Magazine #17 of the Federal Cultural Foundation / Kulturstiftung des Bundes

texts by

spring / summer 2011

das magazin der kulturstiftung des bundes

jutta brückner ute frevert assaf gavron friedrich w. graf margot käßmann noémi kiss thomas lehr sibylle lewitscharoff dorota masłowska jürgen mlynek volker mosbrugger herfried münkler armin nassehi aleks scholz raoul schrott michel serres andrzej stasiuk andreas weber harald welzer

Harvest 2010 Seed 95 ¤ / ha

Fertilizer 76 ¤ / ha

Pest control 45 ¤ / ha Total expenses: 586 ¤

Cost of labour 250 ¤ / ha

Property expenses 120 ¤ / ha

Yield : 13 56 dt / ha × 34 ¤ / dt = 459 ¤ / ha

No matter whether we’re talking climate change, demographic trends, cultural education, integration, religious tolerance or so cial equity a change in awareness and more sustainability in thinking and action are needed now more than ever before. What do we need for the future? What do we want? What can we live without? What can we do to sustain survival on our planet and how can we ensure that it remains a place worth living in?

The Federal Cultural Foundation is addressing these questions in a multifaceted programme titled Über Lebenskunst [www.ueber-lebenskunst.org]. For those familiar with the sub tleties of the German language, the title is a play on words that can either mean »About the Art of Living« or »The Art of Survival«. And this ambiguity is intended. In view of the crises unfolding around the world, the individual’s art of living, based on the ancient concept of ars vivendi, is quickly transforming into a globally-minded art of surviv al which recognizes the necessity of making vitally important provisions for coming generations.

From 17 to 21 August 2011, Über Lebenskunst will hold a theme-based festival in cooperation with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, at which thousands of visitors are expected. Our preparations for the festival began last year. It aims to exam

ine the art of living from every angle, down to the smallest detail, starting with the most elementary aspects such as eating and sleeping. For example, myvillages.org, a group of female artists, has set up a real food pantry, with which they hope to feed the many visitors at the festival over several days.

Pantries have become somewhat antiquated in this age of frozen foods and discount supermarkets that offer industrially proc essed foodstuffs imported from around the world. We believe there’s an alternative. This is not only about feeding people and attempting to produce and process grain for bread, linseed for cooking oil and milk for cheese in an energy-efficient manner on location. The pantry project is also about the procedures and history of collecting, conserving and producing food, as well as forms of trade and exchange. The concept of food storage in this consumption-based, throwaway society has a cultural dimen sion. To actually implement it, though, planning foresight and economical logistics are required .

This real-world food pantry inspired our wish to create an in tellectual pantry. What do we need for tomorrow? What kind of knowledge do we want to refer back to in the future? We decided to dedicate this issue of our magazine to the art of living/ survival. We asked a number of well-known cultural and scien

tific figures to tell us what ideas they would store inside their in tellectual pantry. We received numerous responses back — some of which were quite personal — and were impressed at their di versity. We’ve presented these stories, essays and reflections in such a way that they resemble various items in a pantry where the ham hangs among the sausages, the dried pepperoncini lies next to the onions and the fruit preserves are placed on the shelf next to the jars of pickles. Our intellectual pantry does differ from normal pantries in an important way its products have no expiration date.

The three longer articles focus not so much on the art of living but rather on the adversity and happy coincidence of survival. The Austrian writer Raoul Schrott ventures forth in the dramatic search for the first geological records pertaining to the birth of our planet. The French philosopher Michel Serres asks how our planet can continue to sustain life and builds conceptual life boats. The filmmaker Jutta Brückner has written a touching arti cle about her mother, whose dementia has allowed her to escape to a world of her own.

pantry harald welzer moral inventory 6 ute frevert shared happiness 6 andreas weber people have, plants are 7 sibylle lewitscharoff hoarding 8 margot käßmann teaching them to read 8 assaf gavron time capsule 9 armin nassehi stop predicting! 9 andrzej stasiuk what if… 10 herfried münkler an [almost] impossible art 10 thomas lehr the dream of the golden nut 11 friedrich wilhelm graf getting wise 12 jürgen mlynek diagnosis and therapy 12 aleks scholz the inner idiot 13 volker mosbrugger neither god, nor devil 14 noémi kiss mother in the pantry 14 dorota masłowska slow thinking 15 michel serres everyone into the lifeboats! 17 raoul schrott the first earth 23 jutta brückner in the realm of spirits 29 news 32 new projects 34 committees + imprint 38

The drawings, photos, aquarelles and text collages in this issue were made by the artist Antje Schiffers . Born in Heiligen dorf in Lower Saxony in 1967, she co-founded the artists’ group myvillages.org in 2003 together with Kathrin Böhm und Wapke Feen stra. The project focuses on villages as places of cultural production. Antje Schiffers, who now lives in Berlin, was a flower illustrator in Mexico, a traveling painter in Italy, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, a commercial artist for the tyre industry, and ambassador and correspondent for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Leipzig. From 2007 to 2009 she collaborated with Thomas Sprenger on the project I like being a farmer and want to stay one , which the Federal Cultural Foundation funded through the »Future of Labour« programme. The idea of an Über Lebenskunst pantry was inspired by myvillages.org and its involvement in agriculture, local production and the International Village Store . Several il lustrations printed here were made on a trip Schiffers took to Chile for several weeks last autumn.

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

Klein Steimke, Lower Saxony,

moral inventory. a stretching exercise. by harald welzer

At the beginning of the 18th century, Daniel Defoe was traveling through the region of Newcastle, the most important coal pro ducing area of England at the time. He was awestruck by the »prodigious heaps, I might say Mountains of Coal, which are dug up at every Pit, and how many such Pits there are! It astonishes us and we wonder where the People might live, who consume it.«1

In the meantime, we know quite well who consumed those pro digious amounts of fossil fuels which were extracted from the earth in Newcastle first the inhabitants of England, then Ger many, North America, and after a considerable delay, all of Eu rope and many other parts of the world. Unfortunately, the coal is not yet exhausted. The fact that there’s plenty left is rather trag ic, as many countries and companies continue investing in coal power in the medium term, despite its well-documented, devas tating impact on the global climate.

But I do not mean to make this the primary focus of my ›moral‹ pantry. Rather, I wish to return to Defoe’s amazement. At that moment, this extremely imaginative man who wrote Robin son Crusoe , who through his novels and later film adapta tions demonstrated the blessings of a rationally organized civilization to generations of Western children, found himself una ble to believe his eyes. He couldn’t fathom what was taking shape before him namely the build-up to the Industrial Revolution which would radically and permanently change the face of Eng land, Europe and eventually the entire planet. And how could he have? No one could have imagined at that time that the indus trial use of coal as a fossil fuel would revolutionize the energy demands of society and give rise to all those visions of progress, growth and endlessness which economists, politicians and man agers continue to pay homage to even today.

It is even less likely that anyone could have predicted that this vision of endlessness would result in such plundering and pollu tion of our planet and to such an extent that two hundred years later, it would find itself on the brink of collapse. No, I cor rect myself it’s not the planet on the brink of collapse, but the

human societies that populate it. Many of them are not even aware that they are sorting themselves up into the winners and losers of climate change. Neither Germany nor the current environmental »bad-guy«, China, for example, will resemble what they think they will look like in 2030. In fact, they find themsel ves in the exact situation as Daniel Defoe did two centuries ago. They lack what Günter Anders coined moral imagination the ability to visualize what one is capable of producing. But this moral imagination absolutely belongs in every pantry. Such pantries are stocked in anticipation of a future situation. For example, storing the summer’s harvest so that one can eat in the winter, or saving up in years of plenty to survive through bad times. Obviously the inhabitants of the fossilistic world have lost touch with the concept of seasonal planting and consumption, or that of »bad times«. Most people think they only happen in soap operas, and besides, you can get anything anytime at Lidl, and occasionally at denn’s.

In any case, it appears that neither the average consumer nor LO HAS realizes that their world of consumption is based on three conditions first, that energy prices remain as low (and skewed) as they are now; second, that resources remain constant; and third, that nothing dramatic happens, e.g. the oceans don’t reach the »tipping point« or a huge metropolitan city isn’t wiped out by an extreme weather phenomenon. If just one of these conditions is not met, the times when you can get anything anytime will be over. And when the Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability ( LOHAS 1.0 ) becomes the Lifestyle of Health and Survival ( LOHAS 2.0 ), let’s see who is better off the farmer from Africa or the banker from Frankfurt.

It turns out that those who are accustomed to living with the bare minimum are much better at managing a pantry than those who haven’t yet encountered the possibility of scarcity. In a way, they are better at visualizing the future than those who are more afflu ent, because they have always had to calculate whether they’d have enough to survive into the next week or month. This is the existential aspect of moral imagination; it will take much more effort to incorporate moral imagination into the highly-cultivat ed, abstract circumstances of life and economy in which we live. According to Günter Anders, »the determining task of today consists in developing moral imagination, that is in the attempt to bridge this ›gap‹, to adjust the capacity and elasticity of our im agination and our feeling to the dimensions of our products and to the unpredictable excess of that which we may perpetrate; bringing, to the same level of us producers, our faculties of imagination and feeling.«2

If we do not go to the trouble of bridging this Promethean gap that exists between the destructive potential of our lifestyle and our lack of imaginative ability, we will not be able to fathom what is happening before our eyes and our failure would certainly be more harmful and less innocent than in Defoe’s case. We do know, but we are so firmly situated in our comfort zone that any movement not only seems bothersome to us, but absolutely im possible. Setting up a pantry would certainly represent a shift away from the comfort zone. We would only regard such a pantry as vital if we recognized that reality is actually a mechanism of illu sion, manufactured with enormous amounts of resources. Indeed, this pantry both symbolic and real is the counter-concept to the practices of a consumer society which is blind to the pend ing apocalypse, in which approximately 40 percent of all food is not consumed, but rather discarded, and many things are pur chased, but never used. It’s the exact opposite of stocking up it’s preemptive disposal, the transformation of resources into trash. When things get this far, society loses its sense for survival and with it, all its pre-consumerist capacity for responsibility, fairness and mindfulness. Yet without these skills, it becomes difficult to cope outside the comfort zone. So we had better start getting used to another way of life. Günter Anders recommends doing »moral stretching exercises«, »going beyond one’s limits of imagination and feeling«. In this way, we could prepare ourselves for the era after peak oil, peak soil, peak everything. Or better yet altogether avoid the end of the anything anytime era, and start making provi sions for a life with a future.

Harald Welzer teaches Social Psychology at the University of St. Gal len and is the director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Memory Research at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen. Together with Christian Gudehus and Ariane Eichenberg, he edited the book Erinnerung und Gedächtnis. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch [Re membering and Memory. An Interdisciplinary Handbook], published by the J. B. Metzler Verlag (Stuttgart) in 2010. In 2008, he wrote Klimakriege. Wofür im 21. Jahrhundert getötet wird [Climate Wars. What People Will Kill for in the 21st Century], Fischer Verlag (Frankfurt). Welzer and Sönke Neitzel recently collaborated as editors on Soldaten. Protokolle vom Kämpfen, Töten und Sterben [Soldiers. Reports on Fighting, Killing and Dying], published by the S. Fischer Verlag (Frankfurt) in April 2011

1 As quoted by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Geschich te der Eisenbahnreise. Zur Industri alisierung von Raum und Zeit im 19. Jahrhundert . Frankfurt/M.: Fischer 2004, p. 9 2 Günter Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. vol. 1. Munich: Beck 1979, p. 273

shared happiness by ute frevert

Emotional economy, as I call it, plays an integral role in the art of living and survival. By this, I’m not thinking of markets, limited re sources, supply or demand. Rather, I have the ancient Greek word oikos in mind a complex socio-ethical construct with tasks that far ex ceed the scope of production and distribution of goods. Francis Hutcheson referred to this concept in 1728 when he reflected on the disor derly nature of passions caused by custom, edu cation and company. In his treatise, he argues that it is essential that »just Ballance and Oecono my« exercise control over the passions, as this would »constitute the most happy State of each Person, and promote the greatest Good in the whole«.

We could learn much from Hutcheson and his successors. Of course, there have always been those who gladly give their two-cents worth re garding how best to deal with human affections and passions. There have been times when the fear of fiery emotions was fanned, when voices lavished praise on the happy medium, on a sound balance between hot and cold, passion and tem perance. Although the moral philosophers of the 18th century joined this bandwagon, they al so attempted to relate Ballance and Oeconomy to the fundamental forms of social communica tion. What emotional economy did a modern society need, like that which was developing on the British Isles at the time? What passions were good or bad for a capitalistic economic system, the theory of which Adam Smith outlined in 1776? Egotism and selfishness were obviously insufficient (although they were important and deserved to be defended against religious or po litically motivated attacks).

Such questions and considerations sound surprisingly contemporary. Even today we continue to put much thought into how the egotism of an individual can be reconciled with the common weal. The excessive greed of many investment

bankers and the unrestrained ambition of some scientists stand accused. Praise is heaped, on the other hand, on the beneficence and selflessness of philanthropic activists; along with Mother Theresa, Doctors Without Borders have become iconic for modern empathy. The wide variety of humanitarian interventions, beginning with the campaign against slavery in the late 18th century, maintain some of the highest operational budg ets in the world. Each year, such organizations turn over several billion euros, and the amount is increasing.

And so it seems that sympathy, to which both David Hume and Adam Smith refer, has be come a globally active force. Both philosophers contrast self-love with the equally natural and necessary emotion of sympathy. According to their line of argumentation, modern societies strongly rely on their citizens acting not only in self-interest, but also with sympathy toward oth ers. Smith describes this as fellow-feeling, by which he means the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes and feel what they feel. He asserts that all human beings are born with the ability to sym pathize, and recent neuroscientific experiments and studies support this claim.

Yet just because the expression of sympathy is natural and possible does not mean that it actually happens. For almost three hundred years, scien tists and philosophers have debated which conditions are necessary for evoking Smith’s fellow-feel ing (which we call ›empathy‹ nowadays). It most always involves feeling someone else’s suffering. Whether it’s possible to feel sympathy with our neighbour or someone living halfway around the world, whether it results from the innocence of the sufferer, and whether it helps the sufferer or lends power to the sympathizer are all questions discussed and debated in myriads of books, talk shows and TV documentaries. But few people have reflected on the ability to sympathize with another’s joy. Smith also em phasized the ability and necessity to sympathize with the happiness of others. This normally happens anyway in personal relationships among friends and family. We feel happiness at seeing our children and parents happy. We experience the joy of our friends as if the joy were ours. But what about the joy of those who we don’t care about so deeply? Do we feel happy for a col league who has won a prestigious award? Or do we believe in secret that we were more deserving

people have, plants are by andreas weber

Let‘s fill our pantry! I would put flower bulbs into our storeroom. Kept at a suitably cool temperature, they would hold for a long time. Each bulb is tiny, shrivelled, brown and drab. But each contains tremendous energy. In each bulb slumbers a birth as fresh as creation and an ever-present promise of death. In a way, these inconspicuous dormant organs are like Leibniz’s mon ads self-contained flames, yet luminous the world over. I would choose snowdrop bulbs. Granted, they are a little poi sonous. But snowdrops with their bells hanging in the gray air at the end of winter are truly a new beginning. The embodiment of a fresh start. Two years ago I discovered snowdrops growing wild in an abandoned garden plot. I found them amidst the wilted leaves of a scraggy apple tree where garden clippings had been dumped the previous summer. About a dozen blossoming is lands had pushed their way through the leaves. It seems the ex ceptionally hard winter that had ravaged above their heads hadn’t bothered them in the least. With perseverance that only the truth is capable of, they had, in the frigid darkness, developed into what they were destined to become. I made my way through the brush of the abandoned plot to the apple tree without much hope of finding anything. And at first, I didn’t. But then, after closer inspection, I discerned the fine blades among the crystals of ice, white buds and finally the first

blossoms drooping heavily from thin stalks. The bells hung like tender muscles from their stems, guided by flexible necks, as if they were connected to the earth by an elastic band. Flower chains. The petals, rolled up like interlocked fingers, the cup and stem pushing through a fine skin which would remain behind like the skin of an onion when the flower finally bloomed. Layer by layer, the inevitable spring arrived, peeling away the winter from the light. To defy the frost, cold and dreariness, it seems the highest degree of fragility and tenderness is required. I remained kneeling in the grace of these snowdrops for quite some time. It was this that saved me, at least for the short time these flowers would be allowed to grow here. The garden plots were all being ploughed flat. A new park was planned. I knelt by the flowers and didn’t notice the numbness in my legs. Fine crys talline drops rolled off the petals, reflecting the edges, casting rays of light upon the brightly bending necks of the stems, shim mering in the almost non-existent breeze. The dew drops made each blossom into a crystal chandelier, imperceptibly swinging above the bottomless canyon of a white sky.

Springtime is a period of convalescence, the final stages of an ill ness which carries with it new life, like the scab of a wound con cealing the new, soft skin beneath. If one looked very closely, one would see a spidery web of cracks spanning and crisscrossing the entire landscape, the signs of a new beginning readying itself to burst through the colourless surface. The longer I looked, the more it seemed that the flowers had freed themselves. Perhaps it was happening imperceptibly before my eyes. Like thorns, the tips of the snowdrops penetrated the wet leaves, enshrouded by their decay. Dying is a process of birth in reverse; at the end comes the inconceivable moment of a new beginning arising from nothing.

Every day, sometimes more than once, I returned to the lumi nous bed of snowdrops. I wanted to make sure that they were still

there. I had the intense feeling that everything was contained in these flowers’ tiny gesture. It was the feeling that the thin stems, the green blades of their leaves, the whitest white of their blos soms, their sudden existence one day in March, their inevitable disappearance in the impending maelstrom of spring (buried be neath the budding life) couldn’t be made any more perfect and complete. What a celebration life is, what a long, roaring party, as powerful as space and as fragile as gossamer in the wind.

It’s this effortless waste of energy that we humans don’t under stand this muscle tautened to the point of shredding, com prised of nothing but a wisp of light, yet holding this conver gence in its hand. The flowers had arrived. With the patience of all of creation, they had waited a whole year for this moment when they could finally surrender themselves to the light. In Danish, snowdrops are called spring’s fools. We should embrace their slim necks and let them hold us above an abyss of grace. One morning almost all the flowers were gone. Someone had dug them out, bulbs and all. When I got there, when I saw what remained from afar, a thought crossed my mind up close, these islands of light outshine everything, but from far away, they look rather unremarkable. And then I saw the holes. Wild boars, I thought, the wild boars must have eaten the bulbs. But then I realized that someone had dug them out. Carefully I ap proached and tried to take comfort in the last remaining blos soms, as if I were warming myself with a match whose flame could extinguish at any moment.

Andreas Weber, born in Hamburg in 1967, studied Biology and re ceived a doctorate in Philosophy. Now a journalist, he has written several books, including Biokapital. Die Versöhnung von Ökonomie, Natur und Menschlichkeit [Biocapital. The Reconciliation of Economy, Na ture and Humanity], published by the Berlin Verlag in 2008. His latest book, Mehr Matsch. Kinder brauchen Natur [More Mud. Children Need Nature], will be published by the Ullstein Verlag, Berlin in 2011

of the award? Do we feel joy when we hear of the success and fortune of others? Or do we take se cret pleasure in hearing of someone’s misfor tune or blunder? It’s no coincidence that we’ve got a word for this schadenfreude along with its company of scorn, mockery and ridicule. And interestingly enough, this German word not only exists in English, but also French, Ital ian, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish. By no means does this imply that schadenfreude is a German invention. The German term was likely introduced into other languages through cultural and scientific transfer (in particular, in the field of psychoanalysis). Whatever the rea son, it’s obvious that people everywhere not only in Germany, Austria and eastern Switzer land occasionally feel pleasure at hearing of others’ misfortunes. Psychologists and neuro scientists from Japan, Israel, the United States and the Netherlands have had no difficulty finding enough test subjects for studies on the causes and effects of schadenfreude However, far less energy has been expended for researching its positive counterpart not schadenfreude, but rather mit-freude, or »shared happi ness«. There are numerous reasons for this. Like

the old adage in journalism »bad news sells«, se rious public discourse primarily focuses on that which is problematic, dangerous or perplexing. »Feel-good« topics, on the other hand, are the do main of bad novels, self-help books and health magazines. I don’t mean to pick bones with this division of labour. I also have no intention of promoting happiness as an auto-suggestive elix ir to increase one’s vitality and performance or join Erich Kästner’s readers in asking »What about the positive aspects?«

What I have in mind is more along the lines of Friedrich Schiller’s joyous ode along with its mu sical echo, which, by no coincidence, eventually became the European anthem. Schiller describes joy not only as the powerful mainspring of individual action, but also the ferment of human socialization. Happiness creates a bond between friends, lovers, and even between »brothers«, by which he means potentially »all men« (whether women are included remains unclear). His words, »Those who dwell in the great circle, pay hom age to sympathy!« resemble those of Smith’s but with a new twist and touch of more ancient cos mology. Sympathy and shared happiness are the great assets of social order which Schiller

attributes to the European-cosmopolitan ideal that of openness, meritocracy and solidarity values which are certainly worth drinking to.

We can witness how powerful these assets can be, when, in rare circumstances, shared happi ness is produced and communicated on a mas sive scale for example, the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, the inauguration of Barack Obama on 20 January 2009, and the suc cessful rescue of the Chilean miners on 13 Octo ber 2010. It is just as important to study the con ditions and requirements of such collectively shared moments of happiness and investigate their repercussions as it is to understand the mechanisms of schadenfreude. We could even go so far as to weigh the benefits of teaching the ability to feel happiness with others. Shared happiness can be an educational goal, as schools in the English-speaking world have already dem onstrated with programmes to promote empa thy. This need not only apply to schools, but al so within one’s family, at one’s workplace, in sports, etc.

Of course, there is something artificial and forced about such utopian visions. But we also

know that not all feelings develop naturally. Many feelings require fostering, cultivation and incentives. We also know that every utopia can be discredited by pointing to the extremes and unintended consequences, for example, a land of frozen smiles. This is not about implement ing a totalitarian master plan, but rather creat ing more opportunity for humans to expand on their ability to share in each other’s happiness in our modern emotional economy. We have good reason to hope that this would benefit the art of living and surviving immensely.

Ute Frevert, born in 1954, is a historian with exper tise in the areas of social and cultural history of modernity, emotional history, gender history and modern political history. In 2007 she became the director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. In 1998 Fre vert received the Leibniz Prize . In 2009 she edited the special issue Geschichte der Gefühle. Ges chichte und Gesellschaft [History of Feelings. History and Society], published by Vandenhoeck & Ru precht, Göttingen.

hoarding by sibylle lewitscharoff

My greatest concern is that men will disappear. It is quite possible that the only men left in our latitudes will be those infantile specimens who refuse to develop rugged features or those, who at 40 or 50, can barely keep the last few strands of hair on their heads. That’s why our symbolic pantry should be stocked with books with men in them. Men of broken, sophisticated hero ism upon whom my mind’s eye gazes with a touch of yearning, not to say cute flirtation. We cannot forget Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye . Oh, oh, oh, like a girl smitten, I see the drunken Terry Lennox stumble out of his little sports coupe what a character! A polite drunkard with scars in his very pale face and as we learn little by little a man with a dra matic war history. Speaking of sports cars, let’s put Jack Bickerson Bolling, the Moviegoer , by Walker Percy on the shelf in our pantry. Also a gentlemanly hero, yanked right out of the war in the Pacific and thrown into the novel, an ex cellent sports car driver a low-set MG , whose chassis scrapes every bump in the road a real guy, melancholy but not lame, sensitive but not a sissy caught up in himself.

