Journal der Künste 16 (EN)

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 16

EUROPEAN ALLIANCE OF ACADEMIES NOTHINGTOSEENESS BETWEEN REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING BEUYS – A CLOSE UP ENGLISH EDITION SEPTEMBER 2021

P. 3

EDITORIAL Werner Heegewaldt

P. 4 CARTE BLANCHE

P. 28 NOTHINGTOSEENESS VOID/WHITE/SILENCE

WHITE, ZERO, NULL – PAINTING ON THE THRESHOLD TO INVISIBILITY IN THE 1960s

P. 44 NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES

BEUYS BLEIBT. BEUYS – A CLOSE UP Rosa von der Schulenburg

Anke Hervol, Wulf Herzogenrath P. 50

ÜBER DIE MAUER Arila Siegert Photos by Mila Teshaieva

P. 31

FINDS

WHITE ALBUM – BLACK ALBUM

A FEELING OF GREAT FREEDOM AND SOVEREIGNITY

Max Dax

Torsten Musial

P. 32

P. 52

BREAKING THE SILENCE. ORNETTE COLEMAN, PETER BRÖTZMANN, AND THE RADICALISM OF EXPERIMENTAL JAZZ

CORRESPONDENCE AND DIVERGENCE. THE WRITTEN CONVERSATION BETWEEN KARL SCHEFFLER AND HANS PURRMANN

P. 12 EUROPEAN ALLIANCE OF ACADEMIES

OVERCOMING DIFFERENCES CELEBRATING TOGETHERNESS Jeanine Meerapfel

P. 16

WHEN FREEDOM DIES (CENTIMETRE BY CENTIMETRE)

Bernhard Maaz

Harald Kisiedu P. 54

Radka Denemarková P. 34 TRANSFORMING ARCHIVES P. 23

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS – AN ARCHIVE OF ABSENCE. ON THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF MATEI BEJENARU

SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL IMAGES OF REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING Aleida Assmann

Ulrike Möhlenbeck P. 40

Cristina Stoenescu

P. 56 FREUNDESKREIS

MILITANT ART AND THE ARCHIVE OF THE PRESENT P. 26

ON THE VALUE OF BEAUTY IN THE FIGHT AGAINST HATE Dominika Kasprowicz and Philipp Ther in conversation with Matthias Krupa

FOUNDED NOT ONLY FOR THE PRACTICE, BUT ALSO FOR THE APPRECIATION OF ART. THE FOUNDING OF THE BERLINER KUNSTAKADEMIE IN 1696

Max Czollek

THE RESTITUTION OF LOOTED ART. LOOKING BACK ON THIRTY YEARS OF EXPERIENCE Peter Raue

EDITORIAL

Are remembering and forgetting a pair of opposites or can forgetting also be a form of remembering? The dialectic of remembering and forgetting is not only the subject of our exhibition “Arbeit am Gedächtnis – Transforming Archives”, on show at Pariser Platz until 19 September, but it is also the theme of the varied assortment of articles in the current edition of Journal der Künste. The cultural scientist ALEIDA ASSMANN shows the many forms of forgetting there are and how they are manifested. She develops a theory of memory comprising spatial (storerooms/archives) and temporal (death/rebirth, sleeping/awakening, freezing/thawing) images, and, to combat forgetting, focuses on ways of ensuring preservation and reactivation. She assigns art the function of a monitor: “[I]t creates a mirror of self-reflection that enables a society to watch and think about its acts of remembering and forgetting.” MAX CZOLLEK ’s essay “Militant Art” is an appeal for an archive of the present and against forgetting. He calls for (art) archives to reflect more precisely the radical diversity in contemporary culture and thus to facilitate a more diverse view of history. His approach is thought-­ provoking, as it calls upon the archives to constantly reappraise their collection strategies and selection criteria. An archive alone, however, will scarcely be able to satisfy this demand for radical diversity. ULRIKE MÖHLENBECK recalls a special event in the Academy’s history: 11 July marked the 325th anniversary of the founding of the artists’ association, established in 1696 by Elector Friedrich III of Brandenburg “not only for the practice, but also for the appreciation of art”. The anniversary is an occasion for the Akademie der Künste to look back but also to focus on the current situation. Calendar pages published online highlight landmarks in as well as snapshots of the Academy’s history, demonstrating that the Academy’s history has been by no means linear, but turbulent and varied. It is marked by the transformation of an educational institution into an international community of artists, by new departures and consolidation, by state intervention and the Academy’s will to manage its own affairs, as well as by controversies about art.

“Nothingtoseeness” – is the term the composer John Cage coined in his quest for an equivalent to silence in the visual arts. In his 1952 piece 4’33”, the pianist sits at his instrument for four minutes and thirty-three seconds without touching the keys, enabling the audience to see and feel silence. At the same time, reduction, stillness, emptiness, and immateriality have been crucial devices in the visual arts for exploring new, extreme possibilities and conditions. White has played a prominent role both as a colour and material, as exem­plified by Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paint­

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 16

ings of 1951 and Yves Klein’s intervention Le Vide (1961) at the museum Haus Lange in Krefeld. The exhibition “NOTHINGTOSEENESS ”, curated by ANKE HERVOL and WULF HERZOGENRATH , is dedicated to the semantic spectrum of the colour white, void, and silence. Following on from the sensational show “Weiss auf Weiss” (White on White), which invited artists from Europe and the USA to exchange ideas at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1961, the exhibition presents artistic and aesthetic practices from the 1950s to the present. A contemporary contribution is the installation We Buy White Albums by the US conceptual artist Rutherford Chang, which MAX DAX presents in this issue. After our COVID-related abstinence and virtual fatigue, we can now look forward to an “analogue experiential space” involving some fifty international artists, which can be seen at H ­ anseatenweg from 15 September.

The work of the European Alliance of Academies, which published its founding manifesto Open Continent on 9 October 2020, continues. The aim of this transnational alliance of seventy representatives of European art academies and cultural institutions is to network and demonstrate solidarity for the freedom of art and culture in opposition to nationalist and anti-democratic trends. One example of this joint commitment is a complaint to the UN Special Rapporteur on Culture, coupled with a demand for judicial remedies to the systematic restrictions on the autonomy of the arts and cultural institutions in Hungary. Last year, the takeover of the Budapest University of Theatre and Film Arts (SZFE ) by a foundation affiliated to the government sparked public protests. Dialogue with our partners in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Romania has also resulted in contributions to the current issue.

“A Close Up” of Joseph Beuys is provided by the eponymous book of photographs by Michael Ruetz, commemorating the centenary of the artist’s birth and presented by ROSA VON DER SCHULEN­ BURG . The photographs were taken in the early 1970s, when Ruetz, armed with his camera but without a specific commission, accompanied Beuys at home, at the art academy, and during his performances. The pictures convey a distinctive impression of the artist – not so much a “picture of a saint” as an enlightening observation. It is Beuys’ body language and the presence with which he commands his surroundings that immediately strike the eye. Ruetz’s pictures derive their vitality from his special feeling for the right moment, for situations, and from his detailed observation of people.

Werner Heegewaldt Director of the Archives of the Akademie der Künste

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CARTE BLANCHE

ARILA SIEGERT

“Only

you can save yourself.

In any system.”

A LABORATORY OF THE ARTS

ARILA SIEGERT REHEARSES ÜBER DIE MAUER AFTER WASSILY KANDINSKY

Choreographer and director Arila Siegert is currently working with the experimental artist group Violett on a synaesthetic realisation of the 1914 stage composition Über die Mauer by Wassily Kandinsky. The world premiere is planned for early October at the Akademie der Künste.

Rather than reconstructing a historical production, it is more of an attempt to open a space for a certain way of working that is not defined in classical genres, but in an experimental situation in which all media are potentially present, and the sensory perception of all participants can unfold.

“For me, it is about initiating or revealing an inner existential creativity. Not taking the outward path, but an inner one: the experience of what Kandinsky calls the psychic. Or of what moves us, what helps us, what also enables us to experience this life as a miracle – the sounds, the colours. How someone says something. What energy do we feel coming towards us? What does it mean to turn away or to turn towards? These are the things we experience every day and that we have to decipher. And I see a forward-looking approach in Kandinsky, because he sees the arts in their potentialities side by side, acting freely. It is always a matter of what is essential now….

It’s about cold and warmth, brightness and darkness.

Where can one leave out objects and what happens to the colours?”

Siegert interprets Kandinsky’s text as you would test tubes in a laboratory. Language sets tasks to which actors can respond with their artistic capabilities. A space in which decisions are taken on the spur of the moment. At the same time, Über die Mauer can be understood as a

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didactic piece that, as with works by Oskar Schlemmer or Paul Klee, examines the aesthetic effects of forms and colours on painting – and also on theatre.

Through her in-depth discussions with Kandinsky, Gret Palucca also taught this abstract thinking – with the materials and fundamentals of aesthetic effects – at her school in Dresden, instilling it in Arila Siegert as a young student from the very beginning.

“My work is concerned with an origin, with going back to my inner motivation. What is it that moves me? Where am I with myself? Where do I feel power and where am I powerless? That is my own seismograph, if you like. I also distance myself from things that drain my strength and leave me empty. I look for things that give me a strong presence. It’s an attempt to resist being sucked dry by the media. I try to bring strength to the physical basis of our perception and experience. Everything is within us: the light, the colours, the forms, everything. It makes sense to remember this, to feel it, to experience it. It is an antidote to alienation from each other, but also from ourselves. No one can relieve us of this inner work.”

The quotes have been taken from a conversation between Arila Siegert and Johannes Odenthal that took place in May 2021 during rehearsals for Über die Mauer.

JOHANNES ODENTHAL is the programme director of the Akademie der Künste.

Images pp. 4–11: Mila Teshaieva

THOUGHT LABORATORY Arila Siegert

The idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, born out of opposition to the grand designs of Richard Wagner’s musical and dramatic work, also attracted the attention of the painter and synaesthete Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944). At the turn of the century, many artists were expecting the great transition from the material to the spiritual.

In the age of Albert Einstein and Max Planck, even Kandinsky could not escape the growing influence of science. This is evidenced by the almanac Der Blaue Reiter published with Franz Marc in 1911, his major theoretical work, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, published in the same year, and his doctrine of form, Point and Line to Plane, published in 1926.

The purpose of my book Concerning the Spiritual in Art and of Der Blaue Reiter was to awaken the ability to experience the spiritual in material and abstract things, which is absolutely neces­ sary at this time and makes endless experiences possible.

Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1911 (Bern, 1952)

For Kandinsky, the sound of music – the most abstract of the arts – serves as a cipher for the sound of colour and light, of movement and dance, of words and music.

For Kandinsky, this harmony of the arts could best find expression on the stage as a “stage composition”. At the same time as Arnold Schönberg, who as a composer was concerned with overarching conceptions of the stage, Kandinsky in his stage compositions – which are also to be understood as stage directions – examined the interaction of the various art forms without their merging.

Kandinsky appreciated the abstract clarity of Palucca’s forms of movement, the attention to detail, and compositional coherence. Thus, the ideas of Bauhaus members – and especially of László Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee – were incorporated into the lessons I then enjoyed at the Palucca School in Dresden and with Palucca. Mastering space, working from the inside out, strictly working on a form once found, from content to form and not the other way around, not allowing oneself any sentimentality, but surrendering oneself to one’s ideas, not copying or imitating etc., was the maxim, which an artist, using his imagination, must work his way towards to achieve his potential, also, and above all, through improvisation as a preliminary stage. Slavish specialisation was frowned upon, and progress and change, rather than stagnation, were demanded. Music, colours, literature, and painting, sculpture, architecture, and nature were important elements in the artist’s confrontation with his movement inventions.

We ourselves, resonating in her dance, derive our movements from strength and vitality and mastery. Palucca condenses space, she struc­ tures it: the space revolves, sinks and floats, fluctuating in all directions. And it grows, tenses, loosens and multiplies.

László Moholy-Nagy, 1920s, in Edith Krull and Werner Gommlich, Palucca (Berlin, 1964)

All art requires limitation. But within this limi­tation, ultimate intensity and shaping. I have experi­ enced this in my work, the only teacher the artist has when he or she goes his or her own way. At the beginning there is instinct, and at the end art. It is a matter of never sacrificing nature to art.

The Yellow Sound in 1993 and Violett in 2019. From the experience of working on Violett, created for the Bauhaus centenary in Dessau, we formed the Violett artists’ group.

With this group of artists, we worked on Kandinsky’s piece Über die Mauer in April 2021, which will premiere on 1 October 2021 at the Black Box of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.

Keep your ear open to music, open your eye to painting. And do not think. Examine, if you will, after you have heard, after you have seen. Ask yourself, if you will, whether this work has ‘carried you off’ into a world previously unknown to you.

If so, what more do you want?

Wassily Kandinsky, “Der Wert eines Werkes der konkreten Kunst”, 1938, in Wassily Kandinsky, Essays über Kunst und Künstler (Stuttgart, 1955)

It appeals to me, and I find it important again today to confront the issues of Kandinsky’s writings, to initiate a thought laboratory. This laboratory challenges the participating artists again and again to engage creatively through memory, imagination, invention, and improvisation.

The law of the subordination of the elements and the construction to the inner aim of the work – composition. Theatre laboratories are to be organised where individual elements are to be tested in the sense and for the purpose of theatre.

Wassily Kandinsky, “Über die abstrakte Bühnen­ synthese”, 1919-23, in Wassily Kandinsky, Essays über Kunst und Künstler (Stuttgart, 1955)

Gret Palucca, 1920s, in Edith Krull and Werner Gommlich, Palucca (Berlin 1964)

Palucca’s New Artistic Dance was based on tapping one’s creative talent and originality, recognising one’s own powers as a creator and performer, having the courage to be oneself and to step out of oneself, and an interest in translating thoughts and feelings into dance through one’s own body. In doing so, she suggested that an artist must expose him- or herself to the criticism of respected, more experienced artists. We should not surround ourselves with people who mainly just praise us, and we should not follow fashion.

ARILA SIEGERT received her artistic training under Gret Palucca in Dresden. Her first job took her to the

This is the very union of the arts, where they all speak together, but each in its own language, and there is, unintentionally, an impulse that underlies our compositions. We want any art to come to the fore when it, and it in particular, can say the necessary most forcefully in a minute.

Perfect mastery is impossible without exactitude.

Exactitude is the result of prolonged labour.

But the disposition to exactitude is innate and an extremely important condition of great talent.

Palucca’s dance is versatile and can be illuminated from different points of view. What I would like to emphasise here, however, is the rarely exact structure not merely of dance in its temporal development, but first and foremost the exact structure of individual moments that are captured in snapshots.

Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Theater, 1907–14 (Ostfildern, 1998)

Wassily Kandinsky, “Tanzkurven. Zu den Tänzen der Palucca”, Das Kunstblatt, vol 10, no. 3 (1926)

has directed over forty more productions since then.

dance theatre of the Komische Oper Berlin, under Walter Felsenstein and Tom Schilling. She then became first soloist to the Semperoper Dresden, where she founded her first dance theatre at the Staatsschauspiel in 1987. Her self-choreographed solo performances have taken her all over the world, she has staged full-­ length ballets in Berlin, Leipzig, Cologne, and Vienna, worked with Ruth Berghaus and Peter Konwitschny, and directed the Bauhausbühne Dessau. Her first opera production was Verdi’s Macbeth in Ulm in 1998, and she In 2014, she made her debut as a director in the USA with The Magic Flute in Florida. Arila Siegert has

Gret Palucca’s dances were more abstract than those of her teacher Mary Wigman, and this earned her invitations to the Bauhaus in the 1920s.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 16

So I have always sought closeness to this artistic way of thinking, one which is familiar to me, and have engaged, among other things, with Kandinsky’s stage compositions:

received the Critics’ Dance Award, the Federal Cross of Merit, and is a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and Dresden.

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A COMMENT BY PHOTOGRAPHER MILA TESHAIEVA ON ARILA SIEGERT’S REHEARSALS

The unique power of your play is neither in the mastery of actors nor in their emotional expressions on the stage. It is the combination of everything and the destruction of everything. Its painted messy colours and human bodies integrated into this mess of colours; the mix of forms – an explosion of multiple expressions and freedom of these expressions – this all moves me deeply.

And seeing this play also changed something inside me. The point is that I used to doubt my judge­ ment of art, actually I avoid using the word “art” when talking about things which I feel emotionally connected to. There are simply too many things that I find extensively beautiful, which touch me on a special emotional level, which I would love to call art – but who am I to name anything “art”, what do I know about “art”?

Your performance somehow answered the doubts I had about the hunger I felt for so many expressions.

It made me think that I am open rather than unedu­ cated, I am alive rather than uncritical, I am grateful for all the beauty of the world. So that’s it: I feel freer; after I saw your play, I feel more powerful, con­ fident, more adult, and feel more than ever the necessity to see, to feel, to create.

