ISSUE 04
SUMMER 2017
LOLAMAG.DE
+ Yony Leyser explains the beauty of examining life through film Microdosing and how some Berliners selfoptimise with LSD Mohammad Abu Hajar on making music in exile Notes of Berlin Sara Neidorf Pinball in Berlin Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor 20 Years of Melt Festival Käthe Kollwitz The Battle of Mosul Julia Bosski
MODERAT AN INSIDE VIEW OF THEIR RAD KINGDOM
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10+ Commissioned Works by ABRA / Abu Hajar & Jemek Jemowit / Andreas Dorau / Balbina / Circuit des Yeux / Darkstar & Cieron Magat / Evvol Fishbach & Lou de Bètoly / Grandbrothers / Hendrik Otremba »Typewriter-Klangwelten« / How To Dress Well & Jens Balzer / Henryk Gericke »Too Much Future« Romano / Steven Warwick / »Sticker Removals – The Visual Anthropology of the Hype Sticker« 70 + Concerts, DJ-Sets, Talks and Movies by Acid Arab / Alex Cameron Alexis Taylor / All diese Gewalt / Andrra / Anna Meredith / ANNA VR / Arab Strap / AUF Barbara Morgenstern / Bunch of Kunst / Boiband Christine Franz & Simone Butler / Cristian Vogel / Daniel Meteo / David Laurie & Simon Price / Decadent Fun Club Emel Mathlouthi / Erobique / Friends of Gas / Gaika / Gudrun Gut / Happy Meals / Hello Psychaleppo / Idles / Iklan feat. Law Holt / Islam Chipsy & EEK Jacaszek Jakuzi / Jeff Özdemir, F.S Blumm & Friends / Jessica Pratt / Lady Leshurr / La Femme / Lenki Balboa / Let’s Eat Grandma / LeVent / Liars / Little Simz / Lucidvox Manuela / Masha Qrella / Michelle Blades / Miss Natasha Enquist / Monika Werkstatt / Noveller / Oligarkh Oranssi Pazuzu / Paul Williams, Rob Young & Rob Curry Piano Wire / Prairie / Riff Cohen / Ritornell / Rouge Gorge / Shirley Collins / Sophia Kennedy / Smerz / Strobocop / Soft Grid / Tasseomancy / Throwing Shade Tobias Bamborschke / T.Raumschmiere / Young Fathers and many more …
23 – 25 August 2017 Kulturbrauerei Berlin pop-kultur.berlin
Summer 2017
Editorial
A YEAR IN THE LIFE.
H
ere we are, one year on. It’s been a rollercoaster ride of emotion and thrills. I’m going to turn this editorial letter into a long list of gushing thank yous, because the truth is that without the amazing hard work, dedication, creativity, talent and love of all the people you can see on the masthead, LOLA simply wouldn’t exist, and everything that’s happened in last year wouldn’t have happened. Take Marc Yates, our esteemed Editor, for example. If only you could see the amount of graft, toil and expertise Marc puts into making sure each issue of this magazine is the best it can possibly be. His attention to detail always amazes me, as does his capacity to tolerate my crazy ideas. The title of Associate Editor doesn’t do Alison Rhoades justice. Alison has provided her expertise and support to every area of LOLA, and her contributions are phenomenal. Every piece you read is improved by her touch, and so many of the editorial concepts are the result of her work. Linda Toocaram deserves a special mention for always being an absolute rock
Publisher & Editor In Chief Jonny Tiernan Executive Editor Marc Yates Associate Editor Alison Rhoades
of a Sub Editor, for working to our insane deadlines and for schooling us in the art of perfect grammar. A huge shout out for Stephanie Taralson, who goes above and beyond her role as contributor to help with editing and proofing. Maggie Devlin has also become a big part of LOLA since we met two issues ago, and her editorial contributions are completely invaluable. For the writers, I have to single out Alex Rennie, who has contributed something incredible to every single issue, and who always throws himself full-force into each article he writes. There have been so many great features written this last year, so huge respect and thanks go to Stuart Braun, Emma Robertson, Hamza Beg, Ryan Rosell, Dan Cole, Anna Gyulai Gaal, Jack Mahoney, Gesine Kühne, Alexander Darkish, Jessica Reyes Sondgeroth, Nadja Sayej, Jana Sotzko, Hanno Stecher and Jane Fayle. As for the visual impact of the magazine, I have to give the biggest thanks to Robert Rieger and Viktor Richardsson. They have both helped to shape the visual identity of LOLA in amazing ways, and are a joy to work
Photographers Soheil Moradianboroujeni Shane Omar Viktor Richardsson Robert Rieger Justine Olivia Tellier Illustrator Patricia Tarczynski
Writers Hamza Beg Stuart Braun Erika Clugston Maggie Devlin Gesine Kühne Alex Rennie Ryan Rosell
with. Of course, endless thanks to all the photographers who have contributed to the magazine: Marili Persson, Justine Olivia Tellier, Julie Montauk, Zack Helwa, Fotini Chora, Soheil Moradianboroujeni, Roman Petruniak, Shane Omar, Tyler Udall and David Vendryes. Outside of the magazine, an enormous thank you has to go to Allan Fitzpatrick for designing and continuing to develop the LOLA website; it’s a thing of beauty. Also to our Editorial Assistant Erika Clugston for the endless help, especially with managing our social media presence and increasing the office smile count immeasurably! For all of the help in running our events, Emma Taggart has to get a special shout out. Finally, thanks to everyone who has supported us to date – BIMM Berlin, BRLO Beer, Crazy Bastard Sauce, Garvey Studios, Goethe Institute, Melt! Booking, Mobile Kino, Our/Berlin Vodka, Puschen Concerts, Studio 183 and Universal Music. And of course, thanks to everyone who has been featured in the pages of LOLA. You are the reason we do what we do. Our immigrants’ love of Berlin shines on. Jonny
PR & Events Emma Taggart Special Thanks Alex Brattig Sven Iversen Ben Jones Ann Kristin Sarie Nijboer
Sub Editor Linda Toocaram
LOLA Magazine Blogfabrik Oranienstraße 185 10999 Berlin For business enquiries jonny@lolamag.de For editorial enquiries marc@lolamag.de For PR & event enquiries emma@lolamag.de
Published by Magic Bullet Media Cover photo by Robert Rieger Printed in Berlin by Oktoberdruck AG – oktoberdruck.de Summer 2017
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Photo by Robert Rieger
Contents 04. berlin through the lens
Notes of Berlin “What are people searching for? What are they complaining about? What have they lost? It’s an insight into everyday life in Berlin, but it’s not something that’s written in your typical tourist guide.” 08.
local hero
Sara Neidorf “I think it’s really important to have people in your community who inspire you, and who you can look to as somebody who knows their shit.” 12. Yony Leyser
“When you make a documentary it’s like writing a memoir. You’re shaping a reality through a very big lens.” 16. Pinball in Berlin
“As the day wears on, cries of “Scheiße!” can be heard across the room.”
20. cover story
38. 20 Years of Melt Festival
Moderat “We don’t yet know when we will continue with Moderat, and we also can’t say if. So this Berlin concert will be like the end of an era!”
“There was a couple climbing on the crane at the Gemini Stage, on the very top of it, like 30 metres high, fucking.” 40. Käthe Kollwitz
26. Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor
“The community really keeps me going: just when I feel like I’m ready to leave or move on, this incredible community is like ‘Wait, no, we’re here.’”
“In 1943 she evacuated Berlin, shortly before her apartment was destroyed in a bombing that claimed much of her life’s work.” 42. dispatches
The Battle of Mosul “Too much is going wrong in this war, and too many photos are showing that to the world.”
30. Microdosing
“There’s definitely something major happening right now. I think these drugs will play a key role in the future, in psychiatry and other fields of medicine.” 34. Mohammad Abu Hajar
44.
the last word
Julia Bosski “Call a friend, go for some champagne and I’m back in the game.”
“I won’t accept going back to Syria as a humiliated person. I would only go back as a free person.” Summer 2017
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Berlin Through The Lens
Notes of Berlin
BERLIN THROUGH THE LENS
EXPLORING OUR PEN AND PAPER CITY WITH NOTES OF BERLIN words by Marc Yates
Whether fluttering in the breeze or streaked with running ink in the rain, Berlin’s handwritten posters, ads, announcements and notes are part of the fabric of the city – a sticky taped, pasted up, stapled staple of our urban landscape. They are everywhere. But why is it that such a lo-fi means of communication continues to thrive in the digital age, and what does it tell us about the people we share our city with?
J
oab Nist is in the seventh year of running Notes of Berlin, a website that seeks to answer these questions while archiving and paying homage to the expressions of frustration, anger, love, humour and desire left by Berliners on every available surface. What started as a blog has since become two books, a popular annual calendar, and Joab’s full-time job. We meet with Joab to talk about the motivation behind the project and the fascination with public proclamations that keeps it going. What was the inspiration behind Notes of Berlin? I was always taking photos, especially in places I’d never been before. Not wanting to take pictures of the typical tourist sites – I was curious about discovering the residential and industrial areas. That’s something I did when I came to Berlin as well. In the beginning I was very curious, as it was new. But the curiosity didn’t go away, so I often walked around and took pictures of anything that, for me, was typical of Berlin. The written notes all around the city were something I hadn’t seen anywhere else in that quantity. They 4
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became some sort of treasure for me. When you are new to Berlin, you want to discover how the people are here: what do they think about, what’s on their minds? It could’ve been that a note was very creative, very angry, very political, romantic, maybe lonely – everything that came to mind when I was thinking about Berlin. What are people searching for? What are they complaining about? What have they lost? It gives an insight into everyday life in Berlin, but it’s not something that’s written in your typical tourist guide. It’s completely unfiltered. It’s the truth, and to some extent you can identify with a situation that may have happened. So I tried to find as many notes as I could, but it’s not so much a matter of time as a matter of being at the right place at the right time. That’s when the idea came to document as many as possible, to really capture the character of the city, to style a project that everyone could contribute to by sending in the notes they see. What is it about the notes that people find so compelling? It’s definitely not only one thing. The main thing I think is that a lot of the topics that you
Notes of Berlin
Top left: “Lost dog: on February 28th around 15:30pm, our dog boarded the M13 tram at Schönhauser Allee without me. Who saw this happen and can help us find him? He responds to the name ‘Baader’, has a chip and a heart condition, and hobbles on the right hind leg.” Top middle: “CAREFUL. OLD MAN SPITS FROM BALCONY.” Bottom left: “PISS HERE ONE MORE TIME AND I’LL SHIT IN YOUR MOUTH!” Bottom right: “Elevator doesn’t work, you’ll have to walk, eh!!!” Previous page, right: “In my darkest drunken hour of the night on Friday, you carried me home up to the third floor – that was definitely no fun. For that, lovely French girl, THANK YOU!”
find in the notes are things that every one of us faces each day. Your neighbour is having loud sex; your mail is not getting delivered; someone throws garbage in front of your house; your bike gets stolen; you have a political opinion you want to express; you saw someone in the U-Bahn that you want to see again; you’re searching for a flat. If you live in a city, you experience all of these things to some extent, so it’s very easy to identify with the people who write these notes because it’s someone just like you and me. Another reason people like to follow the notes is because they are from Berlin. It’s more interesting than it would be if they were from Frankfurt or Hamburg, for example. Also, if you were to go to Hamburg, Munich, Cologne or wherever, you wouldn’t find these kinds of notes. They’re not there. Why do you think this form of communication is so widely used in Berlin? It’s just normal for the people living in Berlin that you make use of this form of communication. It just fits
Berlin Through the Lens
somehow. I think it’s not surprising that people in Berlin like to express what they think. They started on the Berlin Wall, you have graffiti, street art, urban gardening, all movements where people are taking part in creating the cityscape. I did a test four or five years ago in Munich. I stuck some creative notes around the subway stations and I saw people taking them down, without reason, just because they thought they didn’t fit. But besides the cityscape, you need the people. You need a certain clash of cultures, of nationalities, to create the situations that result in the notes. Do you find common themes among the notes that you think are particularly ‘Berlin’ in nature? There are some notes that you can easily assign to some districts: things that children lose, or some really fucked up things that happen in Wedding, more international things that happen in Neukölln and Kreuzberg. But when it comes to the themes, there are main topics that you can identify in the notes: neighbours, sex, stealing, Summer 2017
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Berlin Through the Lens
dirt, noise, love, the search for flats, bicycle theft, packages that don’t get delivered… These things are so relatable. Do you think you could use the notes to create a profile of the typical Berliner? [Laughs] I was actually planning to do a little story based on real notes and how a day or a week in Berlin unfolds. So, you wake up because your neighbour is being noisy, you find that your bike has been stolen, you lose your wallet on the way to the U-Bahn, where you see someone who you want to see again, you spend your day searching for a new apartment… it’s the everyday life of people living here. What you’re capturing is such a deeply personal view of the city, and what it really means to live here. You just can’t make it up. And even if this form of communication is beginning to disappear, people have sent in 18,000 or 19,000 notes over the last few years. It’s an archive that will never really go away. Do you write notes yourself? Yeah. I found my first apartment through writing a note. I wrote a note and stuck it around certain streets where I wanted to live, and two days later some artist called me and told me I could live in his apartment for the next year. Also, some years ago I met a girl in a club. We walked to the tram station together but I didn’t ask for her number; maybe I was too shy [laughs]. So
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Notes of Berlin
I wrote a note because I wanted to see her again. I knew where she lived because she told me where her tram station was, so I stuck 20 or 30 notes around the station and she called the next day. You had an exhibition recently, a room in temporary art space THE HAUS - Berlin Art Bang. Tell us about that. Something I always wanted to do was to have a room completely covered with notes that I printed out. I covered the ceiling, the walls and the floor with the best of the last six years. I have done certain exhibitions but not such creative ones as this, and it’s a very nice feeling. I spent sometimes one or two hours in the room watching people – I don’t usually get to see my audience so it was a great motivation. It makes you happy to see that you are making people happy. I would like to continue more with the exhibition stuff, the material is there. Apart from potentially more exhibitions, what’s next for you? I’m planning to do another photo book, but it will be made with quality paper and design in mind. Of course it’s way more expensive to produce that kind of book, so it won’t be an amazing commercial project, it will address a different audience.
