HAS HIT ROCK BOTTOM / FOREVER MORE ///

second. sauerland in summer. The first beer comes. The second beer comes. A few hours pass.

This place is a little like Lomnice. Nice mountains. Nice and quiet. Nice and empty. Lots of land. I wonder what a Sauerländer thinks of Czechs.

You can still buy things cheaply over there. Dreams can come true on the Karlsbrücke. And Karel Gott should finally get mar ried.

But he did! For the first time in his life. In Las Vegas all the Czech women were green with envy. German women, too.

Where was Karel Gott in 1968 ?

With Maya the Bee in Bohemian paradise. And where do our people come from?

From the autobahn. And where were they before?

On the autobahn.

And where are they going after?

Back to the autobahn. Forever. Like always. Very sad thought…somehow.

Order another beer. Old Bohemian cure for melancholy. And then we’ll start?

Then we’ll start!

Several hours later.

postcard to the prague opera director. Dear Opera Director, We are in Sauerland and have not left our apartment for weeks. We are now putting the final touches on the fifth draft. Thank you for being so patient. Yours most sincerely, JR and MB

Where were you actually in 1968 ?

In the Ruhrpott. In a mine, digging coal. And you?

Catching ants in a Bohemian paradise. Sounds like a fairy tale.

It’s probably because fairy tales gives us Czechs the greatness that history doesn’t. But they’re not as cruel as German fairy tales.

But Czech fairy tales can also be pretty frightening. Have I ever told you about Frau Not? A puppet show. An old woman travels from village to village, ravaging one house after another. I had nightmares for years. Sometimes I believe I started writing in the first place because of Frau Not.

Fairy tales. Actually, we ought to tell a fairy tale.

The fairy tale of 1968 ? The German or the Czech version? Our own.

The fifth beer comes. The sixth beer comes. Night. The fol lowing morning both writers wake up from anxious dreams. On the night table they discover a hiking map of the Sauer ländisches Mittelgebirge , on which is written in energetic hand writing:

notes II LOCATION : A KIND OF »MOTEL REVOLUTION«. THERE’S A BAND THAT PLAYS EVERY NIGHT BECAUSE THE JUKEBOX HAS BEEN OUT OF ORDER FOR DECADES. SIGN AT THE DOOR : COME TO OUR BIG BIRTHDAY BASH MOTEL REVOLUTION IS TURNING FORTY! /// THE REGU

LAR PATRONS : RUDI, THE REVOLUTIONARY FROM GERMANY, HUMAN WRECK. ALEXANDER, REVOLUTIONARY FROM CZECHOSLOVAKIA, DRUNKEN FRAUD. /// STORY : THE CRASH. SUDDENLY EVERYONE IS IN THE BAR HALF DEAD. THE YOUNG COUPLE. THEIR CAR IS TOTALLED. THE TWO OLD GUYS. THE TRUCK. ALEXANDER. RUDI. TOO LATE, SAYS THE OLD LADY BEHIND THE BAR, YOU ARE MUCH TOO LATE : DANSE MACABRE. THE YOUNG COUPLE RUB THEIR GERMAN CZECH EYES.

THE BARLADY SINGS IN MELANCHOLY VOICE : /// WE HAVE CARRIED / ART TO THE GRAVE / ALL THAT REMAINS / IS LONELINESS / AND LOVE.

third. berlin in autumn. The first beer comes. The second beer comes. Several hours go by.

Nonstop movement. Everything’s alive. That’s Berlin! I’ve always dreamt of living here. And I ended up in Prague. In a mu seum for tourists from Saxony and the whole world. Sometimes the silence there is death. I always wanted to come to Berlin.

Me, too. Even as a kid. Instead I got a parakeet. I had para keets all my childhood.

My God, parakeets! Ours was from Bautzen. And it could even talk.

German or Czech?

Both. That’s how we should tell our opera!

With parakeets?

Not the small from the big, but the big from the small!

I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Order another beer. Old Bohemian cure for denseness. And then we’ll start?

Then we’ll start! A few hours pass.

postcard to the prague opera director. Dear Opera Director, Berlin is very inspiring. When we’re not at the muse ums, we spend most of our days at our desks. We know you are slowly losing your patience, but we want to truly be sure of our li bretto before we show it to you. As you know, 1968 is a difficult theme and we do not wish to do anything that could potentially damage our German-Czech relations. With our warmest wishes, JR and MB

Alright the parakeet, for example, came from a family they were friends with in the GDR . The man was an engine driver for the Deutsche Reichsbahn. Five years ago, he was run over by a train engine. His wife is now together with one of his brothers. That’s the kind of story I mean. Not like a 68 89 historical drama or anything. Tell the small story, and the big story will come with it.

Are the parakeets at least still alive?

No. Our cat sent them to live with the ants in the Bohemian paradise.

While we’re here in Berlin, shouldn’t we come up with a mot to for our opera instead of talking about parakeets?

That’s what we’ve been doing the whole time.

Come on, say a very Czech sentence. Then I’ll say a very Ger

in autumn.

a german- czech pub transcript

by martin becker + jaroslav rudis

man sentence. We’ll put them together and make up a motto.

OK . My sentence is: All that remains is loneliness and love. Now you.

My sentence is: All that remains is loneliness and love. The fifth beer comes. The sixth beer comes. Night. The next morning both writers wake up from anxious dreams. On the night table they discover a piece of paper on which is printed a finished opera libretto. The beginning reads as follows: exit_revolution_libretto_first_draft_february_ 2008.doc : FIRST PAGE. MOTEL REVOLUTION. A GERMAN-CZECH OPERA. /// SETTING : A RUN DOWN AUTOBAHN REST AREA ON THE DAY OF ITS FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY. TIME : AN ETERNAL NIGHT IN LATE SUMMER. /// CHARACTERS : RU DI, A GERMAN EX REVOLUTIONARY. ALEX, HIS BEST BUD DY, A CZECHOSLOVAKIAN. THEY HANG OUT IN THEIR TRUCKS OR AT THE BAR. A YOUNG GERMAN CZECH COU PLE FROM A CAR ACCIDENT. A BAND THAT’S BEEN PLAYING THERE FOR YEARS. A FEW PROSTITUTES. AMONG THEM, AN AGELESS BARLADY. MAYBE FIFTY; MAYBE EIGHTY; MAYBE NOTHING AT ALL. SCENE ONE. THE BARLADY IS STANDING BEHIND THE BAR. THE BAND IS TUNING ITS INSTRUMENTS. NOT A SOUL IN SIGHT. THE BARLADY POLISHES GLASSES. SHE GOES TO THE DOOR, OPENS IT, LOOKS OUTSIDE. NO ONE’S COM ING. SHE CLOSES THE DOOR, TURNS TO THE BAND AND SAYS : PLAY A SONG. ALL THAT REMAINS IS LONELINESS. AND LOVE!

MUSIC.

In autumn 2008, the writers wake up one morning from anxious dreams and discover an entire mini Prague Theatre on the night table. They quickly get out of bed, dress up in their finest and en ter the small theatre to watch the premiere of their opera.

the federal cultural founda tion has expanded its bilateral cultural programmes

zipp german-czech cultural projects 2007 2009 is the newest programme in a series of bilateral cultural projects with neighbouring countries in central Europe, initiated by the Federal Cultural Foundation. Following the German-Polish pro gramme Büro Kopernikus (2004 2006 ) and the GermanHungarian cultural projects of Bipolar (2005 2007), the zipp projects will address issues which are of mutual interest to both Germany and the Czech Republic. These include the legacy of the democracy movement, the ways each country deals with his toric traumas, their experience with the economic transforma tion process after 1989 and the future of our cities. The extensive range of projects are divided into four theme-based areas: 68/89 Art.Time.History, Real Life in Germany and the Czech Republic, Utopia of Modernity: Zlín and Kafka. German and Czech part ners will co-develop and coordinate numerous events in the fields of contemporary history, art, ethnology, radio, film, theatre and architecture. For more information, visit www.projekt-zipp.de

The formal commencement of ZIPP will take place at a theme evening at the Academy of the Arts Berlin on Pariser Platz on 30 May 2008 crossing 68/89 — Protest, reform and cultural upheaval in Prague, Berlin and Paris This year we will commem orate the fortieth anniversary of Prague Spring and next year all of Europe will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Eastern and Western Europeans associate very different events, experiences and memories with the year 1968. Interna tional contemporary witnesses, historians, cultural critics and art ists will present their perspectives of Prague Spring and the stu dent protests in the West during a long night ( 7 pm– 1 am) of per formances, discussions, concerts and readings. One of the evening’s central themes will be the European and transatlantic rela tionship, and the resulting idea and cultural transfer between East and West. The evening will begin with a podium discussion featuring prominent members of the 68 movement from several European countries, such as Oskar Negt, Friedrich Schorlemmer (and pending their confirmation, Jirˇí Grusˇa, Lionel Jospin, Já chym Topol, Adam Michnik and Jirˇí Dienstbier). This will be followed by a series of performances and discussions based on the international impact of the late 1960s pop culture, its icons and legends. Project partners: Academy of the Arts, Berlin; Sophiensaele, Berlin; Centre for Contemporary History Research, Potsdam; German-Czech Discussion Forum.

Martin Becker , born in Plettenberg, Germany in 1982 , is a professional journalist, writer and pub-goer in Berlin. After completing his studies at the Leipzig Institute of Literature, he received the GWK Literary Promotion Prize of 2007 and a literature scholarship from the Märkische Cultural Conference in 2008. His most recent book Ein schönes Leben [A Wonderful Life] was published by the Luchterhand Literaturverlag in 2007. He is currently working on a novel, radio and theatre plays.

Jaroslav Rudisˇ, born in Turnov, Czechoslovakia in 1972 , lives and works in Prague as a writer and is not ashamed of his fondness for Czech beer. The Rowohlt Verlag published the German translation of his novel Der Him mel unter Berlin [The Sky Beneath Berlin] in 2004. In November 2008 the Luchterhand Literaturverlag will release his novel Grandhotel . His most recent book Potichu [The Silence] was published in the Czech Republic last year. He also produces comics, plays, radio plays and scripts.

Zip(p) refers to the sound a zipper makes in the Czech Republic and, for that matter, practically everywhere else in the world. The transcripts provide an il lustrative and practical example of how Germans and Czechs can easily form strong bonds with one another.

Another upcoming ZIPP programme event: kafka. 196 1968 2008 The 125th anniversary of Franz Kafka’s birth is coming up in July 2008. The conference Kafka and Power at the Liblice Castle near Prague (24 25 October 2008 ) will also commemorate the legendary Kafka conference held at the same location in 1963. It is regarded as one of the key historical events in recent Czech history that sparked Prague Spring five years later. Both years, 1963 and 1968, will be evaluated at the conference, as well as Kafka’s relationship to power. Could it be that Kafka, the greatest expert on power (Elias Cannetti), served as a point of crys tallization for the growing movement that challenged the au thoritarian socialist regime? To what degree do Kafka’s writings rebel against repression and does his analysis of the balance of power still ring true following the collapse of the totalitarian sys tem? Is there such a thing as a grammar of power which Kafka de fies in his writings? Contemporary witnesses, politicians, diplo mats, journalists, historians, philosophers, writers and literary scholars will participate in a series of lectures and discussions at the conference. The conference partners are the Institut für Textkritik e.V. ( ITK ), Heidelberg; the German Studies Department at the University of Hei delberg and the Czech Academy of the Sciences, Prague.

1 2

1 Russian advance on Vienna, April 1945

2 Potsdam Conference, Winston Churchill, Harry S Truman and Josef Stalin, July 1945

 Prisoners of war in Berlin, May 1945 4 Vienna 1945 5 Budapest 1945

6 Cheers after hearing news of the Red Army victory, Budapest, March 1945

in accord the federal cultural foundation launches a national new music network together with over 250 partners

Contrary to conventional practice, we’ll start with the bad news. New Music doesn’t appeal to mass audiences. It simply doesn’t play the role in public cultural awareness as other con temporary art forms do. New Music exists in a very small niche. One might stumble upon it in the late-night public radio pro grammes and, unfortunately, that’s where it stays. In recent years attending exhibitions of modern fine art has become a part of a sophisticated lifestyle, whereas listening to concert performances and, in particular, New Music continues to fall under the category of high culture, i.e., difficult and intellectually challenging. Compared with other countries in the world, the field of Ger man New Music is alive and well as uniquely diverse as Ger many’s traditional music theatre and orchestra scene. However, because the New Music scene in Germany is so fragmented and complex, it cannot gather the necessary strength to attract larger audiences and appeal to new target groups.

And now for the good news. This is only one side of the coin! Many cities have shown surprising interest in developing ways to promote New Music. There is a considerable demand and a strong willingness to increase the popularity of New Music, tai lored to the circumstances on location. After initiating the New Music Network, the Federal Cultural Foundation received 81 project applications from cities all around Germany, from Kiel to Passau, and from Essen to Dresden. In November 2007, the members of the curatorial panel Beat Furrer, Renate Lies mann-Baum, Christian Scheib and Matthias Henke selected fifteen projects to comprise the New Music Network, all of which focus on developing new forms of cooperation for New Music and generating an unprecedented New Musical presence in pub lic cultural life. A very important lesson was learned in the prepa ration phase of the New Music Network when developing in dividual projects, it truly pays off to fully and patiently discuss all the modalities with the participants and responsible parties on location. The Federal Cultural Foundation and the New Mu sic project office have gone to significant lengths to ensure that the projects developed for each city and region have an appropri ate size, solid financing and a carefully tailored theme. For the Foundation, such conditions are very unique and reflect the di versity and complexity of the projects.

The numbers were impressive as soon as the network programme began. The 8 -million-euro funding package approved by the Foundation was supplemented by an additional 10 million euro provided by 46 sponsors from all across Germany mostly states and communities, but also private and public foundations. The 15 network projects combine the forces of 254 partners, rang ing from 5 to 33 per project. The network partners represent a rela tively accurate sample of Germany’s musical life. They include strongly devoted individuals, numerous independent groups and ensembles, schools, music schools, music colleges and universi ties, associations, publishers, event organizers, municipal thea tres, orchestras, public radio broadcasters and their correspond ing orchestras. New Music has never seen such amassed coopera tion and network-building in its entire history, which gives us hope that this national momentum will improve, if not fully al ter, the public’s perception of New Music in the future.