Some people might say I’m too old for such erotic swimming sensations and sports cars, for sure. They’re probably right. A real junkie doesn’t abandon her favourite drug on sound advice. That’s why I’m smuggling a third hero into my pantry another who’s been around for while F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby . Here’s another improbable fellow, very rich, very hon ourable despite a dishonourable past, strongly attached to his first love, albeit foolishly so, a character and I’d eat a broom, the handle and all if I’m wrong who never existed in reality. That’s enough of the Eros-lisping hero-hoard ing. Now to more serious things, to Kafka. Kaf ka, of course, is essential, every literature crack would agree. His diary, in particular, is essential; the mother of all diaries, so surprising, enthusi astically jumping from topic to topic, and yet laced with more penetrating introspection than any other in the world. His unfinished Amerika , don’t forget the Process , and if pos sible, let’s throw in his complete works; it’s not like they take up countless metres of shelf space. Now we come to Herman Melville. We need to have his Bartleby , this slender, extraordinary eccentric, who in some intricate and elegant way says No to everything people ask of him, by which he brings the world to the brink. An American messiah of determination, who con vinces you with his gentle voice that nothing need be or remain the way it is. And that brings me to Mrs. Dalloway , this wonderful, floating phenomenon of post-war London in the

early twenties, as fresh, tender and clear today as she appeared back then. Everything simultane ous, everything in silent uproar, the phenomena touch one another with an energy that Virginia Woolf’s highly sensitive fingertips inspired even beyond the grave. What a work of magic! I also want to have fun. The Three Right eous Combmakers by Gottfried Keller is just the thing. Everything Züs Bünzli does to keep her three suitors interested is so mind-numbingly humorous, I have to laugh when her first name is mentioned Züs, nicknamed Züssi, you bone-dry spinster, mean as a wasp, ingenious as a small-town Machiavelli, I bid you welcome! Speaking of wasps, I do not wish to go without Francis Ponge’s fine portrait of the wasp in La Rage de l’Expression , without his oyster, the fig, the pine-wood, the bumblebee, the peb ble, the frog, the moss, his cigarette or the clam organic, inorganic, and though not human, displaying something humanlike, to blink one’s eyes, to smile at us and hold a tiny speech with tiny gesticulating arms. If the world were to col lapse around us, the speeches, like the one the cigarette delivers to us in the dark, would mean a lot.

But now the Federal Cultural Foundation is urg ing me to pack faster; everything that must go into storage should go without longwinded ex planations. Wunschloses Unglück by Peter Handke, Versuch über die Juke box , in you go, Westend by Martin Mose bach and Was davor geschah , then the

feather-light Pigafetta by Felicitas Hoppe, Porzellan and Vom Schnee by Durs

Grünbein, let’s not forget the irritating timber cutting by Thomas Bernhard, and how could I forget my beloved Lost Ones by Samuel Beckett. My explanation would be very drawn out indeed, if I had to tell you why I’d include the Bible, naturally Martin Luther’s original translation in its not so easily digestible, greaseladen German, and definitely Homer’s Odys see and definitely Dante’s Divine Come dy (perhaps in two translations, one of which should be the eccentric one by Rudolf Bor chardt); and if, after having hastily thrown to gether such company of high calibre, I accident ly include a pulpy Ellroy crime story fine by me!

Sibylle Lewitscharoff, born in Stuttgart in 1954, was awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 1998 Since then she has received numerous literature prizes, the most recent of which was the Leipzig Book Fair Award 2009 for her latest novel Apostoloff , which was published the same year by Suhrkamp. Lewitscharoff is currently working on her next novel about the philosopher Hans Blumenberg.

teaching them to read by margot käßmann

When I was a child, money was tight. We were four kids, one of my brothers died in infancy, and the three of us were expected to go to school, graduate with an Abitur, get an education. Our fam ily never had a scholarly library like the ones I saw in the homes of children whose parents were theologians, lawyers or philoso phers. But our mother never skimped on books. We were allowed to read. Karl May, Enid Blyton, you name it. It wasn’t about pro viding us with »high-quality literature«, but simply having fun reading.

And how wonderful it is to plunge into a book, to let it take you to another place, to let your imagination run free, to try to under stand other worlds! Reading’s allure is impressively strong. I re member when I was a kid, reading underneath the bedcovers with a flashlight, unable to put my book down long after my par ents had announced »lights out!«

When I began studying at university and especially while I was working on my doctoral thesis, reading became a profession. The more I read, the less well-read I felt! I encountered an academic world of philosophy, ecclesiastical history, practical theology and systematology which I often had difficulty understanding. But when I finally slogged my way through and comprehended, I was rewarded with a feeling of elation I understand. We can understand together and think further.

There were times when I wasn’t able to read as much. As a work ing mother with four children, I sometimes had no energy left to

open up a book in the evening, no leisure to dive into another world, no concentration to follow the narrative arc. The sum mers we spent together with many families were absolutely won derful. All of us mothers agreed to read a different book together every year. I recall our vacation in France when all eight of us read Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time We nibbled on the obligatory Madeleines as we read our books.

I learned a lesson, namely that we are less likely to forget a book we’ve read together with someone else than one we’ve read by ourselves. Discussing books make them profoundly deeper. My oldest daughter read a lot, always, constantly. My two middle daughters, twins, were not big readers, they were busy with sports and music. But surprisingly when they studied at university, they practically devoured the books they were assigned to read. As for my youngest daughter, I feared she’d never read, a child grow ing up in the age of computers and Internet. But then she got her hands on The Lord of the Rings . I didn’t see her for days. Then came Harry Potter . She and the leading ac tress in the film versions were the same age, and you could say they grew up together. She read the third book in the series in English with no problem though her English wasn’t especially good. There it was again, that feeling, the fascination of reading, the discovery of new worlds, the enthusiasm, the inability to put the book the down. Wonderful, amazing! It doesn’t have to be Goethe or Descartes. Reading itself is a cultural asset! And reading is a matter of justice and moral responsibility. Mar tin Luther translated the Bible into German so that normal peo ple could read it. Prior to that time, church services were held in Latin. Parishioners only had images, but no words for the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The translation represented an enormous cultur al achievement. In Luther’s times, Bavarians and East Frisians could barely understand one another and to some extent, it’s still that way today. But language educated and integrated! Furthermore, the translation of the Bible was a remarkable aca demic achievement. In his letter to the »Christian nobility of the

German Nation«, Luther called on the German rulers to estab lish schools for both boys and girls so that they might learn to read and write. A measure, he argued, that would allow them to personally temper their conscience according to the Bible’s teach ings. That was a revolutionary cultural achievement! Yes, for me, reading is integral for the art of living. Losing oneself in a book. Not being able to stop, even when it’s time to go to sleep. Rooting for the characters! Reevaluating the world, under standing it differently, seeing it from a different viewpoint. There happens to be a fitting reference to this in the Bible. In the Acts of Apostles according to Luke, chapter 8, Philip meets a »eunuch« reading the scripture of the prophet Isaiah. »Philip ran up and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet and said, ›Do you under stand what you are reading?‹« Philip explains the scriptures to him. The eunuch comes to believe and has Philip baptize him. In my view, Philip was the first reading patron. If only we had more of them! People who would make time to teach children to read. There are a number of wonderful projects out there already just think of all the worlds that children are discovering! Read ing is also a central aspect of integration. Sharing texts and litera ture is a bonding experience. Debating and discussing the writ ten word that contributes to peace. Being acquainted with common texts that creates common identity. And that’s why, for me, reading is an important aspect of the art of living.

Margot Käßmann, former Protestant state bishop, was council chair woman of the Evangelical Church of Germany ( EKD ) in 2009 /2010. In 2011 Käßmann will be teaching Ecumenical Studies and Social Ethics as a guest pro fessor at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Her most recent books include Zu Gast in Amerika… [A Guest in America...], published by edition chris mon (Frankfurt/Main, 2011) and Sehnsucht nach Leben [Desire for Life], published by adeo-Verlag (Aßlar, 2011).

time capsule by assaf gavron

»Yes, who are you?«

Two people sit behind a metallic desk. Men, as far as I can tell. Serious, as far as I can detect. The room is huge, maybe as big as an aircraft hangar. But inside it looks like a room. White walls. A metallic desk. Two people. I approach them. »Excuse me?«

»Who are you?«

»Gavron.«

»Yes, Gavron. When are you from?« Now I remember. They woke me up in the middle of the night. Told me to quickly pack my time traits, the attributes of my era, for an urgent dispatch into the future. As usual, they didn’t give me enough time. I shoved a few things into three capsules and then I can’t remember what happened. Next thing I knew, I was in this room. The metallic table. The people.

»I’m from around the turn of the millennium.«

»Which millennium?«

»End of the second, beginning of the third. A few decades on ei ther side. What year are we in?«

One of them glares at me sternly. »We’re in the future,« he says and looks down. »Yes, I see here. Gavron. You must be talking about the Christian calendar, and you are probably referring to A.D. All right. What have you got for us?«

»I have three capsules. In the first one I threw some cultural artefacts.«

They look at each other and then back to me. »Cultural arte facts?«

»Cultural artefacts: records that hold music in their grooves. Rolls of film containing movies and pictures. Books made of pages, which are made of paper. Artefacts. Stuff. Things you can feel. Touch.«

»What is the use of that?«

»People like liked to touch things. They found it pleasing to know that art is tangible. That it exists in space, that it occupies

volume. That it’s not just air. Air you can amass and listen to and watch in all sorts of beautiful and elegant computerized versions, but still just air, sounds and images and words you cannot grasp with your hand and say ›I own this.‹« They make no response, so I continue: »They like to give and receive, to caress things, smell things. They also like to gather together to watch movies and plays, or listen to music.«

»Together?«

»Lots of people in the same room. A shared, social experience. Communal consumption of culture. Is that something you have here, now, in the future?«

»Mr. Gavron, this exercise is not about us in the future, but about your present. What’s in your second capsule?«

»Liquids.«

»What kind of liquids?«

»I have two bottles, each containing a different liquid. One is fu el, the other is water. Are you familiar with water?« They keep looking at me without saying anything, so I go on. »You need fuel to drive cars and fly planes. And you need water to live. They are both growing scarce in my time, so people are fighting over them. Because of these liquids there are wars.« I vaguely detect a wrin kle appear over one of the men’s foreheads. »There have already been a few wars over oil, so it’s probably all finished now in the world.« I look at the white wall to my right, as if searching for a window through which I might be able to see which year I’m in and what the status of oil is. »Water is a more recent story, but it’s also starting to disappear because the world is getting warmer. So people are beginning to fight over that, too.«

»Are you proposing that we hold onto these two liquids?«

»No. I just hope you’ve found a more available and cleaner energy source than oil. And that you’ve somehow been able to pre serve your water. Water is definitely something from my era that I think should be preserved for future generations.«

They say nothing. One of them drums on the metallic table with something that looks like a pen. I wonder if I’ve disappointed them.

»In the third capsule is an illegal settlement outpost,« I say to break the silence.

»Excuse me?«

»An illegal outpost. It’s something that’s going on where I live. It’ll take too long to explain the whole story, so I’ll keep it simple: different people claim ownership of the same piece of land. Vari

ous forces, at various times, tried to divide the land and establish borders, but they were unsuccessful. The borders are unclear, the leaders are weak, the civilians and subjects are angry, and some of them take the law into their own hands and do whatever they want. For example, they set up settlements without legal permits, with murky support from some authorities and opposition from oth ers. They create confusion, resistance, sometimes violence. They and their opponents are often motivated by an aggressive and uncompromising ideology that stems from religion and nation alism, from laws and dogmas which, they say, reflect an eternal truth that is inarguable and must be obeyed.«

The man who was drumming with the pen, who has been silent up to now, looks at me curiously. This time he speaks: »And what will your illegal outpost bequeath to future generations? What about it are you seeking to preserve for us?«

»Maybe just a warning: about the dangers of religion. The dan gers of borders. I don’t know what sort of world you live in, but if enough time has gone by and you’ve learned how to live without borders, I’m happy for you. If people have continued to wander around the world and races have mingled and procreated in such a way that has significantly diluted the number of ›pure‹ people, turning ›mixed‹ people into the majority, so much so that nation alism and racism have become meaningless because there is no one left to support them or direct them at then so much the better for you. And if the power of religion has diminished, or at least the use of religion to justify immoral, inconsiderate acts, acts that lack any logic more complex than a reliance on ancient texts then I envy you.«

They look at one another. I think I see the pen-holder smirk at his colleague. The other man puts both hands on the table and shouts: »Next!«

stop predicting! by armin nassehi

Talking about the future is easy. And talking about the future is risky. It’s easy, because we don’t know the future. And for the same reason, it’s also risky. The future is the ultimate projec tion surface. In the truest sense of the word, it is the pre-tense of a future that will never be and only the starting point for new future designs. It is no accident that utopias have always been fu turistic visions, because at the moment they are envisioned, their validity never had to stand the test of time. So why talk about something that will never come to pass, at least not as it has been envisioned?

At first glance it may seem that this position re jects the topic at hand. And that’s what it does.

But at a second glance, this position is not borne of intellectual indulgence, the validity of which need not be ascertained, but is the response of a detached observer at a time when it is en vogue to be suspicious of futuristic scenarios, especial ly in view of their inadequate predecessors. But perhaps this position is more than an attempt to wriggle free of responsibility, because, after all, the future is a matter that »matters« to our fu ture.

It’s worth examining earlier futuristic concepts for the future. The history of futuristic concepts is in fact a history of past presents, and by this, I mean the illusions or wishes or fears of the fu ture which each present harbours. We only have to look back at the cultural, Eurocentric eupho ria of the 19th century or the 1960s technologi cal fantasies of metropolitan futures which were mainly spawned by the world’s technical capa bilities and the optimism of Western middleclass realities. Such futuristic visions were ulti mately extrapolations, as they offered an image of the future based on their present time and what other basis was there? Alright, they might have known better, but they didn’t.

The kinds of future concepts we make today are all characterized by consensus and expectation. They generally relate to matters of democracy, de mographics and demotoxification i.e. the forms of state and legitimate decision-making routines of the future, various population trends in global society and poisoning people with too much in formation, with environmental toxins and the impact of energy production. I have no wish to go into these future scenarios here.

By failing to offer concrete positions regarding the future and only reflecting on the strange perspectivity of future concepts, it might appear as if I were trying to avoid the unavoidable. However, my reference to perspectivity, in other words, the imprisonment of every concept with in the perspective of the individual, might be exactly what signifies the social present-day.

Perhaps we would be better off with fewer future concepts, fewer survival strategies, and simply be less enthralled with what the future holds. Perhaps we should be more interested in learn ing how things develop.

This could well be the basic experience of mod ern times that our view of the world engen

ders the world we see and not vice versa. Post structuralist, cybernetic and system-theoretical theories and neurophysiological research find ings are trying to tell us something that every body can now experience on their own. One cannot perceive things beyond one’s senses see beyond what the eye can see, hear beyond what the ear can hear, taste beyond what the tongue can taste, smell beyond what the nose can smell, feel beyond what the skin can feel, and think beyond what our minds are capable of thinking of. We are bound by what our eyes, our ears, our tongue, our nose, our skin and our minds communicate to us.

We are also entangled in our perspectives of the world which differ economically, politically, scientifically, religiously and legally versus the logic of the mass media. This entanglement is evident in our daily conflicts and misunder standings, because these perspectives are the only vehicles we have for communication. If com munication doesn’t seem to work, it’s because communication is not an amalgamation, but rather the tool for processing differences in per spective. Maybe the only reason communica

Assaf Gavron, born in 1968, grew up in Jerusalem, studied in London and Vancouver, and now lives in Tel Aviv. He has written five books and is one of Israel’s best-selling authors today. He has also translated Jonathan Safran Fo er, Philip Roth and J.D . Salinger into Hebrew and is a singer and songwriter of the Israeli cult band »The Mouth and Foot«. In 2010 Gavron was awarded a fel lowship by the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Programme. His novel Alles Pal etti [Moving], translated into German by Barbara Linner, was published last year by the Luchterhand Verlag, Munich. Translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen.

tion exists is because we as people are inaccessi ble and opaque to one another. Yet at the same time, communication promises to remove this mutual opacity. There is no escaping this para dox we must simply learn to live with it. And now I will talk about the future. What we need in the future (in other words, right now ) is a better understanding of how we are entangled within our own perspectives. We have to learn that the problems and solutions of this world all have different implications and significance in terms of their functional perspective their economic, political, religious, scientific, legal and even cultural perspectives. We need solu tions which take this perspectivity into account. Is this too abstract? Possibly, but it’s equally pos sible that our solutions to date have been too concrete, because they always wanted to see what they’d look like when they were put into practice. In terms of Lebenskunst, the art of liv ing, one might think of composure, of enduring one’s present times, on the simultaneous con tingency and inescapability of one’s own perspective. Perhaps Über Leben(s) Kunst , or ›the art of surviving‹ has more to do with art, be cause if anything, there are two lessons that art can teach us learning to understand the ines capability of forms and perspectives and negotiating between total contingency and necessity. Art is capable of seeing more, because it can see seeing and that, by the way, is the oldest modern utopia. We have no need of a new one if we can find a way to stop fighting our own per spectivity and start utilizing it operatively.

what if… by andrzej stasiuk

… or maybe, instead of preparing ourselves to live on in some illdefined way, we could consider a Plan B ?

Consider simply leaving, disappearing. It seems we have no other task beyond the biological survival of the species. Certain repre sentatives of that species are going to be richer and richer and will live longer and longer. Others, quite the opposite. Neither the first perspective nor the second seems worth the effort. We’re go ing to live longer and longer, and get more and more bored. To keep from being bored we’ll have to buy more and more. More and more stuff, more and more health, more and more life, more and more organ transplants. It’ll be a tedious longevity, and an even more tedious eternity, which some may attain. It doesn’t bear thinking about. And it’s even harder to think about those who are never going to attain anything. Who’ll be born, die in short order, and no one will ever hear of their existence. They’ll die of hunger, sickness, of fear and of sadness. They’ll die in the awareness that somewhere well-fed, healthy, immortal people are going on living. Perhaps it’s the case that we’ve already accomplished what we were supposed to and it’s time to go away time for Plan B . Nothing is left of the great religious, metaphysical plan. We were una ble to carry it out. We couldn’t bear the weight of the knowledge that we’re not alone in this world, nor keep our faith in the idea that it’s not the last of worlds. That didn’t succeed. Plan A was a failure. Our life turned out to be as random and egotistical as the life of monkeys, or of shrimp. More so even, because mon keys are at least useful for experiments, and shrimp are food for whales. Our life, on the other hand, is perfectly selfish and serves only for its own survival and self-duplication. Well, maybe we’re of some use to illnesses, to bacteria and viruses. It’s a somewhat ironic turn of events: once we served God, now we serve mi crobes. It would be hard to find beings whose existence carries less meaning. And that’s the end of it. The last historical, hysteri cal attempt to preserve what was left of humanity probably took place in 1917. At that time some of us at least tried to cobble to gether something along the lines of Genesis or the Big Bang. And in fact the world came close to going up in smoke. All the same, it was a bold idea: to create a new sort of human being, since the old kind seemed inadequate.

One way or the other, things don’t look good: as a mass, as a crowd, as globalized manure we’re going to be serving the few on their path to immortality. It’s going to happen eventually: bio technology will be the victorious successor to religion and revo lution. The chosen few will be able to live so long that they’ll be overcome with boredom, they’ll have had enough. At the same time they’ll see to it that the rest should live short enough that they won’t constitute any competition. Because can you imagine one generation after another arriving in the world and not dy ing? Living and living and living, using up what’s left of the ener gy and food and air and light on this cramped planet? It’s a vision from a cosmic horror story. The richest ones, the immortals, will ensure that we croak like ants or termites the moment we stop being useful. You don’t need futurology to understand this, it’s enough to look at the present. It’s enough to imagine to yourself that the whole of Africa, for example, could be removed from the map of the world and no one (aside from the Africans them selves) would notice a thing. Yes indeed, you could simply snip off that part of the map with your scissors and watch it disappear into the blue waters of the ocean, and then into the depths of space. Naturally, beforehand it would be necessary to extract everything of value from the earth: oil, minerals and so on. But do the people who live there constitute anything of value for the rest of the world? Surely only as cheap labor. At least until they lose what’s left of their strength. Strength? Yet human strength is less and less necessary. We fight like dogs over the scraps that the richest fling down to us. We wag our tails so someone will notice how useful we are. In the mean time we become less needed with every day. Like the Africans, just a little more slowly and in a slightly healthier climate. What was supposed to make our lives easier ended up making them su perfluous. And that’s why Plan B seems a way out that, though perhaps somewhat desperate, is at least honorable. If the dino saurs vanished, why should we remain? I see no purpose in it, and furthermore I see no chance that we will ever create such a purpose. We can live a little longer in the knowledge that we’re needed by bacteria and viruses. But ultimately that purpose too will disappear.

kulturstiftung des bundes magazin 17

an [almost] impossible art — finding middle ground and exercising moderation by herfried münkler

Over the course of time, our attitude toward »middle ground« and »moderation« has changed. Whenever advocated by an old er generation, they are scorned as the pinnacle of narrow-mind edness, the expression of fear of the future and a sign of conservative stubbornness. Then there are times when more people voice their belief that society can only have a future if it takes the middle path and exercises moderation. In the first case, call ing for a return to the middle ground and moderation is scorned

as an expression of mediocrity, as the ideology of the unexcep tional. In the second case, the middle ground and moderation are praised as the prerequisites of human survival. In other words, embracing the moderation of the middle is the only way we can control the self-destructive forces of unleashed selfishness and our fatal penchant for exaggeration and excess. In this case, shift ing our focus to the middle and moderation is like erecting a barricade across the collective path into the abyss.

In Germany, the criticism of moderation and middle ground peaked around 1968 when the maxim of mediocrity was coun tered by the burgeoning desire for self-fulfilment and the de mand for radicality. Being radical meant tackling problems at their root and no longer accepting »lame compromises«. Friedrich von Logau’s aphorism, »In situations of great danger and need / the middle road leads to death», dating back to the Thirty Years’ War, became the recipe of inevitable doom for the levelled playing field of middle-class society, as Helmut Schelsky once described the young Federal Republic of Germany. To counter the social stasis of the middle ground and moderation, the New Left focused on the dynamics of future orientation with ideals and visions which were intended to shake up the calcified cir cumstances.

There’s not much left of that spirit of optimism. Many of the leading 68ers who embarked on a radical path have, in the meantime, →

Armin Nassehi, born in Tübingen in 1960, is a professor of Sociology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Univer sität in Munich. His most recent book, Mit dem Taxi durch die Gesellschaft. Soziologische Storys [Taxi Ride Through Society. Sociological Sto ries], was published by Murmann, Hamburg in 2010

Andrzej Stasiuk , born in Warsaw in 1960, writes critiques and essays for major Polish and German daily newspapers. In the early 1980s, Stasiuk was actively involved in the Polish pacifist opposition movement, and in the mid1990s, he started his own publishing company. In 2005 he was awarded the Nike Award for Best Polish Book of the Year. His recent novel Winter. Fünf Geschichten [Winter. Five Stories], translated into German by Renate Schmidgall and Olaf Kühl, was published in 2009 by the Insel Verlag, Frank furt/Main. Translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston

the dream of the golden nut by thomas lehr

über leben kunst survival art über kunst leben about art life leben über kunst life above art kunst über leben art about life

If I were a fine artist and were given the permuta tion above, I would find plenty of ways to ex press the significance of that little gap between the words Über and Lebenskunst .* But I am a writer, and for purely egotistical and prac tical reasons, I’d be satisfied to ask my own exis tential questions using the four phrases above. Should I put art above life or vice versa ? Does art come after survival? Is it worth surviving with out art? Should we know more about art life in order to survive, leaving it open to debate, whether we mean to save our artificial or artistic life?