Once you know about Notes of Berlin, it’s impossible not to notice them everywhere. Contribute your finds to the project at notesofberlin.com
Top left: “Calling the cops because of loud music???? How pitiful!!! Move to Charlottenburg if you want quiet!!!!” Top right: “Doorbell is defective! Either call, yell, or go home!” Bottom left: “Optimist seeks 2-room flat for themselves and their daughter, up to 400€ all included.” Bottom middle: “To the two ‘fucking-acrobats’ in the building. It would be fantastic if you would close the window during your nightly yodelling practice and not tyrannise the entire neighbourhood. It makes us sick that we’re constantly being ripped out of our sleep by your howling and all the residents have to close their windows, just because your ‘openair tournament’ fills the whole courtyard. Screwing is not an Olympic discipline and your nightly presentations won’t be greeted with thunderous applause.”
Berlinstagram
Berlin Through the Lens
Summer 2017
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Local Hero
Sara Neidorf
LOCAL HERO
SARA NEIDORF EMPOWERING WOMEN IN MUSIC As a musician, drum teacher and film festival organiser, Philadelphia-born Sara Neidorf has been on a mission to improve Berlin’s cultural landscape for women and genderqueer individuals since she landed here in 2012. We meet in her drum studio, a black box tucked away behind a carpenter’s workshop on Sonnenallee. We’re a little early, and as she coaches her student through Black Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’, we notice how quiet, poised, and watchful Sara is – the kind of teacher who cares about more than mere instruction. She’s a mentor.
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Sara Neidorf
Local Hero
« MY ENTIRE STUDENT BASE IS FEMALE OR GENDERQUEER. THAT’S WHY I DO THE WORK I DO. »
words by
Maggie Devlin photos by
Viktor Richardsson
T
he lesson finishes with Sara’s student telling us we should check out her band’s first show. Her confidence warms the heart and is precisely why Sara is so important in a scene where women often struggle to get ahead.
on the same page: we all just want to express something, to communicate with each other, and I think doing that on a musical level is really refreshing. So I hope I can pass that on; that ability to express yourself outside the verbal realm.
Was teaching drums part of the plan when you moved here? I’ve been teaching since I was 17. My school didn’t really have a music department; there was no drum set on campus. So I convinced the dean’s office to purchase one in exchange for me giving free drum lessons. Then I came here, and it’s really all I’ve done, steadily. Teaching drums is the job I know best and that I’ve done for the longest.
What would you like to see change for women in Berlin’s music scene? Is the future on your mind? Of course, of course it’s on my mind. My entire student base is female or genderqueer. That’s why I do the work I do. I want there to be more female musicians, I always want it to be better. I found a couple of really important role models when I was learning the drums as a teenager. Having them around was essential to feeling motivated, encouraged and welcome to learn as a drummer. I think it’s really important to have people in your community who inspire you, and who you can look to as somebody who knows their shit. At least for me it was.
What do you think your students get from learning drums? With my younger students, I can definitely tell that they love being loud. It seems to be really liberating for them. They get their earphones and they’re like, [mouths screaming, mimes drumming]. That’s usually always the first five or ten minutes, just letting them get that out of their system without too much structure. After that, I encourage them to start simple things, and we keep going with that for as long as it’s fun. I think they have a lot of fun having the freedom to make unstructured noise and just be kind of aggressive. Iron Man The song took it’s name from vocalist Ozzy Osbourne’s comments upon first hearing the main riff, as he said it sounded “like a big iron bloke walking about.” It later earned a place on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and VH1 named it the greatest heavy metal song ever.
And what do you get from teaching? I personally love the drums so much, so spending all day surrounded by them is a pleasure for me. I like knowing I can pass on that passion to someone else, because it’s such a satisfying way to express yourself; it’s non-verbal. We struggle with verbal communication all the time, so I think music is such a great escape from miscommunications and missteps. We’re all
You seem really invested in Berlin’s musical landscape. How did you come to be here? I was here as an exchange student for a semester and I really fell in love, not just with Berlin, but with so many different things about the city. I found some people I connected with in the music scene, but my main thing was the underground cinema culture. I encountered the Queer Film Club, which I now help to run. And there were all these awesome film festivals, I was really impressed with them; how they had such a rebellious and odd spirit. I was inspired by that, and now I’m running one! Yes! So, tell us about Final Girls Film Festival. It’s a festival dedicated to horror films made by women. We’re in our first year, but already on Summer 2017
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Local LocalHero Hero
Sara Neidorf
our second festival, because when we opened up our call for submissions for the first we received over 400. For the second festival, we have XX, which is a horror anthology with four female directors; Karyn Kusama, Roxanne Benjamin, Jovanka Vuckovic and St. Vincent, which is pretty rad. We also have an art exhibition and a couple of talks. I’m going to give one with my mom about ‘horror hags’ – these huge Hollywood stars who fell from grace and in their older years couldn’t get any serious roles. They were just booked in B-horror movies, basically, and turned into a spectacle for being middle-aged – a horrific, ageing woman. You’re also in a band, Choral Hearse. Yes, my doom metal band. Half of our songs I wrote as a teenager. I came up with a full album of material that I had written the guitar, drums and some bass parts for, and searched high and low for awesome female musicians in Berlin. I didn’t even have the intention to start a band with it, but then this friend had told the singer, Liaam, that I had some music and she was like, “Oh cool! I’ll be in a metal band.” We started as an acoustic duo: acoustic folk metal – that was fun! Eventually we expanded and now we’re a full band.
Horror Hags Notable horror hags include Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, whose performances in 1962’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? are lauded as the beginning of the sub-genre of horror known as psycho-biddy, or hagsploitation.
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« I THINK MUSIC IS SUCH A GREAT ESCAPE FROM MISCOMMUNICATIONS AND MISSTEPS. » You’re a well-known face on the music scene, and visible as a champion of female musicianship… Wait until you see me play guitar with Choral Hearse. [Laughs] How much do your projects intersect with the queer and feminist scenes? The film festival more directly, you could say. The music, I mean, in terms of the content, not in any obvious way. But all four of us in Choral Hearse are queer. I don’t want to be a ‘female drummer’, just a drummer, but I’m okay with being a female drummer, I don’t get angry with being designated as such. It is, in many ways, also a shortcut for finding each other – if a band is playing I want to know if they have a female drummer, ‘cause I’ll go and see them. It would be, of course, wonderful if every show that you went to had a female
drummer in it. If it was three bands and definitely one had a female drummer, yeah, that would be ideal, but how many shows have you been to where all you see on stage is white men? Most of the shows I’ve ever been to. What’s been your high point in music to date? My favourite thing is always practising the music. For me that’s the high point. Shows are great, but I get the true high when I’m just focusing on the music in the practice room. What can we do to support female musicians in Berlin? Support your friends who are trying to earn their living with music. Keep them in mind for music jobs or creative jobs in general. Share their events on social media. Also, it’s really important to let them know you appreciate what they do. We all really thrive on validation. Buy their music. Buy their CDs. Go to their shows. Make them feel seen and acknowledged and appreciated for what they’re doing.
Follow the Final Girls Berlin Film Festival at facebook.com/finalgirlsberlin and listen to Choral Hearse at soundcloud.com/ choralhearse
Our Summer Negroni by
Summer 2017
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Queer and Now
Yony Leyser
TRANSGRESSION, DESIRE, REVOLUTION: DIRECTOR YONY LEYSER ON BREAKING RULES Director Yony Leyser is as curious as he is warm. A born interviewer, he poses as many questions as he’s asked, and delights in little idiosyncrasies on the Neukölln streets that he walks down each day: the grimy sex shop, the fishmonger, the tiny hut at the entrance to a car park on Karl-Marx-Straße. “I’ve always wanted to rent this as my office,” he laughs. “Wouldn’t that be great?”
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Yony Leyser
P
erhaps it’s this fondness for the incongruous that contributes to the power of his work. In his films, transgression and desire act as catalysts for countercultural revolutions, be it through a vibrant portrait of Beat Generation icon William Burroughs in his 2010 documentary William S. Burroughs: A Man Within or explorations of identity and queer underground in 2015’s Desire Will Set You Free. Both films exhibit a profound interest in people upsetting the system, driven by passion, paradox, art and community. “When you make a documentary it’s like writing a memoir,” says Yony. “You’re shaping a reality through a very big lens. People think documentary is like a photograph of something, when in actuality it’s more like a painting.” Yony was born in DeKalb, Illinois and went on to study at California Institute of the Arts and The New School in New York. “Before I was making movies I was an anarchist; I was an activist,” he explains. “But being an activist was too didactic. I had too much humour and I figured art was a more effective and fun way to do it.” The art of filmmaking in particular allowed him to roll all his passions into one: “I was always interested in writing and journalism and documenting, photography, theatre, and I figured film kind of encapsulates everything. It’s such a powerful medium.” A Man Within happened almost by accident, as great works of art often do. After making an art piece at CalArts criticising the dean of students and illegally using her signature, Yony was given the option of either facing prosecution or taking a leave of absence. So, he moved to Lawrence, Kansas planning to make a documentary on counter-culture. Coincidentally, Lawrence was William Burroughs’ home for the final
years of his life. Gradually, Yony made friends with Burroughs’ friends, and eventually the film evolved into a portrait of Burroughs himself. Burroughs was a fascinating subject: a gun-toting, cat-loving, queer junky who shot his wife in the head and made an unprecedented mark on literature. Making a film about such a largerthan-life icon was no small feat. However, Yony managed to successfully marry the enigmatic persona with the conflicted man behind it. Only 21 at the time, his audacity, talent and persistence got him interviews with Burroughs’ lovers, friends and contemporaries from the fields of art, literature and music. “His friends wanted to talk about him,” says Yony. “It was this ripe subject.” Making the film allowed Yony to honour the man whose writing had had such a profound influence on both him and the queer community at large. “I liked that he was the first to break the rules,” he says. “I always felt like someone who didn’t fit into society and I just was kind of imagining someone who was this outcast, who was queer and didn’t fit in, and was rebellious and created his own realities, and did it at a time when no one had ever done it before. Genet too, all these kinds of people paved the way for the subcultures that I took part in.” The result is stunning. A Man Within weaves together footage and anecdotes of a long and astonishing life riddled with joy, lust, addiction, pain, tragedy and poetry. Grainy footage of Burroughs’ face stares you down as his growly voice recites his own erotic and abject verses in the perfect cadence of a poet. The film splices together never-before-seen footage from Burroughs’ life with interviews with punks, poets and counter-cultural greats including John Waters, Patti Smith,
Queer and Now
words by
Alison Rhoades photos by
Robert Rieger
DeKalb, Illinois The city was named after decorated German war hero Johann de Kalb, who died during the American Revolutionary War. Other notable people from DeKalb include model and actor Cindy Crawford, author Richard Powers, and the inventors of barbed wire. Summer 2017
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Queer and Now
« I’M SICK OF SEEING OR HEARING STORIES OF WHITE, HETEROSEXUAL COUPLES DOING BORING, MIDDLE-CLASS SHIT. » Iggy Pop, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. Icons of the Beat and punk movements − the artists, the outcasts, those who upset social norms – talk about their friend and hero with tender conviction, scraping together memories as if trying to sort out who indeed the ‘man within’ really was, once and for all. The point is probably that we’ll never know. But that’s the beauty of examining a life through film: you realise just how complex humans actually are, how riddled with contradictions. Yony’s next film, Desire Will Set You Free, is part feature film, part documentary, and full-on love letter to Berlin. At once a great departure from his previous film and a natural next step, it portrays the city in all its poor, sexy glory. The film follows American writer Ezra and Russian escort Sasha on a fast-paced ride through Berlin’s hedonistic queer underground. It is a study in dualities: Ezra (played by Yony himself) is an American of Palestinian and Israeli heritage, Sasha is a man discovering that he’s a woman, and their friend Cathrine is a bisexual radical obsessed with Nazi paraphernalia. It invokes the contradictions of Burroughs, and plays with Berlin’s divided past by depicting characters at war with themselves, who are two things, or everything all at once. Yony was eager to change gears and do something new, despite the success of his previous film. “The system tells you to do the same thing,” he says. But after years of working on a relatively straightforward documentary, Yony
Yony Leyser
wanted to depict his life in Berlin in a more non-traditional way: “I really wanted to experiment and use my training as a documentary filmmaker to tell a true story and use non-actors, but do it in a fictional approach and not a documentary approach. And it was so fun! Shooting Desire was so much fun. I feel like in a way, it documents just as well as it would if it was a straightforward documentary.” There is a clear storyline, but Desire is also characterised by its non-linearity, with long and beautiful, poetic sequences of the characters simply relishing in the pleasures of having bodies, exploring, and improvising. Yony says that the film was indeed “hugely improvised.” He continues: “When it wasn’t 100% improvised, the text was based on real events; like if it was about these two sex workers at this bar or whatever, then we would go to the bar the night before and hang out with those sex workers and then use that text the next day in the shooting.” The cast is also composed of “either real characters or a mix of real characters. There are only three actors in the film,” says Yony. “The rest are playing themselves.” In fact, the film was inspired by Yony’s encounter with a Russian man who came to Berlin to party before the Mesoamerican-predicted end of the world on December 21st 2012, and came out as a woman during her visit. Desire is like wandering into a dream where narratives don’t always make sense, choices are non-binary, and the landscape is governed, not by rationality or even morals, but by lust and invention. Yony cites Instagram as a visual inspiration for the film. It reads as such, swiping through colourful vignettes composed with seductive humour: Nina Hagen offering life advice from a trailer, trans-men and -women sharing their coming-out stories over mid-morning champagne in a sunlit squat. Late afternoons are spent naked with friends bathed in sun and glitter, exchanging philosophical musings and taking drugs. Night unveils the anachronous pleasures of Berlin’s dark underbelly, from Peaches performing in a plush breast-suit to leather daddies flexing their muscles for a cheering audience. “I actually thought it would be even more fractured,” Yony says. “And if I could do it again I would make it even more fractured. Just because I feel like this city is a dream and it’s about a dream and even in our daily lives we have ideas of what we want to do, like ‘I’m going to this interview and then I’m going grocery shopping or to a play’, and then little things happen in between, like you see someone on the street doing something weird or crazy. I think that’s also part of the Berlin atmosphere, at least for me: you’re going to a meeting and you walk through Görlitzer Park and you see people having sex in the bushes or whatever, and it’s like these moments of distraction.” He smiles: “That’s how life is; life doesn’t play out like it does in a Hollywood movie, you know?” Yony first came to Berlin in 2007 on a Fulbright scholarship. “I fell in love with it,” he says. “I was living in New York at the time and I was so stressed out and the quality of life here was so amazing. I
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Radical Gay Punk Zine J.D.s ran for eight provocative issues from 1985 to 1991, and is considered the catalyst that pushed the Queercore scene into existence. Founder Bruce LaBruce claims that the name initially stood for ‘juvenile delinquents’, but “also encompassed such youth cult icons as James Dean and J. D. Salinger.”
