Stories, Relations, Perspectives 100 Years ifa
Opening of the exhibition prêt-à-partager at the ifa Art Gallery in Berlin, 2012 External view of the ifa after the rebuilding of the Neues Schloss, Stuttgart, 1961
7 100 Years ifa Ursula Seiler-Albring
11 Founding and Development of the Deutsches Ausland- Institut 1917–1932 Kurt Düwell
16 Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen – What a Name! Sudabeh Mohafez
20 Karonga/ Frankfurt
Raymond Mwenifumbo
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Knowledge of the World for the Future – The History of the ifa Library Gerd Ulrich Bauer
27 We Can’t Afford to Lose the Interaction with Society
Caroline Y. Robertson-von Trotha & Jennifer Endro
31 Global Challenges – Order and Responsibility Frank-Walter Steinmeier
37 Das Deutsche Ausland-Institut 1933 – 1945 Katja Gesche
43 Self-discovery with Detours – the ifa after 1945 Peter Ulrich Weiß
46 Cultural Transfer with all the Senses
61 Career Start in Eastern Europe Ulrike Butmaloiu
64 We Should Make Use of Our Experience with Integration Olga Martens & Rosa Gosch
67 Culture Exchange – the Answer to War! Winfried Kretschmann
71 Dialogue on an Equal Footing – Intercultural Exchange
Annika Niemann
Christopher Resch
52 A Place where People Come Together
73 Jörg Armbruster
Anne Haeming about Gülsün Karamustafa
56 Joachim Sartorius
Congratulation
Congratulation
75 7, 500 Kilometres Proma Parmita & Mohammed Asad-Ur-Rahman Nile
57 Magazine Kulturaustausch
78 Mariyam Nizam
Congratulation
4 80 Fruitful Dialogues
Christopher Resch about Marcel Pott
84 The ifa Research Programme ‘Culture and Foreign Policy’ Patrick Wildermann
87 Let’s Talk with Each Other! Fritz Kuhn
91 Wounds/Bonds
Stefanie Jansen about Günther Uecker
93 Rebecca Horn
Congratulation
97 Exhibitions Travelling the World. The ifa Touring Exhibition Concept Heike Denscheilmann
104 In Every Country the Objects Gain a New Cultural Context Volker Albus & Jennifer Endro
109 Stefan Behnisch Congratulation
111 Everything in One Picture
Anne Haeming about Barbara Klemm
116 Wulf Herzogenrath Congratulation
118 We Are Connected by an Intellectual Elective Affinity
Michael Gleich & Rosa Gosch
121 Ed Kashi Photographs
100 F. C. Gundlach
123 On the Foundation of the ifa Academy
102 Exhibition Setup
Congratulation
Martin Kilgus
127 Renaissance of the Analogue Gerhard Steidl
128 Kenneth Roth Congratulation
130 For a Culture of the We Ronald Grätz & Hans-Joachim Neubauer
134 Wolfgang Tillmans Congratulation
135 The European Idea Is the Only Guarantee for Sustainable Peace Martin Roth & Ronald Grätz
139 President and Members of the Executive Committee 142 Picture Credits 143 Acknowledgements 144 Imprint
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  Inner courtyard of the ifa, 1966   Deutsches Ausland-Institut (DAI/German Foreign Institute) in the Wilhelmspalais, 1932
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100 Years ifa
Ursula Seiler-Albring
Granting of the Theodor Wanner Award to Jacques Delors, 2011 ltr: Ronald Grätz, Dr Adam-Claus Eckert, Ursula Seiler-Albring, Jacques Delors, Richard von Weizsäcker, Hans-Dietrich Genscher
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100 Years ifa
Ursula Seiler-Albring
1 00 Years ifa Ursula Seiler-Albring
A hundred years ago, on 10 January 1917, numerous festively attired people gathered at the New Palace in Stuttgart to celebrate the founding of a ‘museum and institute for research into German culture abroad and for the promotion of German interests abroad’ (Museum und Institut zur Kunde des Auslandsdeutschtums und zur Förderung deutscher Interessen im Ausland). In the same year, the museum was re- christened the Deutsches Ausland-Institut (DAI/ German Foreign Institute). Both proceedings must be seen within their historical context. In 1917, the outcome of the First World War was uncertain. But the entry of the United States of America on the side of the Entente powers already loomed at the beginning of the year. Although King Wilhelm II of Württemberg, patron of the DAI, called the institution a ‘work of peace in the midst of war’, a statement Theodor Heuss was later to take up, the extent to which the founding of the Institute was culturally-politically, economically or geo politically motivated remains to be studied. When we celebrate the anniversary of the Institute, we are also telling its history. In this publication, we have deliberately dispensed with a linear narrative and instead assembled a kaleidoscope that illuminates many individual aspects of our past but yields no complete overview. Work on the history of the Institute is still in its early stages, and we expressly encourage scholars to study it. After Ernst Ritter’s book on Das Deutsche Ausland-Institut in Stuttgart 1917–1945. Ein Beispiel deutscher Volkstumsarbeit zwischen den
Weltkriegen (The German Foreign Institute in Stuttgart, 1917–1945. An example of German Volkstumsarbeit between the World Wars) published in 1976, the first comprehensive appraisal of the DAI’s role under National Socialism appeared with Katja Gesche’s study Kultur als Instrument der Außenpolitik totalitärer Staaten. Das Deutsche Ausland-Institut 1933–1945 (Culture as an Instrument in the Foreign Policy of Totalitarian States. The German Foreign Institute, 1933–1945) published in 2006. And yet many questions remain open and require further research. Among these is the question of why the Institute was classified by the Allies as ‘not incriminated in the sense of the Law for Liberation’, although today we know of its co-optation. When in 1967, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Institute, the then Secretary-General Michael Rehs said it had never been co-opted, this statement was surely based on the insufficient research at the time. It also reflects the history of coming to terms with Nazism because, in this respect, the 1950s were characterised by repression, with the public discussion of the Nazi period beginning only in the course of the 1960s. In 1949, the Institute was re-founded and resumed its work in 1951, now being known as the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa/Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations). The re-orientation initiated, among other things, touring exhibitions and a range of inter-cultural and local cultural seminars for Germans who wanted to prepare themselves for stays abroad.
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100 Years ifa
Ursula Seiler-Albring
Since 1951, the ifa has also published a maga- that is firmly committed to international cozine, which today, under the title Kulturaus operation, mediation between cultures and tausch, is a leading medium for current issues thus to conflict resolution. Although the Instiin international cultural relations. In the early tute is located in Stuttgart and has deep roots 1970s, the first ifa gallery opened in Stuttgart, in the city and in Baden-Württemberg, it giving a forum in Germany to contemporary thinks in terms of being European and is dedart from transition countries. icated to European integration. For Europe When I assumed the office of President of – one of the greatest works of peace in the world, the Institute in 2006, after stints as ambassa- for which we have much to thank – remains dor in Vienna, Sofia and Budapest, a central our goal. focus was the dialogue with Central Eastern Having been established for 100 years, the and South Eastern Europe. With the end of the ifa wishes to express our thanks for the achieveIron Curtain and the beginning of the transi- ments of all our staff and to our colleagues past tion process in Europe, the ifa began to reorient and present, our partners, supporters and all its funding priorities. The protection of minor- friends of the Institute. We know that the most ities and the strengthening of the European important currency in personal, as well as inunification process gained in prominence and stitutional, relationships is trust. The ifa has found expression in the promotion of editors earned lasting international trust. This would and cultural managers. In 2001, funding ac- have been impossible without the financial tivities were extended by the zivik (civil conflict support of the Federal Republicof Germany, resolution) programme for supporting inter- represented by the Foreign Office, of the state national peace projects and by the CrossCul- of Baden-Württemberg, represented by its Minture programme (CCP) in 2005 for strength- istry of Science, and the city of Stuttgart, repening the European-Islamic dialogue. resented by its Department of Cultural Affairs. 2009 saw the launching of the Theodor Wanner Award, with which we honour people and organisations that have shown an outstanding dedication to the dialogue of cultures and to securing peace and international under standing. The award, named after the founder of the Institute, has been given to Daniel Barenboim, Carla del Ponte, Jacques Delors, Yoko Ono, Ernesto Cardenal and the organisation Human Rights Watch. The list of prize winners well reflects the ifa’s conception of itself: these names stand for worldwide commitment to peace, equality and human rights, for strengthening civil society, dialogue with the Islamic world, the importance of the work of the International Criminal Court and belief in Europe. This is the current range of our work. It is international, it is multifaceted and it is guided by two words: connecting cultures. The ifa has become an internationally operating cultural mediator, a competence centre for questions of foreign cultural relations and a focal point for communicating contemporary German art. It sees itself today as an institution
First meeting of the Board of Directors of the DAI at the Linden-Museum, Stuttgart, 30 June 1917
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Founding and Development of the Deutsches AuslandInstitut 1917 –1932
Counsel General Dr (Hons. Causa) Theodor G. Wanner, founder of the DAI, 1949 Laying of the foundation stone for the Haus des Deutschtums (House of German Culture), headquarters of the DAI. Theodor G. Wanner holding the welcoming address, 28 May 1924
Kurt Düwell
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Founding and Development of the Deutsches AuslandInstitut 1917 –1932
Kurt Düwell
Founding and Development of the Deutsches Ausland-Institut 1917–1932 Kurt Düwell
The founding of the Deutsches Ausland-Institut (DAI/German Foreign Institute), the ‘precursor’ of the now one-hundred-year-old Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa/Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations), was above all the work of the Stuttgart businessman Theodor Wanner (1875– 1955). Wanner had a special interest in questions of international and external trade, but also of ethnology. In 1910, he contributed significantly to the founding of the respected Stuttgart Linden- Museum for Ethnology. The sponsor of this museum was the Württembergische Verein für Handelsgeographie und zur Förderung deutscher Interessen im Auslande (Württemberg Society for Trade Geography and Promotion of German Interests Abroad), in which Wanner played a leading role.
12 Theodor Wanner originally conceived the idea of founding the Deutsches Ausland-Institut before the First World War. However, the decision ripened only between 1914 and 1916 when Wanner saw his plan encouraged by three other initiatives. The first stimulus was given by the exhibition ‘German Intellectual Culture and German Culture Abroad’, which was opened by the geographer Hugo Grothe on the grounds of the Leipzig Fair at the beginning of August 1914 (before the outbreak of the war) and treated the long underestimated importance of German emigrants and their descendants. Another stimulus was Friedrich Naumann’s book Mitteleuropa (Central Europe), which was published in 1915 and drew a great deal of attention. The work by the Liberal politician Naumann described Germany’s political and economic interests in the region of Central Europe, which in view of the Germans living there (though Naumann hardly mentioned t hem) had only gained in relevance with the advent of the World War. The book was critically discussed at the Württembergische Verein für Handelsgeographie. The third stimulus Wanner received came in 1916 in the form of a memorandum for the Prussian Chamber of Deputies by Carl Heinrich Becker, Professor of Oriental Studies in Berlin and later Prussian Minister of Culture, in which he called for the establishment of ‘foreign studies’ as a new university discipline to foster ‘enhancing knowledge of the world’ and ‘education in international politics’ in Germany. Wanner more or less combined all these ideas and was thus able to gain supporters and funds for his plan in the then leading social circles, including the German high aristocracy, in spite of the difficult circumstances brought about by the war.
‘A work of peace in the midst of war’ But what political interests defined the founding of this new institute, which was also intended to be accompanied by the opening of a museum for good measure? At the solemn inauguration on 10 January 1917, the King of
Founding and Development of the Deutsches AuslandInstitut 1917 –1932
Kurt Düwell
Württemberg, Wilhelm II, called the Deutsches Ausland-Institut, whose joint sponsors were the German Empire, the state of Württemberg and the city of Stuttgart, ‘a work of peace in the midst of war’. In his speech, he linked the opening with the hope for an imminent peace. In fact, the Institute was founded in the midst of an extremely tense political, military and economic situation, which was soon to grow tenser. If the war had until then been a conflict confined to Europe and the overseas German ‘protectorates’, particularly in Africa, at the turn of the year in 1917 Germany was threatened with the entry of the United States into the war on the side of France, Great Britain and Russia, and so with the global expansion of the struggle. The question was: Could the United States’ entry into the war be prevented by a German peace initiative? The outcome of the war hung in the balance; it was a highly risky situation. Only shortly before, in December 1916, a German memorandum on peace had been rejected by France and England. And now the idea of the King of Württemberg and the DAI of mobilising Germans living abroad, particularly in the United States, for a peace proposal, and to gain the American President Woodrow Wilson as the mediator of such a peace, floundered as soon as Germany began waging unrestricted submarine warfare in early February. During the war, therefore, the DAI was able to play only a very marginal role for peace, since in addition to everything else it was constrained to operate within the framework of German propaganda.
The working structure of the Institute The actual work of the Institute could begin only after the war, in 1918. On 1 October 1918, before the armistice, Fritz Wertheimer, who had previously assisted Theodor Wanner, was appointed Secretary-General of the DAI. Wertheimer, who came from a Jewish family in Bruchsal but who was no longer a member of the Jewish religious community, had read political science at university and was a well-
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Founding and Development of the Deutsches AuslandInstitut 1917 –1932
Reading Room of the DAI in the Neues Schloss, Stuttgart 1919/1921
Kurt Düwell
14 known journalist. Before the war, he had written political reports and analyses from the Far East for leading German newspapers, where he had undertaken many trips, and during the war had had access as a war correspondent to General Hindenburg’s headquarters. He had been awarded the Iron Cross Wanner’s and Wertheimer’s work at the Institute was directed by a governing board, which was usually composed of thirty state officials and figures from public life. A scientific advisory board, whose work was supplemented by economic and cultural advisory councils until 1933, was also set up to aid directing the Institute. The executive board consisted of seven persons who supervised different areas of work. During the Weimar Republic, the DAI had departments for Eastern Europe and East Asia, supervised by Wertheimer himself, and six functional departments, namely for emigration counselling, information and job placement, legal questions (particularly concerning the League of Nations and minority rights), support networks (intended for emigrants and for Germans from abroad who were staying in Germany), advertisement and public relations. In 1926, a small America section was added. In 1926/27, the Institute had a staff of about fifty persons.
Activities in old print and new broadcasting media The special importance accorded emigration counselling and support for Germans living abroad effectively made Germans living abroad the focus of the DAI’s activities. Both Wanner and Wertheimer felt committed and responsible to German-speaking ethnic groups living outside the borders of the German Empire. It was their view that these groups had been particularly neglected during the war by the imperial government. As an expert on America and on emigration, emigration insurance and emigration transport, Wanner was very aware of the importance of foreign trade
Founding and Development of the Deutsches AuslandInstitut 1917 –1932
Kurt Düwell
and emigration problems. During the Weimar Republic, he was therefore repeatedly sought out for advice by both the Ministry of the Interior and the Foreign Office. But there was also another area in which Wanner and Wertheimer were active, which was soon to prove an ideal tool for the work of the DAI. As Wanner was a dedicated co-founder of Süddeutscher Rundfunk (South German Broadcasting ) or Südfunk for short and deputy chairman of the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesell schaft (German Broadcasting Society), he, and with him Wertheimer, recognised early on the interesting opportunities that the new medium opened to the DAI: it could help the Institute gain a wider public and ensure a broader dissemination of its material and information. When, therefore, in the spring of 1925, the DAI finally found a suitable establishment for all its departments in the converted orphanage redesigned by Paul Schmitthenner in the Charlottenplatz, it installed a modern radio studio in the complex, of which the Institute made frequent use. The bi-weekly magazine Der Aus landsdeutsche (Germans Abroad), edited by Wertheimer, published regular tips on radio broadcasts about the life of German-speakers abroad, who, as Wertheimer repeatedly stressed, lived and worked as loyal citizens of their various host countries. Beginning in the mid-1920s, the DAI, together with lesser partners, produced an average of 200 broadcasts annually, of which a large part was transmitted directly from the in-house studio via the Südfunk. Because of the intensive use of radio and print media (in addition to the bi-weekly magazine, there were various book series and scientific compendia), the exhibition activities of the Institute were, for a time, neglected. But a further reason for this was the financial difficulties that had burdened the Institute since 1928. ‘Under the constraint of lack of resources, we had to put our exhibitions programme in second place’, Wanner summed up in the 1931/32 annual report. Yet it was not merely the economic but also the domestic political crises of the Republic, especially the increasing radicalism from both
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Founding and Development of the Deutsches AuslandInstitut 1917 –1932
the right and the left, that hindered the work of the DAI. Not least, Hitler and the anti-Semitism of his party threatened the very foundations and prerequisites of the Institute’s work. This did not become evident until after 30 January 1933. Even before then, the rational and liberal approach of the DAI’s management was subjected to the harshest attacks. The same violent opponents who fought with all means against Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann, and brutally destroyed the memorial to him erected in Mainz after his death, now sharply attacked the DAI and Wanner’s and Wertheimer’s liberal policy of long-term inter national understanding. In these circumstances, it was not always possible to maintain the factual, scholarly and scientific basis of the Institute’s work. Kurt Düwell taught at the universities of Cologne and Trier and has been Professor of Contemporary History and Regional History at the University of Düsseldorf since 1995. The focus of his work is on German and European history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and on the cultural foreign policy of the Weimar Republic, the National Socialist period and the Federal Republic of Germany.
Kurt Düwell
Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen – what a name!
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Sudabeh Mohafez
Institut für Aus landsbeziehungen – what a name! Sudabeh Mohafez
Facts two As, a B and a D four Es, an F and a G an H, three Is, an L and four Ns an R with three Ss three Ts, four Us and finally a Z
Words and Syllables*
In Sti tutle ever more people from Rausla. Even at Ezieh there’s a fueror of folk showing their tutits around, while Stifuer and Tutfuer are tutling landwards, yes terra firma’d they tut fueriously into trumpets procured for Usland – ¡despite insti, despite utfu, despite terzo! – and out-tutled, austere Ungslanders with landed land-holdingz a little confused by Utfuer slang are slung into Titu Erau. * to be read loudly and clearly, with a pronounced rhythm
Anagrammatical* Zing! Rubus-hued fest at Anne’s lieu, tinted gris a nut flea: bun-suet-zushi, nineteen lithe usages! Zi… sunburnt fun ad infinit. Zebuu’s Tati angel-rush ensued. * not to be read too loudly, but so that it can be heard clearly, and never silently, but above all, almost (!) like a running text
17 Fantastical ‘Let’s talk’, said Ingold, ‘about names’, and he added prophetically: ‘After all, they hold our fate’. Now, personally, I don’t believe in fate. Nor am I a lover of old Latin proverbs or of those middle class intellectuals who employ them – casually, but with extraordinary finesse and at exactly the right moment – to reinforce their sense of belonging to other middle class intellectuals. So normally at this juncture I would have firmly changed the topic. Normally. This situation, though, was anything but normal. While I, admittedly, view Latin proverbs and many sectors of our society with a certain disparaging scepticism, at the same time I’m an absurdly huge fan of Ingold. And because he’s never before talked so plainly to me (to me!), I stayed quiet and – though I’m not proud of it – I even nodded in agreement. ‘Once a name has been given’, he said, and I asked myself who had given him, this great wise man, his unusual name, ‘it sticks’. ‘But there are surely ways and means to change a name. Especially such a complicated and most unpleasantly archaic one as mine!’ I cried. But Ingold just shook his head thoughtfully. ‘It’s anything but easy to do’, he explained. ‘Just think about the logistics: Your name is on all your business cards and address labels, it’s on the registration certificate at the district court where you registered your business, it’s in the telephone book, in the family register, in your passport, on your driver’s licence and on your homepage. But, above all, it is firmly ingrained in the heads of everyone who knows you – your enemies and your friends. No matter how often you ask them to stop using your old name, no matter how clearly you explain to them that your parents, when they gave it to you, couldn’t have known how quickly and how radically the fashion would change in the world of names, and that they never – never! – would have given you this name if it had been clear to them then how it would sound today in the here and now, the present we all share, and what a range of connotations it would
Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen – what a name!
