Magazine #13 of the Federal Cultural Foundation / Kulturstiftung des Bundes

spring 2009

In these past four years we have investigated the many aspects of the unstoppable transformation of working society and its cul tural implications. Our Future of Labour programme will conclude with the exhibition Work . Meaning and Care , set to open at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden on 24 June 2009. In this issue of our magazine, we address the subject of work once again with reports on our current projects (see the re view of the entire programme by Petra Kohse on pages 16 17) and lay the groundwork for future endeavours. When we first established the programme, no one foresaw the fi nancial and economic crisis of 2008, which will likely accelerate the transformation of working society and could even represent a dramatic turning point on both an individual and societal level. We can expect that our society will be forced to address economic issues and cultures of doing business now more than ever be fore. In the face of global challenges and perils, economies of community and economies of nature will play a larger role in our cultural debates and shape the economy of the market. Julian Nida-Rümelin and Tatjana Schönwälder-Kuntze explore the un derlying cultural dimension of economic practices and theories. Daniel Tyradellis, one of the curators of Work Meaning and Care , explains how the exhibition illustrates the dynam ic relationship between the individual, personal experience of work and its socio-political ›processing‹ in terms of how ›human material‹ is statistically compiled and appropriated by the state

for intelligence and decision-making purposes. Dieter Thomä addresses the social aspect of work from the perspective of generational relationships, as he questions and modifies our con temporary concepts of work and education. Using the example of one of our funded projects, Helmut Höge reflects on a model of labour for the future whose cultural dimension is only gradually (re-)appearing namely cooperative production compa nies which are more widespread in Eastern Europe and have to re-orientate themselves to the dictates of the capitalistic market. Even when the focus is not on the Future of Labour , the other articles in this issue also examine the living and working conditions that surpass our conventional practices and views.

On page 28 we present the Foundation’s new Wanderlust fund for international theatre partnerships. To supple-ment their day-to-day operations on location, state and municipal theatres can now apply for funding to establish and/or intensify coopera tive ventures with theatres all around the world.

Oliver Müller and Frank Pauly have contributed a thought-pro voking piece titled Ecce Cyborg on page 32 , highlighting the medical-technological progress that has brought us disturb ingly close to perfecting the human race. Almost unnoticed by the public, the fictitious and fantastic cyborgs of film and litera ture have become more real than ever before.

Johannes Lepsius, described by Franz Werfel as the »Guardian Angel of the Armenians«, is the focus of Hermann Goltz’s por

trayal of this great philanthropist. Lepsius devoted his life to publicly exposing the fate of the Armenians. According to Goltz, the acknowledgement and respect he deserves will only come with more historic research into this dark chapter of European history.

This is the third and last issue in which Burkhard Müller presents his widely popular column One-Word Phrases . Thanks to Müller, our readers are now more familiar with the jargon we stumble over every day and will probably stumble over for years to come those words that describe cultural aims and projects which are so rife with meaning that a mere word doesn’t do them justice. We thank Burkhard Müller for his entertaining and in sightful pieces.

We also wish to thank cyan, whose highly creative and conscientious work has given this issue a unique look unlike any previ ous issue. The drawings were created in cooperation with the il lustrator Andree Volkmann. In examining the subject of ›work‹, he was inspired by the butterfly an association which, though unusual, is actually quite fitting, as we explain below. There is only one piece in this issue which truly has nothing to do with work Three Bagatelles by the Hungarian writer Attila Bartis. But for you, dear reader, his story is no trifling matter.

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

economy + culture julian nida-rümelin

economics and ethics from a cultural perspective 5 tatjana schönwälder-kuntze cultures of doing business 8

future of labour daniel tyradellis interview work. meaning and care 12 dieter thomä why improving yourself just isn’t enough 14 petra kohse depository of energies 16 helmut höge commodities as art 18 attila bartis

non-euklidian bagatelles 25 wanderlust 28 hermann goltz practical criticism of inhumanity 0 oliver müller und frank pauly ecce cyborg 2 burkhard müller column one-word phrases ( III) 5

news + new projects 7 committees 4

In the animal kingdom there are species that we immediately associate with work busy bees armies of working ants and even sloths, whose long periods of inactivity seem to imply the rejection of work. But why butterflies in an issue that focuses on work? The illustrator Andree Volkmann came up with the idea of butterflies while perusing the graphics which will be used as material for a so-called ›band‹ of statistics that will extend through the entire exhibition Work. Meaning and Care (see the interview with Daniel Tyradellis, pages 12 13 ). Statistics make individuals unrecognizable as they are compiled and sorted into groups based on certain criteria (e.g., all female part-time workers over 35 with school-age children in rural areas). Each statistic conceals the individuals that comprise it, and all the parameters with which statistics operate are compilations and abstractions of deeply meaningful experiences in a person’s life. In contrast to bees, which live in colonies and seem more interchangeable in terms of appearance, a host of butterflies doesn’t seem to detract from the uniqueness of each one.

Born in Warnemünde in 1964, the artist Andree Volkmann has created butterfly illustrations to remind us of the unique characteristics of each individual which are lost through statistical classification and quantitative calculation. In reality, the individual cases which statisticians »project« and average into anonymous units, are as (beautifully) unique as butter flies. As butterflies can be classified into many varieties, like luna moths, atlas moths, painted ladies, monarch butterflies and blue morphos, there are also a wide variety of biographical and diverse working circumstances concealed by the typifying parameter in work statistics. Such statistics (from the Latin statisticus = relating to the state, statesmanlike) are the tools used for reasons of state

The chaotic confusion of large numbers (see illustration on page 7) can only be controlled through order, classification and standardization (pages 20 24 36 ), which gloss over individual characteristics. Andree Volkmann’s drawings do

not illustrate empirical data, but rather how statistics force individuals into categories, how patterns are produced and samples, types, norms and even unknown variables can be ascertained. (see page 36 ). One only has to depict all butterflies with the same length (wingspan) and suddenly they all appear similar and can be compared with one another using a certain criterion. By »superimposing« all the different butterflies, one can create a monster (on left) which doesn’t exist in the real world (e.g., the worker).

Of course, one could also choose other species in the animal kingdom (for example, the largest insect species beetles) to demonstrate the incongruous relationship between individuality and statistical »generalization«. But butterflies a species that exists on every continent of the planet have a very special cultural history. Since antiquity people have not only been fascinated by their delicate beauty and remarkable metamorphosis from the crawling caterpillar to the plain-looking cocoon to the colourful butterfly. Butterflies also became the first ›global‹ symbol for the human soul and immortality. In Christian artworks, butterflies continue to symbolize the (individual’s) resurrection, while in many regions in Asia, butterflies are interpreted as messengers of death, as well as harbingers of a new beginning. From this point of view, there is no better symbol for the transformation of working society than the butterfly in putting the future of labour in perspective.

It wasn’t long ago that the butterfly reached new cultural heights due to the public debate concerning the Chaos Theory It claims that, with a flap of its wings, a butterfly can fundamentally influence complex systems, causing completely unexpected developments. While some analysts may see a threat to the market economy in such wing-flapping, it may just as well set changes in motion that can lead working society in a new and positive direction

economics and ethics from a cultural perspective

The bond that connects economics and ethics has a strong cultural dimension. This is particularly obvious in view of the relationship between rampant corruption and socially established and culturally accepted behaviour. One such cultural context is the nepotism we see in many countries around the world. The deeprooted, primary cultural focus on the family (as well as the legitimate concern for one’s relatives and their professional advancement) leads to inefficient ad ministration, poor personnel choices, cronyism and fraud. In contrast, the suc cess of an anti-corruption strategy is closely tied to the creation and maintenance of civil society, as demonstrated by Leoluca Orlando’s successful La Rete movement in Sicily or Transparency International . There is cause for concern that a country like Germany, which is internationally renowned for efficiency in public administration and whose economy has long been reputed as being largely free of corruption, was recently confronted with a damaging corruption scandal at Siemens and several cases of unfair competition.

by julian nida-rümelin

As the global economy enters a period of upheaval, we require a cultural perspective along with a new relationship between eth ics and politics, law and economy, state and civil society. Each system has an inherent logic, and problems occur when the logic of one system is transferred to another or when one system dominates the others. Following an extensive study on the spheres of justice, Michael Walzer, a liberal, socially-minded communitar ian from the United States, concluded that a pluralistic, liberal society requires a variety of spheres, of which none should dominate any other. One of these corruption which we criticise and attempt to combat by legal means, is simply the intrusion of economic rationality into areas that are inappropriate for such logic. What is the relationship between economic rationality and common sense?1 Even under conditions of competition, the eth ical behaviour of a decent businessperson has become increas ingly indispensible in a global economy. Internal corporate com munication requires compliance with certain principles, such as honesty, equal treatment and fairness. Reliable agreements per taining to cultural and national boundaries and beyond are based in global structures of civil society, which in turn form the basis of an efficient global economy. We have learned from the experience of nation-states that economic efficiency suffers if there is no social capital, as Robert Putnam convincingly argues in a study on the differences between southern and northern Italy.

The current financial and economic crisis has institutional, legal, political and ethical causes. To illustrate, let us look at a central phenomenon which, as of yet, has received little attention in Europe. During the 1980s until the beginning of the 1990s, the American economy stagnated as productivity grew only at a slow pace. The turnaround occurred at the start of the 1990s, for which there were several reasons including the new policies instituted by President Bill Clinton. The expansion of the credit card sys tem undoubtedly played a crucial role in the economic growth of the first half of the 1990s. This had a very different impact in the United States with its specific cultural background than it

did in Europe, and in particular, Germany. Contrary to econom ic theory that claims that individuals who face financial insecu rity and have no stable social net are forced to save more to main tain their standard of living, Americans have always tended to save less than Germans. In terms of economic models of rationality, this behaviour is difficult to explain, since Germany, France and Scandinavian countries have created a dependable social welfare system that has lessened the urgency for individuals to invest so much of their resources in protecting themselves from life’s pitfalls. In the United States, however, it only takes a longterm illness for middle-class citizens to plunge into poverty.

With the influx of credit cards and the possibility of amassing considerable debt in the course of only a month buying now and paying later the rate of personal savings continued to de crease rapidly in the US . From a cultural historic perspective, one could argue that the social background of the large European immigrant population influenced this behaviour, as the lowerclass and proletariat traditionally spent all their available cash resources. Only a few decades ago, workers in Germany were also paid in cash on Fridays the idea of paying wages on a weekly basis was to prevent workers from making large unnecessary pur chases. A ›culture of security‹ became predominant in Germa ny’s middle-class and quickly expanded to the working class and the circle of skilled workers, while the development in the United States apparently headed in the opposite direction. The values of the proletarian and lower-class milieu of the 19th and early 20th century characterized by material-minded, pragmatic and short-term thinking, a low regard for security, reputation and reputability, preference for immediate pleasure over distinction of cultural interests now appear to strongly influence the val ues of all socio-economic areas in the US . The huge, gas-guzzling cars, family-sized packaging, fast-food culture, sensation-addict ed pop and entertainment culture, the rejection of intellectuality and high culture, the high regard for the common man like ›Joe Sixpack‹ or ›Joe the Plumber‹ who played such a central role

in last year’s presidential campaign all this corresponds to the general economic practice of spending more than one earns. Indeed the savings-income ratio in Germany is over ten percent, while in the United States, it’s at – 0 5 percent based on the GDP This means that the entire American consumer base has lived well above its means since the beginning of the 1990s, if not earlier. This raises interesting questions regarding cultural similarities and differences, as well as the ethical criteria of personal responsibility. An economic culture, based on the market and personal responsibility, can only remain stable if it can reconcile the joy of consumption and momentary pleasure with responsi bility for the future creating a balance between short-term optimization of enjoyment and profit on the one hand and longterm provisions on the other.

This fundamental problem with the American economy has par ticularly intensified because real estate mortgages were offered at zero or near-zero interest rates for the first years and amortized by increasing interest rates and repayment plans years down the road. People tend to ›discount with time‹, as decision theorists would say, which means that they generally assess the benefits and disadvantages in the far future as less significant than those they expect for the present or near future. This general human tendency can be compensated by personal commitment, for ex ample, in the form of a life insurance policy, or a collective com mitment, such as the welfare systems instituted by the countries in northern and central Europe. This means that individuals sup port rules they impose on themselves (either individually in cas es of private insurance or collectively and politically for making provisions for the future) and impose structures that influence their behaviour in order to ensure responsibility and economic sustainability in the long term. Certain credit financing prod ucts offered by the American financial market have had the op

1 For more on the theory of this relationship, see Nida-Rümelin: Economic Rationality and Practical Reason (Dordrecht 1997)

posite effect. They’ve strengthened the tendency to optimize the short-term benefits at the cost of long-term responsibility and, consequently, have tempted millions of people to burden them selves with debt they can no longer repay. In order to avert fore closure and finance the repayment of these loans, they have been forced to take out more loans and mortgages, which in turn has deepened their debt even further.

This system has sent the American lower and middle classes into a largely self-inflicted economic tailspin that initially toppled the real estate credit market, threw the entire American banking system into crisis and has now impacted the global financial mar ket. From a decision theoretical perspective, we can analyze how this happened by comparing the system to ›getting hooked‹ in the drug market. Dealers offer their wares at low or no cost, create addiction and then force the drug addicts to pay back what they consumed at ever-increasing prices. In the latter case, the result is an addiction to drugs, in the former, the addiction to the domestic security of a piece of property, a home for one’s family, a place they have come to love after so many years and don’t want to give up, even when faced with increasing mortgage payments that eventually become impossible to pay.

This close relationship between moral responsibility, cultural background and institutional regulations is also illustrated by the bonus system. If we assume that every bank employee works only as hard as the personal gain he can expect in return, then it is necessary to couple his salary to the number and financial size of the contracts he delivers or the salary of the top managers to the development of the stock prices. When this happens in a fi nancial culture at a time when employee turnover is increasing and individual managers only remain at companies for as long as their area of competence increases (for which they are paid hand somely by their next employer) something contemporary cor porate theorists call Darwiportunism the result is a predomi nance of short-term optimization in favour of economic sustain ability. At the same time, this trend massively disrupts the social balance. In 2006 the average income of the twenty best-paid American financial managers was 650 million dollars and in creased to almost one billion dollars in 2007 a year before the financial crisis took hold. To put this in perspective, the top US financial managers’ total annual earnings are approximately equivalent to what politicians expect will be the cost of bailing out the entire German banking system!

Japan, on the other hand, offers an interesting comparison. Like the United States, Japan has a capitalistically-orientated, freemarket economy supplemented by social transfers, the percent age of which is significantly lower than in the US . Japan’s economy is almost as tightly intertwined with the global economy as Germany’s. The Japanese economy is not an island. Yet the salaries of CEO s at Japanese corporations are noticeably lower in scale, amounting to a fraction of those earned by their Ameri can counterparts and well under the salaries of German CEO s. This is undoubtedly a political and cultural phenomenon. In Japanese society, it is not considered admirable to put yourself above the rest, make yourself important and publicly demon strate your superiority. The practice of »doing good and talking about it« increasingly popular among politicians continues to be regarded as vulgar in Japanese culture. If people want to do good, they communicate this wish to others and cooperate with them, so that their own efforts are less obvious when the project is completed. And if it’s successful, they don’t blow their own horn, but allow others to notice it. There are signs that the current global financial and economic crisis has forced some profit-makers of the past years to rethink their behaviour. In fact, we could all learn a cultural lesson from Japan.

One of the economic-ethical conclusions we can draw from this current crisis is that an institutional framework must be created for an ethics of sustainability. Part of what is wrong is the increas ingly prevalent incentive systems that focus on short-term goals. Instead of being paid well for a job well-done and working to the best of one’s ability for intrinsic reasons, the individual has become stylized as a monad of optimization. By embracing this image, each employee contributes to an economy of short-term successes that show up in short-term quarterly reports, causing erratic development and instability which depletes middle- and long-term economic resources.

One of the main causes of the international financial crisis was that companies with little equity of their own took big risks to achieve profit margins which now seem utopian in the real-life business world. There were no long-term contractual agreements in these areas and no transparency because of the complexity of these financial instruments and the convoluted contract relationships. Despite the Rio Conference and its pledge to promote glo bal political sustainability, there is still insufficient institutional support for the ethical sustainability in the global financial mar kets. The responsibility of each individual plays a crucial role in a sustainable and humane economy, i.e., an economy that serves humanity. This crisis will show us once again that, despite their purported sluggishness and devotion to tradition, middle-class, family-run businesses will become a stabilizing element in a glo bally-networked economy that lacks any internal or external or der. There are theorists who advocate completely extracting moral principles from economic behaviour that should be assessed solely on the external criteria of profit. However, studies of lead ing managers show that this theory does not reflect the thinking of most business people and is applied neither internally nor externally in corporate practice. If institutional conditions are designed in such a way that those who have no sense of responsibility ruthlessly pursue their own goals and that of their compa nies, and reap massive rewards at the cost of others, then this sys tem of individual and collective responsibility begins to unravel. Economic ethics should not only be culturally embedded in the larger context of our daily interaction, but also institutionalized.

The market is essential as a regulatory framework of controlled competition. Part of this regulatory framework stipulates that those who are unsuccessful must leave the market in other words, companies must be allowed to go bankrupt. It then be comes a matter of economic and social policy to ensure that this doesn’t lead to an existential crisis for the employees, that laidoff workers can find new jobs and, in the meantime, fall back on federal support to maintain their standard of living. However, preventing companies from going bankrupt currently the strategy of the political crisis management deconstructs the economic regulatory framework and undermines market logic. This course of action privatizes profits and socializes losses. In order to stabilize the financial market, it forces taxpayers to foot the bill for extremely risky business practices, while those who earned hand over foot on these risky dealings are not held accountable. It is no wonder many regard this as scandalous in light of the current crisis.

The market is an essential instrument for coordinating individu al needs and economic production. Under ideal conditions of competition and transparency, it guarantees efficiency in that it generates the kind of distribution for which there is no viable alternative on the market at the least, improving one’s financial position without adversely affecting someone else’s ( pareto optimum ). The ideal marketplace ensures efficiency in the sense of parity criteria. Yet at the same time, we recognize that

the market has failed systematically, i.e., as a system of interac tion, in three ways. First, it cannot produce collective goods, i.e., goods that cannot be purchased individually, such as envi ronmental goods, mutual security, public spaces and institutions. Second, the market distributes wealth blindly, by which I mean it cannot differentiate between just and unjust circum stances of parity efficiency. Third, the market is short-sight ed, which means it does not and cannot look out for the interests of future generations, preserve natural resources and ensure that our world remains habitable, because people who theoretically live in the future do not produce demand for goods today.

These three systematic failings of the market entail a politi cal necessity for establishing responsibility for collective goods, social justice and sustainable development. As a productive state, politics provides goods and services, financed through taxes and duties. As a regulatory power, it establishes national and global regulations that combine efficient market practices with collective goods, social equality and sustainability. Outside the international, continental ( EU ) and global frame works (international institutions and regulatory bodies), any one state would be overwhelmed by such tasks. It can only provide the necessary solutions as part of a cooperative network 2 that in corporates the cultural and moral requirements of economic co operation.

2 See Nida-Rümelin: Demokratie als Kooperation (Frankfurt 1999 )

Julian Nida-Rümelin , born in 1954, is a professor of Political Theory and Philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. From 1998 to 2000 Nida-Rümelin was a cultural advisor for the city of Munich, and in 2001 and 2002 , joined the federal parliament as the Minister of State for Cultural and Media Affairs. Nida-Rümelin was appointed president of the German Society for Philosophy in 2009. His most recent publication Demokratie und Wahr heit [Democracy and Truth] was published by C H . Beck (Munich) in 2006

cultures of doing business

by tatjana schönwälder-kuntze

In autumn 2000 at the advent of a new millennium, Helmut Schmidt gave a speech titled The Self-Assertion of Europe in a New Century in which he claimed that Europe had a European legal and economic culture, formed by the Enlightenment and its past revolutions. He argued that European self-asser tion faced a number of challenges, two of which were climate change and the rapid globalization of the financial markets. The latter as it now appears has not only caught up with Europe, but brought it to the brink of a gaping abyss. Self-assertion may become a matter of survival for entire branches of the economy and with it, our national economies, as well. In the face of this crisis, climate warming is being largely ig nored, though it poses significantly larger chal lenges to our economy with even more drastic consequences.

How do we address these challenges, which are by no means coincidental? What lessons can be learned from our impression that we no long er control the developing events, but are being swept along by them? There are a number of fac tors that are worth considering, the following of which are only a small selection.

The current findings seem to bring us to a com mon conclusion many claim that there is a clear relationship between culture and the way business is done in this culture. According to its dictionary definition, ›economy‹ pertains to »all the costs, efforts, institutions and measures which serve to relieve the tension of supply and demand. Subjectively, individual economic activity aims to reduce the natural short age of goods based on the comparison of profit and loss, cost and yield.«1. And this is where sig nificant cultural differences in its concrete im plementation exist.

Upon closer examination, the first problem could become quite virulent when we ask what exactly is meant by a »European« economic cul ture, as identified by Helmut Schmidt, when on the other hand, in view of the global turbulence rocking the financial markets, Wolfgang Kaden made a sharp distinction between continental European and Anglo-Saxon culture when it comes to conduct in the financial markets.2

Assuming that the problem of dissociation and identification among Europeans and all nonEuropeans is solved, such an empirical ap proach poses another problem in that the corre lation between culture and economic conduct is not merely coincidental. This is an interesting point when we examine whether and to what ex tent cultural conditions are capable of positively or negatively influencing economic behaviour

— irrespective of the fundamental question of how we regard culture in this context. We imme diately encounter all sorts of theoretical prob lems that require clarification before we can even begin examining the causes and conse quences of intentional and unintentional events in the economic sphere. Such considerations are all the more revealing for numerous empiri cal-sociological studies which analyse the rela tionship between various economic forms and their underlying cultures, nations and even reli gions in the sense of a common code of ethics. This has been observed, for instance, in studies that identify a correlation between nepotism and corruption.

A different methodological approach to identi fying cultures of doing business involves examin ing how they changed over history within a (cul tural) region. This method illustrates the genesis, historical conditions and fundamental patterns of thought in which business is done and econo my is reflected on. By this, I don’t mean an anal ysis of various economic theories based on the history of ideas, but rather an archaeological analysis similar to that of Michel Foucault’s. For Foucault, every theory explaining the world has a purpose, and is therefore an interpretation of what exists in favour of certain intentions. Ac cording to Foucault, even though the purposes behind various theories may differ, they all share a common design, a form that establishes validity, so that they are accepted only as theo ries, i.e., relevant knowledge.

In The Order of Things (1966 ), Foucault demonstrates that antagonistic economic theo ries of any era or period of time only display su perficial differences because they result from one and the same way of thinking or way of viewing the world that defines the character of an era.3 In view of the various fundamental premises and categories in which people have thought about economy in modern times Foucault points to two significant revolutions in Europe since the 16 th century 4 we can search for the theory- and knowledge-driven character of our own era based on the studies by Foucault and others. This, according to Foucault, would not only be expressed in our economic culture, but would imprint all products of thought and our general practices with its fun damental form. As a direct consequence, our understanding of ethics, economy and ecology (or climate protection) should neither be viewed as having emerged independently from one an other, nor considered separately.

In this sense, we could reconstruct the genea logical link between culture and economic con

duct, not only illustrating their interdepend ence, but also their mutual form of existence. For the field of economy itself, this has an added significance, as the seemingly extreme differ ences in theoretical models e.g., between neoliberalism and Keynesianism or market econo my and planned economy could prove to be superficial.

Foucault based his arguments on the assump tion that the character of our era could be funda mentally reduced to what Kant termed the form of self-representation. This refers to both the repre sentative potential of understanding the world through consciousness and its categories, as well as the constructive relationship with oneself, in which the individual represents himself, refers to himself in rational terms and forges plans for the future. With this (theoretical-philosoph ical) concept of modern man, we could recon cile not only the image of the honest businessperson, but also that of the greedy investment banker. One could argue that the actions of both in dividuals are consistently self-referential the one thinks of the benefit of others, while the other thinks of benefiting himself. First of all, this means that laws would have to be made to forbid certain types of long-term actions by so ciety, namely enrichment that extends to the end of one’s lifetime and even beyond to future generations or the destruction of the same. The line separating these two kinds of actions can be classically defined by whether the selfreference harms others or not.

Second of all, one could ask whether various qualities of sustainability are distinguishable, for example, that of self-preservation and growth. According to Niklas Luhmann, a modernity the orist with an entirely different perspective, this would mean that modernity like antiquity can be described as an epoch that saw a shift from pure (self-) preservation to surplus, from exchanging what existed to producing more. In this context both Foucault and Luhmann inter pret the idea of limited resources which plays a key role in our modern economic theories as the result of modern economic conduct and not as the initial problem!

If we believe the result of these analyses, the question is: Can we imagine a different, simi larly successful and productive economy also based on this epochal ›characteristic trait‹, yet strives for sustainability instead of sur plus? If so, we could focus on that instead of carelessly risking other cultural achievements of modernity which have been founded upon it for instance, such concepts as the personal

freedom of self-determination and its associat ed virtue of human dignity. Or could we per haps establish other synchronously existing cul tures that also display possible ›character traits‹ and preserve our life and living environ ment, but are based on other preconditions in stead of serving our lifestyle?

Of course, such concepts would only be viable if they were already being developed, if they were already being realized, if people were will ing to see and discover them, to have them intentionally theorized and above all, to have them guide our actions both practically and political ly. That’s why it’s important to keep our eyes open, to let go of old patterns of thought when necessary, look back to our history and look far to the future in order to discover and invent new cultures of doing business. For as long as we believe we only have two alternatives because we are un able to see how deeply entrenched we are in an epochal ›character‹ of thought that has lasted well over 200 years, then we will never recognize any other alternatives. G W F. Hegel calls this kind of entrenchment in seemingly unavoida ble dichotomies as »rational thought« that pro duces rigidity that only reasonable thinking can overcome.