In the following we present a small selection of some fascinating projects which demonstrate the exemplary nature of our network concept. (You can find a complete listing and description of these projects at www.netzwerkneuemusik.de) kiel and passau are practically un

chartered territory on the New Music map. The promotional ac tivities in these cities will mainly focus on the tried-and-true fes tival format. By hosting festivals during non-festival seasons, the projects can rely on a large base of local supporters who will con tinue the festival work in the future. In Passau, which is located at the three-river junction Danube, Inn and Ilz, the city’s geograph ical location will play an integral role in the annual festival featuring a series of concerts which musically interpret the theme Everything in Flow . The festival will feature works by com posers who come from important river regions of the world (Danube, Isar, Seine, Po, Volga, Mississippi and Mekong). Fur thermore, audiences will be introduced to projects and musical styles that operate along the boundaries between genres. Local composers, improvising composer/performers, musicians, con ductors, choir directors and pedagogues have agreed to work to gether to bundle the creative potential that already exists in terms of contemporary music, integrate it into the cultural identity of the city, and offer national and international New Music a per manent jetty to dock onto.

The same goes for moers, whose renowned MOERS FESTI VAL , dedicated to improvised music and experimental jazz, will take its audiences around the city. In addition to special events for children and young adults, the citizens of Moers will have the opportunity to experience improvised music in their everyday environment. Famous improvisation artists and expert present ers will take audiences to banks, the tax office, the city hall, the unemployment office, car dealerships and other venues, where they will perform concerts and hold discussions.

The circumstances in the music metropolises of Hamburg, Berlin and Cologne are obviously of a very different calibre, though there is still plenty of room for improvement. In view of the frag mentation of the New Music scene in the past and the hopeful outlook of the new Elbe Philharmonic set to open in 2010, the project partners in hamburg have planned a large-scale inte gration and promotion programme with events that range from a mobile sound container to joint concert subscription series. The project ear shore hopes to enrich the opulently institutional ized life of berlin by rigorously assimilating impulses and for mats from the fringe scene. In the old musical city of dresden, some of the better known proponents of New Music, e.g., the Dresden College of Music and the Festspielhaus Hellerau, will develop and carry out joint projects with traditional institutions, like the Dresden Philharmonic and its world-famous Sächsische Staatskapelle. In the new musical city of cologne, where an incalculable number of artists, groups and event organizers used to make New Music without any coordination between them to speak of, all 33 (!) major and minor partners have joined forces to create and expand a common production and promotion net work. The long-term goal is to build a new centre for New Music in the city. There was a similar situation in freiburg im Breis gau, a smaller city with an over-proportionate number of New Music ensembles. For the first time in the history of the city and region, the New Music Network will help coordinate the scene and improve artistic exchange and synergetic effects between the formerly isolated musicians and ensembles. The project features a combination of artistic-programmatic ensemble work, contin ual promotional and educational activities and an annual festival as a major public showcase for New Music. The relatively new Philharmonic Orchestra in essen has re ceived numerous distinctions for its work with schools and oth-

er programmes. Now its composer-in-residence projects aim to unite all the city’s musicians and others who are interested in music. Structural change new listening and see ing is the motto of the educational and event programme in saarbrücken, which will introduce audiences to the crossgenre repertoire of New Music as well as demonstrate various creative processes, including how such music is composed. In this way, the project hopes to initiate an artistic change throughout the Saarland region and contribute to permanently creating a new cultural identity. The educational programme will be aimed at young people, school children, college students, professional trainees, and especially those who prefer light or popular music. augsburg intends to use its municipal music theatre to estab lish its own original New Music scene from the ground up. The concept of More Music! is based on the city’s already suc cessful culture and youth programme and taps into the existing theatre-pedagogical experience and music-pedagogical resourc es on location. The various educational projects focus on young people’s apparent interest in experimenting with new electronic music and other popular media-driven game formats.

As one might expect, the regional projects have a more effective impact over greater areas. Music 21 lower saxony will de velop a widespread network of cooperative partners to coordi nate events and educational activities. The goal is to create a New Music identity that is recognizable anytime and anywhere. For example, the current project Contemporary Music in School and other composition classes for children offered at individual schools will be expanded to include all the schools in Lower Saxony. The soundpole project in oldenburg/ bremen focuses on a specific area within the wide spectrum of New Music. The events will address the artistic forms of expres sion that operate along the boundaries between New Music and film, the fine arts and pop music, and the educational aspect which is sometimes the subject of artistic praxis. The Spectrum Villa Musica is a project in rhineland-pfalz which has invited young musicians, lecturers, distinguished music high schools, the state foundation’s Academy of Chamber Music and other municipal and state organisations to participate in a net work of projects in Edenkoben, Leiningen, Montabaur, Mainz, Neuwied and Kaiserslautern. The project aims to generate highquality musical production and introduce audiences to the new est pieces of chamber music and modern classical music on a per manent basis. School projects will teach students about the many different facets of avant-garde music, help them better under stand their regional, rurally-influenced musical culture, and en courage them to perform with conventional instruments in unconventional ways. stuttgart and the surrounding region will establish the Network South to coordinate the artistic en deavours of many well-known proponents of New Music, such as Musik der Jahrhunderte, the SWR Vokalensemble and ensem ble ascolta. Together they will perform in Stuttgart’s surround ing region from Aalen to Winnenden and permanently integrate these venues into their future activities.

And now, the best news for last. The New Music Network will run until 2011. Enough time for the 15 projects and their many partners to get New Music moving forward everywhere in Ger many and to get the public excited about this dynamic musical field. Nothing less will do.

The Editors

what is new music, actually by barbara barthelmes

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Today New Music is employed as a kind of universal category of 20th century art music. But New Music doesn’t designate a clearlydefined epoch, and it certainly doesn’t connote a generally ap plicable stylistic element in the sense that comparable to the developmental stages and schools of Classical or Romantic mu sic a unified canon, with distinct major tendencies, departures, guiding developments and dead-ends, has crystallized. Related terms such as modern and contemporary music, or even mu sical avant-garde constitute points of reference within this frame work of meaning. All of these terms express the demand for rele vance and timeliness: They emphasise the experimental and the innovative, progressive or critical-subversive character of the music of the 20th century and the present.

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Historically speaking, the appearance of what would ultimately be declared New Music marked a historical threshold around 1910 a time which contemporary musicians regarded as the end of 19th century music. In a music-historical sense, this break with the past is connected to Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, or the so-called Second Vienna School. But the advocates of musical Futurism, such as Luigi Russolo and Francesco Balilla Pratella, or remarkable pioneers such as Edgard Varèse and Charles Ives, also number among the path-breaking innovators. Their innovations affected every dimension of musi cal art: harmony, rhythm, tone quality, musical dynamics, form and finally, the shape and artistic character of New Music itself. The insistence on renewal was actually aimed at an extra-musical, socio-political topos: the revolution. People spoke of liberation from the bonds of musical convention and crusty academic ap proaches.

For the listener, however, new meant breaking with a host of con ventions and listening habits. Thus far, the listener had been used to temporary dissonances tending towards resolution and ten sions created throughout which would be resolved in a finale. Now the listener was missing a harmonic reference point to pro vide his ear with some kind of orientation. Instead of melodious sound constellations, sounds split into micro-particles, sound clusters and street noises were impinging upon his musical per ception. The end of the traditional system of harmony also saw the end of those forms which had determined the dramaturgy of a symphony or sonata. Instead, new forms were being tried out: dissolving, short, aphoristic forms, sound collages, sounds mov ing in space and supported by the rapidly developing technology of sound production and reproduction, acoustic ready-mades and much more. The listener’s passive habits of perception were also being attacked. Erik Satie challenged the listener to get out of his seat, walk around, no longer seek the sublime or edifying in music but to view it as ornamental or perceive it as a carpet of sound.

The break with musical tradition revealed New Music’s dilemma the end of listening conventions which made it possible to understand music meant that in each new work, the composer had to create his own, new meaning requiring special mediation. More than a few composers have since felt compelled to provide the code, explanation or analysis along with the music itself.

 If the history of New Music between 1910 and World War II can be seen within the framework of classical music history via the construction of a genealogy of composers, a coherent succes sion of styles or permanently expanding and progressing musical means, developments today resist clear, linear representation.

If we wanted to undertake such a venture, representation would probably resemble an intricate web, a rhizome or a transport sys tem.

The constant accumulation of new musical inventions and the growth of archaeological finds required constant expansion and interlinking of the territory to its very peripheries. Thus, there is a line of development between Russolo’s bruitistic music and his noises through electro-acoustic music to all of the models and ex periments with new electronic instruments. Another contradic tory movement involves reassembling, indeed, abusing consum er electronics, a movement which leads from Nam June Paik’s records through the reconstruction of old radios into new musi cal instruments all the way to hardware hacking. Minimalism crossed paths with New Complexity as well as with popular forms of ambient music and jazz. In this way, one can create all kinds of connections which reveal although anti-hierarchical in prin ciple certain junctions from which one can move in all kinds of directions. One such junction would be, for example, John Cage, who as no other artist in the decades following World War II initiated path-breaking developments, and not only in music.

The public doesn’t only experience uncertainty about aesthetic conventions in the face of this Babel of voices; it also experiences the fundamental loss of certainty about what music actually is. This new lack of clarity (Habermas), which people tended to asso ciate with all that was post-modern at the end of the last century, has created difficulties for the term new. In a field in which all new music is regarded as equally valid, drawing lines which pit new against old is no longer possible. The multitude of possible new types of music seems to lead to mere value-free otherness.

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The portrait of New Music aesthetics where anything goes access to which is difficult for the normal listener corresponds to the topos of its enclave-like existence and to the distortions of the ivory tower, where new music is produced and appreciated. Despite its variety and vitality, the topos limits it to a strange, ob scure territory cut off from the more general world of music; something for only a few specialists and which requires special expertise.

But doesn’t this situation division into a stylistic pluralism and, consequently, into multiple listening attitudes/ways of apprecia tion take the burden off the listener? Despite its extremely ar tificial background at times, the variety of its aesthetic premises and frequently overflowing self-reflectiveness, New Music is like all other music first and foremost a sensuous phenomenon. The primary aesthetic experience hearing doesn’t just con stitute legitimate access to contemporary music; it can also give rise to a new, appropriate understanding of New Music beyond all conventions; especially since New Music, particularly in its most recent history, has constantly tried in a self-critical fashion to overcome boundaries within which a narrowly purist concep tion of musical art had trapped it.

New Music has turned to people’s daily lives and the profane as well as examined the way we hear and the conditions and poten tial of acoustic and visual perception in the creative act. Thus, the boundary between serious and popular music has been blurred and musical genres have arisen which make no attempt to fall under either category. The transitions to related arts such as visu al art and architecture have also been opened up and have created new paths of access to music. Organized sound is projected into real rooms; sound environments arise in which an active

listener exploring the sound is assumed. Music and pictorial art have become connected in a way never seen before: compositions which arise in a critical encounter with works of visual art; noise music, which aims for a kind of cinematic effect in one’s mind; syntheses of sound and picture in which the music generates pic tures and vice-versa, and which, without the experience of film, video clips and video or computer art, would have been incon ceivable. In its encounter with the most recent music technology, music has found new forms, which run the gamut from plumb ing the possibilities of sound syntheses, to sampling, hardware hacking and media bending.

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We can no longer view what is new in the context of more re cent music history as progress or the end of a development. At the same time, newness should not exhaust its meaning in other ness. New Music is best described as a non-normative, open musi cal practice an artistic practice which permits what has thus far been seen as marginal, ignored, worthless and profane to be come the object of artistic formation, thereby giving it the status of something valuable and artistic. If you look at the various in terpretations of musical material, the instruments, the musical forms which music has created in the last hundred years, it ap pears that New Music is finally ready for appreciation by a larger segment of the public.

Barbara Barthelmes is a music historian and has worked as a re searcher for the Foundation’s New Music Network since 2007

1 Nazi house in flames, outside Vienna 1945

Marshall Shukov at the victory parade, Moscow 24 June 1945

Sevastopol 1944

Russian tank, Berlin, Yorckstraße/Mehringdamm 2 May 1945

Vienna 1945

Soldiers loading bombs, Chukotka peninsula 1941

giving the gift of shadow by hortensia völckers

Although the Federal Cultural Foundation takes a strong interest in a wide vari ety of cultural projects in Germany, its relationship to the berlin biennial is especially close. This is not just because the Foundation has funded the event since 2004 and will continue to do so until 2012. The berlin biennial, founded in 1998, has flourished under the aegis of the Federal Cultural Foundation and, in just a few years, has become an internationally acclaimed forum for contem porary art. At the opening of the 5th berlin biennial, Hortensia Völckers held the following speech, based on what she learned from her numerous conversations with the bb5’s curators Adam Szymczyk and Elena Filipovic.

I greet you

Sons and daughters of the sea, You, who live on the other side of the sea… I do not know your language, As you do not know mine.

This is the greeting we hear in a video work by Susan Hiller one of the many projects you will see at the New National Gallery during the 5th berlin biennial. Hiller’s video is remarkable, in that all we see is a black screen. But we hear this greeting spoken in a hoarse voice by a man named Mukalap, one of the last living members of the South African language community of K’ora. German subtitles appear at the bottom of the screen.

Susan Hiller named her work The Last Silent Movie . The title tells us that it’s a silent film. But to be exact, we should say the film is about silence. The language Mukalap is speaking no long er exists. Like the other languages we hear in Susan Hiller’s film Xokleng, Manx, Lenape or Kukhassi — all of which are extinct or in danger of dying out.

What we hear are the last words of languages, spoken by the last living members of their people. Experts predict that one half of the 6,000 languages spoken around the world today will disap pear during the course of this century. Major linguistic fields are becoming a subdivision of archaeological study at a breathtaking speed.

When a language dies, so do centuries of ancient knowledge about animals, plants, mathematics, medicine, and ideas about life and time. As a language disappears, so do entire world views, or Welt sichten a term Wilhelm von Humboldt used to describe lan guages. Hiller’s film forces us to witness this destruction, though we cannot actually see what we are losing. After the film, how ever, we can no longer claim that we hadn’t heard anything about it.

Susan Hiller once said: I struggle with ghosts in all my works. I be lieve we will find some of this struggle at this year’s berlin bienni al. It begins with its title: When things cast no shadow. It sounds a little spooky and brings to mind ghosts or spirits. But what is re ally meant by it?

The shadow metaphor opens up a wide field of images, cultivated for ages and full of pitfalls. No wonder, since the metaphor is as old as our civilization itself. In many myths, the realm of shadows

is the realm of the dead or the undead. In Plato’s famous shad ow parable, the beginning of European metaphysics, the things we believe to be real are actually just shadows dancing on the walls of a cave. Something secondary. The way we see the world is, in fact, faint shadows of divine notions and eternal ideals.