Yony Leyser
remember my first weekend out, waking up in a queer squat and having breakfast with 12 drag queens in the morning after some performance and I was just like, ‘I gotta figure out a way to live in this city.’ The subcultural landscape, especially the queer subcultural landscape, was really impressive to me. The use of public space, the idea of street culture and people of all backgrounds intersecting with each other on the street was very inspiring as an artist.” Does Desire have anything to say about Berlin? Yony pauses to think for a moment: “To me it did – to my version of Berlin. People can be very critical of that because there are a lot of versions of Berlin depending on who you are, and of course class and race and gender and cultural background and neighbourhood or whatever, they all play such big roles. Even in my building, for example, how differently all the neighbours live and what the city, the neighbourhood, or the building means to us is vastly different. So it’s hard to say that a film could represent the city, but what I thought was interesting was that Berlin had something very special that other
cities didn’t have: this kind of psychedelic, Club Kid nightlife, and then this kind of multicultural mixing pot of expats and people who came to the city not for work but for a cultural escape, or to live out their fantasies. I wanted to depict the world as parallel to the 1920s in Berlin − Christopher Isherwood’s ‘20s or early ‘30s.” In both A Man Within and Desire, the importance of community in queer culture is a noteable throughline. “Well, for a lot of queer people, a lot of ostracised people, the idea of a queer community is like creating your own family because a lot of people’s families don’t accept them and aren’t there for them,” explains Yony. “So they can’t relate to them and they can’t relate to a lot of society, so they say ‘let’s create our own tribal family’. It’s a very central theme in my new film, too.” Yony’s upcoming film, Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution, premieres at the Sheffield Documentary Festival this summer. “It’s a documentary about the movement that Bruce LaBruce and G.B. Jones started in the late ‘80s, a gay punk movement, and it started as a farce,” says Yony. “They got
Queer and Now
a bunch of straight punks drunk and took pictures of them and wrote these stories of all these bands in Toronto being gay in this radical gay punk zine, and people believed it. It was before the internet so people couldn’t really fact check, so the zine spread and all these bands started. It led to bands like Gossip, Peaches, The Knife; all these guys kind of got their start from this Queercore thread from the ‘90s.” The German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder once said: “Every decent director has only one subject, and finally only makes the same film over and over again.” Yony bristles a bit when asked what this subject might be for him, or indeed what drives him as an artist. He turns the question back around: “What do you see?” For a director driven by a quest to discover the hidden desires, passions and pleasures that spark creative communities and even radical progress, this is a fitting retort. But upon reflection, he offers this: “I like to tell stories from marginalised communities. I’m sick of seeing or hearing stories of white, heterosexual couples doing boring, middle-class shit, and that’s what 90% of films are. I think it’s quite boring and I think there are very interesting marginalised cultures that are doing interesting things that can also play out in film, and should have a place there, too.” Challenging norms and subverting the language of cinema to be more inclusive and more daring is a noble goal, and Yony is definitely up to the challenge. After all, as Burroughs himself once wrote: “Artists, to my mind, are the real architects of change, not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.”
You can find William S. Burroughs: A Man Within and Desire Will Set You Free on streaming platforms now. Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution will hit cinemas in Berlin later this year. Summer 2017
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Game On
Pinball
A NICHE PASTIME MAKES A TRIUMPHANT RETURN AT THE GERMAN PINBALL OPEN The back corners of arcades, basements, and bars across the globe are home to hundreds of thousands of pinball machines. Some lay forlorn as their intricate web of parts give out, one by one. Others flourish in the care of tender hands and function as though they have just come off the assembly line. With the same appreciation as a vinyl collector or analogue photographer, pinball players adore these kinetic wonders of human innovation. Pinball is not a game of chance from a bygone era; it’s a combination of art and skill, at once repetitive and full of infinite variations.
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Pinball
Game On
A
fter decades of use, every machine plays differently. Repairs have been made, pieces modified to fit into place; some parts simply cannot be fixed. Each table is a Sisyphean puzzle, with players endlessly competing against their own highest score. And like life itself, no matter how good your game is, the ball always drains in the end. Despite achieving popularity as an American phenomenon, the general consensus is that pinball was invented in western Europe during the end of the 18th century as a spring-loaded variant of the French game, Bagatelle. They called it Billard Japonais – Japanese Billiards. As it had nothing to do with Japan, the game’s title was a misnomer. In an ironic twist, however, the same game also evolved into the Pachinko machine, Japan’s most widespread and beloved form of gambling. 1940: New York City. Pinball machines were a largely mob-controlled business, and the press-hungry, bullish Mayor Fiorello La Guardia was sick of them. In an effort to combat what he saw as “mechanical pick-pockets,” La Guardia conducted prohibition-style raids on arcades and bars across the city. The ‘gambling machines’, as he saw them, were rounded up and smashed with sledgehammers, then dumped into the rivers. Major cities across the US followed suit, and in many places pinball became a criminal activity. Yet, despite its struggle, pinball lived on. Major companies continued to produce tables and distribute them to regions where the game had not been banned. In places like New York, pinball machines were imported on the sly, sitting in the back rooms of seedy porn shops and gambling dens. That was true until May 1976, when a young pinball fanatic named Roger Sharpe was brought to a Manhattan courtroom to play in front of the New York City Council. He was a good player, even rumoured to be the best. A writer for GQ and The New York Times, Sharpe gave an eloquent and logical explanation to the City Council about how pinball had evolved into a game of skill. To prove this he began to play ‘Eldorado’, one of two tables brought to court that day. The Council, keen to see a demonstration of such skill, requested that Sharpe play on the table that had been brought along as a backup. He was much less familiar with the second table, ‘Bank Shot’, having trained for his day in court on ‘Eldorado’. However, he stepped up to the second table and announced that the ball would pass through the middle lane of the playing field. Sharpe pulled back the metal plunger, launched the ball into play and sent it through the desired lane. He had called his shot, and the Council formally recognised pinball as a game of skill. Today, Sharpe looks like a typical dad. His formerly wild mustache has been trimmed, he’s neatly dressed, and wears glasses. At pinball conventions, however, he’s a living legend – known as the man whose bold demonstration of skill saved pinball. Following the City Council’s ruling, the machines became legal, and across the coun-
try pinball experienced a renaissance. At this point, pinball’s history starts to get pretty nerdy. Machines changed from electro-mechanical to solid-state, dot-matrixes were introduced, etc. To sum up: it was the 1980s. America’s arcades were packed. Capitalism and haircuts were out of control, and kids had coins to burn. Video games were already starting to encroach on the pinball market, which only fuelled the fire for pinball designers, who were trying to keep the game (and their jobs) alive. During the mid-1990s – like poets on their deathbeds racing to finish their magnum opuses – major pinball companies such as Williams and Bally produced the most technologically advanced and entertaining pinball machines ever made, but neither ‘Addams Family’ nor ‘Twilight Zone’ could stop the bubble from bursting. All of the companies, with one exception, eventually shut down or used their factories to produce a much more profitable coin-operated contraption: the slot machine. But pinball didn’t just lay down and die. Instead, it was martyred, and from the ashes of a once-thriving industry rose a new form of competitive play. Obsessive fans and barflies began putting their skills to the test as an official global ranking system, the International Flipper Pinball Association, emerged. Today, whether for amusement or for glory, players flock to pinball competitions all over the world. This brings us to Potsdam in 2017 for the 20th German Pinball Open.
words by
Ryan Rosell photos by
Soheil Moradianboroujeni
Pachinko Gambling for cash is illegal in Japan so Pachinko players win steel balls, which can be exchanged for prizes or tokens. Pachinko balls are engraved with elaborate identifiable patterns specific to the premises they belong to, and this has led some fans to start collecting the different designs.
Pinball by nature requires a stretch of the imagination. In ‘White Water’, the ball represents rafters heading through turbulent rapids as it descends a bumpy ramp. In ‘Banzai Run’, the player is a dirt biker ascending a treachSummer 2017
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Game On
Pinball
« CRIES OF “OOH” RIPPLE THROUGH THE GROUP AFTER EACH CLOSE CALL, AND PEOPLE BREAK INTO APPLAUSE BREAKS OUT AFTER PARTICULARLY NICE SHOTS. » erous mountain trail. Many of the games are wonderfully kitsch; they revel in their artificiality. So it makes perfect sense that this year’s German Pinball Open would take place in the Babelsberg Film Park, just down the road from the tryhard Quentin-Tarantino-Straße, in a building next to a giant mountain fabricated for a film set. Inside Metropolis Halle, lined up backto-back in neat rows, stand more than 160 pinball tables. Their dates of manufacture span half a century, with the newest tables not even available to purchase yet. Some of the best machines in the hall come from that golden period, before neon-clad kids started begging their parents for Super Nintendos instead of arcade money. Many of those tables were produced in runs of less than 2000. Playing a game on one of these machines is like finding a piece of treasure. For the the crowd on opening day, however, it’s business as usual. Vendors selling replacement machine parts set up shop and begin jovially cutting deals with returning customers. Rivals vying for the same position on the podium taunt one another. Fanatics inspect the tables, arguing over the advantages and disadvantages of replacing bulbs with LEDs. There are punks
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with mohawks and pinball patches sewn into their jackets, nostalgic grandfathers who stick to the slow-paced machines of the ‘70s, and old friends who play sitting on bar stools they brought from home. Some of the serious players are already here, with fingerless gloves and headphones blasting EDM; they have the same tense, sobre manner as professional poker players, seemingly taking no enjoyment from the game. This day is mostly for freeplay, and many of the serious players stay at home, saving their strength for the serious competition. To say the crowd is diverse would be misleading, but it is certainly a diverse group of middle-aged white men. In their heyday, pinball machines traditionally catered to a male audience, and the back glass of many machines sports the likeness of a voluptuous, scantily-clad woman. This is a sad, sexist truth about the game, but it has begun to change in recent years. As the day rolls on, a small but noticeable percentage of pinball-playing women turn up, turning more heads than even the highest scores. Without any major competition on the first day, it seems the pinballers are in for nine or ten straight hours of uninterrupted pinball. That’s until the German Pinball Association guest of honour strolls into the hall: Gary Stern. In 1999, the already-merged Data East/Sega Pinball was about to go under, as so many American pinball manufacturers already had. In a courageous move as president of the company, Stern bought the assets, rallied an A-Team of unemployed pinball designers and founded Stern Pinball, Inc. The tables they produced may not always have been the greatest, but with keen marketing techniques and a steely resolve, Stern weathered the roughest years in pinball history as the owner of the last surviving company, which manufactures new tables to this day.
EXTRA CREDIT: OUR PICK OF BERLIN’S HIGH-SCORING PINBALL SPOTS Logo Cafe Blücherstraße 61 This Kneipe is open 24 hours a day, so you can scratch that pinball itch whenever it comes. They’ve got the new ‘Ghostbusters’ table and cheap drinks, but no matter how rowdy things might get, a player’s concentration is respected above all else. Ron Telesky Canadian Pizza Dieffenbachstraße 62 This place gets it. Tasty pizza, good music, and ‘Medieval Madness’. Go have a slice and a ball on one of the best tables ever made. East Side Bowling Koppenstraße 8 This place is bar-sports heaven. In addition to bowling they have ping pong, poker tables, pool, arcade games, and five pinball tables. It’s the only place inside the Ring where you can find more than two or three tables in one spot. Flipperhalle Berlin Kleinmachnower Weg 1 This place is a game changer. It’s only open from 13:00 to 20:00 on Fridays and it’s in Zehlendorf, but the trip is so worth it. It’s €5 entry, and once you’re in you can play for free on all of their fifty tables. Plus, beers are €1. That’s a crazy deal. This is the cheapest way to fall in love with the game.