As I see it, the answer is simpler than these many questions suggest. I create art in order to survive, and I believe that survival without art wouldn’t be worth experiencing. However, thinking about artificial survival gets more interesting when we reveal the hidden or suppressed connector OF as in the »art (of) survival«. We could, or perhaps should, attach the social aspect to it. This would allow us to view the tense interplay between the personal art of survival and the survival of art as such, which are bound in a complex, antagonistic, but also symbiotic relationship. The max ims for one’s personal will could find a place be tween the extremes of James Bond’s To Live and Let Die and Kant’s categorical impera tive.

If this were only about my personal art of sur vival, then I could exploit the rest of the world in the most deceptive and unscrupulous manner and do it so intelligently (here comes the art) that no one would catch or persecute me. I could also be less criminally minded and live as well as I could to the best of my ability without giving a care for the others as far as they let me. My only offense would be indifference, but then I’d have to take my chances that the Furies might come to haunt me. But, I want nothing more than to do the greater whole a great favour, even if it costs me everything but my credibility. The idea of a pantry may well be the solution for the apparently inherent antagonism between individual and collective benefit. Materially speaking, it cannot eliminate the conflict, for as we know, we only have one real pantry at our disposal the planet Earth. We argue every day and will continue arguing about how we use, exploit and preserve our planet. Society must always pay for whatever the individual takes for him self, and vice versa. What we’d need is some

thing like a golden nut (pantries always evoke the image of squirrels), something that we could store away and take out without inciting dissent and with no need to compete for resources. It’s obvious that this golden nut can be nothing more than a dream, or by extension, an object of the mind. Humanity still has enormous re serves at its disposal. Whether they truly help us is the real question. We have unlimited resourc es of great ethical maxims and general places, but they are not all very believable. Religions, which have been making headlines lately, don’t make me overly optimistic either, especially be cause I am reluctant to see social behaviour tied to the world hereafter (which rarely generates any pleasant forms of the art of living). And who would be so brazen as to carry the bloodencrusted fetish of revolution where, for what, from whom into the pantry? It seems to me that it would be best to look for a concrete, down-to-earth answer, as if my best friend, or better yet, my own child asked me the question. Just now, my ten-year-old daughter came in and asked me what I was writing. After I explained it to her, she naturally wanted to know the answer. And so I said: knowledge and love the content of the golden nut, two halves, which, by no accident, resemble the brain. When I was a young man reading Bertrand Russell, who took the idea from Baruch de Spinoza, I learned to regard knowledge and love as the foundation and basic maxims of human behaviour. With English pragmatism Russell argued that with out love there is no good reason to do some thing for oneself or for others. Without knowl edge, this love would remain helpless and inef ficient, and would be forced to capitulate in most cases of emergency. In Spinoza’s Ethics , one also finds a magnificent, beautifully crystalline

system of thought, which, although no longer believable, is an intellectually rewarding read. Anyway, back to my ten-year-old daughter who didn’t appear completely satisfied with my an swer. I turned the tables and asked her to tell me what she would put into the pantry. She replied, »Peace, agreement, environmental protection, trust, not only work but also fun, and modesty«. That’s not much worse than Russell and Spino za, in my opinion. She also thought my answer was very good and elegant, but a bit short. So I’ll throw in courage as the nutshell, perhaps in the variation offered by Francis of Assisi the courage to change the things I can. You forgot the joy of living, my daughter says and to that I have nothing to add.

*Translator’s note: Depending on the arrangement of the three root words »über« [above, about, through], »Leben« [life] and »Kunst« [art], one can create entirely different meanings. The project title, Über Lebenskunst , can thus be interpreted to mean »About the Art of Life« or »The Art of Survival« an ambiguity that was clearly intended.

Thomas Lehr, born in Speyer in 1957, studied Biochemistry before becoming a writer. He has re ceived numerous awards for his novels, e.g. the Wolf gang Koeppen Literature Prize by the City of Greifswald ( 2000 ). His most recent novel September. Fata Morgana (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 2010 ) was shortlisted for the German Book Prize 2010. In 2011 Lehr was awarded the Berlin Literature Prize by the Foundation of Prussian Maritime Commerce. Thomas Lehr lives in Berlin.

shifted to the middle and not only socially, but also politically. And in view of the rampant capitalistic forces unleashed by the neoliberals, the call for an appropriate level of moderation no longer seems as old-school conservative as it did in the late 1960s.

The debate on greed, as exemplified by the bonuses paid to bank ers and stockbrokers in the wake of the financial and economic crises, brought the ideals of moderation and restraint back into fashion, uniting the political left with the middle-class. The con cept of the middle ground and moderation gained an anti-capi talistic thrust. In light of the dynamic socio-economic develop ment which has resulted in new fractures and formed new bub bles capable of bringing entire national economies to their knees, the calls for a shift to the middle and more moderation have re sembled an attempt to find the brake pedal in a car careening to ward the edge of a cliff. If middle ground and moderation em bodied social stasis and cultural boredom in the late 1960s, they have now become the epitome of deceleration in a dynamic de velopment which no longer contains the promise of progress. The political semantics of the middle ground and moderation are variable and clearly depend on how the social situation on a whole is perceived. Such semantics might reflect resigned ac ceptance of the circumstances, about which »nothing can be done«, or express determined resistance against developments which could ultimately lead to devastating consequences. The

painter-poet Wilhelm Busch, a Schopenhauerian par excellence, illustratively and poetically summed up the former and became the aphorist of conservative-minded comfort. In his view, the selfindulgent, the greedy and the malicious are bound to fail and be ground to a pulp in the gear-wheels of society like Max and Moritz. The pleasure of watching others fail is the moral reward, reaped by those who exercise moderation. Busch’s characters overestimate themselves and have to admit that sometimes one is better off not to hold one’s head too high and be satisfied with a moderate »now and then«. Resignation evolves into a quicken ing insight into the inevitable fate of the mediocre. The counter-concept was expressed by the ancient philosopher Aristotle who connected the ability to hit the middle, that small point in a system of concentric circles, with the remarkable skill of the archer, who can compensate for the gravitational pull on the arrow, the influence of the wind and his own disposition to deviate when aiming. In this sense, hitting the middle is the com plete opposite of mediocrity. It actually represents an extraordi nary and outstanding achievement, of which only few are capa ble. Average people, on the other hand, whose will rarely corre sponds to their skill, do not hit the middle. They are unable to precisely calculate the external influences and their internal dis position, and as a result, their arrows end up hitting the edges and they involuntarily find themselves on the fringe, at the ex

treme. Perhaps they want to keep to the middle, but they are un able to. Nowadays the Aristotelian notion of the archer is an ap propriate image of the great art of hitting the middle. But that’s not to say that Wilhelm Busch will be back in fashion someday when the resistance to the middle ground and moderation be comes resigned comfort.

Herfried Münkler, born in 1951, is a professor of Political Theory at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His book Mitte und Mass. Der Kampf um die richtige Ordnung [Middle Ground and Moderation. The Struggle for the Right Order] was published in 2010 by Rowohlt Verlag.

getting wise by friedrich wilhelm graf

»Teach us to remember that we must die, that we may become wise.« This is how Martin Luther translated Psalm 90, verse 12 . In the Zurich Bible based on Ulrich Zwingli’s reformation in Zu rich, the verse goes like this: »Teach us to count our days aright that we may gain wisdom of heart.« It is clear from both transla tions that those who recited this ancient psalm had a definite idea of what the art of living meant. The verse implies that the most important task of each individual is to be aware of his fi niteness and mortality. This is not a matter of some ars moriendi, the art described in many ancient moral teachings and religious treatises to honorably bid the world farewell in humility before God and be conscious of one’s sinfulness and need for salvation. One could argue that dying is a decisive moment in our lives and therefore, the art of living must also include the art of dying. But those who recite Psalm 90 in prayer have little interest in the final phase of life before death or the end of life as a specific point in time. Rather, much more fundamentally, they wish to gain a new view of life as a whole, a radical shift in perspective. They regard the real art of living as a specific, religiously represented attitude of reflection, that of constantly being aware of their own finite ness. Emphasizing such sensitivity toward death is certainly not intended to cast a somber shadow over life. Rather it is meant to in crease and strengthen the intensity of life. Reflecting on the inev itability of our death serves to make our lives stronger and more intense. »Lord, teach us to remember that we must die, that we may learn to live«.

Learning to live means taking full advantage of the lifetime we are given, aware of the unavoidable finitude of our life. Unfortu nately, there are many people who are unwilling or unable to live in the here and now. Instead they look forward to a better, more fulfilling life in the relatively near future when they finally retire, or at a stage of life when they earn more money, and hope that once they’ve achieved this or that, their life will be happier. These people postpone living for an imaginary future, a tomorrow, or even a day-after-tomorrow, when everything will be much better. Such ›postponers‹ of happiness are notoriously incapable of liv ing in the present. They do have their own ideas of a good life. They also like being masters of the art of living but only a little later in life under subjectively more appropriate conditions. How ever, they suffer from a basic lack of artistic sense and artistry

which are beneficial to life. To be successful at the art of living, one must be willing and able to educate oneself to become a life artist. A religiously conveyed, completely non-fanatic, relaxed sen sitivity toward death is the most decisive lesson in learning the art of living. It allows us to differentiate between what is impor tant and less important, and it helps us to take the here and now seriously, to live in the present moment. Those who can regard each moment of life as meaningful, who can shape and fully take advantage of any given moment in the precious time that we are allotted, are able to increase the intensity of their life, and in turn, the pleasure of living. It is wise to seize the moment and live in the here and now for we are inno position to decide the future. That is the essence of the future despite all of our socio-tech nological efforts to predict, forecast and assess risks, we can never know for sure what will happen.

The presentism of life, as I’ve recommended here, seems to be at odds with the doctrines of moral institutions, which often warn of the destructive, dangerous characteristics of contemporary lifestyles that threaten the chances of life for coming generations. Yet intensified perception of the present moment certainly does not preclude examining the conditions of survival for those who come after us. Wisdom a regrettably underrated virtue in the current ethical discourse commands us to live in the here and now in such a way that others may live out their given time as cheerfully, happily and comfortably as possible tomorrow and beyond. But as a free individual, one must defend oneself from the moral arrogance of others who claim that he or she alone is responsible for the survival of future generations or the fate of the entire planet. Here, too, we can refer to the storehouse of symbol ism contained in religious writings. The holy scriptures of many religions, not only the Bible, all remind us of our limited time and the finiteness of our life’s resources. That’s why I am putting a Bible (or if I were Muslim, the Koran) into my intellectual pan try. Because once in a while I need something to remind me that I must live my life in the present if I, for the sake of others, want to have a future.

Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, born in 1948, is a Protestant theologian and professor of Systematic Theology and Ethics at the University of Munich ( LMU ). In 1999 he was awarded the Leibniz Prize by the German Research Foundation ( DFG ). Two of his books have just been published this year, Kirchendämmerung [Twilight of the Church] (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2011) and Der heilige Zeitgeist [The Holy Spirit of the Times] (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011).

diagnosis and therapy by jürgen mlynek

In his Theory of Evolution of 1859, Charles Dar win described the principles that determined the survival of all living things only the ›fit test‹ survive and propagate, in other words, those species which are best adapted to their environ ment and can use it to their advantage. This was Darwin’s conclusion after meticulously analys ing decades of countless observations. As a scientist, he cast aside the old lines of argument and suggested another which remains valid today and has allowed further advances in biology and medicine. Recognizing the laws of nature is

one of the most significant fruits of scientific study, but it is not the only one. Our under standing of the laws of nature has also given us a certain degree of formative power we create new technology on the basis of research. By em ploying its intellect and inventive spirit, the hu man species has been able to spread to the most inhospitable environments on earth. In a sense, science itself is an art of survival for humans. In fact, I would even claim it’s the most important. But can science continue to meet such expecta tions in the future? Because we’ve been so suc cessful as a species, we now face global challeng es of an entirely new quality. It is now disturb ingly evident that our lifestyle has begun to cause far-reaching changes to the earth and to deplete our natural means of existence a develop ment substantiated by scientific evidence. Now science must go further than providing a diagnosis it must offer a therapy. This is what sci ence can contribute to our survival on this everchanging earth. But what solutions can we ex

the inner idiot by aleks scholz

»We are all scientists and very poor ones at that.« This could be a quote by Feynman or Chandrasekhar, for example, but it’s actually my own. Granted, the first part was the title of an essay by Thomas Henry Huxley, a contemporary, colleague and sup porter of Charles Darwin, and great-grandfather of the perhaps better known brothers Aldous and Julian. In his essay, Huxley convincingly argues that the essential mental operations which scientists use to induce natural laws are quite like those that de termine the daily operations of absolutely ordinary people. He uses apples in his introductory example. When a scientifically untrained person takes a bite of a hard, green apple and finds it to be sour, takes a bite of another apple and comes to the same con clusion, he or she will induce a general natural law in the same exact manner as a scientist and deem it unnecessary to bite into a third hard, green apple.

Huxley’s example with the apple also illustrates why we are such poor scientists; we are much too impatient. Obsessed with the desire for conclusiveness, our mind this inner idiot presents us with a finished natural law (hard and green, therefore sour), even when the sample is miniscule. At least in the case of the ap ples, the number of measured values is n=2 , but in many cases, our inner idiot is satisfied with n=1. A typical example of this is something I’ve heard quite frequently this winter: »Cold today all this talk about global warming can’t be right.« When I said ›frequently‹, of course, I meant ›once or twice‹.

The inner idiot is not only guilty of forming anecdotal »n=1« conclusions. It also has difficulties in neatly selecting and evalu ating samples, because it feels its own experience is of more con

sequence than that of its neighbour, or because it has forgotten experiences that happened long ago. The inner idiot is suscepti ble to several hundred of such faulty mechanisms, and these are only the ones we know about. Our n=1 problem is better known by the name Fallacy of the Lonely Fact, but there are far more exotic creatures in this zoo of false conclusions, such as the No True Scotsman Fallacy. This is a daring assertion based on a sample size n= 0, i.e. with no empirical verification at all. When someone claims »No Scotsman is gay«, but is proven wrong (by someone who happens to find a gay Scotsman), they adhere to their former assertion by expertly disqualifying the exception, saying »No true Scotsman is gay«. It’s an amazing accomplishment that even crocodiles couldn’t achieve.

Why does the inner idiot insist on anecdotal conclusions? Be cause these anecdotes sustain it. Life is not a mass of objective data, collected under controlled circumstances, but a series of subjective anecdotes, singular experiences and emotions which can not be exactly reproduced. Who in their right mind would burn their hand on a stove a thousand times before making an asser tion about the charring characteristics of human flesh? Without this current of unique, subjective episodes, our inner idiot would dissipate and change into something entirely different, for exam ple, into a garden gnome that has no idea what makes him differ ent from an identical gnome next door.

Astronomy is a science which has some similarity to the inner id iot in that its objects of study cannot be examined in a laboratory environment. We just can’t purchase 100,000 hard, green stars and bite into them, but have to accept what the universe gives us. Up until now, for instance, the universe has given us only one planet that looks like Earth, and as a result, all the conclusions we make about how the Earth was created are rather shaky a trag ic predicament. But generally the natural sciences want nothing to do with anecdotes. They remove the inner idiots and clear the way for testing massive, objective samples.

But something interesting has happened as a result. In order to work empirically, scientists have been forced to remove them

selves from their own conclusions. The master builders of this scientific world view don’t even include themselves. This is a problem, because we usually like to explain everything not everything less one essential component. How does the inner idiot deal with this problem? Well, it reverts to the petitio principii, another beloved fallacy. After excluding itself, the observing subject, it claims that the subject doesn’t really exist, or at least, can explain it away scientifically, like it can with stars or stones.

According to the Munich philosopher Ruben Schneider, »We’ve gotten used to dealing with the subject as if it were something like a banana or clump of protein slime.«

The biggest strength of science the exclusion of the inner idiot is simultaneously its biggest weakness. Science is capable of a great deal, but only within clearly defined limits, and is inher ently flawed with regard to the subject. One cannot view the sub ject with an electron microscope or positron emission spectro scope; if you take apart the brain, you won’t find the subject in side. No matter where you look, it’s always somewhere else. »Free the inner idiot!« That might have been a quote by Nietzsche or Homer Simpson, but it’s one of mine, too.

Aleks Scholz , born in Gera in 1975 is a doctor of Astronomy. He con ducted research in Canada and Scotland before taking his current position as a Schroedinger Fellow at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in Ireland. Together with Kathrin Passig, Scholz published a Lexikon des Unwis sens [Encyclopaedia of Ignorance] (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2007) and Verirren eine Anleitung für Anfänger und Fortgeschrittene [Getting Lost A Guide for Beginners and Experts] (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2010 ). In 2010 he received the Ernst Willner Prize for his text Google Earth at the 34 th annual Festival of German-Language Literature in Klagenfurt.

pect? First, we should dismiss the most extreme positions toward science neither exaggerated optimism regarding the formative powers of new technologies, nor outright rejection of science and technology can lead us to a viable future. What we need instead is a mentality familiar with the thought processes and workings of sci ence that not only appreciates the limits of re search, but also fully embraces the possibilities science offers.

The success of science as an art of survival in the future largely depends on two aspects of this mentality that we search for system solutions and deal sensibly with the shortcomings of knowledge. The search for system solutions is one of the major scientific challenges of our time. At present, we lack not only the technolo gy, but also fundamental knowledge necessary for influencing important, complex systems. We’ve been incredibly successful at dissecting natural systems into their building blocks and we know quite well, for example, how a single

neuron functions. But explaining how the 100 billion neurons in the brain interact with one another is a research desideratum. The same thing goes for the system Earth. Although we have a solid understanding of individual phe nomena, e.g. how hurricanes develop, we have trouble putting the pieces together for more complex processes, such as the dynamics of our planet’s climate.

Of course, scientific error is more likely when studying complex systems than partial prob lems. That’s why research also entails conscious ly pointing out the residual uncertainty. And this especially applies when decisions have to be made under time pressure and cannot wait until scientists have completely assessed the matter beyond a shadow of a doubt. The climate-change debate is the most recent example of this prob lem. People without scientific socialization, such as decision makers in politics and society, fre quently expect science to deliver unequivocal ev idence and prognoses. They regard uncertainty

as a sign of weakness in research, not of strength. This attitude is rooted in a fundamental miscon ception that has far-reaching consequences. The value of scientific findings is not lessened by the fact that they are only preliminary and not ab solute. Even tentative statements can enable us to take action; we must simply be aware that there is a risk that the data is incorrect. Above all, we must not believe that individual errors are any indication that science has failed either in principle or as an art of survival. The principle of success of the scientific working method is rooted in the fact that our present state of knowledge leaves room for interpreta tion, in which theories and hypotheses can be formulated and empirically verified. This too is inherent to science as a mentality that can en sure our survival on earth acknowledging empirically substantiated hypotheses as a reality that we must face irrespective of our ideological preferences. Nature is the ultimate bench mark for gauging what we believe to know about

the world. In the process of forming and testing hypotheses, knowledge itself undergoes an evo lutionary process of constant improvement through empirical verification. We would be well advised to advance this process and continue developing science as an art of survival for our species. In this way, we can hope that new insights might prevent this great experi ment of our survival on this planet from taking an unfavourable turn.

Jürgen Mlynek , born in 1951, is a physi cist and has been the president of the Helmholtz Associa tion in Berlin, Germany’s largest research organization, since 2005. From 1996 to 2001, he was the vice president of the German Research Foundation ( DFG ). In September 2000, he was appointed president of the Humboldt Univer sität zu Berlin. In addition to numerous scientific awards, Mlynek has been honoured with the German Federal Or der of Merit.

neither god nor devil by volker mosbrugger

»What is man?

What can I know?

What should I do?

What may I hope?«

These four central questions about humans and philosophy, as posed by Immanuel Kant (1724 1804), are as relevant today as ever. They play a decisive role in understanding ourselves and shaping our future. Each person may answer them differently according to their personal background and philosophical, religious and political preferences. Yet there is also a view of modern natural-scientific research which re gards the development of earth and life, includ ing human life, as a systemic evolution. This

view is both comforting and troubling, as it urg es us to exercise modesty and calm.

What is man? From the point of view of natural science, man is a species like any other, a »Darwinian African«, as the anthropologist Volker Sommer puts it, which originated about 200,000 years ago in Africa from an evolution ary line that separated from the modern apes approximately six million years ago. Man is tru ly unique, but this fact is not exclusive, because every biological species can claim a certain de gree of uniqueness. In our anthropocentric view, we might think of ourselves as quite important and successful, but from a biological standpoint, we are no better or worse than any of the two million known animal and plant species. There fore, it is »naturally« neither surprising nor rep rehensible that we, like every other species, have attempted to conquer the earth insofar as we are capable.

What can I know? A lot, but not every thing if we believe evolutionary epistemology. If the human brain developed over the course of a long evolution, we should not be surprised that, like the brains of other animal species, it is

subject to certain (human) limits of understand ing, rendering it unable to completely grasp multidimensional space, the universe or itself, for that matter. Even Baron von Munchhausen, as we know, cannot pull himself out of the swamp by his long braid of hair! The obvious limita tion of our capacity of understanding should incite (natural) science to exercise more humility there’s always enough space for metaphys ics. On the other hand, the humanities and so cial sciences should more intensively examine the evolutionary conditions of our thoughts and actions. Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize winner in Economic Sciences, wrote a wonderful book in 2010 titled The Idea of Justice , which doesn’t mention Charles Darwin or the Theory of Evolution even once. Can we seriously be lieve that our ideas of ethics, aesthetics or justice have nothing to do with our history of develop ment? Isn’t it possible that the magnificent Tü bingen-based project Weltethos might represent the search for the evolutionary roots and commonalities of our moral fabric? What should I do? Helping one’s species to survive in the long term this is the evolu

tionary mission of every species, including Ho mo sapiens. We can derive much from this, but not everything. Obviously the goal is sustaina bility, guaranteeing the basis of life for the fu ture no easy task in view of the major chal lenges that we face: climate change, mass extinc tion, energy shortage and scarcity of natural re sources. This is not merely a matter of maintain ing the status quo, but developing a dynamic evolutionary strategy of sustainability, induced by a dynamically changing planet. Sustainabil ity cannot exist without clever management of the earth system which assesses the long-term and systemic impact of environmental interfer ence.

What may I hope? For everything, ex cept the obviously impossible! That means that all efforts to attain absolute knowledge and es tablish paradise or eternal life on earth are hope less. What we can hope for, though, is that the four-billion-year evolutionary success story of life on earth will continue a little longer with or without humans.

Developing a sustainable future is an enormous task that requires all areas of human thought →

mother in the pantry by noémi kiss

Just recently I gave birth to twins. Having children is what you might call the art of survival. I’ve made up my mind, however, to put the children away. Like two eggs, I’ll store them in the pantry, preserve them in this moment, exactly as I’d like to look back on them years from now. Though, of course, we’re talking about flesh and blood miracles here, for whom a pantry really isn’t an ideal home. What drives my desire isn’t their massive poopy dia pers, nor their nighttime whimpering as the blankets slip off, nor their sudden impulses to start playing at midnight. Nor their fe vers, hungers, fears, anxieties or screams. Nor their need to breastfeed just when I want to get away from them and sprawl out on the rug, dead tired. Nor do I care to hold onto the sight of them yanking out each other’s hair at eight months, nor the moment when the doctor informed me that there’s something off in my little son’s development, that his muscles are weak and he’s lag ging behind his sister. We do special exercises with him now, playing ball, pushing him along on a rolling board and wrapping him in a bedsheet. My husband and I drop down to all fours and pretend we’re circus donkeys strutting from the living room to the dining room. The twins giggle at the show. Apparently laugh ter also helps with their development.

