The Conditions for Inner Exile
On the day I recorded this conversation with Emily Dische-Becker, cultural workers held a large demonstration in front of the Rotes Rathaus, Berlin’s City Hall. They were protesting the Berlin Senate’s newly released 2025 budget, which cut arts and culture funding by 12-13%. The effects of these cuts, announced five weeks before the new year, pose a catastrophic threat to Berlin’s cultural scene: they will result in the end of the city’s popular monthly free Museum visits, the cancellation of scheduled performances, the loss of hundreds of jobs in an already financially precarious field, the potential bankruptcy of many of Berlin’s cultural centers, and the closure of the city’s Diversity Arts Culture office, as well as supports for deaf and disabled artists. As the ascendant far right continues to wage a culture war, the defunding of a politically-engaged sector that occupies only 2% of the city’s budget is disproportionate, disciplinary, and ominous.
— Julia Bosson
Julia Bosson: The Berlin Senate recently announced their budget for 2025, which included a 130 million euro cut to arts and culture. How would you contextualize this development within the greater political landscape of the last several years?
Emily Dische-Becker: These cuts are part of a broader trend in Germany of austerity politics, which I think are pretty misanthropic. In light of the Berlin Senate’s attempts to implement political litmus tests, the simultaneous defunding of the cultural sector can be understood as essentially defunding dissent. The cultural sector makes up only 2% of the overall budget and was hit hardest. That indicates that this is about more than saving money.
Last year, the Berlin Senator for Culture, Joe Chialo, tried to implement a clause for all funding applications where applicants would have to pledge adherence to the controversial IHRA working definition of antisemitism in order to be eligible for funding. This failed in January, in part because of protests from the organized cultural sector, and ultimately because the Berlin Senate’s legal advisors determined it was unconstitutional — violating freedom of opinion and freedom of the arts.
If you just defund a sector known for its internationalism and vocal dissent from German state identity politics vis-à-vis Israel they can silence critique without direct censorship.
Broadly speaking, attempts to legislate or put into hard law bans on antisemitic expression in Germany have run up against constitutional challenges. In 2019, Germany’s Parliament passed a resolution declaring the arguments and methods of the BDS Movement — the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement initiated by Palestinian civil society in 2005 — to be antisemitic.
Legally this is a non-binding resolution. Both the scientific body of Germany’s Parliament (the Wissentschaftlicher Dienst) and the highest administrative court found that a BDS resolution, if made into law, would be unconstitutional.
As a result, various actors trying to equate antisemitism with substantive criticism of Israel have shifted to attempting to change funding guidelines at the state level. The Tikvah Institute, run by Volker Beck — a former Green Party MP and president of the German-Israeli Society [Deutsch-Israelische Gesellschaft, or DIG], a pro-Israel lobby funded by the German Foreign Ministry — commissioned a study on how to work around constitutional obstacles to forcing adherence to a questionable definition of antisemitism.
I would argue that the immense cuts to Berlin’s cultural budget are actually a way of avoiding explicit censorship, which is tedious because of constitutional protections. If you just defund a sector known for its internationalism and vocal dissent from German state identity politics vis-à-vis Israel they can silence critique without direct censorship.
It’s a tool in the culture warriors’ kit: austerity and defunding widely, so you don’t have to implement minute checks like signing off on a controversial definition of antisemitism. Politicians can find ways around the Constitution while thinking they’re still upstanding democrats defending the process. It’s essentially a bureaucratic solution to the problem of constitutionally protected rights.
Since October 7, cultural and academic spheres have been fighting the battle for maintaining public funding for freedom of scholarship, freedom of expression, and freedom of the arts. These spending cuts are the death knell for that battle in Berlin, which is the most vibrant site of that cultural scene in Germany today.
In the bigger picture, this is also indicative of Germany’s move away from funding culture as a form of “soft power.”
These budget cuts can be seen as part of an epochal shift: bolstering military budgets while defunding arts and academia. The militarization also entails a re-nationalization on various registers, and a general drift to the right. The new survivalist and competitive paradigm coalesces around dismantling the social contract and guarantees of the postwar era, chiefly human rights infrastructures and the social justice and anti-discrimination measures.
What does the far right have in common from Israel to Europe and beyond? The concerted effort to dismantle the legal infrastructure that on a supra-national level had been designed to reign in national sovereignty: the EU, human rights courts, the UN. And then there is the war on “wokeness,” which targets the internal corresponding infrastructure: the budget cuts in Berlin overwhelmingly defund initiatives working in the broader field of antiracist and anti-discrimination measures. What is so attractive about the call to order under the banner of Israel solidarity is that in the wake of it, the entire legal infrastructure on both international and national levels is being eroded, if not abandoned altogether.