Let me address the concept of shadows without taking any philo sophical detours profanely, non-metaphysically, worldly even geo-physically if you will. What does the appearance of our shadow depend on when we’re outdoors? It depends on the sea son, or the position of the earth in relation to the sun. It depends on the time of day in other words, the rotation of our planet. It depends on our latitude and longitude our exact location. It depends on our individual shape, the movement of other people and things around us. And lastly, it depends on the texture of the ground on which it falls. Therefore, we can say that every shadow is unique. And that distinguishes it from the things themselves and ideas the alleged blueprints of the world.

A shadow is a fleeting witness of the fleeting present. It darts by and vanishes. At the same, however, it provides us with extremely detailed information regarding the position of things and people in relation to their earthly, and yes, universal position. It is the most precise, clearly perceptible indicator of the existence of things and people in time and space.

So if we look at it from the other way around, what does it mean when things and people do not cast shadows? It would imply they had fallen away from the world incomplete and ghostlike.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s Wanderer says to his shadow: You should know that I love the shadow as much as I cherish the light. For facial beauty, clarity of speech, quality and firmness of character, shadow is as necessary as light. They are not opponents: they are rather affectionate, holding hands — and if the light disappears, the shadow slips away after it. And the shadow replies: I love human beings […] and I’m pleased when their eyes shine as they discern and discover knowledge […] That shadow, which all things cast, if the sunshine of perception falls upon them — that shadow am I as well. This is a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche’s book Human All Too Human

Allow me to examine this link between shadow and perception a little further from a literary perspective, as literature plays a crucial role for the curators at this year’s bb5. The 600 -page book about the biennial which I consider a collective artwork of the bb5 in paper form contains numerous references to literature. Typically enough, the last picture in the catalogue is a silhouette, namely the illustration to the story Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte written by Adelbert von Chamisso in 1813

The tale is a classic piece of shadow literature. Peter Schlemihl sells his shadow to the Devil for an enchanted purse that never runs out of gold. The illustration depicts the exact moment when the Faustian pact is sealed. The devil kneels behind Peter Schlemihl to separate his shadow from his body, roll it up like a rug and take it with him.

The consequences of the pact are fatal. His bride and others in the vicinity shrink away from him in fear. Without his shadow, Peter Schlemihl suffers from the loss of his existential presence and even the gold doesn’t compensate for his loss. According to Chamisso, Peter Schlemihl is completely cut off from life itself He has exchanged his limited physicality his grounding, the here and now for the utopia of unlimited wealth.

But you, my friend, if you wish to live amongst others, then learn first and foremost to honour thy shadow before money this is the moral of Chamisso’s story. Yet Peter Schlemihl cast out by human soci ety by previous fault of his own devotes himself to the sciences and becomes a naturalist who travels in solitude through the lush garden of the earth, from India to Cape Horn all the way to Green land.

What is remarkable is that the writer Adelbert von Chamisso shared a very similar fate he, too, was an outcast, torn between two homelands. In the same year he wrote his tale, Chamisso travelled around the world to study nature and record foreign languages, especially those that were handed down orally and were especially threatened by the progress of civilization. In his report On the Hawaiian Language, which Chamisso

submitted to the Berlin Academy of the Sciences in 1837, he summed up his research with this dismal conclusion: The customs, history, myths, cults […] all the keys to the most important secrets […] of mankind […] sink into a sea of oblivion the moment they are placed into our hands.

Chamisso’s words express the sad truth of ethnography the same truth Susan Hiller addresses in her work, which at least tries to usher the acoustic shadows of world views across the sea of oblivi on. And there lies the fragile hope that these faint shadows of the past, which we see through the art of perception and the percep tion of art, can illuminate our path into the future.

Adam Szymczyk recently said: People are dealing with the past be cause they are looking for something that leads them into the future. This has nothing to do with aesthetic nostalgia or the often-quot ed preservation of our cultural heritage. What he meant was the ac tive, artistic search for that which has become invisible people, things and works of the past which seem important to our future, but no longer cast a shadow because there is no one there to illu minate them.

These messages sound quite simple. However, the languages the artists use to express them are replete with nuances that alternate between the symbolic world and the material world, between in ternal and external spaces, and even between day and night. It turns out that four venues and seventy days is not enough to present the entire range of works at the bb5 , and therefore, the curators have decided to hold events at night in a series titled My Nights Are More Beautiful Than Your Days. Nights that are full of light and full of shadow, where both as Nietzsche would say are rather affectionate, holding hands and if the light disappears, the shadow slips away after it

But the light will not disappear. It is now shining brightly at this fifth berlin biennial. And it casts strong shadows.

The 5th berlin biennial is hosted by the KW Institute for Contemporary Art and will run until 15 June 2008. For more information and programme notices, please visit www.berlinbiennale.de

upcoming event

art values society Conference on the significance of nonprofit art institutions today An event funded by the Federal Cultural Foun dation in cooperation with the Federation of German Art Associations and the Academy of the Arts Berlin

The conference Art Values Society (Kunst Werte Gesellschaft) will take place during this year’s 5th berlin biennial and shall examine the current situation of publically and privately funded art. It will focus on the current significance of non-profit organizations as mediators between the public sphere and the art market, and, more specifically, their function in the social proc ess of negotiating the value of art.

The market-oriented art world and privately financed projects continue to strongly influence society’s view of contemporary art. They provide the public with internationally acclaimed blockbuster exhibitions and spectacular sales of artworks at fairs and auc tions. What impact does this trend have on publically financed and non-profit art institutions which help link academies and colleges to museums and public art galleries? How freely can public art institutions develop their programmes today? The in creased competition with the private sector is putting smaller and medium-sized art institutions under cultural-political pressure to legitimize their need for public funding. Larger institutions, on the other hand, are trying to beat the competition at its own game by developing programmes very similar to those at popular art galleries. The conference will examine the current situation in the art market from the point of view of artists and representa tives from art institutions, the art market, the cultural economic sector, cultural politics and the media.

The speakers will include Marion Ackermann, Uli Aigner, Marius Babias, Stephan Berg, Daniel Birnbaum, Beatrice von Bismarck, Anne-Marie Bonnet, Armin Chodzinski, Stephan Dillemuth, Harald Falckenberg, Bernd Fesel, Ca trin Lorch, Dirk Luckow, Stephan Opitz, Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, Andreas Siekmann, Hortensia Völckers, Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, Adam Szymczyk and many others.

May 16 18 , 2008 at the Academy of the Arts, Hanseatenweg 10, 10557 Berlin

For more information about the conference programme, please visit: www. kwg.kunstvereine.de

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1 Berlin, Landwehrkanal Hallesches Ufer, May 1945

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2 Soldiers barricading street, Vienna 1945

 Police headquarters on fire, Berlin Alexanderplatz 1945

4 Russian soldiers outside Vienna, 1945

6 Civilians queuing for water, Berlin, May 1945

history ’s long-lost brother

an alternative history of the 19th century by burkhard spinnen

Napoleon Bonaparte’s youngest brother Jérôme has always been treated as a minor char acter in European history books. Although he ruled as the King of Westphalia, he is better known by his irreverent nickname König Lustik [King Happy]. The Hessian State exhibi tion König Lustik?! Jérôme Bonaparte and the Model State the King dom of Westphalia , funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation, will re-open a for gotten chapter of German history at the Museum Fridericianum Kassel from 19 March to 29 June 2008. The exhibition will review the political reforms and cultural life of the King dom of Westphalia. In the following article the writer Burkhard Spinnen puts a fictional twist to the story of Napoleon’s younger brother Jérôme, catapulting him from his role as a historical footnote to a key political figure who unintentionally changed the course of European history.

As King of Westphalia, Jérôme Bonaparte was strongly committed to founding a modern state based on the French system and making his sub jects happy. However, those who lived in what is today Hesse and the Braunschweig region* were less than happy with his regency and regarded him as an oppressive foreign ruler. Various seg ments of the population actually benefited from his reforms, especially from the Napoleonic code which comprised the legal basis of the kingdom. And for Kassel, his artistic inclination positively influenced the city’s formerly plain appearance. As time passed, however, Jérôme was unable to win the approval of his subjects. In fact, he was lucky to foil several attempts to overthrow his government.

Even if the inhabitants of this new kingdom had welcomed the fact that they were now the citizens of a modern constitutional state, their enthusi asm for the French was all but extinguished by the economic restrictions caused by the Conti nental System and, in particular, continual troop recruitments. The Westphalians were bitterly op posed to the French robbing them of their chil dren to fight on the battlefields of Europe for the glory of France.

Jérôme tried to his best to ignore his subjects’ re sistance. He felt indebted to his older brother, who had not only forgiven him for his North American escapades i.e., desertion but also entrusted him with such an important role in the new European political order. However, Jérôme was increasingly troubled by his subjects’ disapproval of him and his reign. In the begin ning he tried transforming Kassel into a royal seat based on the French model. He wanted to bestow the city with a new image and at least

gain the support of the most influential mem bers of society. He hoped to build a better rela tionship with his German subjects through art which he supported wherever he could. And, in fact, Kassel quickly became a centre for the arts. The court’s presentations and performanc es, though splendidly executed and well attend ed, rarely received any positive echo. Instead, the residents regarded the events as evidence of French arrogance and hedonism, and they were discredited as wasteful. Eventually Jérôme had to admit that he could never be anything more to his subjects than an unpopular governor of an occupying force.

However, the King of Westphalia understood far more of what was going on around him than his contemporaries believed. Although French was exclusively spoken at court, he received in struction in German from the daughter of the King of Württemberg. Soon he was able to un derstand things that were not necessarily meant for his ears. In order to conceal his knowledge of German (which sometimes gave him more rea son to worry about the state of his kingdom), he spoke in ridiculously poor German in public which eventually gained him his nickname König Lustik [King Happy].

Everything changed when Napoleon began pre paring for his campaign against Russia. Now more than ever, the Kingdom of Westphalia was called upon to provide Napoleon with fresh re cruits and supplies. Meanwhile Jérôme was in the middle of a severe emotional crisis, possibly the result of an unrequited love for a young bar oness from the area of Minden. However, the true causes lay deeper. Just two years earlier, Na poleon had forced him to separate from his

American wife, with whom he had been married for six years and had fathered a son. Shortly fol lowing his enthronement, he was pressured into marital union with the Princess of Württemberg for political reasons. And although she was whol ly devoted to him, she was four years his elder and only moderately attractive. Perhaps this is why they remained childless even after two years of marriage; Katharina was already going on thirty.

Napoleon personally informed Jérôme of his plans while he was visiting in Paris in spring 1812. Upon his return to Kassel, without any consultation whatsoever, Jérôme wrote a letter to his brother declaring the neutrality of the Kingdom of Westphalia to take effect immedi ately. He wrote that he was unable and unwill ing to continue supporting his brother’s aspira tion for world domination. Furthermore, he needed money for his own kingdom as he had recently begun a large-scale programme to ar chitecturally enhance the cities of Westphalia. This didn’t mean, however, that there was enmi ty between them. Because they were family, he wished to offer his brother a peace treaty. The contents of this letter would have been known much earlier had Jérôme’s courier not been mis takenly intercepted by a French patrol. After a long odyssey through Europe, the letter finally reached Napoleon while he was already march ing toward Moscow.

There is no record of Napoleon’s immediate re action to the letter. We can assume that he tried to keep the affair under wraps so as not to be disturbed or embarrassed by a fraternal dispute at such a crucial moment of his military cam paign. Although Napoleon said nothing of the

matter, it didn’t take long for the news of Jérôme’s fall from grace to spread. Historians be lieve that Katharina might have leaked the in formation in order to convince her subjects that her husband had their interest at heart. Re gardless of how the news spread, from that moment on all levels of European secret diplo macy worked feverishly to exploit it. Although Jérôme’s escapade seemed like a useless gift at first, Napoleon’s enemies soon recognized its propagandistic value. Before long, flyers with a satirical depiction of the fraternal strife in the Bonaparte family were circulating throughout central Europe.

The success of this destabilization offensive turned out to be much larger than Napoleon’s adversar ies, in particular the English, had ever hoped for. A wave of ridicule followed at Napoleon’s heels while he was already on his way to Russia. Histo rians agree that Napoleon’s weakened nerves were responsible for his serious miscalculations and bad decisions that ultimately doomed his Russian campaign. At his first battle with the Russians on August 17, 1812 , he met them with a half-hearted attack, although he could have easily crushed the poorly-equipped defenders with his amassed troops. Perhaps he feared that the battle would result in a Pyrrhic victory, for Moscow was still very far away. The lives of tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of soldiers from France, Germany, Italy and other countries were spared because of this fateful decision a moment of uncertainty that ultimately sealed his fate and that of the Grande Nation. Though it ended in a draw, the Russians proclaimed the

Jérôme controlled territories in seven of today’s Ger man Länder Hesse, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-West phalia, Bremen, Hamburg, Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt.

battle a major victory. This led the Prussian ar my, which was still under Napoleon’s control, to privately distance itself from its commander and even draw up concrete plans to overthrow him.

In the meantime, English emissaries had been continuously negotiating with Jérôme and finally succeeded in turning him around completely. He had become an important figure in what Eng land imagined post-Napoleonic Europe would look like. If it were up to England, Europe would be comprised of equally strong states which would hinder each other’s ambitions, ensuring that the British Empire would never again be posed against the entire continent. If Europe were to be reformed, the English promised to make Jérôme the leader of the Federation of the Rhine, which, released from its military obliga tion to France, would become an independent state and from the English point of view function as a permanent buffer between France and Prussia.

There is evidence that Jérôme wavered a long time. Some researchers believe that he had not yet fully realized the consequences of his letter. Perhaps he had thought of it as a kind of call for help to his brother. He had set the ball rolling. Napoleon had cracked under pressure. And now if he tried repairing the damage, he would com pletely lose face. Furthermore, most biographers conclude that Jérôme couldn’t help but suc cumb to the temptation of finally stepping out from his brother’s shadow and living his own life. He agreed to England’s proposals, although they were quite vague. According to his wife’s diaries, however, he was terrified of his brother’s revenge. He refused to leave his residence. He had others take care of the daily business of state, especially those related to the secret nego tiations with the English emissaries. And for their part, they were extremely success ful. While Napoleon was making an irresolute stand in Russia, the English were able to con vince other members of the Federation of the Rhine to join the anti-Napoleonic front or at least declare neutrality. Even though the Federa tion had no military presence to speak of, the disintegration of Napoleon’s vassal states had a tremendous psychological impact. In Novem ber 1812 Napoleon transferred his troops back west for he was worried and rightly so that a break-away Federation would allow the Eng lish to land on the northern German coast. The French fleet, practically encircled since the de feat of Trafalgar in 1805 , would never have been able to hinder such a manoeuvre.