Thank you, Mila

MILA TESHAIEVA, born in Kiev in 1974, lives in Berlin. In her work she focuses on constructed social identities and the political manipulation of history and memory, combining a documentary aspect with artistic interpretation. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, with her most recent exhibitions being at MIT Museum in Boston, Massachusetts (USA), Museum of European Cultures (Germany), the Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee (USA), the Alma Löv Museum (Sweden), and the West Coast Art Museum (Germany). Promising Waters (2013) and InselWesen (2016) were published by Kehrer Verlag. She is a member of Ostkreuz – Agentur der Fotografen.

The team is made up of the Violett group of artists: Music / sound: Ali N. Askin

Choreography / direction: Arila Siegert

Actress: Kerstin Schweers Actor: Jörg Thieme Dancer / singer: Isabel Wamig

Projection painting: Helge Leiberg Set / wardrobe / props: Marie-Luise Strandt

Lighting: Susanne Auffermann Dramaturgy: Carola Cohen-Friedländer

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EUROPEAN ALLIANCE OF ACADEMIES 12

OVERCOMING DIFFERENCES

CELEBRATING TOGETHERNESS

Jeanine Meerapfel

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

It urges us to vigorously confront undemocratic and right-wing populist tendencies.

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

For the current issue of the Journal der Künste, we have received some articles through members of the European Alliance of Academies. In her essay “When Freedom Dies (Centimetre by Centimetre)”, Radka Denemarková outlines the interconnectedness of local specificities and international tensions as well as the conflict between neoliberalism and capitalism on the one hand and human rights, democracy, and freedom of expression on the other.

To this end, she traces the historical freedom movements in the Czech Republic (which were “wiped out in 1989”), draws attention to the fate of persecuted authors worldwide – those of the Turkish author Aslı Erdoğan, the Kurdish author and politician Hevrin Khalaf, and the Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo – and reminds us of one thing above all: “Freedom is responsibility”.

In an interview conducted by Matthias Krupa (Die Zeit), the issue of how to respond to the instrumentalisation of negative ­emotions in current political debates is addressed by Dominika Kasprowicz (Villa Decius, Cracow) and historian Philipp Ther. Where does hate come from and what can we do about it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The images on pp. 13–25 are from the series Between Two Worlds (from 2009) by Matei Bejenaru.

High Voltage Lab at the Technical University in Iași, Romania, 02, 2011

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 16

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ICMET – National Institute for Research, Development and Testing in Electrical Engineering, Craiova, Romania, 02, 2019

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

“Dimitrie Leonida” Technical Museum, Bucharest, 01, 2019

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EUROPEAN ALLIANCE OF ACADEMIES

WHEN FREEDOM DIES CENTIMETRE

BY CENTIMETRE

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

Radka Denemarková

Europe is lugging around the unresolved traumas and stigmatisations of past centuries. For years, the continent has been shaped solely by a web of the burdens from the past, remnants of past injustices, distributions of power, collective guilt, and collective victimhood. Populism is a political stance that adapts to the feelings, prejudices, and fears prevalent among a population, exploiting them to define a political agenda that promises quick and easy solutions to all problems. And the underlying populist sentiment found in many countries around the world today – be it in traditional or newly emerging democracies – is fanned by demagogues and exploited mercilessly. But Europe also has other traditions.

As far as the Czech Republic is concerned, I find it hard today to imagine a time when Charter 77, founded by Václav Havel, did not exist. Such a notion conjures up the feeling of a moral vacuum and a total relativity of values. Charter 77 was the first significant act of solidarity in the communist era, and it was the beginning of a civic engagement that brought with it an atmosphere of equality, solidarity, belonging, community, and self-sacrificing commitment to mutual support. But all this was wiped out in 1989, made as if it had never existed. Anyone who has lived as Russia’s vassal in a socialist country and in an occupied regime seems unable to live in any other world. The former “party comrades” are today trying to establish capitalism “with a socialist face” in Bohemia: The elect and the oligarchs are triumphing without contest, and free competition and the rule of law do not exist (just as it was common practice in socialism to wipe the enemy off the board with political persecution). The old mentality has also survived into the present: It is not the gifted and able who are encouraged, but those with lesser talents, on the condition that they excel only in allegiances and ruthlessness. In general, one could say that the Czech Republic physically survived incarceration – six years of National Socialist and forty years of Communist rule – but returned psychologically to the free world as a wreck, with the ability to satisfy

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

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

A contrasting image: At the very same time I was in Graz, the “green dacha” of Anna Akhmatova, the great Russian poetess, was at risk of falling prey to the nouveau-riche dacha boom in Komarovo.

No one had any intention of building a museum or a house for literature at this location (an Eldorado for any estate agent). Where money speaks, truth is silent. Russia has many tools for “disciplining” artists. But for Akhmatova, the allocation of the summer house in 1955 meant that the worst was behind her. She had survived publication bans under Stalin and smear campaigns. Today, no Kremlin ruler would think of providing a dacha for writers. The Cerrini-Schlössl in Graz, on the other hand, is today dedicated to the encounter of different cultures and has saved the lives of many authors. The essay A Room of One’s Own from 1929 also argues for a new freedom; here, Virginia Woolf, with her vision of female writing, liberates herself from the vicissitudes of fate. Although the text became one of

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 16

the most quoted of the women’s movement, it describes across gender lines the oppressive conditions under which writers, male and female, have to produce literature. “[And if we] have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think.”

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

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

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

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

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

THE BEST THING IN THE WORLD: PERSONAL COURAGE We should not only protect monuments, architecture, art, and the like as cultural heritage. We must also protect the personal courage to speak freely and the power to speak truth. Otherwise, freedom, too, will slowly become the “cultural heritage” of the past. There are many examples of stubborn resistance today – in Poland, Hungary, Russia, Belarus, China, Myanmar…. An impressive example is the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. But even more important for me are so-called ordinary people who do extraordinary things. There are already monuments to great personal courage. People like the Hamburg shipyard worker who refused to give the Hitler salute like everyone else at the launch of a naval training ship in 1936. The photo of the ceremony was not widely circulated until sixty years later. It shows him in a forest of outstretched arms, his own crossed in front of his chest, a living portrait of defiant workers’ pride. He had been an NSDAP member but was expelled from the party when he became engaged to a Jewish woman and was imprisoned for “racial shame”.

After his release, he was called up for military service in the Second World War and never returned. The above-mentioned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to eleven years in prison in 2009 for “subverting the authority of the state”. Both his written response to the charges against him and his last statement in court were – like his earlier writings – unequivocal and bold pleas for freedom of expression and human rights. He consciously based his response not only on Western traditions. He paid a moving compliment to his wife: “Dearest, since I have your love, I can face my judgement with equanimity, have no regrets and can anticipate tomorrow with optimism”, and he looked forward to the day “when my country will be a land of free speech and on this soil the word of every citizen will be treated equally. To the day when different values, opinions, creeds and political views can compete and peacefully co-exist.” The judge interrupted him before he could finish, but the free-born Xiaobo still managed to say what he wanted: “I sincerely hope that I will be the last victim of the literary inquisition in this country, and that from now on no human being will ever be condemned for his words. Freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights, the root of humanity, the mother of truth. To curtail freedom of speech is to trample on human rights, to stifle humanity and to obstruct the truth.”

Xiaobo was already famous by this time, and this speech made him even more so. In 2010, he received the Nobel Prize. On 26 June 2017, he was admitted to hospital with liver cancer, where he remained under strict surveillance. Terminally ill, he was denied treatment outside China. He died on 13 July 2017 at the age of 61. The story of freedom is a story of resistance.

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FREEDOM FROM THE STATE IS NOT YET FREEDOM WITHIN THE STATE Again and again, we are left with the big question that haunts us all: the individual or the masses, a closed society or open democracy, totalitarianism or freedom? This question would appear to be a universal one today. In our world, borders run not so much between ethnic groups, nations, and denominations, as much as between reason and fanaticism, tolerance and hysteria, creativity and censorship. Anti-humanism is often the result, the process leading up to it is called dehumanisation.

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

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

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

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

WHERE DO YOU COME FROM? Today, too, many people withdraw into themselves and stop taking an interest in general matters. But this is how an era of apathy and comprehensive demoralisation begins. An era of grey, totalitarian consumerist banality. Society is atomised, tiny nuclei of defiance fall prey to obliteration, the disillusioned and weary public feigns obliviousness to any problems, and freethinking and creativity retreat into the trenches of deepest privacy. Power needs precisely this ­climate; in this, it unwittingly betrays its very own intention: to make life totally uniform, to excise anything that is just a little different, that is idiosyncratic, independent, or defies classification. And in the background, modern man’s proud anthropocentrism reveals itself – he is convinced of his ability to identify and classify everything.

For the world to change for the better, something must change in human consciousness above all, in the humanity of today’s human individual. An individual must come to their senses and free themself from this terrible entanglement in the obvious and hidden mechanisms of the totality: from consumerism, repression, bureaucracy, and advertising to manipulation with the aid of digitisation, new technologies, and media. Humankind must again rebel against the role of the powerless cog in a gigantic machine and find a deeper responsibility for the world in itself.

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

I experience the same reactions. “And where do you come from?”

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

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

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

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WHEN THE HUNGRY SPEAK OF FREEDOM, THEY MEAN BREAD I would like the members of my generation to be among the people who bid farewell to prejudices and uniformity of thought, to the chronicle of Czech small-mindedness, to the fear of anything that is non-Czech, to the feeling that we are only a buffer between West and East. We are Europeans. We are human beings. And literature should oppose any debasement of human dignity; it is able to show that there are countless ways of seeing things, that we can “wash off” the words we think with and use them “differently”, that we can live “differently”, that creative freedom is boundless. In my life, liter­ature is the totality of all forms of bravery, art, love, friendship, and thought that allow a person to be less of a slave – to live liter­ ature in this way is the purest form of love. The struggle for freedom and liberal critical thinking is always difficult and never ends.

But freedom is to society what health is to the individual. The terms “collective guilt” and “collective victory” are monstrous. And nationalism today takes on even more monstrous forms because it only spews out one question: “And where do you come from?” Let’s ask ourselves another, more important question: “Who are we?” That’s what it’s all about. National literature cannot say much now: The time of world literature has come. After all, there is only one boundary – that between one person and another.

No one develops in a vacuum, outside all epochs and systems.

The time in which a person grows up and matures colours his or her thinking. So, it’s more about the ways in which humanity has allowed itself to be influenced. Let’s stop just waiting for the world to get better. Let’s acknowledge our right to intervene and take a stand. History does not take place elsewhere. It is here. We all make it. Life is not outside of history, and history is not outside of life.

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

A PERSON’S VALUE DEPENDS ON THEIR FREEDOM: THE FREEDOM THEY HAVE AND THE FREEDOM THEY GRANT The present is characterised by a dramatic political shift: Racism and contempt for humanity are becoming socially acceptable. What was unthinkable and considered unspeakable yesterday is already reality. Humanity and human rights, religious freedom, and the rule of law are openly under attack. It is an attack that is aimed at us all.

Not only is education the sole sound foundation, it is also the necessary precondition of freedom and the best safeguard against the return of the politics of stultification. Education in the 20th and 21st centuries requires, first and foremost, instinctive resistance to information overload. Thanks to the Internet, no one knows what is real and what is orchestrated, and lies are dumped into life like

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

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

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

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

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ICMET Craiova, Romania, 03, 2019

Natural Science Museum in Iași, Romania, 01, 2015

High Voltage Lab at the Technical University in Iași, Romania, 01, 2011

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EUROPEAN ALLIANCE OF ACADEMIES

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

AN ARCHIVE OF ABSENCE

ON THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF MATEI BEJENARU Cristina Stoenescu Matei Bejenaru has been documenting spaces of industrial production and technological knowledge in R ­ omania for over two decades. Since 2009, the artist’s ongoing archive of analogue photography has delved into a space of memory and loss, in between utopia-building and forgetfulness.

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

Even the euphoric hope of the 1989 Romanian Revolution was not to last, as a slow and lengthy transition to capitalism turned out to be a road built on forgetting and dismantling the old world and its emblematic institutions.

Due to a lack of investment and a fast privatisation process, many factories and facilities were sold for their plant and machinery assets, closed down, or simply went

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bankrupt. The educational infrastructure collapsed as well, with little regard for preserving the spaces of scientific knowledge, themselves perceived as part of a traumatic and dogmatic past. During the last decades, the Romanian economy has almost completely shifted towards performing outsourced IT services or work migration in either agriculture or homecare for the West.

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

In this way, Bejenaru connects the history of photography with the history of the technological sites, in a conceptual transfer of the past to a present of absence.

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

Matei Bejenaru is represented by Anca Poterasu Gallery, Bucharest.

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

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“Dimitrie Leonida” Technical Museum, Bucharest 02, 2019

EUROPEAN ALLIANCE OF ACADEMIES

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

ON THE VALUE OF BEAUTY IN THE FIGHT AGAINST HATE

Dominika, Philipp, you both support the European Alliance of Academies. This alliance sees itself as a Europe-wide campaign for the freedom of the arts, and as against any form of social division. In many countries, this division has been accompanied by an increasing emotionalisation of public debate.

How is it that emotions have become so important in politics today?

DOMINIKA KASPROWICZ Theoretical notions of how feelings are used by political powers to exercise influence go back to the 16th century. Today, it is not only populist or radical right-wing governments that try to gain control of the population by appealing to emotions.

And this is a fundamental trend that has been reinforced by the pandemic. In this context, extreme emotions such as fear and hatred are paramount. There is, in addition, a deepening gulf between politics and ethics. Noble motives, such as selflessness, respect, and tolerance, have thus lost currency.

PHILIPP THER In my view, we’re confronted with a confused, contradictory situation. On the one hand, factual information with substance is in big demand. One need only look at the growing proportion of non-fiction literature on the book market. On the other hand, our socie-

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ties are increasingly being driven by emotions, and politicians are trying harder and harder to operate with emotional messages. This is also because our public sphere is divided. We have the old public sphere in the Habermasian sense – which is committed to enlightenment and rationality – but alongside it, there is a new segment of the public sphere that has constituted itself above all on social media. Here, we can firstly see the domination of capitalist interests and secondly, the emergence of self-reinforcing, public-sphere bubbles – niches for people with a similar view. Emotional messages are important in luring people into these niches and keeping them there.

50 per cent of adult Poles has deteriorated lastingly over the past two years. They not only feel tired and exhausted, but often powerless, intimidated, and, in some cases, paralysed by fear. To some extent, this is a consequence of the pandemic, and obviously, it is not without consequences for the political and public spheres.

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

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

Now, when I compare the situation thirty years ago with today, I am not sure there is a coherent corpus of values

DK Politicians take the same shortcuts that people do in their everyday lives. Those who appeal to negative emotions often accomplish their aims faster. It is a way to achieve spectacular effects, even if they do not often last long. We can get an impression of the typical state of mind in our divided societies if we take a look at current surveys. A study by the University of Warsaw at the end of 2020 found that the general mental state of about

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

that would make comprehensive social change possible.

That, at any rate, is the answer for now. But perhaps we are witnessing a revolution that is only in its infancy.

PT To understand the difference between the 1980s and today, we have to come back to the question of where current negative emotions come from. They are very much a consequence of neoliberal economic policies based on negative mobilisation. Welfare benefits have been cut, and the pressure on the unemployed and the less well-­ educated in particular has been growing. The consequence is that, even in wealthy countries like Germany and ­Austria, more people than before feel threatened by social decline.

In poorer countries like Poland, neoliberal economic policies are having much more dramatic consequences. There, not only do many people feel threatened by poverty, but there are also many who are threatened by poverty. It may be that some degree of economic success has been achieved with these neoliberal policies, such as the German “job-market miracle” starting in 2009; but, more importantly, they have stirred up fear.

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

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

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

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

PT According to surveys, people in Scandinavian countries are happier than those in Eastern Europe, for example. The common denominator of all social-scientific studies is that people in relatively egalitarian societies are happier than those in less egalitarian ones. But this explanation has its limits – otherwise people in the former East Germany would have been particularly happy, which they were not. But material well-being certainly is not the only factor affecting the degree of satisfac-

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tion. Life expectancy plays an important indicator because it is based, among other things, on the quality of education, health systems, and opportunities for social advancement. And it is known to be comparatively low wherever there is a large low-wage sector and high unemployment. This correlation can be observed in all Western industrialised countries, including the USA. But perhaps we should take the opportunity not to talk exclusively about negative emotions and their causes. Within the framework of the Alliance of Academies in particular, we should also ask ourselves what we can do to oppose these negative feelings.

What do you have in mind?

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

DK I’d put the question a little differently. We’ve already talked about the fact that negative emotions do not necessarily have to trigger negative processes. But negative emotions are the strongest incentives to get people to act. Instead of investing all our energy in trying to stimulate positive emotions as efficiently as possible, we should rather look for the shared basic convictions behind them.

In Poland, both political camps work with positive values; nobody says “Let’s wreck our country!”. But, for as long as there are no common convictions, a single nasty remark is enough to set off further hatred.