Sudabeh Mohafez
open up, what kind of an aftertaste it would leave, and what kind of disgust it could even provoke in some people, no matter how often you lay out the complex and substantial contexts, your name will stay your name for them. People are like that. And you will have to struggle with this name of yours for your whole life.’ ‘My whole life?’ I interjected meekly and a little incredulously. There had to be a way to rid myself of my name and get myself another one – a friendly, maybe even funny, but definitely frank and free-spirited name that everyone would enjoy saying, that would make everyone listen and that at its very mention would guarantee worldwide affection. There are names like that. There really are! ‘Your whole life’, Ingold repeated as he looked through the open kitchen window towards the horizon where a large flock of migrating birds was clustering in a wild formation, scattering in seconds in all imaginable directions, only to group back together an instant later and take on a new, even more absurd, even more agile and even more breathtaking form. Migrating birds, I thought bitterly, don’t have the slightest problem with changing and fitting in, and I looked over to Ingold again, who was just putting the kettle on. ‘It’s better’, he murmured, ‘that you accept it and bear your name, perhaps not proudly, since it’s an insidious companion, but with your head held high’. He cleared his throat. ‘You know’, he said finally, ‘in my experience it can be extremely helpful to reach into your bag of tricks’. Which bag of tricks? I wondered, confused, looking around. ‘Now’, continued Ingold, undeterred, ‘first ly, three-part names should be banned anyway. But since it’s clearly too late in your case, they should simply be forgotten. Secondly, we’re living – thanks to Mother Earth and the United States of America – in an age of acronyms. And thirdly, everyone calls you by your nickname anyway: seriously, who has time these days to go about using three-part names in full? So why should it worry you, your real, long, much too long, unbelievably old-fashioned, grating assault on today’s ears of an actual name?’
18 I looked at Ingold, bewildered. What was all that talk about acronyms and Mother Earth? And how did it help me that everyone called me by my nickname? After all, I knew just as well as they did what it stood for anyway. My opinion of Ingold was in grave danger of falling through the floor. A prospect that made me feel even sadder. But, as if he couldn’t see my eyes darkening, Ingold continued, unmoved: ‘But that’s the way it is: the short form of your name’, and here Ingold paused meaningfully and repeated himself gravely, ‘the short form of your name shouldn’t cause you any embarrassment whatsoever’. ‘None?’ ‘Not the slightest bit!’ he cried. ‘Firstly, it is most splendidly short; secondly, it consists most ingeniously of a single word, and that too a word of two syllables; and thirdly it means nothing more and nothing less than keeping the faith….’ ‘Keeping the faith?’ I interjected, bemused. ‘And what faith, and why, is left so beautiful ly open. So the meaning is completely in your hands.’ I felt dizzy. Though I’d been sitting the whole time, I instinctively steadied myself against the table top. Just what had I hoped for from a visit to Ingold’s? A miracle? A kind of magic? The dizziness became so bad that I closed my eyes and fell straight into a deep sleep. I was slumbering so deeply, in fact, that later I only remembered the stubbornly persisting acoustic background music to my dreams, my own snoring. When, the next day – and strangely on the sofa at home – I woke up again, the visit to Ingold’s felt so real that, though I knew better, I found it hard and, to be honest, I still find it hard today, to dismiss it as a dream. But what he meant about the bag of tricks finally became clear to me this morning. Dream or no dream, as if by magic, from that day on I’ve stopped struggling with my name. Mind you, that has less to do with that thing about faith that Ingold seemed to find so important – though, I admit, it sounds nice – and much more to do with points one and two on Ingold’s list of reasons: a short word.
Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen – what a name!
Sudabeh Mohafez
And I would like to add: a short word that ends on an open vowel. Now I think a name can’t be more inviting and just generally better than that. Stations: Tehran, Berlin, Lisbon, Stuttgart and a hamlet near Welzheim | Training: Music, English Studies, Edu- cation | Job: Educator – crisis intervention, violence prevention | Job: Writer – novels, short stories, poems, plays and translations – English, Farsi, Portuguese | Selected awards: German Literature Fund scholarship, scholarship from the state of Baden- Württemberg, MDR Literature Prize, Adelbert von Chamisso Development Prize, writer in residence QMU London and University of Nottingham
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Karonga/ Frankfurt
Raymond Mwenifumbo
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Karonga/ Frankfurt
Raymond Mwenifumbo
Karonga/ Frankfurt Raymond Mwenifumbo
At Lake Malawi, on the border of Tanzania, is the Malawian district of Karonga. Palaeontologists know this area for its many fossil finds. Since 2004, there has been a unique Malawian museum here presenting primeval and early history. In 2016, Raymond Mwenifumbo, a staff member at the museum, came to Germany with a scholarship from the Alexander Rave Foundation. Since 2013, I have been working for the Cultural & Museum Centre Karonga (CMCK). Many fossils were found in this region, including a bone of Homo rudolfensis and fossils of Nyasasaurus parringtoni (Malawisaurus), a primeval lizard. Although these finds were made in Malawi, the fossils became part of European or South African museum collections. This is due to Malawi’s colonial history. Until 1964, the country was occupied by the British. In Malawi, there is no long tradition of studying primeval and early history Raymond Mwenifumbo is a cultural manager. and no education about this in sociSince 2013, he has been responsible for education and public relations at the Cultural & Museum ety, as there is in Europe. The mu Centre Karonga (CMCK). He coordinates interna seum in Karonga is just twelve years tionally supported projects. old. Just to compare – the Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Frankfurt was founded in the beginning of the twentieth century. Oliver Mwenifumbo, Lawrence Mwamlima and Archibald Mwakasungula initiated the foundation of CMCK. The north of
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Karonga/ Frankfurt
Raymond Mwenifumbo
Malawi is a structurally weak region, but also a place with great historical significance. This explains why the museum was established in Karonga. It was planned and designed in collaboration with Professor Friedemann von Schrenk from the Goethe University Frankfurt. When I applied for the Rave Scholarship, I wanted to learn more about exhibition practice and approaches to natural history exhibits in Europe. The conThe Alexander Rave Foundation at ifa was established cepts used in European museums are as the heritage of the Hamburg merchant Alexander Rave. The Foundation works in the fields of science and different from those I had known up research and in education and training by giving scholarships to curators, restorers, museum technicians to then. There are different systems and cultural managers from transforming and deof electronic cataloguing, different veloping countries. methods of presentation and different approaches to museum education. A workshop by the Film Archive of Human Ethology at the Senckenberg Society, which I attended during my stay, looked at interactions between parents and children, for example. I also used my time in Germany to continue working on the project ‘Museum3 – Integration through Interaction’. The aim of this project is to set up a platform for the dissemination of knowledge and an interactive museum visitor network between CMCK in Karonga, the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi and the Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, to give visitors the possibility to communicate directly with each other. My stay in Frankfurt was not only valuable because of all the exchange with German colleagues about exhibition practices and new forms of presentation and education. It also enabled me to see our methods of curating and cultural management in Malawi from an international perspective, so that I was better able to understand our strengths and our potential.
Inauguration of the DAI at the Haus des DeutschÂtums (House of German Culture), 21 May 1925
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Knowledge of the World for the Future – the History of the ifa Library
Gerd Ulrich Bauer
Knowledge of the World for the Future – the History of the ifa Library Gerd Ulrich Bauer There is scarcely another period of history that has undergone the profound upheavals of what has been called the ‘short century’ (Iván T. Berend and Eric Hobsbawm) between the First World War and the fall of the Iron Curtain. Against this historical backdrop, the anniversa ry of the ifa library represents both the achievement of outstanding figures and a collective accomplishment. Conceived as a research, documentation and information centre for ‘German culture abroad’ and as an institution for promoting German interests abroad, this unique special library on cultural foreign relations, cultural encounters and cultural exchange was established in Stuttgart. Its foundation was laid by the Arabist and Professor of Oriental Studies Georg Kampffmeyer (1917– 1924): he constructed the conceptual framework, decisively influenced the founding discourse and developed a system for inventorying the holdings. Extensive donations soon gave breadth and substance to the archives and library, which necessitated the move from the S tuttgart Linden-Museum to the Neues Schloss (1919) and then to its present location in Charlottenplatz (1925). With Hitler’s seizure of power, the Deutsches Ausland-Institut (DAI/ German Foreign Institute) was brought into
line with the new regime. Expansion of the collection, research and Institute publications were now marked by Nazi ideology – for instance, genealogical studies of German communities living abroad. After the defeat of the dictatorship, the library directors Elisabeth Schmidt (1949–1968), Gertrud Kuhn (1968– 1988) and Udo Rossbach (1988–2004) pressed ahead, with dedication and far-sightedness, with the reconstruction of the library and its further expansion, supported by an expert staff, committed sponsors and generous benefactors. The existence of special libraries such as this one is strongly dependent on power-political conditions, utilitarian goals and fashion. Consequently, one indicator of the ifa library’s success is its continued existence, in spite of all budgetary rigour and traditional literate culture’s putative loss of meaning. But more significant is the extent of its holdings: since the establishment of the library, this has grown almost linearly, from approximately 6,000 volumes and 450 regularly received periodicals in the year of the collection’s founding to over 430,000 books and 1,000 journals at present. The unqualified claim of linear growth, however, would obscure setbacks and limitations. For example, after the victory over the Nazis in 1945,
24 the Allied Powers transported a large part of the regional collections and valuable collections of maps outside Germany. They were re turned in the 1950s and integrated into the re built library. And in 1987, for reasons of lack of space and conservation, holdings had to be transferred to the Koblenz Federal Archives, and li mited resources continued to constrain the library to regulate its growth and make careful selection of new material. This, however, also contributed to giving the library a clear profile. Since its founding, the DAI and later the ifa library has endeavoured to improve its possibilities of use, from the systematic indexing of holdings through participation in the library lending system (since 1925), the microfilming of some of its holdings (since the mid-1930s), the inclusion of inventory lists in the data of the Württembergische Landesbibliothek (1958), participation in the journal database (since 1986) to membership in the Southwest German Library Association (since 1989) and the Expert Information Network on International Relations and Regional Geography (1990). Through, among other things, text collections and bibliographies, the library has flanked the reform process that has been afoot in state foreign cultural policy since 1969/1970, which is clearly reflected in developmental policy and accompanying social and cultural research. Most recently highlighted has been the further devel opment of the library into a specialist and service centre for scholars and practitioners of international cultural work; the online portal and library website are now excellent and easily accessible research resources. Even though the social and political conditions of the ifa library have changed profoundly over the last hundred years, and even though its cultural policy objectives and language of political discourse have been significantly adapted to new understandings and sensitivities, the social mission of the ifa is still relevant. This was expressed by the first Secretary General of the ifa, Franz Thierfelder, on the occasion of the library’s re-opening in 1957: ‘We believe that the money could not be put to better use than building, instead of an edifice of stone, this library for foreign relations, which
Knowledge of the World for the Future – the History of the ifa Library
Gerd Ulrich Bauer
stands open to Germans and non-Germans around the world, and would like to contribute to diminishing the strangeness amongst peoples and increasing their knowledge of one another instead of spreading misleading propaganda.’ There is plenty to be optimistic about with respect to the future of the ifa library. For one, there is the far-sighted development of the collection – a forward-looking planning, a further development for the benefit of users and an opening to future generations, especially people learning German, German and foreign students, researchers and practitioners from Germany and abroad. For another, the ifa library is making a valuable contribution to the education and knowledge processes that are indispensable for addressing the major tasks of the future. These lie not so much in some abstract ‘globalisation’ as rather in such tangible phenomena as international migration, changed geo-political constellations and the progressive diversification of our society. The ifa library is contributing to increasing scholarly knowledge of foreign peoples and places, and is thus furnishing the necessary intellectual tools for decision- making in the political institutions of a pluralist German polity that is a member of the chorus of the European community of states. Gerd Ulrich Bauer took his PhD in Intercultural Communication with a study of German foreign cultural and educational policy in 2008. He was then a research associate in Intercultural German Studies at the University of Bayreuth. He now works as an education coordinator for recent immigrants in the district of Wetteraukreis in the federal state of Hesse.
Excerpt from the book Die Hoheit des Teutschen Reichs-Adels wordurch derselbe zu Chur- und fürstlichen Dignitäten erhoben wird (The Sovereignty of the German Imperial Nobility, whereby the same were raised to the dignities of Electors and Princes), 1729
25 Knowledge of the World for the Future – the History of the ifa Library Gerd Ulrich Bauer
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Knowledge of the World for the Future – the History of the ifa Library
Magazine of the ifa library Reading Room with alphabetic and subject catalogues
Gerd Ulrich Bauer
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We Can’t Afford to Lose the Interaction with Society
Caroline Y. Robertson-von Trotha & Jennifer Endro
We Can’t Afford to Lose the Interaction with Society Caroline Y. Robertson-von Trotha & Jennifer Endro Jennifer Endro: What exactly does ZAK do? Caroline Y. Robertson-von Trotha: ZAK is the central academic institution of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). In addition to research and teaching, the area of public science is central. In cooperation with local practice partners, we publically discuss complex topics in the sciences with a broader audience – for example, at the Karlsruhe Discussions. Our transdisciplinary and international approach allows us to look at questions affecting society as a whole from an intercultural perspective. ZAK sees itself as an interface between science and practice. We convert theoretical foundations and empirical data into specific recommendations for practical application, and then accompany this implementation scientifically. Such interactions are, for me, part and parcel of a contemporary understanding of the effects of science. What can work on this interface look like? One example would be the development of guidelines for intercultural projects and activities. In 2015, I was part of a working group that was commissioned by the state of Baden-Würt-
temberg to publish a practical guide on cultural work, Interkultur für alle (Interculture for Everyone). The idea is that examples of best practice and a contribution to the state of scientific discourse will give cities and cultural institutions an important stimulus for their work on the ground. You’re the chairperson of the Academic Council Culture and Foreign Policy initiated by the ifa (WIKA). How does WIKA work? WIKA provides specialized accompaniment in the work areas of foreign cultural and education policy in cooperation with universities and other academic institutions, and networks professors and young researchers with one another. When WIKA was founded, Bernd Thum, my predecessor as chairperson, and I were enthusiastic about a work group that could cast an interdisciplinary look on the topics. During his or her tenure, every chairperson sets his own main focus. Mine is (European) integration and the interactions between local and global social developments. Currently, we’re working on ‘diaspora’ in the broader sense of the word, that is to say, on identity and migratory movements.
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What challenges are facing AKBP (Auswärtige Kultur- und Bildungspolitik/ Foreign Cultural Policy)? At present, a retreat into national thinking and an associated national isolationism is taking place. On the other hand, globalization is dissolving the borders of many areas; climate policy, for example, demands solutions at the international level. Yet international, legitimate and ratified conventions are sometimes not implemented because they are blocked by individual regions or states. This leads to the impression that politics is lagging behind the international community. It’s taking too long to get decision processes going, and so instead of an anticipatory and creative policy we have only reactive measures. We have to find a forward- looking and future-oriented way of thinking. This is a challenge in view of the current situation in foreign policy and some simultaneous opposing social developments. WIKA sees itself as a network or platform. What interfaces to other projects have already been created? We’ve benefitted greatly from our good networking, particularly with the Anna Lindh Foundation, whose German network we coordinate at ZAK. ‘Diaspora’, an important and still little researched theme, not only furnished the title of the last two WIKA workshops, but will also be treated at the next networking meeting of the Anna Lindh Foundation from the point of view of three clusters – Science, Migration and Art and Culture. The exchange is valuable for both parties: WIKA benefits from the civil society practice done in the Anna Lindh network, and this practice in turn gains insights from the analytical and reflective level of WIKA’s work. Do particular moments or events in your collaboration with the ifa come to mind? Especially memorable is the celebration of WIKA’s tenth anniversary at the Representation Office of Baden-Württemberg in Berlin.
We Can’t Afford to Lose the Interaction with Society
Caroline Y. Robertson-von Trotha & Jennifer Endro
With an exceedingly valuable public debate, we succeeded in reaching the Berlin public. It was about ‘Europe: the Acid Test’, a topic that is today more timely than ever. For me personally, it’s very important that we treat socially relevant and explosive issues, and that knowledge developed out of both practice and theory reaches the citizen. In these times we can’t afford to lose this interaction with society. WIKA, in my opinion, has outstanding potential to realize this originally anglophone idea of ‘public science’. Caroline Y. Robertson-von Trotha is Director of the ZAK | Centre for Applied Cultural Studies and General Studies at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Her research interests include multiculturalism and integration policy, globalization and internationalization. Since 2013, she has been Chairperson of the WIKA (Academic Council Culture and Foreign Policy), which was founded by the ifa in 2004. Jennifer Endro worked for several years in the Cultural Department of the Goethe-Institut as a consultant in the field of Science and Current Affairs and for the residency programmes. Since February 2016, she has been head of the project 100 Years ifa.
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We Can’t Afford to Lose the Interaction with Society
Caroline Y. Robertson-von Trotha & Jennifer Endro
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Global Challenges – Order and RespoAnsibility
Frank-Walter Steinmeier
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Global Challenges – Order and RespoAnsibility
Frank-Walter Steinmeier
Global Challenges – Order and Responsibility Frank-Walter Steinmeier
With cross-border crises, refugee flows, international terrorism and dwindling cohesion in Europe, we are surrounded by challenges for which we must urgently find solutions. In the face of the terrible images and news that reach us every day, some may not help but wonder whether cultural relations and education policy can do anything at all to help resolve all of these complex issues and conflicts. I firmly believe that it can do a great deal, and especially now. Our world is becoming increasingly complex. It is determined less and less by state action, but rather by a multitude of highly flexible, interconnected and interact-
ing civil society players. Involving and keeping these players in mind is essential in order to extend our scope for action. Wherever we are unable to make progress with traditional diplomacy alone, we need, as Willy Brandt once put it, to ‘work to strengthen reason as a driving force in the world’ – a form of cultural cooperation that, outside the realm of politics, lays the groundwork for political understanding. It is clear that, in this age of globalisation, our cultural relations and education policy can- not be informed by aesthetic criteria alone, but must also address social issues. We intend to contribute to a more human society with
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Global Challenges – Order and RespoAnsibility
Frank-Walter Steinmeier
our policies. We can achieve this by, among intensifying relations with developing counother things, promoting culture and educa- tries and conveying a realistic image of Gertion – particularly in regions that are current- many. Cultural relations and education policy ly faced with crises. In our daily work in this has become an indispensable part of German context, we put our trust in and rely upon or- foreign policy. ganisations that have, for many years, worked Our history and the responsibility arising at home and abroad to this end. from this to establish a peaceful world order One such organisation is the Institut für continue to guide us until this day. We neither Auslandsbeziehungen (Institute for Foreign Cul- want nor are we able to throw off and set aside t ural Relations), which was founded at the this historic responsibility like an old article initiative of Theodor Wanner in 1917 as a ‘mu- of clothing. It is part of our cultural identity seum and institute for research into German and determines the way in which we think and culture abroad and for the promotion of Ger- act. It encourages us and supports our political man interests abroad’ (Museum und Institut work, as well as our commitment to tolerance, zur Kunde des Auslandsdeutschtums und zur peace and a pluralist society. Förderung deutscher Interessen im Ausland). We are aware of the fact that we will only That same year, the organisation was renamed be able to find solutions to current political is‘German foreign affairs institute’ (Deutsches sues together with our European and internaAusland-Institut). It was to be a ‘project of tional partners. Germany is more globally inpeace in the midst of war’, or so its patron, terconnected than just about any other country. King Wilhelm II of Württemberg, put it. While At a time when the structures of international this mission statement is redolent with longing order are being buffeted by the forces of disinfor imminent peace, the political motivations tegration, we must wield our entire political that led to the institute’s foundation continue clout to keep the building blocks of the interto be an interesting field of work for historians. national order together or to reorder them in After the First World War, Germany sought, an expedient manner. Only with clear and deamong other things with its cultural policy mea- pendable structures will we be able to create a sures, to re-establish relations with former al- reliable framework for international policy. liance partners and neutral countries. It was Structures of international order are not a with this objective in mind that the Federal matter of course, but are based on dialogue Foreign Office's Cultural DirectorateGeneral and negotiation. If we intend to create a stable was created in 1920. This, however, was rapid- order founded on broad acceptance, we must ly placed at the disposal of the National Social- listen to and understand each other. This helps ist propaganda machine in the 1930s. The Deut us to ensure that differences do not turn into sches Ausland-Institut (DAI) too became a plan- misunderstandings, misunderstandings into ning centre for the NSDAP’s Volkstum policy. conflicts and conflicts into wars. One of the The German cultural institutions were re- most urgent tasks of our cultural relations and founded after the end of the Second World education policy is therefore to create spheres War, and a decision to re-establish the Institut for dialogue and discourse, as well as for crefür Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa) was taken in ativity and understanding. 1949. The concept of culture gradually develThe Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen prooped and expanded. Social potential and the motes access to culture and education across social power of culture and education have cultural, religious and social borders through been its focus since the 1960s. its work. It has made crossborder cooperation These principles, which are geared towards in the spheres of education, knowledge and openness and the reciprocity of cultural ex- culture a focus of cultural relations. Innovachange, are the benchmark for our actions tive side events for art exhibitions, the Crosstoday. This includes our dialogue in a spirit of Culture programme and other formats are just partnership, cooperation with civil society, a few examples.