Pinball
Bird’s-eye View
On the second day of the tournament, competitive play begins. A separate section of the hall is opened and competitors are assigned to tables in groups of four. While a massive amount of skill is required to become a pinball champion, there is also an element of luck. Some people are assigned to a table they know intimately, others step up to a table cold. As the day wears on, cries of “Scheiße!” can be heard across the room. Dreams are crushed, and competitors are slowly whittled down in number until only four remain. The showdown between the final four takes place on the third day. A surprise selection of three tables is presented, and the winner is chosen based on the culmination of their scores on all three machines. This year’s selection includes the Stern hit ‘Ghostbusters’, a table that has widely instilled faith in the pinball community by proving that new machines can be as good as the classics. The next is ‘Medieval Madness’ from the 1990s, regarded as one of the greatest tables ever made. The last to enter the championship is ‘Domino’s Pizza’. This table, like most fast food, is pretty disappointing. The first of the finalists is Stefan Harold. He’s the oldest of the group but incredibly fast. He has the footwork of a featherweight boxer and his shoes dart back and forth under the table as he plays. Up next is young Roland Schwartz, hailing from Austria. He keeps a Swedish Pinball Championship hand towel tucked in his back pocket, which he uses to methodically wipe down the table and his hands before every ball. Next comes Martin Hotze, who won the German Open in 2015 and is a favourite with the crowd. Last is Armin Kress. He’s young and in decent shape, and when his ball inevitably drains, Armin is the only player not to become visibly upset. He just smiles modestly, steps back from the table, and waits for his next turn. A crowd of around 30 gathers around the finalists as they progress from table to table. Cries of “ooh” ripple through the group after each close call, and applause breaks out after particularly nice shots. None of the players do too well on the ‘Domino’s Pizza’ table. In the end, age and experience beat youthful enthusiasm, as the final game is between Harold and Hotze. The match comes down to the very last ball, but Hotze needs only a few flips to restate his position as German champion. Trophies are disseminated, awkward handshakes are exchanged and the crowd dissipates. The machines are carefully packed away by their owners and prepared for long journeys home. The crowd leaves the hall, many of them having played pinball for three consecutive days. The sun is bright, but it’s not flashing ‘EXTRA BALL’, so no one pays it much attention.
Reading about pinball is not nearly as fun as playing it. Gather your spare change and check out our picks of the top spots in Berlin for a beer ‘n’ ball. Summer 2017
KEVIN MORBY
PEAKING LIGHTS
02.07.17, Quasimodo
12.07.17, Berghain Kantine
OF MONTREAL
ULRIKA SPACEK / THE MEN
20.07.17, Festsaal Kreuzberg
03.08.17, Berghain Kantine
BEACH FOSSILS
NADIA REID / MOLLY BURCH
06.09.17, Musik & Frieden
CHASTITY BELT
17.09.17, Berghain Kantine
CHAD VANGAALEN
13.09.17, Berghain Kantine
WAXAHATCHEE
28.09.17, Musik & Frieden
PRIESTS
22.10.17, Berghain Kantine
26.10.17, Urban Spree
MOUNT EERIE
MAC DEMARCO
05.11.17, Silent Green
08.11.17, Astra
Spring 2017
TICKETS & INFO: PUSCHEN.NET
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Cover Story
MODERAT
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Issue Four
Moderat
words by
photos by
Gesine Kühne
Robert Rieger
This summer, Berlin loses one of its most iconic acts to an undetermined hiatus. As Moderat begins what could be their final festival tour, we join them and talk transitions: past to present, and urban sprawls to garden walls.
M
oderat: the chimeric brainchild of techno giants Modeselektor and Apparat. Although their name means ‘moderate’ in German, their sound is anything but: sombre and sophisticated, exciting and often painfully lush. Moderat is a play on words, on genre, on sound and vision, and on what it means to be a live band. By definition a supergroup, the Berlin-based producers wear their status as ambassadors of the city with a casual air. They smile and cajole off stage, and let their music do the serious talking. Like many of Berlin’s closely-cherished heroes, they are of the city but not from it, hailing from small-town Germany and finding their futures in the grimy basement parties of the late ‘90s. Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary’s Modeselektor is all punch, sex, grit and grime. A cross-section of ‘90s boom bap, stuttering vocal samples and bass drops that can feel like G-force training, as euphoric synths wrench the listener in all directions. It’s a union of blissful paradox – where Modeselektor thumps, Apparat whispers. Sascha Ring’s soulful dream-pop delights the ear with vocals that walk the line between the acrobatic and the strained, on a tapestry of nimble beats. Apparat skirts the radio mainstream but always manages to keep things off-centre, cementing his place as one of music’s countercultural superstars. Moderat lives an amphibious existence between both sounds: all the sensitivity and intricacy of Apparat, delivered with the take-no-prisoners moxie of Modeselektor. It’s a cocktail that wins hearts across the globe, and last year sold out Berlin’s massive Velodrom in a matter of minutes. Make no mistake: this band is loved in this town, a fact that makes this a painful year for fans. On September 2nd, Moderat will take to the stage at Wuhlheide where they’ll say an indefinite Auf wiedersehen. Until then, they’ll court the summer festivals, filling parks and melting heads with their visually stunning live set. We join them on the road to Reims in the heart of provincial France, where they will headline La Magnifique Society. It’s a brief foray: a weekend getaway with a 14-hour drive each way. It’s a lot of distance to cover for a one-hour set, but it’s the kick-off for festival season, and with a further 28 shows to go, Moderat have more experience and grit than to quiver at overnight bus journeys, sleeping to the ambient hum of an engine a metre or so beneath their pillows. What is life on the road for Moderat? Backpacks with fresh underwear, packets of cigarettes and pressed baguettes from a sandwich toaster say ‘student digs’ rather than ‘club circuit celebrities’. Laughing, Szary insists that the toaster is one of the bus’s most valuable possessions: “A sandwich gets about 300% better when you grill it in a sandwich maker!”
Cover Story
Compared to the band’s early days, he has a point – a sandwich toaster is a step up. “In the very beginning, we drove ourselves and shared a hotel room,” says Sascha. The Moderat project began in 2002 – the trio writing their own software so they could jam together, since what they needed wasn’t available off-the-shelf. They produced their first EP the following year. Auf Kosten der Gesundheit (At the Cost of Health) emerged to a flood of positive reviews, but the title and subsequent six-year hiatus hinted at a trying time behind studio doors. Nevertheless, in 2009, Moderat released their first full-length record: a self-titled opus of post-minimal, club-ready hits. Trampolining off the success of the first EP, Modeselektor’s Hello Mom and Happy Birthday!, as well as Apparat’s collaborative LP, Orchestra of Bubbles with Ellen Allien, Moderat was an unquestionable success. Despite their decade-long success, Gernot, Szary and Sascha have managed to remain grounded, avoiding the tropes of inflated egos with characteristic nonchalance. They still leave their hotel rooms to explore the surroundings of their latest gig, be it a city or somewhere more remote. “I mean, I grew up in a village, kind of, so I always have a need for green,” Sascha says. “Previously, I satisfied that desire by motorcycling into the woods, for example. Now I’ve found something that fits my age better. I drive to my piece of land, to my garden.” All three members have bought land just outside Berlin where they’ve each built houses – Sascha’s, next to a pond; Gernot’s, near the open countryside. “I realised that my job is done all over the world, but 99.9% of everything happens in huge cities, so I don’t need to live in one any more,” Gernot says. “Back in the day, we destructively exploited our bodies,” he adds, explaining some of the reasons why the trio have turned away from urban living. “We only worked at night, then when we were done around five or six in the morning, we’d have another kebab and a beer and go to bed. We’d get up around two or three in the afternoon. We wasted so much time this way, but now we’re trying to optimise our lives. The environment we’re in and what’s in front of our door plays an important role; for example, no drunk tourists having the summer of their lives in Berlin.” Gernot continues, “That’s why the photos for LOLA were shot where we feel comfortable; where no one lives, where we don’t have to talk, and where no one recognises us. It happens a lot in the city: we go for a coffee, and all of a sudden we get a coffee for free because someone else offers to pay. That’s not bad, of course, but on the other hand you feel watched the whole time. Where we live now, north of Berlin, there is a little organic supermarket and they don’t care at all who shops there. They leave you alone,” he says, then laughs. “Unless you touch the vegetables.” As much as Gernot, Szary and Sascha love their newfound sanctuaries with their families, they equally love being on tour. “It is Tourlaub,” or ‘tour holiday’, Gernot says, smiling. “That’s the term our wives came up with. They don’t see touring as work.” But Sascha interjects, clarifying: “We wouldn’t call it Tourlaub, I mean, we are talking about sometimes playing every day for three weeks in a row. That really wears you out.” However, even on the road they manage to find a routine: “We have learned to live with a certain rhythm,” says Sascha. “During the day we wind down, and we still get very euphoric about our job on stage. It still gives us a huge kick.” Summer 2017
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Cover Story
Moderat
“We are touring professionals,” adds Gernot. “We toured as Modeselektor and Apparat before and during Moderat, and we know all forms of touring: as a band, as DJs with USB sticks, on buses, trains, planes, jets and boats. We haven’t had a helicopter yet,” he laughs. “When we get home the mode switches instantly because our kids take over, and they aren’t interested in what happened at Fabric, for example. Switching modes quickly is actually quite nice.” Szary agrees: “When I get home the first thing I do is I make myself some coffee. Then I go outside, drink it, and smoke a cigarette. Then I say, ‘Kids, come over, sit down on my lap, because Papi would like to explain to you what he has experienced.’ And after that, it is back to normal: clearing out the dishwasher…” In addition to giving them plenty to tell their children about when they return home, Tourlaub allows them to escape the routines of work, the record label, studio and family time, to travel with friends. And like friends, they listen carefully when any of the crew members have personal matters to talk about. “We are dependent on the crew,” Gernot explains. “They have to give 110% so we can deliver 120%. Trust and being nice to each other is essential.” “There’s no one in our crew who is just a worker,” Sascha adds. “They are all people we have known for ages. Most of them are part of the crew for exactly that reason. We grew together. We rarely have changes within the crew, and that’s important.” From the production manager to the technicians, the crew work with the kind of intimacy that comes from years of knowing each other. And Moderat is the fulcrum, the three characters creating the kind of balance needed to get through such punishing tour schedules. Sascha is the contemplative maverick who maintains the overview of production plans and costs. Szary pursues new interests and broadens his knowledge over coffee and cigarettes. His interest in foreign climes has made him the socalled travel minister, checking routes and researching hotels for the band. Then there’s Gernot, the cheeky, bright-eyed joker, who listens carefully and is able to parse out solutions to whichever obstacles present themselves. His demeanour and outgoing nature make him the perfect candidate for handling press and communication. Maintaining a jovial spirit isn’t always easy. Back on the bus, the clock reads half-past-midnight, and Sascha looks uneasy. “I’m really worried that I won’t get enough sleep,” he announces, sitting at the small table on the lower deck of the double-decker bus, a white nightliner with tinted windows. Christoph, the lighting technician, points silently towards a bottle of whiskey, but Sascha leaves the bottle untouched and goes to bed in the tiny bunk that’s only just long enough for his tall frame. He closes the curtain behind him with a bright ‘shink!’, the heavy piece of fabric creating something close to privacy. Sascha doesn’t like touring on buses. “I don’t sleep very well on them,” he mutters, from within his ersatz sanctuary. The next morning, we cross the Belgian border. Szary and Sascha are still sleeping, but Gernot is already on the task at hand, discussing the gig, now mere 22
Issue Four
“WE STILL GET VERY EUPHORIC ABOUT OUR JOB ON STAGE. IT STILL GIVES US A HUGE KICK.”