It remains unclear whether Napoleon’s anger with his brother led him to march through the Kingdom of Westphalia. What we do know is that his retreat strengthened the position of the Russian and Prussian forces the moment of retaliation had come. The Prussian king with drew his pledge of allegiance to Napoleon, and following a series of skirmishes, Prussian and Russian forces met Napoleon at the famous Bat tle of the Nations near Eschwege in December 1812

Today, most historians believe that the hastily organized attacks by the Russian and Prussian

forces would never have achieved the decisive victory over Napoleon’s still very strong Grande Armée had he only been better prepared for the encounter. As we know, Napoleon had been de layed; the battle had already begun. Apparently he had wanted to pay his brother a visit in Kassel, which never took place because Jérôme had gone into hiding at a secluded farm. Finally back with his troops, Napoleon succeeded in posi tioning his forces to launch what would have been a successful counter-attack. Little did he know, however, that the Prussian artillery regi ment had secretly positioned their cannons to attack the French military command headquar ters. The result, of course, was the bombardment of Döringsdorf, one of the most famous decapitating strikes in modern military history. With fortune on their side, the Prussians succeeded in killing Napoleon’s staff officers and mortally wounding Napoleon himself with just a few sal vos. When asked if there was anything he want ed before he died, Napoleon allegedly replied, my brother’s head. However, this is one of many countless anecdotes about Napoleon and its truth is highly dubious.

The battle itself ended in a draw, as the Russian and Prussian forces retreated in the face of the insurmountable French army. However, Napo leon’s death had changed everything. Before his successor was named, the English succeeded in influencing the course of events to their ad vantage. They offered France a kind of status-quo agreement, which meant they would come to the aid of France to defend its territory against Rus sia, Prussia and Austria as long as they ful filled certain conditions. One of these was to ac cept the Federation of the Rhine as an independ ent confederation of states.

The English plan worked brilliantly a new po litical order was hastily drawn up and agreed to by the beleaguered French leadership. The Prus sians received the short end of the stick as they were only meagrely compensated for the loss of their territory west of the Elbe River and now had a new German brother state that stretched in a narrow corridor from the North Sea to the Alps with the Kingdom of Westphalia in the middle as its political centre. For its part, Ba varia had no interest in meddling in its neigh bour’s business as it seemed to have an all too Protestant character, and continued to flirt with a sulking Austria instead.

As the 19th century progressed, the development of Europe was driven more by economic inter ests than political manoeuvring. Although Prus sia succeeded in annexing Saxony in 1866 after endless disputes with Austria, the country be came increasingly agricultural and slowly fell behind economically. The Federation of the Rhine, however, was finally and clearly reaping the benefits of the Napoleonic reforms, which significantly advanced technological progress and prompted the rise of a class of bourgeois en trepreneurs. Moreover, the Federation enjoyed very good relations with France and England, the driving force in the Industrial Revolution, which were never seriously damaged. As a result, the port cities, as well as towns along the Ruhr and Main, in Baden, Württemberg and on the

Saar began expanding into modern industrial centres thanks to the flourishing trade and ex change with the Federation’s western allies. In light of the growing wealth of their lands and pressured by a bourgeois class whose influence was growing by the day, the rulers of the indi vidual states of the Federation soon voluntarily relinquished their absolutistic claim to power and permitted parliaments to be established. The rapid momentum of these developments resulted in the establishment of a federal parlia ment in 1848 with the consent of the princes in Kassel. The new federal parliament was integral in unifying the individual states of the Federa tion of the Rhine as one common nation, which became the German Federal Empire in 1856. Al though the princes continued appointing kings as figureheads for a long time, the new state de veloped in a relatively unspectacular manner and eventually became the first democracy on German soil, strengthened by the success of its economy and protected by its firm integration in the western alliance.

However, its rivalry with neighbouring Prussia continued to be the cause of frosty relations be tween the two countries throughout the 19th century. Although Prussia succeeded in gaining some economic ground by the end of the centu ry, the two German states continued to have very little in common. On one side was the Rhenish proto-republic with close ties to the west, pre dominantly catholic, ambitious, hard-working and good-natured. On the other side was the au thoritarian Protestant country of Prussia which was unwilling and unable to cut its long-standing ties to Russia. Even though their economic rela tions grew stronger as the 19th century drew to a close, their opposing character traits remained. And following the great economic crises around 1900, their political relations worsened dramati cally, culminating in the catastrophes of the 20th century from which central Europe is only start ing to recover.

Although his infamous letter so radically changed the course of history, Jérôme Bonaparte had lit tle role to play in the events that followed. Faced with the alternative of remaining King of West phalia or holding a high office in Paris, he chose his homeland, though he was never very happy there. Because of his family name, he was fre quently used by others to promote their ideas or ambitions. For many, he was the great traitor, while others regarded him as the man who saved the legacy of the French Revolution from the emperor’s autocracy. There were many others, however, who looked beyond history and only saw him as the brother of a great emperor. When he made public appearances, which occurred less frequently as years went by, he was constant ly greeted by old veterans who stood at attention and saluted or women who wanted to touch him. The situation wasn’t very different in the Federa tion of the Rhine. He was gradually stylized as a national hero of sorts, and soon every city be tween the Baltic Sea and the Alpine foothills had either a Jérôme Bonaparte Square or a statue honouring the former King of Westphalia. However, this reverence was not directed at him personally; it actually served to celebrate the

country itself and its more or less voluntary shift from old-German conventionality into a new era.

Jérôme held several high-ranking offices in the French government, generally as a minister with out portfolio, and then gradually bowed out of public life. His marriage to Katarina remained intact, as she had always played and continued to play an important political role in his life. In fact, their arranged marriage became a deeply in timate and loving relationship. And to the com plete surprise of many in Jérôme’s inner circle, the couple was blessed with children in later years. Their youngest born, Joseph Charles Paul Napoleon, nicknamed Plon-Plon, eventually be came the patriarch of the Bonaparte family. The last of Jérôme’s odd claims to fame occurred in 1829 when he chose the sleepy fishing village of Cannes on the Côte d’Azur to be his summer residence. In the following years, other French and English nobles settled there as well, who were then followed by wealthy entrepreneurs from the Federation of the Rhine and artists from London and Paris. Jérôme invested large sums of his personal finances to enlarge the city and convert it into a high-class health resort; people were not just poking fun when they began call ing him the King of Cannes. For the rest of his life, he watched France securely anchored in a western European context struggle with a new style. In the end he even witnessed his nephew Louis become president of the republic and flounder for several years wearing his broth er’s extremely oversized shoes.

When asked as an old man about the era his brother so influenced, he used to say that life in Europe was peaceful and predictable. The age during which they had lived was a golden age. But, unfortunately, not exactly happy.

Burkhard Spinnen, born exactly 100 years after the founding of the German Federal Empire, lives in Münster, the capital of the western region of Westphalia. He has pub lished fifteen books, including novels, stories, children’s literature and essays. He has been awarded numerous liter ary distinctions and is the holder of the Jérôme Ring.

While some people admiringly call him the Russian Robert Capa, others have never heard of him the photographer Yevgeny Khaldei (1917 1997). The retrospective Yevgeny Khaldei The Decisive Moment will present many of Khaldei’s famous and also unpublished historic photos at the MartinGropius-Bau in Berlin from 9 May to 28 July 2008, some of which have been reprinted here in this issue. The Federal Cultural Foundation is funding this event, which will then go on display in Kiev. Peter Jahn, the former director of the German-Russian Museum in Berlin-Karlhorst, reflects on the relatively unknown, but eventful life of this photographer.

exhibitions

The Soviet leaders wanted to present the victory in an impressive way. They chose the Reichstag, the undisputed symbol of Nazi supremacy, as the place to hoist the red flag. When the fighting ended, numerous photo journalists were sent on their way to stage this historic event. Though most of these pictures were published, the ones that are constantly reprinted and remain burned in our memory were taken by Yevgeny Khaldei, who captured a group of Red Army soldiers raising the communist flag on May 2 , 1945 The flag, which Khaldei had brought with him from Moscow, was not placed on the dome of the Reichstag but rather to one side of the roof. And he didn’t show it billowing against the sky, but rather waving majestically over the destroyed city of Berlin. With this dynamic shot, Khaldei succeeded in captur ing the moment of victory. For millions around the world, his photograph has come to symbolize the end of World War II in Europe.

Today Khaldei’s red flag atop the Reichstag is a photographic icon of the war. However, he took many other black-and-white photos during World War II , which, viewed in their entirety, cre ate a tableau of photographic memory. The inhabitants of Mos cow listening anxiously to the news of the German attack on June 22 , 1941 from a street-side loudspeaker. An old woman, carrying a wooden suitcase on her back, wandering through a forest of chim neys in the fire-ravaged city of Murmansk . Marshall Shukov, mounted upon a white stallion, riding past the troops in the victory parade on Red Square on June 24 , 1945 . A downcast Hermann Göring at the Nuremberg prison And, of course, the photo of Josef Stalin at the desk at the Pots

dam Conference in August 1945 an apotheosis of the conquer or in a radiant white uniform just a few of Khaldei’s many com pelling historic photos.

Yevgeny Khaldei belonged to an exclusive group of photo jour nalists who worked for Moscow’s newspapers (such as Pravda and Iswestija) or news agencies (TASS , Sovinformburo) and were sent by the Red Army political department to document the military operations at important theatres of war. His main customer was Fotochronika TASS , for whom he worked prior to and following the war. When he was sent on his first job to Murmansk at the northern front in June 1941, he ordered 100 metres of film mate rial. They only provided him with 30 metres, reasoning that the war wouldn’t last that long. In the next four years Khaldei shot photos in the north, outside Moscow, near Rostov, Kursk and Odessa, and then followed the troops to Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria and finally Berlin.

All of these war correspondents were experienced photo journal ists who had learned and mastered their craft in the 1920s and 1930s. Photography in the Soviet Union was strongly influenced by the photo aesthetics of the 1920s, which were analogous to the disintegration of the object in painting. The new photographic style began emphasizing details and new perspectives, shifting away from the confrontational frontal perspective. And because photography was regarded as the art of the industrial age with revolutionary aesthetics in a revolutionized society, it was con sidered an important element of radical social upheaval. Photo journalism and artistic experimentation were often one and

the same, as the works by Boris Ignatovich and Arkadii Shaikhet demonstrate.

This radical development in the 1920s spawned a generation of journalistic photographers who were able to preserve crucial ele ments of this newly developed pictorial language despite the Par ty’s restrictions regarding formalism and naturalism (e.g., showing the hole in the best worker’s pullover). This group of young photo journalists included Ivan Shagin, Georgi Selma and Geor gi Petrussov in the early 1930s and Mikhail Savin, Dmitri Balter mans und Yevgeny Khaldei in the late 1930s. Following an inten sive period of training, all of these talented photographers were able to make the leap from small-town newspapers to major pub lications in Moscow.

Yevgeny Khaldei made it to Moscow in 1936. Born in 1917, Khal dei grew up in a devout Jewish family in the Ukrainian town of Jusovka in the Donetzk region (named Stalino from 1924 to 1961, then renamed Donezk). He never had any formal training in photography; he taught himself how to use a camera, the first of which he constructed himself. In 1930 he began working at a fac tory where he took portrait photos of the best worker. In 1932 he accompanied the agitation brigade as its photographer through the region of Stalino, where he witnessed mass starvation as a re sult of forced collectivization. After several jobs at regional news papers, he was sent to take a course with the Soyusfoto Agency in Moscow. The quality of his work got him a job with the TASS news agency.

He returned to TASS following the war but was laid off in 1948 and couldn’t find another job. The late Stalinist battle to curb

1 Soviet flag (montage), Berlin, Reichstag 2 May 1945 2 4 Soviet flag, Berlin, Reichstag 2 May 1945 1 2

4



cosmopolitanism resulted in increasing discrimination toward Jew ish citizens. Fortunately, following Stalin’s death in 1953 , the dis crimination was not allowed to boil over into undisguised terror. After some time Khaldei landed decent jobs at the communist party’s official newspaper Pravda and the magazine Sovet skaya Kultura . Yet this period of persecution was traumatic for Khaldei perhaps even more so than the years of war. And he certainly had his fair share of traumatic events during his life time. In 1918, a year after he was born, his mother was killed in a pogrom by the anti-Bolshevist White Guard. In view of such ex periences, he, like many other Jewish citizens, saw no other alter native to Soviet rule, especially as they were now offered educa tional and career opportunities that Jews in Czarist Russia had been denied. And during the war, Khaldei’s father and sisters were among the two million Soviet Jews who were murdered by the Germans. In his Berlin photos and not the iconic image of the red flag on the Reichstag we can see that the Soviet victory was Khaldei’s own personal victory. It is no wonder that he, the photographer at the centre of political power, suffered terribly in

the post-war years under the politically-spearheaded discrimination that was so obviously anti-Semitic.

Yevgeny Khaldei continued taking photos for several decades following the war until his eyesight started failing him. His war photos often overshadow the extensive collection of post-war photography, which is unfortunate as it conveys much more than socialistic propaganda depicting the rise and progress of the So viet Union. But, of course, there is a propagandistic undertone in all his photos from 1941 to 1945 it simply lies in the nature of the subject.

A large number of these war photos portray heroes and heroic deeds, parades and triumphs magnificent photos, free of cli chés and depicting authentic people, despite the obvious propa gandistic message. However, even more impressive are the pho tos that depict the horrible face of war, and especially the ambiva lent images in which the contrasts clash the less-than-heroic Muscovites who listen to the news of the German attack with

trepidation the idyll of sunbathers lying under little umbrellas with the destroyed city of Sevastopol in the background the confused old women who come face to face with Soviet tanks on Berlin’s Yorckstrasse . Perhaps one of Khaldei’s most moving photos depicts a couple at the victory parade on Red Square in June 1945 a thin woman dressed in a simple house coat standing next to her husband, a highly-decorated field offic er in his parade uniform, an invalid on crutches with only one leg . Never has the price of victory been so clearly and sub tly captured in just one image. Khaldei finally published the pic ture forty years later. Yevgeny Khaldei died in Moscow in 1997.