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Global Challenges – Order and RespoAnsibility
Frank-Walter Steinmeier
There is no guarantee, of course, that such efforts will be successful or help to achieve a peaceful resolution to the world’s conflicts. One thing is certain, however, which is that if we want to preserve the opportunities for reaching understanding in all of these conflicts, then cooperation with and between civil societies plays an ever more decisive role. I am grateful to the German cultural and educational institutions for dedicating themselves to this key task together with the Federal Foreign Office. I would like to express my heartfelt thanks especially to the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, our oldest cultural mediator, for doing such important work for the cause of peace in the midst of growing uncertainty and disintegrating orders, thereby remaining true to its original mission statement in the best conceivable way.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier, born in Detmold in 1956, studied law and worked for a number of years as an academic assistant at Giessen University before entering the world of politics in the early 1990s. He headed Gerhard Schröder’s personal office in the government of Land Lower Saxony and was Head of the State Chancellery. Following the change of federal government in 1998, he was appointed as State Secretary, becoming Head of the Federal Chancellery soon afterwards. He helped to spearhead important reform projects of the Social Democrat/Green coalition government, such as the decision to phase out nuclear energy and the Agenda 2010 programme. He was Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs in the Grand Coalition from 2005, and also Deputy Chancellor from 2007. From 2009 to 2013, he chaired the SPD parliamentary group and was leader of the opposition at the German Bundestag before returning to the Foreign Office as the Minister in December 2013.
Library of the DAI, 1933
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The Deutsches Ausland-Institut 1933 –1945
Katja Gesche
Logo of the DAI, 1933–1945 May Day parade before the Silber Hotel (headquarters of the Gestapo in Württemberg) and the DAI in the Dorotheenstraße, 1 May 1933
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The Deutsches Ausland-Institut 1933 –1945
Poster of the Stuttgart Tourist Information Service, 1934/1938
Katja Gesche
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The Deutsches Ausland-Institut 1933 –1945
Katja Gesche
It may be surprising today, but in the 1960s the then Secretary General of the Institute, Michael Rehs, declared of the predecessor organisation: ‘The Deutsches Ausland-Institut (DAI) was never brought into line with Nationalist Socialist government policy’. In defiance of all the facts, the conviction prevailed after 1945 that the DAI did nothing wrong under the ‘Third Reich’.
The Deutsches Ausland-Institut 1933 – 1945 Katja Gesche It was not until 1964, when relevant documents found their way from the United States into West German archives, that the picture of a politically neutral institute began to unravel and was then finally swept away by Ernst Ritter’s dissertation in 1976.
38 Co-opting and rise of the DAI The Nazi ‘seizure of power’ represented a dra matic turning point for the Deutsches Ausland- Institut. Not only did it lead to a change of leadership, but it also set the DAI into a competitive battle with new institutions, such as the Foreign Organisation of the NSDAP, in which it maintained itself remarkably well after a short phase of orientation. If previously the Institute had primarily organised exhibitions and advised prospective emigrants, after 1933 it shifted its activities to cultivating direct contact with Germans living abroad. The official goal, as described in the brochure ‘New Tasks of the German Foreign Institute’ issued in 1934, was the ‘education of ethnic Germans living abroad in the spirit of a unified German world-view, into, as it were, soldiers of the Third Reich’. These pithy words preceded the forcible coordination: on 7 March 1933, the SA occupied the H aus des Deutschtums (The House of German Culture), the headquarters of the DAI, and hoisted the swastika flag. The incumbent Secretary General, Fritz Wertheimer, was prevented from entering the building and sent on ‘leave’ because he was a Jew. In 1938, he emigrated to Brazil. The founder and chairman of the DAI, Theodor Wanner, was also pushed out of office. The department chiefs, however, remained unmolested. A commission consisting of local representatives from politics, scholarships and science was appointed to find successors for these long- standing leaders. Soon the ambitious new mayor of Stuttgart, Karl Strölin, was fixed for the position of chairman, and later president. The position of institute director was more difficult to fill. The choice fell on Richard Csaki, a former teacher and editor, who came from an old Transylvanian family. As a leader, however, he kept a low profile, giving the department heads plenty of leeway, and relinquished his office to the staunch Nazi Hermann Rüdiger in 1941. The DAI not only continued its work, now with a new direction, under the Nazis, but also
The Deutsches Ausland-Institut 1933 –1945
Katja Gesche
significantly expanded during this time. In 1933 it had a staff of 52; at the outbreak of the war the number was 157. Its budget also increased between 1933 and 1942 from 300,000 to 1.4 million Reichsmarks and remained stable at a high level until 1944. Its sponsors from the public sector – the Home Office, the Foreign Office, the State of Württemberg and the City of Stuttgart – were joined in 1935 by the Ministry of Propaganda. The Institute’s expansion shows the importance of the DAI to the new rulers – for example, as a supplier of propaganda material for ‘Germanness abroad’. The DAI also laboured to supply state, party and military organisations with foreign press articles – so successfully that in 1934 the Foreign Affairs Bureau of the Nazi Party felt itself inundated by them. In addition, as was the case during the Weimar Republic, the DAI held specialised lectures that were addressed primarily to the military.
The DAI’s war effort After the outbreak of the Second World War, the DAI increased its activity further. On 31 August 1939, the Institute began a ‘Special Information Service’ for Wehrmacht positions. DAI publications and exhibitions in the occupied eastern territories served to legitimize German territorial claims, making use of theories that described the East as so-called German national or cultural soil. If before 1933 the DAI still defined ‘Germanness’ in terms of culture, it now increasingly adapted itself to the racist vocabulary of the Nazi. It also even willingly assisted the Gestapo (lodged in a neighbouring building) by supplying it with information about people planning official visits abroad. DAI staff themselves frequently travelled in the East until mid-1942. There, they not only wrote reports on people of German descent but also documented war-related events in neutral or allied countries. In the West, particularly the United States, the DAI started initiatives designed to bind people of German descent living there more closely to the Ger-
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The Deutsches Ausland-Institut 1933 –1945
Katja Gesche
man Reich and so hamper America’s entry into the war. The DAI also exercised direct influence on the events of the war, for its archives possessed maps that showed the distribution of population groups in Eastern Europe and thus furnished essential information for resettlements and deportations in the occupied territories. With respect to the relocations, not least in consequence of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the DAI was deeply involved in their preparation and evaluation, working closely together with the SS. Noteworthy in this connection is a failed sabotage attempt in the United States in 1942. The DAI staff member Walter Kappe, who had already joined the Nazi Party in 1923, trained several spies and provided them with plans for sabotaging aluminium production in America. One of the spies, however, betrayed the group to the local authorities immediately after arriving in the country. The further course of the war in favour of the Allies increasingly restricted the work of the DAI until it was then ended in 1943, when the Institute was put under the control of the Office for Ethnic Germans and remained in abeyance until its re-founding under its present name in 1949.
Katja Gesche took her doctorate in political science in 2004 with a dissertation on culture as an instrument in the foreign policy of totalitarian states, using the example of the Deutsches Auslands-Institut. She now works as a freelance journalist and writer based in the Hessian Odenwal
Costumed procession: opening ceremony dedicating the ‘Memorial for German Achievement Abroad’ before the DAI, 27 August 1936
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Stuttgart after the Second World War, 1948 The building of the institute after reconstruction, 1948
Self-discovery with Detours – the ifa after 1945
Peter Ulrich Weiß
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Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (r.) in conversation with Federal President Theodor Heuss at the inauguration ceremony for the Federal Constitution, 28 September 1951
Self-discovery with Detours – the ifa after 1945
Peter Ulrich Weiß
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Self-discovery with Detours – the ifa after 1945
Peter Ulrich Weiß
Self-discovery with Detours – the ifa after 1945 Peter Ulrich Weiß
When it comes to the beginnings of the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa/Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations), people like to quote Theodor Heuss. In 1951, he spoke enthusiastically of the newly founded ifa as a federal German ‘primary school for intercourse with abroad’, a future ‘clearing house’ of cultural give and take. The institute was no longer to be an instrument of foreign policy, but rather an independent platform for international understanding. Then as well as now this definition sounds visionary and quotable. Anyone who wishes to see these slogans as describing only a success story, however, should bear in mind that the post-war history of the ifa was, for a long time, shaped politically and programmatically by uncertainties and the legacy of the Nazi era. It was far from self-evident that the ifa’s predecessor organisation, the Deutsches Aus-
land-Institut (DAI/German Foreign Institute), could continue to exist under its old name after 1945. Today it has been sufficiently documented that the DAI, which consisted of a staff of 130, remained by no means unaffected by the ‘Third Reich’. So the Allies assumed. But a large number of false testimonies and doctored misrepresentations enabled the authorities to pretend that it had been an innocuous institution. A handful of remaining staff succeeded in rescuing some of the office furniture and equipment and preserving some of the old contacts in the chaos following the war. But from a cultural-political point of view, the work of the Institute was like an unheeded man treading water amidst the debris of post-war German society. The turning point came with the founding of the Federal Republic; it was also the symbolic watershed. When a change of not only
44 the Institute’s logo but also its name was proposed, there were initially objections. Politicians such as Heuss and others argued against this by pointing to the name’s tradition and international visibility. It was only on 5 July 1949, under threat of neither funding nor recognising the Institute, that the state government of Baden-Württemberg forced the re- christening. Still, it took two years before the new institute and its premises were solemnly inaugurated. The gesture of renewal determined the new Institute’s initial steps. Franz Thierfelder was appointed the ifa’s first Secretary General. This appointment, however, hardly testified to a ‘zero hour’. The energetic Thierfelder was one of the most colourful and, at the same time, contradictory figures of the time. As Secretary General of the German Academy, with its focus on ‘research on and maintenance of Germanness’, he had adapted himself in the 1930s to Nazi ideology and published work in this spirit on language policy. After 1945, he fought passionately for the restoration of the Academy and positioned himself in various cultural policy circles and institutions, including on the board of the Goethe-Institut. His career is representative of the post-war history of West German foreign policy, whose dynamics grew mainly out of the actions of individual personalities and their networks. Thierfelder, who like many other ‘researchers of ethnic traditions’ came through the process of denazification unscathed, now repudiated old ideas and became an ambassador of the new: ‘To make foreign cultures comprehensible and our own culture understandable to others: that is the deepest sense of the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen’, he declared in the first issue of the in-house publication Mitteilungen (Reports). The erstwhile belief that ‘Germanness abroad’ could serve to build bridges to foreign cultures he now described as a ‘well-intentioned error’. Accordingly, he polemicized against the Verein für das Deutsch tum im Ausland (Association for Germanness Abroad), whose backward-looking image of Germany he rejected. It was a mixture of substantive conviction and political calculation
Self-discovery with Detours – the ifa after 1945
Peter Ulrich Weiß
that spurred his actions and identified Thierfelder, who continued in office until 1960, as a transformed representative of progressive foreign cultural policy. The break with the past was positively received by the German Foreign Office and rewarded with vital subsidies. Nevertheless, the ifa’s financial support remained modest for years. Emigration counselling, in-house journals, expansion of the ifa library, sending book donations abroad, organising exhibitions – the initial tasks sound multifarious. But in fact, after the euphoria of the new beginning, the ifa’s degree of activity was restricted. The difficulties were immense: broken relationships and contacts, particularly to Eastern Europe; obstacles and barriers owing to the Nazi past and the Cold War present; a foreign policy that gave little importance to culture; programmatic fluctuations of profile and reorientations; overlapping content and competition with other mediating organisations, especially the Goethe-Institut; the modest scope of finances and number of personnel; and low visibility abroad. The Institute’s search for formative power and its own voice in the concert of cultural policy continued well into the 1960s – typical for the long way that foreign cultural policy was to take from the ‘second track to The Third Stage’ (editorial note: meaning ‘third pillar’ of foreign policy). These circumstances have also led to the comparative silence about the ifa when it comes to the history of foreign policy in the Federal Republic. Here a change of perspective could provide a remedy. The ifa as part of the history of the democratisation of West German institutions and elites: now in this case there would be much to tell. Peter Ulrich Weiß is a historian at the Centre for Historical Research in Potsdam. He took his doctorate with a dissertation on the history of the German-German cultural competition in Romania during the Cold War. He lives in Potsdam.
Building up relations after the Second World War: a visit from India
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Cultural Transfer with all the Senses
Annika Niemann
Cultural Transfer with all the Senses Annika Niemann
IÂt is summer. At ifa Gallery Berlin, a number of young people are lying on the floor with their eyes closed, concentrating on honing their sense of smell. An invisible installation is sending various scents through the gallery space. Some of these condense into thick and strong-smelling clouds, while others remain little more than inklings. Here and there the scents combine to create complex aromas. This composition of smells is the result of a multi-layered cultural translation initiated by the Japanese artist Megumi Matsubara during a stay in Morocco. There, she asked a local perfumer to ‘translate’ her poetic texts into scents. This olfactory and poetic exchange of cultures became a sensual experience of its own during an exhibition tour in 2015 in Berlin. For school students in the eighth grade, who had just moved to Germany and were bringing diverse languages and backgrounds with them, this was an opportunity to enter into lively
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Cultural Transfer with all the Senses
Annika Niemann
  Opening of the exhibition Carrefour/Treffpunkt at the ifa Art Gallery Berlin, 2015   Megumi Matsubara speaking at the exhibition Carrefour/ Treffpunkt, 2015
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Cultural Transfer with all the Senses
Annika Niemann
  Opening of the exhibition Cube or Dome at the ifa Art Gallery Berlin, 2012
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Cultural Transfer with all the Senses
Annika Niemann
dialogue on the possibilities and limits of translation – working with myself and artist Nadin Reschke within the scope of an art education project entitled sounding difference. How does diversity sound? What makes us feel lost for words? How can we express experiences beyond words? What cannot be translated?
Lost in Translation? Cultural translations and finding or inventing new languages was also the subject of the exhibition Carrefour/Meeting Point – The Marrakech Biennale and Beyond, which was shown in 2015 in the ifa galleries in Berlin and Stuttgart. Artists were invited to try out new forms of encounter and exchange, and ways of moving towards each other. This is a fundamental principle that underlies the entire programme of the ifa galleries in Berlin and Stuttgart, which see themselves as platforms for dialogue between people and cultures. Since 1971 (Stuttgart) and 1991 (Berlin), the two galleries have been influential institutions in international exchange in art, architecture and contemporary design from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. Programmes of events accompanying the exhibitions link global questions with local spaces, ways of life and experience, combining them with transnational perspectives and voices. The 2012 exhibition Cube or Dome, for ex ample, presented new perspectives in contemporary mosque architecture and contrasted innovative aspects of design with frequently controversial debates on the role of Islam. In 2014/15, the exhibition In a Class of Its Own – Schools Worldwide showed international examples of contemporary school architecture. These were buildings that saw the space of the school as the ‘third teacher’ and where
learners and teachers were involved in the design. During the exhibition, school students from Stuttgart and Berlin were invited to explore new perspectives and artistic interventions in their own school environments. In 2016, the experimental research and ex hibition project Politics of Sharing – On Collective Wisdom looked at contemporary practices of sharing, in collaboration with Artspace from Auckland, New Zealand. This began with two open education formats. The transdisciplinary collective KUNCI Cultural Studies Centre from Yogyakarta transformed ifa Gallery Berlin into a radio station for four weeks and tested the Indonesian numpang as a practice of shared space with invited guests and a public audience. ifa Gallery Stuttgart invited local sharing economy initiatives to present new cultures of sharing as a form of radical counter project to usual economic practice.
Transdisciplinary Explorations in Intermediate Spaces Sharing knowledge and transnational mutual learning are the declared aims of the ifa galleries. They are polyphonic places of diversity, and stand for different forms of expression and perspectives, experiences and discourses, curatorial voices and potential interpretations. Exhibitions may be explored in dance and com-
50 mented on in choreographies, they may be shifted to urban spaces, or they might be made to speak in improvised voices. Translations from the eye to the ear are also at the centre of a new presentation format at ifa Gallery Stuttgart. For some time now, the gallery has been offering dedicated tours for people with visual disabilities. Following a tour for the blind of the photography exhibition Leap in Time, showing works by Erich Salomon and Barbara Klemm (2016), one participant summarised his experience by saying: ‘You lend us your eyes and thanks to you we can at least see again for a short time.’
Combinations More than twenty-five years ago, ifa Gallery Stuttgart began to challenge and break down Eurocentric views of the world and of other cultures, as did ifa Gallery Berlin more than five years ago. Seeing foreign cultural and education policy as a ‘two-way street’, the galleries wish to present contemporary art from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe to a broad audience – as meeting points and places for exchange and for the collaborative production of knowledge. The aim is to include all interested persons, irrespective of their origin, age or any limitations, drawing on their expertise, experience and voices and facilitating true enjoyment of art and genuine cultural exchange.
Cultural Transfer with all the Senses
Annika Niemann
Annika Niemann has been working f or more than ten years as an art educationalist, curator and cultural agent, among others for ifa Gallery Berlin and for the art department in the German Federal Parliament. She is especially interested in participatory and transdisciplinary formats of knowledge production.
Exhibition Religious Art of Ethiopia at the ifa Art Gallery in Stuttgart – then still the Forum für Kulturaustausch (Forum for Cultural Exchange)
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A Place where People Come Together
Anne Haeming about Gülsün Karamustafa
A Place where People Come Together Gülsün Karamustafa A Portrait by Anne Haeming Three silver spoons wrapped together with a piece of white cloth, lying on the floor – it all began with this, back in 1994. Heimat ist, wo man isst (Home Is Where You Eat) is the title of the work, whose showing at the ifa Gallery as part of a group exhibition commenced the collaboration between the ifa and Gülsün Karamustafa. And the context in which these spoons are now to be seen in 2017, over twenty years later, demonstrates the importance that this Turkish artist has gained in the meantime in Germany: Heimat ist, wo man isst is part of her first large retrospective outside Turkey, at the Hamburger Bahnhof, a museum for contemporary art in Berlin. That the ifa plays a special role in her career is explained not only by the ‘continuity’ and ‘loyalty’, which characterises this relationship and which she has repeatedly emphasized, but, above all, the stance of the institution, which in her opinion has the character of a model: ‘Back then, in the years after the
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A Place where People Come Together
Anne Haeming about GĂźlsĂźn Karamustafa
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A Place where People Come Together
Anne Haeming about Gülsün Karamustafa
The installation Etiquette at the ifa Art Gallery in Stuttgart, 2011
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A Place where People Come Together
Anne Haeming about Gülsün Karamustafa
fall of the Wall and the end of the Cold War, the focus of the artistic world shifted from the centre to the periphery a paradigm change in which the ifa played an essential part’, says the 1946-born Karamustafa, whose works treat migration identities. How much she feels herself linked to the ifa becomes clear when she talks about the installation Etiquette, which she cre ated in 2011 for the 40th anniversary Gülsün Karamustafa (born in Ankara in 1946) has of the ifa Gallery Stuttgart. ‘It was influenced contemporary art in Turkey as no other artist has. Her oeuvre spans more than forty years the first time I’d seen it since the renand the range of her expression is immense. ovations’, says Karamustafa. ‘I enKaramustafa has used sculptures, installations, videos and performances, repeatedly interwoven with tered this large, light-flooded, open elements of pop culture, to treat subjects such as space, and the moment so inspired migration, gender and Turkish history. She lives in Istanbul. me that I knew what I would do for the Anne Haeming is an art journalist living in Berlin. anniversary.’ She placed a huge table, eighteen metres long, in the middle of the room. The exposed pipes and supporting columns structured the surrounding space like a pattern. ‘Such a big dinner table has something festive about it’, she says. ‘It’s a place where people come together, get to know one another and exchange ideas – like the ifa itself.’