JB: Essentially, you’re identifying attacks on two of Berlin’s most prized qualities of its own self image. There’s the “poor but sexy” — the poor representing affordability, and the “sexy” relating to the arts and the freedom associated with it — and there’s also the diversity of life in Berlin, which often has its expression in the cultural sector. Could you discuss what the cuts will mean for the actual people living here, the artists and cultural workers, especially those with international backgrounds?
EDB: This is a disaster across the board and exemplifies a confluence of anti-immigrant sentiment and a version of anti-antisemitism we’ve seen accelerate since October 7.
For the past two decades, people have been criticizing capitalism with billionaires’ money in the art world and criticizing the state with state money in Germany. I would hypothesize that that was an aberration historically and that window is now closed. We’ve lost the battle to maintain public funding for the freedom to do, say, and create whatever you want.
In Germany, you can have an opinion on Palestine, but you can’t maintain a livelihood as an artist, journalist, or in any other field that receives public funding. Unlike the US, Germany lacks private philanthropy, which raises critical questions about how people will make a living and how civil society — deeply dependent on state funding — will reinvent itself.
Berlin is becoming a city for the wealthy. This is clear in housing policies and the systematic defunding of public services, like public transportation. Even before October 7, there were massive cuts to social programs in areas like Neukölln. Schools weren’t being maintained, playgrounds weren’t being rebuilt, and after-school activities for children were disappearing.
These cuts will likely lead to increased social tensions, with few supportive programs for low-income families. There’s a “carceral logic” emerging, a state solution of increased policing and repression targeting areas with majority Arab populations. The police president has explicitly stated that certain Berlin areas are “not safe for Jews and LGBT people,” suggesting a clearly racialized approach to social management (while admitting in the same interview that the primary victims of “antisemitic-motivated violence” are not Jewish people but the police).
JB: You and I have discussed the unique irony facing people who arrived in Germany in the 2010s, fleeing authoritarian regimes, only to become targets of an authoritarian crackdown here. The whole story has a vicious, cyclical nature. Given the bleak prognosis you just delivered, where do we go from here?
EDB: It’s a burning question. It’s fine to acknowledge that nobody has real answers for what we do now. I feel strongly we need to stop doing the same things expecting different results. Writing another open letter assumes there’s a liberal sphere where it would matter — instead, these letters just become bases for blacklisting people.
I moved back to Berlin in 2013 after eight years in Lebanon alongside people leaving Syria, Bahrain, Egypt, and other places after the crackdown following the Arab uprisings, because Berlin promised to be a melting pot of left-wing Arab culture which seemed impossible anywhere else — a cultural scene that many left-wing Israelis who chose to leave are also a part of. As a result, Berlin has a concentration of people with immense experience confronting authoritarian rule. I’m not suggesting Berlin will become like Egypt or Syria, maybe more like Hungary or Poland, but we can recognize how the “Authoritarian International” learns and replicates successful strategies across different places.
We’re seeing similar patterns globally: anti-NGO bills in Egypt charging people for taking money from international organizations, similar measures in Slovakia, Hungary and Israel. In the US, a bill allows the Treasury Department to declare nonprofits as “aiding or abetting terrorism,” stripping their status. We might anticipate iterations of that across the world.
The key question is: How do we operate once we’ve accepted we’re no longer in a liberal democratic paradigm?
We have much to learn from people who have operated under difficult political circumstances and bring that knowledge here. There’s a lot of talk about free speech warriors on the right, which is one of the reasons free speech has a bad name in certain left-wing circles. But I would say that the people who are the most committed to fighting for democracy and insisting on their democratic rights are overwhelmingly those who have experienced authoritarian rule and aren’t going to accept that they’ve built a life here only to be told they are second-class or non-citizens.
Meanwhile, given the meekness and opportunism I see amongst a sector of German liberal society that has done very little to stand up for unpopular opinions — or the expression of facts that make them uncomfortable — in the last few years, I’m astonished by what German liberals take as the lesson from the past. They seem to think that resisting injustice would be comfortable or welcome, as opposed to entirely unwelcome and coming at a cost. But once defunding is at this level, where it targets the entire cultural sector, I would assume that changes the calculus for a number of people. If there’s no survival scheme in keeping your mouth shut, then the consensus crumbles, potentially creating opportunities for new modes of organizing and solidarity — though I’m under no illusion: This is extremely difficult, especially as life has become very expensive here.
The key question is: How do we operate once we’ve accepted we’re no longer in a liberal democratic paradigm?
We have to act differently. At the risk of saying something that sounds flippant, or even romanticizes the difficulty of life under authoritarianism, having to communicate subversive ideas around state sanctions demands a different kind of creativity and bravery — and a different economic model. It will be interesting to see what work emerges from this era — not to approve of what’s happening, but as a silver lining.