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

we should join forces. This is also why I appreciate the idea of the Alliance of Academies – the more we work together, the stronger we become.

Philipp, you pointed out that something must be done to oppose the radical, populist forces. What role can art and culture play in this?

PT Resistance is a task, first of all, for political activists. The weakness of the political left and the willingness of conservatives to collaborate with the radical right are big problems. But art and culture can contribute to change, and they can do so – even if it sounds naïve – with beauty. I know beauty is a controversial concept and a still life with a bouquet of flowers is not necessarily art.

But a village or a small town that spruces itself up with flowers or invites street artists can fire the imagination.

If we want to overcome black-and-white thinking, it’s no use going for grey. We must add colour.

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

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

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

Scriptwriting Academy and courses on political discourse through art.

PHILIPP THER is professor of Central European History at the University of Vienna. His research fields are

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

European contemporary history, social history, migration history, and music history. Two of his monographs The Outsiders: Refugees in Europe since 1492 (2019) and Europe since 1989: A History (2017) were published by Princeton University Press. In 2019, he was awarded the Wittgenstein Prize of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).

In 2020, he founded the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET).

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

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NOTHINGTOSEENESS VOID / WHITE / SILENCE

David Ostrowski, F (Don’t Honk), Acrylic, lacquer, cotton on canvas, wood, 2015

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“Nothingtoseeness” is how John Cage described the equivalent of silence in the visual arts, translating nothingness into visual and sensory terms, but not, of course, in the sense of “seeing nothing” or “not seeing”. In this context, white as a colour and as a material takes centre stage, and this is the theme of the exhibition project “NOTHINGTOSEENESS”: white expresses immateriality, point zero, and emptiness, but is also “stillness and movement, is activity and passivity [...] boundless dimensional space [...] pure energy”, writes Raimund Girke.1 These and other historical and current artistic and aesthetic practices have led to a critical and process-based

artistic approach in selected circles internationally from the 1950s/60s to the present, as exemplified by Raimund Girke, Otto Piene, G ­ otthard Graubner, and Günther Uecker and today by the painter David Ostrowski, Rutherford Chang’s We Buy White ­Albums installation, and Gregor Schneider’s HAUS u r. These are now to be experienced in an analogue experiential space in the aftermath of the pandemic-related shift of artistic and cultural encounters into the virtual realm. The exhibition “NOTHINGTOSEENESS” will take place from 15 S ­ eptember to 12 December 2021 at the Akademie der Künste, B ­ erlin, on H ­ anseatenweg.

TWO ASPECTS OF AN EXHIBITION WHITE, ZERO, NULL PAINTING ON THE THRESHOLD TO INVISIBILITY IN THE 1960s From the 1950s and ’60s at the latest, in the USA and in Europe, the broad semantic spectrum of the colour white, emptiness and silence, and the associated difference between materiality and immateriality gave rise to a change in the artist’s self-conception, as can be seen in the exhibitions of these early years, and resulted in a real exchange between artists on either side of the Atlantic.

Monochromatic and achromatic painting, together with Nouveau Réalisme, were permanent features of those early international art exhibitions dedicated to the “avant-garde”, the New European School, Arte Programmata, New Tendencies and Anti-Peinture, which categorised to some extent highly heterogeneous schools.

What they shared was a turning away from Tachisme, but not yet a secure place in art historiography. In 1963, ­William E. Simmat described pre-war modernism as the driving force behind these “new tendencies” and stated that “their triumphal march [...] was in full swing”, but still without an academic penetration of the phenomenon.2 On the other hand, Curt Schweicher, a critic of recent modernism and then director of the Städtisches Museum Trier, staged his exhibition “Avantgarde ‘61”3 with the goal, according to the journal Vernissage, of confronting visitors with contemporary artistic articulations – the selection was the subject of controversy – and thus advancing the discourse.4 Two wings of the “new movement” were juxtaposed: the heavily criticised reversion to Constructivism and Suprematism of the 1920s on the one hand, and the younger generation that turned “energetically to colour” on the other: “The temperature [of] the pictures is above zero.” They were looking for an “equivalent of the complex, not of the particular”, and for a “static-dynamic space-surface unity” in which colour would be immaterial and serve as a medium of the “spiritual”. White monochromatic painting occupies a special place here – a fact recognised and

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described, especially with regard to the differing points of reference (“wings”), not only by those mentioned, but also by the Hannover gallery owner, writer, and publisher Adam Seide and above all by Udo Kultermann, who initiated the “Monochromie” exhibition with international partici­pation in Leverkusen in 1964.5

was then shown in 1966 at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover (Massachusetts) – he forcefully advocated against the rejectionist attitude of numerous American art critics and for collaboration between the American and European positions. As early as 1966, ­Harald Szeemann, who as the director of the Kunsthalle Bern from 1961 had made it a much-discussed venue, invited numerous artists from Europe and the USA to his exhibition “Weiss auf Weiss”, encouraging dialogue, the broadening of horizons, and networking. Yayoi Kusama, for example, who lived in New York, intensified her contacts with representatives of the ZERO movement, and Otto Piene organised a “ZERO” exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Penn­ sylvania in Philadelphia in 1964. Having emigrated in the meantime to the USA, Udo Kultermann wrote the thoroughly researched article for the exhibition magazine on all the cultural, symbolic, and artistic aspects of the colour white. The Europeans such as Girke, Uecker, and Piene, but also Fontana, Yves Klein, and Piero Manonzi worked in small formats, while the Americans, such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, ­Robert Motherwell, and Mark Tobey, operated with impressively large ­canvases, with everything from drip painting to calm ­monochromaticism. Radical positions such as R ­ obert Rauschenberg’s “White Paintings”, first shown in 1951 at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, were on display in Berne in 1966, as were works by Josef Albers, Sam Francis, Jasper Johns, Claes Olden­burg, Robert Ryman, and George Segal – at the time a uniquely enlightening and inspirational experience for all concerned.

Exhibition magazine of the Kunsthalle Bern, May 1966 ANKE HERVOL is secretary of the Visual Arts Section

When Frederick P. Walkey opened the exhibition “White On White”,6 co-initiated by George Rickey, in 1965 at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln (Massachusetts) with numerous international artists (including Lucio Fontana, Girke, Oskar Holweck, Walter Leblanc, Henk Peeters, Jan J. Schoonhoven, and Uecker from Europe) – which

of the Akademie der Künste.

WULF HERZOGENRATH, art historian and curator, has been a member of the Akademie der Künste, Visual Arts Section since 2006 and Director of the section since 2012.

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Gregor Schneider, Haus u r 1985–to date, (clockwise from top left): u 24, FLUR, Rheydt 1989–Venice 2001; u 28–29, FLUR, Rheydt 1989–93; u 30, TREPPENHAUS, Rheydt 1989–93; u 24, FLUR, Rheydt 1989–93

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Rutherford Chang, We Buy White Albums (ongoing)

WHITE ALBUM – BLACK ALBUM The Beatles’ White Album, designed by Richard Hamilton as a white projection surface, is contrasted with Prince’s Black Album, which can be understood as an expression of self-empowerment in the form of a black square. While the White Album sold millions of copies and was marked by Hamilton – as a comment on the mass-produced product – with an embossed serial ­number asserting the item’s unique status, the situation with Prince was entirely the opposite: the artist withdrew his music and the recording medium a few days before its scheduled release on 8 December 1987. Hundreds of thousands of vinyl albums were destroyed, and only approximately one hundred copies were inadvertently circulated as review copies – these are truly unique items compared to the Beatles’ White Album.

Both covers have their iconic precedents in painting – Malevich’s Black Square and Robert Ryman’s white squares. In 2007, the US conceptual artist Rutherford Chang began buying up all the copies of the White Album he could lay his hands on at flea markets and in second-­ hand shops. Since 2012, Chang has been exhibiting his collection of copies of the White Album, now amounting to 2,620, in increasingly large room-installations reminiscent of a record shop. Due to wear and tear along with water stains and “embellishments”, no two white squares look alike. All have aged individually.

100 Shades of White: While the various gradations of white in Rutherford Chang’s installation, We Buy White Albums, are displayed exactly a hundred times as in a record shop, Prince’s Black Album, which enjoys Holy Grail status in the music collectors’ world, is protected by a burglar-proof showcase. What’s more, the showcase stands on a plinth, built around which is a matt-black cube reminiscent of the pilgrimage site Mecca, while the white-painted interior of this space, a white cube, is the ideal setting for the presentation of art offered for sale

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 16

in galleries. Finally, in the sightline from the entrance to the security showcase hangs the work Judas! I don’t believe you / You are a liar! by Michael Schirner on the facing wall of the white cube. It is an extension of ­Schirner’s “Pictures in Our Minds” series into the realm of music. Until the exhibition “Black Album / White Cube” curated by Max Dax in 2020 at the Kunsthal Rotterdam, the subjects of Schirner’s “Pictures in Our Minds” were limited to images that have imprinted themselves deeply into the collective consciousness: the footprint of the first man on the moon, the burning Twin ­Towers, Willy Brandt’s genuflection in Warsaw, etc. – in the form of a black square on which the very event of global significance is succinctly described in white Helvetica. The image is in the mind’s eye of the beholder. Bob Dylan’s famous response to the insult “Judas!” hurled from the audience in Manchester in 1966 was “I don’t believe you / You are a liar!” With his angry reaction, Dylan defended his own artistic stance as a musician rather than as a mere entertainer.

Art leads to new art through appropriation. Dylan’s spontaneous outburst of anger was incorporated into a new work by Schirner; a salvaged original of Prince’s Black Album becomes a monument as a testament to Black self-empowerment in the context of the blackand-white cube as well as a comment on Malevich; all the while the Beatles’ White Album in the context of Rutherford Chang’s We Buy White Albums installation becomes a meditation on the uniqueness of mass-produced products and the nature of projection surfaces.

MAX DAX, journalist, photographer, and curator, was editor-in-chief of the music magazine Spex from 2006 to 2010. He lives as a freelance author in Berlin.

1 https://www.raimundgirke.com 2 William E. Simmat, ed., Europäische Avantgarde, exh. cat.

(Galerie d, Schwanenhalle, Römer, Frankfurt am Main, 1963).

3 See the list of all participating artists at https://www.­ artist-info.com/exhibition/Stadtmuseum-Trier-Id369150 4 Vernissage, vols 7/8, no. 2 (1962), n. p.

5 Udo Kultermann, “Monochrome Malerei – eine neue Konzeption”, Monochrome Malerei, exh. cat. (Städtisches Museum Leverkusen, Schloss Morsbroich, Leverkusen, 1960), n. p. See participating artists at https://www.­ artist-info.com/exhibition/Museum-Morsbroich-Id362776 6 The platform artist-info.com has ranked the exhibition as one of the most “Influential Contemporary Art Exhibitions in the 20th and 21st Century”: “The ‘White on White’ exhibition […] was chosen for this list because the selection of artists and artwork provides a thoughtful overview, based on George Rickey’s (Art Journal, 1964) and Barbara Rose’s (Art in America, 1965) texts on constructivist artists. The exhibition provides a view from the outside on what happened in Europe, and in America. It was as well an important statement against the many art critics who disfavored the ‘cool art, ‘idiot art’, ‘know-nothing-nihilism’.” See https://www.artist-­ info.com/blog/influential-exhibitions-in-the-20thand-21st-­c entury/; and list of participating artists at https://­w ww.artist-info.com/exhibition/deCordova-­ Museum-Id372561

NOTHINGTOSEENESS – VOID / WHITE / SILENCE An exhibition by the Akademie der Künste as part of BERLIN ART WEEK Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 15 September–12 December 2021 Curated by: Anke Hervol and Wulf Herzogenrath Exhibition opening: 15 September 2021

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On 21 December 1960, African American saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman gathered eight musicians at New York City’s A & R Studios to record the album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet.1

Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet, 1961, inner sleeve

BREAKING THE SILENCE Harald Kisiedu

ORNETTE COLEMAN, PETER BRÖTZMANN, AND THE RADICALISM OF EXPERIMENTAL JAZZ 32

The ensemble Coleman had assembled consisted of two quartets with two woodwind instruments and a rhythm section comprised of double bass and drums, and it included some of the foremost Black experimentalists, such as trumpeter Don Cherry and multi-reedist Eric Dolphy. At 37:03 minutes long, Free Jazz is a series of collective improvisations interspersed with composed fanfares and themes, with each wind instrument taking the lead while others improvise continuing responses, dispensing with harmony-based structure and deploying motivic association. When the album was released in September 1961, its inside cover featured Jackson Pollock’s 1954 painting White Light. Already in the liner notes for his album Change of the Century (1960), Coleman had asserted his mobility of concept and practice by drawing connections between his musical aesthetics and Pollock’s abstract expressionism. Pointing out “a continuity of expression, certain continually evolving strands of thought, that link all my compositions together”, Coleman suggested of his music: “Maybe it’s something like the paintings of Jackson Pollock.”2

For Robert K. McMichael, the late 1950s and early 1960s in the US were characterised by “a critical shift in the balance of moral authority from white to black which penetrated the entire social fabric” and for which significant gains made by the Civil Rights Movement during this period were crucial.3 Concurrently, Coleman fundamentally challenged the ongoing whiteness-based “possessive investment” in the construction of an ontologically stable Black Other.4 In the words of McMichael, Coleman’s recording of Free Jazz “underscored these social and cultural changes partly by decentering the body in musical representations of blackness through a deconstruction of rhythm and a recontextualization of the traditional blues-based harmonic structures of jazz”.5 The radical transfer of sonic ideas deployed by Coleman’s double quartet in Free Jazz would become a critically important point of reference for later landmark experimental jazz recordings made both in the US and in West Germany, such as John Coltrane’s Ascension (1965), Peter Brötzmann’s Machine Gun (1968), and Manfred Schoof’s European Echoes (1969).6

In January 1962, for the very first time in its history, the jazz magazine Down Beat published a double review of an album in which both reviewers rated Coleman’s Free Jazz on the publication’s usual five-star scale.

Awarding the album “No Stars” and deploying psychopathological terms, the magazine’s associate editor John Tynan scathingly opined: “Where does neurosis end and psychosis begin? The answer must lie somewhere within this maelstrom… ‘Collective Improvisation’? Nonsense. The only semblance of collectivity lies in the fact that these eight nihilists were collected together in one studio at one time and with one common cause: to destroy the music that gave them birth.”7 The apparent horror with which Tynan responded to Coleman’s radical realisation of the concept of total improvisation suggests that perhaps something larger might have been at play here. As the descendant of people who were subjected to perpetual physical and psychological terror brought about by transatlantic slavery, Coleman’s utilisation of what scholar John Szwed has denoted as “maximal individualism within the framework of spontaneous egalitarian interaction”, not only had profound sociopolitical overtones, but took on a larger existential meaning.8 Referencing both the ring shout – a religious ritual first practised by enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and US in which people form a circle, move in a counter clockwise direction, and sing aloud – and John Cage’s well-known composition 4’33”, composer, musicologist, and computer music pioneer George E. Lewis has observed: “It seems fitting that in the wake of the radical physical and even mental silencing of slavery (as distinct from, say, an aestheticised silence of four minutes or so), African Americans developed an array of musical practices that encouraged all to speak.” 9 The comprehensive silencing of slavery addressed by Lewis thus produced a silence akin to the wilful absence of produced tones and sounds; 10 this deliberate absence of sound and noise is the conducting of a produced silence.

Similarly, scholar Gascia Ouzounian has differentiated between two fundamentally different conceptions of silence: “One notion of silence understands it as a physical or acoustic phenomenon, that is, the absence of sound – the sense in which Cage used the term when he proclaimed that ‘there is no such thing as silence.’

Another conception of silence understands it in historical and sociocultural terms, as in the silencing of a person or people.”11 The latter conception of silence is brought about by the presence of conducting. In that regard, silence is not about absence but actually about presence, albeit not in a Cagean sense. Silence is about marking a blank space, which is occupied by a multitude of sounds. In a seemingly paradoxical fashion, it is not really silence but a scream comprised of the dense polyphony of unheard voices.