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Congratulation
Joachim Sartorius
With the ifa, I connect two things in particular: firstly, artistic exchange, as it has taken place through the presentation of contemporary art from abroad in the ifa galleries and the worldwide exhibitions of con temporary German art; and secondly, Kulturaustausch (Cultural Exchange), a magazine that has its finger on the pulse of the time, and merits still more attention. The commitment of the ifa to contemporary art has always been very considerable and brought about a great deal. It is not unimportant that it has remained fairly loyal to some artists. The artist Rebecca Horn is a good example. Her exhibition in Maribor was surely one of the most important events during the city’s ten ure as European Capital of Culture 2012. During my work at the Goethe-Institut, I invariably found the collaboration with the ifa in arranging trav elling exhibitions to be very pleasant. My wish for the ifa is that its dialogical work, its presentation of art and its magazine Kulturaustausch continue to thrive. Today, foreign cultural work is facing immense chal lenges in view of political developments, such as those in Turkey and throughout the Middle East. Successful cultural work is quiet, continuous, optimistic and per sistent. It rightly trusts in the restoration of conditions in which networks that have been maintained over stretches of time will once again pay off. In this spirit, I also wish the ifa success on the path it has taken and the goodwill of numerous supporters. Joachim Sartorius was Secretary General of the Goethe- Institut from 1996 to 2000, and headed the Berliner Festspiele from 2001 to 2011. He is a poet and a translator, and lives in Berlin
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The magazine Kulturaustausch has been published since 1951, until 1962 under the title Mitteilungen (News) and from 1962–2006 as Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch (Magazine for Cultural Exchange). In 1970, it cast a glance at Algerian-German relations.
Magazine Kulturaustausch
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150th anniversary of independence from Portugal – occasion for the focus on Brazil in 1972; on the title page: São Paulo
Magazine Kulturaustausch
In 1996, five years after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch asks about the status quo of cultural relations with Central and Eastern Europe. Issue title: Nach dem Mauerfall (After the Fall of the Wall)
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Magazine Kulturaustausch
  What about the future of transatlantic relations after the end of the Cold War? In 1998, the focus fell on American-German relations. Issue title: ZwiÂschen Atlanta und Berlin (Between Atlanta and Berlin)
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  Since 2006, the magazine has appeared under the title Kulturaustausch (Cultural Exchange). In 2016, it explored the fragile balance between personal freedom and group memÂbership. Issue title: Ich und alle anderen (I and All the Others)
Magazine Kulturaustausch
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Career Start in Eastern Europe
Ulrike Butmaloiu
Career Start in Eastern Europe Ulrike Butmaloiu
‘Germans don’t like jokes and don’t laugh’, the Pakistani literary scholar Shamshir Haider from Lahore was convinced when he came to Germany for the first time. Among the editorial team of Kulturzeit at the 3Sat television station in Mainz, he soon learnt that Germans are quite capable of distinguishing between joking and seriousness and various kinds of humour – ‘like every country in the world. I have friends there who are really very witty’, says the journalist now. The then 31-year-old’s internship at 3Sat was thanks to the CrossCulture programme (CCP), launched in 2005 by the ifa (Institute for Foreign Relations) for countries of the Muslim world and now extended to the states of the Eastern Partnership. Through these auspices, career starters and young volunteers from the regions are given the opportunity to pursue an internship in Germany. Conversely, young Germans can gain their first professional experience in Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia or Russia. They go to these countries for eight weeks and work at youth centres, universities, human rights organisations and in art, culture and media projects, accompanied by workshops and seminars.
Heated discussions in Asia CrossCulture is only one example of how the ifa extends intercultural networks. The programme supports the foreign cultural and edu cational policy of the Federal Foreign Office,
which rests on the belief that relationships which arise through dialogue, cultural exchange and education are stable and reliable in the long term. To this end, the ifa had to adapt itself again to current conditions: the last major restructuring took place in the 1990s when Eastern Europe bid farewell to its old political and economic systems. The three newly created specialised working groups (exhibition, events and media work) and the transformation of the Institute in 1997 from a public corporation into an association, promised cultural work aimed at content. The new focus was on international cultural dialogue. The association was now divided into the departments of Art, Dialogue, Media and Administration. ‘The ifa is a leading German institution in the global cultural exchange’, says Karoline Gil, who has headed the section Integration and Media since 2013. It provides support for the German minorities in Central and Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Republics: ‘The potential of minorities is considerable. They mediate between cultures and give a stimulus to multifaceted coexistence’. The ifa has been supporting various organisations for over 20 years by placing young journalists and cultural managers from Germa ny in media groups and cultural institutions operated by minorities in Eastern Europe. In Poland, Hungary and Romania, the career starters develop theatre pieces in youth clubs, organise photo exhibitions, film and radio play projects and football tournaments. These are events that make the German minority inter-
62 esting to other people in their surroundings. ‘If they have attractive programmes, they can cut a confident figure and be recognised’, says Gil. This was also Cornelia Riedel’s experience when, in 2005, she went to Almaty, Kazakhstan, for two years as the ifa editor for the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (DAZ). The paper appears once a week in German and Russian. Its articles treat not only the Kazakhstan Germans; the Kazakhstan-German team of journalists report on current events in the entire country and Central Asia. There are news reports and interviews on politics, culture, Kazakhstan society and the German community. ‘We spent a lot of time talking about journalistic standards’, remembers Riedel, who now works as an editor in Saxony. ‘The fundamentals of research and interviews were often the subject, as was the question of how news and opinion could be separated from one another. The discussions were sometimes heated. My own standards were automatically put to the test.’
Blogging for minorities In order to stimulate discussion about the role of the media and journalism in the region, the ifa editor launched a special project in 2006: the Central Asian Media Workshop (ZAM). ‘We wanted to bring together young German journalists and young people from the Central Asian countries. The idea was that they would work together on a joint journalistic project’, says Riedel. Since then, young writers from Germany and the rural areas of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan meet annually in Almaty for five days to produce texts, photos and film for their media and to discuss media and journalism. So that the texts and topics that arise in such a project are not lost, the ifa has re-established Mind_Netz (Mind_Net). On a daily basis, the editors of these social media projects read through more than 40 media of German minorities in Eastern Europe. Interesting contributions in print and from radio and television are disseminated on Facebook, Twitter, You-
Career Start in Eastern Europe
Ulrike Butmaloiu
Tube and VKontakte. In this way, young media-makers and bloggers are animated to post readable contributions about Germans in the East. To maintain the standards of the editors and the blogs, the ifa invites authors every year to an advanced training and networking meeting where they can become acquainted with the latest media trends and work together on new uses of the Internet. In the end, no one need think that the Germans have no sense of humour. Ulrike Butmaloiu is a journalist and media trainer for n-ost and IDEM (Institute for Media, Democracy and Cultural Exchange). It focuses on, among other subjects, reporting from the regions of Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus. She has worked for five years in the Altai region, in Moscow and St. Petersburg as an editor in the ifa placement programme.
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We Should Make Use of Our Experience with Integration
Olga Martens & Rosa Gosch
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We Should Make Use of Our Experience with Integration
Olga Martens & Rosa Gosch
W e Should Make Use of Our Experi ence with Integration Olga Martens & Rosa Gosch Rosa Gosch: Frau Martens, how can national cultural minorities be supported? Olga Martens: The main thing is to never stop promoting their language, culture and media. For us, a German minority in Russia, support from ifa is very important – particularly in media work. We have been working with ifa since the Moskauer Deutsche Zeitung (MDZ) was founded in 1998, and the MDZ has become a well-respected German–Russian newspaper In what ways do you cooperate with ifa? Every year, an editor from Germany works at the MDZ within the scope of ifa’s programme for posting German staff with minorities ab
‘Digitalising the cultural heritage of the German minority in Russia is one of the biggest challenges we are currently addressing.’
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road. Sometimes there are even two editors. This leads to fascinating exchange between German and Russian journalists. This cooperation is not just targeted at the needs of the German minority, but is aimed to make a contribution to broader German–Russian civil-society dialogue. How does that work? To give one example – alongside the everyday work to produce the newspaper, since 2011 we have been inviting students, young professionals and experts from Russia and Germany to the ‘Moscow Dialogues’, where we discuss topical issues in bilateral relations. This was an initiative by an editor participating in the ifa’s programme. The MDZ is also involved in Mind_ Netz, a new ifa social media project that networks the media of the German minorities in Eastern Europe and in the post-Soviet states. Why are the social media so important for your work with minorities? Ethnic Germans are spread all over the whole of Russia. This makes contact via social media and digital channels very important. Digitalising the cultural heritage of the German minority in Russia is one of the biggest challenges we are currently addressing. The large numbers of refugees in re cent years has led to new minorities in Germany, which must be integrated. What could we learn from your expe rience in working with minorities? Many national minorities are very concerned about how the current refugee situation is being discussed, especially in the press. Some
We Should Make Use of Our Experience with Integration
Olga Martens & Rosa Gosch
people are also afraid that newly arriving refugees will lead to traditional minorities being forgotten or neglected. Germans in Russia have a lot of experience with this kind of fear and with integration into majority experiences and narratives. We could all profit a lot from that. What do you wish for future work with ifa? I would like the fields of culture and media to be more closely interlinked. The Germans in Russia have a very rich cultural heritage and a very diverse cultural scene. I hope that ifa can use its expertise to increase its support for us in the field of digital media.
Olga Martens, born in 1969 in Alexandrowka in the region of Omsk, Russia, is vice-president of the International Association of German Culture, vice-president of the Federal Union of European Nationalities and editor of the Moskauer Deutsche Zeitung. She studied foreign languages at the Kokchetav Ualikhanov Pedagogical Institute, Kazakhstan, and has been active in work with the German minorities in Russia and Kazakhstan since 1992. Olga Martens lives in Moscow. Rosa Gosch is a journalist and lives in Berlin.
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Culture Exchange – The Answer to War
Winfried Kretschmann
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Culture Exchange – The Answer to War
Winfried Kretschmann
Culture Exchange – The Answer to War! Winfried Kretschmann
The ifa (Institute of Foreign Relations), with Europe is our answer to the global political its headquarters in Stuttgart, looks back on a problems of the twenty-first century. Only a century of valuable experience. I would like to united Europe, capable of action, can effecti congratulate it most sincerely in the name of vely champion its basic values in the world the state government of Baden-Württemberg. today and also ensure that they are reflected Cultural exchange dedicated to the peaceful in international regulations. And precisely for and enriching coexistence of peoples, states this reason, we must not leave Europe to the and religions forms the foundation for the populist and anti-European forces. They precommitment of the ifa at a time when cultural tend to have simple answers and solutions and exchange is more than ever a work of peace. tend to national and nationalistic patterns of Cultural policy can mitigate crises, build bridg- thought. The path they propose is one of isoes and initiate lasting cooperation. lation and division. War and terror are the basic evils and causThe European Union and its members have es of the global crises of the various kinds cur- reached the crossroads between erosion and rently afflicting us. The plights of thousands integration. For us in Baden-Württemberg it of refugees, the influx of refugees into Europe is perfectly clear which path the EU must take and the strengthening of populist parties have – in the direction of mo-re Europe! This also made us painfully aware of this. We do not means that we must set Europe back on its feet. want that new walls are erected across Europe The guiding principle is subsidiarity. as well as in the heads and hearts of Europeans.
68 As one of the most internationalised regions of Europe, Baden-Württemberg has not only the opportunity but also the duty to influence affairs on the international stage. In 2014, we launched a major project: together with California, we initiated an international climate protection alliance for partners below the national level. Since its start, more than 130 signatories, from over 30 states and six continents, have joined us. We also set up a special programme for traumatised women and children from the region of northern Iraq and Kurdistan in need of protection. So far, we have brought more than 1,000 people to safety in Baden-Württemberg. We have thus helped victims of the terrorist army of the so-called Islamic State, predominantly Yazidi women. In Baden-Württemberg they have access to therapeutic treatment and the chance to live in peace and security. Amongst them is the UN Special Representative Nadia Murad – an incredibly courageous and strong voice that has denounced the atrocities of the ‘Islamic State’ and brought them more into public awareness. Mrs Murad’s untiring commitment has been duly honoured with the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought and the Vaclav Havel Prize. These initiatives show that an individual German state can achieve a great deal. This success has confirmed my belief that much can still be set into motion by international cooperation, whether in economic, environmental or cultural policy. Especially in the case of the last, we continue to rely upon the work of the ifa. Foreign cultural policy is rightfully looked upon as the ‘third pillar’ of foreign policy. As early as 1951, Theodor Heuss made the wise observation that ‘You can’t make culture with politics; but perhaps you can make politics with culture’. We cannot and do not want to ‘make’ or even determine culture. But what we want to do, what we can do and what we in fact do is to promote it to the best of our ability. Our support of culture adheres to four principles: liberality, plurality, subsidiarity and decentralisation. We believe that these principles are not only advantageous and beneficial for art and artists in Germany, but are also precisely
Culture Exchange – The Answer to War
Winfried Kretschmann
the criteria for the creation of the Europe that we want and that we need. Culture means origin; it creates identity and strengthens social cohesion. Europe draws its strength from the diversity of the regional roots of its culture. Thus it is also especially artists and creative people in general who build networks, surmount barriers to thought and advance international understanding. Culture and the arts sharpen our critical eyes for seeing old and new Europe. They convey experiences with strangers, they give us distance to the accustomed and they teach us empathy – far beyond the borders of Europe. They show the diversity that holds us together. I am, therefore, grateful to all those institutions and actors which, in this spirit, carry culture across all borders. Winfried Kretschmann, born in Spaichingen in 1948, studied biology and chemistry at university in preparation for a degree as a grammar school teacher and then worked as a teacher after taking his Second State Examination. Politically active since his student days, Kretschmann founded, with others, the Baden- Württemberg Green Party in 1979, and in 1980 became a member of the first Green state parliamentary group in Baden-Württemberg. In1986, the then Hessian Minister of the Environment, Joschka Fischer, appointed him policy advisor in the first Green Ministry of Environment. Two years later, he returned to the Baden-Württemberg state parliament. In 2002, Kretschmann was elected parliamentary party leader, which he remained as until 2011. On 12 May 2016, the state parliament elected Winfried Kretschmann for the second time as Minister-President of Baden-Württemberg; he had been elected to his first term in office on 12 May 2011.
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Dialogue on an Equal Footing – Intercultural Exchange
Christopher Resch
Protests in Tahrir Square in Cairo during the Arab Spring, May 2012
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Dialogue on an Equal Footing – Intercultural Exchange
Christopher Resch
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Dialogue on an Equal Footing – Intercultural Exchange
Christopher Resch
Dialogue on an Equal Footing – Intercultural Exchange Christopher Resch With its several lines of projects, the ifa is an important pillar of German foreign cultural and educational policy. A central part of its work in cross-border cultural exchange is the CrossCulture programme (CCP), with which the ifa has already reached more than 500 multipliers in the Arabic-Islamic world. Three summer months in Asma Abidi’s life ifa is an excellent example of the commitment still linger in her memory: in mid-2014, the to abolishing borders in people’s heads, refutyoung Tunisian took part in the ifa’s CrossCul- ing stereotypes about ‘the other’ and combatture programme. She worked at the German ting images of the supposed spectre of Islam. media NGO MiCT in Berlin. ‘The CCP was a The essence of this effort, according to Beckdoor-opener for me; it really kicked off my mann, is that ‘dialogue must always be bilatcommitment to cultural initiatives’, says the eral’. The ifa is a central part of German foreign 27-year-old Abidi today. She is particularly cultural and educational policy, which since proud of the documentary project The Wedding, 2002 has actively devoted itself above all to whose aim was to bring Tunisians and Euro- dialogue beyond political and cultural borders. peans closer together across the Mediterrane- At the time, in response to the devastating atan. ‘We focused on the perception of borders tacks in New York on 11 September 2001, the – cultural, social and physical.’ ‘European-Islamic cultural dialogue’ intensiBorders that can be crossed in both direc- fied, with the goal of bringing the people of tions lose their isolating effect. Hardly anyone two cultural regions, highly interrelated but knows this better than Urban Beckmann: the equipped with very different values and sysDirector of the Department Dialogue at the tems, more closely together.
72 This cannot be accomplished overnight; after all, almost a billion people live in the two regions. As part of a multi-cultural approach, the ifa developed the strategy of seeking ‘dialogue motors’, as Beckmann describes them. Individual actors can become multipliers and exercise a lasting influence on a society. An outstanding example is the CrossCulture programme, in which Asma Abidi took part. ‘First of all, the CCP enabled me to get to know other participants and so expand my horizons’, says Abidi. ‘Being in the heart of Berlin, this intercultural city with its wealth of daily events and concerts, opened so many possibilities for me.’ Another advantage, explains Beckmann, is the excellent alumni network. ‘More than 500 people, coming from completely different backgrounds, have so far taken part in the CCP.’ They often came from the area of human rights work, but also sometimes from further afield: one participant, for example, championed a beekeeping cooperative, remembers Beckmann. ‘Such social structures are also, in the end, very political.’ An alumni network works properly only when it is maintained. That is one of the jobs of Elham Khattab. During her internship at Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst (GfZK) Leipzig (Gallery of Contemporary Art Leipzig), the now 25-year-old Egyptian developed a concept for communicating art to children. Today, she heads an initiative that promotes Egyptian artists. ‘I’ve become the CCP representative for Egypt’, she says, ‘because I help the new interns and want to prepare them for this great experience’. The ifa also supports such committed CCP former grant holders through pro ject promotions, such as the add-on module CrossCulture Plus. Another major project line is zivik – Zivile Konfliktbearbeitung (civil conflict resolution). Naturally, the ifa does not stand alone with its projects. The Goethe-Institut supports, in particular, the German language events and organises the cultural events, and the DAAD (German Academic Exchange service) offers, among other things, scholarships for students. ‘These various approaches are very important for intercultural exchange’, says Beckmann
Dialogue on an Equal Footing – Intercultural Exchange
Christopher Resch
with reference to the transformation partnerships that have existed between the Federal Foreign Office and Tunisia and Egypt since 2011. ‘Here we’re pursuing the approach of first conducting a context analysis by bringing together relevant actors and so defining what needs and opportunities there are. We then identify suitable multipliers and expand the networks.’ The result is specific projects, tailor-made for each situation. What is clear is that the Middle East-North Africa region is not a monolithic bloc; the developments in each individual country are complex – for example, the situation of women’s rights in Egypt is, to put it mildly, difficult. Nevertheless, Beckmann is optimistic. ‘However strict the system may be, people always find ways to be creative and to challenge it. Sooner or later the system will change.’ The director of the Dialogue Department of the ifa sees confirmation of this in the fact that there are still a huge number of applications for various projects pouring out of Egypt. That the Institute has no permanent branch office in the country he thinks is even a positive factor: for one thing, the actors are then less likely to come into the sights of the secret services; for another, the ifa feels more compelled to think in terms of networks from the start. Stereotypes and bogeymen fade the more people have to do with ‘the other’. This of course applies to work not only in the countries of the Arabic-Islamic world but also in Germany and Europe. For this reason, the ifa has turned its gaze towards home in the new CCP special module ‘Escape and Migration’. The aim of the project line is to strengthen cooperation in the area of civil conflict management and (re-) integration, in the transitional countries of the Arab world, but also expressly in Germany. Christopher Resch is a freelance journalist and writes mainly on culture and politics in and concerning Islamic countries. He has also worked for the Goethe-Institut in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. In Riyadh, he organised the German contribution to the Janadriyah cultural festival in February 2016.