Preserving them, of course, is not really an option. It will be just as well once they’re all grown up, and the frenzy surrounding their premature birth is one thing I definitely won’t be missing. My secret desire for preservation arises first and foremost in reac tion to the atmosphere of this quaint, exotic country where they were conceived. I want to spare them the experience of growing up in a place where anybody would dare put them on the spot for how they came into the world.

My children were conceived in vitro. Just like Jesus, they arrived at Christmas. In their short little history, a tension has been at

play between two metaphysical powers, that of the poet and of the doctor. Not long ago in a newspaper piece he wrote for New Year’s, one of our award-winning, national populist poets wrote that twins conceived by IVF are »unimaginable in the natural world.« At about the same time in the clinic I’d asked the doctor what determines whether or not the embryo attaches to the uter ine wall. His answer: »God.« It seems immaculate conception in vitro is reliant on the imagination of the Lord, and ultimately the doctor and I have no say when it comes to nature. So where does this poet get off calling in vitro fertilization unnatural?

While the poet presents his aphorisms and thinly veiled judg ments (i.e. the older career woman gives birth to her test-tube ba bies), Doctor Joseph readies Mary’s ovaries, stimulating them with fertility drugs and aspirating her eggs once mature. Next the nurse inserts a catheter into the uterus, while the technician si phons the blastocysts, fertilized by armies of strapping lads, out of a petri dish. The rest is up to God.

It looks like the miracle has a lot more to do with biology than with the imagination of our poet. The doctor put it so much more beautifully than the poet. In a city where people up above poke their noses into women’s business on a daily basis and given how tired I am of this patriarchal society, sure, I could rant about it, but no, I think I’d rather do a little research. I’m curious what my fellow mothers think. So I’ve consulted over ten expecting moth ers while at the hospital, on the playground, at the local pediatrician, or during lullaby hour where we go weekly for baby mu sic. Every one of them believes they have experienced a miracle, and however their children were conceived was entirely beside the point.

Has anyone ever wondered whether Mary’s son, Jesus, might be a test-tube baby? The story is the same. The three kings bore wit ness to the birth of the miracle child. In my case, a doula, pedia trician, and wet nurse stood as my witnesses beside the incubator where my son was laid out like a tiny frog in the pediatric inten sive care unit.

Years ago, when I was unable to get pregnant and thought I never would be, I slipped into an online forum for infertile women, curious what strategies they relied on to get over the news. Even as they tried to come to terms with their infertility, they still

prayed that they would one day become mothers. There were those who went to holistic practitioners, fortunetellers and gypsy women, or stuck themselves full of needles, hoping that might help. Within an average of a year or two, the women would dis appear from the forum, and about twenty-five percent of those going to fertility clinics would come away with an infant sooner or later. Many went home from the hospital with two or three kids tucked under their arms. Then there were those who adopt ed that too is a miracle. These women gradually made their way over to the sites for mothers. Without exception, not a single one among them had believed that they’d be able to have a child on their own, and they all said the same exact things: »Something special must have happened, I can’t grasp it,« and »I can’t believe I have a baby.« This state of wonder would hold out until one feverish night when the baby’s incessant scream came shattering in. One foggy grey winter’s day, like today, after my sick and hungry babies had been howling all day, I curled up on the sofa in utter desperation and exhaustion and comforted my self by looking at my first sonogram. Wrinkled and milk-stained, I carry it around in my pocket. Come to think of it, it’s that image that belongs in the pantry.

There are days when I’d happily pop my children right back into my stomach. In part because they were born too soon and it’s painfully obvious that my son needed more time swaying about in the womb. In part because the world crams them full of so much idiocy. If they don’t fit back into my womb, then I’ll hide them in the pantry and back into the petri dish. Since it’s sure to be dark in there, we’ll use a flashlight to read together, and we’ll choose a story that speaks to our very own miracle.

Noémi Kiss , born in Gödöllö, Hungary in 1974, studied Hungarian Stud ies, Comparative Literature and Sociology, and also studied for a time in Ger many. She has a PhD in Literary Studies and has published numerous short sto ries, essays and critiques in German and Hungarian. Kiss has been a lecturer for Comparative Literary Studies at the Hungarian University of Miskolc since 2000. Her most recent publication in German, Was geschah, während wir schliefen. Erzählungen [What Happened While We Were Sleeping. Stories] was published by Mattes und Seitz, Berlin, in 2009. She is currently working on a compilation of short stories titled Verfallene Schmuc k dose. Reisen in den Osten [Crumbling Jewelry Box. Jour neys into the East], slated for publication in 2012. Translated from the Hungarian by Rachel Miller

and action. Modern scientific research urges us to take up the task with an evolutionary self-im age which regards humans for what they are the product of a long evolution, neither good nor evil, neither godlike nor devil-like, neither omnipotent nor powerless. We can and must ac tively shape our future and our earth. And to this end, we need courage and humility.

Volker Mosbrugger , born in Constance in 1953, is a paleobotanist and paleoclimatologist. He is the general director of the Senckenberg Nature Research Society in Frankfurt/Main. He also works at the GoetheUniversität in Frankfurt as a professor of Geosciences. He has been the scientific coordinator of the Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre in Frankfurt since 2008. In 1998 Mosbrugger received the Leibniz Prize by the German Research Foundation ( DFG ).

slow thinking by dorota masłowska

Being the mother of a 6 -year-old, I have of necessity been keep ing up with the latest offerings from the Disney and Pixar film empires. As someone who, at the age of 6, played with chestnuts and listened to fairy tales on records that barely spun, I usually leave the cinema with my hair a mess, and drooling far more than the 6 -year-old, whose attitude to the increasingly ominous perfection and monumentality of those pictures is sympathetic, but tinted with nonchalance, as is the case when you take some thing for granted.

These extremely colourful films, viewed in 3-D, at extreme vol umes, intensified to the max visually and sonically, attain a para doxical degree of reality; they are more real than the real. Hidden somewhere deep inside these ever more perfect visions are vague excuses for plots sketchy and sidelined by the technical excess a good guy, a bad guy, and a fall-guy, drawn inexorably to wards freshly-discarded banana peels. Drifting around the work like a lone protein molecule in a huge Haribo jellybean is the to ken moral: we should respect animals and nature because they’re threatened; it’s not worth chasing after money because what mat ters most in life is friendship, etc. All this pays lip service to the semblance of a fairy-tale plot transformed here into a set of breathtaking images with the momentum of a rollercoaster. All that’s missing is a man-made wind tearing the hair off your head. I’d actually welcome that. It would save me the effort of pulling out my own hair while musing on the imminent cultural apoca lypse.

If the arms race between cartoon empires, to which we are expos ing our children, is really the contemporary equivalent of telling or reading them stories, then I suspect that Bruno Bettelheim is turning in his grave. Fairytales exploring the dark side of human nature, which took children into the gloomy realms of the world and trained them to find flashes of good in the darkness, were originally a vaccine of sorts, preparing young people for life on Planet Earth, which, for all its shades of pink, by no means lacks colours less rosy. While the fairytales of today, where the story is just an excuse to generate dazzling visions, are about as nutri tious as a merry-go-round ride, or being spun in a tumble-drier. Not that I want to be a 27-year-old battleaxe wagging her as-yetunarthritic finger at the world for not being what it once was, and claiming that all kids should go back to playing with branches, unexploded munitions and cats, and then spend their evenings reading Andersen (on their own!), particularly his picturesque descriptions of little girls in their death-throes, murders and planting human skulls in flowerpots. Nonetheless, I’d take the conclusion a step further: the current development of visual and communications technology is definitely directed against classic mind-skills such as story-telling.

With the increasing popularity of various devices designed to record reality, such as cameras, digicams and cellphones, stories are losing their raison d’être at a terrifying rate. We hope that pho tos and films will tell others, or maybe even ourselves, about our holidays. We blithely delegate our ability to remember and clas

sify facts to computer hard drives. What’s more, we casually en trust them with the task of being as such. In exchange, we take upon ourselves the function of compulsive recording. I wonder when it was that I stopped going to see concerts. Con certs are meant to be gatherings of spontaneous communities coming together to listen to live music. I don’t mean ecstatic spir itual bonding, communal nirvanas, or tearing off one another’s clothes in ecstasy. The ‘60s generation did all that even before people discovered just how bad drugs are. What I have in mind is the simple pleasure of listening to live music together. And I think my ability to feel that pleasure ended when my view of the stage started being blocked by hundreds of cellphones thrust av idly in the air, as if it were possible to seize and own the moment by recording it on your phone. And then there’s that strange dis connect between total involvement in the process of recording and the consequently total lack of commitment to the process of being. As if being itself were too ordinary, too bland and unprof itable, as if it were wasteful. Recording, registering, storing, ac quiring the moment I think that »to have being« would be the appropriate verb form here, if only it made any sense. What does all of this have to do with stories? A concert that 90% of its audi ence have recorded is not ever likely to be talked and thought about or recalled, because everyone will »have« it. We do not re alize that entrusting our memory to the hard drives of comput ers and phones, compulsively photographing every moment, as if we wanted to take it home with us to relive in an unspecified future, seriously impairs our ability to be, feel, think and com municate.

So far, we’re getting along somehow. We keep texting and even mailing, but even this communication is mutating, getting shorter, changing into code. We do still read »Like« on Facebook be fore we click something, and still type to log into our accounts. We still have conversations, though they tend not to address ab stract issues, but boil down to exchanges of bare facts: the who, where and when.

But, given the tendency of unused organs to atrophy, we can’t re ally tell how long it will take the brain areas responsible for generating and taking in stories to die out. As the basic manifesta tion of mental slow food, or maybe slow thought, stories should be protected and kept in the cultural pantry. Naturally, without un due thinking, everything takes place much faster and perhaps more painlessly. We attain greater speeds, but we don’t know how much we’re paying for them, and in what currency.

Dorota Masłowska born in Wejherowo, Poland in 1983, wrote her first novel Schneeweiss und Russenrot [Snow White and Russian Red] at the age of 18. The book became an overnight sensation in Poland and was awarded the Polityka Prize and the Nike Award . Her most recent novel in German, Die Reiherkönigin. Ein Rap , [The Queen’s Pea cock], translated by Olaf Kühl, was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Co logne, in 2007. In recent years Masłowska has been devoting most of her time to writing plays. The Schaubühne Berlin produced the world premiere of her play Wir kommen gut klar mit uns [We Get on Alright Together] in 2009 Translated from the Polish by Artur Zapalowski

Lagunillas, Cajón del Maipo, Chile

20 kg wheat flour, 10 kg powdered milk

10 kg wheat meal / oatmeal

5 kg corn, linseed, beans

5 kg pasta, rice sugar, honey, jam salt spices (pepper)

cilantro, oregano and peppermint grow right outside. Yerba Buena, bay leaves, etc. dried vegetables and mushrooms dried fruit herbal tea

cured-meat sausages round of beef, marinated until its weight increases by 30 %, then pressed into a wooden frame and matured 1–2 months (August, Sept. ideal)

dried sausages pork bratwurst made with beet juice to give the dried sausages a naturally dark-red colour

Stimulants tobacco, red wine beer * (works wonders as a sedative in extreme situations) ONLY FOR ADULTS

Games and cartoons for kids films children’s games (important: no missing game pieces) movies, etc.

Medicine pain relievers for children and adults anti-inflammatory medicine (herbal tea Boldo) oximeter device to measure one’s pulse and oxygen saturation.

*

Mountain lodge, Lagunillas, Cajón des Maipo, Chile, December 2010 * In extreme situations, you should eat and drink what you’re used to.

Pantry Refugio Suizo

ever yone into the lifeboats!

In terms of world history, there is nothing more important than securing the future of our civilization. Although we know that an environmental-cultural rev olution is necessary, we have difficulty taking action. On the occasion of the Über Lebenskunst festival from 17 to 21 August 2011 a project initiated by the Federal Cultural Foundation in cooperation with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt the Suhrkamp Verlag will publish the anthology Über Lebenskunst. Initiative for Culture and Sustainability , edited by Susanne Stemmler and Katharina Narbutovicˇ. The editors asked fifteen writers from Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, Oceania and North and South America to offer their visions of the future from a cosmopolitan point of view and thus make the Platonic and Aristotelian »art of living« correspond to the needs and challenges of the 21 st century. The anthology includes texts by María Sonia Christoff (Argentina), Louis-Philippe Dalembert (Haiti), Sema Kaygusuz (Turkey), Michel Serres (France), Vladimir Sorokin (Russia), Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Kenya), Abdourahman Waberi (Djibuti), Alexis Wright (Australia) and Liao Yiwu (Chi na). The following is the piece by Michel Serres.

by michel serres

A little while ago, I published a book in Paris entitled The World War. It is a survival treaty, as my friends in Berlin have requested.

growing violence

The book begins with a description of the very dynamics of vio lence. Whether it erupts in public squares, on the playing field or in a café where a few drunken sailors start squabbling, any alter cation begins with a minor, sometimes almost inexistent event that attracts more and more belligerent participants and grows so fast that its development can no longer be stopped. For who has the power to do so?

On the playing field, a blast from the referee’s whistle can suffice to stop an unauthorized clash. At the market place, the police try to do likewise without using their weapons, and in the café, the military police called by the bar owner handcuff the brawlers. What stops violence? The answer: legitimate violence, or in other words, further violence used lawfully. This is why violence should not be confused with war; the latter is established after a prior declaration. And an armistice followed by a peace treaty both lawful events bring hostilities to an end.

history

The question of why violence grows incessantly and whether or not it can be stopped has been asked since time immemorial. Most of the cultures I know, whether they are Hindu, Hebrew, or Egyptian, tell a fairly consistent story, that of the Flood. The flood is a material representation of human violence, and rises so

high that it destroys the world and totally drowns all humanity. As for the Bible , it speaks of not one, but two such floods. The second portrays Noah, a patriarch who, by building an Ark, saves himself, his children and two of each animal from universal de struction. But the first flood occurred without any such rescue or any remaining life; the very first lines of Genesis say that only the Spirit of God is present above the waters. Visibly, nothing survived this primordial flood, this total eradication. At the very least, an all-powerful deity was needed to recreate the world and its inhabitants.

a tale of eradication

More recently, a widely appreciated novel by Agatha Christie en titled And Then There Were None tells a similar story. Bad storms temporarily confine ten people to an island we might as well call it a microcosm, a scaled-down equivalent of our world and our society. When a respite in the storm finally al lows witnesses to arrive on the coast of this isle, it is to see that not a single survivor remains, and that the group have killed each other to the last man. This drama could, and must have been played out in hundreds of civilizations, and this is precisely why we have so very few traces of them. Do we know how our Neanderthal ancestors disappeared?

modernity

This risk of our species eradicating itself is as old as the hills, so old that it affects the very origins of humanity. Recently, it sud denly became closer, in two different ways.

We have been living with a widespread anxiety that humanity could very well eradicate itself ever since we invented and then used the nuclear bomb, a weapon of mass destruction, or in other words, since the Manhattan Project, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And thus we come to the question, asked here and now, of our survival.

The same question arises for the second time. Since our realisa tion that industrial techniques and the economy are putting the world in danger, we have lived with a similarly widespread fear that future generations will have great difficulty surviving on the planet we will have left for them.

We have two major risks: the first is purely collective and depend ant on our own violence; the second is related to our interven tion, violent in itself, in the objective world.

the war

I illustrated above that law alone is capable of limiting violence. Yet war, as experienced and waged in our history over thousands of years, is a legal institution. As I have already said, it is officially declared by towns, states or nations, and it ceases, I repeat, by equally official signatures which decide on the end of hostilities.

In his book On War , Karl von Clausewitz states that violence increases to an extreme level during combat. The number of deaths over the past centuries has indeed shown a constant in crease, even if we take world demographic growth into considera tion. Even so, war remains a legal institution that in some way prevents unlimited violence from paving the way to eradication.

Yet in recent years we have experienced the end of that particular type of war. There are several reasons for this, the main one being that a hyper-power’s monopolization of the most efficient weap ons makes it impossible for symmetrical conflicts to be fought with more or less equivalent forces. Secondly, despite this une qual weaponry, this power cannot impose its will on small and weak nations. Is this the end of war? Probably.

The end of these wars is not good news, as along with them disap pears the official legislation that controlled the growing dynam ics of our violence. Henceforth deprived of the law that con tained it, this violence, which we could now describe as terrorist, has resumed its growth. The fear of the Flood and eradication is back amongst us again.

How can it be stopped? Amid all these threats, how can we imagine survival?

the sailors fight on board

Now I return to our fighting sailors, but this time they are no longer in a bar at the port, far from the storms on the open sea, but aboard their own boat. The mechanics, for example, might hate the boatswains and attack them. As the increasing violence of battle cannot be stopped, the crew might well continue fight ing to the last man.

Agatha Christie’s story reappears, except this time on board a boat abandoned to the sea swell rather than on an island, and in the form of an event at sea with no land in sight. Again, we have the microcosm, a representation of our planet. But aboard this boat-planet abandoned in space, there is no shore in sight, no port, no refuge, no safe haven.

red alert

A battle to the death rages on board.

Suddenly, a cry arises from within the mass of injured sailors, singled out from the background noise of reciprocal hatred and fighting. The sailors hear the hull crack. The side splits open, fore and aft, and seawater surges through the hull below the waterline of the boat, drowning the engines and killing some of the fight ing men. This impact, audible to all despite their rage, is followed by a sinister call that every one of them recognizes deep down inside, even without ever having heard it before. The loud ripping noise is followed by a collective screaming of: everyone into the

lifeboats! Shipwreck imminent.

What will the fighters on each side decide to do next? The odds are a thousand to one that they will immediately stop quarrel ling, and rush to attempt to plug the hole in the hull. That even

in their mutual hatred, they will unite their forces to hold back this common danger, this major danger, this total death. Stop violence? Yes. Peace? Yes. The best news yet.

the world war

The book ends with this call, which I have called The World War . This term is generally used to describe two of the major wars experienced in the despicable 20th century, when the alleg edly most knowledgeable and cultivated nations committed hei nous crimes, leading to more than one hundred thousand deaths. But my book gives this term a whole new meaning: the war against the world. It is certainly not a conflict between mankind, but rather a conflict with the world. Nor is it the atro cious game for two that history named »war«, but a new game for three players, where right in the middle of our unrepentant hos tilities, an unexpected partner steps in the planet itself. We are on board. Our vessel is alone in space, with no port or quay for safe mooring. The crew of this boat are as disparate as the mechanics and boatswains, and is made up of Greeks and Per sians, Romans and Gauls, Mongolians, Chinese and Europeans, English, Hindu and Aborigines, Germans and French … The crew has persistently I don’t know why, maybe for childish or animal instincts of domination persistently, I say, engaged in constantly lethal battles without any concern for the wounds inflicted on its vessel, the third partner. Yet these wounds can be so deep that the skiff can henceforth be put in danger, and consequently the entire crew, regardless of their differences. The breach in the hull has put all the sailors on the same side.

hence, the second meaning of the world war takes over from the first. Incommensurable with the dangers of previous wars, which were all local, partial and left hope for remaining life as in Noah’s Flood, the perilous situation now puts the entire crew in mortal danger. So, the eradication of the human race rises like a black sun over our horizon. From this moment onward, there will be neither winners nor losers; everyone will lose. No more Ark, no more Noah. Everybody will lose his habitat and life, just like in the first few days of Genesis , when the Holy Spirit floated above the sur face of the water.

World War, with the meaning I give this term, has just surpassed World War in its usual sense.

the good news

The story of this tragic horizon is most certainly the best we can tell our children. No, I got it wrong we and our ancestors are the ones who were just children, playing the cruel game of fight ing one another, without pity or purpose other than an extremely

animalistic desire for dominance. Without thinking, we were al so playing, just as stupidly, at making war on the world. New wisdom: If we do not immediately bring to an end this chapter of history which is as deadly as it is stupid, we are in dan ger of eradication. And it is no longer our fragile and conven tional law that will stop us fighting, but rather the final shout be fore the boat sinks: everyone into the lifeboats!

This is the best possible call. I almost said »the best ever in histo ry«! Two results will come of this.

Firstly, peace. Maybe even perpetual, as a long-term halt in fighting will be needed in order to associate enough energy for a lengthy task, i.e. repairing the vessel we all share.

Secondly, a new history, during which different techniques, an other economy, another law, different politics could be thought up which would all in turn sign a peace treaty, a natural contract with the world.

Two elements of survival.

Michel Serres , born in Agen, France in 1930, is a French scientific phi losopher and member of the Académie Française. A central premise of his work is the need for a new contract between humans and nature. His most recent book in German Das eigen tliche Übel [Le mal propre: polluer pour s‘approprier?] was published by the Merve Verlag, Berlin in 2009. Translated from the French by Joanna Lignot

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the first earth

The Federal Cultural Foundation is funding a multi-year project by the writer Raoul Schrott. His goal is to identify the important places of world history and human history and narratively circumscribe these sites, from which we excavate our knowledge. His experiences and discoveries during his travels will become the basis of a three-volume epic tale, titled The First Earth.

For the past twenty years a kind of existential curiosity has drawn me to a whole range of disciplines in the sciences and humanities.

Before I die I want to know why the world around me has become what it is. Not being religious, I have only scientific facts to go by.

To bring these closer, however, I need to link them to something real, to travel to those sites which though largely unknown evidence the different stages of our recent genesis. But even impres sions we gain on location cannot be grasped unless they are put into words, or until they are given a poetic form in short, until their story is told.

So instead of going on a pilgrimage to Mt. Sinai, my own journey has taken me down the rivers of the Canadian Arctic in a canoe. It was an expedition to the oldest rocks yet discovered the remains of a continent which, astonishingly, dates from a period not long af

by raoul schrott

ter our planet came into existence. Half starved after our canoe had capsized in rapids and the river had swept away all our equipment, driven to distraction by mosquitoes, my two companions and I had only stories to pit against the hunger pangs. We talked of our desti nation, of what the geologists had said about it as a place where the earth had begun. To actually handle a fragment of that early earth, weighing in one’s hand a 4.2 billion year-old lump of gray gneiss, rendered the idea of origin suddenly palpable: a rock as auratic as a reliquary. Instead of the biblical story of a world created in seven days, the history of creation had become something quite tactile, replacing conventional notions of transcendence by the equally boundless timelines of geology. An inkling of something entirely other, predating memory and even history, had entered the here and now part of our journey to one of the edges of civilization.

[Raoul Schrott]

«

Travelling late one night by car from Saarbrücken to Mainz, by taxi next morning to the train station, thence to the airport; in Calgary, under posters warning of the dangers of West Nile Fever, through customs and immigration to catch a plane to Edmon ton, where we land in a hotel room in which, according to the re ceptionist, Leonard Cohen wrote his Sisters of Mercy Then up again far too early to catch a bus for the next plane to the North Western Territories, in which the stewardess hands out a local newspaper with a B & B address which Norbert and I, when we finally reach Yellowknife that afternoon, repeat to the taxi driver, who mumbles that the place has already closed down be cause it belonged to a German terrorist who has just been de ported and was, at that very instant, on board a plane bound for Germany. And it was as if every new time zone implied a com pletely different frame, each story giving way to the next, all un hinged in time and space, a journey with no beginning, arrivals without end.

Two hours later found us sitting in the Air Tindi office, while they calculated the price of our canoe and camping equipment and the fuel costs of the seaplane due to drop us off shortly be fore 8 o’clock the following evening some 350 km further north.