This does not mean that it’s time to shelve the »common European culture of law and econo my«, but rather enlighten it in the best sense of the word by searching for a possible common global culture of law and economy!

1 dtv-Lexikon, vol 20, p.114, lemma Economy ( 1989 ). The same definition can also be found in more recent lem mata, for instance, Meyers Lexikon online, 29 Dec. 2008 or the entry on wikipedia.de.

2 »Warum die Finanzmärkte zivilisiert werden müssen« [»Why the financial markets have to become civilized«], September 2008

3 Foucault’s term for what I’ve simplified here, perhaps erroneously so, as character, is the ancient Greek word for knowledge (¤ÈÛÙ‹ÌË ): »In a culture, or at a certain moment in time, there is always a single episteme that defines the conditions for which that knowledge is possible.« ( O dD : 213 )

4 In the Renaissance (ca. 1400 1600 ), discoveries were characterized by similarities, while during the period of (French) classicism ( 1600 1780 ), they were marked by an absolute identity between the name of something and the thing itself.

Tatjana Schönwälder-Kuntze , born in 1966 is a research assistant at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Univer sität in Munich where she has also worked as a private lec turer since 2007. She is especially interested in the process of theory-building in practical philosophy and economy, and its influence on how we perceive and construct our world. Her doctoral thesis, titled Freiheit als Norm ? [Freedom as the Norm?] will be published shortly.

The Federal Cultural Foundation is currently planning an event series on the Cultures of Doing Business, slated to begin in autumn 2009. We will keep you updated!

the various forms of doing business and the possibilities of a global culture

work. meaning and care

The exhibition Work . Meaning and Care marks the conclusion of the Federal Cultural Foundation’s Future of Labour programme. The curatorial team at the Exhibition Praxis and Theory office (Hürlimann | Lepp | Tyradellis) developed a concept that critically focuses on individual per spectives on work, personal anxiety resulting from earning one’s living, condi tions of subjective satisfaction and social recognition and the function of work as a meaningful activity. Of course, the curators have not neglected the econom ic arguments that dominate current debates, presenting scenarios of accelerated capitalism in combination with major upheavals of the 20th and 21st centuries. On the whole, the exhibition offers a gripping portrayal of the personal and glo bal anxiety connected to work. In an interview with Christian Schlüter, the cu rator Daniel Tyradellis describes the exhibition concept and how anthropologi cal issues concerning meaning and care tie into the socio-political dimension of the future of labour.

s: Christian Schlüter

t: Daniel Tyradellis

s: Mr. Tyradellis, you were commissioned by the Federal Cul tural Foundation to prepare a major exhibition on the meaning of work at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden. Work has been a permanent feature on practically all political agendas for decades especially with regard to unemployment. Do you think of this exhibition as a political commentary of sorts? As a contribution to the discussion about the value and future of la bour?

t: Absolutely! But the real question is how one can approach not only politically, but also theoretically such a heavily loaded term using the exhibition as a medium. An exhibition is not a scientific treatise nor should it aim to be. We decided in the end that we wanted to show what we feel is missing in the discus sion about work namely the personal and individual experi ence of those who want to, can or must work. Usually discussions about work are dominated by general or abstract statements like ›We have to reduce unemployment‹ or ›Employment is not a via ble model for the future‹ or ›Our attitude toward work must be come more flexible‹. We were more interested, however, in exam ining the seemingly basic question in everyone’s life: How does it feel to work? What is it like for people who work?

s: …So you would describe your approach then as less his toric and systematic, and more phenomenological?

t: The exhibition tries to build on what the visitors already know about work. For example, when they think about leisure time, which we encourage the visitors to do in the first exhibition room, and they ask themselves how they know what work is and what leisure time is, and whether computer games are only meant for entertainment or perhaps can be viewed as a method of be coming accustomed to the circumstances on the job later in life, then they’re heading in the right direction… We base the exhibi

tion on people’s experience and observations of today and not on catchphrases like productive power or the oppressed working class these concepts were talked to death thirty years ago, no body wants to hear about them today. Work as an individual and existential issue and the discussion among experts about abstract terms like globalisation are often at odds and we’ve used this tension to develop the argumentation of the exhibition. In this context, we might ask ourselves: Are activities, which we are not paid for less important or less valued?

s: The answer to that question would clearly have to be yes. How does one come to such value judgements?

t: The exhibition tries to answer exactly this question. In one of the exhibition rooms we call it the Training Room we ex amine how we come to have an individually shaped attitude toward work. Do we get it from playing or learning from our par ents? What role do our teachers in school play? What occurs in the training relationship between the master and apprentice? It turns out that recognition plays a crucial role here and we can hardly overstate its significance. We could also ask why we often feel work is unreasonable or why we feel guilty if we don’t work or don’t have a job, or what forces us to get out of bed every morn ing for that matter. To paraphrase Jacques Lacan, the great ques tion of man is why he gets up in the morning and not why he does little else.

s: This existential question primarily refers to paid employ ment.

t: Of course, we don’t usually talk about work when we do something voluntarily. Only when we refer to the burden of work and earning money are we talking about ›real‹ work that is, paid employment. But this distinction requires some refinement. Do we truly know what paid employment is? Do we mean a life-

long position in a profession, or a job that lasts for a longer dura tion? Or does it rather signify the form with which we generally organize the time and space of our lives? Perhaps the organiza tional centre of what we call ›family‹? And of course, we must also ask ourselves whether paid employment is in deep crisis and is, in fact, disappearing…

s: …The exhibition take place in a museum and museums are where we expect to find things that are historic or even ex tinct.

t: (laughs) Do you mean, as extinct as paid employment? All the statistics demonstrate just the opposite. In Germany, there are more people in a secure employment situation than ever be fore. It seems the problem lies more with its meaning, in other words, with our overly restrictive view of work. If we want to talk about a (paid) employment crisis, then I’d regard it as a need an open-minded approach to consider new forms of work, to examine what kind of control function work has in comparison to all the other ways one could spend one’s day. Generally the exhibition attempts to modify the term ›work‹ so that we no longer equate it with drudgery and burden. And earning money is not the only purpose of work. We shouldn’t measure the value of work on the basis of how much income it generates. Instead, social professions, also socially-oriented international activities, should be regarded as having more value. This is what we mean by ›care‹ in the exhibition.

s: More emphasis on doing public good or civil service is all fine and well, but it costs money…

t: This is the objection we always hear. We might agree that bringing up children is a job, but if it’s not paid by anyone, then there’s a need to find a ›real‹ job to earn money. In such a workintensive society such as ours, we discussed this knock-out argu

ment regarding money for a long time. At one point we tossed around the idea of not only charging for admission, but also for viewing each exhibit or section. Our aim was to force people to ask themselves again and again how much culture, education or learning is worth to them. We rejected the idea in the end be cause it seemed to be taking the matter a bit too far, and the mu seum was also worried about its proceeds. What this example shows us, however, is that we are obviously unaccustomed to at taching monetary value to seemingly basic activities. Or to put it in more radical terms, as Walter Benjamin would say: If we no longer had to work because machines did all our daily chores for us, we would have the opportunity to reflect on the meaning and value of work in an entirely new way. For society, it would truly represent a new beginning. That’s what we’re afraid of.

s: Instead we perfect our lamentations about the crisis. If a society consciously stands in its own way by failing to utilize the resources at its disposal, then we have to ask why. What’s the ben efit of not taking the opportunities offered us?

t: One part of the exhibition addresses this question from the point of view of the media. We’ve now compiled over 900 clips from talk shows from recent years from Sandra Maischberger to Maybrit Illner the whole gamut. The result will be a large installation featuring talk-show snippets that confront us with those hackneyed phrases whose primary purpose is to prevent us from thinking and questioning. What we discover is an unholy alliance between the paralyzing fear of loss and relinquished authority to so-called experts.

s: The stultifying effect of talk shows and the values im pressed on society by the neo-liberal lobby cannot be the only reasons why we obviously prefer thinking about managers’ sala ries over socially meaningful work.

t: When you ask about the question of why, then the focus on the media and the prevalent circumstances obviously doesn’t go far enough and are also too general. Yet when I return to the individual perspective and ask what the term means to me personally, I come upon a more precise answer. In terms of paid employment, we’re dealing with a distribution of values that marginalizes certain socially-oriented activities, even though these are fundamentally important to society. These social ac tivities are ones in which people have to work closely with others, and even have occasional physical contact (with children, elderly, handicapped, sick patients, etc.). In other words, our predomi nantly work-derived values seem to favour distant relationships compared to those that are all too close.

s: Are we afraid of too much intimacy?

t: That seems to be the case. Naturally, this poses the question as to the cause of this (fear-induced) need for distance and how it (historically) originated. For me, it’s enough to know that we apparently prefer a social environment in which we in a very literal sense cannot be touched, caressed, beaten. Those who have the opportunity to distance themselves through power or money are usually the most respected by society.

s: Do we maintain a social and economic hierarchy of professions that favours jobs that have little human contact or de pendence on others? Work has always been at least in civilized societies a medium for distancing oneself. If we see it as natu ral development, then we can base it on human freedom that is, freeing ourselves from the urges of nature through work. At least that’s the promise expressed by civil emancipation.

t: Yes, and in terms of Marxism, this means the more diversi fied work becomes, the more estranged our relationship to it. In my opinion, this assumption seems a little too cut-and-dry. If you ask why we, in refusing to shake off certain attitudes regard ing work, allow social resources to go to waste, then I would re spond by emphasizing the rather individual aspects connected to fear. And this is what we do in the exhibition, as well. In one section the so-called Machine Room we focus on the idea of affluence a strange word! and consumption. Affluence is portrayed as productive and consumptive waste, as an expensively staged, flashy form of wish fulfilment. But if we’re never sure whether a death-wish lurks behind the pleasure principle and the reality around us…well, at least we can ask ourselves

what comes after consumption and whether we ought to fear what follows. Consumption pushes away and marginalizes exis tential fears. That’s what pulls us to it it’s a must.

s: The industry of consumption and mind-altering substanc es proponents of the great delusion?

t: That’s exactly what I’m saying. Anyone who faces immi nent unemployment or is already unemployed knows that peo ple who do not have a socially accepted and commensurately paid job can no longer participate in the consumptive frenzy. Not only are they excluded from society, but are forced to face their personal fears in a very different and more intensive manner.

s: People don’t only work to earn money for consumption or pursue occupations that lead to self-estrangement. Work is also fulfilling and builds identity.

t: The exhibition addresses this aspect in the Work Room Here we focus on the intensity of work, which we consciously avoided limiting to artistic or creative aspects. That is, work also involves the feeling of success. This can be interpreted cynically, of course, if I describe someone’s mind-numbing work, for ex ample, as a great identity-building experience. At the same time, we’re dealing with personal attitude how do I cope with the profession that I am currently in? In the Work Room, we exhibit our own specially-designed installation showing people at work the manager, the cashier at Aldi, the surgeon, the chef, the truck driver… For each activity, eight different perspectives are shown simultaneously. For instance, a manager’s work is not only comprised of decision-making and problem-solving, finding and implementing innovative ideas, or holding motivational speeches, but also tedious repetitions, tiring routines and dis placement activities.

s: Then work is also self-disappointing in a way?

t: It turns out that only after we’ve entered a profession do we begin to understand the kind of disappointments and the kind of fulfilment that are connected to our job. This contradiction is what we try to illustrate in our Training Room. The filmmaker Bärbel Freund showed her younger brother a complete list of professions registered at the employment office and asked which one would interest him. Her video lasts several hours after all, there were hundreds of professions on that list and shows her brother becoming increasingly annoyed. How can he know what to expect?

s: This video primarily appeals to younger viewers?

t: Yes, but also well-meaning adults who gently and persist ently encourage young people to choose a profession for them selves. School classes comprise seventy percent of the visitors to the German Hygiene Museum. That was also one of the reasons why we incorporated more video material and less traditional ex hibit cases in the exhibition. The issue of work is too urgent, the dialogue with children and young adults is too important to rely solely on the customary museum exhibit formats. And besides, reading long texts is perhaps not the most effective way to under standing the sensual and concrete forms of work today. None theless, such an exhibition cannot afford to leave out theoretical and statistical material.

s: Statistical material that sounds dull… t: …Not necessarily. All five rooms will be connected by a long band of statistics a kind of gigantic touch screen, which when touched, will present empirical material, such as the devel opment of income tax rates or the unemployment rate. If they wish, visitors can have their photo taken at the beginning of the exhibition the picture of their face will run along the length of the statistics screen through all five rooms, until some one touches the screen. All the faces will suddenly merge togeth er to form a graphic statistical representation a digital Levia than. This trick symbolizes the interrelationship of the individual with the whole of society. Furthermore, some of these figures represent interviews with real people that visitors can listen to with a touch of the screen.

s: Has the iPod principle found its way into the museum?

t: Why not? Having said that, we’ve only made the exhibi tion as technologically elaborate as necessary. The exciting ques tion was how we could convey something as dry as statistics to

exhibition goers. With animation you can explain things much more clearly.

s: Despite such euphoria, allow me to ask a somewhat peevish question about the limits of work. Or can everything be better and brighter if we only do it right?

t: No, work also brings with it irrevocable destruction of our natural resources, for example. We should have no illusions about this. Or to put it differently, we live in a way that postpones our inevitable end the completed entropy. Until then, we have many years ahead of us. But when everything has taken its entropic course, then I’d rather share the remaining warmth with my neighbour than waste my time with the circus of consump tion. Indeed, I’d regard this attitude as qualitative growth. In the last (neo-liberally influenced) decades, we’ve had it drummed in to our heads that work is a static or morally neutral activity. But it’s not. And now it’s important to make ourselves aware of this fact again.

s: …And hope for religious revitalization?

t: Capitalism is as old as the Christian church as old as the death of God. Christianity has provided us with a dead God and bound us to the principle of guilt after all, He died for us. We don’t necessarily have to like this idea. I think the right idea is that God is in the world as long as there is charity completely irrespective of whether one believes in God or not. In other words, capitalism as a carefully balanced regime of shortage and religion as a kind of perpetual neurosis of guilt form a perfect match. And yet we cannot ignore the idea of charity. One of the main tasks of labour in the future to express it em phatically is to establish justice on a global level, to regard work as a means to care about the world with all its inhabitants. s: So down the road, you hope that work may someday be repoliticized or re-ideologized?

t: That’s exactly what the title of the exhibition expresses Work Meaning and Care . Yet I don’t want to get people’s hopes up too high. In the last room, we’ve displayed an antique vase depicting the unsung hero of the exhibition Sisyphus one who is committed to work and gains his dignity from it. Utopia does not imply liberation from work, but the ful filment one finds in it and takes from it. We still have a lot of work ahead of us.

Daniel Tyradellis , born in 1969, is a philosopher. He wrote his doctor ate on phenomenology and the history of mathematics. Winner of the Hum boldt Prize, Tyradellis has also been a long-time member of the DFG research training group Coding of Violence in Medial Transformation at the HU Berlin. His research concentrations are immanence philosophy and transferral to the sciences. His most recent publications include: Die Szene der Gewalt [The Scene of Violence] (co-edited with B. Wolf, Frankfurt 2007) and Death Drive Politik , immanente und transzendente Geschwindigkeiten [Death Drive. Politics, Immanent and Transcendent Speeds] ( 2008 ). He has been the research director of several exhi bitions, e.g., 10 + 5 = Gott Die Macht der Zeichen [10 + 5 =God. The Power of Symbols] (Jewish Museum Berlin, 2004) and Schmerz [Pain] (Hamburger Bahnhof/Medizinhistorisches Museum Berlin, 2007).

Christian Schlüter , born in 1965, is the editor of the feature pages in the Frankfurter Rundschau, responsible for political debate, the arts and popular culture. He received his doctorate from the Humboldt-Universität in Phi losophy with the thesis Equality — Freedom — Justice . His interview with Daniel Tyradellis took place in Berlin in January 2009

work. meaning and care An exhibition by the Ger man Hygiene Museum Dresden, funded through the Fed eral Cultural Foundation’s Future of Labour programme. Curated by Exhibition Praxis and Theory (Hürlimann | Lepp | Tyradellis, design: chezweitz & roseapple), 25 June 2009 to March 2010 www.arbeitsausstellung.de

why improving yourself just isn’t enough

work as education in the generational game

by dieter thomä

It was a late night or maybe early morning at a party in Berlin when I witnessed the short going-away scene. A guy was leaving the party be cause he had to »go back to work«, and when the curious bystanders asked him what kind of work he had to do, he replied »improving myself.« I’ve never forgotten these words, and the longer I mull over them, the more they an noy me. I would love to have asked the noctur nal smarty pants stripping all the irony away, which was surely part of his reply what he exactly meant by it. Having missed the oppor tunity, I guess I’ll have to vent my irritation and explain my thoughts here in detail. And let me assure you that these thoughts ultimately take me beyond the focus of my annoyance. This self-working man is only a small figure in a big panorama in which modern-day people publicly exhibit their lifestyle and relationship to work. I would like to take a look at this pano rama.

People, who only improve themselves, talk about work, but, in fact, they are simply trying to situate real life outside the realm of work. They rave about leisure, parties, games, recrea tion or consumption and even though sever al of these areas are incompatible with one an other, they exude something enticing that is difficult to resist. If we take the time to spread out these contrasting foils, we’ll see a haze start to engulf the world of work. Until recently this development was a result of a wish to do away with work altogether. It sprung from the hope that, when supported by almost fully automated production, people could live a life of leisure and strive for bigger and better things. The way I see it, this hope has dissipated, and instead work has been conceptually disman tled, the result being that people actually feel ashamed if they have to knuckle down or lend a hand.

The strategies that aim to counter this devaluation of work don’t have it easy as they often conflict with one another in other areas. First, there’s the strategy of disillusionment, which ultimately proposes that the assumed paradisiacal condition of not working can only exist as a small niche if at all and that not only one’s professional life, but life in general is de

termined and characterized by work. Accord ingly, we are always working, whether to earn money or not. If we believe this, we’d be putting recreational society into the drying-out cell, but it doesn’t make the strategy especially enticing.

There are those who take another approach by emphasizing the transformation of work. They don’t only want to extend the area of work, but transform it. According to this theory, people who work shouldn’t be content to only go through the motions, but try to work differ ently, more creatively, more entrepreneurially. The way to escape the world of poverty, want and necessity is to stop feeling like a gear in a machine and start seeing oneself as the subject of one’s actions who is responsible for optimiz ing one’s product and oneself. For the sake of work, we can shift the emphasis. Then we can refrain from those smug demands, calling on each worker to mutate into an entrepreneur, and instead remain intuitively aware that the proc ess of work itself should not be undervalued. The aim is to rehabilitate work as an opportunity to invest one’s efforts, to develop one’s talents, prove oneself, be in touch with oneself, and at the same time, shape the world and master life. As Henry David Thoreau wrote in the 19th century, »It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living; how to make getting a living not merely holiest and honourable, but altogether inviting and glorious; for if getting a living is not so, then liv ing is not.«

I don’t deny the fact that I regard the idea of doing away with work as an illusion of the ideology of progress. We also have to protect our selves from the parasitic effect of conceptually dismantling work. Likewise, the strategy of dis illusionment is not very helpful either, as it assumes life is completely comprised of work which only leaves us to consider how we can or ganize its compensation through various pay ment systems. I’m also uncomfortable with try ing to transform the worker into an entrepre neur (or to promote him to the status of entre preneur). It’s not only that it glosses over the true extent of an individual’s room to manoeu vre. For even if we could generalize this ap

proach to make it apply to everyone, the ques tion remains whether it’s in our best interest if everything we do is gauged by its viability in a social environment dictated by competition.

Of course, if we look back at the history of the entrepreneurial concept, as proposed by Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Werner Sombart and indi rectly by Friedrich Nietzsche, we see an overlapping boundary between entrepreneurial energy and dynamics on the one hand and a person who works and actively shapes his life on the other hand, as described by Hegel, Max Weber and others. Schumpeter also emphasizes the »joy of doing«, »joy of being at work«. This brings me back to the matter of rehabilitating work which I would like to advocate. It would be a mistake to view work inasmuch as it ensures our self-preservation as a quasi-natural proc ess that functions blindly or irrationally. After all, the activities that make up this area of life are embedded in complex, technical learning processes, social relationships and cultural tra ditions. Consequently, there is no reason why we cannot rehabilitate work as a positive expres sion of how we lead our lives.

Now the moment has come when I can return to the point of contention that tripped me up in the beginning that passing comment I heard one night in Berlin of someone who want ed to »improve himself«. One might argue that I’m missing the point by obsessing over the phrase »improving oneself«. I don’t intend to give it more importance than it deserves. But it doesn’t stand alone it is rather a part of a large spectrum of rhetorical phrases which modern people use more and more to describe them selves. Their common feature is that they cause a short circuit within oneself. The goals that people have set their sights on begin at the right place so to speak with oneself. As a result, the work on improving oneself leads to self presentation, identity management, ego marketing, and especially widespread self-fulfilment. According to the Hamburg-based Trendbüro, »self-design« is the next big trend.

The perfidious aspect of improving ourselves is that, in turning away from work, we take it to the extreme. We bid farewell to work, as we

know it, but continue talking about and believ ing what we’re doing is nothing less than work. People who only work to »improve themselves« apparently stretch the demands of conventional work ad absurdum. To quote a famous (false) translation from Luther’s Bible in a slightly al tered form: »And if life was sweet, so was the work in improving oneself.« Actually, I think there’s nothing sweet about this at all.

Worst of all is that we do injustice to a special feature of work that gives it its particular appeal, namely its ability to create a bridge between oneself and the world. When we work, we’ve got a firm grasp of the world while at the same time, we are aware of ourselves and our own oc cupation. We can express this in another way, which brings us what a surprise! to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He offers a very sim ple thought which can disperse the foul mood that hovers around work like a hungry crow. Reducing Hegel’s burdensome formulation as much as possible, it would read, »Work […] forms.« Hegel plays with the two meanings of the word ›form‹ i.e., shaping or designing something, the formation of an object, as well as the formation and development of the human being. In his interpretation of Hegel’s concept, Alexandre Kojève observes: »Work is formation in two senses of the word on one hand it forms and changes the world […]; on the other, it changes the human, forms, educates […] him«.

If we examine the self-improver from Hegel’s point of view, we immediately recognize his weakness he believes he can be successful with half the power and half the work which only focuses on himself. In terms of Hegel, the self-improver signifies the end of forma tion. He’s content in shaping himself, and thereby cuts himself off from the resources up on which the formation depends. If we take the connection between work and formation seri ously, then we also examine the place where for mation has always resided the place of up bringing. Upbringing involves the relationship between those who bring up and those who are brought up i.e., the relationship be tween generations. And this is where another deficit of the self-improver comes to

light. By removing himself from this relation ship, he becomes a symptom of a crisis that has gripped modern society a crisis of interaction between the generations.

This cross-generational crisis is closely interwo ven with the modern concept that we, as fin ished, self-determining individuals, should keep a safe distance from the world and embrace it only after careful consideration. Those who think in this way reject the complexities and dif ficulties, in that they first become who they are. Such considerations are burdensome or even unbearable in their opinion. However, humans do not enter society like guests coming to din ner of free will, fully dressed with a smile on their face. Humans belong to society from the first moment they are cradled in the arms of their mother or father. Likewise, they depend on the interaction of others in their formation as adults.

Practically all the heroes of the modern emanci pation movement were obsessed with scenarios of re-establishment, of a totally new beginning. The same applies to the self-made man, whom 19th -century American popular culture regard ed as a »genius« who required »no outside assist ance« and »educated« himself on his »path to fame«. People who see themselves as such are only lying to themselves. It’s worth noting that the economist Joseph Alois Schumpeter, who sang the praises of the entrepreneur like no other, was quite aware of the inadequacy of attempting to do and achieve everything by oneself. In his words, »if a person had to intellectually ex plore and creatively shape every minor act of daily life, he would have to be […] a giant of in sight in all matters of social life and of resolve just to get through each day.«

Society is not comprised of individuals who are in control, who shape themselves and independ ently work on improving themselves. With any luck, they create a network that anchors them and strengthens the bonds between the generations. The formation process of human be ings is only imaginable as the interplay of tradi tion, adaptation and deviation. Energy is only released if the relationships that are involved in this process preserve their high intensity. I would like to focus on three developments, which, in my opinion, threaten this intensity

and generational interaction, after which I shall return to the connection between education and work.

1The exorcism of work from private life. Nowadays education and upbringing take place in a protected environment of their own, formed from the private sphere and pedagogical institutions of all kinds. Education relies on such a sphere, for otherwise there would be nothing to protect children from being imme diately incorporated into the working world and exploited by it. However, this certainly doesn’t mean that work is absent from the sheltered edu cational environment. Growing up also entails taking on tasks, proving one’s abilities, endur ing stress and being responsible.

However, this is where things have gone awry in terms of the family’s private sphere. The fact that we have a saying like Hotel Mama a fa milial environment that children regard as a kind of maintenance centre demonstrates that the sheltered space outside the working world that we provide for children has now become rede fined as an amusement park. As a result, there is a noticeable degree of incompetence among young people today. When they eventu ally have to fend for themselves, they have diffi culties dealing with problems or even managing the minor trials of everyday life. We should not forget that the private household is a household, an oikos, where key skills required for survival are practiced on a daily basis. Without this prac tice, the connection between education and work, and education itself will suffer damage.