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Congratulation
Jörg Armbruster
I still remember it well. It must have been early in 2000, in February or March. I had been a television corre spondent for ARD in the Middle East for nine months when I received an invitation to take part in a meeting of German and Egyptian colleagues in Cairo. The invitation was to an intercultural dialogue and it came from the ifa. The discussions lasted two days and were carried on in a large group, perhaps too large. But that wasn’t the decisive thing. Much more important were the con versations on the sidelines, the tête-à-têtes, the infor mal discussions, the talks over dinner and in the excur sion bus to the pyramids and back. They became increasingly open, went deeper and deeper. Though I didn’t at the time strike up any friendships with Egyptian col leagues, I did make lasting acquaintances, which have helped me to understand them and, I hope, them to understand us a bit better. It is especially for such events that I would like to congratulate the ifa on its anniver sary and wish it another hundred years. We need such encounters wherever dialogue is important – that is, everywhere. Jörg Armbruster reported on the situation in the Near and Middle East from 1999 to 2005 and then again from 2010 to 2012 for ARD. He is now a freelance journalist living in Stuttgart.
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7,500 Kilometres
Proma Parmita & Mohammed Asad-UrRahman Nile
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7,500 Kilometres
Proma Parmita & Mohammed Asad-UrRahman Nile
7,500 Kilometres They first met in 2011 in Dhaka. About 7,500 kilometres from home, Nile and Proma met again on another continent as scholarship holders in the CrossCulture programme (CCP) in Germany. Proma Parmita: I first met Nile in 2011 at a Christmas party in Dhaka. Then we lost touch for a while. After I graduated, I took on a job in social and economic research. The scope of my work is international, including the fight against poverty, the protection of minorities and precautionary measures for natural catastrophes. The causes of poverty and natural catastrophes are never just national, there is a global context. I wanted to research a field that took this global side into account, and so I joined the Munich NGO joyn-coop, which works in interna tional development cooperation. Most of our communication was online. Then I applied for the CCP because I wanted to know how organisations working in this field are structured in highly developed countries. Because of my work at joyn-coop I was especially interested in the German perspective.
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7,500 Kilometres
Proma Parmita & Mohammed Asad-UrRahman Nile
Mohammed Asad-Ur-Rahman Nile: Like Proma, I am active in international development work. My fields are the sustainable promotion of business and the promotion of development in the private sector. My work brought Mohammed Asad-Ur-Rahman Nile worked before me frequently to Europe, but I had and after his stay in Germany for PIND Foundation and the Economic Development Centre in Nigeria. In 2016, never been to Germany before. I wanthe became Technical Specialist at LICT (Leveraging ICT for Growth, Employment and Government), a project ed to know more about German culsupported by the World Bank to promote the informature and ways of life and I applied for tion technology sector in Bangladesh. the CCP in 2014, when a friend told me about the programme. At the time, I was working for the prime minister’s office in the scope of Access to Information. This was a programme for the development of the private sector supported by U.S. and UN development agencies and by the state of Bangladesh. In the same year, I saw Proma again at the preparatory meeting for the CCP in Dhaka. We had met briefly a few times before, professionally or with friends. But we only really got to know each other in early 2015 at a workshop in Stuttgart. After the workshop, I wanted to visit a friend in Frankfurt and I decided spontaneously to visit Proma in Düsseldorf on the way. Proma: At that time, I had an internship at Eine Welt Netz (One World Net NRW) in Düsseldorf. It was St Valentine’s Day, in the middle of the Carnival, when Nile visited me for a day. We went to Königsallee to see the carnival procession. Spending the day together, we realised that we did not have that much in
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7,500 Kilometres
Proma Parmita & Mohammed Asad-UrRahman Nile
common but really felt good in each other’s company. When I took him to the station and we wanted to say goodbye, with a lot of people in fancy dress around us, I somehow felt empty. It was like looking through a veil. I knew then that this was only a goodbye for a short time. Nile: Proma soon came to Berlin, where I had been working since the beginning of 2015 at NUMOV, an association for the Near and Middle East. Although we were both very busy with our jobs, we took some time to explore the city together. I showed her my favourite places. Thinking back, I can see us at Alexanderplatz in the snow or Proma Parmita is a researcher at Mesovision Consulhaving dinner in a restaurant in the tancy Limited in Dhaka, an organisation that advises ministries, associations, organisations and businesses evening. I can remember so many in the field of development cooperation. details. I felt I wanted to be with Proma, and this feeling became certain. Just before she was to leave for Düsseldorf I asked her if she could imagine a future together and she said yes. Proma: A year later, on a hot July day, we celebrated our wedding with our close families in Dhaka. The reception took place in early August. There were around eight hundred guests, but this is still relatively small for a Bengali wedding. Relatives, friends, colleagues, CCP scholars and staff from the German embassy all came to celebrate with us. The evening was magical.
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Congratulation
Mariyam Nizam
Other Countries – Other Ways In the three weeks that I was in Aachen, I development. This has strengthened my encountered not only a different cultural belief that humanity must set aside differsystem but was also exposed to an entirely ences and work towards a common goal new way of life. I had the opportunity to – the safeguarding of our planet and its reengage with the German legal, political and sources, with a special interest in human social systems, while my interaction with interactions with the natural environment, individuals led me to not only understand cultural landscapes and built heritage. I the German way of life but also to reflect have learnt that all around the world people upon culture, customs and social-political struggle every day, with some destined for variants in my own country. more struggles than the rest – yet within During my travels, I looked out into the our nature lies the very answers we are vast German landscape and towns that searching for. I have been blessed to be able whizzed by, so different from Pakistan. to explore and understand that every counEvery inch of land was used to its full po- try has its challenges and that we must all tential, cultivated acre after acre, tradition- learn from the mistakes of our fellow hual wooden beams and cob houses inter- mans and empower those around us. spaced with new modern concrete conSome of the photographs that I took durstructions. Grey walls covered with graffiti ing my stay in Germany could be placed added cheer to the otherwise dull urban anywhere in the world, because what fabric. I saw small community garden plots makes us human are our relationships, our with wooden cabins and apartment blocks families and our friends. That is true for with beautiful and well-tended balcony any place on Earth. gardens, and of course many people enjoyI would like to congratulate the ifa on ing a summer’s day. The trains stopped at its 100th anniversary! Its valuable work to various stations, people would get on and connect individuals, to compare people, off, and I would often wonder when the cultures, history and languages, all within ticket conductor would arrive to check the such close parameters, leads to the conclutickets. I noticed that everyone seemed to sion that people are people, no matter be engrossed in their phones, much like in where they come from, and this can change Pakistan, but, unlike there, the fact that the way we view our world, one individual people were sitting beside each other did at a time. not seem to be a reason to strike up a conversation. In Pakistan, I would have been Mariyam Nizam has been working since 2010 as project coordinator surprised by this lack of conversation, as and heritage manager for Heritage the train would have been full of queries Foundation of Pakistan. In 2013, about destinations and reasons for travelshe participated in the CrossCul ture programme (CCP), to exling, the sharing of gossip or views on polplore German approaches to culitics. In Germany, the hustle-bustle of betural heritage at Aachen’s Centre ing on public transport seemed like a disfor Documentation and Consertant memory. vation. In 2015, she became thesis advisor in the Department of ArI have spent my professional career chitecture at Indus Valley School tending to global commons – World Heritof Art and Architecture, Karachi. age sites, climate change and sustainable
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Congratulation
Mariyam Nizam
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Fruitful Dialogues
Christopher Resch about Marcel Pott
Fruitful Dialogues Marcel Pott A Portrait by Christopher Resch
Impressive careers sometimes begin with a coincidence. In this case, Marcel Pott was looking for such a coincidence and was ready to take his chance when it came. It was 1982 and Pott had been working as an editor at Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR / West German broadcasting) for several years when Near East correspondent Gerd Schneider felt he needed a break from all the chaos of the Lebanese Marcel Pott (born in 1946 near Cologne) is an civil war. ‘I was basically a holiday repla author and journalist and a respected expert on the Near East. After studying law he worked as cement’, Pott laughs, ‘and no one wanta lawyer, first in Cologne, then in Paris, where he ed to take it on except for me, a comwas asked to report on large trials for WDR. He accepted the offer and became a political editor. In plete greenhorn. I had no knowledge of 1982, he went to Beirut to report on the war in the region at all. It was all learning by Lebanon. Later, he became foreign correspondent and head of the ARD radio studios in Amman. doing’. In 1992, he returned to Germany and worked until Marcel Pott learnt quickly. He was 1997 as a chief editor at the ARD television studios in Bonn. Marcel Pott still works as a freelance soon explaining the Near East – a rewriter and journalist, focusing on the Arab gion that both attracted and confused and Muslim world. so many people – with his informative pieces for radio and articles for the Zeit newspaper. A little later, the editor-in-chief of WDR radio asked Pott if he would like to become their correspondent. ‘I said yes immediately and never regretted it for a second. This was the most interesting period in my life.’
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Fruitful Dialogues
Christopher Resch about Marcel Pott
Marcel Pott spent ten years in the region. Then he brought his vast experience to the ifa, including working as a participant in media dialogues with journalists from various countries. Pott well remembers the media dialogue in Damascus in 2009 – one of those high-ranking platforms serving the promotion of awareness, as he says. ‘A frequent Christopher Resch is a freelance journalist and writes theme was diverging preconceptions, mainly on culture and politics in and concerning the question where the West was Islamic countries. He has also worked for the Goethe- Institut in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. In Riyadh, he generalising, and also the other way organised the German contribution to the Janadriyah around. I thought that was very cultural festival in February 2016. fruitful.’ Especially in the surveillance state of Syria, the personal level is incredibly important, Pott says. ‘These dialogues are part of a civil public diplomacy’, he explains. Two years previously, Pott moderated the ifa media dialogue in Cairo. A panel looked at the media as protagonists of social change at a time when the Arab Spring was certainly nowhere in view, but Pott says that it is impossible to ‘separate the so-called Arab Spring from the fact that the whole region is and was in a miserable state’. Observers of the situation in countries like Egypt or Syria might despair, but historically speaking the revolt is a massive paradigm shift. ‘For the first time in history, Arab peoples have risen up against their rulers. This overcoming of the barriers of fear cannot be taken away from them.’
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Fruitful Dialogues
Christopher Resch about Marcel Pott
What now has to succeed is the reconciliation of tradition and modern reality. ‘A critical exploration of the concept of freedom, the rights of the individual in the collective, these are unresolved questions and now we ourselves are confronted with them again.’ The important subject of refugees plays a role here, the problem of populism and colliding value systems. And thus also questions of respect and tolerance. Back in 2007, Pott was already talking about ‘tolerance and its borders’ at the ifa-Schlossgespräch dialogue. ‘I could hold the same lecture again today.’
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The ifa Research Programme ‘Culture and Foreign Policy’y’
Patrick Wildermann
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The ifa Research Programme ‘Culture and Foreign Policy’y
Patrick Wildermann
The ifa Research Programme ‘Culture and Foreign Policy’ Patrick Wildermann
What is the role of foreign cultural and education policy in states undergoing transformation? How can the media reinforce citizens’ interests in European Union affairs? And what are the needs for art and culture in refugee camps? These are just a few of the many questions explored by the ifa research programme ‘Culture and Foreign Policy’ during what is now six years of work. This programme connects themes from practice with research and the media in the field of foreign cultural and education policy. The ifa not only has considerable theoretical resources but has also established a broad network of researchers and practitioners and can make use of many different channels of communication. The programme focuses on art exchange, civil conflict management, intercultural dialo gue, media relations, the integration of minorities, and dialogue between the state and civil society. The research programme is continually identifying topical and important themes within these areas, providing analysis and exploring application of the knowledge gained in specific projects. This close connection between re-
search, politics and public society is very special. This is not about work for academic ivory towers but research deriving from practice feeding back into practice.
From the ‘Poor Cousin’ to a Field of Research For a long time, there was very little research into foreign cultural and education policy. As late as 2002, an ifa workshop asked if this field was no more than a ‘poor cousin’ in research. This sparked off a development that led to the foundation of the ifa WIKA (Science Council on Culture and Foreign Policy) in 2004. This brings together researchers and academics in various disciplines, mainly from the humanities and social sciences, all of whom are addressing the realities and foundations of cul-
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The ifa Research Programme ‘Culture and Foreign Policy’y
Patrick Wildermann
tural exchange. The aim is to combine forces they are not servile to the dictum of direct pracwith university teachers, researchers and prac- tical use value. The programme also addresstitioners, to promote foreign cultural policy in es the fundamentals of foreign cultural and research and teaching, and to interest more education policy and their terminologies. students in the field. ‘From Dialogue to Cooperation’ was the title In particular, it is young academics who are of a recent project, for example. This study active in WIKA, corresponding with future investigated whether and why a programmatopportunities and the growing need for knowl- ic paradigm shift in international relations has edge. More and more state and non-govern- taken place – moving from dialogue to coopmental protagonists are active in the field of eration, and also what the key differences in international cultural relations. In times of various forms of exchange are. growing tensions between increasing globaliAnother project asked how sustainability sation and resurgent nationalist tendencies, and effectiveness can be controlled and steered. cultural exchange becomes immensely impor- In the end, all action in foreign cultural and tant. This is a theme that WIKA has reflected education policy is subject to dynamic and often on in one of its regular workshops. fast changing political and social conditions. The study ‘Digital Diplomacy – Opportunities Presented by New Media in the Field of Foreign Cultural and Educational Policy’ highlighted the increasing importance of social media as means of political communication and the ensuing opportunities and risks. Whether it is regional studies, media eduThe work of this research programme would cation, migration or the after-effects of histornot be possible without the resources of the ical events – the great variety of the research ifa library, which helps to coordinate WIKA. programme creates a resource space where This is the world’s only specialist library de- civil society and politics can enter into dialogue voted to international exchange, with 430,000 on their different and mutual concerns. This books, 1,000 magazines and journals, and has become a forum for active democracy that 220,000 press articles. This library dates back is heard both inside and outside Germany. to the year 1917. Specialist areas covered in the ifa library include intercultural communication, national stereotypes and cultural regional studies. This is an internationally networked lending library that is open to the public and also accompanies research projects and academic Patrick Wildermann studied politics, work. On the Internet, the ifa library provides German studies and journalism at the University of Münster and began basic texts, such as planning documents and his career in journalism with the cultural agreements. This library’s very special cultural pages of the Münstersche inventory makes it the headquarters of the reZeitung newspaper. Since 2005, Wildermann has been working as a search programme.
The Headquarters of the Research Programme
Resonant Spaces of Democracy The studies that are conducted within the WIKA scope are geared towards practice, but
freelance cultural journalist living in Berlin. He writes theatre reviews, portraits of artists and reports on cultural policy for Der Tagesspiegel, the Goethe-Institut, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and others. Since 2014, he has been working as a dramaturge for the Berlin Theatre company santinis production.
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Let’s Talk with Each Other!
Fritz Kuhn
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Let’s Talk with Each Other!
Fritz Kuhn
Let’s Talk with Each Other! Fritz Kuhn
It began as the Deutsches Ausland-Institut (Ger man Foreign Institute), abbreviated as DAI in capitals. Today, we know it just as ifa, in small letters. The importance of ifa as an organisation is not reflected in this modest graphic presentation of its name, but this understatement is not just a nice friendly touch. It amounts to a mission statement as to how ifa sees its own work in culture – not wanting to convert anyone, and not wanting to tell others what culture actually is, but working in an attitude of curiosity, looking for exchange, interested in other people and their cultures. Throughout its history, ifa’s work has changed with the times. It began as an institution offering advice for emigrants and looking after Germans abroad and organising exhibitions. From 1933, it was transformed into a planning centre for state policy on race and ethnicity. The history of ifa as a democratic institution working for international under-
standing began in the early 1950s, when ifa became a pillar in German foreign cultural policy, which had not been a priority before. Cultural policy had been seen to promote economic exchange, and as nothing more than an appendage, even if a meaningful one. Among politicians, Theodor Heuss was one of the first to recognise the central significance of foreign cultural policy. In 1951, on the occasion of ifa resuming work after the Second World War, Heuss called it a ‘clearing house’ and a ‘primary school for intercourse with abroad’. His choice of words may seem a bit clumsy today, but he hit the nail on the head by saying that this organisation has an educational mission. It teaches intercultural ways of seeing. It broadens our interest. No culture is weighed against another. They are all seen as equally valuable. You travel to other countries, taking your own culture with you, but not to convince anyone of anything. The aim is dialogue. Culture is a bridge to communication.
88 It is a practice of tolerance, and you can only learn tolerance if you are open to others and want to get to know them. Put simply: Let’s talk with each other! Today, the city of Stuttgart is a good place for ifa to be, not least because Stuttgart is one of the top immigrant cities and has a specific international profile. Stuttgart’s contemporary history of migration began in the 1950s with the Italians, Greeks, Turks, Portuguese, Spaniards and many others who found work here and supported the economic revival of the city and the region. Later, many people came from former Yugoslavia, and Stuttgart became a city for refugees. 34,000 of them lived here during the Balkan conflict. Many stayed, their families joined them, and many became German citizens. Today, Stuttgart is a safe refuge for 8,000 refugees from the civil wars in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. More than 3,500 people of Stuttgart are helping to look after them in voluntary refugee initiatives. The large number of nations and the diversity of cultures is a particular strength of the city. Stuttgart is an international city where people understand each other. ifa’s concept of meetings between cultures based on equality and understanding corresponds to the city’s integration policy that sees integration as a form of ‘renewal’ – following the Latin origin of the word. People who come to the city must renew themselves and change, just as those who are already here must renew themselves and change. This makes it possible for both to engage in mutual and fruitful encounters. Stuttgart has been developing concepts for integration policy for many years. One milestone was the foundation of the Forum of Cultures in 1998. Representatives of immigrants have been active in the International Committee since 2000. The city operates a Welcome Centre for the region and the state, as a central point of contact for new citizens and international skilled labour. In many places, our urban integration policy is highly respected. Stuttgart is often praised for its role as a capital city of integration. ifa fits perfectly into this context. ifa and the city are closely connected, and the city is
Let’s Talk with Each Other!
Fritz Kuhn
pleased that this organisation is here. ifa brings people together in what is known as civil society, just as we try to bring people together in our own ‘municipal foreign policy’ through a large number of city partnerships. Stuttgart can see itself as one of the pioneers of the idea of city partnerships. As early as 1948, Stuttgart began a partnership with St Helens in England, then in 1955 with Cardiff in Wales, in 1960 with St Louis in the USA and in 1962 with Strasbourg. Stuttgart is also a partner of Mumbai in India. Today, the city has ten partnerships in four continents. These are active and lively, not just involving meetings between institutions but also between citizens. Cultural exchange across the borders of nations has a special function today. It can build bridges where politics and business do not manage this alone. More cultural exchange would be good for the European Union, as common markets alone do not create a sense of belonging. This makes ifa’s idea highly topical and we can be sure that ifa’s future looks good. ifa is urgently needed if fruitful and peaceful coexistence between cultures is really to succeed. Kuhn, born in 1955 in Bad Mergentheim, has been mayor of Stuttgart since January 2013. He studied linguistics and philosophy, was a co-founder of the German Green Party, member of parliament in the state parliament of BadenWürttemberg and leader of the Green parliamentary group there. He was national chair of Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, member of the German Bundestag and leader of the Bündnis 90/ Die Grünen parliamentary group there.