During the early 1960s, Coleman’s groundbreaking innovations began to have an impact on musical practices in West Germany too, a place not so often associated with the African diaspora, via the extended ­networks of Black experimentalism. Among the white German musicians profoundly impacted by what Ouzounian has denoted as the “radical collective expression” of African American experimentalists – of which Coleman’s work is clearly catalytic – was critically important saxophonist and visual artist Peter Brötzmann.12

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 16

Brötzmann’s work and activities have been instru­mental in establishing post-war Germany as an important site for jazz experimentalism in Europe. Trained at W ­ uppertal’s Werkkunstschule (School of Applied Arts) during the early 1960s, Brötzmann began to forge important connections to visual artists and musicians during visits to the Netherlands, such as Jan Schoonhoven and Yoko Ono. Brötzmann’s formative years as a visual artist and musician intersected with the emergence of the international and transdisciplinary Fluxus network, whose experimental concepts and practices deeply resonated with the young Brötzmann. Out of all the artists associated with Fluxus, Nam June Paik was to have the most profound influence on him. In March 1963, Brötzmann had the opportunity to work with Paik on the occasion of the Korean artist’s first solo exhibition, “Exposition of Music – Electronic Television”, at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal. As Brötzmann remembers: “I was lucky that I had the chance to work with Nam June Paik, who came from the music side. I was, for a couple of exhibitions and projects, a kind of assistant and he showed me that the rules are there to be broken.”13 Brötzmann is a member of a war-born, “damaged” generation, which came of age during the period of postwar “conservative modernisation” and which was especially receptive to the burden of Germany’s recent political history.14 Debates were taking off during the late 1950s and gaining in momentum during the 1960s in which issues at discussion included continuities between the Nazi era and the West German post-war, so-called “miracle years”, as well as the complicity of the parent generation in Nazi Germany’s atrocities. This led to a mounting intergenerational conflict which surfaced in the debates Brötzmann had with his uncle, formerly a high-ranking Wehrmacht officer. The demands of the war-born generation for answers to their questions about their parents’ complicity in the unspeakable atrocities of the Nazi racial state were usually met with silence. As Brötzmann has related about the significance of his engagement with African American musical knowledge for his individuation process: “After the war, we Germans were in a very special situation. We had problems. The fathers we had brought the whole world nearly to the end, in a way.

And so, we had to find answers for that. And, of course, we didn’t get answers from our fathers. So, we had to find answers to the question of what life is and why things like that can happen. I had to look somewhere else and, again, music was not only a help, but it was a kind of book I could read, and I could find little answers for myself.”15 In an undisguised fashion, Brötzmann’s remarks illustrate the dynamics of how, in Paul Gilroy’s words, “during the latter half of the twentieth century an appetite for various African American cultures was part of how Europe recomposed itself in the aftermath of fascism”.16 As a descendant of enslaved people and someone who had experienced segregation codified by Jim Crow laws during his formative years in Fort Worth, Texas, Coleman devised strategies that effectively resisted the s­ ilencing of radical Black voices. By means of engaging with Black musical knowledge, Brötzmann was able to break a different kind of silence in post-war West Germany and to artistically come into his own.

1 Ornette Coleman, Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet [1961] (CD, Los Angeles, CA: Atlantic Records, 2004).

2 Ornette Coleman, liner notes for Ornette Coleman, Change of the Century [1960] (CD, Los Angeles, CA: Atlantic Records, 2002).

3 Robert K. McMichael, “We Insist! Freedom Now: Black Moral Authority, Jazz, and the Changeable Shape of Whiteness”, American Music, vol. 16, no. 4 (1998), pp. 375–416, here p. 379.

4 I have borrowed the phrase “possessive investment” from George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Benefit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998).

5 McMichael, “We Insist!”, p. 399.

6 John Coltrane, Ascension [1965] (CD, Santa Monica, CA: Impulse, 2000); Peter Brötzmann, The Complete Machine Gun Sessions [1968] (CD, Chicago, IL: Atavistic, 2007); Manfred Schoof, European Echoes [1969] (CD, Chicago, IL: Atavistic, 2002).

7 Pete Welding and John A. Tynan, “Double View of a Double Quartet”, Down Beat (18 Jan.1962), p. 28; reprinted in Robert Walser, ed., Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History (New York: Review Books, 1999), p. 255. Pete Welding awarded the maximum rating of five stars.

8 John Szwed, “Josef Škvorecký and the Tradition of Jazz Literature”, in John Szwed, Crossovers: Essays on Race, Music, and American Culture (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), p. 187.

9 George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. xii.

10 In this and the following paragraph, I’m drawing upon insightful ideas developed by my partner Andrea Rothaug during a recent conversation.

11 Gascia Ouzounian, “The Sonic Undercommons: Sound Art in Radical Black Arts Traditions”, in Jane Grant, John Matthias, and David Prior, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), p. 510.

12 Ibid, p. 512.

13 Harald Kisiedu, European Echoes: Jazz Experimentalism in Germany, 1950–1975 (Hofheim: Wolke Verlag, 2020), p. 25.

14 Translated from the German, “konservative Moderni­ sierung”. Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried, Deutsche Kulturgeschichte: Die Bundesrepublik von 1945 bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2009), p. 234.

15 Peter Brötzmann, interview with the author, Wuppertal, Germany, 2 July 2010; see also the version published in Kisiedu, European Echoes, p. 47.

16 See Paul Gilroy, “Foreword: Migrancy, Culture and a New Map of Europe”, in Heike Raphael-Hernandez, ed., Blackening Europe: The African American Presence (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. xviii.

HARALD KISIEDU is a historical musicologist and received his doctorate from Columbia University. His research interests include jazz as a global phenomenon, Afro­diasporic classical and experimental composers, music and politics, improvisation, transnationalism, and Wagner.

Kisiedu is also a saxophonist and has performed with George Lewis, Branford Marsalis, and Henry Grimes.

He is currently a lecturer at the Institute for Music at Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences and is the author of European Echoes: Jazz Experimentalism in Germany, 1950–1975 published by Wolke Verlag in 2020.

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SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL IMAGES OF REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING Aleida Assmann

There are many intermediate stages between remembering and forgetting. I will ­examine some of them more closely. In doing so, I will also focus on language and metaphors and point to examples from artwork and installations to illustrate my thoughts.

Mauro Fiorese, Treasure Rooms of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale – Naples, pigment print on cotton paper, 2015

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TIERED ATTENTION IN THE MUSEUM

TEMPORAL IMAGES OF REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING

Unlike inside libraries and archives, the museum is a frame in which different degrees of intensity of remembering and forgetting are staged in spatial arrangement. To make this more evident, the model of a department store can be used to consider the sequence of connected and interconnecting rooms of the museum space. Facing out onto the street are the display windows, which are designed to attract the attention of shoppers, holding stimulating offers and an aesthetic arrangement of the products on sale inside the store. People will normally pass the window display providing an “inside look” before entering the store. In the salesroom, customers will then find the showcased items from the window displays, well sorted and presented, to inspect and probe, before buying them. Beyond this, there is a third space that is not in public view: This is the warehouse, where the merchandise is stacked on shelves, invisible to the customers, but waiting to be called forth.

The three-tiered spatial sequence of display window, salesroom, and warehouse (“Magazin”) can easily be applied to the museum space too. Here, there is also a display window; these are the special exhibitions, which are carefully presented and subject to rapid change. These temporary exhibits often get moved from place to place in order that as many viewers as possible get to see them. As a fleeting opportunity, these exhibits often receive the greatest attention and the strongest media response. Behind them, analogous to the salesroom, are the regular museum exhibition spaces, which make accessible the permanent collection.

Here, one can reliably encounter the most prized works of art history again and again, in a long-term, if not permanent arrangement. The canonised paintings and objects, which are presented to visitors over many decades, provide opportunities to revisit them again and again and from generation to generation. Many visitors enter the museum space with the most popular images of the Western art canon in their minds, because they have already seen them countless times in reproductions in books and magazines, on calendars and postcards. They are engrained in the bourgeois memory through education and different media. Visiting museums, therefore, is inspired not only by curiosity, the chance of new discoveries, but also by a desire to re-encounter old favourites. With each re-encounter, the impression deepens and enriches the imprint of the images on the memory. It is in this renewed exchange with canonical images and classical works of art that cultural education and aesthetic understanding unfold.

Spaces purely used to store things, on the other hand, like the cellar or the attic, are much less accessible, rarely visited, and generally hidden from view. The Italian photographer Mauro Fiorese has made a series of photographs in the storage facilities of some of Italy’s great museums. In a series called “Treasure rooms”, he focuses only on what is in storage, hidden-fromview, that which thus exists on the reverse of the public’s attention – well preserved, but spatially excluded, locked away, invisible, and forgotten.

So far, when it comes to the metaphor of memory, attention has been focused in spatial images, such as the two-dimensional writing board or the three-dimensional magazine. These spatial-image donors must, however, be supplemented by the fourth dimension if one is to grasp the temporal dynamics of remembering and forgetting in their complexity, because remembering is not the same as storing. A central source of imagery for the temporal dynamics of remembering and forgetting is the complex of death and rebirth or revival, which played a major role in the conceptual self-image of the Renaissance. While the humanists of the early modern period prided themselves in their conscious retrieval and restoration of bringing back to life a dead culture, thanks to their huge efforts in education and learning, the early 20th-century scholar Aby Warburg reinterpreted this epochal concept and metaphor of the Renaissance in terms of an unconscious return of the repressed.

Another popular-image provider for remembering and forgetting is the biorhythm of sleeping and awakening. T. S. Eliot found impressive words for this rhythm in his verse drama The Rock:

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 16

“We are children quickly tired: children who are up in the night and fall asleep as the rocket is fired; and the day is long for work or play. / We tire of distraction or concentration, we sleep and are glad to sleep, / Controlled by the rhythm of blood and the day and the night and the seasons. / And we must extinguish the candle, put out the light and relight it; / Forever must quench, forever relight the flame.”1 In the myth of gnosis in late antiquity, sleeping and awakening are associated with forgetting and remembering a former authentic state of existence. We can find the motif of sleeping and waking as a signal of deep transformation in fairy tales such as Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, where life is suddenly arrested and falls back into an unconscious state of sleep for a long period of time. This metaphor is used in everyday journalism: An article on German colonial history is titled “A Gap in our Memory”, another, “Dornröschen-Schlaf beendet” (Sleeping Beauty has Awoken).

A particularly sensory image for temporary forgetting is freezing and thawing. Ruth Klüger, for example, when writing down memories of her experiences in concentration camps and death camps, came up against a sudden barrier in her memory after fifty years. She could no longer remember the false name that she and her mother had adopted while fleeing shortly before the end of the Second World War. She picked up the phone and called her then 87-year-old mother. The mother: “[A]fter a short hesitation, calls up the stored name on the screen of her memory: ‘Kalisch was our name on the wrong papers.’ At first, the name means nothing to me. Kalisch. It’s like food you take out of the freezer, odourless and tasteless.

Then, when it thaws, a slight aroma emanates from it. From far away I taste it, chewing on it. Because it was frozen and is

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now thawing, it has retained the smell of the February wind of 1945, when the efforts of our flight were successful.”2 What is happening in these examples of a rhythmic dynamic is compressed and expressed in the small prefix “re-”. It does not only appear in the word Re-naissance, but also plays a leading role in all the various expressions for remembering: re-member, re-mind, re-collection, re-cordare, up to the “re-turn of the re-pressed”. Something is always re-trieved or comes back of its own accord, which does not necessarily have to be the same as the initial stimulus. With this movement of a re-turn, re-petition, or re-storation the dimension of time comes into play, extending and filling in the distance for the intervals between remembering, forgetting, and re-membering. To be certain of remembering something, it must have temporarily disappeared from the screen of our consciousness. Remembering always takes place over temporal intervals of not remembering or even forgetting. Spatial metaphors of memory, be they two-dimensional like the slate or three-dimensional like the warehouse, are therefore insufficient. Remembering gains weight and meaning only with this effort at overcoming a temporal distance and a phase of absence: a contingent trigger or a conscious effort brings something back into the present or engages with something that temporarily, or for a long time had not been the object of attention, knowledge, or active consciousness. Friedrich Georg Jünger, therefore, distinguished between two forms of forgetting, one that involves loss – when there is nothing to retrieve any more – and one that involves preservation and, therefore, includes the possibility of retrieval: “The forgetting that makes possible the preservation of what has been thought and its return to thought” is what he calls preservative forgetting.3 Preservation presupposes a place where something is safely stored. Consequently, to be able to do justice to phenomena such as deferral or latency, we must merge the spatial-memory images with the temporal ones. Latency, after all, comes from the Latin verb latere, to conceal, to hide; there must be a place where something temporarily removed from consciousness can hide and endure.

STABILISING FORMS OF DURATION AND REPETITION Remembering and forgetting have expiration dates, which are controlled by the frames and rhythms of memory that organise our consciousness. These rhythms are biologically, physiologically, and anthropologically based and are culturally shaped. In remembering and forgetting, then, it is imperative to consider the interplay of the two dimensions of space and time. There are “stabilising forms of duration” and “stabilising forms of repetition”. Memory needs both: what is stored exclusively materially and is not reactivated again will be forgotten, despite its lasting presence. This is true for monuments as well as for books. Without repetition, re-reading, and periodic renewal, for example on anniversaries, no memory will be formed. Cultural memory, like individual memory, is therefore dependent on external impulses or “triggers”. What is

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permanently stored in museums, archives, and libraries must be triggered from time to time on certain occasions, that is, initiated, performed, staged, and reactivated. Anniversaries and jubilees are scheduled dates that serve several functions: They create occasions for a re-encounter with one’s own history, which is critically reviewed, renewed, updated, and synchronised in the present on these occasions. On historical anniversaries, a society assures itself of the central key events and turning points as lasting and normative reference dates of its history. These dates form a framework for collective self-staging, they offer occasions for personal participation in events, and stimulate debates and reflections, which update and critically renew the historical consciousness and position of a society.

Forgetting, therefore, can occur as a direct consequence if the spatial and temporal dimensions of remembering are radically separated. Where a message is written in stone and given a monumental form intended to connect with an indefinite future, but no provision is made for the refreshment and renewal of that message, the monument invariably turns into a symbol of forgetting.

Robert Musil famously noted a paradox here: that monuments are designed to attract attention and become unforgettable, but, due to their massive immobility and solid permanence, people automatically ignore them and they become quickly invisible. The Rider monument on the square in front of the main railway station in Hanover, for example, has the inscription: “To the patron of the country, his loyal people”. Those who pass by it are no longer these loyal people and hardly know which Landesvater was hoisted onto a horse here. Although the monument is highly visible in public space, its commemorative appeal is extinguished. The monument has changed into an object of folklore. But that does not mean that it has become superfluous. People who want to see each other agree to meet “under the tail”.

FORMS AND TECHNIQUES OF FORGETTING There are material and mental forms and techniques of forgetting, and among them some that are actively and consciously deployed, and some that are passively experienced and work unconsciously.

Let us take a closer look at four of these: Losing, destroying, repressing, and silence.

Losing: Christian Boltanski brought the meaning of this word back to general consciousness in an exhibition staged at the Haus der Kunst in 1997. It was called “Lost in Munich” and presented objects that the artist had received from the lost-and-found office in that city. To this day, it is the only art exhibition in which owners could pick up their lost items. At the same time, the exhibited objects were perceived quite differently in the new setting. Boltanski no longer worked with the formal aesthetic logic of the object trouvé, but within the very different framework of the search for traces.

For Boltanski, every object has a history, and is soaked with the human imprint of an individual story for which he is always searching and pointing to, even if there is no possibility to retrieve or

Mauro Fiorese, Treasure Rooms of the Ca’ Pesaro – Venice, pigment print on cotton paper, 2015

r­ econstruct it. For Boltanski, the used object is a mute witness of a unique human life.4 In this way, he uses art to make the absence present. The object is thereby transformed from a commodity into a memento and, when these memories are lost, which happens inexorably, into the last witness of a life lived or a childhood lost.

Very much like photographs, the clothes from the lost-and-found office are indexical signs. They retain a trace of the direct contact which they once had with the absent person to whom they once belonged.5 Things are full of stories, and since we no longer know them, Boltanski is the one to remind us that this knowledge is lost.

Destroying can take different forms. One of these is through deliberate violence. Examples are the acts of vandalism and iconoclasm that have accompanied the history of religious struggles in Europe. Over the centuries, images, sculptures, and sacred objects have fallen victim to blasphemic or zealotic destruction. Today, we witness the ostentatious destruction of ancient ruins such as the oasis city of Palmyra by the Islamic State. But in a different mode,

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modern art also retains an iconoclastic trait when ornamental facades of historic buildings are erased to please the purism of modern architects. Abstract art is yet another case; it forbids itself the figurative richness of tradition, while atonal music abolished the rulebook of harmony.