Economically, I have no idea. We’ve always resisted the mutual aid models present in the United States precisely because they assume a neoliberal paradigm we’ve tried to fight against in Germany by saying that it’s the state’s responsibility to deliver basic services. That was certainly my initial response in 2015 when civil society initiatives started feeding and housing refugees, which the state ought to do. But it’s a reality we’re living in and we need to figure out how, as a community, we manage to do things, including being entrepreneurial. There was a time in which we were fighting shrinking spaces, but now the spaces have shrunk. So how do we create those spaces for ourselves and what are the models for that? What would the “Chinatown” version of Berlin be — a space that resists assimilation, existing as if it’s in another part of the world, while being distinctly local?
We’ve discussed the idea of the Parallelgesellschaft — “parallel society,” a term that’s a slur used by racist German tabloids and politicians, which I believe has antisemitic roots. Jews have historically been accused of having closed-off kinship networks. And now it’s mostly wielded against Arabs and Middle Eastern people.
JB: In November, there was a remarkable moment at the Neue Nationalgalerie, when Nan Goldin delivered a searing speech at the opening reception of her new exhibition. Could you talk a little about the significance of that moment in the current cultural landscape?
EDB: This case was in some ways the exception that proves the rule. Cultural institutions love the allure of hosting internationally relevant artists, including those from the global south, but they prefer not to have to engage with the actual politics of those artists themselves. Like, “Why can’t you just do your work and not have these political positions, which make trouble for us?” On the one hand, Nan Goldin’s ability to use her platform that way is a result of her being “too big to fail,” or too big to cancel, in part because she brings in multiple millions of euros in ticket sales. On the other hand, the institution’s director, Klaus Biesenbach, cherishes his international profile and wouldn’t want to risk ruining his reputation by canceling someone as famous and beloved in cosmopolitan circles.
There’s a fundamental conflict between those who see “horrible images” as atrocities in Palestine, and those who see “horrible images” as a Jewish artist and pro-Palestinian activists inside a cultural institution.
The media responses were fascinating. Die Welt newspaper wrote that there were “images we never wanted to see” flooded into our feeds on social media. My initial response was that they must be referring to the images of the well-documented atrocities being committed with impunity in Gaza and Lebanon by Israel’s army. But no, they meant the absolute horror of this 71-year-old Jewish artist in perfect choreography with activists who had smuggled banners past security.
The German media primarily complained about her criticism of Germany, not her indictment of Israel. When she mentioned statistics like 88% of housing in Gaza being damaged or destroyed, they didn’t challenge that. But her accusations about cancel culture? They called that ridiculous.
There’s a fundamental conflict between those who see “horrible images” as atrocities in Palestine, and those who see “horrible images” as a Jewish artist and pro-Palestinian activists inside a cultural institution. This moment exemplified Germany’s awkward attempt to regulate reality — a failed effort to dictate perception.
JB: You’ve spoken about diaspora as a form of self-exile or inner exile, which I think connects to the idea of the Parallelgesellschaft. This conversation highlights a compounded exile — for those who come to Germany in literal exile, and those who are now excluded from the state-funded cultural scene.
EDB: There are interesting examples of inner exile — or inner emigration. The latter is a term used by Germans in the 1930s who stayed and weren’t vocally opposed to the Nazis, later claiming they were in “internal emigration” — and so the phrase has a connotation that isn’t entirely sincere. It’s a term used in the Islamic Republic of Iran as well, as I’ve learned from Iranian friends. But I certainly believe in inner exile, hopefully not on my own, but as a form of worldmaking with others.
I think it’s an interesting challenge: Can we live in a place like Berlin, and create our own society in exile, despite the hostility? The obvious limitation is the immigration authorities. Individual likes on posts that say anything like “from the river to the sea,” even if it’s explaining what that even means, are automatically classified as participation in an antisemitic demonstration. There’s an entire surveillance apparatus evidenced in some of the reports we’ve received about questions people are being asked in their citizenship tests about their activities on social media.
If we’ve exited the space where words, protest, and activities can have an impact, then these are ripe conditions for inner exile.
I’m interested in what it would look like to continue to live here while ignoring the official discourse. At this point, most people are really bored of being part of a conversation that’s essentially dumb, with people who are ignoring the most basic facts of reality. Nothing interesting comes of that. You can’t have a conversation about the future of climate catastrophe with people who aren’t capable of seeing a genocidal war in Gaza waged with impunity as fundamentally altering what remains of the rule-based order. The normalization of that kind of violence, the impunity of flouting institutions of international law, the temporality of the crime: We are being primed to accept that there is nothing we can do to stop this. It doesn’t matter if we go to the streets, it doesn’t matter if public opinion is vastly in favor of halting weapons to Israel: All these things have no apparent impact on actual policy.
If we’ve exited the space where words, Instagram slides, protest, and activities can have an impact, then these are ripe conditions for inner exile. Once you accept that we’re no longer trying to convince with arguments because nothing can come of that, then we’re having a conversation with a different purpose for a different audience, and invest in longer term organizing.
How do we build something together that can make this time tolerable, and hopefully even joyful? We need one another. When you’re insisting on defiant joy in an absolutely abhorrent situation, that can be an act of resistance.