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Forest of Hanging Stones, 1992 60 Words from the Old Testament, 1992
Wounds/Bonds
Stefanie Jansen über Günther Uecker
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Wounds/Bonds
Stefanie Jansen about GĂźnther Uecker
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Wounds/Bonds
Stefanie Jansen about Günther Uecker
Wounds/ Bonds Günther Uecker A Portrait by Stefanie Jansen
You could call Günther Uecker an ambassador of art, if the inherent officiants of this designation were not fundamentally contrary to his nature. He is rather a fighter and disputer, an optimistic realist in Che Guevara’s sense, one who accepts reality but never wearies of again and again demanding the impossible. ‘Where language fails, there begins the image.’ This statement by Uecker can be seen as the guiding principle of his artistic work, which he has now followed for several decades. Thanks to recurring motifs – for example, the spiral – and materials, such as stone, sand, earth and ashes, he has succeeded in transforming a minimalist vocabulary into universally readable signs. The artist seeks dialogue with the viewer, and he succeeds in finding this all over the world. Uecker believes profoundly in the power of transformation that makes images and objects into means of communication with which people from the most different cultures can be reached and relate to each other. Günther Uecker was born in 1930 in Mecklenburg. His childhood and youth were stamped with painful experiences, which left behind physical and psychological wounds. ‘Wounds’ and ‘bonds’ are key concepts in his life as in his work:
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Wounds/Bonds
Stefanie Jansen about Günther Uecker
like a red thread, split and ‘wounded’ surfaces and bandages run through his work. After the division of Germany, Uecker worked initially in the GDR as a poster painter. When he was no longer able to cope with the discrepancy between ideology and reality, he fled to the West in 1953. Now in Düsseldorf, his work gained in radiance and appeal from 1955 onwards. In 1961, he joined the international art movement ZERO. In 1964 and 1968 Uecker took part in the documenta, and shortly thereafter he was representing Germany, together with three other artists, at the Biennale di Venezia. He Günther Uecker (born in 1930 in Wendorf) completed was also the first post-war West an apprenticeship as a painter and advertising artist and then studied painting in Wismar, Berlin and DüsselGerman artist whose works were exdorf. In the 1960s he was a member of the artist hibited in Moscow. group ZERO, and from 1976 to 1995 held a professorship at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. In 1998 Uecker In 1993, the exhibition Günther designed the devotional space of the Reichstag Uecker. Der geschundene Mensch building in Berlin. – 14 befriedete Gerätschaften Stefanie Jansen is a curator and Director of Exhibition (Günther Uecker. Maltreated Man – Management at the Art Collection of North Rhine- Westphalia. There, together with Marion Ackermann, 14 Pacified Instruments), organised she was curator of the major 2015 retrospective Günther Uecker. by the ifa, opened in Budapest. This exhibition has just ended its twenty-three-year long tour through forty-seven countries exactly where it took its conceptual beginning: in Rostock. The large installation is based on Uecker’s shock at the xenophobic attacks in 1992 in Rostock-Lichtenhagen. The injuries and hurt that man inflicts upon man is a depress ing subject, which because of its current manifestations remains a continual challenge. The optimistic realist Günther Uecker absorbs this into his daily work, true to his credo of 1983: ‘Art cannot save man, but by means of art a dialogue becomes possible that calls us to act in a way that preserves our humanity’.
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Congratulation
Rebecca Horn
Will o’ the Wisps The lost walkers circling in their loneliness never seen to be arriving fled when still too young those silenced in the wind Rebecca Horn, Maribor 2012 Rebecca Horn is seen as one of Germany’s most versatile artists. She is internationally renowned and has received many awards and recognitions for her sculptures, films and installations. With her own unique artistic approach, she creates installations that address complex themes like the body and space, light and dark, life and death, the past and the present, while speaking to all our senses. During the last seventeen years, she has been touring with ifa with a large exhibition adapted to each new venue, and shown in well-known museums like the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo, and the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. In 2012, she worked with the project office for the European Capital of Culture Maribor, the Umetnostna Galerija Maribor and ifa on ‘The Maribor Project’. She invited artists, composers and writers to a joint exhibition and series of events.
Workshop as part of the exhibition prêt-à-partager with Ndjaga Diaw, Lambert Mousseka, Zille Homme and students of the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart
94 Exhibitions Travelling the World. The ifa Touring Exhibition Concept Heike Denscheilmann
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Exhibitions Travelling the World. The ifa Touring Exhibition Concept
Heike Denscheilmann
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Exhibition Linie Line Linea, in La Paz, Bolivia, 2013 Exhibition Werkbund (German Work Federation) in Santa Fe, Argentina, 2015 Exhibition Future Perfect in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2015
Exhibitions Travelling the World. The ifa Touring Exhibition Concept
Heike Denscheilmann
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Exhibitions Travelling the World. The ifa Touring Exhibition Concept
Heike Denscheilmann
Exhibitions Travelling the World. The ifa Touring Exhibition Concept Heike Denscheilmann
Visitors to the exhibition Travelling the World. monographic exhibitions of the works of wellArt from Germany (Weltreise) in 2016 will see known artists, such as Günther Uecker, Rebecmuch more than just an exhibition. This show ca Horn, Barbara Klemm, Wolfgang Laib and comprises four hundred works from ifa’s own Marcel Odenbach, and also thematic presentacollection, presented on five continents and tions. They may be based on developments in representing artistic positions from Germany architecture, urban planning, design and arfrom over the past five decades, including Jo- tistic explorations of contemporary German seph Beuys, Carlfriedrich Claus, Hermann history. Sometimes ifa commissions art works Glöckner, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Isa especially for exhibitions. Once it is ready to Genzken, Barbara Klemm, Sibylle Bergemann, travel, each exhibition is packed into boxes Else (Twin) Gabriel and Wolfgang Tillmans. and sent to partner organisations, art instituCurators Matthias Flügge and Matthias Winzen tions, the Goethe-Institut or educational orselected these works from more than 23,000 ganisations around the world. At every venue, items in ifa’s inventory. This selection is a com- ifa representatives or the artists themselves prehensive new view of our own collection. install the exhibition and adapt it to local conWorks in the ifa collection, including those ditions. There are also accompanying events in Travelling the World, are usually bought for – guided tours, discussion and workshops that ifa touring exhibitions. But what is a touring the participating artists implement together exhibition? Renowned curators are commis- with locals from the relevant art scene. On sioned by ifa to compile them. They include average, an exhibition tours for five to ten years,
98 and some shows have even been touring for decades. A few numbers will show just how much ifa does in this format – between 1990 and 2010, 88 touring exhibitions were developed, and 46 of them were on tour in 2010.
Early Exhibition Work Back in the days of the Weimar Republic, ifa’s predecessor institution, the Deutsches Ausland-Institut/DAI (German Foreign Institute), made use of cultural exhibitions with the aim of opening doors for Germany after the First World War and gaining access to artistic and diplomatic networks in European states, and also presenting new views of Germany and Ger man culture and art abroad. These attempts were put to an end with the Nazi seizure of power and exhibitions abroad were usually no longer promoted. After the Second World War, cultural activities abroad served to realign Germany with the Western world. From the mid1950s, ifa set up programmes for exhibitions at home and abroad with this aim in mind. The arts were intended to contribute to reinstating respect for Germany around the world. The presentation of artistic positions and processes has been at the centre of ifa’s work on exhibition ever since then.
Further Developing Exhibition Concepts New methods and strategies in foreign cultural and education policy, and also social changes since the 1950s and the development of art istic movements have all influenced ifa’s exhibitions work. Generally speaking, there are three key stages. 1. ifa has always worked on updating and developing its approach to exhibitions. This work became more professional and gained shape over many years under department head Hermann Pollig. The restructuring and reshaping of a number of organisations working in foreign cultural and education policy also had an influence on ifa. In 1971, some of the work
Exhibitions Travelling the World. The ifa Touring Exhibition Concept
Heike Denscheilmann
of the German Art Council, which was originally responsible for touring exhibitions, was transferred to ifa. By the 1990s, ifa had become responsible for the fine arts, photography, architecture, film and design, and also music, literature, theatre and the natural sciences, technology and regional studies. In 1994, the Goethe-Institut and ifa reorganised their respective tasks, and since then ifa’s focus has been on art exhibitions with original works, while the Goethe-Institut is responsible for historical exhibitions, including in the field of culture. 2. Foreign cultural and education policy is linked to the changing shape of German politics. In 1989 and after the reunification of Germany it was necessary to present the reunited country abroad. Hermann Pollig added artists to the touring exhibitions programme who had lived and worked in East Germany – Gerhard Altenbourg, Hermann Glöckner and Carlfriedrich Claus. After 1990, ifa took over the prints collection of the East German Centre for Art Exhibitions. Touring exhibitions like Two German Architectures 1949–1989 now offered a comparative view of artistic developments in both German states. Berlin became an important theme. The art scene there was presented in the exhibition QUOBO Art in Berlin 1989– 1999, and the changes in the city itself were shown in 1995 in An Urban Experiment in Cen tral Berlin. Planning Potsdamer Platz. 3. ifa exhibitions also reflect changes in the art scene. In 2000, Art Space Germany was the first ifa touring exhibition to show foreign artists working in Germany (a total of 42) and thus to highlight the increasing internationalisation and networking in foreign cultural and education policy and in the world of the arts. Under Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, foreign cultural and education policy became more a matter of dialogue. Cooperation and partnerships were strengthened. The 2005 exhibition somewhat different also included designers from other European states and at each venue also from the country hosting the touring exhibition. For the first time in 2008 and 2009, an international project led to a touring exhibition – prêt-à-partager. Seventeen artists and cultural workers from Africa and Europe
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Exhibitions Travelling the World. The ifa Touring Exhibition Concept
worked together for ten days in a workshop in Dakar, finding artistic responses to questions about identity and history in connection with fashion. The results then became part of the touring exhibition of the same name. ifa touring exhibitions hail back to the mission to present art and culture from Germany abroad back in the 1950s, and today they are platforms for international encounters and art istic exchange. They address topical social issues and questions with global relevance, as in the case of Future Perfect. In this show, artists living in Germany take a look at images of the future and speculate about the course of history. For Nina Bingel, head of the touring exhibitions department at ifa, contemporary rel evance is important: ‘We react to changes, take up new impulses and work on the basis of longterm relations. Shared and peaceful togetherness is only possible if you keep talking with each other and listen to each other, getting to know how your partners think and taking on responsibility’. Dr Heike Denscheilmann studied cultural studies and aesthetic practice at the University of Hildesheim and Médiation Culturelle de l’Art at the Université d’Aix-Marseille, France. In 2012, she completed her doctoral thesis at the University of Hildesheim on Deutschlandbilder. Ausstellungen im Auftrag Auswärtiger Kulturpolitik (Images of Germany. Exhibitions in the Name of Foreign Cultural Policy).
Heike Denscheilmann
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Congratulation
F.C. Gundlach
The exhibition Bildermode – Modebilder (Picture Fash ion – Fashion Pictures), which I had the honour of developing for the ifa in 1995, toured 54 cities on five continents, ranging from New York to Kuala0 Lumpur and from Nizhny Novgorod to Belo Horizonte. At several of these stations, I myself set up and opened the exhibition, and was surprised and delighted at the broad acceptance with which it was met and the va riety of accompanying events. This tour, I think, is an excellent example of the ifa’s activities as a mediator of German culture in the world. The success of the ifa rests on the fact that its projects present a different and unexpected picture of Germany, beyond all stereo types. They show instead an extremely exciting cultural identity. The ifa, and its work, is now one hundred years old, and the institute’s importance for cultural exchange and peace can hardly be measured. Fostering under standing amongst the peoples and religions of the world through direct encounters and the furnishing of information is more necessary today than ever. For the future, I wish the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations) the energy to initiate new projects, perseverance in these challeng ing times and all success in its global cultural work! F.C. Gundlach is one of the best known fashion photographers in the world. Many of his photographs from the 1950s and 1970s, which treated social phenomena and current trends in the visual arts, have gained the status of icons. In 1995, he curated for the ifa the exhibition – Modebilder: Deutsche Modephotographie 1945–1995 (Picture Fashion – Fashion Pictures: German Fashion Photography 1945–1995), which documented five decades of fashion photography.
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  Op-Art Swimsuit, 1966
Congratulation
F.C. Gundlach
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Exhibition Setup
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Exhibition Setup
Transportation of an exhibition in Israel Günther Uecker at the setting up of the exhibition, Rostock, 2016 An exhibition tours the world. Opened in Rostock in 1993, Günther Uecker. Der geschundene Mensch – 14 befriedete Gerätschaften (Günther Uecker. Maltreated Man – 14 Pacified Instruments toured the world for 23 years, stopping in Iran, Cuba and Morocco. In 2016, it closed again in Rostock.
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In Every Country the Objects Gain a New Cultural Context
Volker Albus & Jennifer Endro
In Every Country the Objects Gain a New Cultural Context Volker Abus & Jennifer Endro A conversation with the curator, Volker Albus, on planning exhibitions, on setting them up under pressure and on memories of special places.
Jennifer Endro: You have been curating design exhibitions for ifa since the late 1990s, and these are shown all over the world. How would you describe your approach as a curator? Volker Albus: Design objects are things we know from our direct everyday environments and they are thus easy to understand quickly. The challenge when planning this kind of exhibition is that these objects are placed into a new cultural context in each country. This is why I look for themes that can be relevant worldwide over a long period of time. The exhibition somewhat different was about playing with and breaking with conventions, and new olds looked at the presented objects’ relationship with tradition.
The exhibition venues may be museums, galleries or quite different places. How do you take these different local conditions into account? The exhibitions are always very coherent, that is essential. I work with a modular exhibition architecture, which is highly flexible. This includes plinths and walls that can work as ‘islands’ for specific groups of objects and that can be rearranged simply irrespective of the size of the exhibition space or the shape of a room. Over the years, ifa and I have also work ed on how we present texts. For somewhat different, for example, the stands and walls were coated with blackboard paint and then written on using chalk and the specific local language.
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In Every Country the Objects Gain a New Cultural Contextt
Volker Albus & Jennifer Endro
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In Every Country the Objects Gain a New Cultural Context
  Photo series by Volker Albus: kiosks in Thessaloniki
Volker Albus & Jennifer Endro
107 You always supervise installation yourself. Are there any unusual situations you have had to deal with? We usually get room plans in advance, but the material nature of the rooms and the light conditions are often not noted in these. I have often found that the plans do not really describe the actual rooms. When I was supervising somewhat different in Manila, the room still contained elements from an earlier exhibition, and the museum wanted to keep these there. A second challenge is the accessibility of the rooms. We have had broken elevators, and cases where there has been no space to store or to unpack the transportation boxes. In an old military museum in Novi Sad, the boxes were driven over the terrace by a crawler tractor, which completely destroyed the outer area. Every new venue is a completely new situation. I have been curating for ifa for over twenty years now and have been to at least eighty venues – I have developed a certain routine. The most important thing is to explore and accept the local situation and to be willing to make decisions. The time pressure is enormous. The exhibitions are set up in three to four days, and you cannot think for hours whether you want to move an object a millimetre to one side or the other. What matters is a good solution for the whole. Has an exhibition ever arrived too late at the venue? So far every exhibition has been opened on the opening day, fortunately. I can remember two cases that were pretty tricky. In Venezuela, customs officials only released the boxes two and a half days before we were due to open. We still managed to open on time because the exhibition was shown at a farm and on a large open space, so there was no exhibition architecture. And in Manila the boxes arrived during the night, and we stood for hours in an underground garage, with diesel motors running. That was hard work. When you look back at the last two decades – how have the exhibitions changed over time? We have come a long way since the late 1990s, when we did the first design exhibitions. In the
In Every Country the Objects Gain a New Cultural Context
Volker Albus & Jennifer Endro
‘The most important thing is to explore and accept the local situation and to be willing to make decisions.’ beginning, no local designers were involved. Looking back, these exhibitions seem like competitive fairs that presented a very functional and sober view of the German design scene. That is completely different today. We show objects by German and European designers in other countries, but we also want to enter into dialogue with the local art and design scene. You do not have to follow Western standards. You can work with local materials. Are there any places or moments you have special memories of? Driving four hundred kilometres down the Silk Road in Uzbekistan was very special. I also remember Grūtas Park in southern Lithuania. When statues of socialist heroes were taken down during the transformation years, a mushroom gatherer began to collect them. If you go into the forest there you will meet statues of Stalin up to ten metres high. At every exhibition venue, I always go to local markets, especially those open at night. I document whatever I see and find interesting in series of photos. Do you bring any objects back from your travels? My family is not exactly happy about this – I bring everything I can back: food, DIY objects, designed objects. In Baku, I found a carpet with a socialist motif by chance in a shop. There is a portrait of Lenin on it, and it is now in our apartment. In Brazil, I found a bamboo saxophone and in China a chair made of root wood, which one of my students pointed out to me. That stayed in one place for three years,
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In Every Country the Objects Gain a New Cultural Context
until I finally found a way of transporting it. My home is full of all of these objects. Every time I return from a trip my family wonders what I will be bringing home. What would you wish for the future? I would like to have more time at the venues. After the exhibition has been installed, I usually stay for the day of the opening, and I am able to meet some people. But I would need more time to establish sustainable contacts or to really present the exhibition at its new venue. I would like to be able to use this moment, which can be the most productive and important moment, more thoroughly. Volker Albus is a professor of product design at the University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe. For ifa, he curated the design exhibitions bewusst einfach (aware, simple) (1998), somewhat different (2005) and new olds (2011), and he also worked on Come-in (2002). In 2016, he planned the exhibition Pure Gold, which looks at upcycling and will open in Germany in September 2017. Jennifer Endro worked for several years in the Cultural Department of the Goethe-Institut as a consultant in the field of Science and Current Affairs and for the residency programmes. Since February 2016, she has been head of the project 100 Years ifa.
Volker Albus & Jennifer Endro
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Congratulation
Stefan Behnisch
Every German cultural professional who wants to present his work abroad will have made the acquaint ance of the ifa, which has made major contributions to international cultural promotion. Our collaboration with the ifa goes back four years. Together with Trans solar, we curated an exhibition on the subject of sustainability, which, suggested by the Berlin architecture fo rum AEDES and sponsored by the ifa, could be seen for many years at numerous places around the world. The ifa was invariably a constructive, critical partner, whose efforts to find good exhibition venues and organisations were outstanding. I know of no better means than the ifa for the Federal Republic of Germany not only to represent our culture abroad but also to make us acquainted with foreign cultures. Through such an expansion of the Institute’s activities, and a generous budget, Germany could pres ent itself not only as a culturally creative nation abroad but also foster a greater openness towards others at home. Our internal political problems, some of the unspeakable things that have occurred lately, could thus perhaps be avoided in future – for isn’t xenophobia largely based on ignorance, on lack of contact with others and their culture? With his office Behnisch Architekten and Transsolar KlimaEngineering, Stefan Behnisch developed the exhibition ECOLOGY.DESIGN.SYNERGY, which has toured for ten years around the world since 2006 and been shown in 38 cities, 22 countries and on 5 continents.