Moderat
Cover Story
Summer 2017
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Cover Story
Moderat
hours away. He’s reviewing the changes to the set, because as soon as the crew arrives at their destination, the trio will vanish into separate hotel rooms for hours of preparatory isolation. Hardened tour-bodies notwithstanding, the trip to Reims is taxing. After all those hours of travel, when nine-to-five office workers would call it a day, they get to work giving interviews, having final consultations with the production manager, and warming up their voices. At around midnight, Sascha is practising his high notes. They don’t come easy tonight; he’s coming down with a cold. Szary stares at the middle distance, focused. Quiet. “I’m not nervous,” he assures us. “Just very concentrated. I’m going over everything in my head.” It’s almost time for the headline act to go up. Out front, hungry fans wait for Moderat to start their set. As soon as the first notes of their intro can be heard, the whole crew gathers around the band. Everyone highfives each other, a long-practiced ritual. As they stand in their circle, Moderat and the crew are close-knit, tight as a fist. On their faces, appreciation and unquestioning readiness. Just seconds later, Gernot, Szary and Sascha vanish into the white fog that spills out from the wings. The crowd roars. Do they think about transitioning back to their respective projects? Switching between outfits can have its downsides. “After
the first album we went back Dave Gahan they released in the spring Depeche Mode have enjoyed to our own projects,” Sascha of 2016. They’re still touring, great success in Germany over explains. “And for me it clocking up 150 live shows the years. In 1988 they became one of the very few western was really hard to get back and more than one trip bands to ever play in the GDR to the work with Apparat, around the world. with an unannounced perforto be alone in the studio, That’s not to say the trio mance in Werner-Seelenbinder-Halle, East Berlin. because I really got used to aren’t relishing the joys of the dynamic between three the Moderat era. Gernot, people. So because of that experience we Szary and Sascha love to play, and every didn’t want to make the switch back again single time they approach the stage seekto Apparat and Modeselektor after II. It ing to “shred the audience,” as Gernot says. just took too much energy. The music “Like at our most recent gig at Coachella, world runs in phases. An album is a certain there were so many people and we were phase, and this one is coming to an end. still able to create something like a studio That means it will be the last chance to see atmosphere, where we didn’t feel watched, us for a while.” In fact, Modeselektor are where we all push each other to play even already in the studio again, eager to get better. It’s our little bubble. That’s why back to their techno roots. Sascha sometimes forgets to interact with “Moderat was planned as a recovery prothe audience, to get his Dave Gahan on,” ject from our individual ones,” Sascha tells he laughs. “We have something like an us the following day, everyone recovered electronic grandeur. I realised at Coachella from their high-energy set at the festival. that I don’t give a fuck how many people Gernot picks up Sascha’s thought: “And now there are. It works – still.” There are plenty more shows ahead of we have to recover from Moderat! We’re all the three musicians before they step onto clear about a hiatus for the time being. It the stage in Berlin for their final night of doesn’t have a set timeframe; we don’t yet the tour. The September 2nd gig will be a know when we will continue with Moderat, huge event in Berlin’s live music calendar. and we also can’t say ‘if’. So this Berlin concert will be like the end of an era!” Not only in terms of size – although the It’s time, they say, for Moderat to take Wuhlheide holds 17,000 people. The Berlin a pause. The trio didn’t take a break crowd’s energy is different. The audience following the release of II in 2013, touring is full of friends and long-term fans, so instead for two years and going straight it’s inevitably a unique experience for the into the studio again to record III, which band. “We were asked to play Lollapalooza, but we decided against it. To play Wuhlheide was always our dream,” says Gernot. “We want it to be a grand finale. We booked a support: Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force. Mark Ernestus is a legend. He’s the owner of the Hard Wax record shop. He’s a musical genius.” The home-crowd can also bring some nerves. “I find it uncomfortable sometimes,” says Sascha. “I get the feeling we’re being properly watched, because the audience knows us so well. The feedback in Berlin was always quite personal,” he adds. “But now I’m more relaxed, and it is nice to play in Berlin. Maybe that’s a sign of growing up, that I’m not afraid to play in my hometown any more.” “Berlin is unbelievably special!” adds Szary. “If it’s in front of 9,000 people, like last year at Velodrom – that was rad – or if it is in a small club in front of just 200, Berlin is always so intense. Berlin ist einfach unsere Heimat!” Heimat – the place where you feel you belong.
Get your tickets for the Berlin show by following the link at moderat.fm/live and follow the tour on Instagram with #teambadkingdom 24
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Moderat
Cover Story
“THE MUSIC WORLD RUNS IN PHASES. AN ALBUM IS A CERTAIN PHASE, AND THIS ONE IS COMING TO AN END.”
Wuhlheide The open-air stage in Bezirk Treptow-Köpenick was built for the occasion of the third World Festival of Youth and Students in the summer of 1951. It is the second-largest open-air stage in Berlin.
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Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor
BLACK IN BERLIN JESSICA LAUREN ELIZABETH TAYLOR’S CRUCIAL SALON
Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor has her feet firmly planted in multiple spheres. The artist-in-residence at District Gallery, Berlin, she works within the realms of both conventional and non-conventional theatre, but outside of that, she participates in a particular form of artistic activism. Having studied theatre in the United States, Jessica’s move to Berlin coincided with her growing interest in advocacy for people of colour. Issues of race, identity, and belonging are the materials of her work as a community organiser and artist. Under Jessica’s guidance, dialogue blossoms. 26
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Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor
words by
Hamza Beg photos by
Justine Olivia Tellier hair styling by
Tata Nuo
Ta-Nehisi Coates Coates’ second book Between the World and Me and his article in The Atlantic, ‘My President Was Black’, were both informed by his many interviews with Barack Obama and their differing philosophies on race in the US.
A
s we chat, Jessica speaks enthusiastically. Her tone is matter-of-fact and informed, a combination that makes it strikingly clear why she is a successful moderator for discussions. Black in Berlin is a salon that Jessica began in 2012 in order to challenge the mainstream German– English press on their mishandling of racial issues. That challenge has grown into a movement that empowers people of colour in the city and speaks to Jessica’s own personal journey. Jessica is part of a larger group of people inciting discussions on race in Berlin, although she admits: “I didn’t arrive and get involved, I accidentally got involved.” The catalyst was an article in a prominent Berlin-based magazine that used racially offensive terms in reference to the Afro-Deutsche community, such as ‘jungle fever’ and ‘from the bush’. Appalled, Jessica went directly to the source: “I went to a panel discussion with the editors of the magazine, but the panel was terrible; they talked over the Afro-Deutsche community. I was just really incensed that this was a liberal-left magazine’s take on race in Berlin. Afterwards, a group of us stayed and just chatted into the night. That’s when I started Black in Berlin.” Through this moment of collective frustration, Jessica discovered a critical need in the community here in Berlin. “In the UK and US we talk about race all the time, with our families, with our friends, our neighbours, but here people aren’t used to talking about race at all,” she says. Since the salon began, Jessica and the attendees of Black in Berlin have been discovering the benefits of having an open dialogue with each other about issues of race. As with the victims of discrimination of any kind, the space created for discourse has to be one in which the participants feel completely safe. In this case, this means that the guest speakers are always people of colour, and the ensuing discussions are ones that an audience composed primarily of people of colour feels encouraged to contribute to. But the demographics of the salons are slowly changing: “The salons at the beginning
Vital Debate
were 60% black and brown and, say, 40% white,” Jessica tells us. “But now we’re getting down to about 5% white.” That the number of non-white participants is increasing speaks to the welcoming environment, where demographics of the panel and community reflect those of the participants. Jessica speaks with meticulous clarity of how she constitutes ‘whiteness’. “When I use the term ‘whiteness’, I am referring to a concept of interlocking political and cultural systems,” she begins. “I like what the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has to say about whiteness: that it is a social construct, a fabrication. He says: ‘Whiteness and blackness are not a fact of providence but of social policy,’ though it is important to note that even if whiteness is an invention, it has very real repercussions. Something I always tell people at my salon is: if you’re bristled or made uncomfortable by the terms ‘whiteness’ or ‘white people’ then you have some unpacking to do.” The level of precision with which Jessica explains complex concepts is perhaps a product of her role in responding to the needs of her community. Her ability to distil identity politics into understandable terms is particularly refreshing in a time when many find the subject both difficult and confusing. Jessica concedes that when she came to Berlin, she didn’t have any knowledge of critical race theory, and it is clear that the salon has been a learning experience for her as much as for the participants. “It’s really amazing,” she continues. “I can say that unabashedly because it’s all about the community and the people who come and speak. It’s at least 40% regulars.” The issues that the salons are trying to tackle are not limited to the experience of racism. They are a place of celebration, of sharing thoughts on how to spread a positive message throughout society at large. While Jessica feels that “Berlin is decades behind,” in regards to how race is imagined by other Western, multi-ethnic societies, she also states that she’s “not yet exhausted or tired of explaining things to white audiences.” The salons themselves, however, are not set up for this kind of explanation, but as safe spaces of expression – where people can discuss why most German companies still require headshots on CVs, for example. The community surrounding the salon is making great strides. “Just last week I had to choose between Isaiah Lopez’s talk on what it means to be black, male and queer at Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz, and Natasha Kelly’s celebration of the life of May Ayim at the Hebbel on the same night. The community is just so rich now.” While the salons can be a place to simply let your voice be heard, they are also a space to begin learning or relearning how to articulate your experiences. Jessica’s contribution to the slow and steady march toward racial equality feels revolutionary, but she draws a line between the work of an activist and how she sees her role: “I’m not an activist, and I say that because activists, from what I see, are putting blood, sweat and tears into the movement. I’m an artist, so I’m working for the movement, but I’m also working in the arts context.” Summer 2017
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Vital Debate
Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor
« IN THE UK AND US WE TALK ABOUT RACE ALL THE TIME, BUT HERE PEOPLE AREN’T USED TO TALKING ABOUT RACE AT ALL. » Black in Berlin tackles topics that require subtlety, patience and a variety of viewpoints. The events usually last for two hours, although Jessica admits that this is often not long enough. A recent salon looked at the idea of a ‘new diaspora’ with intersectional perspectives on privilege, class, race and mobility. This style of nuanced and open public discussion is not only radical but also accessible, and often therapeutic for its audience. Here, the participants find themselves in a rare and welcoming space where they can begin to reckon with the trauma inflicted by the politics of race. Diversifying the group of literature- and arts-focused 20–40 year olds is a difficult task. Jessica tries to convince her Turkish and Afro-Deutsche neighbours to attend, but language can be a limitation. To tackle this problem, she encourages people to speak in their own language and finds translators to help out. Black in Berlin is always hosted in a different space. “I try not to have it in academic and art institutions too often, because I want it to have more of a kitchen-table feel,” Jessica explains. This seems to be the very heart of the project: the creation of a safe space in which those who have few places to turn to can
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be heard. “We work in majority-white spaces, we socialise in majority-white spaces and a lot of us are in relationships with a white person. A lot of people have told me that the salons are a bit like church and a lot of the time, these spaces can feel like coming home,” she continues. There’s a simple beauty in creating a homespace here – despite Berlin’s notorious transience – for people who feel that their very social existence is also transient. “Whiteness is so pervasive, it’s in all of us,” Jessica says when discussing the theatre scene in Berlin and finding her place in it. “Berlin has a long, rich history of alternative, progressive, radical theatre. The theatre I was seeing here in institutions, like the state theatre, was the most radical theatre I had ever seen in my life, and it still is,” she says. And yet the actors on stage were all white. Back in the United States where Jessica grew up, the stage was more diverse. She now cherrypicks the shows she will attend. “I also go in with the knowledge that I will be one of the only black bodies in the space. I just made a decision to stop going to majority-white spaces. I realise that I felt deeply uncomfortable, but more importantly exhausted by these spaces. Going to openings and being the only black person in the room, I always felt like a peacock. People were always looking at me, commenting, or touching me, my hair or my outfit.” Jessica’s experience of her own blackness, particularly as a child, has clearly informed her work in Berlin. “As I was growing up I was never black enough. I was always told that I talked like a white girl by the other black girls in my community. I went to predominantly-white schools and all of my extra curricular activities were also majority-white. All of my social community programmes were majority-black, and those were the spaces I didn’t feel welcome in,” she tells us. This early narrative is replete with experiences that impact not only Jessica’s work in the salon but also her ability to understand others. “That was particularly tough growing up because I also grew
Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor
up in a pro-black household,” she says. “My mum came in every year to teach Black History Month to my whole school, she started the first black book club in our town, but then I also had this part of myself that didn’t identify with being black because I was being rejected.” Even later at art school, both students and professors nullified her blackness because it did not quite fit the pervasive stereotype. She was frequently cast as ‘the fool’, a subversive character that comments on the play from the margins. They are often intelligent and witty characters – but it wasn’t until a black professor put on a ‘black play’ that Jessica was cast as a leading lady. With the complex interplay of institutional and inter-personal racism, Jessica’s move to Europe made perfect sense. “In Berlin, I was free from all gazes, and in terms of identity I felt that it was a place where I could start over and be who I wanted to be, because in the States there was a certain way to be black. “The American South is a very special place, it’s a place of warmth and family and bigotry and rampant, rampant unchecked racism, and backwoods and country roads and lawlessness,” Jessica says. Growing up around a certain amount of lawlessness in Florida seems good training for living in Berlin. Jessica points out that both places are built on swamps: “Berlin comes from the Slavic word for ‘swamp’. It’s a place where it is hard to find solid ground, and I think that speaks also to the people here.” It seems, however, that Berlin has stabilised Jessica in her beliefs and passions. She was on her way to the Jacques Lecoq School of Art and Mime in Paris when she first stopped over in Berlin, and never left. She schooled herself instead with alternative theatre in squats and abandoned warehouses. “I felt that it was my classroom,” she says. She plainly loves theatre, but her solid ground atop this marsh of a city is the community of people of colour: “The community really keeps me going: just when I feel like I’m ready to leave or move on, this incredible community is like ‘Wait, no, we’re here.’” Jessica’s next venture sits at the intersection of race and gender. It feels like a deeper, more specific iteration of the Black in Berlin series. She explains: “I’m starting a garden, incubation interview series called Muttererde, which actually means ‘topsoil’. I’m going to be interviewing other femmes of colour about their great-grandmothers while gardening, because I don’t know anything about my great-grandmother at all.” She clarifies that the only thing she does know about her great-grandmother is that she passed down her green fingers, inspiring the project’s gardening theme. “I started the garden a month ago,” she continues. “I go there every afternoon. I’ve always had plants in my house but a garden is something different, a really meditative place. We’ll start the interviews and filming in July and then have a screening in late August or early September.” Finding ever-innovative ways to offer marginalised people a space for expression, Jessica’s work invokes not only significance but also longevity. It is a transformational and representative style of social politics that offers a frame for marginalised experiences. She is in Berlin, not only to take all that the city offers, but also to give back what it so badly needs.