Destruction, however, is not only caused by violence and intolerance, nor only to serve the emergence of new art forms. Catastrophes such as the fire of the Anna Amalia Library in ­Weimar in 2004 also destroyed cultural assets, as did the forest fire in California in 2018, which caused the manuscript of Rilke’s poem “The Panther” to go up in flames in Thomas Gottschalk’s holiday home. Due to uncontrolled underground construction work, the City Archive in Cologne collapsed in 2009. Tons of archival sources were buried in the mud of the abyss. From 2011 onwards, reports were published listing recovered items that were carefully restored piece by piece. In a small-scale example, the little triumphs of recovery amidst the chaos of destruction were another amazing example of

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Mauro Fiorese, Treasure Rooms of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna – Rome, pigment print on cotton paper, 2014

what the syllable “re-” can stand for: Thanks to the impressive technical apparatus of cleaning, restoration, and documentation, the former owners were sent lists of the found and assigned archival documents.6 The word repression encompasses a whole bundle of deliberate acts of forgetting, which Stanley Cohen has described as “states of denial”.7 They include covering up, concealing, silencing, dropping, bracketing, passing over, recoding, overwriting, ignoring, neutralising, whitewashing, trivialising, and normalising. How these actions came to pass within the framework of collective silence in post-war West Germany can be shown by a concrete example, the story of the synagogue in the small town of Haigerloch in the Eyachtal in Baden Württemberg. This town presents itself on its homepage as a “little lilac town, rock town, baroque gem” and “cradle of atomic research” (due to Werner Heisenberg, the physicist, setting up his research space there after the war).8 Cleared out, but not destroyed, the synagogue remained as a

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strange relict of the Nazi past after 1945. Since there was no longer a Jewish community in the small town, it was sold in 1951 to a private owner who turned it into a movie theatre in the 1960s. A craftsman who was involved in the renovations explained: “The order was [...] the synagogue will be converted into a cinema [umfunktioniert]. Back then, no one was surprised about it or gave it a thought. Today one would think about it much more. Today one has much more knowledge about these things, but at the time, one just did what the master said.”9 Master craftsman or Führer, there was obviously not a big difference in this generation. Many continuities were unbroken after 1945. Visitors to the cinema remember that they spent pleasant hours of their youth there, watching mainly Heimat films, doctor’s films, and love stories. After the cinema, the synagogue served as a Spar supermarket until 1981. A shopper remembers:

“Nobody at that time would have imagined that this had once been a synagogue. The space inside was filled with shelves and the goods offered here. In some places, there were slight cracks in the plaster and you could get a glimpse of a trace of the past.”

The synagogue served as a supermarket until the 1970s and then as a storage room until the end of the 1980s. It wasn’t until the 50th anniversary of the November pogrom night in 1988 that the residents of the town finally “woke up” from their long “sleep”.

They formed a discussion group and arranged for the town to buy back the synagogue. A memorial was established there, where the history of the expelled and murdered Jews of this town is exhibited. Today, the city’s tourist office lists on its homepage the five top sights of the city. The synagogue is not among them.10 To make sure that something is remembered it needs to be communicated; what is passed over in silence is quickly forgotten.

This applies primarily to the trauma for which words are lacking, and for which a new language must be created. Robert Anthelme, after his liberation from the concentration camp, began his account with the sentence: “When we finally had the chance to begin to speak, we discovered that we had no words.”11 But there was even more missing than an appropriate language, and that was an empathetic audience willing to listen to their story. The Israeli psychotherapist Dan Bar-On used the image of “a double wall of silence” to explain that there is not only the wall that restrains the speaker, but also the wall that wards off the listener.12 Silence is also considered a shield of defence for the guilt and shame that threatens the sense of pride and self-esteem. A social climate built on a strong sense of honour, fear of exposure, and ostracism sustains silence; to rise above it requires a shared urge to clear up a crime, to show respect for the victims, and generate empathy.

Finally, silence is considered a mode of forgetting in the space of knowledge for everything that is no longer circulated and therefore falls out of communication. German colonial history, for example, had been a vital part of school education in Imperial Germany: “Ehe der Morgen graut / Hat der Kaiser schon an der Flotte gebaut” (Before dawn, the Kaiser has already built the fleet) they had to write on their slates. This history has long since ceased to be a topic taught in school, but its relicts are right now becoming visible again in the public space. They are rediscovered and hotly discussed as Germans start to look at them also through the eyes of new immigrants.

Let me sum up with a few general remarks on the dynamics of remembering and forgetting. Memory, in which remembering and forgetting are always intertwined, works between the extremes of “storing everything” and “deleting everything”. Different gradations and spaces unfold for that which is only temporarily lost and can be accessed again later.

Remembering, in other words, is not the opposite of forgetting, since many things can be retrieved. But remembering is also a fraction of what has been forgotten in total, which we must think of as a vast land of the no-more and nothingness that surrounds us.

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Forgetting can therefore be partial, transitory, and periodic, but also total. When we have forgotten what we have forgotten, it has become invisible and inaccessible. But it remains observable in the process of disappearing or reappearing.

Human memory is self-reflexive. Everyone is able and authorised to analyse these processes in herself and himself. Art plays a special role in this form of monitoring, as it creates a mirror of self-reflection that enables a society to watch and think about its acts of remembering and forgetting.

1 The Rock: A Pageant Play Written for Performance at Sadler‘s Wells Theatre, 28 May–9 June 1934 (London: Faber & Faber, 1934), p. 85. Words by T.S. Eliot and music by Martin Shaw.

2 Ruth Klüger, Weiter leben. Eine Jugend (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1993), pp. 179 et. al.

3 Friedrich Georg Jünger, Gedächtnis und Erinnerung ­( Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1957), pp. 16–17.

On the term “latency”, see Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht and Florian Klinger, eds, Latenz. Blinde Passagiere in den Geisteswissenschaften (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011).

4 Susanne Partsch, Moderne Kunst, Die 101 wichtigsten Fragen (Munich: Beck, 2005), pp. 57–58.

5 Bernhard Jussen, ed., Signal Christian Boltanski (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2004), pp. 63–65.

6 Oliver König, “Die Verantwortung bleibt verschüttet.

10 Jahre nach Einsturz in Köln”, FAZ (published online 1 March 2019), https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/ 10-jahre-nach-einsturz-des-koelner-stadtarchivs-­ verschuettete-verantwortung-16065422.html 7 Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001).

8 “Stadt Haigerloch”, https://www.haigerloch.de/de/Home 9 Utz Jeggle, Erinnerungen an die Haigerlocher Juden: ein Mosaik (Tübingen: Tübinger Vereinigung für Volkskunde, 2006).

10 “Stadt Haigerloch”, www.haigerloch.de/de/Home 11 Robert Anthelme, Das Menschengeschlecht (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1992).

12 Dan Bar-On, Die Last des Schweigens. Gespräche mit Kindern von NS-Tätern (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1993).

ALEIDA ASSMANN is a professor of English Literature and Cultural Theory. The focus of her research is cultural and communicative memory. Together with Jan Assmann, she was awarded the 2018 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2018. Her recent publications in English include Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (2011); Shadows of Trauma: Memory and the Politics of Postwar Identity (2015); and Is Time Out of Joint? On the Rise and Fall of the Modern Time Regime (2020).

Aleida Assmann gave this lecture on 8 June 2021 as part of the series of talks on Arbeit am Gedächtnis – Transforming Archives at the Akademie der Künste.

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MILITANT ART

THE ARCHIVE OF THE PRESENT AN INCITEMENT TO DEBATE

BY MAX CZOLLEK

AND

ARCHIVES AND THE RADICALLY DIVERSE PRESENT I should like to dive straight in with the following assumption, one that I shall return to again and again in this article: German society has become a different one in recent years. That is why we are able to conceive of it differently. And it is threatened by the past, so we have to conceive of it differently.

This assumption can be justified, firstly, empirically: because this society has in fact become a different, radically diverse one, we are able to think of it differently.

Here, a changed reality precedes the ability to also intellectually reframe it. And, secondly, it can be justified normatively: because the present is haunted by the ghosts of the past, we should rethink it. In saying this, I wish to stress two points: the relevance of the past, which is always reframed within histories, for the present. And the relevance of thinking itself, which also has to change in order for things to change.

But first, a word on the relationship between the concepts of the past and history. Matthias Sauerbruch introduced what I consider a useful conceptual distinction in the March issue of the Journal der Künste: While the past is “irretrievably lost, history is produced continuously anew – through interpretations of the past in hindsight”.1 Brecht writes: “Fed by yesterday, today advances into tomorrow.” And that also means that tomorrow is today’s point of arrival, which becomes what it feeds on. And this nourishment is called history. So, with what food do archives feed the present? What future do we thus make possible? What present are we depicting? And what stories about ourselves do we meaningfully want to tell?

I’m highly intrigued by this wanting. Because it tells us a lot about the We – which in Germany one might all too readily hope has already had its day. And yet, it seems, the We continues to exist. And it exists below the threshold of the statements of intent spoken into microphones

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or expressed in editorials. Obviously, we no longer want to be part of a German We. But we continue to think and feel a certain way.

I have dealt with this implicit reproduction of belonging in more detail in my books Desintegriert Euch! and Gegenwartsbewältigung.2 Such systematic reticence would be curious if it weren’t characteristic of the standard procedure for reconstructing German identity after 1945, especially from the 1980s onwards. Reconstruction seems to work especially well when we assume only the best intentions for ourselves, our families, or our workplaces: from “Grandpa wasn’t a Nazi” to the rebuilding of the Berlin Palace to the question: “Where are you from?” Far and wide, not a hint of ill will.

I’m also interested in the professional processes that lead us to exclude certain voices as irrelevant, marginal, unprofessional, and so on. And in a way that ultimately results in statistical imbalances at publishing houses, when it comes to prizes, grants, and reviews, and also in the archives that reflect society’s power structures.

Let’s just consider the following data on the Archives of the Akademie der Künste: one in five of the artists in this archive is female; Aras Ören is one of the very few authors of “guest worker” literature whose estate has been included in the Archives; and authors such as May Ayim and, with her, Afro-German literature still have no place in these Archives. Therefore, although we may think we take decisions with the best of intentions and on the basis of objective and professional criteria, it seems that these Archives also play their part in reproducing the structural inequalities still existing in our society.

I am certainly preaching to the converted when I also underline the earnestness of the work of the Akademie der Künste. Art is a central element of societies because it allows them a place of reflection and an exploration of the ideas it has formed about itself. And of the violence that these ideas produce. In this way, art is not only a cure, but also a symptom of the disease we call society.

An institution like the Archives of the Akademie der Künste is not impartial in its work: The selection of artworks to be included in an archive always means the exclusion of the works that are not included. This is not in itself surprising. A German art archive is not like a Library of Babel. To put it another way, is it possible that the very parameters of importance and relevance in place for the purposes of selection are themselves part of the problem? Is it that artists, audiences, critics, and archives themselves engage in a specific form of complicity in their notions of what constitutes “good” art worthy of preservation and patronage, a complicity that has far more to do with the darker sides of the present than we are comfortable with, or which reflects how we see ourselves?

THE ARCHIVE OF THE PRESENT This brings me to my second assumption: It is not only art, which is after all produced at a certain time, that is embedded in a corresponding social present and its structures of need, so too are the poetics – that is, the dominant ideas about what good art is. This relationship, which I have elaborated upon elsewhere, manifests itself in the complicity just mentioned.3 That all those participating have only the best of intentions is a prerequisite for it all to function. Because with-

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out the mutual assurance that something relevant is being shown, evaluated, applauded, booed, or collected here, something is heralded that is always revealed by a look at the past: change. Or once again a variation on Brecht: “On the bed of the Spree the pebbles are shifting.”

And perhaps that is what we are experiencing right now: those people who only the day before yesterday were able to calmly define not only what literature and art are but also how they work, now feeling under pressure to justify their categories and viewpoints.

And this pressure comes from very different directions – be it from feminist literary criticism, from post-migrant theatre, from criticism of racist practices in theatrical environments, from the question of the middle-class conception of literature, from a radical critique of the relationship between humanity and nature in architecture – as at the current Venice Biennale – or from a notion of self-defensive poetry, as I have been developing for some time now together with Jo Frank and the authors of Verlagshaus Berlin.4 In my view, there is something to be said for interpreting this situation as the outcome of a process in which society’s radical diversity is becoming increasingly visible even in areas that classical Marxist terminology would perhaps assign to the superstructure, which Jürgen Habermas would call spheres of cultural reproduction and Gramsci spaces of metapolitics.

This would seem, at any rate, to be a process of catching up, because social reality has already moved on, and now government, cultural institutions, sports facilities, opera houses and theatres, and literary institutions have to consider how to respond to this. And this also applies, of course, to archives.

Or, more precisely, this applies to archives if and insofar as they see themselves as places whose task it is to map the dynamics of society, that is, to address what the adjective “plural” qualifying “democracy” actually means, which brings me to the first of five propositions that I wish to put forward for discussion: The task of an institution like the Akademie der Künste is to represent not a section of the population and its ideas of what good or relevant art is, but German society in its radical diversity.

In preparation for this article, I also dropped in on the Archives of the Akademie der Künste. The building is right next to the Berlin Charité, where I was born. So many stories, wherever you look.

Superficially, I was interested in digging up some hard facts about the holdings in the Archives: how many Afro-Germans, how many Jews, how many women, how many queers, how many guest workers and post-­ migrants, and so on. But, in the end, we had a lovely, long, and thoughtful conversation about the role of art archives in general – and the role of the Archives of the Akademie der Künste in particular.

One of the arguments from that conversation which has lingered in my mind was that archives are always renewing themselves by the way they are used. That they need continual (re)interpretation to be able to gain concrete form. And I think to myself: absolutely! For archives are repositories, collections of things that have to be sifted and combed through again and again.

At the same time, the fact that only a fifth of the Archives overall are devoted to women, for example, remains a problem, even if one adds up, from a feminist perspective, the assistant directors who wrote the notes, the dressmakers who made the costumes for the performances, and so on. In the language of biblical research, one would still have to ask about those things that have not found their way into the Archives and remain, thus, only apocryphally associated with the collections.

Allow me to stay briefly with the biblical imagery. The selection, which finally crystallises in Judaism into the Torah and in Christianity into the Old and New Testaments, for example, allows the community at the time to make new interpretations. The many Christian reinterpretations and denominations speak a clear language here. And in Judaism, it is said appreciatively that scripture turns a different face to each generation.

Of course, the same is also true of archives. In this respect, the people I talked to were right to refer to the “interpretation of archives”, a process that takes place anew with each reading and which in the jargon is known as “indexing”. And the silenced, the suppressed, the ignored, and the excluded have also undoubtedly found expression in archives.

But I wouldn’t want to bet on it. Because if repression is successful, we no longer know what has been lost.

Especially if we assume that the parameters of what are understood to be important and relevant are themselves historical. Even in the present day we are not immune to the effects of the ideology of what is “good” art.

And this means that I have arrived on the other side of the equation – on the side of those who use archives.

If my reflexive sociological focus on my own artistic practice has made one thing clear to me, it is that the reception of artworks is not at all autonomous, but runs along narrowly bounded by viewing habits, viewing expectations, and the need structures of the public.

Archives, as described, are institutions whose officials decide what is worth preserving. The process leading up to this decision is known as “evaluation” in archive jargon. The linguistic reference to biblical research is appropriate here as well, in that the concept of the canon, which has also become part of our thinking about culture, also comes from this field of research.

In a certain sense, then, the processes of inclusion and exclusion in archives and the processes of their always limited (re)interpretation seem to be interrelated and, not infrequently, even mutually reinforcing. It is impossible to tell which came first. But that they have happened and continue to do so is nevertheless beyond doubt. A little bit of investigative research.

THOMAS MANN AND THE SEDUCTION OF SELF-CRITICISM In early 2021, I came across a speech by Thomas Mann that the embittered recipient of the Nobel Prize for Liter­ ature had given in English to an audience of thousands at the Library of Congress on 29 May 1945.

At this time, Mann himself could already look back on a long and rather serpentine political career. In 1918 he had published an openly reactionary, anti-democratic, nationalistic epic entitled Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, which did not make it any easier for the fledgling

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and highly unstable Weimar Republic to establish itself as Germany’s first democracy. His outlook only changed in the years that followed, such that Mann finally emerged in 1933 as a staunch opponent of National Socialism who recorded pro-democracy speeches while exiled in California.

In the speech, Mann makes several observations, including the connection between Protestantism, German idealism, and the disengagement of German artists from everyday political events. The following proposition of his caught my eye: “Wicked Germany is only merely Germany gone astray.”5 With these words, Mann wishes to stress that exiled German authors cannot simply be regarded as representatives of a good Germany. Rather, they are also part of what had happened in Nazi Germany, because both – the noble and the base – are already inherent in German history.

This sounds good on the face of it, because Mann is taking his audience and himself to task for trying to account for how what happened could happen. And in­ sofar as he attests that German culture is closely inter­ woven with politics, he is more progressive than many contemporary commentators who would much sooner have not heard anything about the links between art and the violent aspects of a society in which it arises.

At this point, however, we also reach the limits of Mann’s analysis. For the speech not only delineates a self-criticism of one of the most important representatives of German culture in 1945, but it also draws a line – not only underlining what he says, but also what he leaves unsaid.

Mann’s distinction between Germany good and evil, for example, seems to focus exclusively on the German cultural canon, which is also suggested by his reference to the Faustian nature of German culture.6 The proposition of the interconnected good and evil Germany thus also obscures the presence of entirely different viewpoints in German cultural history.

This is not entirely irrelevant, especially considering the years 1933 to 1945, because Jewish, queer, and feminist voices, the voices of Sinti and Roma, people with disabilities, and so on, had already been silenced within Germany by the time Mann delivered his speech.

We can perhaps speak here of a “double forgetting”.