Berthold Beitz, Max Schmeling, Ball des Sports (sports ball), 1985 The Wall Is Open, 10 November 1989
110 Alles in einem Bild Anne Haeming über Barbara Klemm
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Everything in One Picture
Anne Haeming about Barbara Klemm
Everything in One Picture Barbara Klemm A Portrait by Anne Haeming
There is an uncanny surreal light, as if a natural disaster had just taken place, shining right through the Brandenburg Gate, which seems to be dissolving. The lower margin of the picture is the only black part. A few umbrellas are discernible above the crowds, and on the right a banner saying ‘Germany United Fatherland’, but the wrong way around. ‘Sometimes you know immediately that a picture is good’, says Barbara Klemm about this picture that was taken when the Berlin Wall was opened up, back in 1989. ‘This was one of those moments.’ She was in the process of leaving the scene when she took this picture, turning back for a last look and then seeing the Brandenburg Gate in this hazy autumn light, with the TV cameras shining at it from street level. ‘I had to climb onto a fence to get this perspective. This was exactly the photo I was hoping for.’ This was to become Barbara Klemm’s photograph of German reunification. Her photos have often defined the images that Germany has of itself. In 1970, she began to work as a photojournalist for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Again and again her photos showed what was happening in the country – a picture of homeless people taken in 1974 in front of a poster of Goethe in an underground train station, or Muslims praying in front of the Bonn Ford factory gate in 1981, ‘guest workers’
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Everything in One Picture
Anne Haeming about Barbara Klemm
arriving at Frankfurt’s main rail station in 1971, protests against the new Frankfurt airport western runway, or a march by East Germany’s Free German Youth organisation. In 2007 and 2009, ifa sent these images of German affairs on tour, with two large exhibitions of Klemm’s works named Leap in Time (also with photographs by Erich Salomon) and Light and Dark. Photographs from Germany. In a speech honouring Barbara Klemm, the writer Durs Grünbein called her work ‘the nation’s family photo album’. She likes this idea, especially as she was always interested in a view of what connected Germans on both sides of the former German–German border. She always wanted to show life in East Germany too. She remembers how she brought three hundred photos to the first meeting to prepare her exhibition. With the help of Ursula Zeller, who directed the ifa Fine Arts department for many years, and curator Matthias Flügge, she brought this number down to 120, with a focus on the former East Germany, West Germany and the process of reunification. She was fascinated by the idea of presenting her work outside Germany. In Germany, she knows her audience and their expectations, and she has a good sense of what they will see in her pictures. But when these imBarbara Klemm (born in 1939 in Münster) trained as ages are presented in other places a portrait photographer. In 1959, she began to work for around the world, then the motifs Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Frankfurt am Main, initially in the photo lab and then as a photojournalist seem to be more abstract and there from 1970. Among many honours, she is honorary prois much more room for interpretafessor at the University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt. Klemm lives in Frankfurt am Main. tion. Klemm was never worried that the context would be completely Anne Haeming is a cultural journalist and lives in Berlin. lost or that levels of meaning would disappear. ‘I always chose the best pictures’, she says reas suringly. ‘If we understand a motif here, then it must be comprehensible abroad too.’ She works on the basis of a principle of ‘amicable insistence’ – you just have to have the courage to try some things out. ‘I learnt this when reading about Erich Salomon. He said that there were many situations when photographers were unwelcome.’ And this was particularly true for Klemm, as a wom-
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Everything in One Picture
Anne Haeming about Barbara Klemm
an in the male-dominated field of press photography. For this reason too she always went her own way, working in places where all the other photographers had not yet been, on the margins and sidelines. ‘You have to be careful not to begin photographing immediately, first to spend some time observing’, she says, ‘and you mustn’t let yourself be taken in by all the euphoria’, whether during the student protests of the 1970s or during the year Germany was reunified. You shouldn’t join in, she says, you have to keep some distance. This is what makes the perspectives in her photos so special, and it was how such famous pictures like the photo of Willy Brandt and Leonid Brezhnev were taken, with Brandt almost falling off his chair and Brezhnev at his side smoking, surrounded by their advisors. Klemm found it particularly inspiring to talk with colleagues during her ifa exhibitions abroad, and to find out how they work. The context defines methods: photo reports involve the expectations of those who commission them perhaps more than any other field of photography. ‘Ultimately it all depends very much on the newspaper involved and the state of press freedom in the various countries, determining what can be published and also what photographers can say with their pictures.’ In Germany, press photography has changed too, Klemm says, and since the advent of digitalisation there is too much photography published. ‘Today it is more about quantity than the quality of a picture. It was always important for me to show a complex situation in a single image. I think my pictures also express my own empathy.’ For this reason, Klemm knows very well that her works will have different effects in different places – in Calcutta, for example, where the population has quite different everyday problems to deal with than to bother much with black-andwhite photographs from Germany in the 1970s. This means that sometimes Klemm may spontaneously decide not to show some pictures in certain places, while she is hanging up the exhibition. These may be scenes of homelessness and poverty, so familiar to local people that there is no need to show them.
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Everything in One Picture
Anne Haeming about Barbara Klemm
Klemm has a very specific reason to want her pictures to tour the world. She says that it is especially important to show po sitions from the outside in countries that have long been politically and logistically isolated from other parts of the world. ‘That inspires people and encourages them to do their own work’, she emphasizes. ‘I myself always profit from looking at the work of my colleagues. It is good to see that there is someone there who is doing work like mine.’ This is what Klemm wants to achieve when working with ifa. This is a perfect opportunity to encourage artists around the world. It is soothing and calming to know that young photographers in Novosibirsk or Kuwait see that they are not alone with their view of the world. And sometimes it is just worth turn ing round to have another look.
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Everything in One Picture
Anne Haeming about Barbara Klemm
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Congratulation
Wulf Herzogenrath
The ifa is one of the most important intermediary cul tural organisations, with countless partners around the world. Especially since the savvy leadership of Her mann Pollig, outstanding colleagues have curated much-respected exhibitions of fine art (photography and video were included early on) in their respective special areas and design and architectural exhibitions, which have been shown internationally. The ifa has supported not only the careers of German artists but has also invited creative artists from all continents to Germany. The reasonable, but bureaucratically weighty, idea of buying entire retrospectives is another of its meritorious undertakings, as is its publication of exten sive books series – for instance, a history of Photo graphy in Germany – from 1850 to the Present in fifteen volumes. There is hardly another institution that has done so much for the German visual arts and inter woven them so closely with the global cultural landscape. I wish the ifa and German culture another hundred years! Wulf Herzogenrath Wulf Herzogenrath is an art historian and curator. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was on the advisory board of the ifa and has since then designed four exhibitions on photography and video art in Germany. He was director of the Kunsthalle Bremen until 2011, is head of the Department of Fine Arts of the Berlin Academy of Arts, and spokesman for the Leipziger Kreis (Leipzig Circle) of German museum directors. He lives in Berlin and Cologne.
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  In the report Return of the Desert Knights, Peace Counts told of a peace project in North Mali.
We Are Connected by an Intellectual Elective Affinity
Michael Gleich & Rosa Gosch
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We Are Connected by an Intellectual Elective Affinity
Michael Gleich & Rosa Gosch
We Are Connected by an Intellectual E ective Affinity Michael Gleich & Rosa Gosch How journalism and intercultural dialogue can work for peace and what role a partnership with ifa can play. A conversation with Michael Gleich, the initiator of the Peace Counts project.
Rosa Gosch: Mr Gleich, how can peace be made? Michael Gleich: I founded Peace Counts fourteen years ago with precisely this question in mind. It is a project in journalism and peace education, and there is nothing else quite like it. It began as a media project with reports about successful peacemakers around the world. We quickly realized that school students can use journalistic formats in class to learn about how peace projects work. Today we also use texts and photos from our reports for exhibitions and workshops, and in crisis regions and in Germany we present solutions that are found for conflicts around the world. The spectrum includes reconciliation and peace commissions, victim-offender mediation, inter-religious dialogue, trauma therapy or the reintegration of child soldiers into society. We hold peace-education seminars and train journalists on these themes.
Can you describe your work more precisely? We engage in and teach ‘constructive journalism’. We report on conflicts and social issues and we concentrate on solutions and success stories. Reports by Peace Counts have now come from more than fifty different conflict regions and have appeared in the major German media. Our partners, the peace educators of the Berghof Foundation, organise school learning groups and provide teaching materials. ifa has been working with Peace Counts since it was founded. How does this cooperation work? We have an intellectual elective affinity – we both want intercultural dialogue. In our reports, we document the social innovations that peace processes generate. The experience gained is then used in training for journalists in conflict regions. In countries like Sri Lanka, Ivory Coast and Colombia, we have already
119 promoted the concept of constructive journalism in seminars, focusing on solutions for social problems. The ifa support programme zivik (civil conflict resolution) Resolution gives us financial assistance in this. Peace Counts and ifa share the same goal of working together on this tough project called peace. Recently, this was shown at Studio Mozaik, a radio school for peace journalists in Ivory Coast. Why is this project special? In Ivory Coast there is not much quality journalism, and certainly no ‘constructive journalism’. Together with the European Union, ifa supported the establishment of Studio Mozaik. There, we are training forty journalists each year and are making programmes that support reconciliation processes in the country. In the long term, we want to create the first politically independent radio station in Ivory Coast. What do you expect of the cooperation with ifa in the future? Links between us and ifa are not only based on financial support. When I was planning the Global Peacebuilder Summit recently, at which peacemakers from the whole world met in Berlin in September 2016, I of course spoke with zivik, and asked them who were the best people to invite. We will keep close contact for the next peace summits in 2017 and 2018. I am sure that we will always find projects that can enable us to promote peace processes together.
We Are Connected by an Intellectual Elective Affinity
Michael Gleich & Rosa Gosch
‘Modern peace education can be done using formats from jour nalism.’
Michael Gleich is a journalist and author of books and the initiator of numerous media projects. His reports have been published in magazines like GEO, Stern and ZEIT- Magazin. In 2002, he founded Peace Counts, a multimedia project about successful peacemakers around the world. Since 2016, he has been organising the Global Peacebuilder Summit, bringing representatives of civil society together. Rosa Gosch is a journalist and lives in Berlin. zivik (civil conflict resolution) advises non-governmental organisations and the German Foreign Ministry in matters of civil conflict resolution. zivik promotes, documents and evaluates projects in crisis regions around the world. Since 2001, ifa has been expanding its work in civil conflict resolution and implementing the Federal Government action plan Civil Crisis Prevention, Conflict Resolution and Peace Consolidation.
Awarding of the Golden Lion for the exhibition at the German Pavilion (artist: Christoph Schlingensief, 1960–2010) to the curator Susanne Gaenshei mer (r.) and Aino Laberenz at the 54th Biennale di Venezia
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Ed Kashi – Photographies
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From the photo-essay Syrian Refugees, Jordan, 2013 From the photo-essay Sugar Cane, Nicaragua, 2015 Appeared in Edition Portraits on the occasion of Human Rights Watch receiving the Theodor Wanner Award, 2016
Ed Kashi – Photographies
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On the Foundation of the ifa Academy
Martin Kilgus
On the Foundation of the ifa Academy Martin Kilgus
The ifa Academy was founded in May 2016. It is responsible for training in the field of foreign cultural and education policy. The Academy offers our established ifa German courses and also seminars and training for people working in the field. Training is not new for ifa, which can look back at many different educational programmes. When Germany began to establish new trading relations after the Second World War, the chambers of commerce and industry in the federal states, trade associations and also the economic and cultural ministries all knew that specialists and corporate leaders required intercultural experience to be able to avoid blunders in international contexts. It was important that no negative images of Germany were ‘sent’ abroad through inappropriate behaviours – as it was called at the time. In the 1950s, ifa therefore began to offer ‘intercultural seminars’ for companies, whose staff could prepare for work abroad in specific regional and cultural training programmes. Secretary General Franz Thier-
felder published the ‘Twelve Golden Rules for People Travelling Abroad’ in the ifa news, including, for example, ‘Dress in a way that no one notices you, but never wear a fez’. This may seem amusing today, but the right clothing, manners and negotiation strategies are still necessary when we talk about cultural sensitivity. Of course, the situation today is not comparable with the 1950s. Today, people and in stitutions working in foreign cultural and education policy need more specific training provision. The ifa Academy seminars are especially aimed at civil-society protagonists. Our selected regional and thematic focuses are based on topical issues in foreign cultural
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On the Foundation of the ifa Academy
and education policy. The seminar Digital Cultural Diplomacy is a good example. It explores how communication processes are changing with the use of new media and social networks in foreign cultural and education policy, and also the potential of these communication and networking instruments for implementing for eign cultural policy. We are presently working with the University of Edinburgh on an online degree program me in Cultural Diplomacy. From autumn 2017, it will be possible to enrol in a master’s or to take single modules. This programme is designed specifically for members of the diplomatic services, for internationally active experts and for specialists in NGOs, public administration, professional associations, cultural societies and cultural institutions. We are also always developing our German courses, adding specific courses for doctors, for example, and by currently planning courses for nurses and carers. Further areas of focus are e-learning and methodologically innovative methods in contemporary language learning. The ifa Academy sees itself as a platform. We are not interested in teaching and transmitting knowledge alone, but – at least in the ideal case – in participants in our German courses, seminars and training programmes networking with each other and profiting from this beyond what happens in the classroom. Before becoming director of the ifa Academy, Martin Kilgus worked as a journalist for NBC in Washington and for Südwestrundfunk (Southwest broadcasting).
Martin Kilgus
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Renaissance of the Analogue
Gerhard Steidl
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Renaissance of the Analogue
Gerhard Steidl
Renaissance of the Analogue Gerhard Steidl ‘The ifa stands for intercultural dialogue. And how can we get to know various cultures better than in the completely old-fashioned analogue way: in real encounters, in personal exchange, from person to person?’ My workplace is as far away from a ‘paperless office’ as possible. Not only as a printer do I have a strong inward relation to paper but also as someone who organises himself in an analo gue fashion and for whom the digital form would not achieve decisively better results. Just as I read printed newspapers and like to go into bookshops made of stone and cement. Old school, old-fashioned. But out of date? Yesterday’s news? In any case, I’m not alone in this. The book printed in the form in which it has been made since the days of Gutenberg has had to cede parts of the market in recent years to the e-book, but this trend has now stagnated at a level under five per cent of the total turnover for books. In many areas, ac cording to the once-famous film material company Kodak, there is even a ‘renaissance of the analogue’. Kodak is, therefore, offering a new version of its legendary analogue Super 8 home movie camera – for films that can be put into the projector as before. A product not for old refuseniks but for young, discern-
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Renaissance of the Analogue
Gerhard Steidl
ing people, because, as Kodak says, ‘There are some moments that digital just can’t deliver’. This trend is on the same wavelength as the resurrection of the vinyl record, the appreciation of handmade things, the pleasure in craft beer and the vogue for repairing technical devices instead of immediately tossing broken ones away: all only seemingly cases of nostalgia, which on closer inspection reveal their social significance. The journalist David Sax, who writes for the New Yorker, knows ‘why physical things are important in a digital world’, and is not at all surprised at the return of the analogue: it enriches life, whereas the digital at best makes life easier. Man himself, after all, is an analogue creature equipped with senses and feelings, and not merely a computer centre called ‘the brain’. In November 2016, Spiegel Online reported that teachers feel more thwarted than inspired by digital ‘services’ used in the classroom. One teacher, who went back to a ‘printed grades calendar from the bank’ after using a grades calendar app, said: ‘Give me a tool that can process lists faster than I can with a pencil and I’ll use it!’ The advantage of paper lies not only in its haptic dimension but also in its aid to intellectual appropriation: connections can be grasped better from a book made of paper, pasteboard and binder, and anchor themselves deeper in the memory. The same applies to your own creativity. In 1968, Gerhard Steidl founded his own publishing ‘A man provided with paper, pencil house and established a screen-printing workshop for and rubber, and subject to strict disprint graphics and posters in Göttingen. He is now, in Germany, the publisher of the largest series of books cipline, is in effect a universal maon contemporary photography and of an ambitious chine’, said Alan Turing, the early theliterature programme, and designs and curates exhibitions worldwide for, among others, Karl Lagerfeld orist of modern information and and Robert Frank. The cooperation between Steidl Pubcomputer technology. lishers and the ifa began in 2011. Publications in this programme include the Edition Perspektive Auswärtige They are well-advised who not Kulturpolitik (Perspective on Foreign Cultural Policy) only put what they have to commu and the Kulturreport (the EUNIC yearbook). nicate online, but also know that knowledge and information are better placed in a printed book in several respects, especially as far as permanent storage and dignity of rank is concerned. As a publisher and printer, I am convinced of the truth of this. Good that the ifa also sees it this way.
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Congratulation
Kenneth Roth
In times of rising nationalistic and xenophobic ten sions, the defence of human rights requires enhanced efforts at dialogue and understanding to reaffirm our core values. The work of the ifa (Institut fßr Aus landsbeziehungen) is invaluable in strengthening civil society as we confront the politics of fear. Kenneth Roth has been executive director of Human Rights Watch since 1993. In 2016, this organisation, which campaigns for human rights in more than 80 countries, was granted the Theodor Wanner Award in recognition of its work.
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For a Culture of the We
Ronald Grätz & Hans-Joachim Neubauer
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For a Culture of the We
Ronald Grätz & Hans-Joachim Neubauer
For a Culture of the We Hans-Joachim Neubauer & Ronald Grätz A conversation with Ronald Grätz, Secretary General of the ifa
Hans-Joachim Neubauer: In the Stuttgart headquarters of the ifa, there’s a bust of Theodor Wanner. Would the founder of the then Deutsches Ausland- Institut/DAI (German Foreign Institute), today’s ifa, like the work the institution now does? Ronald Grätz: Absolutely! The Institute was founded here in Stuttgart in 1917, during the First World War, as a ‘work of peace’. But it wasn’t as idealistic as that may sound; the DAI’s maintaining of relations with so-called ‘German expatriates’ was not primarily for reasons of pacifism. Still, the Institute recognized that cultural exchange could build a bridge of understanding between Germany and abroad. We’ve preserved and developed this fundamental idea. We’re convinced that cultural work is work for peace.
What can a cultural mediating organisation such as the ifa do in foreign cultural and educational policy? We can make a lasting contribution to foreign cultural and educational policy in three key areas: research and consultancy, art and cultural exchange, civil society dialogue and promoting and safeguarding peace. As a mediator linking science, politics, media and cultural actors, the ifa makes important basic information available through its research programme and large specialist library, and advises cultural and political decision-makers. Further, in the area of art we develop new formats to communicate art, design and architecture. And finally, we foster dialogue in civil society by developing procedures that create potential out of problems and, for example, see minori-
131 ties as bridge-builders; we therefore also maintain sponsorship and scholarship programmes for young trainees and professionals from the Islamic world and support NGOs in rebuilding war-torn countries. What can the ifa not do? We can’t, unfortunately, create peace in the world – although there’s nothing more important than that. I profoundly wish that culture could be the key to peace, but it alone can’t create peace. Still, we try to make a contribution. Power and money shape politics. Does culture here have any chance of making a difference? Of course not just those of us in Europe have noticed that power politics is enjoying a renaissance. Dialogue in civil society and artistic ex change could form a counter-pole to this because it could demonstrate to people another dimension of human contact – one that isn’t about asserting interests but rather about understanding and shared responsibility. The power of dialogue is one way; the attempt to enrich people through culture in their individual lives and their way through life is another. When it succeeds, that’s already quite a lot. What does the slogan of culture as the roof of foreign policy mean? Culture isn’t the roof; it’s the foundation. Along with diplomacy or security policy and economic policy, foreign cultural and educational policy is one of the three pillars upon which foreign policy is based. Every human contact is shaped by culture, every formation of identity, and therefore too many conflicts arise from culture. We can seldom solve problems through culture alone, but we must be aware of cultural standards, norms and values in order to surmount political and diplomatic conflicts. With whom does the ifa work? We work internationally, and the list of our cooperation partners is very long, beginning with the Charhar Institute in Beijing through think tanks such as the Clingendael Institute in Den Haag to the International Biennial Association. We also work together intensively with EUNIC, the umbrella organisation of European cultural institutes. We’re primarily networked in Eu rope, but are active worldwide.
For a Culture of the We
Ronald Grätz & Hans-Joachim Neubauer
‘Culture alone can’t create peace, but we try to make a contribution.’
With whom won’t you work? With actors who want to take advantage of us out of economic or political interests. We also have opinions about and a stance towards human rights, freedom of expression and many other central political issues. We won’t collaborate with the political right wing or the rightwing populist spectrum, or with the extreme left. How do you reach actors in the regions? Over recent decades we’ve built up a dense network of alumni and cooperation partners, and we know the key players in the important countries worldwide. In addition, we reach our target groups through the international art scene, through our university networks and, of course, through our extensive activities on the social networks. Your focus theme for 2017 is ‘Cultures of the We’. Why? As a result of globalisation, more and more new communities are emerging. We want to ask who today is actually a ‘we’. Before and more clearly than today, the family, the immediate environment or even the state formed such associations. That has changed. There are now a lot of other, partly new forms of the ‘we’: web communities, religious and political affiliations. When we talk of ‘Europe’, how is the ‘we’ composed? Is that still only states, or do some states form a genuine we-connection? In addition, we also want to consider what forms of the ‘we’ are indispensable.
