|
"Untitled" (2025) by Hamishi Farah. Oil on Pumice primed linen, 80 x 65cm
Photography: Stefan Korte. Courtesy: The Artist, Arcadia Missa, London and Maxwell Graham, New York.
|
|
Mitch Speed
|
|
On a recent winter evening, I stood outside of a Kreuzberg laundromat, at the end of the block where I have lived for nine years. I was washing my new weighted blanket, which I’d bought to combat the anxiety that torments my sleep. As it tumbled, I scrolled through old news.
|
It’s notoriously hard to discern healthy fear from paranoia. Take the creeping worry that, if push comes to shove, the protections of civil society (free speech, the right to a fair hearing…) won’t hold, and you might find yourself under power’s boot, or just an ambitious politician’s grudge. It’s a worry that has been experienced not infrequently by dissident artists and intellectuals, the players whom society relies upon to maintain a critical vantage on authority. One would like to believe — especially in a country with a past as dark as this one — that such concerns can be filed soundly under paranoia. One would be wrong.
|
The Wheels of Justice
|
The CDU’s defunding of culture is a more politically shrewd variation on the gaudy hatred displayed, in a 2024 Telegram dispatch, from Slovakia’s far-right Minister of Culture Martina Šimkovičová. “LGBTI+ NGOS,” Šimkovičová wrote, “WILL NOT RECEIVE A SINGLE CENT MORE FROM THE MINISTRY OF CULTURE…” It also reflects the Trump administration’s threat to defund public schools which utilize diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the name of — wait for it — defending civil rights. In the competition for most extravagant derangement of logic, Berlin’s government, which rolls out “anti-discrimination” clauses with the left hand while slashing diversity funding with the right, is putting up a good fight against Trump’s America.
|
Last summer, in an investigative report for the German newspaper nd, journalist Pauline Jäckels chronicled the efforts of Joe Chialo, member of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) who was at the time Berlin’s senator for culture and social cohesion, to defund a local cultural center called Oyoun. Founded in 2021, Oyoun is, in its own words, dedicated to “artistic-cultural projects through decolonial, queer* feminist, and migrant perspectives.” Chialo’s mission seems to have been triggered by allegations of antisemitism within the organization, particularly surrounding an event held by Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost (Jewish Voice for a Fair Peace in the Middle East). These allegations were reported by the Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel, against whom Oyoun has since won two defamation cases. Each attempt to cancel Oyoun’s funding sparked an inquiry. In turn, each inquiry found the allegations insufficient and non-actionable. Not to be deterred, Chialo sent his staff on a legalistic truffle hunt for grounds upon which funding could be cut. In the end, he got his wish.
|
Chialo, who suddenly vacated his post on May 2, had maintained his course despite warnings issued by his staff. His actions could be interpreted as impinging on free expression, and might pose an existential threat for Oyoun’s 15 employees, some of whose work visas were dependent on those jobs. But the politician’s advisors neglected another danger: By proceeding, a suspicion would be sewn that the accusation of antisemitism was only ever a pretext. In a country where diminishing the Holocaust’s significance is rightfully a grave offense, this alone should make the blood run cold.
|
In fairness, Chialo was just following unofficial protocol. Legal decisions, we have learned, are to German politicians as don’t-walk signs are to non-German residents of Berlin: suggestions to be considered on a case-by-case basis. A few years ago, the activist group Deutsche Wohnen & Co. Enteignung mounted a successful citizen's referendum to reappropriate 243,000 corporate-owned Berlin apartments into public ownership. In response, Berlin’s municipal leadership simply delayed the referendum’s implementation until the citizenry got tired and gave up. After the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, CDU leader Friedrich Merz —now the chancellor — made clear that the Israeli Prime Minister would still be welcome in his country. Asked in February if he would respect the International Court of Justice’s authority should it find Israel guilty of genocide, the outgoing chancellor Olaf Scholz answered that he would find the decision “absurd.” So much for letting the wheels of justice do their work.
|
If and when the history of Berlin culture in the first half of the 2020s is written with integrity, it will largely be a story of right-wing revanchism, through a systematic rollback of the decolonial and pro-diversity advances which shaped the preceding decade (that 2010s diversity politics often manifested tokenistically, and that this tokenism functioned to obfuscate unchanging structures of inequality, negates neither their fundamental importance nor the viciousness of the current backlash). It will be a story of one of the world’s most robust urban bulwarks of multiculturalism and non-conformity being sucked into a maw of restricted freedom. This process has had a manifold character. Composed in large part by a local variation of the totalitarianism sweeping the globe, it is also driven by neoliberal policy: a closing of the open city courtesy of a rapacious property-speculation industry that has squeezed out the space upon which free culture — and free thought — depends.
|
Chialo took office in 2023. During his tenure, this process only accelerated. Now, all cultural organizations need to do to land on the lethal side of political power is shelter global-southern (and especially anticolonial) perspectives. When a brutal program of municipal funding cuts was announced last November, culture was aggressively trimmed, with diversity programs singled out for total gutting. The exhibition “Spectres of Bandung” was set to open in 2023 at Martin Gropius Bau before suffering cancellation by way of terminal postponement. A research-based endeavor, the show was to focus on the 1955 Bandung conference, which congregated formerly colonized nations. For a while, the museum’s website promised new exhibition dates. Then, without a sound, “Spectres of Bandung” itself became a ghost.
|
|
The CDU’s defunding of culture is a more politically shrewd variation on the gaudy hatred displayed, in a 2024 Telegram dispatch, from Slovakia’s far-right Minister of Culture Martina Šimkovičová. “LGBTI+ NGOS,” Šimkovičová wrote, “WILL NOT RECEIVE A SINGLE CENT MORE FROM THE MINISTRY OF CULTURE…” It also reflects the Trump administration’s threat to defund public schools which utilize diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the name of — wait for it — defending civil rights. In the competition for most extravagant derangement of logic, Berlin’s government, which rolls out “anti-discrimination” clauses with the left hand while slashing diversity funding with the right, is putting up a good fight against Trump’s America.
|
|
|
|