Keep up with Jessica and her upcoming projects on her website, thejessicastudy.com Summer 2017
Summer 2017
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High Times
Microdosing
T D E I S C T A
AN INSIDE LOOK AT THE MICRODOSING TREND 30
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Microdosing
High Times
Lysergic acid diethylamide – more commonly known as ‘LSD’ or ‘acid’ – is a drug that has long been affiliated with marathon benders, hippy culture and tie-dye visuals. Yet these associations are being completely overhauled by microdosing, the practice of taking tiny amounts of acid to boost creativity, productivity, and even deal with mental health issues such as depression. We talked with some of Berlin’s microdosers to find out how this traditionally recreational psychedelic substance is being put to use in an entirely new context.
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SD’s tumultuous history began in 1938, when it was first synthesised by Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman at Basel’s Sandoz Laboratories while he was trying to develop new circulatory and respiratory stimulants. In 1943, utterly by chance after accidentally ingesting the drug, he discovered its strong psychoactive qualities. Three days later, Hoffman intentionally took 250 micrograms (µg) of LSD, famously first feeling the buzz as he cycled home. The following half century saw LSD transform from a promising medication into a controlled substance. Numerous CIA-led experiments, the Vietnam War, a massive counter-cultural revolution in the 1960s and the subsequent 1971 United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Drugs resulted in LSD being denigrated as a harmful recreational drug, consumed en masse by vociferous hippies all looking to ‘turn on, tune in and drop out.’ Its apparent threat to the moral fabric of society was judged too grave, and most research into LSD ground to a halt. Today, LSD is strictly regulated around the world. In Germany, the drug is classified as an Anlage I substance. According to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, substances that fall into this category are defined as “narcotic drugs not eligible for trade or prescription.” Under Germany’s drug policy, or Betäubungsmittelgesetz, distribution and possession of acid is a criminal offence, although prosecutions seldom occur for small quantities intended for personal use. However, this socio-judicial overhang is slowly ebbing away. A reinvigorated scien-
tific interest in psychedelics has emerged, and a host of studies have cropped up that seek to explore the potential benefits of LSD in treating psychological conditions such as anxiety and PTSD. Perhaps the biggest driver of this renaissance is microdosing, a trend popularised by hyper-smart techies holed up in Silicon Valley looking for an edge in a competitive corporate landscape. But it’s not all software engineers and complex algorithms. Microdosing is thriving in Berlin, and there’s more to it than meets the eye.
words by
Alex Rennie illUstrations by
Patricia Tarczynski
Our first port of call was Susan (not her real name), a radio journalist who put together a story on microdosing for Deutschlandfunk in April. Over a glass of wine, Susan explains how she was switched on to the idea after hearing it talked about amongst her yoga circles. “I ran into a few people who started dropping the term ‘microdosing’ at my yoga practice; it was the first time I’d heard of it,” she says. After a few more conversations, she realised microdosing was much more widespread than she initially thought: “A couple of months later another friend mentioned they were trying it, and I thought, ‘you too?’” The idea had presented itself. In the process of producing her story she reached out to a handful of microdosers, as well as Dr Henrik Jungaberle – a Berlin-based psychologist involved in drug prevention programmes and research. Dr Jungaberle asserts that microdosing is a proxy for enhancement. “With microdosing, people are trying to self-optimise, they want to work better,” he says. “PeoSummer 2017
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High Times
Microdosing
“THERE’S DEFINITELY SOMETHING MAJOR HAPPENING RIGHT NOW. I THINK THESE DRUGS WILL PLAY A KEY ROLE IN THE FUTURE, IN PSYCHIATRY AND OTHER FIELDS OF MEDICINE.” ple today experience real boredom, everyday life may be monotone. It’s a tool to make things more enjoyable.” In his opinion, there are parallels with Ritalin usage, especially as a means of driving up productivity. As part of her groundwork, and in true gonzo style, Susan decided to experience microdosing for herself. “I wanted to try it because people were saying it opens up different pathways in your mind,” she says. “I wanted to see whether it’s bullshit or not, to know what it does and doesn’t do.” But in embarking on this endeavour, she discovered one of microdosing’s biggest difficulties: how to measure an accurate dose. Typically, one tab of acid contains 100µg of LSD. The best way to siphon off a microdose – between 5–15µg according to Dr Jungaberle – is to soak a tab in 100ml of distilled water overnight. Storing it in the fridge preserves its potency for approximately one month. Using a syringe or pipette and taking it neat or in tea is the most precise way to hit the sweet spot, though more haphazard microdosers simply snip off a tiny corner of the tab and hope for the best. Susan recounts sampling her first microdose one Saturday. Shortly afterwards as she went to meet a friend in a café, it quickly dawned on her she’d had more than enough. “When I got there I was super hyperactive, my friend asked me why I was being so giggly. I told him about microdosing. He got me to look him in the eye, and he said, ‘Oh my God, you’re high!’” She estimates she took about 30µg, double the ideal amount. The following time she tried it, it didn’t have much of an effect. Dr Jungaberle notes that this is quite common: “Obviously the dose depends on the individual, its effects can vary. There are people who’re very sensitive to LSD and people who won’t feel anything on such a small amount.” It’s hard to gauge how to hit the jackpot in this psychedelic lottery.
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In retrospect, Susan is sceptical of how microdosing has been extolled as a means to increase productivity and creative output: “I think it’s a bit hypocritical using it to achieve something; it feeds into our digital, non-stop, don’t-sleep, we’re-all-replaceable world.” Though this critique has traction, it doesn’t quite gel with the reality of other Berliners who’re readily portioning out their own micro-odysseys. A week later, Max (also not his real name) sits in the spring sun beside Wedding’s lesser-known Schifffahrtskanal, a secluded stretch of water bordering the western edge of the district. It is midday and it seems a beautiful enough location without psychoactive drugs – but Max is here to bare all about his psychedelic encounters. Originally from the US, he’s been living in Berlin on-and-off since the early 2000s. He divides his time between photography, filmmaking, and teaching English. He’s been consistently microdosing 10µg of diluted LSD every fourth day for the last three months. Before leaving his flat, Max carefully measured out a tiny droplet of acid and swallowed it. It’s striking how lucid he is.
Lysergic Acid Diethylamide LSD is synthesised from the lysergic acid found in ergot fungi, an organism that grows on rye. There is widespread belief that kykeon, a drink imbibed during Ancient Greek cult initiations, contained hallucinogens derived from ergot. Albert Hofmann The LSD-pioneer was rumoured to have microdosed for decades, well into his old age. He died in 2008 at the age of 102. Bicycle Day April 19th 1943 is the day that Hofmann tested the effects of LSD on himself. After ingesting 250μg and experiencing an extraordinary change in perception, he cycled home. The anniversary of this event is now celebrated among LSD enthusiasts around the world as ‘Bicycle Day’. Shroom for Improvement Microdosing isn’t limited to LSD. People also consume tiny amounts of psilocybin, psilocin or baeocystin mushrooms in order to feel similar enhancements to creativity and productivity. Berlin’s LSD Kiez Prenzlauer Berg’s Helmholtzkiez is known locally as the LSD-Viertel. However, that’s not because residents are partial to tripping; it gets its name from the three main roads that intersect the neighbourhood: Lychener- Schliemannand Dunckerstraße.
Microdosing
Not only that, his answers are thorough and crammed with information. But how does he feel? “I’ve got that butterfly feeling in my stomach, and the acid taste in my mouth is slightly apparent,” he says. “The colours are brighter and I can hear the birds, they’re fucking loud as shit right now!” Echoing Susan’s reservations, Max explains how his first foray into microdosing wasn’t a calculated one: “I started off with the slap-dash approach. It’s OK if that’s your entry point. But if you want to be more serious about it, when it can be an addition to your week and help your productivity, it’s better to figure out how to do it properly.” Having tailored the right amount to his needs, Max expands on how microdosing aids his daily routine: “There are days when you wake up and you feel tired and sluggish, you’re forgetful. It’s about not being that; it makes you a better version of yourself. You’re getting closer to peak performance: you’re happy and in a good mood, you’re sharp, ready and focused. For me, it’s less about creativity and more about efficiency. My ability to empathise with the world around me and the people that I talk to is greater, too.” So far, Max’s motives resonate with Susan and Dr Jungaberle’s assessments. This link wavers when Max digs deeper into the reasons behind his experimental assays. It was in the midst of a severe bout of depression that he decided to revisit acid. “I started doing LSD again as therapy for myself, to get into a better state of mind. The first time I did LSD again I had a very clear view of whatever pit I had fallen into.” Beyond the efficiency, Max’s stance on microdosing is one that’s strikingly holistic. “As a tool it is incredibly useful, I’ve cleaned out that emotional closet in my life a handful of times, not just microdosing but also macrodosing,” he says. “If you go into it wanting to resolve problems, it’s extremely helpful. If you’ve ever tried to be creative whilst you’re stressed out with normal life shit, it’s so hard to do.” After an hour in the sun discussing how microdosing “connects these different parts of the brain that wouldn’t normally be connected,” Max finishes on a poignant note concerning its paradigm-shifting potential. “Society has definitely portrayed LSD as something scary, and that shapes our views on these kind of things. It’s time to get past it. I think this can be a norm, as well as a wonderful helping hand in the growth of our human consciousness.” It’s tricky to argue that Max’s personal experience is solely centred on self-optimisation in the Silicon Valley sense. In fact, his microdosing mental-
ity seems more to do with therapeutic factors than anything else. His belief that acid could one day slot into the normative framework is both upbeat and infectious. It’s also an ideal shared by Kjartan Nilsen, a Norwegian filmmaker with a background in medicine. Having landed in Berlin three years ago, Kjartan established The German Psychedelic Society last June. “We want to be a platform for psychedelic users, a space where people can connect, exchange knowledge with each other and participate in seminars and social events,” he says. Their last event in April at Prenzlauer Berg’s Musik Brauerei attracted around 250 guests. Like Max, Kjartan also extolls the virtues of microdosing, though he only dabbles in it every now and then: “It’s been very beneficial for me. I become more focused and my creative output is higher, and it also has a strong spiritual side to it; I become more aware. From morning to evening, I’m experiencing this ‘flow’ state. Even though this sounds kind of floaty, it removes the ego, the mask that you’re carrying in your daily life, and you see others as an extension of yourself.” Kjartan is clued up when it comes to current research. He spends some time fleshing out recent scientific investigations into LSD, including Imperial College London’s now notorious fMRI scans of brains on acid. Though he admits “we need more science” concerning microdosing, he references American psychologist James Fadiman’s qualitative work as an encouraging benchmark. “His studies are quite promising: 99% of users report positive effects, and a slight percentage
High Times
are reporting an emotional release during microdosing sessions,” he says. But we have to ask: what about the risks? Is Kjartan not concerned that repeated LSD use could inflict harm? “Certainly, there is risk,” he agrees. “But I would argue that the risk is minimal because we already know that psychedelics are the least harmful group of substances on the market today.” Harkening back to Dr Jungaberle’s responses, Kjartan’s confidence is well-founded. “LSD is one of the least damaging substances that exists, certainly less harmful than alcohol,” says the German scientist. So could it be that we’re on the cusp of something truly revolutionary? Kjartan thinks so: “There’s definitely something major happening right now. I think these drugs will play a key role in the future, in psychiatry and other fields of medicine.” Perhaps it’s too premature to assess what the future holds. Nevertheless, this reinvigorated surge in psychedelic science does seem to be a convincing marker of things to come. And as microdosing becomes more visible in the public domain, it may well begin to dissolve the perceived danger that LSD poses to society’s mental wellbeing. Kjartan is quietly optimistic: “A lot of information that people have on psychedelics is based on myths spread throughout the media. But the evidence is telling us that these are some of the least harmful substances that exist, and that they even have great personal benefits, spirituality and creatively. Times are changing.”
Keep up with the latest from The German Psychedelic Society at facebook.com/ psychedelicsde Summer 2017
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Music in Exile
Mohammad Abu Hajar
WE FED UP
words by
Stuart Braun photos by
Shane Omar
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On a cold day in early February, a large crowd gathers at the Brandenburg Gate to protest Executive Order 13769, Donald Trump’s ban on persons entering the United States from seven majority-Muslim countries. Amid the ‘Ban Fascism Not Muslims’ and ‘Love Trumps Hate’ placards, Syrian rapper and activist Mohammad Abu Hajar steps onto the stage at the front of the rally to address the crowd. The young man, also known as MC Abu Hajar, grew up under authoritarianism. He has spent time in the prisons of the Assad regime. He understands how one man seeks to maintain power by brutally oppressing others. This understanding is shared by his Syrian bandmates in Berlin and it fuels the powerful music they’ve been unleashing on the city’s stages since 2015.
Mohammad Abu Hajar
Above: Mohammad (second from right) with Mazzaj Rap.
