This February has been unusually busy in German cultural warfare. First warzone: Bochum, where theatre-goers \u201cunleashed their inner resistance fighter\u201d (Frankfurter Allgemeine) at the premier of Tiago Rodrigues\u2019s\u00a0Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The award-winning play ends with a kidnapped far right politician delivering a nasty, extremist monologue. You\u2019re supposed to feel uneasy, even outraged \u2013 at the ideas. Not at the guy delivering them.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In Bochum, however, as well as boos, an elderly couple climbed on to the stage and attempted to drag the actor into the wings.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Critics were baffled that an educated theatre crowd would confuse fiction with reality. Others pointed out that attacking art \u201cagainst fascism\u201d is, well\u2026 kind of fascist. So an evening that was meant to warn about authoritarianism ended up demonstrating it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, in Hamburg\u2019s Thalia Theatre, there was a fake courtroom. For three days, Swiss director Milo Rau held a \u201ctrial against Germany\u201d that put the AfD in the dock, with real lawyers, an ex-justice minister as presiding judge, and a jury of seven citizens playing democracy\u2019s Simon Cowell.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Some critics labelled it \u201ccompletely irresponsible\u201d as the witness line-up included prominent ex-AfD MPs. Others berated the \u201cjudge\u201d for badgering an AfD-leaning influencer of Pakistani descent, who (correctly) cited crime statistics. The verdict: AfD looks largely unconstitutional but a party ban? Erm\u2026 not quite.<\/p>\n
And then, finally \u2013 the 76th edition of the Berlinale. Which, if you believe an open letter signed by Tilda Swinton, Javier Bardem, Mark Ruffalo and around 80 other film activists, is \u201ccensoring artists who oppose Israel\u2019s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the German state\u2019s key role in enabling it\u201d.<\/p>\n
The spark? Jury president and director Wim Wenders. When provocatively asked at the opening press conference what the jury had to say about \u201cselective solidarity\u201d and the \u201cgenocide in Gaza supported by the German government\u201d, he replied: \u201cWe have to stay out of politics because if we make movies that are dedicatedly political, we enter the field of politics.\u201d<\/p>\n
He insisted that film-makers are \u201cthe counterweight of politics. We have to do the work of people, not the work of politicians.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Festival director Tricia Tuttle backed him. Polish producer Ewa Puszczy\u0144ska, a member of the jury, called the question\u2019s framing \u201cunfair\u201d, a view shared by the jury. Perhaps because its members \u2013 from Nepal, South Korea, India, the US, Japan \u2013 wondered why jurors at a Berlin film festival were expected to issue position papers on the Middle East.<\/p>\n
Novelist Arundhati Roy, however, cancelled her appearance. A pity, as the festival, compared with Cannes or Venice, is notoriously short on VIPs.<\/p>\n
When reading the letter, which scolds the Berlinale for not fulfilling \u201cthe demands of its community\u201d by not condemning \u201cthe ongoing Israeli Genocide against Palestinians\u201d, I felt reminded of a GDR agitprop song. It\u2019s called\u00a0Sag mir, wo Du stehst\u00a0\u2013 \u201ctell me where you stand\u201d.<\/p>\n
Quite apart from the presumption of appointing oneself the voice of \u201cthe Berlinale community\u201d, I always thought it was generally authoritarian regimes that required artists and institutions to declare political allegiance to a cause.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In a democracy, one is \u2013 refreshingly \u2013 at liberty to choose. A side. Or no side at all. Or perhaps the side of art.<\/p>\n
The Berlinale dilemma is partly self-inflicted. Since its beginnings, it has styled itself as \u201cthe most political\u201d of festivals, which made sense back then, in a city divided by the cold war. Although one might still assume that \u201cpolitical\u201d referred to the art on screen or its interpretation, not to the institution itself.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Finally, at the awards ceremony, Palestinian-Syrian film-maker and Perspectives winner Abdallah Al-Khatib (Chronicles From the Siege) went on stage with a Palestinian flag and lambasted the German government as \u201cpartners in the genocide of Gaza by Israel\u201d.<\/p>\n
The reaction? Some applause, the one cabinet member present left, and there were also boos and shouts of \u201cFree Palestine from Hamas\u201d. Some even saw a threat in Al-Khatib\u2019s words \u2013 that once Palestine is freed \u201cone will remember who was against us\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Nothing says \u201csilenced by censorship\u201d quite like a live microphone, stage lights, press coverage and a festival prize.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This February has been unusually busy in German cultural warfare. First warzone: Bochum, where theatre-goers \u201cunleashed their inner…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23783,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[15774,112,1138,2246,190],"class_list":{"0":"post-23782","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-berlin","8":"tag-arts-and-culture","9":"tag-berlin","10":"tag-film","11":"tag-gaza","12":"tag-germany"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23782\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}