Middle EastAnalysis

‘We are losing free places to talk without judgment, and to listen with kindness’

Totalitarian creep attracts crowds in Berlin museum

For Cuban artist Tania Bruguera the reading is a form of 'behavioural art'. Photograph: Derek Scally

Derek Scally's face
Derek Scally in Berlin
Fri Feb 9 2024 - 19:47

On the plaster facade of Berlin’s leading modern art museum, a discreet metal plaque reads: “Stroke here in case of emotional surges.”

Given Germany’s unstable mood these days, crowds should be lining up here in the drizzly grey morning.

Instead people have gathered inside under the museum hall’s cast-iron arches – it is a former railway station – to listen to the words of Hannah Arendt, the German-born philosopher.

For 100 hours since Wednesday, day and night, artists have read from – and audiences on grey bean-bags listened to – the entire 500-page text of Arendt’s On the Origins of Totalitarianism.

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The project, by artist-activist Tania Bruguera, was long-planned and twice-postponed. As the world appears to spin ever-faster off its axis, Arendt’s analysis of anti-democratic dictators seems eerily – and wearily – timely.

“Desperate hope and desperate fear often seem closer to the centre of such events than balanced judgment and measured insight,” she wrote in 1950, the early years of the cold war. “The central events of our time are not less effectively forgotten by those committed to a belief in an unavoidable doom, than by those who have given themselves up to reckless optimism.”

For Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, whose first reading of the book in 2015 during her house arrest attracted official ire, the reading is a form of “behavioural art”. It has added relevance in Germany, she says, given a political instability and what she calls a “hardening of prejudice”.

[ Berlin arts squat completes journey from cultural collective to tourist trap ]

The Berlin event began with a public reading of the names of artists in Germany who have come into difficulty, or had work or shows cancelled, because of their Israel-critical and pro-Palestinian views.

Beyond the museum, meanwhile, further demonstrations are planned this weekend against the radical deportation policies of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, which is up to 35 per cent in polls in eastern Saxony in advance of a September election there.

“Many people here in Germany, the centre, are afraid of the AfD growth and do nothing, but a major lesson of Arendt is that evil happens when ordinary people just carry on with their days,” says Alice, a middle-aged Berlin artist, readying for her one-hour reading session.

Also present in the hall, she says, are German dilemmas over the Gaza war. While German politicians face a dilemma – given historical responsibilities for Israel – she sees public opinion in Germany as increasingly pro-Palestinian. Recent social media posts of Israeli soldiers joking about destruction and killing were, for many, the last straw.

“But these are just young men who, in normal circumstances, would not be slaughtering children had they not experienced an unspeakable brainwashing,” she says. “This is the tragedy which Hannah Arendt warns about: What can happen when you are trained to see your fellow human as an inhuman other?”

Fury at the ongoing Israel-Gaza war spilt over earlier this week in Berlin, where a local university student who is Jewish was reportedly attacked outside a city bar by a fellow German student with Arab roots.

News of the attack spread quickly, with other Jewish students speaking of no-go areas for them in the city’s Free University (FU) since Israel’s response to the October 7th Hamas-led attack.

FU president Günter Ziegler has insisted that university authorities act against any staff or students who question Israel’s right to exist.

“During the occupation of lecture halls and demonstrations, however, we have had aggression from both sides, there’s a lot of insults and shouting... but from individual actors,” he told the Tagesspiegel daily. “But the university is an open space. We cannot prevent entirely that flyers are in circulation that break our rules, but it doesn’t mean we tolerate them.”

In the latest disruption on Thursday night in Berlin, pro-Palestinian demonstrators entered an international legal gathering at the Humboldt University and prevented an address by Daphne Barak-Erez, a constitutional judge critical of government court reforms.

Amid a chorus of cancel claims and counterclaim of censorship, Argentinian artist Evangelina finishes her reading of a particularly dense section of the Arendt text on Lenin’s death with an air of calm – and a moment’s silence.

“I feel totalitarianism is creeping in everywhere once more: look at my homeland, Argentina,” she says. “We are losing free places to talk without judgment, and to listen with kindness.”

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