Peter Jahn, born in 1941, is an expert in East European history. He worked as the director of the German-Russian Museum in Berlin-Karlshorst until 2006 One of the major thematic focuses at the museum was war photography. Peter Jahn lives in Berlin.

going tropical. an appeal for a transareal perspective of the tropics

Westerners often associate the term tropics with lush exoticism a cliché reinforced by traditional art from the equatorial regions of the world. Since their discovery, the trop ics have come to represent the failure of various cultures to live and communicate with one another. In recent years contemporary artists have begun to re-examine the tropics a mythically-charged subject ideally suited for reflecting on the hopes and problems in an increasingly globalised world. The exhibition The Tropics Equatorial Perspectives , funded by the Federal Cultural Founda tion, will present selected works of contemporary art from the Ethnological Museum in Berlin-Dahlem, arranged in such a way to create a trans-areal perspective. Ottmar Ette describes the long, often sad history of the tropics and calls for a new view of this region of the world.

by ottmar ette

At the beginning of the seventh volume of Decades , written in 1524 and dedicated to Duke Francesco Maria Sforza of Milan, the Ital ian historian Pietro Martire d’Anghiera briefly summed up the past decades of European ex pansion. He emphasized the extraordinary fer tility and wealth of faraway places in the world that had risen from the ocean. Every year ex plorers were discovering new countries, new peo ples and an immeasurable mountain of treasure Better known by his Spanish name Pedro Mártir de Anglería, he was the first to summarize the history of the New World which became the Eu ropean view of a historical process. From the per spective of the Old World, it truly appeared as if new islands and continents with strange inhab itants were rising from the depths of the sea. At a later point he exuberantly claims, Every day brings us new wonders from that New World, from those western antipodes discovered by a certain Ge noese (Christophorus quidam, vir Ligur). The Italian chronicler, who sent all his information to the incumbent pope in Rome, instilled every line with a feeling of incredible acceleration into a new era.

Pietro Martire d’Anghiera was personally ac quainted with practically every important European explorer and had faithfully recorded their achievements and discoveries since 1493 the

year of Columbus’s return while at the Span ish court and the Consejo de Indias [Council of the Indies]. He was not the only one who per ceived the newly discovered tropical lands as pos sessing wondrous fertility and immeasurable wealth. All of this remained in Europe’s longterm collective memory. Well into the 19th cen tury there were many who still believed that in credible stores of gold and jewels were waiting to be found in hot, tropical countries. And even in the 20th century many researchers were con vinced that tropical farms were inexhaustibly fertile. The tropes of the tropics, i.e., the figura tive language used to describe the tropics, spread from Europe to the rest of the world with longterm effects.

During the first phase of accelerated globalisa tion long before Magellan and Elcano had circumnavigated the globe Europeans were already hearing reports of yet unknown civiliza tions between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Martire d’Anghiera knew that these re ports necessitated a revision of Western knowl edge of Occidental geography and other studies that had been valid since antiquity. For many years people continued holding the view that the hot regions of the world were uninhabitable, yet this began changing with the appearance of new cartographic images of the earth which in

cluded the tropics. These were supplemented by illustrations of earthly paradise, as described in Christopher Columbus’s log book (1492 /93), and the portrayals of alternative social arrangements in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516).The tropics had long begun to influence the outer tropics. hidden nature revealed It is remarkable that the image of the tropics pos sessed negative and even threatening qualities very early, as we can observe in Martire d’Anghiera’s chronicle. Of course, the Europeans suffered from tropical diseases, caused to some extent by the living conditions and food which they were unaccustomed to. The main reason, according to Martire d’Anghiera, was the climate, as Hispa niola and Jamaica lie far south of the tropico de Cáncer, the Tropic of Cancer, in a region, which philosophers have deemed uninhabitable due to the scorching heat of the sun. However, those who set off for the tropics in search of wealth were often stricken by something more insidious. Far from all authorities and laws, the blind greed for gold transformed those who were gentler than lambs when leaving Europe into wild wolves as soon as they ar rived. The tropics revealed the hidden nature of one’s personality. These amazing metamorphoses are evidence of the Europeans’ ambivalent image of the tropics; the abundance of wealth

and fertility was equivalent to the abundance of diseases and dangers that could befall the bod ies and souls of those who dared travel to the tropics. The tropics were viewed as both hell and paradise.

Within a matter of years, the early modern por trayal of the tropics began to replace the ancient views of the tropical anoekumene described in numerous myths. The new tropics were dynam ic in character, which in close connection to the cartographic efforts to map the globe com bined climatic, geological, economic, agricultur al, epidemiological, epistemological, sociologi cal, mythological, philosophical and literary as pects. The tropics became a paradigm. The historical contexts changed dramatically in the second phase of accelerated globalisation when the Iberian powers were eclipsed by France and England. The tropes that determined the Eu ropean perspective of the tropics can be found in the writings of the Age of Enlightenment. American thinkers of that period, like Clavijero, tried in vain to prevent European scholars, whose views were so influenced by Buffon, to write off the tropics as an inferior version of Europe. Published in 1770, Guillaume-Thomas Raynal’s now famous encyclopaedia of European colonial expansion, Histoire des deux Indes , portrayed the tropics as lush and fer-

tile, yet inferior and rife with danger. This image stems from another book published two years earlier in Berlin, titled Recherches philos ophiques sur les Américains by Cor nelius de Pauw, who presented a theory of de generation with almost apocalyptic dimensions. De Pauw painted a scenario in which diseases from the tropics, such as syphilis, would spread across the face of the planet. At the same time the economic exploitation of the tropics had reached new heights, although Raynal described the situation based on conventional images used since the beginning of the 16th century. Two and a half centuries after Martire d’Anghiera’s ac count, the Histoire des deux Indes claimed that all Europeans whether they be Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English or French were in danger of committing every misdeed, comparable to domesticated tigers returning to the jungles, impassioned with the thirst for blood as soon as they yielded to their thirst for gold Tropics of gloom, indeed.

Once again, the tropics were not only seen as Europe’s other half, but also a place where the dark side of the European soul threw off its fet ters of domestication, or in other words, its civi lized nature. Since the early period of explora tion, European seafarers would celebrate in a ritualized and often carnivalistic way, revelling wildly, when their ships crossed the equator a tradition that continues to this day. And the wide expanses on both sides of the equator be came the scene of a destructive process that cer tainly did not end with the second phase of ac celerated globalisation. In the third phase at the end of the 19th century, the United States became the new world power, advancing its economic and military interests in the region. The Cuban poet José Martí was perhaps the first to recog nize the old colonial tropes in the Americans’ policy of Manifest Destiny.

the approaching apocalypse

Not surprisingly the tropes of the tropics play a major role in Tristes Tropiques (1955) by the French mythologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who described his fieldwork while living in Brazil from 1934 to 1939. In an aesthetically con structed interplay of mirroring, he conveys the sadness of the tropics by reflecting on the rhe torical figure of the European discoverer from the point of view of a rousseauistically-minded ethnologist and tropical researcher who sees himself as the last link in a long chain of destruc tion. The magnificence of the tropics with its diversity of peoples and cultures sparkles most brilliantly at the moment when the Europeans have seemingly completed their destructive work. Everything is doomed. The disappearance of the Tupi-Kawahib demonstrates the disaster

of the European thirst for knowledge, which is not based on the knowledge of coexistence, and whose global triumph with every possible liter ary means is actually a global failure. According to Lévi-Strauss, the Polynesian islands had long been paved over and converted into aircraft carriers, while Asia and Africa were facing a rapidly grow ing swell of dégradation. World maps were no longer charted by caravels, but rather airplanes, from which we could watch the planet’s rain for ests and jungles gradually disappear before our eyes. It is only logical that this great western civili zation was not only capable of changing the face of the planet with its creations and construc tions, but also its waste and destruction. The dis cursive tropes signalized planetary spaces that were far more apocalyptic than utopian in char acter.

Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques illustrates how the destruction in the tropical Amazon re gion can only be understood by viewing the de struction of the tropics around the world in the Americas, Asia and Africa. It is by no means a new phenomenon. As early as the 16th century, the powerful Iberian nations built a worldwide infrastructure that established a transatlantic connection from the Mexican port of Veracruz and the Caribbean islands to Europe, and a transpacific trading route with Asia from Acapulco to the Philippines. The trans-tropical sig nificance of the tropics, therefore, does not only apply to the field of climatology.

To return to the metaphor used by Pietro Mar tire d’Anghieras, the tropics were comprised of islands, archipelagos and continents which had risen from the depths of the sea and set the ma jor waves of globalisation into motion. Europe attempted to shape the tropics according to its needs and interests, and regarded them as their colonial backyard. However, if we focus only on this one-sided European perspective, it is easy to forget that all of these islands, archipelagos and continents had established complex rela tions among themselves long ago that resulted in innovative phenomena at economic, social, cultural and political levels. Beyond the dialec tics of richness and destruction, which are likely to survive indefinitely, the constant criss-cross ing pattern of movement has defined the tropics more than territorial or climatic boundaries.

trans-areal tropics

The Caribbean is a good example of this dynamic generation of space. It is not enough to view the Caribbean archipelago in terms of its rela tionship to Europe. We must also consider the very important internal relationships within this multicultural archipelago and its connections to the entire American continent, along with its transatlantic and transpacific reference systems.

The AfricAmericas with their routes across the Black Atlantic play as much of a vital role as the ArabAmericas (immigration from and relations with the Arabic world) and the AsiAmericas. If we make the mistake of viewing a certain tropical region in terms of its privileged relationship with Europe, we grossly ignore the migration of peo ple from around the world who influenced the tropics with their agricultural products, knowl edge and manufactured goods. The goal is to multiply the perspectives and structure them by researching together with the tropics instead of doing research on the tropics. Conventional Area Studies cannot handle dynamic networks that make it impossible to understand a region based only on its static territorial borders and circum stances. Our goal should be to reconfigure cer tain world regions such as Latin America, South East Asia or North Africa with the help of Trans Area Studies, allowing us to understand them better based on their global connections. The example of the Caribbean with its nu merous intersecting links to Africa and Europe, South, Central and North America, India and China aptly demonstrates that the tropics are perhaps the only major region in the world that has such strong connections to the outside world and yet such extremely sporadic and mul tifaceted inter-relationality. It would be nothing short of absurd to sum up the tropics based on their ecliptic, angle of the sun, climate, vegeta tion, wind and ocean currents, land-water ratio and other economic, social or political indica tors. Every new wave of immigration through out the various phases of accelerated globalisa tion projected its own logic onto the tropics and exported it to the tropics. To quote Victor Klem perer’s fragment Café Europe (1935), when he asks Jewish emigrants on their way to Peru, Do you miss Europe? / It lies ahead of you in the tropics; / for Europe is just a name! The tropics were not only used by Europe to reflect its own hopes, fears, creations, distur bances and destruction. In a series of short texts compiled in Vista del amanecer en el Trópico (1974), the Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante takes his readers on a similar historic journey through the European tropes of the tropics from expansion to apocalypse, from Martire d’Anghiera to Lévi-Strauss. In the first text of Vista , Infante describes how the is lands rise out of the ocean and, one by one, form a (Cuban) archipelago. By the end of the book, we encounter a sad, unhappy and long island which can only enjoy its location in the tropical Gulf Stream when the last Indian, the last Spaniard, the last African, the last American and the last Cuban have the left the island, leaving it beauti ful and green, everlasting and eternal. But can there be tropics without people?

Since the first phase of accelerated globalisation, the tropics have been marked by a long history of failed experiments of coexistence with other cultures and backgrounds. The time has finally come to view and redefine the tropics in transareal terms. From the European perspective, the tropics’ dependence on Europe was a privileged relationship. However, this perspective com pletely neglects the multifaceted, discontinuous character of a region that has constantly rein vented itself with the changing, complex global movements that criss-cross this huge tropical belt spanning the globe. Of course, the tradition al tropes that have characterized this dynamic space over the centuries remain important. Yet we can only gain an adequate understanding of the tropics by regarding a variety of perspectives which reflect the trans-areal logic of the tropics. The tropics are a trans-area par excellence

Ottmar Ette is a professor of French and Spanish lit erature at the University of Potsdam. Ette was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2004/05. His most re cent publication, ZwischenWeltenSchreiben. Literaturen ohne festen Wohnsitz [WritingBetween Worlds. Literature with No Fixed Address] was published by the Kulturverlag Kadmos in 2005

We kindly thank the Goethe-Institut for allowing us to preprint this article by Ottmar Ette, which is due to appear in the special issue Die Tropen in Uns [The Tropics in Us] of the Humboldt magazine at the beginning of July 2008 Humboldt has been published in Spanish and Portuguese for readers in Latin America for over 50 years. The Goethe-Institut, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil have joined the Federal Cultural Foundation in co-funding the exhibition The Tropics Equatorial Perspectives . The exhibition will be held at the MartinGropius-Bau from 11 September 2008 until 5 January 2009 and will be supple mented by an extensive accompanying programme.

As part of the project Alternating Current , funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation, female writers from six Central and Eastern European countries presented their most recent works of literature in Freiburg, Basel, Vienna, Leipzig, Göttingen and Berlin in autumn 2007. Though rel atively unknown in Germany, one of these talented young writers was the Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort from Minsk. Belarus, which declared independence in 1991, has been enor mously influenced by Russia for two hundred years. The Belarusian language was banned from all areas of public life in favour of Russian first by the decree of the Czar and later by Stalin’s language reform. And the current president of Belarus has even reinstated the ban today! Only one quar ter of the population knows how to speak Belarusian. The decision to write in Belarusian, therefore, is nothing less than an avowal to counter the dangers threatening the language in so many ways and regain its wealth beneath the rubble.

The generation born between 1970 and 1980 grew up during the age of perestroika, followed by the first Belarusian president Shushkevich who manoeuvred the country onto a democratic path. It was a time when it was acceptable to speak one’s language and everyone euphorically embraced any thing Belarusian. This acceptance, this pride and self-confidence decisively influenced Valzhyna Mort’s generation. Valzhyna Mort’s poems, translated into English by the poet together with Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Franz Wright for the first time, are so acoustically beautiful, one would rather listen to them than read them. Nonetheless, we hope the following selection of poems will give you an impres sion of the musicality of her language, the richness of her lin guistic wealth of imagery, her sensuality and precision. How ever, this small selection does no justice to her wide spec trum of themes which include her childhood in Minsk, the urban canyons of New York City and the beaches of Florida.

factory of tears by valzhyna

mort

teacher for Linda Gregg if you are going to be my teacher you will have to become a tiger so that you can bite my head off and i’d have to follow you everywhere trying very hard to get my head back

grandmother my grandmother doesn’t know pain she believes that famine is nutrition poverty is wealth thirst is water her body like a grapevine winding around a walking stick her hair bees’ wings she swallows the sun-speckles of pills and calls the internet the telephone to america her heart has turned into a rose the only thing you can do is smell it pressing yourself to her chest there’s nothing else you can do with it only a rose her arms like stork’s legs red sticks and i am on my knees howling like a wolf at the white moon of your skull grandmother i’m telling you it’s not pain just the embrace of a very strong god one with an unshaved cheek that scratches when he kisses you

berlin minsk Passing Warsaw. Summer. Dusk. Heart has become wind and started blowing.