2Bidding farewell to the past in a peer group. The truth is that children and teenagers are acutely aware of their incomplete ness which is also a source of curiosity and readiness to explore new territory and create new things. This awareness, however, depends in large part on the contrast to the adult world, which young people view as »finished« (I leave it up to the reader to interpret this as the state of being complete or ›done for‹, read: ›you’re fin ished!‹). The problem is that many young peo ple today grow up in a world without adults they seek their luck in a peer group. Strange-

ly enough, many adults try joining such peer groups, as well, by redefining themselves as young professionals. And before you know it, all of society has changed into a peer group that pursues the ideal of youthfulness. When par ents themselves come under the spell of the youth cult, the signal it sends to children is that they should stay the way they are because they’re already at the finish line of life’s journey. By ide alizing youth, adults communicate that young people are the best. The result is that instead of being aware of their incompleteness, young people feel self-satisfied. Which leads to igno rance of the past. If everyone is or wants to be young, then everything old is passé. As Alexis de Tocqueville rightly observed, »When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.« In other words, the spirit lacks edu cation.



No end to mixed signals. The relation ship between generations in Germany since 1945 is one of mixed signals, a history of reoccurring double binds of various kinds. The parental gen eration of the post-war period was a broken gen eration, paralyzed in normality. The response, of course, were the uprisings of 1968 that protest ed the slow-moving establishment of the older generation and the hypocrisy so deeply woven into the economic miracle of the fifties, but also called for a change in the relationship between the generations. How did this younger generation, which also had to come to terms with the mixed signals of its parents, influence the next generation? If we expand the frame of this time window and view the 68ers more comprehensively, we see a generation that will go down in history as the one that inflated Germany’s national debt from 63 billion euro in 1970 to 1 5 trillion euro in 2008 and significantly contributed to the environ mental catastrophe that their children have now inherited. And presently, they are getting dumped with a financial and economic crisis to boot. Therefore, there are a myriad of reasons why young people should reject the older gener ation as a role model for their own education. And yet, such a rejection doesn’t come easy, for the fact of the matter is that the younger generation has parents who are so understanding, for

giving and generous toward their children that it’s difficult to condemn them lock, stock and barrel. Those who have reached or will reach adulthood in this new millennium will have to deal for much different reasons than children of generations past with mixed signals that resonate as loud as warning bells.

What kind of self-image can members of this generation and older individuals who wish to be accepted as honorary members embrace? As I see it, they would be better off focusing on work and education. This also involves a will ingness to face up to difficulties in which the world has packaged up enjoyment. It also in volves the willingness to form oneself, which means being patient with oneself and jump ing into the river of life that sprang from the past and flows to the future. How can we describe such people who share this attitude? We might say, they’re the ones they’ve been waiting for.

»We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.« This statement by Barack Obama in a speech he gave on 5 February 2008 invigorates this relationship between the past and future. What we see is a mood spreading throughout the country, as if the dam has broken and suddenly everything unimaginable is now possible. However, this sentence is not a celebration of self-congratulation or feasibility hype, because along with hope, it also expresses humility. Those who are waiting for themselves have to exercise patience. It’s not about magically appearing or narcissistically working on improving themselves. They are on a journey in which they, slightly para phrasing Heinrich von Kleist will become acquainted with themselves through the won derful efforts they are about to confront. A long time ago, people used to call such trips an edu cational sojourn. Bon voyage!

Dieter Thomä , born in 1959, has been a professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Gallen since 2000. He has published numerous philosophical and cultural-scien tific articles in journals and newspapers, such as the F.A.Z.

DIE ZEIT, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung , and the mag azines Literaturen and Spiegel . In 1996 Dieter Thomä received the Prize for Essay Writing from the Inter national Joseph Roth Journalism Competition in Klagen furt. His most recent book is Väter Eine moderne Heldengeschichte [Fathers. A Modern Heroic Epic], published by the Hanser Verlag, Munich in 2009

The exhibition Work . Meaning and Care will officially conclude the Future of Labour programme in summer 2009. Since 2006 the Federal Cultural Foundation funded several major projects that examined the changes in working society. Most of these are now completed, such as the short film competition do what you want , the many film series and festivals in the project Work in Progress , the literature project Labour Reports for the Last Days and the youth project The 100,000 Euro Job . In addi tion to these large-scale projects, the programme also granted funding to inde pendent projects in all artistic fields. We asked the critic Petra Kohse to look back at the programme and describe her impressions. What ideas did the projects convey in their view of working society in transformation and to what extent are they still valid in light of the surprising developments of the past year?

the future of labour programme — a review

Berlin, January 2009. Discount stores surround the Kulturzen trum Saalbau on Karl-Marx-Strasse in Neu-Kölln. Neon-col oured polyester gloves at Garbelli for one euro and a vacuum cleaner at Preisfuchs for only nineteen. »Come on, it doesn’t cost anything to look,« an older lady outside a T¤di store tells her friend and drags her inside where they find windbreakers for dogs, plastic flower arrangements and mood lamps a gro tesque assortment of products for shoppers who know exactly how much money is in their wallet and yet delight at the luxury of buying what they don’t need. You don’t have to feel ashamed by capitalism as long as you are hooked up to the flow of goods. Even in the main gallery of the Saalbau, the shop windows have been chock-full for weeks. Plastic horns, bath animals and Zdeneˇk Miler’s mole as a stuffed animal remove any hesitation one might feel when entering this area of culture. »We were truly overrun with crowds before Christmas«, says Antonia Herrscher, the press officer of the project Le Grand Magasin , curated by Andreas Wegner. »But most of the walk-in customers were young people. The long-time residents of Neukölln, if they dared to enter the stores, wanted to talk about the cooperative model as many of them had experienced how they work in the past.«

Le Grand Magasin was a sales exhibition of goods, manu factured by cooperatives throughout Europe. The products from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Spain, France, Italy and Germany were displayed based on the principle of solidarity in three and a half gallery rooms. The low-priced lipsticks were placed alongside expensive wooden toys. Gaudy Christmas tree orna ments were opposite stylish chests of drawers. Small stickers were attached to the walls with info about the origin of the goods, oc

casionally photos of the production sites, a few numbers here and there. More detailed literature was available at the informa tion table.

On the whole, the show was an appetizer and surely a lucrative one for the producers which acquainted people with coopera tive work in Europe. Yet Le Grand Magasin didn’t make an overly optimistic impression. Of course, it made sense to ex hibit European products manufactured by people with secure jobs who are involved in the decision-making process amidst a conglomeration of T¤di and Preisfuchs discounters. But do the cooperatives really gain any benefit from shifting their area of competence from the economic to the cultural sphere?

Le Grand Magasin was funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation through its Future of Labour programme. It was one of a dozen projects which viewing them now in hind sight did not so much present visions for the future, but essen tially resulted in field research and simulations of reality. In one case, the project literally presented »field« research. In the farmpainting project I like being a farmer and want to stay one , the artists Antje Schiffers and Thomas Sprenger made oil paintings of farms and agricultural acreage in exchange for videos made by the farmers documenting their work day Man your camera, farmer! For more than eight years, these two artists have travelled to Austria, the Netherlands, Wales and sev eral regions in Germany and have produced art for the benefit of those represented individuals who are allowed to wield the power of the socially-influential image.

Likewise, David Levine’s Rural Folk Theatre , which took place in Joachimsthal in the Uckermark in spring 2007,

demonstrated that farming, as an ancient form of cultural activity, can provide an ideal setting for not only portraying, but per haps overcoming postmodern alienation. An American actor (David Barlowe), who had been rehearsing for the role of Flint in Heiner Müller’s Umsiedlerin [The Resettled Woman], manually cultivated a potato field in Germany for almost four weeks. According to Levine, as he explained in the project’s pub lication, they wished to explore how deeply one can develop a role, i.e., »Can you work like someone else?« Extreme method acting. In the actor’s diary entry that he wrote on the last day of his performance, he confessed, »Frankly I was always more interested in the process of planting than the role itself.«

Other simulation projects aimed for a stronger social impact. For example, the Hotel Subbotnik at the Theaterfabrik Gera last autumn temporarily transformed a vacant department store (address: »Auf der Sorge« »On the Worry«) into a playful training camp to help solve problems of working and unem ployed life. Meanwhile, this cultural venue has been re-convert ed into a business site. Although the city originally planned to sell the historic landmark the first Hertie department store built in 1822 it reconsidered and now wishes to redesign it as Gera’s main department store.

The Great Pyramid , a current project by Ingo Niermann, Jens Thiel, Frauke Finsterwalder and Heiko Holzberger, literally represents the ultimate interface of art and reality. Niermann came up with the idea of creating a global burial pyramid near Dessau into which people from around the world could have their ashes or personal keepsakes interred. The concept is so dar ing and universally useful that it wouldn’t be surprising if the

project’s participants sometimes wonder if they’re working on an art project or actually starting a business. All the aspects of the plan have been evaluated, examined and interconnected economically, ethically and architecturally. They already have a homepage in ten languages. And more than 1,500 people from around the world have already reserved a burial stone. So far no money has changed hands and nothing has been built. But we can be sure this project has a future if we put any faith in virtuality that virtue of Internet to merge appearance and reality that has so expanded society’s boundaries of imagination. When Christoph Schlingensief’s conceptual party Chance 2000 was added to the federal election ballots in 1998 and received 25,000 votes, everyone was astounded at the remarkable coup de theâtre. Today, if you visit the thegreatpyramid.org and read about how easy it is to make arrangements to physically integrate yourself into an artwork and make a global gesture that reconciles economy with affordability, then you have to ask yourself why you didn’t come up with the idea yourself.

For many, the private search for simple solutions is a top priority. Banks are not stable, exports are slumping, the automobile and chemical industries are taking a nose dive, the dairy market is shaky, the art market is stagnating, the US reports that millions are hungry while its government lends itself money to send care packages to its own people and businesses. The German Minister for Media and Cultural Affairs is optimistic, however, and has pledged to increase spending for cultural programmes next year, for this represents (as Bernd Neumann was quoted by the German Book Trade’s Börsenblatt on 22 January 2009 ) »not a subsidy, but an investment in our future.« Perhaps the co operatives are right to have found their niche in the cultural sec tor. And maybe it’s a good precedent to invest cultural funding in the simulation of business ideas by testing them in Second Life before their debut in ›first life‹.

It appears the time has come to proclaim culture as the central depository of energies. The German economy, upon whose reli able growth the self-confidence of the nation has rested for half a century, no longer serves as a projection surface for personal development in the future. This crisis will not be turned around by a little self-initiative from outsourced workers. Twenty thou sand part-time employees at the Daimler factory in Sindelfingen cannot simply reinvent themselves as freelance service providers. Instead, they will consume less, propelling the downward spiral throughout the entire city. It is essential to come up with regional, national and international solutions because each gear of the ma chine helps turn every other gear. Good-bye »Me Corp.«, hello well, what?

In any case, the attempt to gently increase consumption is a step in the wrong direction. Should a family with low income really spend their 100 -euro-per-child refund on household appliances (preferably made in Germany), when their budget hardly covers their grocery bill at the discount supermarket? Obviously this is not a matter of getting through a temporary slump, as the fore casted decrease in our GDP clearly shows. Rather, we are probably going to have to wait a long time before we have it this good again!

Of course, the project applications that received funding through the Future of Labour only comprise a small fraction of the entire programme. During the course of the past three years, the Federal Cultural Foundation initiated and co-produced five ma jor projects of its own: the short film competition do what you want , the youth fund The 100,000 Euro Job , the film series Work in Progress , the literary anthology La bour Reports for the Last Days and the upcoming exhibition Work Meaning and Care that will open at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden this June. In view of how these projects and their impact were perceived, it’s remarkable how significantly the events of last autumn and winter have changed our cultural attitude toward life. Despite its uncon cealed criticism of the present, the short film compilation do what you want (produced in cooperation with the Kurz-

FilmAgentur Hamburg) exudes an amazing degree of certainty concerning the future, based on personal self-initiative and working potential.

The three main theses that can be found in the eleven short films are 1.) we define our existence through work, 2.) we will have to personally take responsibility for creating and designing our work, and 3.) the current system is full of absurdities that we can nonetheless laugh about. Like in Peter’s Principle , a Claymation film by Kathrin Albers and Jim Lacy. It illustrates a principle, proposed by the sociologist Laurence Peter, stating that every employee is eventually promoted to a position for which he is no longer competent, but refuses to relinquish for the rest of his working life. The film features a crocodile who works at the ticket counter of a public swimming pool, is pro moted to pool attendant, and finally becomes the manager of a lifesaver factory which explodes at the end of the film. Waldmeister , a film by Markus Mischkowski and Kai Mar ia Steinkühler, is humorously poignant, as well. When private recycling companies start taking away their work, two »one-euro workers« schlep extra garbage into the city park, for which they are paid to clean up. And Bus by Jens Schillmöller and Lale Nalpanteglo tells the story of a determined group of service work ers which, without being asked, does unnecessary jobs and has the audacity to bill people for it. These are all light-hearted films that exaggerate the situation to show us how much worse things could be. Though they share a pessimistic view toward state-im plemented solutions, they all strongly believe in the ingenuity of the individual to at least get themselves out of a tight bind.

Of course, the individual and social criticism are dominant themes for writers, as well. Five of the seventeen contributors to the Labour Reports for the Last Days (published by the Suhrkamp Verlag) chose to write about the lives of people who have specialized or withdrawn from working life. Juli Zeh wrote about a lesbian couple from Berlin who are now content to groom and trade horses in Brandenburg. Gabriele Goettle inter viewed a former theatre scholar at his goat farm. Georg Klein’s piece featured an ex-punk, a somewhat esoteric self-exploit er , who considered no job below him. Thomas Kapielski de scribes his permanent refusal of state welfare. And Oliver Maria Schmitt portrays Birgit, an energetic senior citizen after she re tires from social services.

The book also contains specific examples of how one can come to terms or make the best of changing circumstances, and the kind of work ethics that have arisen through the Internet. In the more socially critical texts, Bernd Cailloux sounds out the futu rologist of the VW plant, Thomas Raab comes to the conclusion that it’s impossible not to work in a consumption-based econo my (because, by consuming, we are active participants in capital ism), and Felix Ensslin describes the caste of political advisors. Several pieces are more playful in nature with four writers think ing out loud (in writing) about their own occupations. This flour ish may be due to the somewhat forced frame story by the pub lisher Johannes Ullmaier, who was apparently commissioned by an entity from the year 2440 to find »literary poets« to »report to us« on what the world in the »German-speaking areas« looked like at the beginning of the 21st century.

The book is remarkable nonetheless. It demonstrates from what cosmic distance some writers approach the subject of concrete work. And it shows what they gain by this. Experience for them selves and an interpretation of symbols for the readers. It’s inter esting that only two writers focus on an entire group of people, which most would agree represents the losers in the system Kathrin Röggla in her piece on debt counselling in Los Angeles and Berlin, and Wilhelm Genazino in an essay on begging. Genazino’s piece is perhaps the most optimistic in the book, as he convincingly argues that, with adequate training, begging could become a profitable business field.

In comparison, the film series and festivals on the theme Work in Progress seem to radiate with robust, almost crisis-proof topicality. The Friends of the German Cinamathéque created a

pool of 75 films on the subject of work, from which cinemas throughout Germany could customize their own film festival for their city. The media city of Cologne, for example, was interested in films about filmmaking, Sindelfingen home of Daimler focused on the globalised work world, the health re sort town of Bad Tölz on the future of convalescence, and Berlin on gender issues in the work world. Community-oriented and applicable to a variety of areas an event form that has the po tential of becoming a classic!

Another project that captured the imagination of young people throughout Germany was the self-promotion fund The 100,000 Euro Job managed by the Visionauten Leipzig. The applicants themselves (people under 26 ) were responsible for al locating funding to those projects which they deemed beneficial and important. Forty-seven small and middle-sized projects be gan in 2006 across the country. Some proposed new approaches to work, others aimed to make work easier or focused on the issue of work. An unemployed petting zoo on Alexanderplatz in Berlin. A film about environmentally-conscious villages. A but ton-making series ( Body Gallery) on the theme of professions. A Berlin podcast opera for the working commute. Or a courage booster machine in a café for the unemployed in Pirmasens which would give customers something to be happy about (like a cookie), but which first had to be earned (i.e., cut out).

When interviewed in the film documentary, some project man agers thought the programme was »extremely cool«. They gained self-confidence by being allowed to plan and realize their projects. They had fun producing something, by which the process of »getting there« was generally regarded as more important than the final result. All in all, clearly a courage-boosting event for everyone. But was it essentially a petting zoo for the intern gen eration? What production company is prepared to finance the next film by the filmmaker who shot the documentary about the environmentally-conscious village? At least the button maker has created a virtual 80 -cent shop on the Internet (that is, 80 cents per button), while Justin Lépany’s podcast opera can be down loaded for free.

At a time when cultural achievement is increasingly compensat ed by the attention it attracts, while, at the same time it gains importance as a laboratory for real-world endeavours, cultural policymakers have to begin looking for large-scale national solu tions for people to survive without working for a living. My sug gestion for the title of the programme: Future in the Network, or »Whoever comes up with ideas can eat«.

The exhibition Work Meaning and Care in Dresden see the interview with Daniel Tyradellis on page 12 seems to be a step in this direction as it illustrates that money has never been the only goal of work, or that an activity we equate with work can just as much be regarded as art or even recreation. Yet redefining the concept of work does not only involve anthropo logical and sociological issues. It also involves quite concretely the future economic survival of homo ludens. Culture is not al ways a luxury afforded by society, but more frequently a luxury afforded by cultural artists who voluntarily forego the going rates for their work. Despite this injustice, it’s important to maintain this separation between the market and culture at any price.

Petra Kohse , resident of Berlin, has a doctoral degree in Theatre History and works as an editor and feature columnist.

commodities as ar t

What do Le Grand Magasin and The Great Pyramid have in com mon? (see Petra Kohse’s review of the entire Future of Labour programme on p. 16 ). Judging by the media’s response, they were the most spectacular projects in the application-based funding programme. In both projects, the line between a creative cultural undertaking and the testing of an idea about how to produc tively effect change in a working society seemed fluid. It practically lies in the ›nature‹ of such work projects. In his thoughts on Le Grand Magasin , Hel mut Höge seeks out the fine line between culture and the economy and demonstrates how resilient it is.

by helmut höge

Ever since Marcel Duchamp exhibited his ready-mades (indus trially-produced objects merely signed by the artist) in 1923, we know that an object, a product (in his case, a urinal and a bottle rack, among other things) can become an artwork the moment an artist makes it so. Following Duchamp’s lead, Andy Warhol succeeded in expanding the term »art« in the 1960s to include goods from the world of commodities by painting portraits of soup cans and boxes of detergent. These have since become icons of art history. In 1984 Joseph Beuys exhibited hundreds of quo tidian products from the GDR , from LPG sacks of flour to Karo cigarette packages. For the art historian Barbara Saka, this instal lation, which the artist called Economic Values, was »a provocative statement against the glittering aesthetics of the West’s world of goods«. At the same time, Beuys criticized Duchamp’s readymades in declaring them »art«, Duchamp had separated them from the conditions of their production.

Since then, a succession of artists has looked at the relationship between art and commodities as well as the specific conditions of their production and public reception. With his Product Sculptures , which references Beuys, the US artist H J . Sem jon deals with the concept of mortality as promised by art and the transience of everyday goods. His concern with this topic culminated in a project in New York in 2000 in which he pre served all of the products of a grocery store in beeswax. They were just as impossible to buy as Beuys’ GDR products or, to cite another example, the Prada clothes which two artists, Ingar Dragset and Michael Elmgreen, exhibited in 2003 in a ›shop‹ in a totally abandoned street leading through the dry-lands of Texas.Their ›business‹, incidentally, was robbed, prompting Prada to

deliver new clothes free of cost. Most recently, the artist Sylvie Fleury exhibited about 100 pairs of expensive shoes in two glass cases in a Geneva gallery. All of these un-buyable »goods« ac quired an aura normally reserved for artworks simply by being removed from the marketplace or by being placed in ›artistic venues‹. Generally, the artists’ projects were intended as critiques of capitalism or consumption.

Le Grand Magasin , a temporary project funded by the Fed eral Cultural Foundation’s Future of Labour programme 1 , seems at first glance to differ little from the many surrounding shops in Karl-Marx-Strasse in the Berlin district of Neukölln. These are mostly cheap five-and-dime stores where you can by anything for one euro. You can buy and sell, as well, in the Grand Magasin . And »any and everything« is available in this store, which, however, has been built in the Galerie in Saal bau on a temporary basis: plastic and wooden toys, men’s and children’s sandals, watering cans, washing machines, mincing knives, pill boxes, manicure sets, office storage containers, rakes, knitted scarves, camping chairs, etc. And they cost more than a euro. The rake costs 39 euro, the mincing knife costs 23 euro, the child’s scooter costs 38 euro, there’s even a metal chimney pot for 320 euro although the pill box only costs 1 40 euro.

You can’t tell from the goods themselves how they were produced. They all come from production co-ops, of which there are many more in European countries other than Germany. Ac cordingly, most of the products don’t come »from here«, but rather and primarily from neighbouring countries, partic ularly from Central and Eastern Europe, as well as from Italy,

Spain and France. Characteristically and ideally everyone who works for such a cooperative also has shares in it and shareholders work for it. These co-ops usually arise when labourers, craftspeople and small business owners come together because their resources and capital aren’t sufficient to allow them to com pete by themselves on the market. Even as co-ops, they are tiny enterprises compared to the market leaders of their respective branches. This is also true of the electrical device manufacturer Fagor, part of the world’s largest co-op, Mondragon, with 1,200 employees, when compared, for example, to General Electric or Siemens/Bosch. As with other goods, a co-op’s products make their way to customers via advertising, sales, wholesale and retail. In Eastern Europe, co-ops had to establish themselves laboriously and virtually overnight; and more than just produce the goods regularly, they had to meet standards of quality and aesthetics, even in packaging, commensurate with those of the West, in order to compete. In a store window, what counts is a product’s price, design and quality; the fact that it comes from a co-op is but a detail noted on the packaging. The project Le Grand Magasin has retrieved them from their semi-ano nymity and is now presenting them at least within the frame work of the gallery in a non-competitive atmosphere. No item is doubly on offer, meaning you won’t find one version from one co-op, another version from another. A simple shoe-horn or pepper mill represents a concept by a single (Czech) shoe-horn craftsperson or (Slovakian) pepper-mill manufacturer. Both general and concrete indications as to their co-op origins lend the impression that these things somehow bear the signature of a collective producer, making them particularly in the context of the exhibition artworks. But because they have also sold

» people recognize themselves in their commodities «

herbert marcuse

well in the past months, both in the Galerie and over the Internet, one could perhaps say, quoting Andy Warhol, »Good business is the finest art!«

In their book released in 2008, Marke Eigenbau — Der Aufstand der Massen gegen die Massenproduk tion [The Self-Made Brand: The Mass Revolt Against Mass Production], the Berlin-based ›trend researchers‹ Holm Friebe and Thomas Ramge point out several signs that individuallymanufactured products have found a ›global marketplace‹ on ecommerce platforms and that such private labels could even mean an end to mass production a lá Ford. They continue to gain in popularity and their producers’ profits are increasing, not least because they offer their goods ›personally‹ over the Internet. The more »authentic« the producer and his or her product ap pears, the greater the success. What sounds like capitalist sales nonsense might perhaps soon be true for co-ops and their goods. This form of ›labour in the future‹ appeals to consumers (and to which increasing public criticism of a hire-and-fire mentality and exploitation of labour in the Third World have also con tributed no small amount).

In order not to obscure the goods with text and images about the individual co-ops, the exhibition’s curator Andreas Wegner limited their use, although collecting the goods consumed a great deal of the budget trips to Italy, Spain, France, the Czech Republic in order to interview and photograph the manufac turers as well as convince them to take part in the exhibition. Even this procedure providing the goods with a history in or der to raise their value has become a tradition. It began with titles such as purveyor to the court , workshop reputations and Reformhäuser (translator’s note: generally a health food shop) which ensure certain standards, and by no means does it end with the product information for organic and fairtrade goods.

Cultural studies expert Nico Stehr speaks of a »moralization of the market« which is increasingly becoming a »fundamental part of production and consumption processes« without »signal izing a break with capitalism«. He is thinking of organic food stores, ›one-world‹ stores, regional markets and enlightened con sumers who inform themselves about a product’s origins and even behave in an ›environmentally-conscious‹ fashion, taking measures in their personal environment, for example, by reduc ing carbon dioxide emissions or boycotting certain products. In the Hessian town of Vogelsberg, a morally or rather ethically motivated experiment by Peter Mosler arose in 1981 from the land commune movement: »So many things make us poor.« At the same time, a few of the larger communes, such as the »AA Commune Friedrichshof« of the »Longo-Mai-Cooperative« col lectivized, thereby reducing, all property. In 1995, these and similar consumer critics focused more on the production-related issues of goods than on their consumption, for example, in the Werkbund touring exhibition »What things do people need?«

This took place under the patronage of Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, who at the time was still president of The Wuppertal Institute of Climate, Environment and Energy. »The price says ›Buy Me‹ but it never tells the ecological truth,« he wrote in the forward to the catalogue. The catalogue also included »The Cri tique of Product Aesthetics« (by W H . Haug, 1970 ), which posited that practical values no longer fulfilled what increasingly elaborate advertising promised, and discussed Herbert Marcuse’s question as to true and false needs. Media theorist Norbert Bolz responded, »We no longer have any needs. When was the last time you bought clothes because you were cold?«

Marked as cooperative products, the goods in Le Grand Ma gasin indicate to potential buyers that they have been produced by people who have a stake in the enterprise and who help determine how profits will be used. Even the origins of produc tion co-ops differ from many ›normal‹ businesses, which usually develop from an engineer’s idea or invention. Take, for example,

the Czech co-op DUP, in which about 250 employees currently produce manicure sets and make-up cases. It was founded in May 1945 by a group of women whose husbands were either in concentration camps or prison. Initially, they painted wooden souvenirs. Since the group already existed as a work collective, the Communists, upon taking over, decided to create an indus trial site with great potential for a planned economy and the division of labour among socialist states. They invested a great deal of money into the venture. The Italian co-op Copart was founded in 1926 by a group of ship builders. Following the war and rebuilding, the demand quickly shifted to metal ships, so the builders changed strategies today they produce kitch ens. The glass factory CIVE in Leonardo Da Vinci’s birthplace also deserves mention. It was founded in 1950 by a group of glass blowers who wanted to market their products together. To day, with forty employees, the factory is almost completely mechanized and manufactures exclusive Tuscan glass, primarily for the US market.