Wouter Bleeker, the Canadian geologist with whom I had ex changed emails, had kept his word and faxed the coordinates of our destination, but there was no sign of our appointed guide. Instead, while we were waiting, staring at a map on the wall where distances were being measured out with a piece of red string, an Inuit in a baseball cap walked in through the door. He had huge spectacles and a moustache like a walrus. He lacked most of his upper teeth, and a grin split his face from ear to ear. He had only come in for a coffee, but soon removed his parka and joined us to study the map. No, he had never been there, but he knew the area well, and yes, perhaps he was interested, and maybe he did have time. His name was Ben. Who we were? A doctor, and a writer. Uh-huh?

The sense of having arrived somewhere began to dawn on us when we left for a stroll. The sun hung over the Great Slave Lake, which stretched all the way to the horizon, while Yellowknife it self was a silhouette with three tower blocks, the façade of a Po temkin village built by gold and diamond corporations. Its pre fabricated buildings, wooden shacks and corrugated-iron barrel roofs gave the air of a winter residence in a summer of rocks, birches and water, with a downtown so dead that children played marbles on the tarmac roads. The town owed its name to fur-

traders who had found Indians with copper knives there, and with its suppliers, grocery stores and a well-stocked map shop it had retained the makeshift character of an outpost.

The river we intended to paddle down was not entered in the maps we had seen in Europe. The country between the large lakes of the interior and the polar sea had looked like a printing error grey interstices lacking in contour and filled with a lightblue moiré. The labelling Coppermine River , Pros perous and Trapper Lake was reminiscent of prospect ing days. Place names like Redrock Lake , Scented Grass Hills or Whitewolf tended to be generic, while other names Mystery , Desperation or Bliss Lake gave us little idea of the landscape. With our freshly purchased, black-and-white 1: 50k map and the geological charts all spread out in front of us in the B & B , however, we began to read the land scape through a language of abstract orange, red and brown spac es. Numbers became gradients and heights above sea level, and we translated symbols into marshes, forests and rapids, assessing how far we could navigate downstream, pinpointing a drop-off point for the plane, and the pick-up location for the end of the week. For the first time, spread across this table, we saw the black

line that was the Acasta River, tracing its lower reaches to the source, then back again via sinkholes, rifts and chains of lakes to the place where the coordinates crossed on our island destina tion.

My collection of articles about the earth’s most ancient rock for mations went back many years. It was travelling which had first inspired my interest in geology. I had wanted to visit foreign plac es and peoples, but it was only by developing my interest in both that they had become more than a backdrop. To climb a moun tain or cross wastes of ice, sand or water, just because they are there, as Hillary had proposed, may be enough in itself; without knowl edge of what has caused the formations, however, such expedi tions are naught but ventures in blindness and ignorance. To cross a desert should also mean to pace out the passage of time a scale of planetary history on which our present is merely a pro visional phase. Perhaps this is the reason why every journey is driven by a longing to reach a place which because it lies on the other side of the world somehow seems outside time and space a utopia, it is true, but then each passing century, with its various visions of an El Dorado or a Shangri La, had promised us just such a paradise. If one pursues such myths, on the other hand, one finds the longings they express are merely an attempt to square the foreign with the familiar, and to discover their com mon and humanly conceivable origin, a point to which every thing, including one’s own life, can be traced back. What we are searching for is the legacy of that origin, whatever has survived the ravages of time the first earth. This was what I had read about, with its dates and sites: Isua, to the northeast of Nuuk, at the edge of the Greenland ice-sheet, a weather-worn range of 3 8 billon year-old primary sediment; the Acastagneiss in Canada’s Precambrian Shield; and the Mount Narryer zircons of Western Australia, dated at 4 4 billion years old. Deposited in much younger rocks and visible only under the microscope, these crystals bore witness to a crust which had disappeared long ago. The Acasta gneiss, however, had survived intact. To hold a piece of it in one’s hands, to feel its weight, was as if we could touch some thing which had never changed, something real to set against time’s unreality the oldest rock.

The night is short. There is so much light, the air going to one’s head, that strange harshness above a lake which seems only to have one shore. After several such sleepless nights you are left with a constant pressure behind the brow, making it hard to breathe, as if you were 4,000 feet above sealevel. We make our fi nal purchases and pack up the equipment, leaving, at the B & B , details of our planned return. While the mechanics stow our stuff in the Twin Otter, strapping our canoe to one of the floats, we rehearse our route with the pilot. We ask him to drop us off 20 km north of our island, and to pick us up at Little Crapaud Lake, further to the south.

Seen from the air, the shield, carved by rifts and scraped flat by glaciers, gives the appearance of a slowly submerging continent, humps of naked rock running like the backs of whales between connecting lakes, the green of the taiga with its scurfy patches of woodland. It is practically impossible to make out rivers, dirt tracks or roofs. Only once do we catch sight of landing strips near an abandoned mine, but wherever we look melt-water gleams in the sunlight, with a covering of ice here and there. The closer we get to the Arctic Circle, the denser the bands of smoke wafting from the burning forests on the Alaska border, some hundred kilometres away. I compare the map with the landscape and the landscape with the map, trying to keep track, and when, about an hour later, I see the Little Crapaud Lake appear before us, I am seized by a curious sense of excitement. There is the Acasta, flow ing into the lake, and it is here our route will begin. The pilot swings round, keeping the blue-black ribbon with its loops and bows beneath us. At one point it winds through a large swamp, the stream broadening into the white ribs of a rapid. I suddenly catch sight of the island in the middle of the lake and point there is something down there, a metallic sheen, and next to it something red that looks like tents. We gradually descend and land without feeling the impact, gliding towards a line of coni fers on a beach, while a bald eagle soars into the sky. The pilot tells us he has been here before; he once brought archaeologists to this place.

When I point the needle on my 24h-watch dial towards the sun I can read off the points of the compass, whatever the time of day. It is midnight, and the midsummer sun is a disc just above the

horizon, red through the smoke. Before we have had time to un load, a swarm of mosquitoes descends on us. Below the moraine where we are standing, a bar of sand leads to a narrow ford, cov ered in animal tracks: wolves, caribou, moose and a bear, says Ben. What kind of bear? Grizzly ... No need to be frightened of them when they see there are three of us they’ll leave us alone. It’s the lone black bears that get nasty. If they approach you, don’t look them in the eye. Just lie down real slow on your stomach and clasp your hands at the back of your neck. In case anything happens to me, you’d better know how to work the gun. He picks up a pump gun from the bundles on the beach and explains the mechanics. Six cartridges are all you’ve got. Save the last till he’s five steps away it’ll tear a hole in him as big as a man’s head. He makes Norbert and me practise, the dry click of the firing pin shooting at a tree. Then he loads the gun. We take aim over the lake. In the perfect stillness the report is so loud it sounds as if the world had been turned upside down, as if time had stood still at last, or at least slowed down to a human speed.

We are tired enough to sleep in this daylight. We wake a couple of hours later to the clatter of pots and pans. Norbert takes the rod, casts out from the ford and reels in. At first it looks as if his lure has got snagged, but then there’s a trout on the end, as big as a man’s arm. He takes it off, casts out again and immediately hooks another, which he proceeds to pull out of the peaty water. His third cast is equally lucky. We stand around grinning; his first attempt at angling, and now this fisherman’s tale, which of course nobody back home is going to believe. While Ben is frying the fish, we go for a walk, climbing down through the bushes to a dell at the back. Not a sign of the dig the pilot mentioned. Only later do I read that the remains of the oldest known settlement were discovered here, people who had come across the Bering Strait, leaving the charcoal remains of their camp fires, and arrowheads.

We stow our stuff in the canoe and push off, keeping close to the riverbank to begin with as we work our way downstream. We are lying low in the water, with barely a hand’s breadth freeboard, and it takes us a while before we get into a proper rhythm and manage to hold course. Lone black spruces jut out between the rocks, their branches full of young thin twigs that freeze in win ter. Where they stop, the taiga gives way to tundra, a scrubland of dwarf willow, moss and bog. We break our journey on an is land. Yellow reindeer lichen covers the larger rocks, small shrubs, and between them tiny white flowers. Perhaps it was from them that the river took its name, Acasta, one of the Ocean’s daughters, whom Apollo turned into a flower after her death. Only these are not acanthuses, but white dryads.

The sun is scorching. There’s a smell of ozone, and the plastic lifejackets are hot to the touch. We feel dehydrated by the lake wind. Again and again, we scoop up water in our hands; it tastes sweet, but our mouths stay dry. At the first rapid Ben stays in the boat, as does Norbert, who has never particularly liked the idea of white-water canoeing. But the lake was barely deeper than two metres anywhere, and the overflow to the next lake is shallow, so that they end up pushing and dragging and punting the canoe across the gravel bed. Meanwhile, crossing the ridge of a hill, I find circular runnels and a litter of bleached moose antlers; it must be the remains of a camp, but hard to say how many sum mers have passed since it was last used. We are making good progress.

The next rapids are not marked on the map, but their roar can be heard in the distance as we approach. We ride them to an S -bend where the river narrows, white water rushing over rocks until the stream forks at a huge boulder. It is my turn to kneel in the bow. It all looked harmless enough from the bank, but the gradient makes it almost impossible to steer the canoe. Paddle harder! Ben screams behind me. With all my might I thrust the paddle into the spray, pushing us away from larger obstacles while he backpaddles. Everything accelerates; I can barely keep up, and taking the second bend we hit a rock in white water; the canoe tilts. In stinctively I grab the edge ... my mistake; we start to capsize, and a broad stream of freezing water pours over the gunwales. The first of our packs is washed away; the bow is full of water. I jump onto the rock and start hauling the boat up. Let go! yells Ben, so I give it a shove and stand there watching. Entirely submerged, the canoe floats down towards the mouth of the river, with Ben helpless, up to his neck in water, our stuff drifting away to the right and left the scene might almost have been funny, then

everything floats out of sight. I can’t reach the bank on the right, unable hold my footing against the press of water. On the other side, the stream surges against my chest. At first I can’t find a place to climb onto the bank, and for several long minutes I skirt the undergrowth to find a way up.

Norbert stands there pointing, but I can see neither Ben nor the canoe, only our bundles of stuff fanning out with the current in to the middle of the lake. I wade over and look. Ben has hung the canoe upside down between two trees. Soaked to the skin, we sit down to get our breath back. Phew! Ben exclaimed. I thought my last hour had come: I can’t swim ... He reaches for the cigarettes in his breast pocket, but they are soaked too. Norbert shows no sign of irritation, for which I am grateful. Get up! he says only, We’ve got to go look for our stuff. There is no sign of it on the shore. We still have two oars. I dive, keeping parallel to the bank, but can see nothing in the peaty water. I am shivering with cold, when chance brings my foot into contact with Norbert’s rucksack. We spread everything inside it out to dry: a sleeping bag, a rain shel ter, pullover, trousers, washing bag. Apart from that, all we have left are the clothes we are wearing and the stuff in our pockets. I have an All-Weather Field Book, a pencil and a Swiss army knife, while Ben still has his cigarette lighter. Our food and cooking utensils, the gun, camera, tents and even the fishing rod all are lost, the GPS too, and my watch. Even worse, we have lost our mosquito repellent. Soaked and exhausted as we are, it is only now that we notice we are under attack, stung though our damp clothes. We manage to get a fire going and sit for a while in the smoke a choice between coughing and scratching.

We don’t bear up to either for long. In what would otherwise be nighttime we put out again in the canoe, finding the mosquitoes easier to put up with on board, searching once again for our lost baggage, finding only the bag with the nylon transport rope and one of Ben’s fishing lines. But the worst is losing our maps. All we can do now to get further south is follow the shoreline of every bay in search of the next overflow. We take turns paddling. Ben makes a lure out of a piece of bright plastic and a safety pin from the sewing kit Norbert has brought from our Edmonton hotel. When we do find a rapid, we decide to carry the canoe on our backs, only to find that there is no way through and we have to turn back. It won’t be the last time.

The wind, from southwest or west, is against us, and tastes of smoke. Ben converses with the fish: Come, fishy, fishy! I can taste you, fishy, fishy ... You got to be crazy about my hook come, fishy, fishy! We catch nothing. Waves run across the bow, then one of the lakes tapers and becomes a river. We climb a hill, the highest ground far and wide, and survey the scene. Before us is the river meandering through the brown and green of the marshland, broken only by the brushstrokes of black spruces seen from the distance an almost bucolic landscape. Later, we notice a cou ple of swans swimming downstream, keeping each other at a short distance. Whenever we get too close to the male, it trumpets a warning cry, and, with its outsized webbed feet and great wings, flaps and flutters over to the female, landing beside her in a rush of feathers. We disturb it, and the same happens, over and over again, an unlikely thing of beauty in this wilderness. A cloud of tiny flies suddenly descends on us as we enter the next bend of the river; a motion of my hand leaves a pale swathe through their black pelt on the lifebelt of the man in front of me.

In the evening we stretch out in front of the fire, which flares up when we feed it with the resinous bilberry scrub. We construct a den of willow twigs, weaving them to a barrier to contain the smoke and protect us from mosquitoes. The moon has risen and now hangs just a few handbreadths away from the sun. Actually you looked to me like typical city slickers, says Ben drily, but ... what’s with them stones, anyhow? They are the beginning of everything. I begin, hesitate, then continue: Where we’re lying now, there was nothing at all for nine billion years. Sure, there were stars, but there was nothing solid but soot particles, like the ones we smell here all day long. That is until the fog started to thicken, about four billion years ago. Say we still had an orange, I say, by way of an example. If we think of that as the sun, which came out of all that, then the earth would be no bigger than a grain of sand ten paces away no, than that spark over there near the canoe. Wow! You sound like someone on Discovery Channel, says Ben. I was with these guys from MIT up in the ice, and they were looking for meteorites as old as the solar system, older than those rocks you’re going to see tomor row. Yes, but they’re just dross, I interrupt. As if your rocks were

anything else. I know, but it’s all about those ten paces which have made them into our Earth. It is only that distance that turns water without which there would be no life into a fluid. That still don’t mean there are any fish, counters Ben, laughing, but go on with the story. I list the conditions of life, at least as far as I can remember them. If, before it got its crust, Earth hadn’t collided with a protoplanet called Theia, which created the moon, there would be nei ther day nor night, only months of light and dark. It was only be cause of its impact that Earth’s rotation accelerated, making its temperatures less extreme. We owe our seasons to that collision’s skewing of Earth’s axis. The impact also increased the Earth’s mass, which in turn made its magnetic field strong enough to deflect solar winds, which would otherwise have destroyed the ozone layer, nipping all life in the bud. If, if, if, Ben interjects, that’s just what goes through my mind, too, when I hammer away at these rocks. Me, I’m hoping for a vein of gold. We gaze into the fire. What about you, Ben asks, turning to Norbert. Do you believe in God? Norbert shrugs his shoulders, replies: Whether God or rocks, it’s all the same thing. But what about you are you a be liever? This is the question Ben has obviously been waiting for. Right now, what I want to believe in is your non-existent orange. With a bit of luck we’ll be meeting your geologist friends tomorrow. We’ll get something to eat off them …

Washing, we realize we’ve been stung literally from head to toe, with coin-sized blotches even on the soles of our feet. We paddle out from the shore, our bodies stiff. A pale speck on the slopes above, a white wolf, follows us downriver to the next lake. One of the spits jutting into the lake turns out to be the tip of the name less island we are looking for. The metallic sheen we had noticed from the plane is a round Nissan hut in a bay that ends in the humped back of a hill. The door is barricaded with iron bars, but not locked. On a plywood panel above the entrance Wouter Bleeker has written in big letters: ACASTA CITY HALL — FOUND ED 4 GA . Inside we find foam mattresses, chairs, tables, all you need for a summer’s sojourn, including a barbecue, dozens of cans of mosquito repellent, thank God. But there is nothing to eat no fishing rod, not a single can of food, not even a biscuit maybe because of the bears. No sign of the geologists, either, and what, from the air, had looked like tents, are in fact only empty kerosene barrels. We are on our own. A path along the hill side where the rocks have been cleaned of lichen with wire brushes to expose their stratification leads through stunted spruces to a bare cliff. We climb down rubble to the water’s edge, where we discover boreholes, fuses and detonating caps: this is the rock-fall, dated at 4 03 billion years old. The sharp-edged coarse splinters and the boulders, which need two to lift them, have the greyness of crude pencil-shading on paper. Permeated by white flecks, they reveal an occasional thin red vein, or a line of jet-black crystals, which crumble beneath the fingers. The gneiss itself looks so plain it would hardly have merited a second glance, were it not for the significance we attribute to it because of what we know the only thing it helps us grasp are our own theories about a first earth. And yet holding it in my hand while I sit at the table writing this, I find myself trying to scratch something out of it with my thumbnail. I clasp it fast in my hand, as if the pres sure could reaffirm its reality.

Our hunger burrows deeper. We paddle through standing water in the hope of finding a current where fish might be, eventually hooking a whitefish, which we hoist into the canoe with the ut most trepidation, fearing it could drop off our bent safety pin. On the way back to the island we stop at an offshore ridge, which, like the previous rocks, has been cleaned from end to end by the geologists, laid bare bit by bit, and marked with numbered stones whose meaning we are unable to elicit. But what we do see are in numerable lines, the Earth’s musical score, with the lines drawn by time itself, which remain empty until a wader inserts the notes c, f and g, echoing in the blue sky.

I play with a lump of the rock in front of the hut, trying to imag ine what the first earth was like, a shimmering white-hot surface instead of this lake viscous magma slowly hardening after the initial impact of the comet and the nuclear radiation, exuding the seething water without which no stone can come into being water which penetrates the vitreous clefts of the solidified ba salt, changing its consistency as it cools, while the emitted steam falls from the sky as boiling rain. After a mere 200 million years an ocean has gathered, into which the basalt sinks, falling deeper into the Earth, where it liquefies. This, in turn, causes it to float back to the surface, turning to gneiss as it rises, light enough in

the sea to form an island, to which other gneiss layers attach themselves, in time becoming a landmass hundreds of square kilometres in size. All this can be read on the surface of this an thracite-coloured rock. Its greyness and roughness derive from its long exposure, as a part of the first continent, under a sun that shimmered through clouds of sulphurous vapour, and a moon that was larger and yet darker than our own, because it was closer to Earth, in a cycle that knew only five hours of dim daylight and five of night.

We gut the fish its stomach packed with the glutinous mush of swallowed insects and grill it. It tastes of grass and cannot as suage even half of our hunger. The smoke in the air thickens to ward evening because of the wind, or because the forest fires are getting closer. And the further the sun descends, the sharper the outline of the hill, its arching shield. At the far end of this noman’s-bay the cliff flares in the red of the evening. Its layered lines are the annals of the Earth itself, and it is only now that the Greek name makes sense, standing as it does for all that is muta ble and flowing: a-casta. But language fails to grasp the enormity of the timeframe, and, at best, can only translate the latter into the limited compass of a single day, charting the emergence of the continents and oceans in the first hour, of life in the fourth, and of our own species in the last four seconds. But even these twenty-four hours we owe to the moon, with its crescent now growing paler above me, whose gravity steadily held back the ro tation of the Earth while the day grew longer, becoming this wheeling sun circling the lake.

For some time the rock in my hand had continued to be exposed to the impact of colliding comets, as well as to extreme heat and pressure, which had forced granite and gabbro into its tiniest cracks, creating the crystals, blood red streaks and milky parti cles now embedded in its monochrome grey. It had still jutted above the surface of an ocean in which the chemistry of life had already begun to brew as demonstrated in the Greenland sedi ment. Then, three billion years ago this massif was forced up wards and piled up to shape mountain ranges, which eroded and precipitated on the ocean floor. It kept growing, however, forg ing a proto-continent which existed for aeons, until the dynam ics of tectonic plates tore it apart. It was only 1 8 billion years ago that its plates came together again to form a landmass, then again one billion years ago, and finally 200 million years ago, emerg ing as the supercontinent Pangaea, from which the continents we inhabit today broke off. The fragments of the First Earth can be found today in Montana and Wyoming, in Enderby Land in Antarctica, on the Chinese-Korean border, in Goa, in the prox imity of Greenland’s capital Nuuk, and scattered over Brazil and all Africa.

We haven’t much time left if we want to get anywhere near Lake Crapaud, where the plane is supposed to pick us up. We’ve been looking for hours for the best samples of rock and have cast out our fishing hook again. It isn’t far to the outlet of the lake, but we have our job cut out for us, shouldering the canoe and finding our way along the innavigable rapids. Our energy is running out. We paddle with blistered hands, sleep little and restlessly, tell stories to take our minds off the constant hunger, until the stories run out and we have to start at the beginning again. The one I like best is the one about Ben’s cousin on his first snow-machine, ac companying a Mountie on his rounds of the Inuit villages in the north. In the middle of a white-out he gets stuck, without notic ing it, in a crest of snow. He continues to accelerate, until the po liceman, who was on the sledge behind him, stands up, plods through the snow and taps the driver on the shoulder, who jumps out of his skin as if he’d seen the devil himself. The following days blend into one another in a similar white-out, and we lose all sense of time as often as we lose the course of the river.

After a large area of bog we enter hilly country again, and during one of our portages startle a black bear out of the undergrowth. All I can remember now is its large, dark silhouette. We avoided looking it in the eye, backed off, and lay down on the ground. I could see nothing but the soles of Norbert’s mountain boots. I heard it come over and start to sniff him loud in the surround ing stillness then suddenly come lolloping over to me. I was clasping my hands firmly across the back of my neck, but not be cause I thought it was going to grab me by the nape, but because, using its snout, it was trying to turn each of us over onto our backs, while all we could do was brace our legs and elbows against the ground, with its foul smell in our nostrils, its wet snout on our

arms, a powerful physical presence we had nothing to set against. Blood shot into my stomach. I couldn’t think, and yet I was fully awake and clear-headed, as alive as I had ever been. Eventually the sounds went away and we sat up cautiously, trembling from head to foot.

With our bag of rocks stowed in front of me in the canoe, and too tired to actually feel tired, I suddenly sensed how all this came together. That shimmering on the dark, heavy water was light emitted by the first element formed by the Big Bang hydrogen, which fuses into helium in the sun’s core, causing this very radia tion. Water and light are practically what makes up the universe; it was only through them that the other elements came into be ing and solidified into rock, whose measure of firmness and en durance sets the standard for all life. Albeit continuously chang ing form like the water whose molecules, there from the very beginning, had been fused again and again by this light, only to combine anew things do not change, not really. And suddenly my own thought was a part of it too, pausing a moment in the flow, becoming aware of itself.

We never reached Lake Crapaud. On the Saturday, at midday, when we were supposed to meet the seaplane there, we were still some seventy kilometres away. Spreading out our few belongings on the ground in an attempt to attract the pilot’s attention, we listened for the drone of the engine, trying to distinguish it from the whining of the mosquitoes around our heads, as well as the buzzing of the honey bees, bumblebees and flies, hoping we would see it between the trees, but everything we saw turned out to be a false alarm, and waiting for it became more gruelling than all the previous days put together. Towards evening it suddenly came over the ridge and flew directly over our heads. Norbert fired off the pencil-sized distress rocket we had found in the ge ologist’s hut, but the red magnesium flare barely stood out against the sky, fizzling out far too quickly for the pilots to notice it. We could make out their profiles in the cockpit. We waved in vain, and the Twin Otter disappeared again behind the treetops on the far side of the lake.