F
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Survived Hitler’s War Although it was still standing, by the end of the war the gate was badly damaged. Bullets and nearby explosions left holes in the columns, and only one horse’s head from the original Quadriga survived. The head can now be found in the collection of the Märkisches Museum.
or me, what matters is that we don’t only fight Trump, but we fight the infrastructure that created Trump and will create other Trumps in the future,” Mohammad tells the protesters who are cheering him on during the grey mid-winter day. “I’m not here only for Muslims, I’m here in solidarity with my white fellows not represented by Trump. I’m not here only because I’m Syrian or an Arab. I’m here for humanity.” Mohammad goes on to speak of a dictatorship that has been in power for half a century and has ultimately destroyed his country. “I don’t wish it for the rest of the world,” he continues. “I think it’s so important to start dismantling the whole mentality that brought about Trump. It’s not only people standing in solidarity with Muslims. We are standing in solidarity with each other.” The cheers grow louder. He reiterates that despotism is never far away. Backed by the vast sandstone columns of the Brandenburg Gate that somehow survived Hitler’s war, Mohammad says that Berlin understands this well. A flag of the Syrian revolution flutters above the crowd as Mohammad introduces a rap song he wrote on his first day as a political prisoner. He says that his interrogators would ask him if he wanted freedom. If he responded ‘yes’, they would torture him. “That’s the freedom you deserve,” they would say. That night he wrote a rhyme in response to his beatings. “Do you want freedom?” it begins. “Yes, we want freedom and we want Syria to be a country for all, and we want this world to be a place for all.” Mohammad soon has the whole crowd chanting, “yes, yes, yes,” in Arabic. Partly inspired by emerging Arab rappers in countries such as Egypt and Lebanon, but also by elements of traditional Middle Eastern and Sufi music, MC Abu Hajar was one of Syria’s first political rappers. A then-Marxist and atheist, he was barely 20 when he was first jailed in 2007 for making music
Music in Exile
that was critical of the regime – in particular, a song that criticised honour killings of women by men, who are rarely prosecuted for these crimes. That was the year he also formed the band Mazzaj Rap with local Tartous musicians, Alaa Odeh and Hazem Zghaibe. Mohammad’s birth city of Tartous, on the Mediterranean coast, is fiercely pro-Assad. Having already gone into exile in Jordan to study following his initial incarceration, in 2011 Mohammad was inspired to return to Syria during the Arab Spring to take part in the first spontaneous peaceful protests. After decades of emergency rule, of extreme intimidation and fear among a heavily-policed populace, this was a bold grassroots demand for civil and democratic rights that was inspired by revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. Mohammad and his collaborators never worked for a political party, nor did they later fight for the Syrian Free Army when an exercise in civil disobedience became militarised. He was there as a citizen, simply campaigning for freedom of expression among all Syrians, whether Arabs, Muslims, non-Muslims or Kurds. As the revolution spread across Syria by late 2011, Mohammad believed that the regime would relinquish power, just as the Mubarak dictatorship had done in Egypt. But a few months later, he was back in detention, a victim of a vicious crackdown by a desperate government that didn’t shy away from killing its own people. Mohammad first told us his story in a café in Wedding that had recently been opened by members of the growing Syrian community here in Berlin. As we sat and drank tea, he pointed across to a man at the next table with long hair. It was Ahmad Niou, the Mazzaj Rap percussionist with whom he shared a jail cell in early 2012. After being arrested, the two were beaten and then accused, without evidence, of unauthorised political activism. They suffered daily torture, from whippings to beatings with electric prods. Mohammad was witness to the killing of one prisoner, and heard of the deaths of many other inmates. He doubted whether he would get out alive. Mohammad was released two months later, but he was pursued again by secret service agents and one day was forced to flee over his back fence in his pyjamas. Soon after, he left Syria for the last time, arriving in Lebanon before travelling to Europe. He lived in Rome for a couple of years, where he finished his master’s degree in political economics. Mohammad then came to Berlin, in part because a strong community of Syrian political exiles was already established here. Ahmad Niou, also from Tartous, came to join Mohammad in Berlin. Mazzaj Rap were reunited, this time joined by Matteo Di Santis, a friend from Rome who provided electronic beats and samples. In 2016, the core band evolved into another project, Mazzaj Raboratory, which includes Alaa Zaitounah (oud) and Zaher Alkaei (violin), who also made circuitous routes to Europe from the Syrian cities of Swaida and Homs. Beyond the hard-edged American rap idiom, Mazzaj Raboratory are forging Summer 2017
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Music in Exile
Mohammad Abu Hajar
“IT’S NOT ONLY PEOPLE STANDING IN SOLIDARITY WITH MUSLIMS. WE ARE STANDING IN SOLIDARITY WITH EACH OTHER.” what Mohammad describes as an “oriental rap” sound that “tries to break the contradictions between eastern and western music.” “It’s a road that we can all walk together,” he says. This new direction is the subject of the album the band is currently recording, entitled Third Way. Mazzaj Raboratory play their first show in front of a packed audience at Kreuzberg’s Köpi squat. The heavy beats, overlaid with hand percussion (darbuka) and driving oud and violin solos, somehow evoke the flames of the Arab Spring that these Syrian exiles still nurture, and which fuel MC Abu Hajar’s pointed political rhymes. Meanwhile, images of people enduring detention and torture flash across the back wall, along with song lyrics in English. The band is playing ‘We Fed Up’, a track “dedicated to all the political detainees and their mothers,” the lyrics of which Mohammad also recited at the anti-Trump rally. The many Syrians in the audience thrust their fists in the air in response to
the chorus: “You want freedom. Yes, and we want all the detainees!” It is impossible not to be swept up in such a cathartic public outpouring of emotion that has been so long repressed. The band comes back to perform two encores. On May Day 2017, Mazzaj Raboratory perform on a bill entitled The Revolution Will Not Be Televised at Yaam, on an outdoor stage directly on the Spree. Mohammad introduces ‘People Well’, a song about a time when young Syrians dreamed that the Arab Spring would spread from Tunisia and Egypt to Syria. “Two weeks later it came,” he says. The beat kicks in. “From Tunisia, from Egypt, tomorrow a victory will arrive, and people who have been martyred will dislocate the gates of the palace,” he raps, in Arabic. The words and the music have an added tension as police vans line up across the bridge spanning the Spree and beyond. The audience, including a man draped in a Syrian revolution flag, dance and chant, urging political action as Kreuzberg threatens to explode at the May Day witching hour. These Syrian exiles not only depict what life was like under Assad, but their attempt to regain their dignity as they are persistently stereotyped as part of a migrant horde that broke down the gates into Europe. “Who will give housing to a refugee?” Mohammad asked us last year after a spate of terrorist attacks in France and Belgium that fuelled the xenophobic rhetoric of Trump, Le Pen, and Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland party. “On every application I write: ‘I’m Mohammad, I’m not a terrorist.’” Although many refugees like himself do not follow Islam, they suffer the consequences of extremism. “I even feel humiliated by the pity of some people who are pro-refugees,” Mohammad adds. “Pity will always show me that I’m not equal.”
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On the upcoming single ‘Uncertain State’, also the title of a concert the band performed at the Akademie der Künste last October, Mohammad expresses the anxiety that derives from his rootlessness in Europe. “I am trying to stand on my feet but the soil below is so fragile,” he sings. “I’m trying to say I belong … but the tribe’s mentality rejects me.” This uncertainty is amplified by the fact that these exiles do not have the choice to go home. In ‘Homeland’, a video and music collaboration with the Turkish artist Halil Altindere that was exhibited at last year’s Berlin Biennale, Mohammad leaps over a border wall and leaves Syria behind, forever: “The home is lost, the home died, the home is behind me now. And everything finished, it’s over.” Speaking to Mohammad on Pariser Platz as the anti-Trump protesters form a cordon and begin marching down Unter den Linden, we discuss the album he and the band have been recording. Inevitably, we talk about Syria. A lot has changed in the weeks prior. With the help of a Russian air bombing campaign, Assad has taken back Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, from the rebels. Mohammad says it has been a difficult time. The dictator having consolidated his power and the revolution now unlikely to succeed, this young man is contemplating the very real possibility that he will never be able to return home. As we walk, Mohammad explains that it might only be possible to go back if he renounces his opposition and commits fealty to the regime. As a relatively wellknown activist, this might be seen as a coup for Assad, and might save Mohammad from ending up in prison. “But I will never do this,” he says. “I won’t accept going back to Syria as a humiliated person,” he tells us. “I would only go back as a free person.” The revolution continues.
Mazzaj Raboratory released the single, ‘Uncertain State’, in May and the forthcoming album, Third Way, is due out in the summer. Follow them at facebook.com/mazzajrap
studio183.co
Martin Margiela Archive Sale 03.07 - 08.07 studio183 - BRUNNENSTR. 183 - 10119 BERLIN STUDIO183 Summer 2017
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Moments and Memories
20 Years of Melt Festival
GERMANY’S TOP FESTIVAL CELEBRATES TWO DECADES OF GOOD TIMES
From its modest beginnings as a 1,000-capacity festival by Lake Bernstein in 1997 to the 20,000-capacity behemoth now taking place every year in the ‘iron town’ of Ferropolis, Melt Festival has grown into one of Europe’s leading festivals. This year it celebrates its 20th birthday, and throughout these 20 years, countless live acts and DJs have graced its many stages.
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s a festival-goer, you usually only get to see the front-end experience: the music, the setting, the atmosphere. What you may not have considered is the huge amount of work that goes on behind the scenes to make something of this scale come together. It’s a mammoth task with many moving parts, and at every step of the way there is a dedicated team of people working tirelessly to keep things running. Here we speak with some of those unsung heroes who work on making the festival such a roaring success year after year, getting an insight into the crazy things they’ve seen, the moments when things go awry, and some of their own personal highlights.
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TOMMY
Director of Communication and Marketing Do you have an all-time favourite performance? Björk in 2008, closing the festival. One of the best performances I have ever witnessed in my life. How about a favourite year? Again, 2008: the first year we went for three days because Björk could only play on the Sunday. There was a positive vibe, tension and excitement overshadowing the whole weekend as everyone was waiting for Björk and her crew to show up. The atmosphere was emotionally charged at all times during the weekend, and it felt like an atmospheric discharge when finally Björk appeared on stage. That show felt like collectively having multiple orgasms after an amazing weekend. Was there a moment when you said, “We’ll look back on this one day and laugh”? Melt 2005, when Maximo Park opened the main stage and the festival. We heard a heavy thunderstorm coming, and within seconds there was rain pouring down, lightning, thunder, the band running off stage, tents flying around. It felt like the apocalypse for ten minutes. Luckily, no one got injured and not too much damage was done.
words by
Jonny Tiernan
20 Years of Melt Festival
STEFAN
Artistic Director What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen at Melt? Maybe in 2006 or so, there was a couple climbing on the crane at the Gemini Stage, on the very top of it, like 30 metres high, fucking. There were some cheap mobile videos of it, but they’ve since disappeared in the clouds of YouTube. Have you ever had any disasters? More than one! Over the years we’ve had almost all the problems you can have organising a festival, from heavy queues to massive technical problems. The worst was when I had to evacuate the festival because of heavy weather on the Sunday morning around 4am. I had to tell deadmau5 (without his mask) that he had to stop DJing after just ten minutes, and used a mic to tell everyone to please move into the heavy rain and take a nice walk back to the campsite, and that for safety reasons we also had to stop the bus services. Not nice at all. What about near misses? When me and some production colleagues were very frightened watching more and more people entering Deichkind’s show on the Main Stage at 3am in 2005. The security couldn’t stop people climbing up onstage to dance during the last song with the band. In the
end, there were more people on the stage than in front of it, and we were really worried that the stage might collapse. We came close to switching off the energy for the PA, but it turned out to be a legendary moment and fortunately no one was injured. Could you give us a favourite-ever performance? That’s very hard to say when so many of your favorite artists have performed. Booka Shade on the Big Wheel Stage in 2007, and Tiga on the Gemini Stage in 2009 both had crazy vibes. When Tiga finished his set and the festival site closed, people wouldn’t stop making their own beats with cups, sticks on trash cans, whatever they could find.
JULIE
Head of Artist Liaison What’s been your wildest Melt experience? Actually, I just heard it on the radio. They’d found an artist on the campsite the day after his performance – long after his band had left – still partying, with a seriously agitated girlfriend on the phone. Was there a time where it almost all went wrong? Yes, there actually was a time when it all went wrong, but what I learned from it is that you are never alone, your team always helps you and you are
Moments and Memories
allowed to make mistakes. And it’s good if you do, because you learn from it. I’m very grateful that my boss was his calm self and accepted the fact that I just fucked up and simply moved on with the show. Has there ever been a time where there was nothing you could do but laugh? Yes, all the time, you have so many absurd things happening. I think when you’re working in the festival business you have to decide one day whether you’ll become angry all the time or if you start not taking things too seriously. I decided on the second option, and I’m quite happy with it. Best performance? Tiga 2009, closing the Gemini Stage. After he finished, people refused to leave the festival site and started clapping and banging the rhythm of his last track. Everyone kept on dancing – it was one of the best moments ever. Do you have a favourite year at Melt? 2015, because I felt so confident in my job and my team, and everything just came together so perfectly. We all had such a great time working and enjoyed ourselves so much. How many people can say that about their job?
See the lineup for Melt Festival 2017 and get your tickets at meltfestival.de Summer 2017
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The Mother of Berlin
Käthe Kollwitz
COMMEMORATING THE LIFE OF ARTIST KÄTHE KOLLWITZ Regal and somewhat worn, a bronze statue of German expressionist artist and activist Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) gazes out over the playground at Kollwitzplatz in her former neighbourhood. The children of Prenzlauer Berg clamber onto her lap and sit on her knee, the skirt gleaming with patches of gold where the bronze has been polished by generations of hands. Like Berlin’s other monuments and Denkmalen, the statue is a treasured fixture of the Kiez, and the 150th anniversary of Kollwitz’s birth offers us the perfect opportunity to give an introduction to this amazing woman for the uninitiated.