Generally speaking, Eastern European production co-ops differ from those in Western Europe in that the former still have what is known as very high ›manufacturing spread‹. For example, the wooden toys by the southern Bohemian co-op JAS are made from entire beech trunks; not only do the members fell the trees themselves, they also re-forest. Whereas the French co-op Moulin Roy merely designs its toys, which are then produced in the cheap labour market of Romania. Another difference is that Eastern European co-ops see themselves as »anti-commu nist« while they are, in fact, very proletarian-production orien tated, and the Italians think of themselves as very communist although their production processes and marketing have long been strictly organized along capitalistic lines. This difference is reflected in advertising, which in Eastern Europe focuses more on production than on the product. In the advertising DVD s of the Western European co-ops, you see machines working at full speed but certainly not the workers.

The disproportionately high number of Czech and Slovakian co-ops or rather, their goods, in the Neukölln exhibition possess a certain charm, as if the Communist culture of commodities has found refuge. We might even speak of that special ›aura‹ of things. Walter Benjamin defined this as the »unique appearance of a distance, as near as that may be«. In this case, that would mean that the exhibited objects refer back to a prototype of ex change gift-giving. This is characterized by the obligation of reciprocity, while the exchange of goods is rather characterized by the notion of the equivalence of exchanged goods. On the one hand, you have mutuality, on the other, equiva lence. The first refers to people, the second to things. In giftgiving, social structures are created directly and concretely, in the exchange of commodities, in the abstract through value (of things). This is also true of the commodity of labour. It is true that gift-giving characterizes so-called ›primitive societies‹, but even and especially in today’s co-ops one speaks of ›common economic advantage‹ or ›mutual aid‹, also known as mutualism (in contrast to Darwinian utilitarianism ), influenced by the anarchists Kropotkin and Proudhon and still advocated by most theorists of co-operative ventures.

Because these self-organized, humanistic production methods had to compete in a capitalist society, Marxists predicted that they wouldn’t survive on their own for long. Rosa Luxemburg called production co-ops ›hybrids‹. From the political left to right, the prognosis for this ›endangered species‹ was grim, not least because the costs per labourer were increasing steadily in the face of mechanization and automation. Nonetheless, the coop researcher Jost W. Kramer from the University of Wismar said in 2005 »that right now in many European countries, pro duction co-ops are being discussed as a possible solution to cur rent economic and social problems, and are now being discussed in Germany, as well«. The effects of the financial crisis have made these discussions all the more urgent. It’s a good idea for

all concerned who have an eye towards selling their products to join consumer co-ops, as has been done, for example, in Switzer land and Italy. The project Le Grand Magasin gave An dreas Wegner the idea of founding a consumer co-op in order to promote further cooperation with the production co-ops and ensure sustainability.

The aura, particularly the one surrounding products of former socialist European countries, has something nostalgic or melan cholic (in the sense of »apathy in the present and homesickness for the past«).2 The curator has decisively worked against this ›impression‹ or has, by presenting the articles with a minimum of fanfare in the Galerie’s White Cubes, repressed it. He has resist ed today’s enticing marketing tools, and in so doing, has made artworks out of commodities whose aura was fading away to that point where the utopia of pure practical value has (once again) come tangibly close.

1 This project is not only being funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation but also the Brussels’ cooperatives associations, Cooperatives Europe and Cecop, and the EU Cultural Programme 2007 2013 and the Cultural Of fice of Neukölln. The organizers include the Trafó — House of Contempo rary Arts/Trafó Gallery in Budapest, Hungary; the Institute of Contempo rary Art — ICA , Dunaújváros, Hungary; the Jan Evangelista Purkyne Uni versity, Faculty of Art and Design, the Czech Republic and the Emil Filla Gallery in Usti nad Labem. These, in turn, have been funded by the na tional cultural funds of Hungary and the Czech Republic Cultural Foun dation respectively. This wide-ranging support can be viewed as a cultural measure taken to supplement an EU resolution from 2006 by which the funding of ›occupationally-orientated co-operatives‹ are to be funded in order to strengthen local ›economies‹. The state of Berlin offered to assume a ›leadership‹ role, as Jost W. Kramer has written in a study entitled Subsidized production co-ops as a way out of unemployment ? Berlin as an example . Kramer points out the contradictions in the various funding measures which are intended to encourage production co-ops but include procedures which scare people off. Whereas the ›Me Corps.‹ involved too great of a personal risk, the ›We Companies‹ face the hurdle of bureaucratic complexity, the result of conflicting interests and ideologies. Kramer fears »that the measures will not meet the intended goals«. Nonetheless, a number of co-ops have already been founded in Ger many, including, for the first time, a few cultural co-ops established by art ists and computer specialists.

2 Against the will of those involved in production who, like those in the Czech Republic, for example, had already started to put a neo-liberal spin on co-op regulations to water down their fundamental principle of ›every member has a say‹. For example, the management of the Moravian co-op VYVOY , which was founded in 1931 by ten small textile producers and in which today 250 employees manufacture suits for, among others, BOSS , agreed that they would have 70 % of the voting power. While the Prague association’s chairperson warmly recommended this model co-op, the Ital ian chairperson raged that this was no longer a co-op. It’s managing direc tor, JUD r. Rostilav Dvorak, put it this way: »collective decision-making is great when you’re standing around the backyard barbecue, but not in a modern production company«.

Helmut Höge , born in 1947, started as an interpreter with the US Air Force and a trader of large Indian animals. He went on to study social sciences in Ber lin, Bremen and Paris and worked as a farmhand in West and East Germany. Currently, he works primarily as a journalist and has another extraordinary job: back-up janitor with the tageszeitung in Berlin. His most recent book is WPP — Wölfe Partisanen Prostituierte [WPP — Wolves, Partisans, Prostitutes] was published by Kadmos Publishing House in Berlin, 2007

The political upheaval of 1989 didn’t simply happen out of the blue. It had begun in the countries of Central and East ern Europe decades earlier, and ever since, the historic out break of resistance has remained anchored in their collec tive memory. In the 1950s workers and dissidents in Poland, East Germany and Hungary demonstrated against the Soviet control of the East Bloc. When the Hungarians revolted in 1956, Soviet troops were quick to brutally quash the con flict. János Kádár, who was loyal to Moscow, took control and soon thereafter, ended the political repression and initi ated cautious liberalization, which history books now refer to as »goulash communism«. In a clever move, Kádár suc ceeded in championing the cause of the reformers, many of whom suffered a horrible death. The revolt and its repercus sions remained a traumatic experience for an entire genera tion of dissidents. The father of the Hungarian writer Attila Bartis belonged to that generation.The historic year of 1956 not only influenced his father’s life, but his own, although he was born in 1968. At the time, Ferenc Bartis was a member of the Hungarian

minority in Siebenbürgen (Romania). When the Hungari ans revolted, his father wrote a patriotic poem that he read aloud in public, for which he was arrested. He was sentenced to death, but survived seven years of anguish in a Romanian prison. The dictator Ceaus¸escu was unrelenting in his repression and persecution of the Hungarians in Romania. Hungarian language schools, publishing companies and cultural institutions were closed and the Hungarian minor ity was pressured to give its children Romanian names. In 1984 the Bartis family was finally allowed to leave the coun try and move to Budapest, an experience that changed their lives. Recalling these troubling and exciting events, Attila Bartis writes about his relationship with his father. His story is one of a series of literary pieces titled »Fathers and Sons«. Writers from Central and Eastern Europe search for the traces of transformation left behind in their family history and examine how these experiences have influenced the relationship between generations. The series began with stories by the Czech writer Jáchym Topol and the Romani an writer Mircea Ca˘rta˘rescu.

non-euklidian bagatelles

by attila bartis

1From the platform, only a remnant reflection of the afternoon could be seen as it glided across the icy ridges of the mountains toward the Valley of Maros. The flagman waited until the old woman lifted off her sack and two baskets and then motioned to the engineer to proceed. Nobody was getting on.

In front of the concrete barracks of soldiers in the forced labor service, a fire was burning in a barrel. The guard thrust his bayonet into the flames, lifted out a half-charred billet, lit his ciga rette and then threw back the wood. It’s getting cold, we’ll take a short cut, Father said, and we took off along the railway embank ment, following the 4: 20 passenger train, passing in front of the row of barracks, which was against the rules but the guard saw that Father had a child with him and was only taking a short cut.

By the time we reached the barrier, it was pitch dark. High up, somewhere in the middle of the red and white pole, hung a light ed lamp to allow one to see whether the secondary road between the two villages was free. It was not very useful because in winter, at this time of the evening, nothing ever came this way, except perhaps a government vehicle from the County that may have lost its way. The locals were not keen on driving across the valley after dark. They say the horses don’t like to do it. Even those who owned a Dácia would make some excuse and stay at home.

The path toward the potato fields started from a stable beyond the poplars of the main road. The snow reached up to Father’s

knees and to my waist. In his imitation leather coat, carrying his imitation leather briefcase, and in his laced low shoes he tramped the snow before me so it would reach no higher than my knees. Somewhere in the distance, a dog whimpered. The sound tra versed the mountains, came back, and then there was a duet of whimpering. The Páloks’ dog. It’s tied out, my father said, still it was pretty lousy listening to it.

About ten minutes later, I stopped. He asked what happened, to which I had no reply because actually nothing had happened. I didn’t want to stop, I simply did not continue. I would have liked to see the house. Or anything. Keep your eyes open, he said, and then added that at times like this one must not stop because it’s easy to fall asleep. And then it’s all over. Look, I’m wearing only these low-quarter shoes. Never stop in the snow; that’s the most important thing, son.

Then we stopped, after all: the lock on the rear gate was frozen. He fumbled with the key for a while, or maybe he didn’t even have a key. He lifted me across the garden fence, handed me the briefcase and then he climbed across, too. Empty stable, icy shrubs, pear tree. Here we are, he said, and as though from here we would not go any further, he stopped in front of the window.

My grandmother was sitting at the table, cleaning the glass of the kerosene lamp. Her head was wobbling a little; through the closed door, she was staring into nothingness. On the couch, my

grandfather was tinkering with the Szokolla radio and the batteries held together by rubber bands. Two flat batteries had to be combined to get the necessary nine volts, but the mountains and the jamming stations on top of the mountains blocked every thing. Only some undulating humming was left of the news and the dance music, but somehow even that was worth the effort.

My grandmother poured cold water into a washbowl for me to soak my feet but it felt like fire. Father took the newspapers with his poems out of the briefcase. While we ate, he told us that next year we would have electricity. That meant we would have a hot plate, heaters, perhaps even hot water, he had arranged it all; it didn’t work out this year because the times were not right, but it will happen next year, for sure.

Then, as if it were some sort of advance payment, he rifled in his briefcase and took out two flat batteries. There were no ninevolt batteries in Vásárhely, either, but now maybe I can get some in Brassó; he put away the sandwich prepared for him, closed his briefcase and started off to catch the 7: 50 passenger train to Brassó. Grandmother asked him to leave through the front gate that opened to the street, as it is proper; he should know that using the back gate and moving around behind the house bodes no good. My father said all right and started for the front gate. He shut it loudly so we could hear it, but then we also heard how he backtracked in the deep snow and went to the back of the house, heading toward the potato fields.

This happened about thirty-three years ago. For the last fifteen years, only I’ve been living in this house, or maybe not even I. Once I made a photograph of the rear fence: beyond the snowcovered potato fields, above the South Mountain the sky glimmered in a narrow crown, in its reflections transparent thorns hovered in the air. There, above the ridge, in a narrow green stripe, the sky suddenly turned blue, dark blue; toward the east, everything was all purple already.1 Evening was approaching from that direction. I waited for it, be fore going inside. And then, I took a picture the next day, too.

In the seventieth picture, it’s springtime. In the seventy-first, there is snow again. Only two years later, around the four-hun dredth picture did it occur to me that it probably wasn’t the clouds above South Mountain that I had been photographing.

People are reaping in the four-hundred-and-tenth picture, be cause it doesn’t pay to bother with potatoes. In the next one, nothing can be seen because of the fog, and the one from last year shows a sawmill.

As I was taking the five-hundredth picture, somebody stopped next to me.

»One can just boil in this valley,« he said. I nodded yes, sometimes one can.

»What’s that one called over there?«

»South Mountain.«

»Come one, there is no South Mountain and there is no Sinis tra… And which one is the Libán-teto˝ 2 ?«

»There, behind the ash trees.«

»And what about the entertainers? The ones that froze to death. Are they real, too?

»Maybe. I don’t know. But once I also came from that direction and if it hadn’t been for my father I would have stopped before the frozen lock.

mini monologue »…and from the time that the special riot squads of the state security police dispersed the crowd on Mar ketplace, nobody walked outside, not even in their yards, which was of course understandable because the security opted for the most effective method of crowd dispersal: well-aimed shots to the head, and since their training officers were very good, they did not miss many of their targets; in the first round of fire, en gine-fitter Sára Voinich was the only one they could not hit from the windows of the town hall because comrade Voinich was al ready standing on the ladder leant against the building and, be ing an engine fitter, she had knocked down the red star with great expertise, but in the second round, when they had to set an ex ample that would make everyone lose all interest in knocking down red stars, her comrades tied Sára Voinich to one of the poplars on Marketplace and every member of the offended squad emptied an entire cartridge clip into her, which is to say a total of seven hundred bullets so that of the twenty-eight-yearold Sára Voinich only some dirty stains remained on the frittered bark of the hundred-year-old tree and some strains of her hair that along with the bullets had lodged in the tree, even though she had especially asked them to spare her head because she had just brushed her hair, but then the hairs disappeared too because one night someone wanted to light a candle there, but he remembered that with the candlelight he would be an even better target than Sára Voinich had been, so instead he tied a redwhite-and-green ribbon around the tree and then, as a townplanning measure, they cut down this tree, as well as all the other otherwise innocent poplars of Marketplace, so as to leave not a trace of the regrettable events, and they had donated the trees to the paper industry, so that out of Sára Voinich’s hair were manufactured the books that helped several generations to for get the horrors of the counterrevolution, and when the counter revolutionary horrors had softened to regrettable events, out of the same history books they manufactured hygienic wrapping papers, into which Pick salami and the meat for goulash were more and more enthusiastically wrapped, and anyone whom even Pick salami could not make forget that comrade Kádár, on the basis of let’snottakeanychances, had hanged three times as many people than did Haynau after 1848, must have been a per son that nothing here could ever please, but there is no doubt there were increasingly fewer people bothered by Sára Voinich’s hair being embedded in the paper in which the butcher placed the meat for the Sunday goulash, and then these few people slowly began to go out of their minds, somewhat like those who would like to imagine infinity or understand the theory of rela tivity or believe that parallel lines actually do meet, and there is no more direct way of going mad than trying to comprehend what is incomprehensible, for example, how is it possible to eat that goulash, how is it possible without vomiting to put that hair

on the rim of the plate, and they went truly mad when with a light, elegant movement, other people changed the system that they, at the cost of their lives, had wanted to change, and in the great joy of freedom someone called their attention to the following: but gentlemen, you are eating the same goulash, too, and this was more effective than all the hangings, all the school books, and the Pick salami, because this was the reason that drove so many of them so mad that they began to set up equa tions, with which they always reached the same conclusion, namely, that on the one side there were twelve lynched security policemen and on the other side sixty-six volleys of fire, 12 ,000 prisoners and 351 hangings, and this was more than the other side, and therefore those on this side must be asked for their for giveness exactly the same way the forgiveness of the Jews had to be asked after Auschwitz, and when finally this exactlythesame way was sounded, the ambitious young program director had not even read from the sheet in front of him what the editor had pre pared for him, 1. a secret security policeman is also a human be ing, 2. Kádár was not Jewish, 3. but the bloke in the middle with the walrus mustache, is, he’s got the tattoo code to prove it, 4. to night we’ll have a fetish party at Bubus’s place, don’t you dare read this aloud, you idiot; anyway, when he reached this exact lythesameway, the young civil servant had not even bothered to look at the editor’s list in front of him, he only shook his head and said, well, but gentlemen, and they could already be held up for view, as the veterinarian’s crazies, and actually that is when the revolution ended.«

2On the day before the last, the Third One came into the hospital, and later the Other One did too. Not together, they came more as if to relieve each other. I would have been glad if they came together, but they said it was less tiring this way, I should believe them. I did; both of them had already buried their fathers. The Other One brought in his new volume, inscribed it, with friendship, hoping for recovery. Thus, Spoken Language be came the last book into which somebody had taken a glance be fore death’s arrival.

I sat at the far end of the bed and tried not to listen. As though I wasn’t even. Because now he will tell the Other One what he wanted to say to me but never would. I was counting the drops of the infusion. Forty-five, forty-six, forty-seven.

»You know, István, there is a statue in Vásárhely. The two Bolyais. Father and son.«

»Yes, I’ve seen it,« says the Other One.

Forty-eight, forty-nine.

»The son who contradicted the whole Euclidian kit and caboodle. He proved that the parallels meet in infinity.«

»Yes, I know,« said the Other One.

Forty-nine. Fifty. Fifty-one.

»Except that some Austrian officer held back the letter and the son believed that his father hadn’t sent the Appendix to Gauss.« »But he did. How could he not have sent it?«

»Of course, he did. And Gauss, that narrow-minded ass, respond ed that he could not praise the claim because it would be praising himself. He had long been aware that parallel lines cross each other in infinity. But this was a delicate subject and he would have been considered an idiot; he was ashamed to commit it to writing.«

»He should have been ashamed of that letter he wrote.«

Fifty-four, fifty-five, fifty-six.

»But the statue is there, nevertheless. Father and his son. Only the son is a little bit larger,« Father laughs.

Fifty-six. Fifty-six. Fifty-six.

»Of course he is, because he is standing and his father is sitting,« says the Other One.

Yes, he sat about seven years, I think to myself.

»Cut the joking, István. Did you know they named a crater after János on the Moon?«

Fifty-six. Fifty-five. Fifty-four.

»That’s the least of it,« says the Other One. »Without him, it would have been hard to reach the Moon.«

And without his father he would never have realized that paral lels meet in infinity.

Fifty-three. Fifty-two. Fifty-one.

»You know, István, I am very proud of my son.«

»You should be. And of yourself, too.«

»Leave that now. And of my grandchildren, too.«

Forty-nine, forty-eight, forty-seven.

»That’s right, you could be proud of them, too, uncle Feri. You have wonderful grandchildren.«

Forty-six, forty-five, forty-four.

»And do you know what else I am proud of? That my son has a friend like you.«

Forty-three, forty-two, forty-one.

»Thank you, uncle Feri.«

»Never mind, István; I thank you. But you’ll see, another day or two and I’ll be out of here. And we won’t even stop until we get to Szárhegy, isn’t that right son?«

Thirty-nine. Thirty-eight. Thirty-seven.

»If only they stopped dripping this goddamn poison into me.« This is not poison. This is the painkiller already, I think to my self.

»Of course, the two of you wouldn’t even stop,« says the Other One.

Of course, I wouldn’t even stop, I think to myself.

»I’ll be going now, rest uncle Feri. And believe me, one day there will be a statue like that.«



I spend the last days of the year in the house in which Father was born. At night, the temperature drops to minus twenty-eight, sometimes even to minus thirty. It’s a few degrees warmer during the day. With the help of three electric heaters and a wood-burn ing stove, I manage to warm the kitchen and the small room to a livable level. In the two large rooms, shiny ice covers the walls.

I chop some wood, grow tired, and sit down. I figure that if my grandmother committed suicide in the summer of eighty-four, when she found out that her son was about to emigrate, then from the age of seventy-seven my grandfather had lived alone in the house. He split firewood with the same blunted ax and carried it in the same torn basket. He heated the place with the same stove, I mean without the electric heaters that were not yet around then.

Until he was eighty-four, every winter he would melt the shiny ice off the walls; he ate every day, every day he carried water from the well, took a bath daily, swept, and washed the dishes. He put up with his solitude quite well. He went crazy only in 1991, on Christmas Day, when the old system had already been replaced, but Father was still not let into the country because of his book, and the older Ferenc Bartis had not seen his son for seven years.

He put on a white shirt, black tie, took off his shoes because it’s not proper to lie in the coffin with one’s shoes on, and in the same minus twenty-eight-degree cold he started off barefoot, at night, to the other Ferenc Bartis in Budapest. He got as far as the end of the street. He stopped at the stone bridge.

The load is too heavy; the machines blow the fuse. I need some wire, I force open the entrance door near the large room; the lock is frozen. The scent of cinnamon. I don’t understand. Then I remember that last winter when, in a child’s coffin, I brought home Mother’s bones to bury them next to Father, this is where the bones lay in state and for lack of any regular candles in the house, all through the night some awful cinnamon-smelling candle burnt, one that some well-meaning visitor had brought as a gift.

I change the wire in the fuse and disconnect one of the heaters to reduce the load. It is getting dark; not far, the Páloks’ dogs howl the way they did thirty years ago. Black sky studded with blinding nails. The children are getting dressed already, they put coarse blankets on the sleds, we’re going to the church hill. From the corner of the cemetery, past the new mortuary, along the stream to Father’s old school, that’s the best sledding course. At the fence of the parish, we shriek as we make the sharp turn. We’re happy.

1 The italicized text is from Ádám Bodor’s writing, titled The Climate of Gyergyó

2 A famous peak in Transylvania, near Gyergyóújfalu.

Translated by Imre Goldstein

Attila Bartis was born in Marosvásárhely in Siebenbürgen, Romania in 1968. He has won numerous awards for his literary works and is one of the lead ing voices of Hungarian contemporary literature today. The Suhrkamp Verlag has published the novels Der Spaziergang [The Walk] in 1999 Die Ruhe [Tranquillity] in 2005 and the wonderful volume of short stories Die Apokryphen des Lazarus Zwölf Feuilletons [The Lazarus Aprocrypha] in 2007. Bartis was a scholarship holder of the DAAD Berlin Artist-in-Residence Programme in 2007 /08. He lives in Budapest.

wanderlust

As a result of the enthusiastic reception of Jean-Jacques Rous seau’s philosophical writings, walking and hiking came to signify cultural commitment among the enlightened 19th -century bour geois. While the nobility preferred travelling by coach and avoid ed walking whenever possible, the middle class swarmed out into the country and returned with impressive reports about their experiences in the »unspoilt« nature. Or they ventured on long hiking trips into foreign territories, the descriptions of which were meticulously recorded in their numerous travelogues. Dis tancing oneself from the conventions of society, discovering new ideas, experiencing freedom and partaking in adventure were primary motivations behind this romantic idea of wanderlust until the 20th century, when it became ideologically anchored in the service of physical fitness.

It may have been a recreational activity for the bourgeois, but for theatre artists, travelling was an unavoidable and rather uncom fortable reality of professional life. Until well into the 19th centu ry, ›travelling‹ from place to place was as much a part of the thea tre’s existence as the main auditorium is to a city theatre today. It is certainly not the intention of Wanderlust , the Founda tion’s new fund for international theatre projects, to strengthen the principle of touring companies, but rather to strengthen the urge to go out and explore the world. In 2008 the Federal Cultural Foundation established the Wanderlust Fund to sup port longer-term, international, cooperative projects between German city theatres and foreign theatres. Of course, the theatre business has generally become more international, as demon strated by numerous festivals featuring successful productions from around the world. For independent productions, in partic ular, it seems that the utopia of a global village or at least a unified Europe has become reality in many places, borne of curiosity, the need to demolish the boundaries of one’s own restrictive (theatre) world, or financial necessity. However, according to a sobering assessment by the German Theatre Association, the wanderlust among German city theatres and their personnel is far more limited than in the independent scene.

The institutional nature of the German theatre system makes it inherently bound to its location which does not exactly place it at the cutting edge of the internationalization trend. Theatres in Germany be it in Zittau, Freiburg or Berlin produce piec es for specific areas or cities. This is, in any case, what we ask and expect of our theatres, which is occasionally coupled with the ambition of attracting national or even international attention. The people who work in theatre are busy addressing the particu lar circumstances on location what kind of productions suit the city? What issues or formats are local inhabitants interested in? Can they take their audience on an artistic exploration? Mu nicipal theatres have to think of their audiences, which are or should be as diverse as the local population. They have to cater to widely differing tastes with a wide assortment of production formats — the star-studded opera, the operetta, the classic Schill er production, the brand-new play (preferably a world premiere), the experimental productions at the studio venue, the Christmas production, a high-quality children’s play, a project in pub

lic space and the late-night series in the foyer. While they rebel against conventionality, their selection of productions also has to be compatible with their subscriber base. It’s nothing new that the limits of the system are being stretched ever more fre quently in terms of personnel and finances. Public revenues are decreasing more rapidly as wage scales increase, and in the end, less and less money is available for the art. And often the ›wanderlust‹, the desire to discover faraway theatres in foreign coun tries, is no longer an option in light of the demands of the dayto-day theatre operations.

One solution could be to simply do less. But theatres don’t want to do less, they want to do more. They want to explore new for mats, reform the classical distribution of roles, develop new dramaturgical strategies, search for new material and themes, and experiment with new forms of production and presentation. Audiences, too, are more and more interested in new forms of theatre presentation. In response to this mutual desire for change, the Federal Cultural Foundation established the Home Game Fund in 2006. It helped many theatres in Germany integrate productions into their programmes that addressed the urban re ality of their home cities.