By this I mean a dynamic in which the critique itself still means the reproduction of certain aspects of what is being critiqued. In Mann’s case, for example, I suggest that his critique of evil Germany is itself still a reproduction of specific ideas about Germany – and about who participates in this Germany.

Even at the time of the greatest crisis, Mann’s self-­ critical appraisal is unable to distance itself from a specific nationalist conception of German culture. That is no mean matter. Had he instead turned to the voices burned in books and artworks, forgotten, and repressed by the Nazis, he could not have asserted the juxtaposition of good and evil Germany in this way at all. There would simply have been more than would have fit into the narrative of the magnificent and at the same time flawed nature of German culture.

What I am concerned with in this critique is the expansion of the space of what is called “Germany” or “German culture” – because this is also something that can be seen as an expansion of the parameters of importance and relevance. Of course, there have always been other

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cultural practices in Germany: views, for example, that saw art not as an attempt at personal spiritual transcendence, but as a survival strategy.

Which brings me to my second proposition: Art has long been understood as a place that transcends the temporality and contingency of day-to-day political events. But this is not the only perspective that has existed and con­ tinues to exist. For art has always been an expression of those who had to fear for their social or physical survival and for whom aesthetic practices were part of their survival and resistance strategies.

HIRSCH GLIK AND THE SUGGESTIVE POWER OF THE KNOWN At this point, I also wish to illuminate the foundations of my own reflections on the radical diversity of society and of archives. For this has so far largely taken place in a national context. This limitation is inadmissible insofar as it fosters the fiction that art and its archiving respect national borders.

Or, as my good friend Daniel Kahn put it in his album Lost Causes: “A border is not art / it’s just a frame.”7 Perhaps this is my own form of double forgetting. For a lecture I gave almost exactly a year ago in the “Zwiesprachen” (Conversation) series of the Lyrik Kabinett in Munich, I discussed the Yiddish poet Hirsch Glik and what I called at the time an “archive of militant poetry”.8 Hirsch Glik was born on 24 April 1922 in Vilnius, which was then in Poland. He grew up there, wrote poetry from an early age, was part of the left-wing Zionist youth association Hashomer Hatzair and the youngest member of the artists’ group Yung Vilne. In 1941, he was incarcerated with the Jewish population of Vilnius by the National Socialists in the newly established ghetto, which was gradually liquidated over the following two years.

There were several prominent Eastern European Jewish intellectuals in the Vilna Ghetto: Avrom Sutzkever, probably the most famous Yiddish poet of this generation, along with Abba Kovner and Vitka Kempner, who together founded DIN – that famous group of Jewish avengers – after the war, whom the aforementioned Daniel Kahn immortalised in his song “Six Million Germans”.9 The Fareinikte Partisaner Organisatzije (FPO), one of the most important and much sung-about Jewish partisan organisations in the resistance against the Nazis, was also founded in Vilnius in 1942. As a child I was often sung to sleep with the following lines to the melody of Und weil der Mensch ein Mensch ist (And because a person is a person): “Hey FPO, mir sejnen do / mutige und dreiste zur Schlacht / Partisanen noch heint, gehen schlogen den feind / in nem Kampf hoben Arbejter Macht.” (“Hey FPO, we’re here / brave and brazen to do battle / partisans today, go beat the enemy / in battle workers have power).”

Only when researching Hirsch Glik, who wrote some of the most prominent partisan songs before being shot by the Nazis, did it become clear to me that the Vilnius poets, for most of the time, held their pen in their right hand and the gun in their left. And that during the Holocaust, the viewpoint of Eastern European Jewish artists

and intellectuals was very different from that of the Jews of Western Europe and Germany.

When Hannah Arendt writes in her 1960 essay on friendship, for example, that genuine friendship is not possible under the conditions of the stetl and the ghetto, this is not only a Jewish philosopher speaking here, but also an author who can afford her normative individualism.10 Things were different in the stetl and the ghetto – of course friendship existed there.

The difference of sentiment between the inhabitants of the ghetto and Arendt is perhaps rather that in the ghetto one was also collectively at the mercy of the collective fate, without any chance of escape or hiding. Not least because of this, highly individual points of view developed here. This is also underlined by a leaflet that Abba Kovner, then head of the FPO, distributed among the inhabitants of the ghetto on 1 January 1942: “Let us not be led like sheep to the slaughter!

It is true we are weak and helpless, but the only answer to the enemy is: Resist! / Brothers! Better to fall as free fighters than live by the mercy of murderers. /Resist!

Resist to the last breath!”11 I must confess that I find it hard to imagine such a situation in concrete terms. And maybe that’s why I feel a greater affinity to the writings of Hannah Arendt to Max Horkheimer, and of Walter Benjamin to Theodor W. Adorno.

That’s the point I want to underline with this example: that it’s not enough to simply include Jews, women, queers, Sinti, and Roma, and so on, in the archives, and assume that you’ve already achieved radical diversity.

In this respect, archives do not have a problem with “diversity”. At least, the lack or presence of diversity does not seem to me to be the only crucial variable that should be at issue. Because if, as shown, diversity can also reproduce power relations, then we should be talking not only about diversity per se, but about questioning our understanding of culture: what do we value as contributions to culture; what stories do we want these contributions to tell of Germany good and evil, of dissidence and the ruling elite, of reaction and counterculture, of German and non-German?

So what signature does a work of art need for it to be read as a Jewish contribution? And what signature does a Jewish work of art need for it to be understood not as the work of a victim, but as a contribution to German culture, to the archives of modernity, to the Akademie der Künste? Who or what decides whether a Jewish author receives a brass plaque on the wall of a house or a Stolperstein?

The example of Glik and the partisan poets of Vilnius, for me, marks a point where my view of the Jewish perspective has become more nuanced once again. Could it be that even in our attention to a Jewish reaction to the Shoah, we have fallen prey to German and Western European dominance? Could it be that here, too, we encounter the double forgetting that I just observed in Thomas Mann’s speech and in my own text?

This question concerns not only the past, but also the way we allow people to take a stand in the present. Or, to put it another way, looking at history creates a certain idea of what position the people labelled with a certain adjective can take in the present.

Or, to express it again in relation to archives, if you want to narrate the present differently, you also have to rearrange the past. And this brings me to my third proposition:

Art is also the place where the defenceless take up arms. And there exists a series of verbal and material archives of self-defensive art that must find their way into an “Archive of the Present”, which must be re-created again and again.

RADICAL DIVERSITY AND THE ARCHIVE OF THE PRESENT What would it mean if we invited Glik and Adorno to the same table to talk about utopia, violence, and art? How did the perspectives differ between Vilnius and Frankfurt am Main, Pacific Palisades and Eastern Europe, between Glik the man and Adorno the man?

I would like to assume that it is not necessary to play them off against each other. Not necessary to decide who is more right, who is more Jewish, or who is more German. And it is precisely this shift in outlook that I want to stress: that we no longer speak of Jewish, female, queer contributions to German culture, but rather of the fact that it was all these works that created what we call culture today.

Even today, Jewish history in Germany is far too often told as the history of the Germanisation of the Jews, the history of the women’s movement, as the history of women’s gradual ascent into domains of the male norm, and queer history as the increasing normalisation of varied forms of desire.

I find it remarkable that all these examples basically tell the same story: namely that a discriminated minority becomes part of a culture when it sheds its differentness. A narrative that is so well-established in the present that the integrational thinking behind it no longer stands out, and instead, when in doubt, you boast that you have told a story about German–Jewish relations.

As I’ve already mentioned, the tricky thing about the effect of ideology is precisely this: that it works best when the unanimous opinion is that everyone is only doing what’s best. And what we are left with is the reference to the skewed statistics, which in the end prove what one no longer wants to admit to oneself: that there is still a problem with publishing programmes, the gender pay gap, and even the make-up of the archives.

What I would like to call an “Archive of the Present” can also be formulated as an alternative to those parameters of importance and relevance given as guidelines for the collection of the Archives of the Akademie der Künste. Or, rather, the parameters can now be precisely stated. This brings me to the fourth proposition:

about poetics. For the interpretation by this Germany of “the Others” in the relationship, between aspiration and reality and between art and politics, differs in many cases from that which is suggested by the usual parameters used to assess the importance and relevance of modern art. Namely, as concrete practices of resistance, of survival, of the attempt to remain different.

Therefore, let’s shift closer to the plural society in which we already live today. After all, it seems that what we call German culture has always been the result of the differentness of its contributors. And by acknowledging the importance and relevance of their work, we understand a little better how we all became what we are today.

That such a shift in perspective is possible also relates to the fact that we are confronted with a changed societal present today. Suddenly there are post-migrant, Jewish, and Black voices, Sinti and Roma voices, and voices of the disabled and LGBTQI+. Not that they didn’t exist before, but they can no longer be ignored or overlooked today: in literature, classical music, new music, hip-hop, theatre, film, opera, painting, the visual arts, action art, drama, and performance art. They are what we must call contemporary culture.

And this brings me to my final proposition, which was also the first assumption this text opened with: German society has become a different one in recent years. That is why we are able to conceive of it differently. And it is threatened by the past, so we have to conceive of it differently.

1 Matthias Sauerbruch, “Metamorphoses – City between History and Conscience”, Journal der Künste 15 (2021), pp. 48–51, here p. 49.

2 Max Czollek, Desintegriert Euch! (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2018); Max Czollek, Gegenwartsbewältigung (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2020).

3 See Max Czollek, beuys will be beuys. beuys will be deutsch. einige gedanken über kunst im postnationalsozialistischen deutschland, Düsseldorf, 21 July 2021 (podcast in German), https://beuys2021.de/index.php/de/media/ podcasts 4 For example, Haus der Poesie, Das Lesen der Anderen.

Wehrhafte Poesie, Berlin 2020 (podcast in German), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHhAdmFEwjE 5 Thomas Mann, “Germany and the Germans”, in Literary Lectures Presented at the Library of Congress (Washington: Library of Congress, 1973), pp. 32–46, here p. 45.

6 See ibid. p. 46.

7 Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird, “Inner Emigration”, on the album Lost Causes (Berlin: Oriente Music, 2011).

8 See Max Czollek, “Sog nit kejn mol, as du gejsst dem leztn weg.” Zu einem Archiv wehrhafter Poesie bei Hirsch Glik (Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 2020).

9 Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird, “Six Million Germans”, on the album Partisans & Parasites (Berlin: Oriente Music, 2009).

10 See Hannah Arendt, Von der Menschlichkeit in finsteren Zeiten. Rede über Lessing (Munich: Piper-Bücherei, 1960), pp. 21–22; Hannah Arendt, Men in dark Times, trans. Clara and Richard Winston (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968).

11 Abba Kovner, “Lassen wir uns nicht wie die Schafe zur Schlachtbank führen!” (appeal of 1.1.1942), quoted from Gedenkorte Europa, entry on Abba Kovner (1918–87), https://www.gedenkorte-europa.eu/de_de/articleabba-kovner-1918-ndash-1987.html

For me, then, art means an attempt to think things differently without forgetting what has happened in the past. Art is a way of conversing with the dead. But without forgetting just how much their absence hurts.

Finally, I would like to add the very personal conviction that this pain should be an essential part of the Archive of the Present. The inconsolability of the living that things have happened the way they have. And a commemoration of all those we have lost along the way through old age and illness, flight or murder. Who cannot be with us. And who took our strength away with them, strength that we only regained when pen touched paper.

And here I come to where any transparent argumentation would have to end: with myself and my way of perceiving the world.

MAX CZOLLEK is an author and lives in Berlin. He is a member of the poetry collective G13 and co-editor of the

The point of the “Archive of the Present” is to explain how we became what we are today.

This has consequences for the issue of what of the present and the past is worth preserving, insofar as the familiar must always be reframed, and what was previously excluded must be scrutinised for its present relevance, and, if necessary, re-included.

magazine Jalta – Positionen zur jüdischen Gegenwart.

The poetry volumes Druckkammern (2012), Jubeljahre (2015), and Grenzwerte (2019) were published by Verlagshaus Berlin, the essays Desintegriert Euch! (2018) and Gegenwartsbewältigung (2020) by Carl Hanser Verlag. Czollek works for the theatre throughout the German-speaking world, most recently the Tage der Jüdisch-Muslimischen Leitkultur (2020). Since June 2021, he has been the academic and artistic director of

There is and has been not only the good and evil Germany that Thomas Mann spoke of, but also a Germany of “the Others” which extended beyond Germany’s borders. This is also related to the issue mentioned earlier

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 16

the Coalition for Pluralistic Public Discourse (CPPD) initiative. Next spring, the exhibition he is curating Revenge: History and Fantasy will open at the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt am Main.

Max Czollek gave this lecture on 20 July 2021 in connection with the series of talks entitled Arbeit am Gedächtnis – Transforming Archives at the Akademie der Künste.

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NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES

BEUYS BLEIBT. BEUYS – A CLOSE UP Rosa von der Schulenburg

“I know that it is inappropriate to narrate a photograph.” Hubertus v. Amelunxen1 quotes this first sentence from Michel Foucault’s La pensée, l’émotion. He goes on to discuss the desire “to begin a narrative precisely where it has found an end in our observation – in photography, which has elevated the becoming of an end to the ­status of an image”. “But one hesitates and is doubtful”, says Amelunxen, “about language being able to catch up with photography retrospectively”, concluding: “Our desire relapses into language.” For members of my guild (especially for readers of images and iconographers), the desire to approach the per se unattainable goal of narrating photography whilst being constantly reminded that words fail to catch up is, and always will be, strong. Nevertheless, read on.

Images pp. 44–49: Michael Ruetz, Dusseldorf, spring 1971

Roll the film: A dark room. A close-up: his gaze concentrated, Beuys lights a cigarette with a match. / He pauses with the cigarette in his hand. / In close-up, his life-size face, eyes nearly closed, the discreetly tragic and sad expression of a Man of Sorrows. “The face lends itself as the place of heroic transfiguration. Like a spell, a natural phenomenon or a so-called blow of fate. One feels overpowered by them: there is something insurmountable about their authority”, states Gisela von Wysocki in Mitteilungen über das menschliche Gesicht (Messages about the human face), which she regards as “attempts to decipher it”.2 In the text accompanying his book on Beuys, the photographer Michael Ruetz writes that he was interested not in “a picture of a saint, but in the most possibly detailed observation”.3 And this is also what he provides with a dramaturgical flair for the sequencing of the photographs in the book.

Back and to the next shot: Beuys from a little closer, in a typical thinker’s pose: chin in hand, eyes half-closed, brow furrowed. Then the camera pulls back and the room comes into view: Beuys elucidates or argues with his hands. / He fixes his gaze attentively on an invisible other. / Close-up of his calm hands with a shortened cigarette, fine smoke curling upwards from the ash tip – signs of concentrated contemplation.

For Ruetz, this is merely the prelude to Beuys’ entry onto the stage for the production Beuys bleibt.

On the next spread, on the left, a deserted, narrow room containing a narrow, roughly crafted workbench bearing materials, scraps of food – and a knife. On the right, a close-up of Beuys’ long-fingered hands. With an elegant gesture, one hand reaches for an espresso cup on a rusticated table. Next to it are the smoker’s paraphernalia – and an axe.

Then into view comes the legendary “Celtic” performance, which took place on 5 April 1971 in the construction site of a civil defence room in Basel. Beuys idiosyncratically quoted Christian rites and scenarios, such as the washing of feet and baptism. Ruetz allows us to identify the Saviour in the throng of his disciples and draws us close to the gleaming shirt-front of Beuys as a luminary who also shows us the way. The performance caused a media rumpus in its day. We see some familiar elements – and the nuances of the scrutiny by Ruetz, who was obviously granted a box seat during the performance. In the baptismal scene, for example, in which Beuys kneels in a metal tub to receive the water pouring out of a metal watering can, the change in his facial expression and those of the spectators becomes discernible in a rapid sequence of shots. Ruetz is just as interested in the equipment of the cameramen and press photographers, such as a microphone dangling into the picture, a ladder, and the reflections of the bright lighting, as he is in the abandoned space after the performance with carelessly scattered props and other remnants, and the small groups of people in conversation on the fringes. In the state of the space, the remaining items and people, Beuys remains visible in his absence.

In more than a dozen photographs in the book, spaces and things loom large. Beuys is not present in person but visible only as an intervening hand or a figure viewed from behind. Beuys’ interiors with their specific furnishings and agglomerations of things and materials tell us no less about the artist’s singularity than his physiognomy and habitus. Much more than this is peculiar to Beuys, for essential to him are also his reflection and shadow.

In addition to the portraits of spatial and material surrogates, the group scenarios and observations of Beuys in his relations with others stand out. Among them is an extensive series of images showing him discussing students’ works at the art academy. Together with Ruetz’s observations in Beuys’ study, they form the nucleus of the book.

All photographs in the book were taken during the early 1970s, when Ruetz, with his camera but without any specific commission, visited Beuys at home and accompanied him to the art academy and elsewhere.

