Angst essen Seele auf

Gülriz Egilmez about Fear as a main subject in societies nowadays.

01.11.15

8 min

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Quoting a film from the seventies by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Fear is a main subject in societies nowadays- from the Near, Middle and Far East all the way to Western Europe.

The concept of fear got me thinking: I am a woman of turkish origin who grew up in Germany and decided to live and love in Turkey. Turkey is under the regime of an authoritarian nutcase. The authoritarian nutcase is offering refuge for more than two million refugees from various countries like Syria and Iraq in Turkey. In Syria there is currently a civil war going on between the dictator Assad and various rebel groups of the opposition plus on top of it by a so called Islamic State. Iraq is long lost for various reasons. ( „Various“ is the nom du jour as everything is so fucking messed up and I don’t know how to get the facts right by now.) The citizens of Syria and Iraq, from among many others wartorn regions in the world, are fleeing their homelands and countries with Germany as the praised land in mind. Germany is the country that most of the refugees are fleeing to by risking their lives tremendously by choosing unsafe passages through „various“ (sic!) countries like Turkey, Greece, Hungary, Macedonia, Croatia and so forth. The german chancellor Angela Merkel goes out of her way to, on the one hand, invite refugees from aforementioned countries to seek refuge in Germany and, on the other hand, is planning to implement transit zones on the borders of fortress Europe and offering aforementioned nutcase huge monetarian help in order to keep refugees from Germany and Europe. German people disagreeing with Merkel’s open door policy are starting their own way of showing their right to civil disobedience by putting refugee camps on fire on a regular basis.

Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Germany and all of its people are somehow representative for other countries and its people following the same logic.

This is a very simplified way of putting together factors in an equation in order to make my point to which I will come now: As weird and logical as it seems at the same time, Fear is what all these various factors in this incoherent compilation have in common.

I myself am living under a subconscious and sometimes very conscious non-definable fear in Istanbul. I am not endangered as I am not a member of an ethnic minority in Turkey. I strongly support humanist and leftist believes which I am too scared to declare in public right now ever since the first attack on civil society and oppositional groups of mainly left-wings which happened in July in Suruc. A suicide bomber blew himself up among a group of students who were on their way to rebuild the long embattled town of Kobane which got freed by kurdish fighters from the IS and killed more than 30 people. The suicide bombing is supposed to be planned and executed by the IS which never claimed responsibility for it. The turkish government made these claims in order to justify their now proclaimed fight with the IS and more importantly the PKK. Ever since the landslide loss of the ruling party majority in turkish parliament the countries state of affairs hit the downslope. Outright threatening of the opposition, killing civilians in Kurdish regions by claming to fight terrorism. detaining journalists, oppositional politicians, shutting down newspapers and tv channels to name only but a few of regulations is showing the nutcases’ fear of losing his power over the state of Turkey and its people. The second attack in Ankara where again two suicide bombers attacked a gathering of freedom protesters and more than 100 people died in the killing nurtured my rising fear and helplessness in this country. When I was too scared to claim my freedom of speech and attend a peace protest, more than 100 people died because they wanted to overcome their fear and show their strong will for peace. It is terrifying to understand that you die when you fight for your right to protest the status quo. The power of fear is ruling the ruling party of Turkey and it has its people in stranglehold. To maintain a clear vision of if the government is nurturing the IS or fighting it or who is working for whom under which circumstances or which outside forces are again threatening the state, let’s the conspiracy theories go galore and your sane brain AWOL.

To continue: Turkey is offering refuge for more than 2 million people and it is not the safe haven as the government wish it to be seen. Granting no basic civil rights, neither monetarian help nor the right to work legally, refugees are forced to work as cheap labor under miserable conditions and endure racist attacks by Turks. The refugees’ fear to die in the civil war of Syria or the unstable conditions in Iraq ,and after maybe having lost family or friends before, put them on the trail out of their homecountries. By endangering the life you wish to protect you overcome your fear and put yourself on the way. Fear is your force to stay alive which you put aside. You risk something which is your life because apparently life is worthwhile maintaning once you don’t have the privilege to choose.