Wanderlust is a complementary programme in that it offers theatre artists the chance to look beyond their home cities and venture out into the international theatre world. But the problem is, how can one square a circle how can one be both at home and out in the world at the same time? How can the local situa tion profit from the global? How can international connections and contacts enrich the situation at home without obstructing it? City theatres cannot afford to present productions at interna tional festivals as it would endanger their general operations. The dramaturges would be hard-put to cultivate long-term interna tional contacts when they have to prepare two to three produc tions simultaneously with the next premiere just around the cor ner. And even if international contacts already exist and there is a mutual desire to cooperate, it is extremely complicated and ex pensive to host guest performances, let alone organize joint pro ductions. The more closely one examines the daily operations at theatres, the more complex the situation becomes. For example, as a result of wage settlements that explicitly stipulate how long non-artistic personnel are required to work, which cannot be exceeded even in exceptional cases, German theatres are often obliged to take several employees from each department along to guest performances. For a two-person play that requires little make-up preparation, two make-up artists would have to come along, because the working time as fixed in their contract would be otherwise exceeded. The complex set-building and lighting arrangements in productions at German city theatres often re quire a large number of technicians. When German and foreign theatres host guest productions of similar size, it is often the case that twice as many German theatre employees travel with their production than the other way around. Co-productions with German and foreign actors are seldom possible as a result of dif ferences in the theatre systems. For example, a German-Dutch co-production is struggling with the problem of touring through

a new federal cultural foundation programme to fund international theatre partnerships

Holland for several weeks of back-to-back performances, while the production in Germany is set to run for an entire year or longer as a repertory piece with two performances per month. It is as difficult for a Dutch theatre to engage an actor for individual performances for an entire year as it is for a German theatre to present a piece every evening for two weeks in a row. Different engagement systems and audience expectations pose a major hurdle to such co-productions. Oftentimes, even well-financed foreign theatres can neither organize nor afford to host a Ger man guest production.

Consequently, very few theatres enter longer-term agreements with foreign theatres, although there is mutual interest in each other’s work and a desire to engage in a more intensive exchange at the working level which, in turn, would broaden everyone’s experience. How can theatres move beyond their brief encoun ters at festivals, acquaint themselves with new performing meth ods, new ideas and new artists, and incorporate these impressions into their work at home?

Together with the general theatre directors at the German Theatre Association, the Federal Cultural Foundation developed the Wanderlust Fund a model that financially and or ganisationally enables city theatres to engage in international exchange in addition to their daily theatre operations. The Wanderlust Fund is an application-based funding programme that supports longer-term cooperation between German city theatres and foreign theatres. The partnerships are comprised of various phases that span two to three theatre seasons.

In January 2009 a jury reviewed a total of 27 funding applications from which fourteen were selected. The Federal Cultural Foundation has pledged to help these theatres establish or ex pand intensive international partnerships on an individual basis. Some theatres plan to launch their partnership by inviting both ensembles to an initial work meeting. Others will send associated playwrights on an expedition to their foreign partner as the first step. For others, the partnership will kick off with joint re search between participating artists. Youth projects in both cities can also serve as the start of a partnership. Becoming wholly familiar with the partner theatre and its working methods is by no means the final goal. Following a phase of acquaintance, ex change, workshops and guest performances, the Wanderlust Fund expects both theatres to embark on a joint artistic produc tion. The theatres have come up with a wide range of ideas, in cluding performances based on joint research, a playwright col laboration project, a co-production of a classic that is especially relevant to both theatres and a film adaptation. Other partnerships will culminate in projects in urban space, installations, youth projects and interdisciplinary productions. The Editor

The German word wanderlust entered the English language at the end of the 19th century. It describes the strong impulse to go out and explore the world.

14 partnerships in the wanderlust fund

staatsschauspiel stuttgart + romea teatre, barcelona (catalonia/spain)

»People, Cars and Oil. The Carmakers of Barcelona and Stuttgart« Barcelona and Stuttgart are centres of the au tomobile industry. The crisis that has taken hold of the branch will have an impact on these cities and their in habitants. The life stories of the factory workers and facts about car manufacturing will form the basis of theatre texts that will be performed on stage in Stuttgart and Barcelona beginning in autumn 2010 theater freiburg + garajistanbul, istanbul (turkey)

»Cabinet. A German-Turkish Theatre Project« In Germa ny everyone knows Angela Merkel, Dieter Bohlen and Marlene Dietrich. But what about Nazim Hikmet, Duygu Asena or Cahide Sonku? This interdisciplinary theatre project will focus on ten German and ten Turkish public icons from the world of politics, entertainment and media. oldenburgisches staatstheater + kopergietery, ghent (belgium)

»The Pursuit of Happiness« The Kopergietery in Belgium has made a name for itself with wonderfully poetic, inter disciplinary theatre pieces for children and adults alike. Together with the Young Staatstheater Oldenburg, it will develop a project about children who set out on their own to illegally immigrate to Europe.

theater heidelberg + teatron beit lessin, tel aviv (israel)

»Family Ties« When we think of the relations and history of Germany and Israel, the word normality is perhaps the least likely to come to mind. For exactly this reason, both theatres have developed a joint theatre project that focuses on ›normal life‹ within the smallest social unit — the family.

theater an der parkaue berlin + west yorkshire playhouse, leeds (great britain)

»Borderlines. Exploring the Border between Berlin and Leeds« A group of German and English youth will set out to explore the borders within their cities the former Berlin Wall in Berlin and the borders dividing the city quarters in Leeds. To what extent do historic, social and mental borders influence our identity?

theater osnabrück + drama theatre, russe (bulgaria)

»The Voices of Russe« Elias Canetti was born in the Bul garian city of Russe in 1905. His travel notes in The Voic es of Marrakesh inspired this joint theatre project that presents contemporary drama from Germany and Bul garia.

thalia theater halle + théâtre de la tête noire, saran (france)

»Border Crossers / Outrepasseurs« Although Germany and France share a geographic border, they couldn’t be further apart in terms of their theatre aesthetics. An an nual German-French playwright partnership and joint theatre performances will certainly bring them closer together.

landestheater tübingen + karelian national theatre, petrozavodsk (russia)

»Druschba« On the border to Finland in the secluded Republic of Karelia, the Karelian National Theatre in Petrozavodsk performs plays in Finnish and Russian. This joint programme will conclude with a trilingual produc tion of Romeo and Juliet that will emphasize the aggres sion we feel toward foreignness and the utopia of over coming cultural divisions. theater aachen + divadlo komedie, prague (czech republic) »Austerlitz. An Obstacle Course down Memory Lane in German and Czech« Jacque Austerlitz, the main char acter of the novel Austerlitz by W G. Sebald, ventures out to find his identity in the turmoil of 20 th -century European history. Audiences will be able to explore his background and world of ideas through a walk-in audiovisual installation in the form of a human brain. uckermärkische bühnen schwedt + opera in the castle, szczecin (poland) »Frau Luna The Launch of a Berlin Operetta from the Border« Since 1992 the Uckermärkische Bühnen Schwedt and the Opera in the Castle Szczecin (Stettin) have engaged in a vibrant exchange of guest perform ances, projects and audiences, titled Theater Grenzen los [Theater of No Limits]. Now for the first time, the part ner theatres are collaborating on a major operetta.

maxim gorki theater berlin + narodowy stary teatr, cracow (poland)

»529 km to the Future« Berlin and Cracow are only 529 km apart. Yet these European cultural cities are sepa rated far more by a history of injury and destruction, mutual prejudices and differing views. The joint theatri cal adaptation of Ernst Lubitsch’s film classic To Be or Not to Be and artistic interventions along the train route connecting Cracow and Berlin will help redraw the map that spans these 529 kilometres. nationaltheater mannheim / schnawwl + ranga shankara theatre, bangalore (india)

»Do I know U?« Schiller’s Intrigue and Love portrays the misunderstandings, prejudices and contrasting values in a rigid society. Following years of cooperation be tween these two theatres, this German-Indian co-pro duction will demonstrate the common bonds between the vastly different worlds of Mannheim and Bangalore. theater oberhausen + radu stanca national theatre, sibiu (romania) »Oberhausen/Sibiu« The Theater Oberhausen and the German department of the Radu Stanca National Thea tre in Sibiu (Hermannstadt) first contacted each other while researching for a theatre project based on immi gration. Taking along Schubert’s Winter Journey, the di rector/performer Bernhard Mikeska will travel to Sibiu in search of new impressions that he will later incorpo rate into a theatre performance in Oberhausen.

schauspiel leipzig /spinnwerk + freedom theatre, jenin (palestinian controlled territory)

»Homeland Biladi« It’s difficult to express in words what homeland means to young people who live in the Jenin refugee camp in Palestinian-controlled West Jordan. The young artists from Spinnwerk — a theatre workshop for children and young adults supported by the Schauspiel Leipzig — and the Freedom Theatre in Jenin will collaborate in creating a fictional place with theatrical means, where young people can project their own ideas and hopes.

The next and final submission deadline for applications to the Wanderlust Fund is 15 October 2009. For more information, please visit: www.kulturstiftung-bund.de/ Wanderlust

practical criticism of inhumanit y

The Federal Cultural Foundation is funding a film project and audio-visual in stallation about the life and work of Johannes Lepsius at the Lepsius-Haus in Potsdam (preview at the Filmmuseum Potsdam on 28 June 2009 ). Johannes Lepsius (1858 1926 ), the Guardian Angel of the Armenians as Franz Werfel de scribed him, has long been a persona non grata in Germany and, in terms of his status in our culture of memory, has hardly become any more than a persona abscondita. However, whenever his name is mentioned in public forums, the discussion centres on nothing less than the sensitive issue of historic guilt. The symbol of Johannes Lepsius has an incendiary effect in political-historic argu ments when it comes to acknowledging the genocide of the Armenians. Her mann Goltz, theologian and research advisor to the project, describes the event ful life of a man with good background and education, whose ethically and religiously-motivated commitment to aid the threatened Armenian people was his way of personally protesting the nationalism and imperialism of his day.

by hermann goltz

Adolf Hitler, 22 August 1939 : »Whoever talks about the eradication of the Armenians anymore?«

With this rhetorical question, the Führer allayed the concerns of his commanders in a secret speech he held in Obersalzberg sev eral days before the attack on Poland an attack that would ultimately ignite World War II . Hitler then went on to clearly lay out his plans for the genocide of the Polish people.

This well-documented statement uttered by Hitler demonstrates that one of the largest crimes against humanity, the genocide of the Armenians in Ottoman-ruled Turkey in 1915 /16, was not only suppressed and hushed up in Germany during the First World War, but also in the decades that followed. Franz Werfel’s epic documentary on the Armenians, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (published in 1933 !), in which Johannes Lepsius plays a key role, was one of the many books banned by the Nazis. And the historic figure of Johannes Lepsius, the German theologian and advocate of the Armenians, was banished from Germany’s collective memory by its unwillingness to speak about the genocide.

In 2005 ninety years after the genocide in a show of unusual unanimity, all the fractions in the German Parliament clearly acknowledged Germany’s partial responsibility for the blood shed of the Armenian people on account of the alliance between Ottoman-ruled Turkey and the German Empire (Parliamentary document 15 /5689 ). Johannes Lepsius is mentioned at the very beginning of the statement: »With this commemoration, the Ger man Bundestag honours the efforts of all those Germans and Turks who, under difficult circumstances and against the resistance of their own governments, supported the rescue of Armenian women, men and children in words and deeds. Particularly the memory of the work of Dr. Johannes Lepsius, who fought energetically and effectively for the

survival of the Armenian people, should be saved from being forgotten, and instead be kept alive and maintained in order to help improve relations between the Armenian, the German and the Turkish peoples.«

who was johannes lepsius? Johannes Lepsius was born into an elite Prussian family in Berlin in 1858. His father Carl Richard Lepsius, who had established Egyptology in Germany with the support of Alexander von Humboldt, also founded an association in Berlin in 1863 to support the Armenians in the Ot toman Empire. His mother Elisabeth was the daughter of Frie drich Nicolai a Berlin philosopher who was friends with Less ing and Mendelssohn. At the request of his mother, who was an avid supporter of the theologian and social reformer Johann Hinrich Wichern, the young Johannes Lepsius went off to Erlan gen to study theology. Eventually he decided to cross his mother and went to study philosophy and mathematics in Munich in 1878. In 1880 still a student he received a doctorate for his prize-winning paper on Kantian philosophy. But in 1881, though he had become quite involved in theatre, writing and music, he returned to the field of theology of his own volition. In 1884 this multi-talented young man was ordained at the Berlin Domkan didatenstift to work for the German Protestant congregation in Jerusalem.

In vacillating between theology and philosophy, Lepsius came to prefer theology, because as he explained to his disappointed doctoral supervisor Von Prantl in Munich it represented the »practical criticism of reality«. For the rest of his life, Johannes Lepsius held this theological view which bears some resem blance to the Marxist criticism of philosophy and put it into practice to the frequent chagrin of the ecclesiastical and political authorities. Despite his »practical criticism of reality«, he continued cultivating his interest in scientific theology and philoso phy, theatre, music and writing. On his many journeys, he stud

ied his Greek New Testament and his Kant, which he faithfully kept in his right and left jacket pockets. He also found inspira tion in Nietzsche as a »Socratic critic« of Christianity at the be ginning of the 20th century. He remained the best of friends with his brother Reinhold, a portrait painter and philosopher who was highly admired by Max Liebermann, Walter von Rath enau and others prominent individuals. Lepsius was also very close to Reinhold’s wife Sabine, a painter in the Jewish artists’ scene, whose salon helped introduce Stefan George to the capital of Berlin.

Lepsius moved to Jerusalem, which was under Ottoman rule at the time, and began working as a teacher and pastor. There he met his future wife Margarethe, who came from the widely branched-out Zeller family from Württemberg. They got mar ried in Jerusalem and at the end of 1886, moved to a rectory in the small village of Friesdorf in the southern Harz region of Mansfeld. In 1889 Lepsius and his wife started the Friesdorf Carpet Manufacturing Company based on the Mid dle Eastern model to provide jobs for the unemployed popula tion. As one of the first socially-minded pastors in Germany, this business concept drew criticism from his church superiors in Berlin, but garnered him the love of his congregation.

When he learned through his English contacts of the terri ble massacre of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire at the hands of the »bloody sultan« Abdul Hamid II , during which more than 200,000 people lost their lives between 1894 1896 alone, he and his wife felt obliged to come to the aid of these people facing utter annihilation, though the Foreign Office in Berlin tried to prevent him from getting involved. After a factfinding mission to Turkey in spring 1896, during which he was constantly under surveillance by the sultan’s secret police, and the publication of his first controversial Armenian documenta

tion Armenia and Europe (published in Berlin in 1896, French translation in Lucerne-Paris in 1896, English translation in London in 1897, Russian translation in Moscow in 1898 ), and after organizing several large demonstrations in Germany con demning the crime against the Armenians, Lepsius asked the church council for a sabbatical to help the Armenian Relief Or ganisation cope with the massive influx of relief work. Because of political concerns by the Foreign Office and the Berlin church council, Lepsius was not granted a sabbatical. In response, he resigned his position at the rectory, and consequently forfeited all welfare benefits for himself and his bountiful family. Begin ning in late 1896 he directed the Berlin central committee of the Armenian Relief Organization on an unaffiliated basis. Thanks to his brilliant oratorical skills in countless lectures and speeches, he gained broad support from critical church, academic, civic and noble circles in Germany and Switzerland.

In this first phase in the fight for the Armenian people, Lepsius became known as one of the most outstanding orators in Ger many, which led the Prussian Political Police to monitor his pub lic appearances. Fortunately, we have access to these speeches today, thanks to the hard-working Prussian secret police which quietly recorded Lepsius’s rousing lectures and filed them away in the Prussian Secret State Archive under the official heading Armenian Agitations.

With the support of a large group of international aid workers (Germans, Swiss, Danes, Armenians, etc.) and many small and larger sponsors in Germany and neighbouring countries, Lepsi us operated large relief stations in Turkey, northern Persia and Bulgaria for the persecuted Armenians and Aramaeans. The Ar menian population in the Ottoman Empire continued to live in mortal danger and were periodically massacred. The Armenian massacre of 1909 in Adana Vilayet was an especially brutal reac tion to the constitutional Young Turk Revolution in which Otto man Armenians and Greeks also participated.

These violent events reminded the world of the »Armenian re forms« which European powers had promised at the Berlin Con gress and which now had to be honoured. Though regarded by some as the enfant terrible of Wilhelmstrasse, Lepsius was internationally recognized as a friend to the Armenians. The German government offered him the opportunity to participate in diplomatic efforts by the European superpowers to implement the »Armenian reforms« in the Ottoman Empire from 1912 to 1914. In connection with these negotiations, he co-founded the German-Armenian Society in 1914 together with many German intellectuals, including Thomas Mann.

The First World War and the military alliance between the Ger man, Ottoman and Hapsburg Empires changed the situation dramatically. Now the young Turkish, nationalistic dictators on the Bosporus hoped to »solve the problem« of the two million or so Armenian subjects in the Ottoman multiracial state, and realize their vision of an ethnically homogeneous ›Great Turan‹. Johannes Lepsius’s status quickly changed from persona grata to persona non grata in his dealings with the German government, as he continued his fight to save the Armenians in Turkey the confederate of the German Empire. Meanwhile, the Armenians were being driven out of the country into the Mesopota mian desert on a death march, during which between 1 and 1 5 million people died or were murdered.

Lepsius was successful in his appeal for a travel visa to Turkey from the Foreign Office. Once he was there, he was not permit ted to travel further into the country, so he remained in Constan tinople and collected a vast amount of incriminating evidence from many eyewitnesses and diplomats. He was especially sup

ported by the American ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr., the son of Jewish immigrants from Mannheim, who claimed in his memoirs that Lepsius was the only decent German he ever met during his time on the Bosporus. On 10 August 1915 Lepsius met one of the leading perpetrators of the continuing genocide, the Ottoman minister of war Enver Pasha. In a heated debate with Pasha at the Sublime Porte, the centre of the Ottoman govern ment, Lepsius tried to convince him to stop the machinery of genocide that was running at full power with reasonable and eco nomically sound arguments, but he was contemptuously dis missed. Franz Werfel focussed on this historic encounter in the key chapter of his Armenian epic. This chapter, written in 1932 and rife with anti-Hitler sentiment, made Johannes Lepsius a figure of world literature.

Following his return, he waged another journalistic attack, this time against the German military censorship of information concerning the deportation of Armenians. At the beginning of October 1915, Lepsius held a bold speech to the German press corps in the Berlin Reichstag, after which the German govern ment passed an ordinance censoring all issues related to Armenia. The Reichskanzler Von Bethmann Hollweg noted in December 1915 : »Our single aim is to keep Turkey aligned with us until the end of the war regardless of whether the Armenians are purged or not.«

Lepsius’s odyssey to find a publisher for his new manuscript end ed in Potsdam in 1916. Titled »A Report on the Situation of the Armenian People in Turkey«, it was the first international docu mentation of the genocide which was still in progress. In August 1916 the report was banned by the German military censors. The copies for the representatives of the Reichstag, sent by post from Potsdam in July 1916, were intercepted by the authorities and were finally delivered to the addressees in April 1919 ! Lepsius’s international conspiratorial activities against the silence of the German and Turkish authorities led him to be regarded once again as an enfant terrible in the eyes of many in the German gov ernment. One of the few who broached the topic of the report in the German Reichstag was none other than the independent Social Democrat Karl Liebknecht. In a minor inquiry in January 1916, prior to the publication of Lepsius’s report, Lieb knecht confronted the German imperial government with the facts Lepsius produced. Speaking in the plenary hall, his words were drowned out by catcalls from the assembly when he men tioned his source Lepsius by name.

When Lepsius’s passport was about to be confiscated to prevent him from travelling, it seems Lepsius was shielded by other political groups affiliated with the German-Jewish anglophile ›Secret Diplomat‹ Kurt Hahn, who later became a reform pedagogue at Salem. His friends arranged a modest position for him in Hol land to be an observer of the neutral and enemy press for the Military Post of the Berlin Foreign Office. This relatively harm less job for the Foreign Office had to be kept secret from the public as was the custom but had the effect of ballooning legends that continue to circulate today about Lepsius’s alleged ›spy‹ activities. Lepsius remained in close contact with German intellectuals who advocated a peaceful settlement to hostilities as a member of the Berlin »Association of Like-Minded Individuals« a kind of political counterpart to Stefan George’s apolitical association of aesthetes which bore the same name. In ad dition to Lepsius, a number of prominent pacifists were also members of the Berlin association, such as Albert Einstein, Frie drich Wilhelm Foerster, Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze and the Jewish art scholar Werner Weisbach.

Being in Holland also allowed Lepsius, who suffered from diabetes, to take better care of his failing health. But more than any thing, Lepsius took advantage of his post in Holland to continue

his international pro-Armenian work, despite the fact that the German ambassador in Haag explicitly forbade him to do so. The anonymously written Dutch report Marteling der Armeniers in Turkije of 1918 is nothing less than the Dutch version of Lepsius’s Potsdam report. This mimicry for the benefit of the German embassy in Haag still has repercussions today most libraries around the world have yet to realize that Lepsius was the author of the Dutch report.

After his return to Germany from Holland at the end of 1918, Lepsius in agreement with the State Secretary of Foreign Affairs Wilhelm Solf edited a collection of diplomatic docu ments, published under the title Germany and Armenia 1914 1918 (Potsdam 1919 ). Lepsius had to fight for these docu ments, some of which were withheld by the Foreign Office or already ›edited‹. But leading voices in Europe, such as the Lon don Times and the Scandinavian press regarded this edition as evidence of Germany’s partial responsibility for the genocide. As a result, the prepared English and French translations of the publication, were filed away by the Foreign Office and never published.

In 1920 Lepsius wrote an editorial in his magazine Der Ori ent, in which he argued that Germany being partly to blame for the fate of the Armenian people was now responsible for helping those Armenians who had survived, despite the eco nomic misery in post-war Germany. His Armenian Relief Or ganization and his German-Armenian Association participated accordingly in the international relief activities for Armenian refugees spread throughout the world and the young Armenian republic.

While the German-Armenian Academy in Potsdam was being established, the terminally-ill Lepsius passed away in the south ern Tyrolean resort town of Meran on 3 February 1926. He was laid to rest at the cemetery of the Lutheran congregational church in Meran, and on his grave, the Armenian people erected a khachkar (›cross-stone‹) as a sign of their gratitude.

In view of the continuation of his work by Fridtjof Nansen, the first High Commissioner for Refugees of the League of Nations in Geneva, we can regard Lepsius as a non-governmental forerunner to the international human rights and refugee programmes run by the League of Nations and later the United Nations. His humanitarian work is equal to that of Albert Schweitzer’s, who practiced and formulated the principle of »Re spect for Life« in Africa while Lepsius was fighting for the survival of the Armenian people in Turkey. As a theologian who worked conspiratorially in political resistance, Lepsius can be de scribed mutatis mutandis as a forerunner to the theologian and resistance fighter Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The Polish-JewishAmerican lawyer Raphael Lemkin, the intellectual father of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punish ment of the Crime of Genocide (1948 ) referred in his argumentation in large part to the genocide of the Armenian and Jewish people. In his fight against the first major genocidal crime of the 20th century, Lepsius became an avant-gardist in the modern-day fight against genocide a fight that is clearly not over.

Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Hermann Goltz is a theologian, researcher of East ern European and Middle Eastern Studies at the Martin-Luther-Universität in Halle-Wittenberg, and the founder and director of the Johannes Lepsius Ar chive. For years he has worked closely with the Conference of European Churches and the World Council of Churches in Geneva, and has participated in peace efforts between the peoples and religions in the Balkans and Transcaucasia. His numerous publications include Deutschland Ar menien und die Türkei . Documents and Periodicals from the Johannes Lepsius Archive ( K G . Sauer, Munich, 1998 2004) and Alles von Zarin und Teufel Europäische Russlandbilder aus vier Jahrhun derten . With a foreword by Fritz Pleitgen (DuMont, Cologne, 2006 ).

ecce cyborg

Cyborg is the term we use to describe the hybrid of man and machine. Unnoticed by most, this life form has left the world of horror films and gradually infiltrated our social reality. The development of the neurosciences has made this medical-technical progress possible. Optimizing the Human Brain , a project by the Theater Freiburg and funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation, examines the current possibilities of optimizing human potential above and beyond administering performance-enhancing drugs. In cooperation with the Interdisciplinary Ethics Center at the University of Freiburg, empirical sci entists and clinical experts, a group of ethicists, philosophers, dramaturges, di rectors, dancers and performers are working with 50 school children from eight high schools in Freiburg to develop an artistic approach to the issue of self-tech nologization. In the following, the philosopher Oliver Müller and the literary and film scholar Frank Pauly discuss how extensively the cyborg has become a new symbol of our future requiring intensive examination of our human image.

Cyborgs have enjoyed growing popularity on the big screen in recent years and have made their competition vampires, ghosts and superheroes look worn out and washed up. One of the reasons for their successful career is due to innovations in medical and neuro-technologies. Such technologies also appear to have made cyborgization a possibility for concrete human self-design.

The intention of cyborg films has never been merely to scare viewers or tell thrilling popcorn stories. Rather they have always depicted our own history as stories of possible futures in a mech anized world. The figure of the cyborg functions as an anthropological code, which, when decoded, provides us with views of possible and impossible, desirable and problematic mechaniza tions of our existence. The confrontation with the cyborg, an en tity both strange and familiar to us, presents us with the deep structures of our needs. On the one hand, the endless struggle for acknowledgement and the fear of injury and instability rouse the need for high-tech self-protection. Behind the cyborg is a frightened child, aware of its Bambi-like abandonment, and as a result of vague, paranoid fantasies of danger, transforms itself into a fighting machine that can take on the entire evil world, and thereby avenge its loneliness. On the other hand, the desire to cyborgize oneself is anchored in traditional fantasies of omnipotence. Like Milton’s Satan, who, if he could not be the lord of heaven, preferred to be the most powerful in hell, the cyborg, in its fantasies of omnipotence, dreams of dominating and con trolling the world with its technology the price of which is the exclusion of diversity and uniqueness. The hope is that the rational controllability of technology will dominate the uncon trollable realm of emotions.