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For a Culture of the We
Ronald Grätz & Hans-Joachim Neubauer
‘In a world without borders, a world without states, a world of peace, the ifa would be superfluous.’ And what forms would they be? For instance, a new ecological and responsible ‘we’ based on solidarity and dedicated to the preservation of the planet. And since 60 million people have had to leave their homelands and are refugees and migrants, a new social ‘we’ is also needed. This affects every society. They all have to change themselves and construct new forms of community, of the ‘we’. Dream I: a sponsor gives you 500 million euros; what do you do with it? I set up a foundation for worldwide cultural dialogue with the goal of strengthening, commenting upon and discussing global developments from the point of view of culture so as to influence the agenda of multinational organisations. In short, a global representation for interest on culture. Dream II: What will be the ifa doing ten years from now? The same as before – only even better, even more intensely, more specifically, more successfully and innovatively. It has grown into a European institution of German provenance, an institution for even more people who are working on culturally relevant topics. And it is considerably larger than now, maintaining important switch-point branches worldwide. Dream III: In what world would the ifa be superfluous? In a world without borders, a world without states, a world of peace, the ifa would be superfluous. That would be the ideal.
Ronald Grätz has been Secretary General of the ifa and editor of the magazine Kulturaustausch (Cultural Exchange) since September 2008. Before that, he worked for the Goethe-Institut in various positions, including Institute Director in Portugal and Director of Programme Work in the Eastern European/Central Asian Region in Moscow. He has also held positions at the University of Barcelona and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in São Paulo. Hans-Joachim Neubauer is a professor at the Konrad Wolf Film Academy in Babelsberg.
The newly established section ‘Humanitarian Aid’ provides consultation for organisations that help with natural disasters, crises and conflicts in Germany and abroad.
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Congratulation
Wolfgang Tillmans
Photographs by Wolfgang Tillmans have been touring for many years with the ifa exhibition Bildermode – Modebilder (Picture Fashion – Fashion Pictures), planned by F.C. Gundlach in 1995, and presently on view in Travelling the World. For 2018, ifa is planning a solo touring exhibition with Wolfgang Tillmans.
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The European Idea is the Only Guarantee for Sustainable Peace
Martin Roth & Ronald Grätz
The European Idea is the Only Guarantee for Sustainable Peace Martin Roth & Ronald Grätz
Ronald Grätz in conversation with the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Martin Roth, about challenges in Europe, the significance of cultural work and his new role as president of ifa. Ronald Grätz: Mr Roth, you are a passionate European, as you have said and shown many times. What are the challenges Europe faces right now, and how can the European idea be defended in the light of these developments? Martin Roth: The European idea is the only guarantee for sustainable peace. We must do all we can to ensure that Europe is not again shaped by particularistic national interests. Only if we continue to highlight the advantages of common European policy and to work on a common European identity, while at the same time implementing political reforms in the EU, do we have a chance to defend ourselves against nationalist propaganda. We also need to strengthen bilateral and multilateral cooperation. An example is the key role of German– French friendship
ifa works as an intermediary in the field of foreign cultural and education policy. What can cultural education and cultural work achieve for dialogue with other cultures – and what can it not do? We should not overestimate the role of cultural education and dissemination – and not overburden it. Put simply: exhibitions and concerts never brought a war to an end, but they never set one off either. The concept of soft diplomacy has its limits, but within these limits we can do great things. We can contribute to an understanding of global contexts leading to action in global dimensions. In recent years, I have worked all around the world with institutions that are nearly all international in scope. The idea that German institutions send their projects around the world should now be a thing
136 of the past. What matters now is a shared understanding of problems and shared multilateral action. What are the basic challenges that an institution like ifa faces now, and how should it see and position itself in the future? ifa is an outstanding think-and-do-tank that has learnt a lot from its own history, and that is definitely a privilege. It needs a strong anchoring in Germany. I personally very much appreciate that ifa is based and grounded in Baden-Württemberg and in Berlin. Close connections to the German Foreign Ministry mean that ifa is involved in international political contexts – the prerequisites could not really be any better. But that does not mean that ifa should only operate from out of Germany. It can only remain strong in the future within networks with partners from other countries, because cultural dialogue has changed fundamentally. There are so many protagonists, and it rests on civil-society commitment, while revolving around global questions and problems. Today, cultural dialogue is not just a conversation between two sides but a discourse in global contexts of communication. This places high demands on globally operating cultural institutions – fast learning, great flexibility, shared self-reflection and a never-ending desire to innovate. What should the presentation of contemporary art look like in the twenty-first century? It is certainly not only contemporary art that is important. ifa can do more than that. In future, we should also be talking about design, creative engineering, fashion and other fields. Thinking in genres and categories in art has fortunately changed, and we should do this justice. And education in the classical sense is also no longer what is needed. We now think in terms of processes, shared interests and co-production. On 1 July 2017 you will take over the office of ifa president. What are your ideas and vision for this office? This question is too big for this short conversation, of course. Just a few words: over many
The European Idea is the Only Guarantee for Sustainable Peace
Martin Roth & Ronald Grätz
working years I have been able to get to know the opportunities and the limits of international cultural education and dissemination. Even though I am happy to take risks, I also know how far you can go. I nevertheless think that ifa should get more involved in areas of conflict. I am also a friend of partnerships. I am interested in seeing ifa in combination with internationally active universities, businesses, NGOs, religious communities, and personalities. ifa must intervene, by which I mean it must become an active protagonist in international communities at the right places. From Stuttgart to the world and back again? For some projects I prefer a one-way ticket, meaning participation instead of consulting and disseminating. But I also see ifa as a consultant to German institutions and businesses in matters of internationality and global action, working both actively abroad and at home to promote understanding. Mr Roth, thank you for this conversation. We are looking forward to your work as ifa’s president.
Martin Roth was director of the German Hygiene Museum and the Dresden State Art Collections. In 2000, he was responsible for the exhibitions programme at EXPO in Hanover. Since 2011, he has been director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. His work focuses on thematic exhibitions and programmes. In mid-2017, he will succeed Ursula Seiler-Albring as ifa’s president. Ronald Grätz has been Secretary General of ifa since September 2008 and he is editor of the magazine Kulturaustausch.
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The European Idea is the Only Guarantee for Sustainable Peace
Martin Roth & Ronald Grätz
  Inner courtyard of the ifa, exit to Karlsplatz
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President President Ursula Seiler-Albring Ambassador emeritus
President and Members of the Executive Committee
Dr Andreas Görgen Head of Section and Director of the Department of Culture and Communication, Federal Foreign Office
Full members ad personam Dr (LLD) Bernt Count zu Dohna General Counsel (retired) Prof. Dr Götz Adriani
1. Vice President Dr (LLD) Bernt Count zu Dohna General Counsel (retired) 2. Vice President Prof. Dr Götz Adriani Dr Uschi Eid Parliamentary Undersecretary emeritus Dr Andreas Görgen Head of Section and Director of the Department Culture and Communication, Federal Foreign Office Dr Fabian Mayer Deputy Mayor in charge of General Administration, Culture and Law, state capital Stuttgart Dr Claudia Rose Head of Section and Director of the Department of Art, Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts, Baden-Württemberg Otto Ruthenberg External Affairs, Daimler AG Milan Simandl Head of Unit 606, Federal Foreign Office
Ronald Grätz Secretary General, ifa Gunther Krichbaum Member of the Bundestag (CDU/ CSU), Chairman of the Committee for European Union Affairs, German Parliament Brigitte Lösch Member of the Landtag (BÜNDNIS 90/THE GREENS), Baden-Württemberg State Parliament Dr Fabian Mayer Deputy Mayor in charge of General Administration, Culture and Law, state capital Stuttgart Reiner Moser Head of Section, Ministry of Finance, Baden-Württemberg Omid Nouripour Member of the Bundestag (BÜNDNIS 90/THE GREENS), Federal Foreign Office and Committee on Cultural and Educational Policy, German Parliament Dr Jan Ole Püschel Head of Section, Commissioner of the Federal Government for Culture and Media (BKM)
Full members ex officio
Dr Claudia Rose Head of Section, Director of the Department of Art, Ministry for Science, Research and the Arts, Baden-Württemberg
Helga Solinger Minister emeritus
Jürgen Sauer Councilman, state capital of Stuttgart
Rainer Arnold Member of the Bundestag (SPD), substitute member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, German Parliament
Ursula Seiler-Albring Ambassador emeritus, President, ifa
Full Members
Milan Simandl Head of Unit 606, Federal Foreign Office
Birgitt Bender Member of the Bundestag (emeritus) Dr Roland Bernecker, Secretary General, German UNESCO Commission e. V. Petra Bewer Businesswoman Dr Uschi Eid Parliamentary Undersecretary (emeritus) Prof. Jean-Baptiste Joly Director, Akademie Schloss Solitude Thomas Krüger President, Federal Agency for Civic Education Peter Limbourg General Director, Deutsche Welle Prof. Dr Karl-Heinz Meier-Braun Integration Commissioner, Southwest German Radio Prof. Dr Verena Metze-Mangold President, German UNESCOCommission e. V. Prof. Dr Detlef Nolte Vice President, German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) Otto Ruthenberg External Affairs, Daimler AG Prof. Dr Olaf Schwencke Member of the Bundestag/Member of the European Parliament (emeritus), President, German Committee for Cultural Cooperation in Europe Helga Solinger Minister (emeritus)
140 Michael M. Thoss Managing Member of the Foundation Board, Allianz Cultural Foundation Susanne Weber-Mosdorf Former Deputy Director-General of the World Health Organisation
President and Members
CICIV GmbH – Institute for International Education Holger-Michael Arndt, Executive Director German Academic Exchange Service Dr Dorothea Rüland, Secretary General
Goethe-Institut e. V. Johannes Ebert, Secretary General Leibniz Institut, Hessian Foundation for Peace and Conflict Research Barbara Dörrscheidt, Director of Press Information and Public Relations & Fundraising
Honorary Members Dr Barthold C. Witte Head of Department (emeritus) Prof. Dr Kurt-Jürgen Maaß Former Secretary General, ifa Joachim Uhlmann Former Senior Undersecretary, Ministry for Science, Research and the Arts, Baden-Württemberg Supporting Members Heinz Ammann, Stephan Doehler, Dr Cantz’sche Druckerei GmbH & Co. KG, Harald Goegge, Treufried Grau, Bernd Kappel, Prof. Aylish Kerrigan, Janine Maurer, Dr M. Krischke Ramaswamy, Dr Michael Alexander Rehs, Renate Ressel, Dr Michael Sasu, Elisabeth Schilling, Heinz Schnepf, Marilyn Steinacker, Dr Volker Wille Corresponding Members (represented by) Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation Dr Enno Aufderheide, Secretary General Arbeitskreis für siebenbürgische Landeskunde e. V. Dr Harald Roth, Deputy Chairperson Chairman of the Executive Board, Baden-Württemberg Foundation gGmbH Christoph Dahl, Director German Federation for the Cultural Education of Young People e. V. Rolf Witte, Director Cultural Education International Carl Schurz House/German-American Institute, Freiburg e. V. Friederike Schulte, Director
German Archaeological Institute Prof. Dr Friederike Fless, President German Bundestag Dr (Hons. Causa) Gernot Erler, Member of the Bundestag (SPD), Minister of State (emeritus), Federal Foreign Office
University of Stuttgart, Historical Institute, Department of Ancient History Prof. Emeritus Dr Eckart Olshausen Society for Cultural Policy e. V. Dr Norbert Sievers, Chief Executive Officer
German-French Institute Prof. Dr Frank Baasner, Director
Linden-Museum, Stuttgart Prof. Dr Inés de Castro, Director
German Schools Abroad e. V. Georg Pflüger, Executive Director and Headmaster
Stuttgart House of Literature Dr Stefanie Stegmann, Director
German Council on Foreign Relations e. V. Dr Harald Kindermann, Secretary General German Development Institute Prof. Dr Dirk Messner, Director German Cultural Council e. V., editorial department: Politics and Culture Olaf Zimmermann, Executive Director and Editor, Politics and Culture German Music Council e. V. Prof. Christian Höppner, Secretary General German Foundation for Peace Research Dr Thomas Held, Executive Director European Cultural Foundation Katherine Watson, Director Europa Zentrum Baden-Württemberg Florian Setzen, Director German Language Society e. V. Dr Andrea-Eva Ewels, Executive Officer German Federal Enterprise for International Cooperation (GIZ) GmbH Tanja Gönner, Executive Spokesperson
Notre Europe Ute Guder, Assistant to Jacques Delors and Finance Department East-Asian Association e. V. Timo Prekop, Executive Member of the Board of Trustees Pro Helvetia Murielle Perritaz, Member of the Executive Board and Programme Director Pro Stuttgart-Tourist Office e. V. Werner Koch, Chairperson Raphaelswerk e. V. Birgit Klaissle-Walk, Secretary General Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation Krzysztof Rak, Managing Director Foundation for Science and Politics (SWP) Prof. Dr Volker Perthes, Director Foundation Euro-Mediterranean Knowledge Space (WEM) e. V. Prof. Dr Bernd Thum, President South-East European Association e. V. Dr Hansjörg Brey, Executive Director University of Bayreuth, Chair of Intercultural German Studies Prof. Dr Gesine Lenore Schiewer
141 Centre for Applied Cultural Science and General Studies (ZAK), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) Prof. Dr Caroline Y. Robertson-von Trotha, Director Association of German Teachers Abroad e. V. Karlheinz Wecht, Chairperson Museum of World Cultures Dr Eva Ch. Raabe, Director (provisional manager) Central Office for Schools Abroad Joachim Lauer, Department President
Editorial Advisory Board Peter Kettner Federal Foreign Office Johannes Ebert Secretary General, Goethe-Institut e. V. Aris Fioretos Writer Prof. Dr Naika Foroutan Deputy Institute Director of the Berlin Institute for Empirical Integration and Migration Research (BIM), Humbold University Berlin Jenny Friedrich-Freksa Editor-in-Chief, KULTURAUSTAUSCH, ifa Theo Geißler Publisher, ConBrio Publishers Ronald Grätz Secretary General, ifa Sebastian Körber Deputy Secretary General and Media Department Head, ifa
President and Members
ifa Research Advisory Board Prof. Dr Helmut Anheier President and Dean, Hertie School of Governance Dr Barbara Göbel Director, Ibero-American Institute Ronald Grätz Secretary General, ifa Sebastian Körber Deputy Secretary General and Media Department Head, ifa Thomas Krüger President, Federal Agency for Civic Education Prof. Dr Verena Metze-Mangold President, German UNESCO-Commission Prof. Dr Caroline Y. Robertson-von Trotha Director, Centre for Applied Cultural Science and General Studies (ZAK), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Chairperson of WIKA (Academic Council Culture and Foreign Policy) Milan Simandl Head of Unit 606, Federal Foreign Office Prof. Dr Bernd Thum President, Foundation Euro-Mediterranean Knowledge Space (WEM) e. V. Dr Odila Triebel Director, Section Dialogue and Research ‘Culture and Foreign Policy’, ifa Dr Helga Trüpel Member of the European Parliament, Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance, Deputy Chairperson of the Committee for Culture and Education
Arts Advisory Board Nevin Aladag Artist Elke aus dem Moore Director, Department of Art, ifa Ulrich Domröse Director, Photography Collection, Berlinische Galerie Dr Yilmaz Dziewior Director, Ludwig Museum Rainer Hauswirth Department Head, Visual Art, Goethe-Institut e. V. Mark Edgar Kwami M. Kwami Design Services Simona Malvezzi Kuehn Malvezzi Associates GmbH Christiane Mennicke-Schwarz Artistic Director of Dresden Municipal Gallery of Contemporary Art Dirk Schulz Deputy Head of Unit 603, Advisory Legation Councillor (VLR), Federal Foreign Office Nasan Tur Artist Franciska Zólyom Director, Advisory Board of the Leipzig Gallery for Contemporary Art
Alexander Rave Foundation Dr (LLD) Bernt Count zu Dohna General Counsel (retired) Ronald Grätz Secretary General, ifa
Evelyn Roll Managing Editor, Süddeutsche Zeitung
Dr Ulrike Groos Director, Stuttgart Art Museum
Dr Claudia Schmölders Cultural scientist
Helga Solinger Minister (emeritus)
updated November 2016
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Picture Credits
Cover Photo: Zara Zandieh Photos: ifa archive, Fellbach Photo: Christophe Ndabananiye
S. 41 Photo: Stadtarchiv Stuttgart (city archive) Photo: ifa archive, Fellbach
S. 2 Photo: Zara Zandieh Photo: ifa archive, Fellbach
S. 42 Photo: Bundesarchiv/ Bundesbildstelle
S. 5 Photos: ifa-Archiv, Fellbach
S. 45 Photo: ifa archive, Fellbach
S. 6 Photo: Britta Radike/ifa
S. 47 Photos: Victoria Tomaschko
S. 9 Photo: ifa archive, Fellbach
S. 48 Photo: Christophe Ndabananiye
S. 10 Photos: Bundesarchiv Koblenz (Federal Archives)
S. 51 Photo: ifa archive, Fellbach
S. 13 Photo: Bundesarchiv Koblenz (Federal Archives) S. 19 Photo: snyderjg/iStock.com S. 22 Photo: ifa-Archiv, Fellbach S. 25 Photos: Luca Siermann/ifa S. 26 Photos: Luca Siermann/ifa
S. 53 Photo: Muammer Yanmaz S. 54 Photos: Frank Kleinbach/ifa S. 57 Photo: ifa archive S. 58–60 Photo: ifa archive S. 63 Photo: www.rusdeutsch.ru
S. 90 Photo: Ingrid von Kruse S. 94–95 Photos: Sebastian Schrof S. 96 Photo: Michael Lapuks Photo: Rubén Suppo, FADU UNL Photo: Luciane Pires Ferreira S. 101 Photo: F.C. Gundlach S. 102–103 Photos: Thomas Häntzschel/ nordlicht Foto: Edwin Bader S. 105 Photo: Siri Gögelmann/ifa S. 106 Photos: Volker Albus S. 110 Photos: Barbara Klemm S. 115 Photo: Tom-Oliver Schneider S. 117 Photo: Paul Hahn S. 120 Photo: Roman Mensing, artdoc.de
S. 29 Photo: ZAK/Felix Grünschloss
S. 66 Photo: Staatsministerium Baden-Württemberg (State Ministry of Baden-Württemberg)
S. 30 Photo: Dominik Butzmann/laif
S. 69–70 Photo: Pascal Mora/Keystone
S. 34 Photo: ifa archive, Fellbach
S. 74 Photo: Asad Rahman
S. 129 Photo: Luca Siermann/ifa
S. 35 Logo: ifa archive Photo: Stadtarchiv Stuttgart (city archive)
S. 79 Photo: Mariyam Nizam
S. 133 Photo: Christian Als/laif
S. 83 Photo: Architekt Behnisch – Behnisch&Partner/Roland Halbe
S. 134 Photo: Wolfgang Tillmanns
S. 36 Placard: bpk – Kunstbibliothek der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin/ Dietmar Katz S. 40 Photo: ifa archive, Fellbach
S. 86 Photo: Michael Ehrhardt S. 89 Photos artworks: Nic Tenwiggenhorn/ifa
S. 121–122 Photos: Ed Kashi/VII S. 125 Photo: Markus Jans Photo: Joakim Eskildsen
S. 137 Photo: Thierry Bal S. 138 Photo: Luca Siermann/ifa
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The publication was funded by:
The publication was made possible by the kind support of:
Acknowledgements
144 Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e. V. (ifa), Ronald Grätz Charlottenplatz 17 70173 Stuttgart www.ifa.de © 2016, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e. V. (ifa) © for texts and interviews by the authors © for the images according to the picture credits © for the reproduced works by Günther Uecker by VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form (printed, photocopied or using any other method) without the written permission of the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e. V. (ifa) nor may any part of it be processed using electronic systems The ifa (Institut für Auslandsbezie hungen) is funded by the German Foreign Office, the State of BadenWürttemberg and the City of Stuttgart. Editing Jennifer Endro Image Editing Juliane Stein English Translation Greg Bond, Jonathan Uhlaner, Kate Roy Copy Editing Lektorat Unker www.unker.de Design & Layout Bureau David Voss Ondine Pannet, Jim Kühnel, David Voss Image Processing Dotgain Production and Printing Steidl, Göttingen Steidl Düstere Str. 4 37073 Göttingen Tel. +49 551 49 60 60 Fax +49 551 49 60 649 www.steidl.de ISBN: 978-3-95829-358-8 Printed in Germany by Steidl
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