When, after an hour, it hadn’t returned, Ben shrugged. We’ll just have to walk back to Yellowknife then, he suggested stoically. In a few weeks time the snow will be here which means we need enough to eat, winter clothing and a sleeping bag. That makes three caribou skins for each of us for clothing, and another six to sew us a sleeping bag. Kill ing them ain’t hard. They’re short-sighted, and a herd will just run past you more or less blind. We can smoke the meat. What he was telling us seemed quite normal and appropriate, given the circumstances, and could have become reality if the plane had not finally found us along the river the following morning. There wasn’t much of a welcome. The pilots were out of sorts, unsure whether they would get the money they thought they were owed. Our hosts, as soon as they had realized we were marooned, had put pressure on them to return for a second search operation.

Raoul Schrott , born in 1964, is an award-winning writer, translator and doctor of Literary Studies. His new translation of the Iliad , published by Hanser, Munich in 2008, was received with widespread interest. His latest book, which he wrote collaboratively with Arthur Jacobs, Gehirn und Gedicht Wie wir unsere Wirklichkeiten konstruieren [The Mind and Poetry How We Construct Our Realities], was published by Hanser, Munich in 2011. Translated from the German by Iain Galbraith

above: Santiago de Chile, December 2010

below: Meseberg and Klosterfelde, autumn 2010

Weißenspring, Brandenburg, September

in the realm of spirits

These were the first lines of the first film I ever made, Tue recht und scheue niemand [Do Right and Fear No One], in 1973 The woman who said them was my mother. She was almost 60 years old, and this shy and insecure woman, who never saw her self as being anyone important, wavered between fear of not meet ing expectations and a desire that someone listen to her, first me and then the many thousands of viewers who would watch her in the made-for-TV movie. These lines originate from an earlier ex tensive interview which I had recorded on audio tape.

I had asked her to tell me about her life, which had run its proto typical course in the metaphysical insubstantiality which history offered women back then, with all the demands and obstacles which women had to submit to, their hidden struggles and their often silent revenge, the unfulfilled hopes of a good, forever childlike life and the possible rebellion against it.

I was interested in the female point of view of society and Ger man history, because at that time everybody had been impacted by the German catastrophes and everyone had to choose be tween conformism and resistance. The life of this woman would demonstrate how difficult it was to distance oneself from collective expectations and attributes, and that it ultimately had to happen.

My mother described the sixty years of her life in one hundred photos private photos, photos of social and political situa tions, numerous photos of unidentified people. In these pictures, the ‘people’ in society started taking shape and over long spans of the film, her body was concealed among the anonymous bod ies of the unknown people, all of whom formed the collective body of the film. But the wonderful photos by August Sander became the backbone of the film pictures taken where she had grown up, depicting what had also shaped the beginning of my mother’s life the individual and archetypical moments hadn’t yet become dissociated. These people, dressed in their professional garb, were looking straight at the camera, confident ly bearing witness of themselves and their world without that rift, which is one of the features of modernity.

While we were making the film, my mother started seeing herself more and more as a unique individual. Deep inside, she began noticing a secret and steadily growing love for herself. She had been quite hesitant in the beginning. Although she wanted to see the film made, she didn’t want to appear in it herself. But when I told her that I’d be filming her cousin, who had led a life very similar to her own, she finally agreed. When I showed her the finished film at the editing table and awaited her verdict with trepidation because back then, making a movie about one’s

mother was absolutely unheard of she said »I can’t deny it that’s my life.« She identified with the image of herself so com pletely that when it was broadcast on television, she told my fa ther »Now you watch this this is my life and you don’t know anything about it.« This film be came her weapon and her revenge. And the longer I travelled the world showing the film on behalf of the Goethe Institute, the more satisfied she became. One of her favourite descriptions of herself was »plain and modest«, but she wanted to shine in this modesty.

My mother is now 96 years old. She has Alzheimer’s and lives in a nursing home just two blocks away from my apartment. Those who have witnessed this process of gradual twilight know how terrible it is to look on helplessly while loved ones painfully real ize that they’re losing themselves. My mother’s sentences be came increasingly disconnected and chaotic. Her poor hearing deteriorated to deafness, and the less she heard, the more urgent became her need to express herself. She spoke without pause, and any kind of reply was enough to keep her monologue going. Sometimes it was enough to move my lips every so often. Our com munication was nonsensical.

But eventually I realized that this was not merely a condition of decline; it possessed certain truths of its own. My mother’s de mentia transformed conventional rationality into chaos, but every so often in this sea of words there were islands, insights of deep truth. Wishes which she had never spoken aloud and had proba bly never been conscious of, suddenly became experiences. This timid and prude woman had been romantically »involved« with one of the male nurses, but she selflessly ended it because she didn’t want him to divorce his wife on her account. With my help, she also »saved« a small Turkish girl living in a box in her room from her brutal father and the police. She »managed« a furniture company, which stored truckloads of furniture in my cel lar. She fondly »looked after« my three children (I have no chil dren), especially the smallest who spends her life in a little wicker basket on my bookshelf, and she gave me advice on raising chil dren and cooking (she hated cooking all her life). This is how she repaired the generational chain that I had broken. She »negotiat ed« the eternal dispute among our relatives, reconciling every one. She lived by the words that she had spoken almost 40 years earlier: »You only know how to live when your life is over.«

In her dementia, my mother designed the final chapter of her life story. All life stories are stories of aspiration and not necessarily the sum of one’s experiences. Everyone becomes the inventor of his or her own past. My mother rewrote her life, a life very unlike

by jutta brückner

the constricted, impoverished and fearful one she had experi enced. Her flow of speech characterized her metamorphosis, not logically and narratively, but rather symbolically and figurative ly. This is how she also »overwrote« the film Tue recht und scheue niemand , with which she had so completely identified while she was in full possession of her mind. She altered it and continued it.

For two years, my mother’s dementia had lingered at the thresh old, an existence of no longer / not yet, which underlies the basic progression from life to death. This intermediate realm of spirits had no resemblance with what our culture calls »meet ing the end of life with dignity and self-determination«, for this always implies complete possession of one’s mental faculties. The soul is at best »our inner Africa«, as Freud once put it. But erasing the boundaries, as my mother did in her hallucinated experienc es, had more in common with self-determination than much of her earlier life. Again and again in the long phase of progressive dementia, there were moments when I thought she had never been so alive. Those who speak are not dead.

In the materialistic culture we live in, it’s difficult to appreciate the value of this intermediate state. In a book in which Roland Barthes mourns the death of his mother, he claims that the age of Western materialism has come to an end and beings do not dis appear with their bodies.

I kept silent in my first film. I listened to her words the mother tongue. As a filmmaker, I had to learn to speak through pictures, and I did so by borrowing my mother’s voice and image. I wanted to break away from her, but I didn’t want to abandon her, I want ed to forge ahead, but not against her. As the feminist movement awakened, my generation became the first that was able to clearly decide against motherhood thanks to the Pill. We had the good fortune and the need to completely reinvent ourselves and reject all aspects of our mothers’ lives. If we had wanted to, we could have cancelled that century-old generational contract, obligat ing women to make their bodies the reflection of the maternal. If in fact having a child was the best method to counter the daugh ter’s tendency to merge completely with the mother and no other social rituals to the same end were known until Freud had penned the theory then the first feminist generation had to find an ersatz ritual to avoid a lifelong struggle against this fu sion. My ersatz ritual was this film. As a cinematic autodidact, I don’t think I would have made any film if I hadn’t been able to make this film.

While making the film, I had the chance to have a heart-to-heart talk with my mother for the first time. I was like many other chil

dren who could never talk to their parents as long as they were alive. I wanted to find out what kind of woman she was, a woman whom I had only known as my mother. As I was making the film, I wanted to take her with me on my path of awakening and she was grateful that I did. One of the last things she said in the film expressed how strenuous it must have been for her: »I can’t go back to the old way and I don’t know how the new way works.« For a long time I underestimated what kind of turmoil my mother must have felt. Even she didn’t notice it at the time, the surge of possibilities was too liberating. But now in her monologues, suppressed fears rose to the surface. What is one’s life worth when one’s daughter rejects it so radical ly? All her life, my mother was afraid of not meeting the expecta tion of others, who always told her what to do. Now I was one of the »others«. She was afraid that she wasn’t good enough in my eyes, not fast enough, not brave enough. The woman inside my mother, who was awakened by my film and who had been sup pressed in her role as a mother, envied me and feared me. As a re sult, my mother developed an excessive desire for approval and tokens of love to calm her anxiety. And constant reassurance of her importance as a mother.

And I suffered, too. For it touched on the guilt that every daugh ter feels when they send their mother to a nursing home. Of course, my mother had said, »You must promise to never send me to a nursing home «. And of course, I promised. And this is where the archaic logic of every mother-daughter relationship comes into play my life in exchange for yours. I was always getting caught up in conflicting emotions of this mother-daughter relationship, torn between obligation, self-sacrifice, guilt and disappointment. And I fought against it with all my strength. In moments of selfcastigation, I always tried reminding myself that I was morally justified in refusing to beat myself up and suffer. Even I was af fected by the ambivalence my mother had experienced and the same applied to me: »I can’t go back to the old way, and I don’t know how the new way works«.

And so I also started talking, beyond the mechanical act of keep ing her monologue going. I began telling her things I would have never dared had she been of sound mind. I wasn’t sure whether she could even hear me since she was practically deaf. But it was important for me to say these things out loud as long as she was alive. In this intermediate realm, there was nothing vengeful in my words and they were not in vain. I talked about our film. I made it because I had picked my mother to deliver the female view of the story, to represent »women in Germany«, prototypi cal in her masochistic compulsiveness to keep pursuing real life, and interpreted her love of consumption and hectic drive to make up for what she missed out on as a problem of her social class and generation. That wasn’t wrong, because history can on ly be experienced through personal stories and personal stories are formed under the pressure of history, but it wasn’t the whole truth. I also made the film to conceal the image of my mother in the grand panorama of German history and in the images of the many nameless individuals. I undercut her uniqueness and made her a social paradigm in my film because I was afraid of the unique character of what a mother is to her daughter. The mother is the body, not only a reference person. The bearer, from whose body one is born, has a far larger symbiotic significance than the begetter.

It was only possible to show this in a film, a medium like no other that can keep the processes of the subconscious going. In film,

one can stay at a distance from this body, and at the same time, confront it. I became the creator of a maternal object that was different and separate from myself. Of course, this all happened unconsciously. Working in pictures, you can know something but not be aware of it, like being alive and dead at the same time. When I watch my film today, I realize that the medium of film the modern cemetery of images is also a medium of rein carnation.

Because my mother is now completely in her own world. She no longer speaks, she doesn’t notice I’m there when I visit her. I don’t go anymore because I’m not strong enough to endure this silence. She doesn’t appear unhappy. No one expects anything from her that she couldn’t live up to. And most importantly, she doesn’t expect anything of herself anymore. Physically, she is now like a child, a time in her life when she was the happiest, and I have be come her mother, responsible for providing what she needs. A woman, who always defined herself as a mother, can be happy in only one other state that of a child. When my mother fell silent, I only wished I could save the image I had of her as she moved further and further away from me, sit ting there in her wheelchair. On the table in front of me now are four pictures. In the first picture, I see my mother holding me as a baby a smiling, young woman and me, a wriggling white bundle who, doesn’t want to be held. In the second, I see an ele gant, smiling young woman holding a toddler on her lap, who, with wide eyes, waits for the birdy to pop out of the camera. This picture was taken so that my father, a soldier, could carry it with him. I froze my mother and myself in these pictures. She always made me responsible for her happiness. Whenever she felt bad, whenever she was sad, I was the one who had to make her happy again. Now these two photos represent a state of happiness that my mother could only regard as a strong, pure emotion, unsul lied by any ambivalence. In these photos, she can be an object of affection with no compulsion, no sacrifice and no punishment.

The third photo shows my twelve-year-old mother next to her own mother and siblings. She is the only one gazing out of the picture, as if she were looking for something, while all the others are staring directly at the camera. Is she looking for her missing father? And in the fourth photo, she’s a baby lying in her moth er’s lap, surrounded by her siblings and father in uniform. This one was also made for a soldier, her own father, who was fighting in a different war. She had never cried louder than at her moth er’s funeral. The baby in the mother’s care, regardless of who the mother was and who the child this was the last moment she shared with me before disappearing into silence. A realm I can no longer enter.

the undead. congress and theatre installation, 12 14 may 2011, kampnagel hamburg

When does a life begin? When does a life end? And who decides? Modern biotech and medical advances have given us extensive capabilities to intervene into life proc esses. As a result, it has become increasingly evident that we need a new definition for the realm between life and death. The project The Undead. Life Sciences & Pulp

Jutta Brückner is a screenplay writer, director and producer, and has written books, radio plays and theatre pieces. Her feature and documentary films, most recently Hitlerkantate ( 2005 ), have received numerous awards. From 1986 to 2006 Brückner was a professor at the University of the Arts in Ber lin. She became the director of the Film and Media Art Department at the Acad emy of the Arts in 2009

Fiction, organized by the Federal Cultural Foundation in cooperation with Kampnagel Hamburg and the BerlinBrandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, will investigate in what ways we can describe and regard this »new«, »improved« and »prolonged« life. Popular cul ture has already offered answers to these questions; our films, novels, comics, feature pages and bestseller lists are teeming with undead characters. They offer visions, nightmares, explanations, myths and parodies of the conceivability and viability of the undead, and have ac companied the development of the life sciences since their inception with terrifying, dramatic narratives. This cross-disciplinary congress, supervised by artistic director Hannah Hurtzig, will demonstrate how the images, films and discourse of popular culture are related to those of the life sciences. More information: www.untot.info

Grigoriopol, Transnistria/Republic of Moldova, 2004

agents for creative schools

The Federal Cultural Foundation and the Stiftung Mercator are collaborating on Agents for Creative Schools , a cultural education programme which will run for several years. Both foundations have allocated 10 million euros to the pro gramme which will begin with 50 Agents for Culture in five Ger man states in the 2011 /12 school year. The following states have been selected to participate: Baden-Württem berg, Berlin, Hamburg, North Rhine-Westphalia and Thuringia The states have agreed to co-finance this model programme and are closely involved in its implementation. More information: www.kulturstiftung-bund.de/kulturagenten

new länder fund to be prolonged

Established by the Federal Cultural Foundation in 2002 , the Fund to Strengthen Citizen Involvement in the Culture of the New German Länder will be prolonged until 2015 and replenished with an additional 2 mil lion euros. Its goal is to promote development of the cultural infrastructure and professionalize cultural activity in Eastern Germany. So far the fund has provided 143 organizations and projects financial support totalling 3 3 million euros. The fund has already been prolonged twice before due to its overwhelming success. By supporting citizen involvement in cultural organiza tions, the fund hopes to strengthen people’s attachment to the regions in which they live. More information: www.kulturstiftung-bund.de/fnl

›crazy blood‹ on tour

In response to the heated debate surrounding integration and in terculturalism in Germany, the Executive Board of the Federal Cultural Foundation decided in January 2011 to show the play Verrücktes Blut [Crazy Blood] to German audiences na tionwide. Directed by Nurkan Erpulat and produced by the Ber lin Ballhaus Naunynstrasse together with the Ruhr Triennial 2010, the play will begin its two-year performance tour in Mu nich and Osnabrück. Wonderfully artistic and masterfully acted by a young ensemble of mostly non-German actors, Verrücktes Blut addresses social issues and fears that are well suited for reflecting on the current debate surrounding integration. More information: www.ballhausnaunynstrasse.de

mal!‹ festival

The play Simurghs letzte Feder [Simurgh’s Last Feather], funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation and co-produced by the Freiburg Theater im Marienbad and the Drama Academy in Teheran, has been invited to Augenblick mal! , a children’s and youth festival in Berlin on 14 and 15 May 2011. The play is based on the Persian national epic tale Shâhnâmeh the Book of Kings. Four Iranian and four German actors developed the play centred around the themes of »autonomy and obedi ence« and »faith and reason« and performed it in both languages in Teheran and Freiburg. Congratulations! More information: www.marienbad.org

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documentation of ›cultures of economics‹

now available

In May and June 2010 the Federal Cultural Foundation in coop eration with the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich hosted the three-part conference series Cultures of Eco nomics at Radialsystem in Berlin. An extensive documentation of the event is now available free of charge online at http: //epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de To order a copy of the documenta tion on CD (5 90 euros) from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, call: +49 ( 0 ) 89 21 80 – 61 80

40yearsvideoart.de‹ releases second study edition

The project record > again ! 40yearsvideoart.de has just released a new 25-hour-long study edition featuring a fasci nating overview of the early days of video art in Germany. View ers can look forward to a total of 60 outstanding works art videos, recorded performances, interviews and documentaries by 58 artists and artists’ groups. The edition includes the boxing match by Joseph Beuys, shown at the documenta 5 in 1972 , the re construction of Wolf Kahlen’s piece Schafe [Sheep] from 1976 that was originally shown on six separate monitors, the Me diengarten [Media Garden] from 1978 by HA Schult, more clips by Klaus Rinke and Ulrich Rückriem from Gerry Schum’s Television Gallery , a documentary about Anna Opper mann from 1977 and unpublished video material of the Festi val Genialer Dilletanten at the Berlin Tempodrom in 1981 This edition was edited by Christoph Blase and Peter Weibel from the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. The DVD study edition can be purchased online at http://shop.zkm.de for 99 euros by educational organizations for private teaching and research purposes. More information: www.zkm.de

›dance techniques‹ 2010

documentary ›assertion of space‹ now on dvd

The documentary Behauptung des Raums Wege unabhängiger Ausstellungskultur in der DDR [Assertion of Space Methods of Independent Exhibition Cul ture in the GDR ] by Claus Löser and Jakobine Motz is now com mercially available on DVD. The film tells the story of the nonconformist art scene in the GDR . It takes the viewer on a journey from the Galerie Eigen+Art, the Herbstsalon in Leipzig, Clara Mosch in Karl Marx City to Jürgen Schweinebraden’s private gallery in East Berlin in the early 1970s. Recent interviews with leading art figures of that time, e.g. Lutz Dammbeck, Christoph Tannert, Gerd Harry Lybke and Olaf and Carsten Nicolai, ac company newly discovered historic film material. The documen tary was produced as part of the History Forum 1989 | 2009 A Divided Europe at the Brink of Re newal funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation. Released through absolut Medien (www.absolutmedien.de), the DVD with English subtitles and a bonus film by Jörg Herold is available for 19 90 euros from selected retailers.

tanzplan germany publication

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In 2008 the Dance Plan Germany initiated a research project on contemporary dance techniques in which several re nowned dance academies in Germany and Europe were involved. The research findings will now be published in a book titled Dance Techniques 2010 – Tanzplan Germany, edited by Ingo Diehl and Friederike Lampert. In this publication, dance experts and artists discuss the most important techniques of modern, post-modern and contemporary dance (Humphrey/Limón, Cunningham, Jooss-Leeder, Release, Muller, Countertechnik and others). The experts not only refer to the corresponding histori cal context, philosophy and aesthetics of each technique, but al so the physical requirements, the characteristics of movement, teaching concepts and working methods in training. The book also includes related essays on dance techniques and their outward forms, more than 80 photos and two training DVD s. / Dance Tech niques 2010 – Tanzplan Germany. 320 pages, euros [D ] 19 90, ISBN 978 3 89487 412 4 (German) / ISBN 978 3 89487 689 0 (English). More information: www.tanzplan-deutschland.de

›viceversa‹ — international continuing education programme for translators

The German Translator Fund , financed by the Federal Cul tural Foundation and the Robert Bosch Stiftung, has launched an international continuing education programme for literary translators. With support from the German Federal Foreign Of fice and under the patronage of Minister of State Cornelia Pieper, the programme ViceVersa will hold bilingual translation work shops for participants who translate from and to certain languages (for example, from German to Russian, and vice versa). The workshops will run for several days at a time and offer participants an ideal setting for discussing the subtleties of literary translations. Furthermore, the participants will receive qualified feedback re garding their work and have the chance to establish professional contacts with colleagues from other countries. This model has proven quite successful and has inspired new projects and con stellations at various locations in recent years. ViceVersa will provide core funding to these bilingual workshops, support with acquiring partners and sponsors, and consultation in matters of content and organizational implementation. Seven ViceVersa projects are in planning this year, including a German-Hebrew workshop at the Literary Colloquium Berlin and a German-Rus sian workshop in Puschkinskije Gory, Russia. More information: www.uebersetzerfonds.de

more music! is good for young ears

More Music! , the Augsburg-based project by the New Mu sic Network has garnered two 2010 young ears awards In the category »Best Practice«, the piece The Adventures of Tom Dumb shared second place with Monsieur Mathieu, now what? by the Oper Leipzig with no first-place winner. The children’s opera Tom Dumb is an extraordinary music theatre project which incorporates children and young people in every step of the production. The piece Hörhülle won first place in the category »LabEar«. Originally a school project titled New Sounds Need New Spaces , the pupils designed this sound space for the purpose of experiencing New Music. More information: www.mehrmusik-augsburg.de

›simurgh’s last feather‹ invited to the ›augenblick

an instrument for every child

The Federal Cultural Foundation will conclude its four-year funding programme An Instrument for Every Child (AIFEC ) on 31 July 2011, after which it will continue under the aegis of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The programme was inspired by a model project in Bochum in 2003 which featured an innova tive partnership between the city’s municipal music school and its primary schools. The idea was to give every single child ir respective of social and financial situation or parent-run educational interest groups the chance to learn how to play an instru ment and make music with other children at an early age. In an ticipation of the Ruhr 2010 Cultural Capital festivities, the Fed eral Cultural Foundation and the state of North Rhine-West phalia in cooperation with the Future Foundation for Education decided to fund a major model programme which would extend musical instruction to primary schools throughout the Ruhr re gion. With a new concept and funded through a specially created foundation of its own, AIFEC began in the 2007 /2008 school year. Since then, 42 towns and cities in the Ruhr region with 56 municipal and private music schools have joined the programme as participants and partners in the foundation. A total of 54,200 children participated in AIFEC in 2010 /11. The cultural-political spark, which the Federal Cultural Foundation hoped its commitment would create, has spread like wildfire. Not only in North Rhine-Westphalia, but throughout Germany, cultural and edu cational policymakers are now intensively discussing how to shape and finance basic musical instruction for all school-age children. More information: www.jedemkind.de

kleist year 2011

On 21 November 2011 Germany will commemorate the 200th anniversary of Heinrich von Kleist’s death. The Federal Cultural Foundation is participating in the Kleist Year 2011 with sev eral projects of its own which pay tribute to the poet as a pioneer of modernity and highlight the relevance of his artistic legacy to a broad segment of the public. The Federal Cultural Foundation has allocated a total of 2 13 million euros to fund these projects. Two new projects have recently been added to the programme. An Acoustic Kleist Memorial is a radio play installation which allows visitors to acoustically explore the site of Kleist’s death at the Wannsee in Berlin. Heinrich von Kleist Stages of Literary History , which will take place at the Heiligengeistkirche in Heidelberg on 17 June 2011, is a literaryhistorical exhibition that presents original manuscripts and first editions of the poet’s works to the public for the first time. More information: www.kulturstiftung-bund.de/kleist

silver bear for the world cinema fund

The World Cinema Fund , co-founded by the Federal Cultural Foundation and the Goethe-Institut, garnered another film prize at this year’s 61st Berlin International Film Fes tival . The international jury, which included Isabella Rossel lini, Nina Hoss and the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, awarded the WCF -funded Argentinean film El Premio (The Prize , directed by Paula Markovitch) the »Silver Bear« for Outstanding Artistic Achievement for the camera and production design. Told from the perspective of a little girl, El Premio is the story of a torn family and how it survived the Argentinean military dictatorship. More information: www.berlinale.de

new jury appointments in 2011

Every three years, the Federal Cultural Foundation appoints a new General Project Funding jury. In 2011 the following mem bers were appointed to the jury for the next three years until 2013

Sophie Becker Dramaturge at the Sächsische Staatsoper Dresden Dr. Andreas Blühm Director of the Wallraf Richartz Museum & Fondation Corboud in Cologne

Karl Bruckmaier Radio presenter, radio playwright and director

Johan Holten Director of the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden Dr. Lydia Jeschke Radio programme editor of Word/Music at SWR 2 Dr. Stefan Luft Political scientist at the University of Bremen

Barbara Mundel General theatre director of the Theater Freiburg Dr. Olaf Nicolai Fine artist

Elisabeth Ruge Publisher

media

library at the federal cultural foundation

In January 2011 the Federal Cultural Foundation launched a media library on its website. Online visitors can now access video and audio clips of selected projects supported by the Foundation. The library also includes information about publications by the pro grammes and projects initiated by the Foundation, online publi cations as downloads and an overview of the Foundation’s blogs and networks. Visit our media library: www.kulturstiftung-bund. de/mediathek

… you can notify us through our website www.kulturstiftungbund.de. If you do not have Internet access, you may also call us at: +49 ( 0 ) 345 2997 124. We would be happy to place you on our mailing list.

join us on facebook

Visit the Federal Cultural Foundation on Facebook and tell us what you’re interested in. Our Facebook site supplements our main website and provides information about calls for proposals, competitions, funding opportunities and programmes. Those who would like to discuss a particular topic in more detail can al so visit our programme pages. Many of our funded projects have Facebook pages of their own, such as the Wanderlust Fund International Theatre Partnerships, the New Music Net work , the programme Über Lebenskunst Initiative for Culture and Sustainability, the KUR –Programme for the Conservation of Movable Cultural Assets , and The Undead event series.

www.facebook.com/kulturstiftung www.facebook.com/wanderlust.fund www.facebook.com/tanzplan.deutschland www.facebook.com/NetzwerkNeueMusik www.facebook.com/UeberLebenskunst www.facebook.com/kur_programm www.facebook.com/dieuntoten

our website

The Federal Cultural Foundation maintains an extensive, bilingual website where you can find detailed information about the Foundation’s activities, responsibilities, funded projects, programmes and much more. Visit us at: www.kulturstiftung-bund.de

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new projects

During its joint session in autumn 2010, the jury of the Federal Cultural Foundation selected 27 new projects in all artistic fields to receive fund ing through the application-based »General Project Funding« programme.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a mediabased educational programme for youngsters. In addition, several practical projects will focus on the conceptual, thematic and formal-aesthetic aspects of the artistic examination of the sky.