In addition to these deep psychological-archetypical desires that crystallize in the great myths of final battles between good and

evil and the masochistic images of world dominance through cold, technoid perfection, the cyborg figurations point to the more concrete, real-world hopes that we place in technology. In particular, the phenomenon that ethicists are currently discuss ing is the wish to increase performance, improve our memory with technology, our physical condition, our spiritual being. For example, enhancement refers to medical treatment for the healthy, i.e., not therapy for patients, but the means to fulfil the custom er’s needs and desires. The individual and social advantages, as well as the moral and legal limits of such self-improvement meas ures are subject to heated debate. Pharmacological ›improve ments‹ to memory and concentration are already in use, research of implantable memory chips is underway, and medical clinics are applying various techniques to stimulate areas of the brain. Basic scientists are already testing neuro-prostheses on monkeys, while researchers have already succeeded in remotely controlling rats with neuro-electrical impulses. Even though medical and neuro-technologies are still in their infancy, we can expect self-technologizing developments in the coming decades that will bring the cyborg transformation of humans one step closer to reality.

But what is a cyborg? Is there a defining line separating humans and cyborgs? Aren’t we cyborgs if we have some sort of technology on our bodies? Although the idea is older, the term cyborg was first coined by two astrophysicists, Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, in 1960. In the highly respected journal Astronautics , they discussed the possible adaptation of hu mans to space, which at the time, was the next frontier to be im perialistically conquered. The word they used to describe a tech nically enhanced human, cyborg, came from the synthesis of cy bernetic und organism. Here cybernetic refers to high-tech elec tronics in the largest sense of the word. Their vision of an entity

suited to space exploration involved an artificial digestive appa ratus and constant psycho-pharmacological monitoring of the astronaut’s emotional balance, as the endeavour involved travelling long distances in the absolute silence of deep space. No wonder literary and cinematic works of science fiction so eagerly snapped up the term cyborg as we see in the shortened form of Borg, featured in Star Trek.

From an ethical point of view, cyborgs are interesting, because, in trying to define the word cyborg more precisely, we encounter an anthropological evaluation of the degree and limits of selftechnologization. The most common and general definition of cyborg is the human-machine hybrid. This definition, however, in cludes everything from the Borg to the senior citizen with a pace maker. To restrict the meaning of cyborg even further, several distinguishing criteria need to be added. ( 1) The technology can not simply be on a human, but inside the human, i.e., it has to be invasive; (2 ) The technology has to be connected to the hu man organism to such a degree that it can no longer be removed, i.e., its integration is irreversible; (3) The technology has to have a controlling function, i.e., it cannot be a conventional prosthesis, but perhaps have a purpose that ensures one’s survival; (4) The technology has to interact with the nervous system in some way; (5) The technology cannot have a therapeutic function, but must specifically serve to enhance the organism cognitively, mentally or physically.

Although these criteria may provide essential distinctions, as of yet, there is no unanimous agreement on a final definition. There are typically two differing positions those who apply a wider definition and regard a person with two leg prostheses as a cy borg, and those who define cyborg more restrictively as a neuro-technologically equipped entity that has obviously been ›en hanced‹ in some way. The philosopher Dieter Sturma goes one

by oliver müller and frank pauly

step further, claiming a true cyborg would be a technologically equipped entity that voluntarily forfeits its independence and ventures on a heroic military or humanitarian mission that a normal human would be unable to achieve. By applying such stringent definitions, one can assume that a cyborg is certainly very different from a human. When cyborgs no longer possess typical human characteristics emotions, personality traits, the practical relationship to oneself or perhaps even the human form then we qualitatively distinguish cyborgs from humans. The looser definitions, on the other hand, entail that the cyborg is also a human.

If we make a strict distinction between humans and cyborgs for instance, if we say that human-machine hybrids may have the same human organism at the outset, but have been so opti mized that their abilities well exceed that of typical humans, and no longer possess sympathy and a sense of responsibility the question is: should we be allowed to manufacture cyborgs at all? And when they do exist, what rights and obligations do they have? Faced with the first question, most people would cer tainly be reluctant to wish for such creatures and would perhaps even consider taking legal steps to prevent this kind of cyborgization. The second question is more complex. If cyborgs had personality traits of some kind, then they would have to have the same rights as humans. Although they might not possess most of these traits, we would still have a hard time ascribing the status of a machine to this life form.

Putting such extreme considerations aside, the issue of cyborgs is nonetheless ethically and anthropologically significant. The distinguishing criteria mentioned above clearly demonstrate that these matters have a lot to do with our reality of life. The reflection on cyborgization processes confronts us with other pressing questions, such as: how much technology is good for us, how much technology do we want inside us to be in control of our lives, what are the limits to our self-technologization? As an anthropological figure for reflection, the cyborg also serves for ethical orientation. In our notions of cyborgs, we discover potential forms of being that cannot be expressed in mere tech nical terms. The cyborg does not only provide us information about the possible degree of mechanization processes, but also about our needs, the hopes we place in technology, and the fears that accompany these mechanization processes (perhaps unnec essarily so). If we resist succumbing to the nightmarish visions of some cyborgs presented on the big screen, and instead inter pret the events in basic anthropological terms, we may find that our consideration of cyborgs can help us balance nature and technology in our bodies.

It is difficult to determine precisely what human nature is. How ever, it seems evident that the human is a self-interpretive crea ture. He learns about himself through the otherness within him self, his human identity is that which belongs to himself as dis tinct from that which is alien. Expressed in more extreme terms, one could say humans understand who they are by what they are not (yet). Traditionally, God, angels or animals allowed hu mans to recognize their human characteristics, gain awareness or experience self-abasement. In the future, however, machines will become the absolute alien entity and the cyborg »the other« within, by which humans will define themselves. Humans will attempt to define themselves based on their own future.

It turns out that cyborg films have become an especially promi nent and useful medium of futurological human self-interpreta tion. First of all, genre-typical products of pop culture (including a dominance of delectare over prodesse ) make it easier to approach uncomfortable subjects. Potential inhibitions are overridden be cause the entertainment potential of fictitious visions of being outweighs the fear of confronting the increasingly disturbing cy borg issue. Second of all, the fantasy-induced imagery and drama turgy of such films provide extremely concrete forms to an ini tially abstract theme. The problems connected to the concept of cyborgization are depicted with particular clarity as various cy borg paradigms are presented as figures. The synthesis of the hu man organism with technology and the repercussions are por trayed in film as both a distorting mirror and a magnifying glass which enables us to sensually experience today how these experimental directives may impact our future.

Within this reception-aesthetic framework, cyborg films offer many images for the above mentioned aspects with which we can create a Typologia Cyborgiana classifying three cyborg visions that have become embedded in our collective consciousness.

1The cyborg is portrayed as a model of human perfecti bility and not only in terms of physical, but also moral at tributes. For the materially amplified human is placed in the service of a higher normative order which he is obliged to uphold. While the 6 Million Dollar Man (1974 78 ), The Bion ic Woman (1976 77), Robocop (1987) and Iron Man (2008 ) combat evil on Earth, Luke Skywalker fights the forces of evil in far-off galaxies in the Star Wars trilogy (1977 83 ) and in the Star Trek : Voyager series, even the former Borg drone Seven of Nine , because of her cyborg attributes, becomes a valuable member of a crew that strives for knowledge and sets the highest moral standards for itself. Endeavouring to perfect the human organism does not only produce heroes, it also reveals satirical potential once we discover that these ›higher‹ norms, for which cyborgs are created, are a medium of ideological retaliation. For example, in the 2004 remake of The Stepford Wives , the perfected human is not superhero out to save the world, but actually the perfect American housewife Caucasian, Christian, well-bred, erotic and sexually compliant with infinite admiration for her husband. Perfectibility as a category of cyborgization becomes sud denly quite ambivalent, as this ideal image of human desire be comes an object of social criticism and individual fears.

2

The cyborg is also portrayed as a threat in films. On one hand, because of its potentially limitless physical powers and in destructibility, it can easily become an unstoppable weapon in the complex intrigues of political constellations. A film title like Universal Soldier (1992 ) or the sinister aura of Darth Vad er in the Star Wars films speak for themselves. However, in contrast to the obvious danger of cyborgs, a more subtle fear is often at the heart of the cyborg nightmare. It is the fear of en croachment, even the loss of one’s sensitivity that characterizes the potential danger of cyborgization. Used as weapons, cyborgs lose their free will generally regarded as an essential human trait. Even Robocop, established as a hero at the beginning, encounters this limitation as he finds he can no longer combat what he recognizes as evil because of his programming. The cy borg is portrayed as the product of de-individualization, as individual consciousness and personal freedom battles and all too frequently succumbs to externally controlled perfectionism. This idea is explored in detail in the Borg collective of the Star Trek cosmos. As a collective, the Borg are practically indestructible, immortal and omniscient yet individually, the members do not know who they are, or that they exist, for that matter. Although the Borg episodes programmatically highlight the advantages of such an existence (and sometimes convincingly so), thanks in part to the appropriately frightening physiology of the Borg, the viewer’s desire for self-preservation wins out in the end. For, in fact, this is all about the soul’s desperate battle to preserve its existence.



Finally, the cyborg is depicted as a victim. Passivity seems to be an inherent trait of the cyborg. With only a few exceptions ( Iron Man ), the figure is not the subject, but the object of cy borgization. When both physical traits and psychological disposition are adapted to the perfectionizing ideology, the cyborg quickly loses any right to freely develop its personality. The cy borg is violently forced into submission, which it can neither re sist physically ( Robocop , Wolverine in the X -Men [2000 06 ]) nor mentally, like Chise in Saikano (2006 ). This film op tically portrays the discrepancy between technical perfection and the impossibility of a private emotional world to the extreme. This is not a virile, muscular unstoppable cyborg, but a shy Japa nese school girl, who, for ill-considered patriotic reasons, allows herself to be reprogrammed as a weapon. The situation couldn’t be more grotesque when she is not functioning as a super weapon for the military, she is an innocent girl, trying to make sense of the psychological hurdles of puberty as she falls in love for the first time and enters a relationship that unsurpris ingly is complicated by her being a cyborg. Therefore, Chise has to combat physical military power, as well as the emotional confusion caused by and to her personal situation. As a result

of her instrumentalization, she is denied any possibility of emo tional intimacy. Chise becomes a victim of the system and, in the end, dies as a detonated bomb in a final act of self determination.

These de-individualized cyborgs mutate into monstrosities that not only shed light on their own crippled identities, but also on their creators. It comes as no surprise that many cyborg films in corporate intertextual references to Mary W. Shelley’s Frank enstein . The cyborgs are not the only Freudian prosthetic gods ; their Promethean creators play God no less so, in that they irre sponsibly build the perfect machine-humans in their »own im age« as soon as they taken by a fatal devotion to progress succumb to the possibilities of technology, to which they them selves are latently shackled. In The Outdatedness of Human Beings (1956 ), Günther Anders characterized selfcyborgization as follows: Based on the fact that we increasingly regard our non-concretization as a failing, that we are ashamed of our naturalness in view of the standards of technical perfec tion, we increasingly adapt ourselves, our bodies and our minds, to the efficiency and intention of technology, and yes, perhaps voluntarily cyborgize ourselves for the benefit of the machines. We adapt our needs to the supply or demand of the mechanized world and its apparatus. The gloomy consequence of this theory is that the only access we have to ourselves is technological. The human becomes a sub specie machinae

Oliver Müller , Dr. phil., is a philosopher and the director of a group of young researchers studying The Human Nature as a Norm for BioEthical Orientation at the Institute of Medical Ethics and History in Freiburg. Müller has published numerous articles on philosophical subjects and regularly writes pieces for the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Berliner Zeitung . Together with Jens Clausen and Giovanni Maio, he is currently pre paring the anthology Das technisierte Gehirn Neurotechnolo gien als Herausforderung für Ethik und Anthropologie [The Mechanized Brain. Neurotechnologies as an Ethical and Anthropologi cal Challenge] for publication by the Mentis Verlag.

Frank Pauly , born in 1969, is currently writing his doctoral thesis on P B Shelley and the tradition of neo-Platonic poetologies. In the project Optimiz ing the Human Brain , Pauly is responsible for contributing scientific ex pertise regarding cyborg fantasies

optimizing the human brain interdiscipli nary congress on 18 19 April 2009, Theater Freiburg. The results of the congress will be incorporated into Hans-Werner Kroesinger’s production of ME , Cy borg which will be performed by children and actors in the main auditorium of the Theater Freiburg (October 2009). For more information, visit: www.gehirn.bplaced. net; www.theater.freiburg.de

one -word phrases (III)

We’ve come to learn that a single word can be phrase, as Burkhard Müller has re vealed in his sharp-witted exposés on significant catchwords in the convoluted language of our funding applications. In the following, he presents three more the last in his column. This does not mean, however, that our arsenal is de pleted. Let us say we eagerly await the next change of paradigm(I) for the whole of society(II) that generates a network (III) of unconventional (III) formats(II) and sustainable (III) , innovative(I) interventions(I)

by burkhard müller

unconventional Why in the world have we come to dispar age convention so much? And not just one or the other convention, but the fact that conventions exist at all. ›Convention‹ comes from the Latin word convenire, meaning ›coming together, uniting‹, which entails the possibility of negotiating, reaching an agreement. Conventions make it easier for everyone. They ensure that the social atoms neither solidify as a compact mass nor volatize as a gas, but remain wonderfully fluid like water. If there were no conventions, we would surely take offence at something or other every day. We shouldn’t rely all too heavily on the legal system. Although it protects the small core of our personal rights, it does not prevent the incredible amount of hassle we would have without conventions. The law protects us from physical injury, but not from shoving and pushing. We all benefit from a very useful convention, for example, when a train enters the station we always allow passengers to get off before we board. Though the rule isn’t written down anywhere, every one clearly understands why it’s important. Nonetheless, every time a train comes in, you’ll notice that at least five percent of the people waiting on the platform force their way through the flow of disembarking passengers, although they don’t reach their seats any faster probably slower and cause and suffer a lot of aggravation. They’re inconsiderate idiots. They do not care for their fellow man and they are blind to the consequences of their actions collision. In this sense, these people are uncon ventional.

So much for the ethical and pragmatic side of convention. What about its aesthetic aspect? Shouldn’t the principle of good and social behaviour also have primary importance to that which is beautiful and extraordinary?

The term ›extraordinary‹ is based on order, for in art more than anywhere else meaning is imparted through the order of symbolism. If an artwork were absolutely unconventional, then no one would be able to recognize it as such. The advantages of a bratwurst are obvious to any carnivore and require no debate. But this doesn’t apply to panel painting. Those of us who have a close relationship to art should feel a deep sense of gratitude toward convention. It is the gravity that holds all the works and their references in a precise orbit, and without which everything would zoom away into the darkness of outer space, never to be seen again. Even the most unconventional artwork is at least 80 % convention, most of which is comprised of the agreement that art exists at all. It’s disconcerting that unconventional has become without the need for any qualifier a way to describe the value of inno vation, a measure of quality. Does this mean that innovators lack that basic instinct of self-preservation and are willing to thrust themselves into a void of absolute meaninglessness? Or is what we are seeing something even more threatening perhaps not directly to the artists themselves but to art as a whole in the long term a new, inferior, undialectic convention that wor ships the idol of absolute, individual sloth? When table manners tyrannize us, it can be liberating when someone, just once, puts their feet up on the table. But if everyone does it all the time, we all lose our appetite.

sustainability The concept of sustainability became popular thanks to forest management. By 1800 German forests had been ravaged by constant overuse, tree-felling, brush collecting, blow-

down removal forest grazing, and foliage harvesting for animal litter, food and fertilizer. In fact, the forest resembled more of a savannah, or to use a German word, a ›heath‹. Anyone who has ever admired Caspar David Friedrich’s lonely oaks should know that they weren’t standing near the forest they were the forest.

Enough of this! was the resounding cry after 1800. In the future, foresters were to remove only as much wood as the forest pro duced. It was the birth of the spruce monoculture as spruce trees proved to be the most sustainable.

At closer look, however, nature doesn’t care much for sustainability, at least in terms of earthly life. Rather it follows laws of thermodynamics, resulting in diffusion and loss. It’s just that we that is, the planet Earth constantly tap the obviously non-renewable resource of the sun. This makes new things grow though the extent of this new growth greatly depends on the whims of our home star, on the sunspots and magnetic fluctua tions which we are only now beginning to understand. It’s very possible that in a thousand years, the face of the sun will dim, the polar cap will extend back down to the North German Plain and there won’t be a piece of grass left growing.

If the sun above our heads and earth beneath our feet are indeed so inconstant, how can we so readily apply the term sustainability to the even more changeable area of culture? Topsoil and sun shine is to the forest as money is to culture. Or more precisely the readiness to spend it on culture, which at best can be regarded as an investment, is also deemed by perhaps the majority as a wasted subsidy. We can rest assured that something will be grow ing in the fields ten years from now, but whether we’ll still be subsidizing rape is doubtful. What objective basis can complete ly justify the hope or assurance that a theatre today will be able to afford its three divisions ten years from now?

Political authorities draw up new budgets every year, and every four years, we elect new members to represent us. Consequently, budgetary strategies cannot and should not extend further than this. (Private patrons with a long a life-long stamina have become rather rare). Whoever makes promises of sustainability to cultural institutions, as if it’s possible to plant string and wind players like trees which simply grow by themselves, and whoever acts as if they can bypass the process of cultural support that requires constant renewal, should be mistrusted like all nar rators of fantastic fairy tales. In history, we have always faced a blustery and changeable wind.

networking Nets have always existed. Whenever it appeared as a metaphor, it described the (frequently dubious) means and not the end. A beautiful woman threw out her net to catch a rich bachelor, or the police closed the net around a counterfeiting ring. Of course, networking has nothing to do with this. It doesn’t waste a thought about what it catches, but lovingly gazes at the knots, as if they were an asset in themselves.

The strength of the new metaphor lies in the fact that two domi nating fields reflect and strengthen one another neurology and information technology. The connection of millions of computers resembles nerve fibres, which has certified the organic nature of this leading contemporary technology. Likewise, the opaqueness of our nervous system can be viewed more clearly if we compare it with those ubiquitous desktop machines. Both areas are proud that their nets are no longer linked, but grow

like the chick inside the egg, unregulated by reason or willpower, for at this degree of complexity, no directives could master such growth. Who makes the chick inside the egg? It makes itself, of course. And it’s not even aware of it.

There is a strange kind of natural piety in this belief in network ing something that unconsciously produces itself and conse quently deserves our adoration. Every artist and art official can regard herself as a neuron with fibres made of axons and den drites, highly sensitive and yet full of sequestered innocence a happy channel in a larger current. It’s not clear what they do beyond letting it flow through them. Of course, they continue to have particular interests as civic individuals, yet they draw true enjoyment and rationalization by connecting to the myriad of others like them. The networked individual, who just secured a large amount of funding for a project, would be sincerely trou bled if one confronted him with the fact this money was now his. Troubled, but he certainly wouldn’t want to relinquish it. He’d feel embarrassed, but would be thankful if someone whis pered in his ear that this money only represents the indispensible excitement potential, without which the neuron would not be able to fire off and the nervous system would not be able to function.

Most importantly, it’s not a good idea to ask just what exactly is being networked. It’s enough to know that something is. With a more active emphasis, networking puts a legitimate, stream lined efficiency to that old-fashioned cosmos of gossiping, wheel ing and dealing and stand-up receptions that have always smacked of corruption and a waste of time. If you are networked, you no longer waste your own and others’ time, but break through that sterile boundary separating official and private life. You transport your entire being, that irreplaceable standard of measurement in the creative field, comprised of indiscrimi nate chit-chat about whatever even if it’s only what the best springtime diet is as if you’re a bank manager getting down to the nitty-gritty.

It may turn out that the cultural field is not at the cutting edge as it so often likes to believe and does not represent the avant-garde, but actually is lagging behind the times. It is begin ning to dawn on people, now more than ever in light of the economic crisis, that absolute networking can also be detrimen tal. Disentanglement is the new word of the hour, as we’ve discov ered that the closer our net strings are tied, the faster we all fall when one falls, and the world as we know it threatens to unravel before our eyes.

(I) magazine 11 (II) magazine 12 (III) magazine 1

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 den Lebendigen und den Toten [Xerxes’ Tears — On the Living and the Dead] was published by the zu Klampen Verlag (Springe) in 2006

news + new projects

zipp: czech utopias of modernity the city of zlín The international symposi um Utopia of Modernity: Zlín will take place in Prague and the eastern Czech city of Zlín from 19 to 23 May 2009. It is one of many events in the programme Zipp GermanCzech Cultural Projects, initiated by the Federal Cultural Foundation in 2008 to support the development of cooperative ven tures between cultural artists in both countries. The city of Zlín is one of the most important architectural monuments of Czech modernity. Built at the start of the 1920s by the shoe manufacturer Tomáˇs Bat’a, Zlín was designed with a clearly defined idea in mind. It was to be a city of functionalism, based on a sophisticated eco nomic and service-oriented structure. Within a few short years, the city would blossom into one of the world’s leading centres of shoe manufacturing. The conference Utopia of Mo dernity: Zlín aims to achieve more than a formal examination of architecture and urban planning. It will also study Tomáˇs Bat’a’s vision of social utopia. In building an ideally struc tured living environment, he attempted to cre ate a new industrial man. This fascinating and multi-facetted project reveals the contradictions and negative aspects that comprised the utopia of Zlín. For more information, visit www.projektzipp.de

dance plan germany makes a lasting impact The Foundation’s Dance Plan Germany recently succeeded in getting the five most significant German dance ar chives to enter a joint association to devel op measures that strengthen the cultural-politi cal standing of these institutions, digitalize their archives and create a joint dance portal. The nine partner cities involved in the Dance Plan on Location have taken important steps to ensure the sustainability of their programmes. The education, training and artist-in-residence programmes in Hamburg and Frankfurt have already attracted international artists and strengthened the cities’ local dance scenes. With its interdisciplinary projects, Essen has be come a centre of exchange between dance and other artistic fields. Düsseldorf and Mu nich have successfully implemented projects for young children and teenagers, which has resulted in growing audiences and participants in school dance projects. The cities and states, which are participating in the North Germany Dance Conference, are now planning to con tinue their joint festival programme after the Dance Plan ends in 2010. The research laborato ry for dance at the new dance college in Ber lin is building its reputation among interna tional students. Dresden can revive its tradi tion as a dance city with its ambitious project involving the Semperoper, Hellerau and Paluc ca, and the artist-in-residence programme at the fabrik Potsdam has already hosted more than 300 artists from over 20 countries. In the programme area Dance Plan Educational Projects, the organizers have succeeded in devel

oping qualification criteria and international recognition of dance training in Germany to gether with state-run educational institutions. The first sign of cooperation was evident at the 1 st Dance Education Biennial / Dance Plan Germany at the HAU / Ber lin in spring 2008. Thanks to funding pledges from the Federal Ministry for Education and Research, the European Capital of Culture Es sen Ruhr.2010, and Dance Plan Germany, the 2 nd Dance Education Biennial will take place in Essen in spring 2010. All the major national and international dance education in stitutions are currently collaborating on a new research project on contemporary dance techniques, which will be pub lished as a book of methods at the end of 2010

And finally, a 100,000 -euro qualification programme for dance teachers has begun, in order to encourage and improve dance instruction in school. The international response to the German dance programme has demonstrated how influential this structural funding project is. Similar projects have been developed on the basis of the Dance Plan Germany in Austria, Belgian Flanders, Hol land, Finland, Great Britain, Ireland, Denmark, Spain, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Australia and New Zealand.

Look for more information on Dance Plan Germany in the next issue. www.danceplans. blogspirit.com

dance congress 2009 Three years since the successful Dance Congress Germa ny, which 1,700 people attended at the House of World Cultures in Berlin, the next congress will take place at Kampnagel in Hamburg from 5 to 8 November 2009. The programme was de veloped in cooperation with four think tanks in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Düsseldorf, at which 100 dance artists openly discussed ide as and current issues related to their practical work. In addition to addressing these issues, the Dance Congress 2009 will particularly focus on the political and social potential of dance. How can we more strongly anchor dance in the educational canon and research? How can we improve production conditions, fund ing structures and marketing strategies? What are the current views on various artistic ap proaches and methods in dance? What will the dance archives of the future look like? In addi tion to lectures by international scholars who will present their sociological, philosophical and cultural-historic perspectives on dance, the congress in Hamburg will predominantly fea ture participative formats, such as workshops, salons, laboratories and performances. As the Dance Plan Germany concludes in 2010, the congress will also address the possibility of continuing the work of the dance projects established through the Dance Plan Ger many. The Dance Congress 2009, like its pred ecessor, invites dancers, choreographers, pro ducers, dance pedagogues, dance researchers, critics, politicians, and dance enthusiasts from

Germany and abroad to participate in the event. Initiated by the Federal Cultural Foundation in cooperation with Kampnagel, K 3 Zentrum für Choreographie/Dance Plan Hamburg and the Centre for Performance Studies at the Uni versity of Hamburg. Funded in part by the Hamburg Agency for Culture, Sports and Me dia. www.tanzkongress.de

deutschland 2009 commemorative year There are several major historic events to commemorate and celebrate this year the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 60th anniversary of the Federal Repub lic of Germany, to name just two milestones in our recent history. The Federal Cultural Foun dation will mark the 2009 commemorative year with a series of events in which artists and cultural producers chronicle, comment on and critically review East-West German contempo rary history and the European process of unifi cation.