“The act of photography is like going on a hunt in which photographer and camera merge into one indivisible function. This is a hunt for new states of things, situations never seen before, for the improbable, for information. The structure of the act of photography is a quantum one: a doubt made up of points of hesitation and points of decision-making”, writes Vilém Flusser in conclusion in his 1983 essay Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie.4 The phenomenon of Beuys with his habitual appearance and impact has etched itself into the collective pictorial memory. Each picture portrays the person to whom it is devoted and, at the same time, its maker. Ruetz’s view of Beuys contributes subtle nuances – less veneration and more enlightenment – to the enduring collective image of Beuys. And that is by no means little.

1 Hubertus von Amelunxen, Theorie der Fotografie IV. 1980–1995 (Munich: Schirmer, 2000), p. 15.

2 Gisela von Wysocki, Fremde Bühnen. Mitteilungen über das menschliche Gesicht (Hamburg: EVA, 1995), pp. 14 and 18. She does not devote a portrait study to Beuys in this book.

3 Michael Ruetz, “Serendipity”, in Michael Ruetz, Beuys bleibt. Beuys – A Close Up (Paris: éditions facteur cheval, 2021), p. 84.

4 An extract can be found in German in Amelunxen, Theorie der Fotografie IV, pp. 49–64, here p. 53. See also Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans.

Anthony Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 2000).

ROSA VON DER SCHULENBURG is head of the Art Collection of the Akademie der Künste.

Michael Ruetz, Beuys bleibt. Beuys – A Close Up was published by éditions facteur cheval, Paris, in ­January 2021. The photographer donated all of his Beuys negatives to the Academy Archives.

A selection of photographic prints from these are printed in the book. The book is available at the Galerie van der Grinten (art@vandergrintengalerie.com).

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 16

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NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES

FINDS A FEELING OF GREAT FREEDOM AND SOVEREIGNTY ON THE FOUNDING OF DEUTSCHE FILM AKTIENGESELLSCHAFT (DEFA) SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO

Torsten Musial

The slightly yellowing document – worn from much use and now very brittle – confirmed Kurt Maetzig was pursuing important cultural endeavours as editor-in-chief and production manager of the newsreel Der Augenzeuge (The eyewitness). This document allowed him to claim food stamps and to move freely in all four of Berlin’s occupation zones. But strictly speaking, when the pass was issued on 3 April 1946, the issuer, the Deutsche Film AG, did not as yet, exist. It was only officially founded a good six weeks later.

The Soviet occupying powers had already given the order to establish a new German film industry shortly after the war. One of the first to apply for this task to the German Central Administration for National Education was the then 34-year-old Kurt Maetzig, who had previously come into contact with the medium of film only through work in his father’s film-copying business. He and set designers Carl Haacker and Willy Schiller, actors Adolf Fischer and Hans Klering, and businessman and lighting technician Alfred Lindemann set up a working group in November 1945 to prepare for the resumption of film production. This “Filmaktiv” identified the available production facilities and film equipment, forged contacts with other film professionals, and set about building up the new company. Soon, a name was found: Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft, or DEFA for short. Hans Klering designed the logo – two stylised pieces of film reel side by side, one white and one black, each bearing two letters of DEFA in black and white respectively.

First, the Soviet occupying powers ordered the creation of a newsreel with a new artistic and journalistic profile. Maetzig took on this job and had already started filming in mid-January 1946. On 19 February 1946, the first German newsreel in post-war Germany had its premiere – the new film company’s very first production.

Maetzig worked as a director, author, and occasionally as a narrator together with his then-wife Marion Keller on the newsreel, which shortly afterwards was renamed Der Augenzeuge. For the show, they coined the slogan: “You see for yourself – you hear for yourself – judge for yourself!” Maetzig later recalled, “I felt com-

50

pletely free, and I was completely free in that initial phase.

There was a censor there, but he hardly ever exercised his censorship powers. And that gave us a feeling of great freedom and sovereignty.”

Work on DEFA’s first feature film also got under way before the production company was actually founded. In the ruins of Berlin, Wolfgang Staudte began shooting Germany’s first post-war film, Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers are Among Us), on 4 May 1946.

Finally, on 17 May 1946, the new company was officially founded on the premises of the Althoff-Ateliers in Alt Nowawes, Babelsberg. As the Soviet cultural officer Sergei Tulpanov put it, it was to “help restore democracy in Germany, free German minds from fascism and educate them to become socialist citizens”. Tulpanov presented the licence for the “production of films of all categories” to five licensees, among them Maetzig, who was appointed DEFA’s first artistic director.

A novella by Hans Schweikart arrived on Maetzig’s desk only a little later, based on the fate of the actor Joachim Gottschalk and his Jewish wife. The Gottschalks had ­committed suicide together when Mrs Gottschalk was to be deported to Theresienstadt in 1941. The material appealed to Maetzig, who saw parallels with the fate of his own Jewish mother. His parents had officially divorced in 1935 because of the Nuremberg Laws, but they continued to meet secretly. When his mother was threatened with deportation in 1944, she also took her own life.

Maetzig subsequently decided to film the story himself. In the winter of 1946/47, he wrote the screenplay for Ehe im Schatten (Marriage in the Shadows), and on 3 October 1947 the film was premiered concurrently in all four sectors of Berlin. It met with a huge public response.

Within a short time, it was seen by over ten million film­ goers – making it the most successful German film of the period. In 1948, it was one of the first winners of the New Audience Award from the magazine Film Revue, which was sponsored by the publisher Franz Burda; this award was soon to become famous as the “Bambi”.

DEFA existed for over forty years, producing more than 700 feature films, 2,250 documentaries, and 750 animated films. With East Germany officially dissolved, the film studio was sold in 1992, and the new owner removed the abbreviation “DEFA” from the company name, renaming it Studio Babelsberg. Since 1998, the DEFA Foundation has been responsible for the production company’s cinematic heritage, as has the Akademie der Künste with the preservation of the archives of numerous artists who worked for DEFA.

TORSTEN MUSIAL is head of the Film and Media Arts Archives of the Akademie der Künste.

Kurt Maetzig’s employee pass for the DEFA newsreel Der Augenzeuge, 1946

NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES

CORRESPONDENCE AND DIVERGENCE THE WRITTEN CONVERSATION BETWEEN KARL SCHEFFLER AND HANS PURRMANN Bernhard Maaz

PECULIARITIES Karl Scheffler was an almost disturbingly prolific author of books on, in most cases, bygone epochs and phenomena of art history. He “thinks art” not from the artist’s point of view, and certainly not from the perspective of the art writer that he himself was, but from that of the collector.2 This is not astonishing for his generation, which, like none before, witnessed private collectors as the driving force outside royal patronage. His writing, and above all his journal Kunst und Künstler, addressed this very clientele, the buyers. Since these circles were mostly unfamiliar with art but affluent, he couched many of his books in an accessible language that also sought to engage. In addition, to bridge the gap between artists and the public, he often invited artists to contribute pictures and articles.

Among the authors permitted to print both their thoughts and art in Kunst und Künstler was Hans Purrmann. Such collaboration presupposes a rapport, which will have grown from both sides. Liebermann was also in direct contact with Scheffler from 1904 at the latest. In 1906, the painter stated that he “value[s] Mr Scheffler as one of the most competent writers on art”.3 However, a bond was also forged when Liebermann – after the war, the revolution, and the founding of the republic – wrote to the author in 1919: “Not until Expressionism brings forth a genius that sets the rules for art will it be art; until then it will be nonsense.”4 The journal Kunst und Künstler was the mouthpiece of the Secession artists, who demonised the Expressionists, but such a shared publication also fostered community. The publisher Bruno Cassirer was certainly as open-minded as his brother Paul, who had remarked: “My basic idea [...] is not that one generation should be succeeded by the next or that the gap between one generation and the next should be widened, but rather the

WRITING TRADITIONS Writers and painters pursue separate disciplines, yet strive towards each other. This has been the case in the modern age and especially since the culture of letter writing became popular in the 18th century, and paper and postage affordable. The resultant collections of letters gave rise to entire books – one prime example being Goethe’s biographical text arrangement on the life and work of Jakob Philipp Hackert, based on his correspondence.

Correspondence between artists in the 19th century reached a high point with Konrad Fiedler, the Leipzig patron and art theorist, who engaged in weighty exchanges with the painter Hans von Marées and, more importantly, with the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand in theoretical, life-based letters. With the theoretician engaging with the practitioner, they enriched each o­ ther’s perception of the world and art, and chose to hold the conversation by post. For subsequent generations this is a blessing, as they can see right into the foundations of the intellectual edifice and gain insights that they would never have gained otherwise.

And then there was the painter and socialite Max Liebermann, who corresponded with the Hamburg museum reformer Alfred Lichtwark and the Berlin museum director Hugo von Tschudi – both sets of cor-

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respondence have long since been edited – as well as with numerous other art administrators, writers, and critics. Liebermann sought an exchange of views, debate, confirmation, and criticism. And in the lightness of the word that replies and elicits a reply in return, this enormously productive letter writer was certainly one with a special calling. The correspondence between Karl Scheffler and Hans Purrmann also ties in with this conception of the exchange of ideas.

Liebermann’s letters reflect an entire epoch and a wealth of themes, life from the Gründerzeit (period of German industrialisation) to National Socialism and from Impressionism to the postulate of “degenerate art”, but also the history of ideas from the German patriotism of the Wilhelminian era to the Jewish fate of persecution bitterly experienced by this artist in particular.1 While Purrmann’s correspondence appears in manageable editions and allows readers to peruse his dialogues, the complete nine-volume edition of Liebermann’s letters is more of a reference work: each of these forms has its merits, but it is always true that the people, the correspondents, reveal the light and the dark sides of their character; and it is precisely this that encourages a compassionate interpretation.

Top: Monday reception at Curt Glaser’s, March 1929, from left: Bruno Cassirer, Else Cassirer, Dody Scheffler, Karl Scheffler, Hans Purrmann, and Rudolf Grossmann Title page of the journal Kunst und Künstler, vol. 21, no. 1 (1922/23), illustration by Max Slevogt

opposite.”5 Many other contemporaries lacked this unconditional openness and this awareness of the value of continuous organic development. But one must also bear in mind that the period of the Weimar Republic was an epoch of radically accentuated conflicts and struggles, which in the political sphere went hand in hand with murders and in the aesthetic sphere more with assassinations.

This should be mentioned as an indication of the intellectual climate of the time, and one must bear this in mind in order to understand how valuable and revealing the correspondence between Purrmann and ­Scheffler is.

ART STRUGGLES Making concessions was not the order of the day. Scheffler fraternised with the painter Liebermann and served the publisher Cassirer, both of Jewish origin; but where rivalry flared up, hatred and cliché also flourished. About Emil Heilbut, with whom Scheffler vied for the running of Kunst und Künstler, Scheffler wrote in 1933/34 in his memoir: He “became my enemy, although I had behaved with almost anxious propriety; he never forgave me and constantly sought to harm me. Which he succeeded in doing in petty matters, since he was a master of deceit and cunning. With his distinct profile and jet-black hair on his head and chin, he looked like an ancient A ­ ssyrian.”6 Scheffler’s failure to delete this passage in 1946, when the manuscript written a decade and a-half earlier was printed, gives a true indication of the polarised thinking typical of the time, with ideological tendencies and personal animosities. The historian must accept and mention this too and not ignore it. Rather than diminishing the abundance of the individual’s accomplishments, such a spiteful remark enriches the spectrum: letters are valuable for this very purpose. But that was not all, Scheffler supported Max Tau, the former editor of the Bruno

Cassirer publishing house, on his emigration in November 1938 with a letter of recommendation, when such actions were no longer without risk.7

CONTRADICTIONS Scheffler, like Purrmann, lived according to a bourgeois aesthetic concept that shielded itself and, from 1933 onwards, also had to urgently distance itself from the dictates of banality. Scheffler’s ability to exclude the works of Paul Klee from his perceptual horizon as “little more than froth”8 may be puzzling from today’s point of view. However, schooled in Impressionism, Scheffler’s position denied him access to the younger generation.

He was all the more eager to seek contact with Hans Purrmann and others; he attentively observed Purrmann’s progress and maturation as an artist and followed his period abroad in quasi-exile with benevolence and patience. Purrmann had not only developed great creative powers, but also a wisdom in adapting to the adversities of the times in such a way that he was able to intelligently and safely practise and sell his art.

Even after the Second World War, the critical, literary, and polemical Scheffler sought confrontation, now with abstract painting, as he professed on all occasions, be it towards Purrmann (Letter No. 38) 9 or Max ­Schwimmer:10 the campaigner and writer of secessionist modernism had become retrograde and backward-looking; this he shared with many other writers on art. Cassirer had cultivated reservations about Henri Matisse. And the Berlin general director Wilhelm von Bode, who was at times close to Max Liebermann, also drew a clear line when it came to modernism, so that his younger colleague at the Nationalgalerie, Hugo von Tschudi, not only went unprotected into a futile battle with the French Impressionists against the judgement of

Kaiser Wilhelm II, but also made no attempt to acquire the paintings of Vincent van Gogh for Berlin. They were all art historians, museum people, critics, dealers – and as such were chained to judgement and the market. Bode even called Cubism an eternal disgrace.11 Art, on the other hand, has always had the last word, no matter how important an accompanying edition of letters and – in general – an understanding of the personalities and circumstances of their thoughts and actions may be.

1 Ernst Braun, ed., Max Liebermann. Briefe, vols 1–9 (BadenBaden: DWV, 2011–21).

2 Karl Scheffler, Das Phänomen der Kunst. Grundsätzliche Betrachtungen zum 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: Paul List Verlag, 1952), p. 258.

3 Ernst Braun, “Max Liebermanns Briefe an Karl Scheffler”, in Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen, vol. 44 (2002), pp. 223– 49, here p. 231.

4 Ibid., p. 239.

5 Eva Caspers, Paul Cassirer und die Pan-Presse. Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Buchillustration und Graphik im 20. Jahr­ hundert (Frankfurt am Main: Buchhändler-Vereinigung, 1989), p. 21.

6 Karl Scheffler, Die fetten und die mageren Jahre (Leipzig: Paul List Verlag, 1946), p. 181.

7 “Ernst Braun, Max Tau und Karl Scheffler in ihren Briefen und Erinnerungen”, in Detlev Haberland, ed., “Ein sym­ bolisches Leben”. Beiträge anlässlich des 100. Geburtsta­ ges von Max Tau (1897–1976) (Heidelberg: Darmstadt, 2000), pp. 137–64, here p. 139 f.

8 Ursula Feist and Günter Feist, eds, Kunst und Künstler. Aus 32 Jahrgängen einer deutschen Kunstzeitschrift (Berlin: Henschelverlag Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1971), p. 301.

9 Printed in the forthcoming volume commissioned by the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and the joint heirs of Dr Robert Purrmann, Munich. Felix Billeter, Julie Kennedy, and Anke Matelowski, eds, Künstler und Kritiker.

Hans Purrmann und Karl Scheffler in Briefen 1920–1951 ­( Berlin: Deutscher Kunstbuchverlag, 2021).

10 Karl Scheffler to Max Schwimmer, 31 Dec. 1947. Printed in Ernst Braun, Briefe zwischen Karl Scheffler und Max Schwimmer. 1942–1949, Marginalien 122 (1991), pp. 36–60, here p. 57.

11

Bernhard Maaz, “Das konservative Ideal – Bodes Verhältnis zur Skulptur seiner Zeit”, in Angelika Wesenberg et al., eds, Wilhelm von Bode als Zeitgenosse der Kunst. Zum 150. Geburtstag (exh. cat. Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 1995), pp. 135–46, here p. 140.

BERNHARD MAAZ has been director general of the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen since 2015.

Previously, he was director of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister and the Kupferstichkabinett of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.

This is an abridged version of the essay in the forthcoming volume commissioned by the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and the joint heirs of Dr Robert Purrmann, Munich. Edited by Felix ­Billeter, Julie Kennedy, and Anke Matelowski, Künstler und Kritiker. Hans Purrmann und Karl Scheffler in Briefen 1920–1951 will be published

by Deutscher Kunstbuchverlag, Berlin, in October 2021.

Hans Purrmann: Monte Pincio in Rom, 1926, oil on canvas, 66 × 82 cm

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 16

The launch will take place on 14 October 2021 at the Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz.

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325 YEARS OF THE AKADEMIE DER KÜNSTE

FOUNDED NOT ONLY FOR THE PRACTICE

BUT ALSO FOR THE APPRECIATION OF ART

View of the Marstall, c. 1696, unknown artist (Foto-AdK-O 13)

THE FOUNDING OF THE BERLINER KUNSTAKADEMIE (BERLIN ART ACADEMY) IN 1696

Ulrike Möhlenbeck The Akademie der Mahl-, Bild- und Baukunst (Academy of the Art of Painting, Pictorial Art and Architecture) was opened on 11 July 1696 by Elector Frederick III, later King Frederick I. After the academies in Paris and Rome, the Berlin institution was the third of its kind ever in Europe and the first state academy of art in the German-speaking world. During Berlin’s transformation into a residential city, Frederick III entrusted his minister of state, ­Eberhard von Danckelmann, with the establishment of the Academy based on the French model. The aspiration was to create an academy of art that was “founded not only for the practice, but also for the appreciation of art”; “One should study here not a craft, but the secrets of the arts.”