Artistic director: Sabine Himmelsbach / Curator: Michael Connor (USA) / Artists: Alex Ceccetti (I) , Peter Coffin (USA) , Spencer Finch (USA) , Lisa Oppenheim (USA) , Trevor Paglen (USA) , Joe Winter (USA) and others /Edith Russ Site for Media Art Oldenburg, 27 May 7 Aug. 2011, opens 26 May 2011 /www. edith-russ-haus.de

image and space

the metaphor of growth exhibition The Frankfurt Kunstverein, the Kunstverein Han nover and the Kunsthaus Baselland have assem bled a group of artworks that deal with the phe nomena of growth. They will use these to create three separate exhibitions, each with a slightly different emphasis. The curators wish to investi gate the concept of growth, its positive and neg ative connotations, and its significance in nature, society and economy. On one hand, growth represents a natural, organic process which includes blossoming and passing away. On the other, it serves a metaphorical function in an economic and social system which fails to recognize the principle of saturation or full-growth. The art works examine biological cycles, models of uto pian technologies and the problems of an expansive economy. The exhibitions will be accompa nied by discussions based on the themes »Eco nomic Growth and Crisis«, »Risks and Limits of Technological Progress« and »Information Technology and the Explosion of Knowledge«.

Artistic director: René Zechlin /Curators: Holger Kube Ven tura, Sabine Schaschl (CH) , René Zechlin /Artists: Michel Blazy (F) , Max Bottini (CH) , Mark Boulos (GB/NL) , Peter Bug genhaut (BE) , Armin Chodzinski, Dirk Fleischmann (KR) , Ulrich Gebert Tue Greenfort San Keller (CH) Mika Rotten berg (USA) , Ene-Liis Semper (EST) , Pasquale Pennacchio & Marisa Argentato (I) , Thomas Rentmeister, Reynold Rey nolds (USA/D) , Julika Rudelius (NL) , Gerda Steiner & Jörg Lenzlinger (CH) , Superflex (DK) , Sebastian Mundwiler (CH) , Vik Muniz (BR) , Franziska & Lois Weinberger (A) , Andreas Zybach and others / Kunstverein Hannover, 16 Apr. – 26 Jun. 2011, opens 15 Apr. 2011 / Kunsthaus Baselland (Switzerland), 20 May – 10 Jul. 2011, opens 19 May 2011 / Frankfurter Kunstverein, 27 May – 31 Jul. 2011, opens 26 May 2011 / www.kunstverein-hannover.de

wild sky exhibition on mapping, measuring and depicting the sky This exhibi tion features artistic photography, videos and installations which deal with the phenomena and the study of the sky. The wish to understand and depict our solar system, the stars and celes tial events is as old as humankind itself. Yet there are areas still waiting to be explored and new boundaries confronting us all the time. The featured artists reflect on the ancient dream of understanding the sky and use the visual technologies of the past and scientific methods of today for inspiration. They also show our in ability to absolutely depict the endless potential of the sky, from which they derive an irrational, mystical moment of observation that stands in contrast to the natural scientific study of the sky.

the global contemporary art worlds after 1989 In what way do global processes influence art and how do artists and institutions react to the increasing interweave of the global art world? The exhibition The Global Con temporary presents some 100 works by international artists and documentary materials which examine the effects of globalisation on contemporary art production and its reception. The exhibition focuses on art shows and depic tions of »global art«, its locations (metropolitan cities, institutions) and the global art market. The project also includes a residency programme for young artists who wish to examine the glo balisation of the art system. The artists will have the opportunity to continue working on their projects on site and develop formats which il lustrate the economic and political relationships to the viewing public. The curators also plan to offer an extensive art-educational programme with workshops, discussions, screenings, performances and concerts. The concept of the exhi bition builds on the work of the research project Global Art and the Museum which began at the ZKM Karlsruhe in 2006 and has grown into a worldwide network of individuals and institutions in the art world. Following its presentation at the ZKM Karlsruhe, the exhibi tion will continue the dialogue between art and globalisation at a number of international insti tutions.

Curators: Peter Weibel, Andrea Buddensieg, Jacob Birken, Antonia Marten / Curatorial advisors: N’Goné Fall (SN) , Carol Lu (CN) , Jim Supagkat (ID) , Patrick D. Flores (PH) /Scien tific advisors: Hans Belting /Art education: Henrike Plegge / Artists: AES + F (RUS) , Kader Attia (F) , Zander Blom (ZA) , On drej Brody & Kristofer Paetau (CZ/FI) , Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkacova (CZ) , Minvera Cuevas (MX) , Meschac Gaba (BJ/ NL) Thierry Geoffroy (DK) Matthias Gommel Josh Greene (US) Jompet (ID) Marysia Lewandowska & Neil Cummings (PL/DK) , Liu Ding (CN) , Gabriele die Matteo (IT) , Pieter Hugo (ZA) , Pooneh Magazehe (US) , Eko Nugroho (ID) , Matthias Olofsson (SE) , Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (TH) , RYBN (FR) , Ruth Sacks (ZA) , Sean Snyder (US) / ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, 17 Sept. 2011 19 Feb. 2012 , opens 16 Sept. 2011 /www.zkm.de

speaking even when all words fail expansion of the video archive at the memorial to the murdered jews of europe In 2008 the Federal Cultural Foundation funded the project Living with the Memo ry at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. It pre sented thousands of video interviews with Hol ocaust survivors who recalled their suffering caused by the National Socialists before, during and after the Holocaust. The archive will now be expanded to include forty new interviews

with the last living eyewitnesses who suffered persecution in the large former Jewish commu nities in Central and Eastern Europe. In terms of content and technical details, the project will apply the established methods used by the For tunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimo nies at Yale University. As soon as they are re corded, the interviews will be archived and cat egorized in terms of historiography, educational content and textual analysis. The goal of the ar chive is not so much to completely document history, but rather convey personal experiences and memories. The interviews will be made ac cessible to the public at the Information Centre. Scientific director: Daniel Baranowski / Curators: Ruth Oelze, Gaby Zürn, Barbara Kurowska (PL) / The interviewees were members of Jewish communities in Breslau, Cz ernowitz, Königsberg [Kaliningrad], Kowno [Kaunas], Cracow, Lemberg, Lodz, Prague, Pressburg [Bratislava] and Riga. / Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Ber lin, 1 Jul. 2011 30 Jun. 2013 / www.stiftung-denkmal.de

water street rail air exhibition on mo bility around lake constance Traffic and mobility are the central themes in this exhibi tion at the Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshaf en. It documents 200 years of transportation history in the region of Lake Constance and illus trates how the initial enthusiasm for innova tions in transport technology were dampened by the impact of noise pollution, a rapidly grow ing volume of traffic and other negative side ef fects of industrialization. The exhibition exam ines how progress during certain periods of his tory influenced the economic, social and cul tural structure of the region of Lake Constance. In addition to historical and technical exhibits, the curators will present works by international contemporary artists who respond to the multi farious challenges of personal and social mobil ity which become more volatile in times of rap idly changing working and living conditions. By means of this cross-sectional view of culture, the exhibition hopes to offer new insights into mobility and its impact on our life.

Artistic director: Frank-Thorsten Moll /Curators: Heike Vogel, Barbara Waibel, Jürgen Bleibler, Sabine Mücke / Artists: Michelle Atherton (GB) , Marnix de Nijs (NL) , Georg Keller, Andreas Lohrenschat, Bruce Naumann (USA) , Peter Piller, Michael Sailstorfer, Roman Signer (CH) , Hector Zamorá (MEX) and others / Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen, 20 May 11 Sept. 2011, opens 19 May 2011 / www.zeppelin-museum. de

bild your own nation axel springer and the jews Whenever a new editor was hired by the Axel Springer Verlag in the 1950s, he or she had to pledge to »promote the reconciliation be tween Jews and Germans« and »support the Is raeli people’s right to exist.« Ten years after the Holocaust, Axel Springer (1912 1985), the editorin-chief of the BILD newspaper, made this proIsraeli position an official tenet of his tabloid. For Springer, the hope for political unity among the Jewish people paralleled his hope for politi cal unity in a divided Germany and Berlin. Pro moting this ideology, BILD became one of the most widely circulated newspapers in Europe and a sort of flagship of pro-Israeli politics. This exhibition examines the German-Israeli rela

tionship as it was depicted from the perspective of Germany’s largest tabloid. It makes the argu ment that BILD was responsible for accelerating a process which continues to be one of the most remarkable in German post-war history. Between 1933 and 1945 Germans exercised the most radical anti-Semitic politics in their history, cul minating in the systematic extermination of the Jewish people. Immediately following the war, their collective attitude toward Jews seemed to completely reverse itself. Axel Springer polar ized the nation. For the 68ers, he epitomized the »fascist« power of the media. The truth is that he was both personally and professionally com mitted to seeing through a radical »project of reconciliation« with the Jews and the young state of Israel at a time when this type of engagement was highly unpopular in conservative circles. This exhibition aims to make these fascinating contradictions more understandable as aspects of philosemitism

Artistic director: Dmitrij Belkin (UA/D) /Jewish Museum Frankfurt am Main, 15 Mar. 29 Jul. 2012, international conference at Museum Judengasse and the Goethe-Universität Frank furt/Main: 27 28 Mar. 2011 / www.fritz-bauer-institut.de

animism exhibition, congress, educational programme Recent films such as Avatar and Uncle Boonme have demonstrated that the religion of animism has be come an integral part of our popular culture. In response to this current animistic turn, the FU Berlin and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt have invited scientists, politicians and artists to joint ly focus on and present the international and interdisciplinary interest in animism with its pre-enlightened explanations of the world. The preceding, complementary exhibitions in Ant werp (2010 ), Berne (2010 ) and Vienna (2011) will be shown each with their specific thematic focus in one major exhibition in Germany in 2012 . As an example of an experimental ›anthro pological museum of modernity‹, the Berlin ex hibition represents the culmination of this panEuropean project. It will be supplemented by an international congress on New Animism which aims to advance the debate regarding our present and future understanding of the world, whereby scientific positions are contrasted with aesthetic viewpoints. The exhibition is designed as a montage of documents, archived materials and artistic works. Divided into thematic areas, it re-examines animistic concepts and searches for answers to question like: Where exactly does the boundary lie between nature and culture, between life and non-life? What defines the rela tionship between culturally disparate forms of knowledge and education which influence these views? And in such a context, what role do hu mans play in ecological systems?

Curator: Anselm Franke / Project manager: Irene Albers / Artists: Bruno Latour (FR) , Philippe Descola (FR) , Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (BR) , Michael Taussig (US) , Esther Leslie (UK) , W.J.T. Mitchell (US) , Erhard Schüttpelz, Martin Zill inger, Gabriele Schwab, Angela Melitopoulos / Maurizio Lazzarato (D/I) , Paulo Tavares (BR) , Ken Jacobs (UK) , Didier Demorcy / Isabel Stengers (BE) , Kobe Mattys / Agency (BE) , Marcel Broodthaers (BE) , Hayao Miyzaki (JP) and others / Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 9 Mar. 6 May 2012 / www.fu-berlin.de

the prevailing aesthetics are the aesthetics of the prevailing class 2011 artistic collectives form an alternative academy During the recent renovation of the Munich Kunstverein, workers discovered part of an old exhibition behind a wall which the as sociation’s former director Reiner Kallhardt had created in 1970. Kallhardt had provided rooms for art academy students to protest the conven tions of the artistic education system. The resulting scandal forced the art association to tempo rarily close. The discovery provided the impulse for an international project with the same title as the exhibition of 1970. The goal of the project is to take a fresh look at modern artistic conven tions and the role of the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. Once again, the art association wishes to engage in discourse about the prevailing criteria for assessing aesthetics a discourse which has frequently caused tensions between the art association and institutions which firmly advo cate canonization in the art field. The exhibi tion will be accompanied by an ›alternative academy‹, comprised of five artists’ collectives, which will offer public lectures and workshops, seminars and performances. These will give artists the opportunity to redefine themselves, which in view of current developments could be a suitable form of artistic education and produc tion.

dry / Renate Lorenz, Lilibeth Cuenca (DK) , Diamela Eltit (RCH) , Valie Export (A) , Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (ROK) , Sanja Ivekovic (HR) , Lea Lubin (RA) , Teresa Margolles (MX) , Dora Maurer (H) , Marta Minujin (RA) , Ana Mendieta (C) , Tanja Os tojic (SCG) Ewa Partum (PL) Adrian Piper (USA) Ene-Liis Semper (EST) , Mierle Landerman Ukeles (USA) and others / Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz (E) , 23 Sept. 23 Dec. 2012 /Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic, Zagreb (HR) , 10 17 Feb. 2012 / Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk (PL) , 15 30 Mar. 2012 / Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde (DK) , 20 Apr. 15 Jun. 2012 / Tallinn Art Hall (EST) , 8 16 Sept. 2012 / Fundaçio Antoni Tapies, Barcelona (E) , 10 Oct. 15 Dec. 2012 /Academy of the Arts, Berlin, 10 Feb. 10 Apr. 2013

film and new media

bine Handel’s opus for the very first time with liturgical music of the three monotheistic world religions and new compositions. Experts of Ba roque music are working together with Israeli and Arab-Muslim artists to develop a new ap proach to Handel’s works. In the form of a con cert dialogue, they want to go beyond merely comparing musical and textual elements, and instead reveal new possibilities of intercultural encounter. The piece will be performed in 2011 at the Handel Festival in Halle and the internationally renowned Israel Festival in Jerusalem, both of which are co-producing the project.

sented solo artists who have played a crucial role in shaping the development of improvised mu sic. This also applies to the 80 -year-old Ornette Coleman, who is one of the most influential liv ing musicians of New Improvised Music today. Coleman will perform with his current ensem ble and in other arrangements. He also plans to continue developing his project Song X in a modified instrumental accompaniment. The organizers hope that their Artist-in-Residence project will generate a significant artistic im pulse and more international interest in the fes tival.

the performing archive exhibition, live performances, screenings, performance archive The central module of this project is a temporary, mobile archive which documents the works of international, gender-oriented performance practice of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as contemporary positions. The archive includes a continually expanding collection of graphic, video and print materials which in clude interviews, scores, video performances and documents about the history of their pro duction and reception. In cooperation with an international network of partner institutions, the performance archive will be shown at various locations in Germany, Spain, Croatia, Poland, Estonia and Denmark from 2011 to 2013. It will also be expanded with additional modules, for example, exhibitions and live performances, lectures, seminars and screenings. In addition to lesser documented regional performance move ments, e.g. in Southern, Northern and Eastern Europe, the archive will also incorporate signifi cant positions from Latin America and the Arab world. The partner institutions will also cooper ate with regional universities and art academies to hold various workshops and seminars aimed at encouraging dialogue between scholars, stu dents and artists and expanding the archive with more regional works. The Performing Archive will also launch an extensive web site and its bilingual catalogue will ensure its vis ibility long after the project ends.

provocation of reality 50th anniversary of the oberhausen manifesto On 26 February 1962 , 26 filmmakers, including the di rectors Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz and Peter Schamoni, affixed their signature to the Ober hausen Manifesto. It declared the collapse of conventional German film and demanded a renew al of West German filmmaking. The Oberhausen Manifesto marked one of the most impor tant but perhaps least known chapters of Ger man film history. Until now, there has been no attempt to systematically collect and preserve the cinematic works which the signers of the Manifesto produced during their most active professional years (1958 1967). In some cases, the archived films are in a desolate condition. The goal of the project is to make the achievements and errors of those former »provocateurs« visi ble and accessible once again. The project will include an international symposium at the Uni versity of Vienna and produce several film series, a DVD edition, book and Internet platform. The 50th anniversary of the Oberhausen Manifesto in February 2012 will be commemorated with the premiere of a documentary by Alexander Kluge and a reception organized by the city of Munich. Starting in April 2012 , film series will be shown in Berlin, Munich, Oberhausen and Vienna, at the New York M oMA , the Pesaro Film Festival and Goethe Institutes around the world. Artistic director: Ralph Eue /Curator: Lars Henrik Gass /Art ists: Christian Doermer, Bernhard Dörries, Rob Houwer (NL/D) , Alexander Kluge, Pitt Koch, Dieter Lemmel, Ronald Martini Jason Pohland (F/D) Edgar Reitz Peter Schamoni Haro Senft Wolfgang Urchs / Filmmuseum Munich, 28 Feb. 2012 (premiere) / International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, May 2012 /Kino Arsenal Berlin, May 2012 / Austrian Film Museum Vienna, May 2012 / Pesaro Film Festival, June 2012 /Museum of Modern Art and GoetheInstitut, New York, July 2012 / www.kurzfilmtage.de

music and sound

israel in egypt from slavery to free dom George Frideric Handel rendered the bib lical story of Israel’s exodus from Egypt in his 1738 oratorio Israel in Egypt . Werner Ehrhardt will now integrate this story, described in the Old Testament and the Torah and alluded to in the Koran, into an extensive, interreligious musical project. This concert project will com

Artistic director: Werner Ehrhardt / Artists: Yair Dalal (IL) Yaniv d’Or (IL) , Baroque orchestra l’arte del mondo, Tölzer boys choir / Marktkirche, Handel Festival Halle, 5 Jun. 2011 (world premiere) / The Jerusalem Centre for the Per forming Arts, 13 Jun. 2011 /Bayer Kulturhaus, Leverkusen, 4 Sept. 2011 / www.lartedelmondo.de

hybrid music for humans and machi nes What is so fascinating about electronically produced music and how does it differ from hu man sounds? The project Hybrid Music looks for answers to these questions. It will form a unique human-machine ensemble comprised of the renowned chamber ensemble Neue Musik Berlin , six soloists, seven music machines and two music installations by the English artist Martin Riches, whose acous tic works are typically displayed at exhibitions. In a joint concert, the ensemble will perform works especially composed for such a comple ment. In various works, the composers, such as Masahiro Miwa (Japan) and Robert Pfrengle, contrast music and technology and examine the specific function of each machine in the music. Sometimes the musicians’ performance corre sponds with that of the machines, and at other times, they contradict or even imitate the ma chines’ characteristics and functions. Conversely, the machines are »humanized« and pro grammed to play too fast or too quietly. The ironic aspect of this interaction culminates in Riches’ music machines which are based on the automats of the 18th century, but are controlled by modern computer technology. The concert will be performed at Suntory Hall, the most fa mous concert hall in Japan, and the new audito rium at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen.

Artistic director: Dirk Reith / Artists: Martin Riches (GB) , Masahiro Miwa (JP) , Roland Pfrengle, KNM Berlin, Günter Steinke, Thomas Neuhaus, Amelia Cuni, Lesley Olson / Suntory Hall Tokyo, October 2013 / Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen, November 2013 / www.folkwang-uni.de

moers festival 2011 ornette coleman artist in residence To mark the 40 th anniversary of the annual Moers Festival on the Lower Rhine, artistic director Reiner Michalke has selected the musician and composer Or nette Coleman to be the festival’s »Artist in Residence« in 2011. For many years, festival direc tors have invited renowned artists of New Im provised Music to Moers especially repre sentatives of the leading scenes in Chicago, New York, Tokyo and London. In addition to out standing ensembles, the festival has always pre

Artistic director: Reiner Michalke / Artists: Ornette Cole man and others / Moers Festival 2011, festival tent, 10 12 Jun. 2011 / www.moers-festival.de

kommeno another case of war crime

In 2008 the percussionist Günter Baby Sommer attended a concert in the Greek village of Kom meno. While he was there, his hosts told him that the village of 600 inhabitants had been the site of a massacre during World War II. Soldiers of the German army executed over three hun dred civilians in August 1943. The stories, told by the survivors of the massacre, serve as the ba sis of his latest music project Kommeno . To gether with four Greek musicians, Sommer will record a CD of newly arranged songs which were sung in the village at that time in history. The CD will be accompanied by a trilingual book of annotated original documents pertaining to the massacre in Kommeno and point to gaps in the official history which researchers have not yet adequately studied. The musicians from Greece, Germany and other countries will take their programme on tour with performances at nu merous European venues.

Artistic director: Günter Baby Sommer / Artists: Floros Flor idis (GR) , Savina Yannatou (GR) , Eugenios Voulgaris (GR) , Spilios Kastanis (GR) / Kommeno marketplace (GR) , 16 Aug. 2012 / Jazzwerkstatt Berlin, 12 Oct. 2012 / Jazzclub Neue Tonne, Dresden, 13 Oct. 2012 / Megaron Mousikis, Thessaloniki, 18 Oct. 2012 / Megaron Mousikis, Athens, 19 Oct. 2012 / Rote Fabrik, Zürich, 21 Oct. 2012 / www.jazzclubtonne.de

singing garden concert installation

Musical portrayals of natural phenomena, such as storms, thunder and lightning, the seasons and light, as well as the musical simulation and reflection of nature, play a central role in the history of music. The Four Seasons by An tonio Vivaldi is perhaps one of the best-known examples of this in European musical tradition. But nature plays a key role in Japanese music as well. One of the most important contemporary composers in Japan, Toshio Hosokawa, is devel oping what he calls a Singing Garden a composition into which he integrates Vival di’s concerti. The concert will combine elements of Italian music from the Baroque period and contemporary Japanese music, and will be per formed by musicians of the renowned Akade mie für Alte Musik in Berlin. The spatial artist Claudia Doderer will develop a corresponding visual presentation for the stage. The light instal lation and musical interpretation will present viewers with the image of a garden.