The first commemorative event was the film series After Winter Comes Spring. Films Presaging the Fall of the Wall, which premiered at the Berlinale in Feb ruary 2009 and has since been shown at cinemas throughout Germany. The series of fifteen feature-length programmes is comprised of German and Eastern European films which fore told the changes to come. The selection of fea ture, documentary, animation, short and experimental films include famous names of film history, as well as works by lesser-known film makers. Art-house cinemas and other film ven ues can borrow copies of the series until the end of 2010. For more information, please contact the Deutsche Kinemathek — Museum für Film und Fernsehen. www.deutsche-kinemathek.de The upheaval of 1989 and its political, cultural and social causes and consequences will be the main topics of discussion at the History Fo rum 1989 | 2009. Closing the Chap ter on German and European Divi sion, which will take place in Berlin from 28 to 31 May 2009. The exhibition German Art in the Cold War will reveal that the com peting human images and ideological concepts during the period of German division also bat tled for dominance in the fine arts. The exhibi tion presents approx. 300 outstanding art-his torical paintings, sculptures, graphic art, pho tography, installation art, books and videos by more than 120 artists. All of the works were made between 1945 and 1989 in the FRG and the GDR . Following its debut in Los Angeles, the exhibition will go on display at the Germa nisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg on 23 May 2009 and then at the German Historical Museum in Berlin on 3 October 2009. The Theaterhaus Jena will explore the events of 1989 in its project The Third Way. A Theat rical Demonstration. The director Nina Gühlstorff will ask contemporary witnesses what the path between socialism and capitalism would look like if they could have chosen an other way to reform their country. The inter

views will serve as the basis for a play which will premiere at the Theaterhaus Jena on 10 October 2009. The documentary filmmaker Thomas Heise will create a unique historic panorama which is very different from the official images of history presented by the GDR . For his instal lation, titled Material , he assembles visual and audio material that he has collected in his artistic endeavours over the past thirty years. The installation will open at the Berlin Acade my of the Arts at Pariser Platz this autumn. www. kulturstiftung-bund.de/deutschland09

golden bear for the world cinema fund The film La teta asustada [The Milk of Sorrow] funded by the World Cinema Fund (WCF ) surprisingly won this year’s Golden Bear the top award at the Berlin International Film Festival. This feature-length film by Claudia Llosa was the first Peruvian film ever entered in to competition at the Berlinale. The completion of the film was made possible with production funding from the WCF. Initiated by the Federal Cultural Foundation in October 2004, the WCF has funded a number of foreign films, four of which have received the top prize at the Berlinale. Since it was established, the WCF has re ceived 928 funding applications from 69 coun tries in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Central Asia, South East Asia and the Caucasus. Out of the 56 projects which have received WCF production and distribution funding so far, a large number have been invited to re nowned film festivals around the world evi dence that the World Cinema Fund enjoys an international reputation. www.berlinale.de

the archival revival: 40yearsvideoart. de — part 2 On Friday, 17 July 2009, the Cent er for Art and Media Technology ( ZKM) in Karl sruhe will open an exhibition featuring the sec ond part of the Foundation’s restoration project 40yearsvideoart.de. The project prima rily focuses on video works from the 1970s by renowned artists like Joseph Beuys, Wolfgang Stoerchle, Ulrike Rosenbach and the group »Telewissen«. Only recently, many of these works were assumed lost or only salvageable through intensive restoration efforts. In addition to remastering and digitalizing these threatened works, the second part of 40yearsvideoart.de also presents rare and original techni cal hardware, such as the design classic Wegavision 3000. Following its debut in Karlsruhe, the exhibition will go on tour to the Lud wig Forum for International Art in Aachen, the Kunsthaus Dresden and Edith Russ Site for Media Art in Oldenburg. For more info, visit www.zkm.de

an instrument for every child a trailblazer for national programmes An Instrument for Every Child, devel oped by the Federal Cultural Foundation in 2007 for the European Capital of Culture Essen Ruhr.2010, is now being used as a model for numerous programmes throughout Germany.

Regardless of political affiliation, communities and towns in practically every state in Germany are busy preparing music-instruction pro grammes for their primary schools. The projects have not only been initiated by the responsible ministries and cultural agencies, but also pri vate supporters and committed citizens. Seven ty primary schools began a pilot programme in Hesse last August to test a possible state-wide model for schools that have only one first-grade class that would continue into grade two. The participating schools are cooperating with local music schools to provide as many children as possible the opportunity to learn an instru ment. An Instrument for Every Child is the new motto in Hamburg, as well, where initially seven, and next year, 61 primary schools shall participate in a programme, coordinated in cooperation by the city-state senate, the Hamburg State Youth Music Academy, and the College for Music and Theatre. The Free State of Saxony is also planning to implement a model of An Instrument for Every Child in 2009. In addition to schools in the state capital of Dresden, the programme will especially support schools in rural areas to es tablish basic music instruction and allow chil dren to learn an instrument of their choosing beginning this September. The state govern ment in neighbouring Thuringia has also initiated a three- to four-year project of the same name, set to begin in 2009. The concept also involves close cooperation between the partici pating primary schools and local music schools. A privately-organized project in Weimar has taken the lead in the effort to provide an instru ment to every child; since autumn 2008 three primary schools in Weimar have already begun to offer musical instruction by professional music teachers. Similar concepts are currently in preparation in more than 40 cities and districts in almost every state in Germany.

www.kulturstiftung-bund.de/jedemkind

guitars rank number one Following their first year in the programme An Instrument for Every Child, 6,300 second graders were allowed to pick out their own musical instru ments in autumn 2008. During their first year in the programme, they were introduced to 15 different instruments. At the top of their wish lists, children selected guitars (2 ,132 ), violins (1,147), transverse flutes (529 ), recorders ( 372 ) and violoncellos (260 ). The clarinet was chosen by 239 second graders, while 237 others are learning the accordion. The children have also shown interest in instruments from other cul tural circles, such as the baglama (76 ), a Turkish long-necked lute. The children are allowed to practice the loaned instruments free of charge until the end of the fourth grade. At present 19,600 first graders at 370 primary schools are choosing the instruments they would like to learn when they begin the second grade. In Au gust An Instrument for Every Child will open the world of music to another round of 31,300 first-graders. The music schools desper

ately require extra funding from citizens and companies to purchase new instruments for the children. To learn more about funding pos sibilities, visit www.jedemkind.de

deutschlandfunk and deutschlandradio kultur to support the new music network until the end of 2011 In Febru ary 2009 Deutschlandradio with its affiliated Deutschlandfunk and Deutschlandradio Kul tur agreed to broadcast concert recordings, dis cussions, features and reports from and about the 15 centres and regions currently funded by the New Music Network. Initiated by the Federal Cultural Foundation, the New Music Network aims to anchor New Mu sic more strongly in cultural life from Dres den to Moers and from Kiel to Passau. The New Music Network also cooper ates with two print media partners the Neue Musikzeitung / nmz-Media and the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik /Schott Verlag. www.netzwerk neuemusik.de

the beginning of the end of a temporary solution — new headquarters for the federal cultural foundation Seven years have passed since the Federal Cultural Foundation was established on 21 March 2002 This March 2009 the Foundation enters a new chapter in its young history with an international architecture competition. Until now, the Federal Cultural Foundation has run its opera tions from the Franckesche Stiftungen in Halle an der Saale an outstanding architectural en semble of buildings which have been nominat ed for inclusion on the UNESCO World Herit age Site list. The Foundation, however, is not located in one building, but has offices at three separate locations. The construction of the new headquarters for the Federal Cultural Founda tion has been approved. The building will com ply with its articles of association i.e., initiating and funding national and international, innovative cultural projects and combine modern, energy-efficient building methods and technologies with an early modern architectural style matching that of the surrounding build ings. A total of 2 5 million euro has been allocated for its construction.

The expert panel of judges for the competition are the architects Prof. Donatella Fioretti (Berlin) , Prof. Peter Kulka (Cologne/Dresden), Alfred Nieuwenhuizen (Berlin) , Silvia Schellenberg-Thaut (Leipzig) , Volker Giezek (Dresden) and Maik Westhaus (Berlin) The jury will select the winning proposal in Sep tember 2009

new projects

In November 2008

the jury selected 27 projects from all artistic are as to receive funding through the Foundation’s application-based General Project Funding de partment.

received at the documenta and the Sculpture Projects in Münster. In 2007 Genzken was com missioned to design the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennial. Her extensive range of works includes sculptures, installations, projects in public space, photos, collages, films and works on paper. Genzken’s artworks are highly adapt able to the current social, political and econom ic situations of our day. She works with an im pressively diverse range of media and addresses a wide array of compelling subjects. With ap proximately 100 works and groups of works, this retrospective offers a unique overview of Genz ken’s artistic development from the late 1960s to the present. The works on display will be sup plemented by documentary material on Genz ken’s exhibition activities and her work on projects in public space. The renowned Whitechap el Gallery in London has chosen to reopen in 2009 with an exhibition by Isa Genzken. Fol lowing its presentation in London, Kasper König, together with Genzken, will prepare the ex hibition for display at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.

Artistic director: Kasper König / Artist: Isa Genzken / Whitechapel Gallery London: 4 Apr. – 21 June 2009 / Museum Ludwig, Cologne: 15 Aug. – 15 Nov. 2009 / Museum Ludwig www.museenkoeln.de/museum-ludwig

image and space

germany of all places! jewish-russian immigration to germany Jewish commu nities in Germany have grown at an incredible rate thanks to European unification and a steady stream of Russian-Jewish immigrants to Germany. Today Germany’s Jewish communi ties are nearly five times larger than they were in 1990. Most of these new citizens speak Russian. However, an immigration act passed in 2005 put an end for the time being to the largest wave of Jewish immigration to Germany in its history. This exhibition presents the reality of daily life for Russian-Jewish immigrants, their cultural, social and religious backgrounds, their experiences in temporary housing and integra tion communities, and their opinions of Ger many as a country of immigration. The primary focus of the exhibition will be the experiences and perspectives of Russian-Jewish immigrants. It will address the legal and administrative as pects of immigration, bureaucratic hurdles for immigrants, and the Jewish and non-Jewish public reaction toward the new arrivals from Russia. The exhibition hopes to contribute to the discussion regarding Germany’s role as a country of immigration within the context of an ongoing inner-European process.

Artistic director: Dmitrij Belkin / Curator: Fritz Backhaus / Jewish Museum, Frankfurt am Main: 1 Mar. – 30 June 2010 / Jüdisches Museum der Stadt Frankfurt am Main www. juedischesmuseum.de

isa genzken retrospective Isa Genzken is one of the leading contemporary artists of our time. Her works have been enthusiastically

the demand for form brazilian art. from neoconcretism to brasilia 1959 1964 In the late 1950s Brazil entered a phase of unprecedented cultural, social and economic upheaval. Brasília, the new capital, was planned and pounded out of the ground within a few years. The Bossa Nova revolutionized the music scene and Neoconcretismo represented a new artistic positioning in the fine arts geometri cal austerity combined with a touch of playful ness which influenced the new forms in archi tecture and art. This exhibition at the Academy of the Arts in Berlin not only highlights the icons of Brazilian architecture of that period Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer two archi tects who significantly shaped the look of the Brasília, but also presents the mutual interac tion of architecture with the art and cultural scenes. The exhibition illustrates Brazil’s pio neering cultural role, which didn’t merely imi tate Western modernity, but established its own unique style of Brazilian modernity, the arrival of which was encouraged by an economically bolstered spirit of renewal. Brazil in the 1950s was an example of the opportunities resulting from global integration of social, artistic and economic developments, which can function today as a matrix of current developments in India or China. Several festivals will accompany the exhibition, one of which will highlight the connection between Neoconcretismo and contemporary art, featuring interventions by contemporary artists from Brazil, new interpre tations of Bossa Nova, film presentations and performances of concrete poetry.

Artistic director: Luis Camillo Osorio BR ) / Curator: Robert Kudielka / Artists: Hercules Barsotti, Reynaldo Jardim, Roberto Burle-Marx, Ruben Ludolf, Aluisio Carvao, Os

car Niemeyer, Willys de Castro, Helio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Lucio Costa, Ione Saldahna, Milton Dacosta, Dionisio Del Santo, Marcel Gautheroth, Ivan Serpa, Ferreira Gullar, Carlos Bevilacqua, Eduardo Coim bra, Tatiana Blass, Carla Guagliardi ( all BR ) , Franz Weissmann ( AT / Academy of the Arts, Berlin, Hanseatenweg: 18 June – 5 Sep. 2010 / Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Niteroi, Rio de Janeiro: 6 Nov. 2010 – 9 Jan. 2011 / Akademie der Künste www.adk.de

afropolis. city, media, art Today more than half the world’s population lives in cities. While many cities in Europe are shrinking, countries in the southern hemisphere are con fronted with rapid urbanization. In fact, most of the world’s megacities are now located in Af rica, Asia and Latin America. Many people in Germany are still unfamiliar with the cultural development in Africa due to the fact that me dia coverage continues to grossly neglect the continent. Consequently, we know very little about the specific topographies and cultures in African cities which do not necessarily corre spond to historic Euro-American models of ur ban development. The exhibition Afropo lis. City, Media, Art examines six Af rican cities, their significant structures and pat terns of development. With texts, photos and audio material, the exhibition will present the history of each city, while African artists address the current challenges of urbanism in a variety of new works, including photography, graphic art, sculptures, video works and interactive net work art projects. The combination of scientific analysis and artistic research, as well as the co operation between curators and artists, will pro duce a comprehensive view of the highly dy namic, informal processes at work in African cities.

Artistic director: Clara Himmelheber / Curators: Kerstin Pinther, Akinbode Akinbiyi NG ) / Artists: Olu Amoda NG ) , Black Box / Andrew Esiebo ( NG , Bodo CD ) , Pume Bylex ( CD ) , Viyé Diba ( SN ) , Modou Dieng ( SN ) , Christo Doherty ZA ) , Ekle go Design ( ET ) , Isamail Farouk ZA , Francesco Jodice I ) , Aglaia Konrad ( B , Salifou Lindou / Christian Hanussek CAM ) , Wangechi Mutu EAK ) , Issab Samb SN , Karola Schlegelmilch, Guy Tillim ZA , Barthélémy Toguo CAM ) , Minette Vári ( ZA ) , Jules Wokam ( CAM ) and others / Exhibition and accompanying events: Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, Cologne: autumn 2010 / Workshop / preview: Nairobi Arts Trust and the Goethe-Institut Nairobi: 1 Feb. – 31 Mar. 2010 / Iwalewa-Haus Bayreuth: 5 Apr. – 31 Aug. 2011 / Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum: autumn 2010 www.museenkoeln.de/rautenstrauchjoest-museum

amines the opposite, i.e., the loss of space and the consequences this has on our ability to ori entate ourselves. In reference to Aby Warburg, the Halle für Kunst in Lüneburg will present space as a locus of artistic thought and interpre tation which can be further expanded and ap plied to daily life. Based on the realization that architecture does not merely function as a ›con tainer‹ for human needs, but forms communi ties and creates needs, the Kunstverein Harburg will open a ›space to negotiate‹ the relationship between architecture and community. The ex hibitions will be accompanied by symposiums, film screenings, presentations, lectures and oth er events. A joint catalogue will tie together the exhibitions at all four institutions.

Curators: Eva Birkenstock, Stefanie Böttcher, Hannes Loichinger, Britta Peters, Tim Voss and Janneke de Vries / Artists: Ian Anüll CH , Guillaume Bijl ( BE , Karla Black UK , Cezary Bodzianowki PL ) Gwenneth Boelens ( NL ) Geta Bratescu RO ) Wolfgang Breuer, Franck Bragigand ( NL Elín Hansdóttir ( ISL ) , Joachim Koester DK ) , Guillaume Leblon ( F , Rosalind Nashashibi ( UK ) , Peles Empire, Falk Pisano ( NL ) , Kai Schiemenz and others / GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen; Künstlerhaus Bremen; Kunstverein Har burger Bahnhof, Hamburg; Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg: 17 May – 26 July 2009 / GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst Bremen www.gak-bremen.de

Klima US )

/ Edith Russ Site for Media Art, Oldenburg and Springhornhof Neuenkirchen Art Association: 28 Aug. – 15 Nov. 2009 / Ed ith-Ruß-Haus für Medienkunst www.edith-russ-haus.de

Studer & Christoph van den Berg ( CH and

Watson ( all AU / ACC Galerie Weimar: 26 Jan. – 22 Mar. 2009 / Halle 14 in the Baumwollspinnerei Leipzig: 1 May – 26 July 2009 / ACC Galerie Weimar 2009 www.acc-weimar.de

2009 zen concrete sound art from japan and germany In summer 2009, the Quilow moated castle located in Western Po merania will host an exhibition for sound artists from Japan and Germany who will attempt to acoustically merge Asian Buddhism and Euro pean Enlightenment. The ruins of this Renais sance-period castle today a registered historic landmark have been vacant for 15 years. As an exhibition venue, it is an ideal environment for the works to interact with and respond to the spatial characteristics on location. All six artists adhere to the tradition of the musique concrète, using concrete noises and sounds from daily life and applying them through montage or electronic processing to create a new listening experience. The artists also integrate the Buddhist Zen philosophy into their works which raises emptiness and silence to an aesthetic experience. The connection of space, light and sound, its syncretistic interpretation based on Far Eastern and European traditions with installations located at a solitary venue, an abandoned castle, will guarantee visitors an extraordinary artistic experience.

Artistic director: Jörg Hasheider / Artists: Hitochi Kojo ( J ) , Anne Krickeberg, Rie Nakashima J , Johannes S. Sister manns, Miki Yui ( , Rolf Julius / Quilow moated castle: 6 June – 22 July 2009 / Stiftung Kulturerbe im ländlichen Raum www.kulturland-mv.de

terra nullius contemporary art from australia Long ago the British Crown declared Australia to be a terra nullius a no-man’s land so that it could lay claim to a continent al ready inhabited by an indigenous people. Final ly in 1992 , the High Court of Australia reversed this distinction and granted the descendents of the aborigines land property rights. However, despite improvements to their legal standing, the aborigines continue to struggle with intoler ance when exercising their rights. And although Australia presents itself to the world as an open society with rich cultural diversity, its restrictive immigration laws are an indication of the country’s contradictory image.

louise’s island worlds exhibition of contemporary art and didactic museum project Queen Louise of Prussia (1776 1810 ) remains one of the most popular women of Prussian history to this day. Initially admired for her beauty, simplicity and warmth, she be came a figure of civic hope for political reform during the French Revolution and later served to rally the struggle for Prussian independence from Napoleon. Peacock Island [Pfaueninsel] was one of Louise’s favourite places. Located on the Havel River southwest of Berlin, the island is unique for its architectural, cultural and land scape history. As a place of retreat and recrea tion for the Prussian kings, the island became a landscape park with numerous architectural gems, such as the artificial castle ruins. It was named after a menagerie of exotic animals, cre ated in the 1820s based on the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. In commemoration of the 200th anni versary in 2010 of the death of the Prussian queen, Peacock Island will be transformed into an expansive exhibition venue. Coinciding with the 6th berlin biennial, the exhibition will present recent international contemporary art that highlights the history of the island and the myth of Queen Louise. Visitors will be able to stroll among the site-specific contempo rary artworks and discover the diverse cultural historic connections between Weltflucht [es cape from the world] and Weltsehnsucht [longing for the world]. Museum didactic exhibits and events are aimed to especially attract the interest of families and children. Based on the motto Picnic on Peacock Island with theatre performances, music, games and readings on cultural historic topics, three event-filled days will re-invoke the spirit of the royal excursions to the island two hundred years ago.

Artistic director: Michael Lukas / Participating artists: Janet Cardiff ( CA , George Bures Miller ( CA , Christian Engelmann, Joan Fontcuberta ES , Robert Stieve, Martin Weimar, Sylvie Bussières ES and others / Peacock Island [Pfaueninsel] Ber lin: 1 May – 31 Oct. 2010 / Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg www.spsg.de

doppler

effect the nature of images

space_revised

exhibition and event programme Be it two- or three-dimensional, or even virtual, art is always spatial it creates and defines space. Space_revised offers new platforms and perspectives on this age-old theme which many artists have begun to re-ex amine as of late. Four institutions are collabo rating on an exhibition to present a snapshot of the artistic development of space as an artistic theme. The GAK (Society for Contemporary Art) in Bremen will focus on strategies of spatial acquisition, while the Künstlerhaus Bremen ex

landscape 2.0 exhibition Our view of landscape and its nature has changed over the course of history. By examining landscape de signs, we can learn about the attitudes of a cer tain society at a certain time in terms of how it developed and shaped nature. In the Roman tic period, landscapes came to symbolize the human psychological condition. Today we must ask ourselves how significant landscapes are when they are depicted as a social and cultural construct and are primarily regarded as an eco nomic or ecological resource. Is it even possible to think of landscape as intact and unspoiled nature? How do we imagine real, natural land scape, and how is landscape portrayed in digital fantasy worlds? This exhibition takes a con temporary approach to the landscape theme. Against a backdrop of historic ideas, it will present current landscape concepts and their impact on economic, environmental and sociopolitical decision-making. International artists will create a number of new works for the exhibition, as well as outdoor, site-specific works. While some examine the historic developments and their effects on the structures and uses of landscapes today, others develop utopian ideas and concepts for sustainable landscape plan ning in the future, or create digital spaces of ex perience and model worlds. An extensive educa tional and media-pedagogical programme, lec tures, film presentations and workshops will ac company the exhibition.

Artistic directors: Sabine Himmelsbach and Bettina von Dziembowski / Curators: Bettina von Dziembowski, Sab ine Himmelsbach, Katrin Werner / Participating artists: Vahram Aghasyan ( AM , Daniel Garcia Andújar ( ES ) , Wapke Feenstra ( NL ) , Amy Franceschini US ) , Tue Greenfort DK ) , Beate Gütschow, Graham Harwood GB ) Marine Hugonnier ( FR

The exhibition Terra Nullius presents Aus tralian contemporary art which critically exam ines and comments on this situation. In photos, videos, mixed media installations, conceptual artworks, performances and texts, the artists ad dress the legal struggles of Australia’s indige nous people, their social exclusion and the dis regard for their culture.

Artistic director: Frank Motz / Co-curator: Deborah Kelly ( AU / Artists: Vernon Ah Kee, Tony Albert, Richard Bell, boatpeople.org, Jon Campbell, Destiny Deacon & Virginia Fra ser, Julie Dowling, Tina Fiveash, George Gittoes, Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro, Gordon Hookey, Dianne Jones, Mike Parr, pvi collective, Tony Schwensen, Merran Siera kowski, Soda Jerk, Squatspace, Natascha Stellmach, Judy

in art and science Images are a medium of communication in both the arts and sciences, whereby the nature and impact of images vary according to their aesthetic and epistemological contexts and functions. The Kunsthalle zu Kiel will turn its attention to the role of images in art and science with an exhibition that dem onstrates how things become visible through images, things that could not be so easily con templated otherwise, such as an idea or docu ment, a complex aesthetic expression or the vis ualization of a scientific theory. The title of the exhibition, Doppler Effect, refers to the physical phenomenon of the relationship of mutual dependence between the perceived ob ject (image) and the perceiving subject (viewer).

Yael Kanarek US , Janice Kerbel GB , John

, Monika

others

The exhibition presents the history of images spanning six centuries from the early modern age to the present. It will feature a number of internationally renowned artists, whose works combine the artistic and scientific worlds of imagination and thought, including commis sioned pieces by Christine Borland, Mark Dion, Tue Greenfort and Olaf Nicolai. The culturalhistoric evidence of the Doppler effect of an image that interrelationship between logic and inspiration, research and imagination will be discussed in an extensive catalogue and lecture series given by well-known scholars in the image, cultural and natural sciences.

Artistic directors: Petra Gördüren, Dirk Luckow / Artists: Christine Borland ( GB , Mark Dion ( US ) , Tue Greenfort ( DK ) , Damian Hirst GB ) , Marta de Menezes ( PT , Olaf Nicolai, Thomas Ruff and others / Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Christian Albrecht Universität: 30 Jan. – 2 May 2010 / Kunsthalle zu Kiel www.kunsthalle-kiel.de

the quotidian revolution the order of things latin american contempo rary art The Museum Morsbroich is planning a theme-based group exhibition featuring positions of Latin American contemporary art which are not yet well known in Germany. The artists generally deal with everyday objects, the material or form of which they change, or sim ply remove them from their normal context in order to assign them a new frame of meaning. By playing on our conventional perception and intentionally contradicting expectations, the artists upset, and thereby revolutionize our tra ditional, routine ways of perceiving the world around us. In many of the works, the explosive force of such intention is often combined with black humour or biting irony directed at the ideologically established language of form in European modernity.

Artistic director: Stefanie Kreuzer / Artists: Alexandre da Cunha ( BR , Diango Hernández ( C ) , Gabriel Kuri ( MEX , Jorge Macchi ( RA ) , Wilfredo Prieto ( C ) , Martin Soto Climent MEX ) , Valeska Soares ( BR / Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen: 23 Aug. – 1 Nov. 2009 / Museumsverein Museum Morsbroich www.museum-morsbroich.de

street, political events, scenes at a prison, in the parliament views of everyday life which con tradict the official image of the GDR . Heise made these recordings knowing they would have to be kept secret until he could one day present them to the public. The oldest audio recordings and photos date back to a reporting exercise he completed at the College of Film making in Potsdam Babelsberg in 1979. The most recent photos include scenes of the demo lition of the Palace of the Republic in Berlin. In addition to the installation itself, the project includes the release of a working book and DVD that provide a behind-the-scenes look at the work of this filmmaker, whose documentary films, in particular Vaterland and Im Glück (Neger), were enthusiastically re ceived by German audiences.

Artist: Thomas Heise / Installation: Academy of the Arts, Pariser Platz, Berlin: summer 2009 / Book presentation and reading: Duisburg Film Week: 13 Nov. – 15 Nov. 2009 ; ZKM Karlsruhe: autumn 2009 ; Zeughauskino and Arsenal Berlin: autumn 2009 / ma.ja.de filmproduktions GmbH www.majade.de

tensive event programme, the project organiz ers hope to attract a broad audience along with the usual exhibition crowd.