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Issue Four
A critical turning point in Kollwitz’s life was the death of her youngest son, Peter, who was killed in combat during World War I. From that moment on, Kollwitz embraced pacifism and dedicated her art to inciting social change, increasingly turning to darker themes such as sacrifice, death and mourning. She spent the years from 1924 to 1932 working on a memorial to her son: The Grieving Parents (Die trauernden Eltern). The granite sculpture depicts Kollwitz and her husband bowing over their son’s grave, wrought with the pain of losing a child. In addition to memorialising her son, Kollwitz’s sculpture pays tribute to all the children who were lost during the war. In the following years, her work reflected the legacy of the trauma inflicted by war, particularly upon women. With dark, hollow eyes, heads bent in sorrow, and large hands clutching dead bodies in agony, Kollwitz’s images convey the cruelty of war in all its wretch-
words by
Erika Clugston
Above: Self-portrait 1888-89. Below: Gustav Seitz’s statue of Käthe Kollwitz in Kollwitzplatz. It is based on one of her self-portraits and was erected in 1961. Soheil Moradianboroujeni
H
aving borne witness to two world wars, Käthe Kollwitz critiqued the tragic impact of conflict on society with vivid and emotional art. Her life’s work had an immeasurable influence on the art world and on the city of Berlin, which will celebrate her 150th anniversary with several events this year. Kollwitz remains a powerful symbol of feminism, activism and resistance – her work mourning a tragic past and seeking a better future. Growing up in an unusually liberal, middle-class family, Käthe Schmidt was encouraged to pursue a career in art. She studied painting in Berlin and Munich before finding her calling in graphic art, devoting herself to etchings, lithographs, woodcuts and drawing. In 1891, she married Karl Kollwitz, a doctor for working-class Berliners, and in his patients she found new subject matter. With incredible tenderness, Kollwitz depicted the daily struggles of poor and working-class families. She focused on the oppression of women and children in particular, and found printmaking a useful medium for creating and distributing her provocative artworks. She became popular amongst the German working class, and made her art readily available to the masses as prints, posters and postcards.
Käthe Kollwitz
The Mother of Berlin
« HER PROTOFEMINIST WORK PORTRAYS INDIVIDUALS WITH COMPASSION AND STRENGTH, SPEAKING OUT AGAINST INJUSTICE AND CALLING FOR REFORM. » edness. Figures emerge from a black abyss, shaped by the artist’s expressive lines. The pain of loss is wrought in colourless fury. Mothers’ cries are heard from the shallow depths of ink on paper. Kollwitz also devoted her art to social justice causes: from advocating for abortion and contraception rights to class equality, Kollwitz created complex images that called attention to women’s issues. Her bold prints, posters and sculptures were a passionate outcry against violent injustice.
Kienzle u. Oberhammer
Kollwitz continued to produce dark, socially critical work, but her international acclaim arose from her talent as an experimental artist as much as from her subject matter. She was elected the first female professor of the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1919, proving that she had established herself as a formidable success in a world dominated by men. However, in 1933 the newly-elected Nazi party forced Kollwitz to resign from the Academy, prohibiting her
Above: ‘Sturm’ (‘Storm’) 1893-97.
from exhibiting, and classifying her art as ‘degenerate’. They would later appropriate her art for propaganda, recontextualising her anti-war imagery for their manipulative purposes, including a claim that her Hunger series showed victims of communism. Kollwitz nonetheless was steadfast in her pacifist beliefs and continued to work. Her last great series of lithographs, titled Death (Tod) (1934–37), was even darker, starker, and more emotional than before. The following years were filled with loss as World War II raged. Kollwitz’s husband died in 1940 and her grandson was killed in battle two years later. In 1943 she evac-
uated Berlin, shortly before her apartment was destroyed in a bombing that claimed much of her life’s work. Kollwitz died in the spring of 1945, just two weeks before the war in Europe ended. To the end, Käthe Kollwitz was an audacious artist and advocate for the oppressed. In museums and monuments across Berlin, her artwork makes her an ever-watchful presence in the city. Her proto-feminist work portrays individuals with compassion and strength, speaking out against injustice and calling for reform. And although Kollwitz’s dark figures, shrouded in death, haunt our present moment with their fierce critique and painful memories, they also burst forth with life. Her artwork speaks with a mother’s love, bearing the pain of tragedy while tenderly lifting us up – like children she cradles in her lap – urging us to strive for a better future.
Find out about all the special events honouring Käthe Kollwitz in 2017 on the Käthe Kollwitz museum website: kaethe-kollwitz.de
Above: Käthe Kollwitz museum. Right: Hand study 1891. Summer 2017
41
Dispatches
The Battle of Mosul
DISPATCHES: A FRONTLINE REPORT FROM MOSUL Photojournalist Sebastian Backhaus depicts the ravages of war as only a photographer can. His work focuses on the Middle East, where he continues to report on residential districts shattered by terrorist bombs, volunteer armies preparing for battle, and the horrors of the front lines. Here, he shares his recent experiences in Mosul, where the largest deployment of Iraqi troops since the 2003 invasion continues its campaign to reclaim the city from ISIS forces.
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M
osul, Iraq has been under fire since October 2016 as Iraqi forces battle ISIS, who overran the city in 2014. When the fighting will end is a question of weeks or months, and the winner will be the Iraqi army. But it’s tricky to talk about winners in this war. The losses experienced by the Iraqi forces are countless; the word ‘winner’ has lost all meaning. The international media focuses on civilians, who will finally get back their freedom after three years under ISIS occupation, but they are the furthest from winning. The state of Iraq will get back its city; the ISIS jihadists will reach their goal when they are killed and get access to the paradise of their perverse ideology; but the people of Mosul are losing not only their homes,
Below: Mud covers a refugee collection point in Hamam Al Alil, where citizens mainly from the city of Badoush gather.
Issue Four
Sebastian Backhaus
but also their relatives in the crossfire when they are caught between the front lines, during imprecise mortar shelling or air strikes, or when ISIS use them as human shields. When the offensive started last year, photographers were warmly welcomed to join the euphoric beginning, to show the world that Iraq was starting to take its fate into its own hands with the Mosul offensive. But today, thousands of civilians are dead or trapped in the last embattled western part of the city. The Golden Division, the Iraqi special forces unit for the first front line, practically doesn’t exist any more because of their high losses, and the mission for photographers in this war can only partly be accomplished. Access to the front lines is only possible with deep relationships Left: These sisters are living with their family downstairs after a shelling destroyed the upper floor of their house. The heavens are darkened with smoke from the oil fields, still burning after ISIS set them alight as they left the city, to make it more difficult for coalition fighter jets to take aim on ISIS positions.
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words and photos by
Top: A boy who stayed at home in western Mosul with his family, even under ISIS occupation. His belly shows strong indications of malnutrition. Above: A boy is treated in a field hospital in Hay Samah, Mosul after a rocket hit his family’s house injuring him and killing his grandmother.
The Battle of Mosul
Dispatches
Below: A family arrives at the first post behind the front line in the desert, after fleeing from their village between Qayyarah and Mosul, where heavy fighting between the Iraqi army and ISIS took place. Here they get checked by fighters of a unit of the Iraqi army. They told me that they managed to flee when ISIS pushed them with other families from their village towards the Iraqi army to use them as a human shield when the army opened fire.
Top: A soldier of the Iraqi army on a house roof at the front line of a fire fight with ISIS, in the embattled district of Bark, south-eastern Mosul.
Above: A rare picture of happiness in this war: a family, who managed to escape from ISIS territories in Mosul, reaches a liberated area in the eastern district of Hay Samah.
Below: The feet of an exhausted citizen from Badbush, near Mosul, on arriving in Tal Ghassoun after his escape. As he fled, he lost his shoes and walked for two days in the cold, muddy desert.
with high-ranking military leaders, or while working on assignment for big names. Too much is going wrong in this war, and too many photos are showing that to the world. Capturing the war against ISIS in Iraq is a special challenge for photographers. Besides the problems of access there is the danger of being shot, specifically by extremely well-trained and well-equipped snipers, becoming the victim of a mortar shell, stepping into a booby trap, or being kidnapped. However, these are only the dangers that are visible on the surface. Each photographer, and each writer, has to find their way through this experience without losing their mind. Personally, it’s hard for me to find a professional distance from some of the experiences I have had in and around Mosul during the last months. When I was shooting at a field hospital directly behind the front lines, I became witness to the lives of whole families changing within seconds. Humvees were approaching the field hospital from the embattled areas, sometimes at a rhythm of mere minutes. Doors were opened, and heavily injured civilians or dead bodies were brought to the medical staff. And around them the parents, partners or children of those dead or wounded were screaming, falling to the ground or were so shocked that they just functioned and helped where they could. But there is one picture from this mission which will never leave me. I worked at an escape point where civilians managed to flee the fighting. A couple with their baby in their arms approached, exhausted after nearly three years under ISIS terror, and told me their life-changing story. Some weeks previously, their baby had a high fever and they went to the hospital in Mosul, in the ISIS controlled area where they were living. The doctor asked for the name of their child and they told him, without considering that it could mean the death penalty for their daughter, given her Shia name. The doctor recognised that they were not a Sunni family, and gave the baby an injection. Afterwards, their child became seriously mentally and physically disabled. I went to the field hospital with them, and after an examination the doctors diagnosed the cause of their child’s disability as a sudden intoxication, with gasoline.”
See more of Sebastian’s incredible and affecting photography at photo-backhaus.de Summer 2017
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Champagne Supernova
Julia Bosski
didn’t have bubbles! I know this business, so I knew they must have given me some stuff from an old bottle. I mean, it was a pretty fancy bar; I couldn’t take it.
Viktor Richardsson
When was the last time you found a new favourite restaurant? Lately Pauly Saal, because I often go to another bar in Mitte (Cordobar which is my most beloved place at the moment). The other night there was a sommelier there from Pauly Saal. We started talking and he invited me for lunch the day after. Great place.
THE LAST WORD: JULIA BOSSKI
C
hef, business woman and jazz singer Julia Bosski is the powerhouse behind Polish Thursday Dinners. As one of Berlin’s friendliest regular dining events, it aims to bring the tastes and influences of the Polish diaspora to the city, but always with a twist. Here we get a unique insight into Julia’s psyche with a quick-fire interview.
When was the last time one of your heroes disappointed you? I don’t get disappointed easily, let’s drink a shot and forget it. It will all be fine. What was the last compliment you received? That I look like a Japanese warrior. When was the last time you cried? I’m that ice queen with a heart of stone. I cried a few months ago, but only because I was so hungover that I thought I was gonna die from being sick. [Laughs] When was the last time you doubted yourself? Hm, that happens to me pretty often, mostly when I’m about to get my period or when a business deal I was hoping would succeed didn’t work out. But I always say to myself that ‘this is life’. Call a friend, go for some champagne and I’m back in the game. 44
Issue Four
When was the last time you were scared? “Was that the last bottle of champagne?!” When was the last time you broke the law? Honey, you’re talking to the queen of Polish mafia here. [Laughs] Who was the last person to truly surprise you? I get surprised by tiny sweet gestures, like when someone opens a door for me, or gives me a hand when I get out of a car, or when my business partner brought me homemade, Italian honey from his vacation, or when my flatmate brought me delicious cakes from her coffee shop. These are small, beautiful surprises. What was the last good film you watched? Woody Allen’s retrospective. I watched all his movies, and totally loved the last one, Café Society, but I also recently saw Godard’s Bande à part. When I watch his movies I want to be in love and hang out with my babe, behaving like these French bohemians. I love Godard. What was the last good album you bought? Chet Baker’s best stuff on ten CDs. What was the last great meal you ate? I just came back from dinner at Umami, a Vietnamese place in Prenzlauer Berg. I had beef with mango stripes on rice, then I had a matcha cake at a Korean café on the corner of my street. When was the last time you sent something back at a restaurant? I sent back a glass of champagne, on Valentine’s Day – it
When was the last time you drank too much? [Laughs] I say to myself every day ‘I have to stop drinking so much.’ The last time… Friday? I started with whisky cocktails, next went through champagne, mixed with wine, then more wine, and at the end a few more cocktails… What was the last new recipe you tried out? Porridge with oat milk, Himalaya salt and blended banana with some smoked apple cream, toasted sesame, and homemade cherry marmalade. And for my last dinner I made buckwheat sourdough soup – my own version of traditional polish Żurek. When was the last time you were on TV? In January – so lame – but I’m coming back on air soon! Maybe with something really geil, like my own TV show. Let’s see, wish me luck.
Find out when the next Polish Thursday Dinners event is at facebook.com/ obiadyczwartkoweberlin
LAST ORDERS Elix Cup Make a simple syrup of equal parts sugar and warm water, and set aside to cool. In a highball glass, muddle a few fresh mint leaves and a couple of cucumber slices, then fill with ice. Add half a shot of fresh lime juice, half a shot of the simple syrup, and a shot of vodka, then top up with prosecco.
THIS ISSUE WAS POWERED BY… Saltwater, complaining about the weather, waking up early on Saturday, breathing, apartment moves, various kinds of pain, stressing, not stressing, sunshine, Korean fried chicken.
BERLIN’S RICH MUSIC SCENE AND THE CREATIVE ENVIRONMENT AT BIMM
‘‘
BERLIN
CALLED ME TO MOVE FROM
SWEDEN
TO STUDY SONGWRITING. THE TUTORS ON MY COURSE, THE SKILLS I’VE DEVELOPED AND THE FRIENDS THAT I’VE MET AT BIMM HAVE SHAPED MY LIFE AND HELPED ME TO DEVELOP AS AN ARTIST. THIS PLACE HAS STOLEN MY HEART!
KAROLINA BEIJER BRONDEN LUND, SWEDEN
EUROPE’S MOST CONNECTED MUSIC COLLEGE
BIMM.CO.UK/BERLIN Summer 2017
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