Ten minutes in the station. Midnight. Summer. Heart inside the chest is spinning like a planet.

It’s not a lump in the throat that’s made you mute. This is how brutally, this is how tight heart climbs out of the mouth and strains eyesight.

factory of tears

And once again according to the annual report the highest productivity results were achieved by the Factory of Tears.

While the Department of Transportation was breaking heels while the Department of Heart Affairs was beating hysterically the Factory of Tears was working night shifts setting new records even on holidays.

While the Food Refinery Station was trying to digest another catastrophe the Factory of Tears adopted a new economically advantageous technology of recycling the wastes of the past memories mostly.

The picture of the employees of the year were placed on the Wall of Tears.

I’m a recipient of workers’ comp from the heroic Factory of Tears. I have calluses on my eyes. I have compound fractures on my cheeks. I receive my wages with the product I manufacture. And I’m happy with what I have.

belarusian even our mothers have no idea how we were born how we parted their legs and crawled out into the world the way you crawl from the ruins after a bombing we couldn’t tell which of us was a girl or a boy we gorged on dirt thinking it was bread and our future a gymnast on a thin thread of the horizon was performing there at the highest pitch bitch

we grew up in a country where first your door is stroked with chalk then at dark a chariot arrives and no one sees you anymore but riding in those cars were neither armed men nor a wanderer with a scythe this is how love loved to visit us and snatch us veiled

completely free only in public toilets where for a little change nobody cared what we were doing we fought the summer heat the winter snow when we discovered we ourselves were the language and when our tongues were removed we started talking with our eyes when our hands were poked out we talked with our hands when our hands were cut off we conversed with our toes when we were shot in the legs we nodded our heads for yes and shook our heads for no and when they ate our heads alive

we crawled back into the bellies of our sleeping mothers as if into bomb shelters to be born again

and there on the horizon the gymnast of our future was leaping through the fiery hoop of the sun

Translated from Belarusian by the author and Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Franz Wright. Copper Canyon Press, 2008 Valzhyna Mort , born in Minsk in 1981, currently lives in Washington, D.C. She is a poet, fiction writer and transla tor. Her first volume of poetry Ja tonen’kaja jak tvae vejki (I am as thin as your lashes) was published in Minsk in 2005. Her second (bilingual) volume of poetry Factory of Tears, published in Swedish in 2007, was released by the US publisher Copper Canyon Press in January 2008. In 2004 Valzhyna Mort received the Crystal Award at the Vilenica Literature Festival in Slovenia.

one-word phrases

by burkhard müller

phrases are the death of thought and the language of pa ralysis. It is vital that both language and thought remain flexible, that each of their joints can be swivelled this way and that. We can be certain that thought has become inflexible when the same set phrases keep coming up again and again. Like a rusted hinge, a phrase is comprised of at least two parts i.e., two words which were once quite flexible before being jammed together in immobile union.

However, there are phrases comprised of only a single word. These are actually the most interesting. At first they appear quite inno cent a mere word in the dictionary. But if we take a closer look, we notice that this little word like a bouillon cube in a bowl of soup contains an entire mentality, a certain way of looking at the ever-changing world from only one perspective. Public lan guage is full of them in politics, culture, the economy, in cere monies and speeches of every kind, whenever an official touch is needed or a public resource is desired, when we want to cut some body off, put someone in their place, or force something onto someone. One-word phrases are powerful tools. Perhaps the word jobs is the most widespread and effective of them all and by now, almost everyone knows how to use it. But there are many more, a few of which commonly crop up in culture-speak which deserve closer examination.

paradigmenwechsel [change of paradigm]

The paradigm and its change have been around in Germany for decades (four, to be exact), and never seem to go out of fashion. They’re oldies but goodies and whenever the DJ plays the best of the seventies, eighties, nineties and today, this Golden Oldie is sure to be one of them.

The academic theorist Thomas Kuhn’s claim to fame can be boiled down to this one word an unarguably inspired idea based on the grammatical term paradigm which he applied to sci entific history. In grammar books a paradigm is a list of inflec tional forms of a word conjugated for example, I go, you go, he goes, she goes, etc. When arranged in a list and supplemented by varying tenses, paradigms are what language students mean when they complain about grammar. Kuhn altered this arrangement in temporal succession and instilled the word with an intolerant character that it didn’t originally have. Scholars, who advocated a scientific paradigm in their youth, defended it tooth and nail for the rest of their lives, as any major change would render their life’s work and that of their colleagues’ worthless and force them off the playing field. The perfect example of such a change of par adigm occurred when the world of Newtonian physics was cast overboard by the achievements of Albert Einstein. Obviously this involves more than merely rethinking something. The change here is so radical that it even threatens to overturn the basic assumption that there is such a thing as scientific progress. The change does not occur like the building of a house, in which the first generation sets the foundation, the second builds the walls, and the third puts on the roof. Rather, the change follows a pattern of fashion. Of course, the new hat in this season some how followed the old hat from the last season. But that doesn’t help us. All we have is old hat, and wearing it would make us look ridiculous. Or to use another metaphor, the intellectual stream completely changes its course. The former meanders are no long er navigable and become marshy.

It follows that there cannot be more than one change of paradigm per field and per generation or century. But it is amazing how quickly a thousand mark note can become a thousand lira note when one overdraws his credit. Everyone has begun to drop the word whenever they have something to promote and require sup port and funding for a project. The paradigm has been reduced to

a superlative for change (like age-old is older than old and ice-cold is colder than cold). And people have also become sloppy with the word change in that it no longer has to refer to a successive change. In the fine arts, there has always been a wide range of talented and not-so-talented artists who have perhaps eyed each other be grudgingly from time to time, but have been all well-loved by the art market for their charming differences. But now there’s talk of paradigms in the fine arts which is completely inappropriate a sure sign that the word has lost its sharp conceptual edge. When given a drawer of their own, paradigms begin to get along with one another much like grammar lists. At the world congress of psychoanalysts, Freudians and Jungians put an end to their tiresome squabbling without opening up old wounds by simply agreeing that their disagreement was the result of differing para digms. Everyone nodded in relief. And thus, a large tomahawk was whittled down to a small peace pipe.

innovation

Eager are you for new things, Catilina! Cicero accused his arch-ene my at a public forum. Catilina had just attempted to assassinate the consul Cicero. He had also organized gangs to set fire to the city and stir up anarchy and mayhem. Yet all this was nothing compared to Cicero’s terrible denunciation. Any Roman who strived to bring about something new only for the sake of it being new was regarded as despicable. And weren’t they right? Isn’t it justified to mistrust those who want something new? They should be obliged to support their argument in two ways. First, they should explain why the old thing they wish to get rid of is so bad, and second, why the new thing they wish to adopt would be better. This is not to say that the old is always good. But it has functioned well in the past and people are familiar with it. And whoever urges people to re linquish something tried-and-true has to offer significant safe guards in return. In any case, there is always a price to pay to make something better. It takes effort, costs money, consumes time and causes confusion. It’s like moving to another city. When we go to the trouble of moving, we make sure the new apartment is a significant improvement over the old one. We have to care fully consider if and when we should move because the whole process is quite stressful. Nobody would constantly move from place to place simply because s/he likes the sound of moving trucks pulling up.

Yet this is exactly what we are asked to do when the word innova tion makes the rounds in our society. Actually, the word means nothing more than renewal. But the German word doesn’t pos sess the presumptuous will to overthrow the old. For example, we can give the faded facade of our house a new coat of paint, or rebuild the rotten fence in the garden; the result is the restoration of how the house and fence used to look before. A working con tract can be renewed, which means that it continues as before. But beware if it comes in contact with innovation. That would most likely entail a deregulation in terms of working hours, and the previous contract would be converted into a franchising agree ment without a guaranteed salary.

According to Schopenhauer, new things are seldom good things, because good things are only new for a short time. Innovation claims the opposite. New things are always good things! And when they are not so good anymore, it’s probably because they have grown stale and need to be replaced by something new. For this reason, the principle of innovation can never be disproven. However, innovation does have its Achilles’ heel. If innovation is formally determined by a continuous change containing no in herent qualities, then people quickly realize that a little comedy can achieve the same goal. If the important thing is to keep the

moving truck moving, then all you have to do is drive it around the block three times and then unload the furniture at the same place you picked it up and nobody would notice. Whenever companies or organizations are forced to innovate, the game of musical chairs normally does the trick. Everyone jumps to their feet, runs around yelling innovation! and when the music stops, they quickly sit down again. Only that one person is left without a chair (a little cost-saving bonus that always factors in somehow).

intervention

There used to be a time when art caused scandals. It exclaimed: Everything is allowed in the name of art. And predictably, socie ty shouted back: No, it’s not! Those were good times for art, but they couldn’t last forever. Eventually, art conquered every posi tion which seemed worth conquering, and no one was willing to make the effort to get upset when naked people danced across the stage, blood dripped off a canvas or a urinal graced the halls of a museum. Everything was possible which made everything meaningless.

When the petty bourgeois stopped venting their rage, art began to realize how exquisite this rage tasted. It no longer wanted to relinquish its reputation of aggressively crossing the line even in times of peace. And thus, for lack of a scandal, the intervention was born. It means nothing more than the urgent plea for a scan dal. Earlier, in the heroic age of modern art, art enjoyed a seller’s market ; the public took offense wherever it could and gladly so and at almost any price. This was followed by a buyer’s market, in which art measured its value in terms of how offensive it was. Hey look at us, says intervening art, Look at how we thumb our noses at you, we don’t respect your rules, we’re declaring war on you and we’re going to invade, what else do want from us?! And since you don’t seem to care about art for art’s sake, nor insist on artistic skill, then at least take notice of us politically and feel insulted!

However, nobody knows better than the aforementioned petty bourgeois, to whom this desperate appeal is being made, that art and its related academic disciplines, which want to jump out of their skin and squirm into politics, cannot really cause any seri ous harm. It’s like a small child who throws himself to the ground and pounds angrily on the floor with his fists. The petty bour geois lean back, smile and say: You’re just pretending you’re going to invade. And indeed, that’s exactly the case.

The term intervention testifies to art’s emphatic misjudgement of the situation. Intervention signifies the most confident act of one who is in command. The most powerful nations intervene when they protect their interests abroad through the direct use or threat of force, thereby abruptly suspending all existing rules. Those who need follow the rules are clearly not the ones in com mand. Art makes a big mistake in confusing autonomy, which it has long struggled to achieve, for a position of dominance. True intervention is found at the end of bayonet and in the depths of a bank vault. Those who do not carry a bayonet and have to rely on other people for subsidies would be well advised to avoid such childish threats. It’s not that the threat will backfire; it will simply fizzle.

Burkhard Müller (born in 1959 ) is a lecturer in Latin at the TU Chemnitz and a journalist for the feature pages of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. His most recent book Die Tränen des Xerxes. Von der Geschichte der Lebendigen und der Toten [Xerxes’ Tears On the History of the Liv ing and the Dead] was published by the zu Klampen Verlag (Springe) in 2006

1 Berlin, Prenzlauer Berg, July 1945

2 Khaldei as a soldier at basic training, 1938  Berlin, Französische Straße 1945 4 Soldiers outside Vienna, 1945 5 At the edge of the victory parade on Red Square, Moscow 1945

funding extension for cultural institu tions of excellence In 2004 the Federal Cul tural Foundation launched a five-year funding programme to enable six major cultural institu tions of excellence to plan their future activities on a secure financial basis. In December 2007 the Board of Trustees approved an extension of this funding programme. The documenta will be awarded an additional 3 5 million euro from 2008 to 2012 , the berlin biennale will receive 2 5 million euro for each festival in 2010 and 2012 , the theatertreffen has been grant ed 1 5 million euro for each annual festival from 2009 to 2012 , the donaueschinger music days will receive 210,000 euro for each festival in 2009 and 2010, the ensemble modern shall receive 445 ,000 euro annually in 2009 and 2010, and the Berlin media arts festival transmediale will receive annual funding of 450,000 euro from 2010 to 2012

new jury At the same session in December 2007, the Foundation’s Board of Trustees also appointed a new jury to review and select propos als in the area of General Project Funding. The jury, which is appointed for a three-year term, is comprised of experts from a wide range of artis tic fields. The following jury members are re sponsible for reviewing all general project funding applications starting in 2008 : Dr. Marion Ackermann, director of the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; Dr. Ulrike Lorenz, director of the Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie in Regensburg; Dr. Simone Eick, director of the German Emi gration Centre in Bremerhaven; Wilfried Schulz, theatre director and managing director of the State Theatre of Lower Saxony (Hannover); Prof. Dr. Gabriele Brandstetter, professor of Theatre Studies with a concentration in Dance Studies at the FU Berlin; Dr. Jörg Bong, programme di rector for German-language literature at the S. Fischer Verlag in Frankfurt; Hanns Zischler, ac tor, writer, stage director; Peter Herbolzheimer, jazz musician, composer and arranger; Dr. Meret Forster, programme editor for New Music at MDR Figaro.