Artistic directors: Folkert Uhde and Jeremias Schwarzer / Artists: Toshio Hosokawa (JP) Jeremias Schwarzer Akademie

Artistic director: Bart van der Heide /Curators: Bart van der Heide, Binna Choi (NL) /Artists: Electric Palm Tree (NL/RP) , Grand Opening (USA) Slaws and Tartars (PL/RU) and others / Kunstverein München 1 Aug. 11 Sept. 2011 / www.kunstverein-muenchen.de

Artistic directors: Bettina Knaup, Beatrice Ellen Stammer / Artists: Helena Almeida (PT) Arahmaiani (RI) Pauline Bou-

new projects

cinema jenin a symphony for peace live musical accompaniment for the documentary »project cinema jenin« The cinema in the West Bank city of Jenin was forced to close at the start of the first intifada in 1987 and has suffered heavy damage over the years. It reopened in August 2010 as one of only three public cinemas in the entire West Bank. The director Marcus Vetter hit upon the idea of resurrecting the cinema while filming his award-winning documentary Heart of Jenin . Together with Ismail Khativ, he in itiated the reconstruction work and captured each stage of the process, up to its completion, on film. The material formed the basis for his current documentary Cinema Jenin . In autumn 2011, the film will premiere with live musical accompaniment by the Dresdner Sin foniker, conducted by Andrea Molino. The or chestra will then join Israeli-Palestinian musi cians to form an international orchestra, which will go on tour performing concerts in Ramal lah, Haifa and Jerusalem. Prior to the official world premiere, German audiences will have the chance to preview the film at Radialsystem V in Berlin, featuring a live performance by the Dresdner Sinfoniker. The orchestra will then accom pany the film on a second tour when it officially premieres in Europe.

Artistic director: Andrea Molino (CH) / Artists: Marc Sinan, Torsten Rasch, Dresdner Sinfoniker / www.dresdner-sinfoniker.de

jazz lines munich 2011 festival for new and improvised music After a seven-year hiatus, the Jazz Lines festival in Munich took place again in 2009. With its focus on con temporary and cross-border positions in jazz, the festival has re-established its leading role in Munich’s music scene. In 2011 the festival aims to build a bridge to the fine arts, literature and film. One of the main focuses of its programme will be the musical interpretation of film and photographic art. The American guitarist Bill Frisell is developing a programme featuring the artistic photography of Michael Disfarmer, one of the greats of American documentary photog raphy. The saxophonist Francesco Bearzatti will pay tribute to the photographer and femme fatale of the 1920s, Tina Modotti. The Swiss Ensemble Koy will perform a score for a silent film by Ernst Lubitsch, and the French bass player Renaud Garcia-Fonds will compose the music for a papercut film by Lotte Reiniger. The organizers have also invited numerous musicians and ensem bles whose works probe and explore the bound ary between jazz and New Music. For example, Beat Furrer is developing a programme with the Munich Chamber Orchestra which combines improvised music and New Music.

Annelie

(GB)

Town er / Paolo Fresu (USA/I) , Francesco Bearzatti Tinissima Quar tet (I) , Yitzak Yedid Quintet (ISR) , Munich Chamber Orchestra conducted by Beat Furrer (AT) , Bruno Chevillon (F) , Michael Riessler Bojan Z (F) Renaud Garcia Fonds Ensemble

ligenkirchhof, Muffathalle Munich, 27 Mar. 3 Apr. 2011 / www.kulturkontor.org

theatre and movement

impulse international fringe theatre festival Since it began in the 1990s, the Im pulse festival organized by the NRW KUL TUR sekretariat has become one of Germa ny’s most important festivals of independent theatre in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. For the fringe scene, this festival is regarded as the counterpart of the Berlin Theatertreffen , an event also funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation. Directed by Tom Stromberg and Matthias von Hartz, it presents a programme of selected plays, installations and performances at theatres in Bochum, Düsseldorf, Cologne and Mülheim an der Ruhr. Impulse showcases productions which are representative of the character of the independent scene and the impulses it generates. When selecting the pieces, the jury especially looks for those which demonstrate new ways of addressing current issues and crea tive approaches to theatrical forms. The Im pulse jury then selects the most interesting performance, which goes on tour to various fes tivals, including the Theatertreffen in Berlin and the Vienna Festival. In 2011, the festival will be held for the first time during the summer so that it can take advantage of outdoor public venues for its performances. The organizers have also decided to expand the international curatorial programme to include a scholarship programme for young curators and festival organizers.

Artistic directors: Tom Stromberg Matthias von Harz / Prinzregenttheater Bochum, Forum Freies Theater Düssel dorf, Studiobühne Köln, Ringlokschuppen Mülheim an der Ruhr, 21 Jun. 11 Jul. 2011 / www.festivalimpulse.de

narcissus / fritzl music theatre performance Narcissus / Fritzl is a com bination of two thematically related, but musi cally distinct short operettas. The first part fo cuses on the character of Narcissus in Greek mythology. The second ties in aspects of the in cestuous drama surrounding the Austrian Josef Fritzl of Amstetten. The Canadian singer, pian ist and composer Chilly Gonzales is known for crossing and combining various genres, such as pop and classical music, chansons, cabaret and hip hop. For this production, he will write both the music and libretto of both operettas and will perform on stage as a musician and singer. In Narcissus / Fritzl, Gonzales links the clas sical corpus of operetta with minimalist music and pop. This musical crossover will be sup ported by icons of pop and folk music in the leading female roles, Peaches and Leslie Feist. The singer and performance artist Peaches will play the leading female roles in the Fritzl oper etta and the Canadian Leslie Feist will play the nymph Echo in the Narcissus drama. The project, directed by Sebastian Baumgarten, will

portray the similarities and differences in the two stories.

Artistic director: Matthias Lilienthal /Artists: Chilly Gonzal es (CA) (composer) , Sebastian Baumgarten (director) , Joel Gibb (CA) Peaches (CA) Leslie Feist (CA) (singer) / Hebbel am Ufer Berlin ( HAU 1), 26 30 Sept. 2011 /www.hebbel-amufer.de

art into theatre II performance art of a new millennium For its Art into Theatre festival, the Hebbel am Ufer Theater ( HAU ) will invite six fine artists to develop per formances which will be shown at all three HAU venues and several other locations in Berlin. The organizers believe that the radical figures of performance art of the 1960s and 1970s are now entering a phase of museum-like retrospection. Thanks to some major exhibitions, the actions of forty years ago are now visible as a compact artistic legacy. In view of this legacy, a young generation of fine artists are attempting to re-define performance art using contemporary meth ods. All of the selected artists use video and au dio recordings and playfully apply them to the human body in its media-represented form. The works also focus strongly on their interaction with public space. Pawel Althamer, for example, will make a home for himself inside a moving Berlin subway car for an entire month, and in so doing, artistically privatize a publicly accessible space. In preparation for its upcoming festival, HAU is cooperating with the world’s only per formance art biennial Performa which will take place in New York City for the fourth time in 2011

Artistic director: Matthias Lilienthal /Artists: Keren Cytter (IL) , Nevin Aladag, Phil Collins (GB) , Ari Benjamin Meyers (USA) , Dominique Gonzales-Foerster (FR) , Pawel Althamer (PL) / Hebbel am Ufer Berlin ( HAU 1 3 ), 20 30 Oct. 2011 / www.hebbel-am-ufer.de

magic fund theatre project on the mysterious disappearance of capital The Deutsches Theater Berlin and the Theater Basel are working with youngsters in their cities on a performance about the relationship between magic and money. How does a piece of paper acquire value and then lose it again? What does money do when one deposits it into an ac count or purchases shares of stock? How can money simply disappear when a bank fails or a speculative bubble bursts? This project illus trates the magical power of money as explained by a generation which has grown up knowing no alternative to globalized capitalism. The youngsters, aged 16 to 19, are the experts in this project. Their views and questions concerning how we deal with money and the recent turbu lence in the financial world will be central to the development of the piece. The hope is that the perspectives of the young people from Basel, a supposedly affluent city, and those from »poor« Berlin will complement each other. Following an extensive research and rehearsal phase in Berlin and Basel, the results of the joint project will be presented in both cities.

& Bar), 28 Apr. 10 Jun. 2011, premieres 28 Apr. 2011 / Theat er Basel (Kleines Haus), 19 Jun. 12 Jul. 2011, premieres in Basel on 21 Jun. 2011 / www.jungesdt.de

F.I.N.D.11 festival of international new drama with a focus on faith and religion Since the Schaubühne Berlin estab lished the Festival of International New Drama in 2000, it has strongly contrib uted to enhancing relations between theatres around the world. With a newly modified con cept, the 11th edition of the festival will place more focus on promoting new talent in this field. As in previous years, the ten-day festival will have playwrights, directors and actors de velop new plays and present their contemporary pieces in guest performances, world premieres, studio performances and writers’ projects. For the first time, fifty acting and directing students from various countries have been invited to the festival where they will participate in master classes, meet artists at the festival, and address current issues of international drama in scenic studies, analyses and discussions. The Schaubühne has chosen faith and religion as the theme of this year’s F.I.N.D.11 subjects which many international artists are currently exploring. The guest performances will include Noli me tangere by Jean-Francois Sivadier and Shukshin’s Stories by Alvis Hermanis. The Israeli director Yael Ronen will present her current production Science Fiction & Re ligion as part of a workshop, and the Spanish director Rodrigo Garcia has been invited to work with actors of the Schaubühne’s ensemble to develop a play about faith, superstition and the sins of humanity.

Artistic director: Thomas Ostermeier / Artists: Cilla Back (FIN) , Rodrigo García (RA) , Ofira Henig (IL) , Alvis Hermanis (LV) , Wajdi Mouawad (CA) , Yael Ronen (IL) , Kirill Serebren nikov (RUS) , Jean-François Sivadier (F) and fifty international actors and directing students from Germany, France and Russia / Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin, 3 13 Mar. 2011 / www.schaubuehne.de

dark was the night scene for twelve musicians, two blind guides and audience This project investigates our per ception of music in darkness. Enclosed in a dark room, visitors lie on resonant structures and lis ten to the musicians play their instruments while moving vertically or horizontally around the room. The audience can neither localize the source of the sounds visually, nor identify which instrument produces which sound. Unable to anticipate the sounds by sight, the audience has to completely rely on its sense of hearing and the physical experience of sound. Because the fixed position of sounds provides structure to space, the performing ensemble will be kept constantly in motion, thereby dissolving the material space and creating a purely acoustic en vironment. Blind guides will be on hand to as sist the visitors this reversal of roles will hope fully encourage visitors to re-evaluate the domi nance of visual perception. For this project the director Sabrina Hölzer will collaborate with twelve string players from the instrumental en semble Kaleidoskop. They will perform works by international contemporary composers

für Alte Musik Berlin, Claudia Doderer / Radialsystem V Berlin, 8 Sept. 11 Sept. 2011, premieres 8 Sept. 2011 /www. radialsystem.de

Artistic director:

Knoblauch / Artists: Bill Frisell Quartet (USA) , Fred Frith

, Louis Sclavis (F) , Ralph

(F) , Gunter Hampel, Kimmo Pohjonen (FIN) , Karl Ritter (A) , Les 1000 Cris (F) , Trygve Seim Ensemble (N) and others / Munich Volkstheater, Schwere Reiter, Glyptothek, Allerhei-

Artistic directors: Tobias Rausch, Birgit Lengers, Martin Frank (CH) / Artists: Eva Gruner, Jelka Plate, Matthias Herrmann, Tobias Graf, Ulrich Rausch, six youngsters from Basel (CH) , six youngsters from Berlin / Deutsches Theater Berlin (Box

such as Sánchez-Verdú, Sciarrino, Hosokawa and Xenakis as well as some classical composi tions. The project has also commissioned sever al new works which involve movements, chang es in movement, vocal and tonal jumps and the transferral of motifs and sounds. In addition to performances in Berlin and Salzburg, concerts are planned around the world, for which a mo bile room installation will be specially made. Artistic director: Sabrina Hölzer / Artists: Ladislav Zajac (SK) , Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop. With works by SánchezVerdú (ES) , Salvatore Sciarrino (IT) , Peteris Vasks (LV) , Lachen mann, Xenakis (GR) , Hosokawa (J) , Blind Willie Johnson (USA) Qu Xiao-song (CH) Marcelo Toledo (RA) / Sophien saele Berlin or Funkhaus Nalepastrasse, Berlin, 12 16 Dec. 2012 / Rainberghalle, Salzburg (A) , 8 11 Mar. 2013 / www. zeitgenoessische-oper.de

dance on the internet digital dance atlas and collection of works Cho reographers from Germany have significantly influenced international contemporary dance in recent decades. Yet despite the efforts of such illustrious dance artists as Mary Wigman, Dore Hoyer, William Forsythe and Pina Bausch, modern dance in Germany continues to be charac terized by a poorly studied history and limited public visibility. The goal of this project is to de velop a modern online dance portal like no oth er in Germany, primarily containing historic film and video recordings of dance. The material, which is currently located in numerous ar chives and institutions, will be compiled onto a central Internet platform and made publicly ac cessible. This involves securing the rights, digi talizing materials and restoring them if neces sary. To develop a suitable database, the project will build on a prototype developed by the Dance Plan Germany , a project initi ated by the Federal Cultural Foundation. Fol lowing a three-year implementation phase, the Academy of the Arts and other institutions and archives will take responsibility of the platform and ensure its sustained operation.

Directors: Franz Anton Cramer, Caroline Rehberg /Inter net website, planned launch on 15 Sept. 2011 /www.adk.de

nine times kleist interdisciplinary series on kleist‘s correspondence In commemoration of the 200 th anniversary of the death of Heinrich von Kleist in 2011, the inter disciplinary project Nine Times Kleist will compare the poet’s life and correspondence with a selection of his literary works. The focus on Kleist’s biographical background aims to deepen our understanding of his texts and their relevance to the present day. A walk-through set, combining the poet’s life and literary world, will serve as a frame for a collage of letters, films, lec tures and docu-fictional interviews. For exam ple, a psychologist and a medical ethicist will speak with Kleist’s girlfriend Henriette Vogel and other contemporaries about Kleist’s suicide. In this theatrical installation, the poet’s letters will be read aloud, put to music and staged. They will be categorized by theme wars, concepts and catastrophes and divided into nine mod ules. Literary scholars will join artists and jour nalists in discussing the relevance of Kleist’s writings for us today.

Artistic director: Miriam Sachs / Artists: Silke Wiegand, Eva van Heijningen (NL) , Angelina Kartsaki (GR) , Fritzi Haber landt, Miriam Sachs, Eva Jankovsky (AT) , Claudia Oberleit ner (AT) , Leo Solter, Dieter Mann, Jürgen Ruoff, György Pongracz (HU) Stephane Lalloz (FR) Michel Keller (AT) Lars Rudolph + Mariahilff, Giorgos Kyriakakis (GR) , Justin Lep any / Experts: Angelika Vaskinevitch (RU) , Wolf Kittler (USA) , Alexander Weigel, Günther Emig, Jens Bisky, Alexander Opitz, Wolfgang Schmidbauer, Wolfgang de Bruyn and Bernd Heinrich von Kleist / Following the events of Nine Times Kleist in Berlin, the project will be presented at various locations in Europe under the title On the Road / Nine Times Kleist: Heinrich Böll Stiftung, Ber lin, 30 Apr. 2 May 2011 (preview performances: Theaterka pelle, Berlin, 22 24 Apr. 2011). Theaterkapelle Berlin, 27 28 Aug. and in September 2011. Berlin (venue to be an nounced), 8 – 9 Oct. 2011 / On the Road: Kleist-Ar chiv Sembdner, Heilbronn 25 Jan. 2011. Theater Pygmalion, Vienna, 24 26 Feb. 2011. German-Russian House, Kalin ingrad, 12 May 2011. Conference room at the University Medical Center Eppendorf, Hamburg, 20 Jun. 2011. Can tiere Internazionale d‘Arte, Montepulciano, 29 Jul. 2011 Premiere of animation film, Schlossmuseum, Thun, 19 Aug. 2011 / www.theaterkapelle.de

keloglan in alamania or the reconcili ation of pork and lamb The bald-headed boy Keloglan is a famous Anatolian fairytale character. In this project, Emine Özdamar stag es the fairytale in modern-day Berlin and com bines the humour and mischief of Turkish fairy tales with Shakespeare’s dramas. In this new ad aptation, Keloglan came to Germany from Tur key with his mother when he was a small boy. Today he is a high school drop-out, unemployed and unmarried. When he turns eighteen, his residence permit in Germany will no longer be valid. He either has to find work or marry a Ger man otherwise he will have no choice but to return to his »home country« of Turkey that he hardly knows. On the night before his 18th birth day, Keloglan is swept away on a mythical odys sey during which he meets police officers, thieves and trolls. Like a Shakespearean drama, reality and fantasy intermingle. The tale, produced by director Michael Ronen and his artists’ collec tive Conflict Zone Arts Asylum ( CZAA ) will be presented as a summertime open-air performance on Naunynplatz in Kreuzberg. By performing the piece at such a public venue, the Ballhaus Naunynstraße and CZAA hope to reach a broad audience which is all too familiar with the issues of the piece. The project will be accompanied by a theatre workshop for pupils who will have the opportunity to present their own ›Keloglan esque‹ stories on stage.

Artistic director: Michael Ronen (IL) / Artists: Emine Sevgi Özdamar (TR) , Daniel Kahn (USA) , Oktay Özdemir, Tuncay Kulaoglu (TR) and others / Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Berlin, 30 Jun. 10 Jul. 2011 / www.conflictzonetheatre.com

performing music four strategies for combining music and performance Concerts, song recitals and music theatre pieces are becoming more common in theatre pro grammes all the time. Conversely, musicians and bands are applying theatrical methods to enhance their performances and create more of a ›live‹ experience. The project Performing Music focuses on such cross-genre pieces and

presents four outstanding international concepts for innovatively integrating music in perform ances, theatre and choreography. The project will begin with Delusion by Laurie Ander son, who has been an icon of performance art and sound art since the 1970s. Set up as a series of short plays, Anderson’s piece combines vio lin, electronic puppetry, music and visuals to create a poetic language rich in imagery. The choreographer Xavier le Roy will offer a new interpretation of Sixteen Dances (John Cage, 1951) originally commissioned by Merce Cunningham for four dancers with a ten-person NDR chamber ensemble. The Amer ican theatre minimalist Richard Maxwell and the Swiss playwright Laura de Weck are also col laborating on plays which explore the interface of theatre, concert and performance.

Artistic director: Amelie Deuflhard /Artists: Laurie Ander son (USA) , Laura de Weck (CH) , Xavier le Roy (FR) , Richard Maxwell (USA) / Kampnagel Hamburg; (Delusion), 20 21 May 2011, (Neutral Hero), 20 22 May 2011, (John Cage, Sixteen Dances), 23 25 Sept. 2011, (vocal concert), 17 19 Nov. 2011 / www.kampnagel.de

jury

The members of the General Project Funding jury are:

Dr. Marion Ackermann, Director of the k20k21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen /Dr. Jörg Bong, Programme director at S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt / Prof. Dr. Gabriele Brandstetter, Professor of Theatre Studies with a concentration in Dance Studies, FU Berlin / Dr. Simone Eick, Director of the German Emigra tion Centre, Bremerhaven /Dr. Meret Forster, Mu sic editor at Bayerischer Rundfunk, Munich / Dr. Ulrike Lorenz, Director of the Kunsthalle Mannheim / Dr. Bert Noglik, Writer, journalist, artistic director of jazz festivals and concert series /Wilfried Schulz, General theatre director of the Staatsschauspiel Dresden / Hanns Zischler, Film actor, journalist

committees

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

Bernd Neumann

Chairman of the Board

Representing the Federal Foreign Office

Representing the Federal Ministry of Finance Representing the German Bundestag

Representing the German Länder

Representing the German municipalities

Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Cultural Foundation of German States

Representing the fields of art and culture

Minister of State in the Federal Chancellery and Commissioner for Cultural and Media Affairs Cornelia Pieper Minister of State Steffen Kampeter

Parliamentary State Secretary Prof. Dr. Norbert Lammert President of the German Bundestag Dr. h.c. Wolfgang Thierse Vice President of the German Bundestag Hans-Joachim Otto Parliamentary State Secretary Dr. Valentin Gramlich State Secretary, Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs of Saxony-Anhalt Walter Schumacher State Secretary, Ministry of Education, Science, Youth and Cultural Affairs of Rhineland-Palatinate Klaus Hebborn Councillor for Education, Culture and Sports, Association of German Cities Uwe Lübking Councillor, Association of German Towns and Municipalities Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Böhmer Minister-President of Saxony-Anhalt

Senta Berger Actress

Durs Grünbein Author Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Wolf Lepenies Sociologist Prof. Dr. Clemens Börsig

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

Chairman of the Cultural Committee of German Business with the BDI e.V. Jens Cording President of the Society for Contemporary Music Prof. Martin Maria Krüger President of the German Music Council Prof. Dr. h.c. Klaus-Dieter Lehmann President of the Goethe-Institut

Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen Secretary General of the Cultural Foundation of German States Dr. Volker Rodekamp President of the Association of German Museums Dr. Dorothea Rüland Secretary General of the DAAD Dr. Georg Ruppelt Vice President of the German Arts Council Prof. Dr. Oliver Scheytt President of the Cultural Policy Society Johano Strasser President of the German P.E.N. Center

Frank Werneke Deputy Chairman of the ver.di labour union Prof. Klaus Zehelein President of the German Theatre Association

juries and curatorial panels

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

executive board team

Hortensia Völckers

Artistic Director Alexander Farenholtz Administrative Director Secretarial offices Beatrix Kluge / Beate Ollesch [Berlin office] / Christine Werner

Assistant to the Executive Board Dr. Lutz Nitsche Contract department Dr. Ferdinand von Saint André [legal advisor] / Doris Heise / Anja Petzold / Katja Storm Press and Public Relations Friederike Tappe-Hornbostel [dept. head] / Tinatin Eppmann / Diana Keppler / Julia Mai / Christoph Sauerbrey / Arite Studier

Funding department Kirsten Haß [dept. head] General Project Funding Torsten Maß [dept. head] / Bärbel Hejkal / Steffi Khazhueva Programme department Dr. Ulrike Gropp / Teresa Jahn / Anne Maase / Annett Meineke / Uta Schnell / Friederike Zobel / Ines Deák / Marcel Gärtner / Kristin Salomon / Kristin Schulz

Project controlling Andreas Heimann [dept. head] / Berit Koch / Kristin Madalinski / Fabian Märtin / Antje Wagner / Barbara Weiß Administration Steffen Schille [dept. head] / Margit Ducke / Maik Jacob / Steffen Rothe

Publisher Kulturstiftung des Bundes / Franckeplatz 1 / 06110 Halle an der Saale / Tel +49(0)345 2997 0 / Fax -333 / info@kulturstiftung-bund.de / www.kulturstiftung-bund.de

Executive

Editor Friederike Tappe-Hornbostel

Design cyan Berlin

Production hausstætter herstellung

Print run 26,000 [German] / 4,000 [English]

Editorial staff Christoph Sauerbrey /Tinatin Eppmann

Translation Robert Brambeer unless otherwise specified

Copy date 31 January 2011

Illustrations © Antje Schiffers

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

Board Hortensia Völckers / Alexander Farenholtz [responsible for the content]

a b Monumento Natural El Morado, Chile, December 2010

c