Curator: Helmut Böttiger / Exhibition design: Lutz Dittrich, Peter Karlhuber / Berlin, April – June 2009 / Frankfurt a.M., August – October 2009 / Munich, October – December 2009 / Hamburg, January 2009 – February 2010 / Leipzig, March – April 2010 / Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung www.deutscheakademie.de

Eastern theatre culture, the project aims to de velop new and modern ways of performing Handel’s opera. Admeto will be performed in Göt tingen and Edinburgh. In addition to the tradi tionally well-versed Handel enthusiasts who at tend the Handel festivals every year, the project organizers also hope to attract even larger audi ences by arranging a public screening of the op era premiere outside the theatre in Göttingen.

film and new media

material a contribution to the archaeology of real existence Thomas Heise was born in East Berlin in 1955 and grew up in the former GDR . His experiences under the communist regime strongly influenced his view of German history, which will be the theme of an installation titled Material. In a mon tage of photos and audio materials, collected over the past thirty years, Heise creates an in stallation that portrays a uniquely personal, his toric panorama that starkly contrasts official versions of recent German history. The viewer observes fragments of real life, people on the

word and knowledge

double life the history of literary life in germany after 1945 This exhibition of fers a multifaceted portrayal of literary life in West and East Germany during the first ten years following World War II . When it was reestablished in 1945, public literary life was strongly characterized by the utopia of a demo cratic society that hadn’t yet been divided into public and private institutional structures. On the basis of historic textual documents, photo graphs, film and audio recordings, and staged reconstructions, this exhibition will discern the requirements, conditions and relationships that were responsible for significantly shaping the reinvigorated literary life in post-war Germany. The exhibition does not intend to provide a sys tematic overview of post-war literature under German division. Instead, it focuses on regional specifics the literary scenes in Berlin, Frank furt, Hamburg, Munich and Leipzig all formed under unique conditions and consequently, each had its own unmistakeable character. In order to adequately portray the special charac teristics of these former literary centres, the Ger man Academy for Language and Poetry and the Literaturhaus Berlin will modify the design of the exhibition to correspond to each city. In co operation with selected partners at the presenta tion venues, the core exhibits will be displayed in varying exhibition settings. A two-volume publication about the exhibition will explore the views and insights regarding the revival of German literary life in more depth. With peda gogical projects e.g., materials specially de veloped for instruction in schools and an ex

music and sound

music of the orient and occident jazz and improvised music of the world in potsdam Stylistically speaking, jazz, Jewish klezmer music, flamenco, and Balkan folklore have a lot in common. Yet how does one com bine German and Moroccan music, or how does an ensemble of Turkish and Greek musi cians sound? This concert series presents Arabic, Jewish and Western musical styles with a view to the Iberian Peninsula and the Balkans where the music of the Orient and Occident still intermingle today. The musicians, all of whom come from widely differing musical backgrounds, will perform in joint concerts and engage in dialogue between musical cultures which seldom come into contact. One of the concerts will feature a joint performance of Sar dinian musicians with the Macedonian brass band Kocani Orkestar. Performances by musi cians from Palestine, Turkey and Greece are also on the programme, as well as a traditional Moroccan ensemble from Rabat which per forms at ceremonies for the Sherif royal family. Artistic director: Ulli Blobel / Musicians: Kocani Orkestar ( MK , Ramon Lopez ( FR ) , Okay Temiz ( TR , Floros Floridis & Nicky Skopelitis GR ) , Vladimir Karparov ( BG , Conny Bauer, Uwe Kropinski & Michael Heupel, Majid Bekkas MA ) , Ali Keyta ( BF ) , Paolo Fresu & Antonello Salis ( IT , Orchestra Popolare ( IT ) , Klezmer Madness, Benjamin Weidekamp Bläser band / Nikolaikirche Potsdam: 4 Apr. 2009, 10 Oct. 2009 / Nikolaisaal Potsdam: 11 Apr. 2009 8 Oct. 2009 / Mutter Fourage Jazzscheune Berlin: 9 Oct. 2009 / Förderverein Jazzwerkstatt Berlin-Brandenburg e.V. www.jazzwerkstattberlin-brandenburg.de

admeto handel’s opera meets japanese theatre culture The international music world will commemorate the 250th anni versary of the death of George Frideric Handel in 2009. Together with the Edinburgh International Festival, the Göttingen International Handel Festival will co-produce Handel’s opera Admeto, directed by Doris Dörrie. This pro duction is remarkable in that it combines Ba roque composition with elements of Far Eastern theatre. Not only will the opera ensemble be joined by the Japanese International Butoh Dance Ensemble (directed by Tadashi Endo), but the design of the set will be based on Japa nese theatre models. By tying Handel to Far

Director: Doris Dörrie / Musical director: Nicholas McGegan ( GB / Set and costume designer: Bernd Lepel / Choreogra pher: Tadashi Endo ( / Lighting technician: Linus Fellbom S ) / Soloists: Admeto: Tim Mead GB ) , Alceste: Marie Arnet ( S ) , Antigona: Kirsten Blaise ( US , Orindo: Andrew Radley ( GB ) , Trasimede: David Bates ( GB ) , Ercole: William Berger ( ZA ) , Meraspe: Wolf Matthias Friedrich / FestspielOrchester Göttingen / Deutsches Theater Göttingen: 26 May – 3 June 2009 / Festival Theatre Edinburgh: 27 Aug. – 31 Aug. 2009 / Internationale Händel-Festspiele Göttingen www.haendelfestspiele.de

from the quartet book 2009 concert series and film programme by the rosamunde string quartet of munich In this four-part concert series, the Rosamunde String Quartet combines a film programme with performances of classical chamber music and works by contemporary composers, some of which have never been performed in Germa ny before. The works by Joseph Haydn will be the main focus of the 2009 programme with thematically related pieces by contemporary composers, such as the Russian-born Boris Yof fe, Tigran Mansurian from Armenia and Arvo Pärt from Estonia. The concerts will be per formed together with films of a similar theme, such as The Color of Pomegran ates by the Armenian director Sergei Para janov, shown to a work by the composer Mansurian, and the film The Gospel Accord ing to St. Matthew by Pier Paolo Paso lini, shown to Joseph Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross . Public rehearsals and discussions with the musicians are an important feature of the project. These events are especially targeted at school children and college students in hopes of better acquainting them with chamber music and getting them interested in cross-disciplinary artistic performances.

Musicians: Andreas Reiner AT ) , Diane Pascal AT ) , Helmut Nicolai, Anja Lechner / Composers: Arvo Pärt EST , Boris Yoffe ( IL ) , Tigran Mansurian ( ARM , David Halladijan ( ARM/CH and others / Bavarian Academy of the Fine Arts, Munich: 21 23 Jan., 4 5 Apr., 20 22 May, 14 16 Oct. 2009 / Ro

samunde Quartett München www.klangverwaltung.de

aura music theatre piece by josé-maria sánchez-verdú based on the no vella by carlos fuentes Aura is the first music theatre co-production by Musik der Jahr hunderte Stuttgart, Operadhoy Madrid and the Biennale di Venezia Musica. In past years these three institutions have intensified their focus on contemporary music and are now endeavouring to expand their repertoire of experimental music theatre. This piece is based on the eroti

cally charged novella Aura by Carlos Fuentes (*1928 ), one of the most influential Mexican writers today. While investigating the legacy of a deceased general, the historian Felipe meets his widow and her young niece Aura. As the sto ry progresses, the characters become less and less distinguishable until their identities merge. The boundary between imagination and reality begins to dissolve. With experimental élan, the Spanish composer José-Maria Sánchez-Verdú has written a score that portrays the thrilling and psychologically complex nature of the nar rative. He has designed a new musical instru ment especially for this piece called an Aura phone a type of electronic-instrumental installation that responds to the characters’ ac tions on stage, and thus becomes a protagonist itself. The piece will be directed by the Norwe gian theatre director Susanne Øglænd. Artistic director: Christine Fischer / Composer and conductor: José-Maria Sánchez-Verdú ( E / Director: Susanne Øglænd ( NO / Set and costume designer: Mascha Mazur / Artists: Neue Vocalsolisten, Sarah Maria Sun, Truike van de Poel NL , Andreas Fischer, Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin / Teatro Zarzuela, Madrid: 30 31 May 2009 / Theat erhaus, Stuttgart: 17 18 July 2009 / Arsenale, Venice: 2 3 Oct. 2009 / Musik der Jahrhunderte Stuttgart e.V. www. mdjstuttgart.de

audio poverty a conference on the state of post-economic music The mu sical world is undergoing radical change. The spread and duplication of music via the Internet has led to unexpected opportunities, which in turn has necessitated new forms of marketing and music criticism. These fundamental chang es have impacted the music business and its sig nificance in all areas from production condi tions and profit margins to the behaviour of consumers and listeners of music. Although music has never been so ubiquitous and so often listened to as it is today, the entire industry finds itself in a remarkable crisis that is not only reflected by decreasing sales of audio recordings and financial losses. Critics of the music scene also warn that our musical culture is becoming less and less diverse and the quality of music journalism is on the decline. The three-day con ference Audio Poverty will address the current issues facing the music industry, the re ception of music and its production. Specifical ly it will explore how the new production condi tions are affecting music, how new distribution channels can be used, how the artists’ rela tionship to the audience can be improved and how music can preserve its social relevance un der these changing conditions. Current prob lems of pop culture and art music will be the fo cus of lectures, podium discussions and inter views with artists. Concerts and DJ sets will present a wide spectrum of music, including Bricolage hip hop, TV operas, Musica Povera and improvisation.

Participants: Achim Bergmann, Ekkehard Ehlers, ManonLiu Winter AUS ) , Diedrich Diederichsen, Alan Hilario RP ) , Thomas Meadowcroft ( AUS ) , Helga de la Motte-Haber, Marc Chung, Dieter Gorny, Awesometapesfromafrica ( US Jose

www.wandering-star.org

Predrag Strbac RS ) / Writers: Soeren Voima, Ras¸it Çelikezer TR ) Branko Dimitrijevic´ ( RS ) Eduardo Erba I ) François Gremaud ( CH , Goran Stefanovski ( SLO , Tena Sˇtivicˇic´( HR , Matéi Visniec ( RO / International theatre train with stops in Is tanbul, Novi Sad, Zagreb, Stuttgart and other cities: 1 May – 8 July 2009 ; Festival in Stuttgart: 9 19 July 2009 / Schauspiel Stuttgart www.staatstheater.stuttgart.de

theatre and movement

instruction in the art of granitless being music theatre project It doesn’t take long to build a house. By the time the founda tion stone is laid, most of the rental and pur chase contracts have already been signed. And when moving day comes, the tenants quickly regard their home as the centre of all future ac tivities. Building, living and thinking form a single unit the home is one’s castle, ›carved‹ out of stone. But what if the goal of a construc tion project is not to build a permanent struc ture? Together with artist Rebecca Horn, the composer/director Ruedi Häusermann plays on this idea in a performance that focuses on the creation and modification of fragile archi tectural structures. A mobile, architectural ap paratus made of fine rods, ropes and strings is immersed in the musical sounds of a string quartet and continually reassembled into new architectural designs. Each completed design is the product of a gradual process of re-formation. Although it concludes with a topping-out cere mony, the message of the piece is that all artistic work is process-driven, a sequence of invention, rejection, variation and correction.

Set and stage design: Rebecca Horn / Director and composer: Ruedi Häusermann ( CH / Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin: 1 15 Sep. 2010 / Kulturkontakte e.V. www.kulturkontakte-ev.de

orient express a theatrical journey through eight european countries The Orient Express will begin its European journey in Ankara in May 2009. In a converted freight car, eight theatre ensembles from eight countries will perform plays in their own lan guage at different locations during their journey. Following the premiere in their hometown, each ensemble will travel by train to the next city where it will perform again and meet up with the next ensemble, which, in turn, will per form its premiere. In terms of content, the thea tre project examines European identity, expecta tions of and past experience with the European unification process, and issues like escape, ex pulsion, mobility and settling down. Following stops in Turkey, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Slov enia, Italy and Switzerland, the train will arrive at its final destination four months later the Stuttgart main station. There, all the partici pants will meet once again at a theatre festival and perform their pieces on the rolling stage.

Artistic director: Christian Holtzhauer / Directors: Christian Tschirner, Mircea Cornis¸teanu ( RO ) François Gremaud ( CH

connections international theatre mentor project This international theatre project aims to intensify and create more trans parency in the exchange and transfer of knowl edge between artists of different generations and theatre genres. In terms of content and structure, Connections continues and ex pands the work that began with the project What’s next? in 2007. The goal is to explore the continuity and continuing development in the theatre landscape, and pass this knowl edge on to a younger generation of theatre art ists. To achieve this end, experienced theatre artists will act as mentors for younger colleagues, each of whom will be selected to co-produce a new theatre production that will premiere at in ternational venues. The joint productions will create an environment in which both artists will be able to share their perspectives, experiences and methods with one another in practical situ ations with a concrete result.

Artistic director: Tilmann Broszat / Artists: Anna Viebrock, Meg Stuart BE ) , Tim Etchells GB , Dirk Pauwels ( BE , Kirsten Delholm ( DK , Natasa Rajkovic´ HR ) / Theaterfestival Spielart, Munich: 26 29 Nov. 2009 / Campo, Ghent BE ) : 2009 / 2010 / Theaterhaus Gessnerallee CH : 2009 /2010 / Brut, Vienna A : 2009 /2010 / Forum Freies Theater, Düsseldorf: 2009 /2010 / PACT Zollverein, Essen: 2009 /2010 / Huis a/d Werf, Utrecht NL : 2009 /2010 / Theaterfestival Spielart München www.spielart.org

canaries in the coal mine spotlight on belgium festival of contemporary dance Thirty years ago a series of pioneering dance productions from Belgium created a Flemish dance wave that catapulted the country to one of the most important dance nations in Europe. However, according to many Belgian dance artists, dance funding in Belgium hasn’t been able to keep pace with the scene’s rapid development and has repeatedly failed to meet it current needs. Dissatisfied with the situation, a group of artists organized themselves to call for cultural and funding policy change based on the master plan Canaries in the Coal Mine. Long ago canaries were used as an early warning system in coal mines to sig nal dangerous levels of poisonous gas. In the same way, this group of dance artists uses the symbolism of the canary to warn cultural policy makers of the danger of neglecting their artistic field. European neighbouring countries have provided additional momentum for this plan in particular Germany where the Federal Cultural Foundation’s Dance Plan Germany established comprehensive meas ures to ensure long-term, sustainable dance funding. The project Canaries in the Coal Mine will focus on Belgium and examine

the appropriate cultural political conditions for high-quality, field-specific artistic funding. In addition to presenting contemporary dance performances and exemplary classics of contempo rary dance, the project will host a round of dis cussions that focus on production conditions and develop specially designed dance funding measures. Canaries in the Coal Mine will be presented during the Tanztheater Inter national Contemporary Dance Festival.

Artistic director: Christiane Winter / Artists / ensembles: Jan Lauwers & Needcompany B ) Les SlovaKs Dance Collective B , and others / Orangerie Herrenhausen, Hochschule für Musik und Theater and other venues in Hannover, 3 12 Sep. 2009 / Tanz und Theater e.V. www.tanztheaterinternational.de

the christmas oratorio by johann sebastian bach a scenic performance

The Christmas Oratorio by Johann Sebas tian Bach is one of the best-known and most frequently performed compositions of religious music in the world. Attending a concert of the Oratorio during the Christmas season has prac tically become a tradition of popular culture. The independent opera company Novoflot has developed a performance of the Christmas Ora torio and specially adapted it to the rooms at Radialsystem in Berlin. The structure of the piece has been completely rearranged both tem porally and spatially; the six cantatas of the oratory will be performed simultaneously in different halls and various storeys throughout the entire building. The result will be a round of performances in various versions for actors, soloists, choirs, ensembles and a large orchestra. This unique tour through the Christmas Oratorio will allow the audience to re-discover this magnificent work of music history in all its com ponents and facets. The performances will take place during the Christmas season and offer a striking contrast to conventional productions.

Director: Sven Holm / Musical director: Vicente Larrañaga ( RCH/D ) / Dramaturge: Malte Ubenauf / Text: Juan Goytisolo ES / E xperimentalensemble: Bauer 4 / Set design: GRAFT ( US/CN/D / Radialsystem-V-Berlin: 10 Dec. 2009 5 Jan. 2010 / Novoflot www.novoflot.de

your

nanny hates you! a festival

based on family Your Nanny Hates You! is a theme-based festival that focuses on families in which working parents are forced to leave their children alone or have others take care of them for an extended period of time. To what degree do personal relationships suffer from the loss of familial care? How well can oth ers take responsibility for inner familial caregiving and what are the consequences if even this is not possible? The festival programme is divided into four parts, each of which investi gates the personal and economic consequences such circumstances have on individuals. Using Mexico as an example, She Works Hard For The Money! examines the plight of work immigrants who leave their children behind and ille gally immigrate to a rich neighbouring country, where they frequently earn money taking care

phine Foster ( US ) , Jonathan Fischer, Goodiepal ( DK ) , Hair Police US ) Quarta 330 JAP David Keenan SCO ) Björn Gottstein, Alvin Curran ( US , Enno Poppe, Ensemble Mosaik, Eva Reiter AUS ) , Barbara Romen AUS ) and others / House of World Cultures, Berlin: 6 8 Feb. 2009 / Wandering Star e.V.

of someone else’s children. The second part of the festival Work Orphans addresses the prob lems of the abandoned children of immigrants, while Property and Neglect focuses on the condition of families, in which parents isolate, abuse and even kill their children. The festival will feature a variety of positions from theatre, performances and films in combination with a youth project and a conference programme ti tled Intimate Labors that addresses the phenomenon of economization of the private individual. Artistic director: Stefanie Wenner / Directors: Susanne Sachsse, Joël Pommerat ( F , Hofmann and Lindholm, Janina Mö bius and others / Hebbel am Ufer 1 3, Berlin: 11 21 June 2009 / Hebbel am Ufer www.hebbel-am-ufer.de

lery, London: 1 8 Oct. 2009 ; C3 Center for Communica tion & Culture Budapest: 15 22 Oct. 2009 / Theaterhaus Je na www.theaterhaus-jena.de

Artistic directors: Shermin Langhoff, Matthias Lilienthal / Participants: Nurkan Erpulat, Feridun Zaimoglu, Maral Ceranogˇlu TR , Dries Verhoeven ( NL ) , Odan Projesi TR ) , Neco Celik, Tuncay Kulaoglu ( TR , Alper Maral ( TR , Ayse Polat ( TR , Idil Üner, Murat Daltaban TR and others / Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin: 1 15 Nov. 2009 / Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Berlin: 1 15 Nov. 2009 / Hebbel am Ufer www.hebbel-am-ufer.de

scenography now! festival in

the 2009

sexy sustainable sustainably sexy art as a sustainable lifestyle Climate change, food shortages and the energy crisis the majority of citizens and politicians are aware of the daunting challenges of our time. However, these issues seldom have practical conse quences on how we lead our lives. How might »sustainable action« work? Does it automatically entail reducing or even ceasing our consump tion of attractive, stylish products? In Au gust 2009 Kampnagel will host the Internation al Summer Festival with the motto Sustain ability A Question of Style?

bauhaus

commemorative year In 2009 the Bauhaus in Weimar will commemorate its 90th anniversary. The historic State Bauhaus was regarded as the leading education al institution in the field of architecture, design, free and applied art in Germany. The Bauhaus also included a theatre workshop in which his toric and internationally pioneering artistic ex periments with space, bodies and light were developed. Oskar Schlemmer, László MoholyNagy and others created concepts and models of the avant-garde, the traces of which still exist today. The now classical connection be tween architecture and set-building for staging exhibitions, theatre and film productions has now been supplemented by elements of media art which are intended to further develop the Bauhaus ideas both technologically and aes thetically. In recent years the design demands for temporary venues have steadily increased, resulting in a growing interest in new sceno graphic concepts. With a focus on the 20th -cen tury avant-garde, which the Bauhaus greatly in fluenced, Scenography Now! will tie in the ideas and challenges of today and present current scenographic projects as part of the festival Crash!Boom!Bau! The programme includes an audio room featuring the diaries of Oskar Schlemmer as well as the scenographic reconstruction of the Dadaistic-Bauhaus con cert Stop Making Sense by the Talking Heads. Most of the festival events will take place at the former auditorium of the Theaterhaus Je na. Designed by Walter Gropius in 1921 and de molished in 1987, the auditorium will serve as the basis for a discussion about its reconstruc tion. The project includes guest performances in Berlin and project presentations in London and Budapest.

Artistic director: Markus Heinzelmann / Curators: Jan Brüggemeier, Janek Müller / Dramaturges: Martin Wigger, Christin Bahnert / Artists: Louis Philippe Demers ( CA ) , Heiko Ka lmbach, Emma Waltraud Howes CA ) , Ulrike Haage, Staffan Schmidt SE , Edina Cecília Hováth ( HU ) , Adám Ledvai HU ) , Mika Hannula ( FI ) , Tanja Siems GB ) , Theo Lorenz, Martin Blacícek CZ ) , Vivarium Studio/Compagnie ( FR , Showstu dio/Compagnie GB ) , andcompany&Co, Mass&Fieber ( CH and others / Festival: Theaterhaus Jena: 1 7 May 2009 / Guest performance: Dock 11, Halle Pankow, Berlin: 4 11 Sep. 2009 / Project presentations: Architectural Association Gal

As part of the festival, the project Sexy Sus tainable Sustainably Sexy will present dance and theatre performances, instal lations and events in public space which address this and other issues. One of the invited guests is Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shop ping, which shuns capitalism and ›preaches‹ the virtues of critical consumption and environ mentally-friendly behaviour. The programme also includes a Sustainably Sexy Fair which began with a competition in December 2008. The contest is looking for ideas pertaining to sustainability that are also persuasive in terms of their outward attractiveness or their style. Ten of the submitted projects will be se lected for realisation and another ten will be ex hibited as concepts.

Artistic director: Matthias von Hartz / Artists: Rodrigo Garcia ( AR ) , Reverend Billy US ) and others / Kampnagel Interna tional Summer Festival, Hamburg: 13 30 Aug. 2009 / Kamp nagel Internationale Kulturfabrik www.kampnagel.de

beyond belonging theatre festival The festival Beyond Belonging has featured performances based on the issue of migration since 2007. The third annual festival in 2009 will focus specifically on immigrants in Istan bul and Berlin. In these cities immigrants expe rience difference on a daily basis. The crea tive scene in these cities often comes in direct contact with issues and personal stories that are shaped by the clash of cultures and experience. Or the artists have personally experienced such cultural differences themselves. The Istanbulborn dancer and choreographer Maral Ceranogˇlu will direct a performance titled The Ugly Duckling in which three women, a Kurd, a lesbian and Muslim speak out about the various prejudices they have encountered in Turkish society. Another example is a piece by the German-born Turkish director Neco Celik from Berlin-Kreuzberg, who tells the story of the double life of Turkish men who have fami lies in both Berlin and Istanbul. The text by Feri dun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel is based on empirical research. For the first time in 2009, the festival Beyond Belonging will take place in cooperation with the Theater Hebbel am Ufer ( HAU ) and the performance venue Ballhaus Naunynstraße, which re-opened in 2008

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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

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

Minister of State in the Federal Chancellery and Commissioner for Cultural and Media Affairs Dr. Peter Ammon 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 Stanislaw Tillich Minister-President of Saxony

Senta Berger Actress, President of the German Film Academy, Berlin Durs Grünbein Author Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Wolf Lepenies Sociologist

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.

Dr. Christian Bode Secretary General of the DAAD Prof. Dr. Clemens Börsig Chairman of the Cultural Committee of German Business with the BDI e.V. Jens Cording President of the Society for Contemporary Music Dr . Michael Eissenhauer President of the Association of German Museums Prof. Dr. Max Fuchs Chairman of the German Arts Council Martin Maria Krüger President of the German Music Council Prof. Dr. h.c. Klaus-Dieter Lehmann President of the Goethe-Institut Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen Secretary General of the Cultural Foundation of German States 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 Frank Werneke Deputy Chairman of the ver.di labour union Prof. Klaus Zehelein President of the German Theatre Association

juries and curatorial panels The Federal Cultural Foundation draws on the scientific and artistic expertise of about 50 jury and curatorial panel members who consult the Foundation on thematic and project-specific matters. For more information about these committees, please visit the corresponding projects described on our website www.kulturstiftung-bund.de.

Hortensia Völckers

Artistic Director Alexander Farenholtz Administrative Director

executive board team

Assistant to the Executive Board

Lavinia Francke Legal Advisor Dr. Ferdinand von Saint André Press and Public Relations

Friederike Tappe-Hornbostel [dept. head] / Tinatin Eppmann / Diana Keppler / Christoph Sauerbrey / Arite Studier

General Project Funding Torsten Maß [dept. head] / Bärbel Hejkal / Katrin Keym Programme Department Dorit von Derschau / Eva Maria Gauß / Anita Kerzmann / Antonia Lahmé / Annett Meineke / Dr. Lutz Nitsche / Uta Schnell

Administration

Steffen Schille / Margit Ducke / Maik Jacob / Steffen Rothe / Kristin Salomon / Kristin Schulz

Contributions and Controlling Anja Petzold / Ines Deák / Anne Dittrich / Susanne Dressler / Marcel Gärtner / Andreas Heimann / Doris Heise /

Secretary’s Office

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

Illustrations Andree Volkmann

Editorial staff Tinatin Eppmann / Diana Keppler

Translations by Robert Brambeer

Design cyan Berlin Production hausstætter herstellung except pp. 18 19 by Rebecca Garron

Circulation 4.000 Copy date 10 February 2009 and pp. 25 26 by Imre Goldstein

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.