seven million euro for 26 projects in the kur programme In February 2008 a ju ry selected 26 projects for inclusion in the pro gramme to preserve and restore mo bile cultural assets ( KUR ). Museums, ar chives and libraries with valuable, cultural-his toric objects that are in grave danger of deterio ration applied for funding to help preserve and restore the endangered treasures in their collections. Furthermore, restoration of many art works face a daunting challenge as the necessary techniques and scientific know-how simply do not yet exist. A portion of the funding in the KUR programme, which has 7 million euro at its disposal, will also be allocated to solving this problem. The KUR programme is a cooperative venture between the Federal Cultural Founda tion and the Cultural Foundation of German States. Some of the restoration projects include the Umbrian panel paintings at the LindenauMuseum in Altenburg, natural-historic speci

mens in preservative fluids ( wet collec tions ) at the Museum of Natural History at the Humboldt-Universität Berlin, objects of art and natural history at the Naturalienkabinett Waldenburg, a printed-fabric collection at the Württemberg textile printing company Pausa (now a cultural landmark), historic keyboard in struments from Weimar and Halle, archaeolog ical findings made of iron, audio tapes, newspa per pages, realistic-looking wax moulages of disease at the German Hygiene Museum in Dres den, medieval burial garments from the cathe dral in Speyer, and historic weapons at the Thuringian State Museum in Heidecksburg. For a complete listing of all the projects funded by the KUR programme and other information, please visit www.kulturstiftung-bund.de/restaurierung

over 100 projects in the new länder fund The Fund to Strengthen Citizen Involvement for the Culture in the New German Länder is currently providing financial support to 100 cultural organizations. The newest beneficiaries in the programme in clude the Kunstverein Schwerin , the Heimatmuseum Warnemünde and the Klosterverein Rehna in MecklenburgWestern Pomerania, the Radioplay Sum mer Leipzig and the Friends of Con temporary Art in Zwickau, Saxony, the New European Art Salon in Thuringia, and the Verein Denkmale Glambeck in Brandenburg. The Federal Cultural Founda tion established the New Länder Fund with a funding volume of 3 3 million euro in July 2002

another award-winning film in the short-film compilation do what you want The film Peters Prinzip [Peter’s Principle] by Kathrin Albers und Jim Lacy has been awarded the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Short Film Prize of 2008. Congratulations! Sev eral of the 11 short films made for the film com petition do what you want, a project in the Foundation’s Future of Labour pro gramme, have already received one or more film prizes and awards. The short-film compilation is currently on tour at cinemas throughout Ger many. For venues, dates and times, visit www. machdochwasduwillst.org

the exhibition shrinking cities on tour in russia After two years of touring the world, the exhibition Shrinking Cities will now be shown in Russia for the first time (14 March–27 April 08 ). The exhibition, which will be held at the Pro Arte Institute and the Museum of City History in St. Petersburg, will present the results of numerous studies on urban shrinkage in Ivanovo and East Germany. A double exhibi tion of Shrinking Cities , featuring a sum mary of over six years of research work, is cur rently on display in the Ruhr region. (Dortmund: Museum am Ostwall, until 27 Apr. 08 / Duisburg: Liebfrau enkirche, until 11 May 08 ) www.shrinkingcities.com

In November 2007 twenty-three new project applications received funding approval based on the recommendation from the General Project Funding jury.

new projects

wrinkles in time the art of folding in modern art When we think of folds and creases, we usually think of a common everyday phenomenon. However, scientists, mathemati cians and philosophers also spend much of their time thinking about how and why material folds and how these processes can be influenced. The exhibition Wrinkles in Time aims to ex plore both the principles and design possibili ties of folding in predominantly contemporary works of fine art.

image and space / exhibitions

michaela melián: memory the ephem erality of modernity Jointly coordinated by the Ulmer Museum and the Lentos Kunstmu seum in Linz, this exhibition examines the his tory of the legendary College of Design in Ulm (1953 1968 ). Before it closed at the end of the 1960s, the college was widely regarded as one of the pioneering institutions in the fields of de sign, architecture, film, photography and elec tronic music. The college in Ulm boasted one of the first electronic studios in Germany which is now displayed at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. The artist Michaela Melián has de signed a room installation dedicated to the his tory of the college a room of memories created from drawings, photos, projections and sounds. She describes her artistic method as a policy of memory. Early digital culture and the relation ship of design and modernity are the central themes of this project.

Curator: Brigitte Reinhardt / Artist: Michaela Melián / Ex hibition and accompanying programme: Ulmer Museum: 20 April– 23 June 08 / Exhibition: Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz (AT : February–May 2009 / Ulmer Museum www. museum.ulm.de

Curator: Sylvia Martin / With works by Doug Aitken US ) John Baldessari ( US ) Michal Budny PL ) Olaf Holzapfel Pierre Huyghe ( FR , Gareth James ( GB ) , Bojan S ˇ arcˇevic´( CS ) , Richard Serra ( US , Monika Sosnowska PL , Wolfgang Tillmans, Janaina Tschäpe, Franz Erhard Walther, Albert Weis, Rachel Whiteread GB ) , Haegue Yang KR ) and others / Krefeld, Kun stmuseen, Museum Haus Lange and Kaiser Wilhelm Mu seum: 2 March– 25 May 08 / Kunstmuseen Krefeld www. krefeld.de/kunstmuseen

image machines optical experiments and their reception in contemporary art This exhibition presents current artistic po sitions in combination with media-archaeologi cal exhibits. Its premise is based on the observa tion that contemporary artists often refer to his toric media to reflect on the conditions of mod ern-day image-making. In addition to various artworks, the exhibition will feature a number of pieces from filmmaker Werner Neke’s exten sive collection which offers a cultural-historic panorama of optical media. The works, ranging from the laterna magica to the wunderscheibe, are regarded as the predecessors of film, television and digital media. Each exhibition venue will also display artworks that correspond to the local collections and current discourse in each country.

kavalierstart 1978 82 exhibition

The exhibition Kavalierstart 1978–1982 presents the artistic positions of the early 1980s a time when artists developed a new form of thought in pictures. Exhibition goers will have the opportunity to view many early works by artists who have since become quite famous. The art ists featured in this exhibition applied strategies that were quite different from modern rational istic and functionalistic tendencies in that they focused more strongly on fiction and narration, irony, appropriation and simulation.

Curator: Stefanie Kreuzer /With works by John Baldessari ( US , Peter Fischli & David Weiss ( CH ) , Katharina Fritsch, Isa Gen zken, Robert Gober ( US ) , Jack Goldstein US , Mike Kelley ( US , Martin Kippenberger, John Knight US , Allan McCollum US , Raymond Pettibon ( US , Cindy Sherman ( US ) , Jeff Wall CA ) and others / Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen: 20 April–20 July 08 / Museumsverein Museum Morsbroich www. museum-morsbroich.de

Curator: Nike Bätzner / With works by Christan Boltanski ( FR ) Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller ( CA , Gábor Császári HU ) , Valie Export AT ) , Margarete Hahner, Gary Hill US ) , William Kentridge ZA , Rachel Khedoori AU ) , Julio Le Parc ( AR ) , Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák ( PL , Anthony McCall GB , Giulio Paolini ( IT ) , Markus Raetz ( CH , Jesus Raphael Soto VE and others / Mu seum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen: 5 October 08 11 Janu ary 09 / C3 Center for Culture & Communication Founda tion, Budapest HU ): 15 February–17 May 09 / Centro Anda luz de Arte Contémporaneo, Sevilla ES : 14 June– 20 Sep tember 09 / Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen www. kunstmuseum-siegen.de

multiple city urban concepts 1908 / 2008 How can we describe the current devel opment of our cities? Which urban concepts of the 20th century are still applicable to our situa tion today? This exhibition in the Pinakothek der Moderne at the Architekturmuseum in Mu nich presents artistic photography, the original plans and models of historic urban concepts. The exhibition will also be accompanied by a discussion series with sociologists, urban devel opers, philosophers and artists, as well as a film programme.

Project manager: Winfried Nerdinger /Artistic director: Sophie Wolfrum / Curator: Susanne Schaubeck / Participants: Markus Lanz, Urs Schönebaum and others / Exhibition, film se ries, symposiums: Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Film

museum Munich: 12 November 08 16 February 09 / Architekturmuseum TU München www.architekturmuseum.de

vanishing point + appeal einar schleef. paintings and sketches The Stiftung Moritzburg in Halle possesses 150 paintings and more than 6,000 drawings by the writer and theatre director Einar Schleef. These pieces pro vide a practically seamless portrayal of Schleef’s works of fine art, which are far lesser known than his dramatic works. In keeping with Schleef’s creative concept, the exhibition will break with the conventions of museum-like presentation forms. Displayed at a vacated department store in Halle, the works will be presented down lines of vision to vanishing points which will allow cycles, series and work groups to be viewed in their entirety. As it will run concurrently with the Handel Festival and the Theater der Welt festival in Halle, the exhibition will be able to present the complexity of his artworks to a larger audience which may have known Schleef as a theatre artist, but not necessarily as a fine artist.

Curator: Michael Freitag / Former Karstadt dept. store Mansfelder Straße, Halle/Saale: 26 April– 20 July 08 / Stif tung Moritzburg, Kunstmuseum des Landes www.moritz burg.sachsen-anhalt.de

subvision *art *festival *off Beyond the large art fairs and biennials, new forms of artistic activity and presentation strategies are develop ing around the world at a rapid pace. Although these artist groups, producer galleries and artistrun spaces operate outside the established cul tural scene, they have become extremely suc cessful and widely accepted by the public. The three major art institutions in Hamburg the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Deichtorhallen and the College of Fine Arts have invited over one hundred such artist groups from around the world to Hamburg. The festival will take place in a ship container area at the new Hafen City Hamburg. The curatorial planning group hopes to combine fine arts projects with compa rable approaches used in architecture, maga zines, Internet, film, fashion and design.

Artistic director: Martin Köttering / Curators: Brigitte Kölle, Tim Voss / Artistic consultants: Hubertus Gassner Robert Fleck / HafenCity Hamburg: 27 August– 7 September 08 / subvision GmbH www.subvision-hamburg.de

under the influence exhibition This ex hibition presents artistic positions based on the theme of intoxication. How has the consump tion of mind-altering substances changed over the years and what does it say about our society?

The artworks and extensive exhibition pro gramme will focus on the use of so-called popu lar drugs such as alcohol and nicotine and will address the social sanctions imposed against psychedelic and performance-enhancing drugs. The predominantly contemporary artistic posi tions reflect on the motif of longing for a differ ent reality and relate this to various societal situ ations over the course of time.

Curator: Susanne Weiß / With works by Pawel Althamer ( PL and Artur Zmiejwski PL ) Ulf Aminde Jan Bünnig Lysann

Buschbeck , Olafur Eliasson ( DK ) , Esra Ersen ( TR ) , Dirk Lange, Antje Majewski, Oliver Pietsch, pymca GB , Ashkan Sahihi US ) Soziale Einheit Rosemarie Trockel Herbert Volk mann, Stafeta / Dresden: Kunsthaus, Städtische Galerie für Gegenwartskunst: 2 August– 5 October 08 / Kunsthaus Dresden www.kunsthausdresden.de

theatre and movement

new european plays 2008 theatre biennial This biennial festival is the only one in the world that exclusively presents new plays by contemporary playwrights. With support from well-known dramatists who foster talented young writers, the curatorial team has invited promising playwrights from over 20 countries to present their new plays this year. In the past the festival has helped launch the international careers of many of today’s established play wrights. While audiences enjoy ten days of excit ing high-quality theatre, the newcomers to the theatre scene can make important contacts to theatre-makers and writers throughout Europe.

Artistic director: Markus Bothe, Manfred Beilharz, Ursula Ehler, Tankred Dorst / Staatstheater Wiesbaden, Staatstheater Mainz: 12 22 June 08 / Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden www.newplays.de

palace of projects festival on the re lationship of theatre and economy

Whenever the subject of money for theatre comes up, people usually complain about the lack thereof. In celebration of the 100th anniver sary of the Hebbel am Ufer Theatre in 2008, the relationship of theatre and money will be exam ined from a very different point of view. During this theme-based festival, the theatre will be come a trading centre featuring a large trading floor where theatre ideas and models can be ex changed or auctioned off as projects. The festi val programme will also feature productions that reflect on economic themes and relation ships, such as investing, producing, distributing and getting into debt. The third part of the pro gramme will feature a symposium on concepts such as abstinence, discretion and restraint. Eco nomic processes will not only be simulated, but will actually take place as real-life experiments in a theatre environment.

Artistic director: Matthias Lilienthal / Curators: Barbara Gro nau, Carena Schlewitt / Participants: Showcase beat le mot, Tomas Schweigen( CH ) , Chris Kondek and others / Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin: 16 30 April 08 / Hebbel-Theater Berlin GmbH www.hebbel-am-ufer.de

reciting heiner müller artistic and scientific symposium with performanc es, presentations and workshops In what way can or should one recite Heiner Müller’s texts? How do time, space and one’s voice interact when speaking his texts aloud? The The atre Institute of Giessen in cooperation with the Université de Paris X , the Hessian Theatre Acad emy of Frankfurt and the International Heiner Müller Society has organized a three-day sym posium on issues concerning language and voice in Heiner Müller’s works. The symposium — cu rated by Laurent Chétouane (Münchner Kam-

merspiele) will encourage actors, directors, students and young artists to investigate how to work with Heiner Müller’s texts in a series of per formances, lectures and staged experiments. Artistic director: Heiner Goebbels / Participants: Laurent Chétouane, Jean Jourdheuil FR , Rainer Nägele ( US , Heiner Goebbels, Josef Bierbichler, Anton Bierl CH ) , Hans-Thies Lehmann, Tatsuki Hayashi ( JP , Ulrike Hass, Günther Heeg, Krassimira Kruschkova BG ) , Helmut Schäfer and others / Justus-Liebig-Universität, Giessen: 26 29 June 08 / Institut für Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft www.atw-giessen.de

theatre from the very beginning! theatre festival for young children Although our European neighbours have been familiar with them for a long time, Germany is just start ing to discuss and experiment with theatrical pieces for our youngest theatre-goers. The Chil dren and Youth Theatre Centre in Frankfurt has joined the national debate concerning aes thetic education at the preschool level and has discovered that children under five are far more open to theatre than adults might believe. At this festival nine theatre groups from around Germany put on aesthetically engaging produc tions attended both by young children and in ternational theatre artists who work with this genre and seek artistic exchange and inspiration. After showings in Berlin, Mannheim and Hamm, the festival in Dresden will conclude a two-year thematic cycle based on the project Theatre from the very beginning! An exhibition of the project’s reception and discussions with international youth and cultural policymakers will supplement the guest performances and of fer perspectives for continuing cultural educa tion programmes in this field.

Artistic director: Gerd Taube / Participating theatres: Theater Junge Generation, Dresden; HELIOS Theater, Hamm; SCHAWWL Children and youth theatre at the Nationaltheater Mannheim; Theater SiebenSchuh, Berlin; DeutschSorbisches Volkstheater, Bautzen; Theater Mär, Hamburg; Spielraum Theater, Kassel; Junges Schauspielhaus, Düssel dorf and others / Theater Junge Generation, Dresden: 6 9 November 08 / Kinder- und Jugendtheaterzentrum in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland www.theatervonanfangan.de

different a theatre performance based on the novel »anders« by hans joachim schädlich Hans Joachim Schäd lich’s novel Anders is the basis for this theatre performance by norton.commander.produc tions. The novel presents three cases in recent German history when people had to radically change their roles following a major political up heaval. The play examines personal ethics and moral courage in the face of political repression, as well as the possibilities of individually shap ing the political change. With the upcoming 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the performances in Strasbourg and other Ger man cities are aimed at young people who have only learned about the political upheaval from hearsay.