The Academy was to devote itself to three tasks: As a society of members, it united the best artists on a s­ ingle site, who exchanged their ideas on the art of ­painting

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and sculpture in regular academic meetings and worked collegially on the perfection of their art. As an educa­ tional institution, it taught the next generation of artists.

The members gave lessons in preparatory classes and in advanced subjects such as drawing from models, architecture, perspective, geometry, and anatomy. As a committee of artists, the Academy advised the king on matters of art, such as on the design of Berlin’s City Palace, for example.

In 1696, the Academy comprised five members, including its first director, the painter Joseph Werner (1637–1710) from Bern, the Dutch Baroque painter Augustin Terwesten (1649–1711), and the sculptor and architect Andreas Schlüter (c. 1660–1714), Berlin’s most important artist of his time. The act of foundation on 11 July, the Elector’s 39th birthday, was preceded by a two-year trial period. Thus, the founding statute was drafted as early as 1696; it still exists today in the Historical Archives of the Akademie der Künste and is also the oldest document on the history of the Academy.

The Academy was assigned the new Marstall in Doro­ theenstadt as its seat. To create space there, the south wing – overlooking the avenue Unter den Linden – was given an upper floor to the plans of the architect and master builder Johann Arnold von Nehring. Six halls were designated as teaching rooms, meeting venues, and

e­ xhibition space for the Academy. Since the basic financial resources were provided by an Academy fund, the institution was able to establish itself in the long term and participate in the upsurge of artistic and intellectual life in Berlin around 1700.

Today’s Akademie der Künste can look back on an eventful 325-year history. Then as now, the focus has always been on the shared task of promoting the arts.

ULRIKE MÖHLENBECK is head of the Historical Archives of the Akademie der Künste.

On the occasion of its 325th anniversary, the Akademie der Künste presents snapshots from its history in video clips – the calendar sheets – published on the Academy’s website and on its social media channels. See more at www.adk.de/ kalenderblaetter

Academy Charter drawn up by Electoral Decree According to which His Electoral Majesty wishes to have the Academy established.

I. All those who are appointed to this Academy or who declare themselves shall be recorded with their names and noted on a written tablet, each with his rank, and such tablet shall also be hung up in the Academy.

II. Anyone who registers with the Academy shall submit an example of his work and leave it with the Academy, according to which it can be judged in which Class such a person belongs and for what kind of Office he is fit.

III. Whichever Scholar wishes to join the Academy must apply to the Director of the Academy, accompanied by a Patron who has recommended him to the Academy and who gives assurance of the Scholar’s good conduct, and for this receive the Letter of Acceptance, which is signed by the Director, Rector in Office, and Secretary and confirmed with the small Academy seal; moreover, every person who is accepted shall be bound by the Academic Statutes and Regulations and shall take a vow thereon, but in the event of transgression he shall expect the fitting punishment.

IV. Every well-ordered Academy shall have a Director, Superior, or Overseer, of the Academic Arts Teachings, Statutes, and Rules, who shall at the same time be the Censor who metes out punishment on transgressors and shall judge their work and name the reward or prize for it. At all monthly meetings, when one Rector abdicates his office and another assumes his, he shall attend and take leave of the abdicating Rector, but shall be invited by the Academy and appointed by the Chamberlain; he may arrange extra lessons as he sees fit and as occasion may require, and the Academicians and other art lovers may be called to attend, whereupon the [Page 2] Academy members shall be bound to appear.

Draft of the Academy statute, p. 1, 1696 (PrAdK 1434)

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FREUNDESKREIS

THE RESTITUTION OF LOOTED ART LOOKING BACK ON THIRTY YEARS OF EXPERIENCE Peter Raue

It is remarkable – and one of many saddening realisations – how post-war society in the Federal Republic of Germany has dealt with the injustices inflicted by the National Socialists, particularly on their Jewish fellow citizens. For decades, even the most reputable art dealers and auction houses traded in Jewish-owned artworks, paintings and sculptures, and museums acquired “tainted” works without the parties involved investigating the issue of their provenance. It was not until 1998, fifty-three years after the Second World War, that a turning point was reached with a non-binding agree­ment under international law: The Washington Principles laid the foundation for systematic provenance research to locate and restitute cultural property looted primarily from Jewish citizens.

THE WASHINGTON PRINCIPLES Under international law, this agreement is a voluntary commitment by all states signatory to the declaration, including of course the Federal Republic of Germany, to identify works “confiscated” (!) during the National Socialist era as “looted art”, to locate their pre-war owners and come to a “just and fair solution” with them.

In Germany, this voluntary commitment finds its expression in the Statement of the Federal Government, the Länder and the national associations of local authori­ ties on the tracing and return of Nazi-confiscated art, especially Jewish property (the Common Statement); it is followed by the Guidelines on implementing the claims for restitution (most recently from 2019). This document, which is also “intended as legally non-binding guidance to the implementation of the Common Statement”, provides an assessment procedure, according to

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Franz Marc, The Foxes, 1913, oil on canvas Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf

which the following questions are to be asked: Was the applicant persecuted by National Socialist acts of violence on the grounds of “race, creed or ideology”?

Did [...] the loss of property occur through forced sale, expropriation or in any other way?

In this case, the presumption that the loss of the artwork is due to persecution can only be rebutted if the seller received appropriate proceeds from their sale and could freely dispose of them. This arrangement is more stringent for sales after 15 September 1935. From this point on – according to the Guidelines – an investigation must show whether “the legal transaction [...] would also have been concluded without National Socialist rule”. The Guidelines explicitly point out that – following The Washington Principles – in the event of a restitution claim, a “just and fair solution” is to be sought, which “can only be achieved together with the rightful

owners”. Repurchase, permanent loan, and exchange are also possible alternatives to restitution. If the parties – the parties claiming restitution and the owners of the reclaimed works of art – cannot reach an agreement, they can appeal to the Coordination Office for the Loss of Cultural Assets, which is an Advisory Commission on the return of cultural property seized as a result of Nazi persecution. Both sides must agree before an appeal to the Advisory Commission can be made, and the commission can only make recommendations; that is, the Advisory Commission has no decision-making authority.

A fact that is often overlooked in the discussion should be emphasised: The Washington Principles and the associated national provisions are addressed exclusively to the public authorities (Federal Government, Länder, and local authorities). Under The Washington Principles, these bodies alone are obliged to provide restitution and to seek a just and fair solution.

THE WASHINGTON PRINCIPLES AND PRIVATE PROPERTY Although (only) the public sector is bound by the obligations of The Washington Principles, the truly dramatic field of application concerns works that are privately owned. We lawyers speak of the “normative force of the factual”: although there are no provisions on this, The Washington Principles de facto exclude trade in artworks that are privately owned and were once seized from their Jewish owners.

No reputable art dealer today will offer a painting for sale or purchase one; no trustworthy auction house (the world over!) will hold an auction; and no museum will even accept a donation of a work where there is a suspicion (!) that the painting was wrested from its former Jewish owners under Nazi rule. It makes no difference here whether the artworks were put up for sale and sold at so-called Jewish auctions (the proceeds of which – if received at all – the Jewish owners generally had to spend on Reichsfluchtsteuer, the “Reich fugitive tax”); or the loss was due to the fact that the Jewish owners were forced to (or able to) flee the country at short notice, leaving behind their belongings, including their artworks; or – as is so often the case – the artworks were confiscated in Nazi raids.

However, the effect of The Washington Principles on private property is reinforced in a barely foreseeable and highly problematic way by the Lost Art Database of the German Lost Art Foundation. When a search report is submitted, a serious consistency check is not even carried out by the foundation (as this would overstretch its resources). Once an artwork is entered into the database, the work is usually barred from trade. Often, the artworks registered there have been in the possession of buyers (and their heirs) for decades who, when acquiring the artworks, had no reason to suspect nor had any indication that these artworks might have been seized from Jewish owners due to the discriminatory action of the National Socialists. The deletion of a (false) entry from this database is almost impossible to achieve in practice!

that in many cases a place initially considered safe was later occupied and controlled by the National Socialists, and that the persecution of Jewish citizens in foreign countries once considered safe was common practice in those places as much as it was in Germany. Here, therefore, it is widely agreed that the fact that a sale took place outside the German Reich does not rule out the possibility of the property being seized as a result of Nazi persecution. For example, Jews who fled to Italy (or who were resident there) were initially not persecuted even under Mussolini’s rule. But this changed radically with the so-called leggi razziali (racial laws) from 1938 onwards.

Under these laws, Jews in Italy were forbidden, among other things, to trade in art. From 1940 – when Italy entered the war – foreign and Italian Jews were interned in around fifty camps and, from 1942, obliged to perform forced labour. In this situation, the loss of artworks (through sale) can often entail an obligation of restitution, even though it is “fugitive property”.

Until now, the largely shared understanding of all those involved in restitution issues has been that works of art sold by Jewish owners exiled abroad – in South America, the US, especially in New York (and generally done in order to secure a living), were not subject to “persecution-related seizure” by the National Socialists.

And this is where a recommendation of the Advisory

Commission has recently caused a commotion and considerable – also public – controversy. The recommendation of the Advisory Commission concerned dates from 10 February 2021.

THE FOXES AND THE ADVISORY COMMISSION A picture painted in 1913 by Franz Marc entitled The Foxes belonged to the collection of the Museum Kunst­ palast in Düsseldorf from 1962 – a gift from Helmut Horten, the great department store owner (and shameless profiteer of the “Aryanised department stores”). The former owner of this work, Kurt Grawi, a Jew undeniably persecuted and expropriated by the National Socialists, who was imprisoned in a concentration camp for several weeks in connection with the so-called Reichspogrom­ nacht, was able to flee to Santiago de Chile at the end of 1939, where he died in 1944. In order to secure his livelihood in Santiago at least to some extent, Grawi managed to sell The Foxes in New York through an art dealer in 1940. There is no evidence to suggest that Grawi did not receive the proceeds of sale – which corresponded to the value of the painting at the time. Nevertheless,

FROM LOOTED ART TO FUGITIVE PROPERTY While we find ourselves on more or less safe ground when it comes to restitution claims for “looted art”, the debate on how to deal with “fugitive property” has increased truly dramatically in recent years.

The term “looted art” is generally understood to refer to the involuntary dispossession of property in the so-called German Reich. “Fugitive property”, on the other hand, is understood to mean works that (though not confiscated, forcibly sold, or seized directly by the state) were sold abroad by Jewish owners who had been expelled from Germany. Whether “fugitive property” should also be amenable to restitution claims has not really been decided to this day. The answer is also complicated: According to the prevailing opinion, artworks that were initially taken to a country of exile considered safe (e.g.

France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy) and sold there are not to be regarded as “fugitive property” amenable to restitution. Admittedly, it is important to bear in mind

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Fritz Erler, Schwarzer Pierrot, 1908, oil on canvas Akademie der Künste, Art Collection It was only by inspecting the reverse and researching the provenance that Erler’s original painting on canvas of a fencer, previously thought to be lost, was rediscovered. The Pierrot was displayed in the Moderne Galerie of the German-Jewish art dealer Heinrich Thannhauser in Munich in 1910. The Thannhauser family was forced to flee from the National Socialists, and the art they left behind was seized. How long the Pierrot was in the possession of the Moderne Galerie has not yet been established.

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when the Advisory Commission advises the City of Düssel­dorf to restitute this work to Grawi’s heirs, this sets a massive new precedent! The Commission recognises (quite correctly) that Grawi’s life was no longer in danger in Santiago, but that the sale of the painting was caused by the previous “virtually complete depletion of his assets”. Therefore, according to the Commission, it is a case of “expropriation in connection with Nazi persecution”, “although the sale was completed outside the sphere of Nazi influence”.

This decision has led to a lively public debate, notably in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). Patrick Bahners (on 15 April 2021) first criticises the decision under the headline “So Now Almost Everything is Looted Art” and rightly recognises that this is an “implicit change in the decision-making practice” of the Advisory Commission, since the sale was undoubtedly not a forced sale (but perhaps a “sale of necessity”). This is all the more astonishing – according to Bahners – as the Commission itself acknowledges that its decision is not covered by the stipulations of the Guidelines.

A little later, the former presiding judge at the Berlin Administrative Court, Friedrich Kiechle, wrote in the FAZ (on 22 April 2021): “By restituting The Foxes, Düsseldorf’s City Council would risk criminal prosecution” (because there was no legal basis for the loss of this work worth millions).

For the first time since the Commission came into being, that is, for the first time in about thirty years, the Chairman of the Commission, the former President of the Federal Constitutional Court Hans Jürgen Papier, also justifies the Commission’s recommendation in the FAZ (on 7 May 2021) with the (to me unconvincing) claim that it is consistent with earlier recommendations made by the Commission. At the heart of Papier’s attempt at justification is the sentence: “The only asset that [Grawi] was able to save was Franz Marc’s ‘The Foxes’ [...] a work he now sold [...] because he hoped it would provide him with the necessary funds for a new start.”

Papier concludes his justification for the decision passed by six votes to three with the sentence that in the Commission’s view this sale was not a voluntary decision, but “a sale under the immediate pressure of persecution”.

If this recommendation of the Commission is the yardstick for future restitution recommendations, then practically any legal transaction involving works of art by Jewish emigrants, even in safe foreign countries from 1935 to 1945, is a case calling for restitution under The Washington Principles. A Jewish emigrant succeeding in taking pictures with him when he emigrated from

Germany (commenting almost whimsically: “at that time we lived from wall to mouth”) is not seen by the Advisory Commission as one of the many terrible consequences of the National Socialist persecution of the Jews, but as the state’s confiscation of property (belonging to Grawi). However, this cannot be regarded as a case of confiscation, which according to The Washington Principles is a prerequisite for the obligation to restitute.

When one considers that the decision of the Advisory Commission not only binds the public authorities, but also affects the private owners of such works of art, the recommendation does genuinely set a highly significant new precedent.

The widely held belief that restitution claims will be settled soon after adoption of The Washington Principles is mistaken. The proceedings are steadily increasing in number and will soon – if the Commission sticks to its concept of the “sale of necessity” – extend to all sales (of artworks!, but not jewellery, for example) by Jewish emigrants. This is not unproblematic. The debate will continue.

PETER RAUE is a lawyer in Berlin, specialising in the field of art and copyright law and often dealing with restitution issues. Raue is honorary professor for copyright law at the Freie Universität in Berlin and a founding member of the Society of Friends of the Akademie der Künste.

Provenance Research

Max Kaus, Havel-Ziehbrücke in der Mark, 1931, oil on canvas Akademie der Künste, Art Collection The painting was confiscated from the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen (Bavarian State Painting Collections) in Munich in August 1937 as part of the “Degenerate Art” campaign. Via the estate of Bernhard A. Böhmer, it came into the possession of Friedrich Schult in Güstrow. Today it belongs to the Art Collection of the Akademie der Künste.

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From 2017 to 2021, experts of the Art Collection of the Akademie der Künste systematically investigated the provenance of 223 paintings and 170 sculptures held in the collection and exe­ cuted before 1945 as part of a research project funded by the German Lost Art Foundation.

During the project, no artwork, especially from Jewish ownership, was identified to have been seized as a result of Nazi persecution. In an exhibition taking place from October 2022 to January 2023, in addition to the project findings, the experts will reveal further stories behind selected works of art, cultural objects, and archive records and present the various areas of provenance research (https://digital.adk.de/ provenienzforschung/).

CREDITS

COLOPHON

pp. 4–11 photos Mila Teshaieva/ OSTKREUZ | pp. 13–25 photos Matej ­B ejenaru | p. 28 © David Ostrowski, Courtesy Sprüth Magers; p. 29 © Kunsthalle Bern; p. 30 © Gregor Schneider/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021; p. 31 © Rutherford Chang | p. 32 © PollockKrasner Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021 | pp. 34–38 © Mauro Fiorese, Courtesy: Galleria Gaburro, Verona – Milano; pp. 44–49 photos Michael Ruetz | p. 51 Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Kurt ­M aetzig Archive, no. 1872 | p. 52 (top) photo Käte Witkower, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Karl Scheffler Archive, no. 687/31; p. 53 privately owned © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021 | p. 54 Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Foto-­ AdK-O, no. 13; p. 55 Akademie der Künste, Berlin, PrAdK, no. 1434 | p. 56 Kunst­p alast – ARTOTHEK; p. 57 Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Art Collection,fol. no. MA 221; p. 58 Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Art Collection, fol. no. MA 1 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021

Journal der Künste, Edition 16, English issue Berlin, September 2021 Print run: 800

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