Artistic directors: Harriet Maria and Peter Meining / Partici pants: Irm Hermann, Hermann Beyer, Thomas Neumann, Nikolaus Woernle, Martin Bochmann, Gabriele Nagel and others / Mousonturm, Frankfurt am Main; Festspielhaus

Hellerau, Dresden; Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin; Forum Freies Theater, Düsseldorf; Le Maillon, Straßburg FR Premiere: Frankfurt am Main: 24 October 08 / norton.commander. productions www. nc-productions.com

50 years of fidena commemorative programme In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of fidena (Figurentheater der Na tionen), this festival will present one of the oldest theatre forms in the world in its wide diversity in an international and contemporary context. Theatre groups and puppeteers from Japan, Tai wan, Turkey, France and Australia will present pieces of puppet, performing-object, hand-, shad ow- and stick-puppet theatre. The pieces will combine traditional performing methods with modern trends in the fine arts, dance and thea tre, appealing to both children and adults alike. The combination of performances by classical puppet masters like the Japanese artist Hoichi Okamoto and genre-crossing artists like the dancer and choreographer Nicole Mossoux will surely expand the definition of the puppet art genre and provide audiences with insights into the interplay between humans and objects.

Artistic director: Annette Dabs / Schauspielhaus Bochum, Pact Zollverein Essen, Zeche 1, Bochum, prinz regent theat er Bochum / Museum Bochum: September 2008 / Deut sches Forum für Figurentheater e.V. www.fidena.de

musicflash performance series The artists Alex & Liane from the performance group Gob Squad have developed a new theatri cal format in a three-part performance series featuring well-known Hamburg bands. Deich kind, Tocotronic and Die Sterne are protago nists in the three performances which examine the star cult promoted by the emotionalization of music and its instrumentalization. Known for their installations and numerous perform ances, Alex & Liane will stage the bands and their performances in a music-concert style with 800 to 1000 concertgoers at each performance a turn-out that theatre alone can rarely achieve. The performances will be interspersed with film sequences and theatrical scenes which aim to tarnish the mythos of stars and provide an in sider view of the mechanisms of interaction be tween the artists/stars and their fans.

Artistic director: Amelie Deuflhard / Participants: Alex Large Liane Sommer, Deichkind, Tocotronic, Die Sterne and others / Kampnagel, Hamburg: 14 24 May, 12 23 November 08, 20 31 May 09 / Kampnagel www.kampnagel.de

film and new media

art of education from the archives of film-related films Films about cinema, its history and aesthetics could be categorized un der a new genre called film-related films. Such films might include an artistic video work fea turing a compilation of typical shots from Hitch cock movies or a documentary about images frequently found in movies by the director John Ford. The film-related film genre would comprise a wide variety of formats, such as experimental and essayistic forms for cinema or television and bonus footage on DVD s. Until now public

television broadcasters have been the only pro ducers in Germany to give directors the oppor tunity to focus on film as a theme in their mov ies. The goal of this project is to document the history of films about films which spans more than fifty years. Information about each film will be researched, documented, publicized and made publicly accessible.

Artistic director: Michael Baute / Project manager: Stefan Pethke / Participants: Volker Pantenburg, Stefanie Schlüter, Werner Dütsch, Sebastian Lütgert, Harun Farocki, Matthias Müller Cristina Nord Christiane Habich Tag Gallagher ( US Bettina Henzler Winfried Pauleit Alexander Horwath AT and others / Vienna: 12 13 September 08, Berlin: 10 11 October 08, Cologne: 7 8 November 08, Bremen: 22 24 January 09 , Munich: 13 14 March 09 and other ven ues / entuziazm Freunde der Vermittlung von Film und Text www.entuziazm.de

village love a film production In 2009 film director Pamela Meyer-Arndt will present her documentary titled Dorfliebe [Village Love], a film about the changes that have taken place in the village of Berka in northern Thur ingia from 1949 to the present. Based on the con cept of a long-term study, Meyer-Arndt cine matically presents photo series by the late GDR fashion photographer Ludwig Schirmer (1950 1961) and his son-in-law Werner Mahler to create a historic view of the village community. By con trasting these portraits of the village with her own film footage of Berka today, Meyer-Arndt describes the villager’s social interaction and the changes that have occurred in the village com munity as the political systems have changed.

Director: Pamela Meyer-Arndt / Artists: Ludwig Schirmer, Werner Mahler / Film presentations at a variety of German and foreign cultural institutes: 1 January– 31 December 09 / Filmgalerie 451 Filmproduktion OHG www.filmgalerie451.de

music and sound

bachfest world premieres in leipzig at the st. thomas church performances and commissioned compositions The world-famous Bachfest in Leipzig will commission a new composition each year for three years which reflects the fascination and inspiration Johann Sebastian Bach provides contemporary composers. The Chemnitz-born composer Friedrich Goldmann received a com mission to produce a new work for 2008. In 2009 the Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa will present his new piece based on the Bachian cho rales. And in 2010 the festival will conclude the cycle with the world premiere of a work by the English composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle.

Composers: Friedrich Goldmann, Toshio Hosokawa JP ) , Sir Harrison Birtwistle GB ) / Ensemble: musikFabrik NRW / St. Thomas Church, Leipzig: 15 June 08, 14 June 09 , 13 June 10 / Stiftung Bach-Archiv Leipzig www.bach-leipzig.de

common enterprise jeu de vie The Co logne-based music ensemble musikFabrik and composer Thierry de Mey are working together on a Common Enterprise , a project aimed at dissolving the traditional separation between the compositional and interpretative process.

The musicians will help create the composition while the composer develops musical characters specially tailored to the individuality of each member of the ensemble. The working process will be additionally enhanced by electronic equipment. Jeu de Vie is the first of three planned compositions, directed by the Belgian composer and multimedia artist Thierry de Mey.

Artistic director: Thierry de Mey BE ) / Ensemble: musik-Fabrik / Klaus-von-Bismarck-Saal des WDR , Cologne: 27 Febru ary 09 musikFabrik Landesensemble Nordrhein-West falen e.V. www.musikFabrik.org

climate musical theatre The concerts, mu sical theatre performances and the colloquium hosted by the Rheinsberger New Music Pente cost Workshop feature a new theme every year. In 2008 the events will be based on the theme of Balance in reference to the relationship between humans and nature. The Pentecost Workshop will present the world premiere of a multimedia musical theatre piece titled Climate . Using contrasting musical styles, the work will explore the fragile balance that exists between humans and the climate on several artistic levels (music, text and video).

Artistic director: Ulrike Liedtke / Participants / Artists: Ralf Hoyer, Susanne Stelzenbach, Barbara Kenneweg, Antje Kaiser, Dominik Busch, Titus Engel / Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin / Musiktheater, Rheinsberg Castle thea tre: 9 25 May 08 / Musikakademie Rheinsberg www.musikakademie-rheinsberg.de

madrigal network the modern character of renaissance-period madrigals The Italian Renaissance was a period of great mu sical innovation. Modern compositional tech niques can be traced back to the madrigals com posed during the Renaissance. From Bulgaria to Vietnam, these madrigals have heavily influ enced classical European and non-European tonal systems. Even their literary motifs seem surprisingly modern, as they are often based on openly erotic and sexual themes, as well as death, desire and loss. The KlangForum Heidelberg has started a project titled Madrigal Net work which will present these aspects of Ren aissance-period compositions in a series of five concerts. These musical miniatures will be framed and linked by introductory pieces and interludes, specially composed for the concerts. The sometimes harsh and seemingly modern harmonic shifts in the madrigals remain one of the major challenges facing performers and composers today.

Artistic director: Walter Nußbaum / Participants: Schola Hei delberg , ensemble aisthesis / Heidelberg, Zürich, Venice and other venues: 1 May 09 31 March 11 / KlangForum Heidel berg e.V. www.klanghd.de

european journey 2008 c/o pop fes tival 2008 The c/o pop electronic music festi val has focused on new approaches and trends in the European independent pop cultural scene since 2004. This year’s c/o pop will feature the project European Journey 2008, which aims to intensify the festival’s European net working activities at a thematic level, and in par

ticular, integrate countries from the far corners of Europe. Ten of these countries (including Nor way, Romania and Turkey) have been invited to jointly develop the musical programme with a major live act or band performance of their own. Artists and producers from the fields of music, design and art will discuss production condi tions and the possibility of artistic exchange.

Artistic director: Ralph Christoph / Participants: Hans Nieswandt, Wulf Gäbele, Stefan Lehmkuhl, Alberto Campo IT , Rokolectiv RO ) , Numusic ( NO , Ultrahang ( HU ) , Dis-Patch RS , Pomladi ( SI Resfest ( TR ) Wilsonic SK Dissonanz IT ) Roots & Routes ( PT and others / Stadtgarten, c/o pop and others, Cologne: 13 17 August 08 / cologne on pop GmbH www. c-o-pop.de

word and knowledge

and seek another, always speaking of hölderlin. international hölderlin days in bad driburg Hölderlin spent prob ably the happiest weeks of his life with Susette Gontard the Diotima in his poetry in Driburg in 1796. His stay in Driburg strongly influ enced his poetry, and for this reason, this town is now the venue for a large public poetry con ference of renowned Hölderlin translators from several European countries and the United States. The conference will address the challenges of new Hölderlin translations and the influence of his poetry on other languages and artistic gen res, in particular music, which will be the focus of discussions and musical performances. Artistic director: Brigitte Labs-Ehlert / Participants: Aris Fioretos ( SE ) , Christopher Middleton (GB , Philippe Jaccottet ( FR) , Luigi Reitani IT , John Ashbery US , David Constantine (GB) , Fuad Rifka ( LB ) , Rüdiger Safranski, Urs Widmer CH ) , Wolf gang Rihm, Walter Steffens, Dzˇevad Karahasan BA , Petr Borkovec CZ ) , Friederike Mayröcker ( AT ) / Gräfliches Bad Driburg and the surrounding region: 13 16 November 08 / Literaturbüro Ostwestfalen-Lippe in Detmold e.V. www. literaturbuero-detmold.de

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committees

board of trustees The Board of Trustees is re sponsible for making final decisions concerning the gener al focus of the Foundation’s activities, its funding priorities and organizational structure. The 14-member board reflects the political levels which were integral to the Foundation’s establishment. All the trustees are appointed for a five-year term.

Bernd Neumann

Chairman of the Board

Representing the Federal Foreign Office

Representing the Federal Ministry of Finance Representing the German Bundestag

Representing the German Länder

Representing the German municipalities

Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Cultural Foundation of German States Representing the fields of art and culture

Minister of State in the Federal Chancellery and Commissioner for Cultural and Media Affairs Georg Boomgaarden State Secretary Werner Gatzer

Parliamentary State Secretary Prof. Dr. Norbert Lammert President of the German Bundestag Wolfgang Thierse Vice President of the German Bundestag Hans-Joachim Otto Chairman of the Parliamentary Cultural Committee Dr. Valentin Gramlich State Secretary, Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs of Saxony-Anhalt Prof. Dr. Joachim Hofmann-Göttig State Secretary, Ministry of Science, Continuing Education, Research and Culture of Rhineland-Palatinate Klaus Hebborn Councillor for Education, Culture and Sports, Association of German Cities Uwe Lübking Councillor, Association of German Towns and Municipalities Roland Koch Minister-President of Hesse

Senta Berger

advisory committee The Advisory Committee makes recommendations concerning the thematic focus of the Foundation’s activities. The committee is comprised of leading figures in the arts, culture, business, academics and politics.

Actress, President of the German Film Academy, Berlin Durs Grünbein Author Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Wolf Lepenies Sociologist Dr. Christian Bode Secretary General of the DAAD Jens Cording President of the Society for Contemporary Music Prof. Dr. Max Fuchs Chairman of the German Arts Council Prof. Dr. h.c. Klaus-Dieter Lehmann President of the Goethe-Institut Dr . Michael Eissenhauer President of the Association of German Museums Martin Maria Krüger President of the German Music Council Prof. Dr. Oliver Scheytt President of the Society for Cultural Policy and Dept. Head for Cultural Affairs of Essen Johano Strasser President of the German P E N. Center Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen Secretary General of the Cultural Foundation of German States Frank Werneke Deputy Chairman of the ver.di labour union

Prof. Dr. Clemens Börsig Chairman of the Cultural Committee of German Business with the BDI e.V. Prof. Klaus Zehelein President of the German Theatre Association

juries

and

curatorial

panels

Approximate ly fifty experts in the fields of science, research and art be long to juries and curatorial panels which advise the Federal Cultural Foundation in thematic and project-specific mat ters. For more information about these committees, please visit the corresponding projects described on our website www.kulturstiftung-bund.de executive

Hortensia Völckers

Artistic Director Alexander Farenholtz Administrative Director

board team

Lavinia Francke

Dr. Ferdinand von Saint André

Friederike Tappe-Hornbostel [dept. head] / Tinatin Eppmann / Julia Mai / Christoph Sauerbrey / Arite Studier General

Kirsten Haß [dept. head] / Bärbel Hejkal / Kristin Schulz Programme Department Dorit von Derschau / Eva Maria Gauß / Anita Kerzmann / Dr. Holger Kube Ventura / Antonia Lahmé / Annett Meineke / Dr. Lutz Nitsche / Uta Schnell Administration

Steffen Schille / Maik Jacob / Steffen Rothe / Kristin Salomon / Tino Sattler / Ines Deák / Doris Heise Contributions and Controlling

Secretary’s Office

Anja Petzold / Ilona Böttcher / Susanne Dressler / Marcel Gärtner / Andreas Heimann

Berit Ichite / Lars-Peter Jakob / Berit Koch / Fabian Märtin / Marko Stielicke

Beatrix Kluge / Beate Ollesch [Berlin office] / Christine Werner

Published by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes / Franckeplatz 1 / 06110 Halle an der Saale / Tel 0345 2997 0 / Fax 0345 2997 333 / info@kulturstiftung-bund.de / www.kulturstiftung-bund.de Executive Board Hortensia Völckers / Alexander Farenholtz [responsible for the content] Editor Friederike Tappe-Hornbostel Editorial staff Tinatin Eppmann / Julia Mai Translators Robert Brambeer / Rebecca Garron / David Short Design + Image Editing cyan Berlin Image sources Ernst Volland / Heinz Krimmer Collection Berlin Production hausstætter herstellung Circulation 4,000

Copy date 10 February 2008

By-lined contributions do not necessarily reflect the opin ion of the editor. © Kulturstiftung des Bundes All rights reserved. Reproduction in part or whole without prior consent from the German Federal Cultural Foundation is strictly prohibited.