Germany now is the country that most of the refugees are longing for in order to be safe. Safe from death and fear. Chancellor Merkel announced that Germany is able to welcome 800.000 refugees this year (without raising taxes) and refugees keep coming in. „Wir schaffen das“, is the famous remark by her which struck me for a mere second as it made me wish to believe that Germany can change after all (???) and offer asylum for people in need as it is indeed a very wealthy country and make up for their role as one of the biggest warfare exporters in the world. Nonetheless Merkel is faced with utter refusal by her own coalition partners and the utter racist population in the country who is in fear of being overrun by muslims. Her fear of losing her power and her face her integrity after admitting the refugees to come and now realizing that Germany as a whole is not that humanist and charitable after all, lets her negotiate some utterly despicable deals with the aforementioned nutjob (utter and utterly is prominent in this part of the text.) Money for keeping the refugees away to put it in a nutshell regardless of Turkey’s ruling party’s disrespect for civil or human rights. The blatant opportunism of this thinking is unbearable. Again here the fear of turkish people is at stake as Merkel is reinforcing Erdogan’s power fantasies.

For all who can’t read or write or remember recent history and evaluate present times: Turkey is not a safe third country according to the EU as it wishes to be or as Germany suddenly wants it to be, without even ever accepting Turkey as a candidate without restrictions. Oppositional parties, kurdish people in Kurdistan as civil targets, journalists, newspapers or civil society groups- everyone forming their own right to oppose the ruling party or are a minority is under attack. As it can’t grant safe living conditions to all of its citizens it can’t grant these conditions to refugees.

This means that the fear of the refugees to stay in their countries or to stay in Turkey will lead to more fleeing to the fortress, no matter what. The wish to live is bigger than the fear, in case of the refugees aka the people of Syria, Iraq, Libya, Eritrea, Sudan and many more wartorn countries as they are humans in the first place and not refugees per se.

Fear is embracing all of us and has us in its grip.

Irrational fear of sth bad might happen is opposed to rational and certain fear where sth bad will happen.

People in safe countries are more plagued with irrational fear.

People in unsafe countries are under constant fear of i.e. dying or being injured or traumatized.

Germany is a safe country.

Syria and Iraq are unsafe countries.

Turkey is on the verge of getting an unsafe country.

Once Turkey is an unsafe country the more refugees will come to Germany.

Hard facts put together rather simplistic.

Fear is egoistic and makes you only want to think for yourself. I among many fear for myself in Turkey, the people of Syria and Iraq are fearing for themselves in their countries, german people are fearing for themselves let alone all the governmental representatives.

I have no idea how to overcome this deadlock. I only know that being ruled by fear doesn’t mean to threaten, endanger or kill another person in order to feel safer. Killing or endangering others doesn’ t let you live safer, it endangers your own life. Fear is eating your soul to come back to the start. When your soul gets harmed you ask yourself what else is left.

Terrace after my mother set the flag on Turkish Republic Day, October 29th, 2015

Time broadcasted on TRT (National Turkish television) as allocated to political parties and president RTE according to the newspaper "Sözcü"

My mother's flag

Murat Suner about Control on Turkish Republic Day

30.10.15

4 min

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Turkey, October 29th, 2015.

We arrived earlier than expected. My mother walked out on the terrace, her hair still in curlers. Ah, she didn’t notice my text message that we managed to change flights. A little moment of embarrassment, when you arrive with a guest, who wasn’t introduced yet. “You’re early, way too early!”, she says with the notion of a mother, who knows her son to be rather late than early. “I won’t forgive you that one!” she says and laughs. We all laugh. A burst of laughter is always a good introduction, isn’t it?

A laughter is also the perfect easement for people, who are used to keep their stuff under control: Get up, but more importantly make my father get up, make breakfast, make my father have breakfast, make my father take his medicine before his first bite of breakfast, and strictly before that: make him take four pills, which he inspects every day from scratch, again and again with utter care, as if he took a brand new decision about his life on each morning.

Is that his way to control what remains uncontrolled? Is her strict daily routine from early morning till late at night her way to keep control? Over the loss of control that his dementia brings along to both of them – every day anew? Is it her way to exercise control in a country that shows you every day how little its people are in control of things? Where people with power abuse every bit of it, commit crimes, break the constitution, ignore court decisions as if there was no tomorrow, and lie straight to people’s face, day by day? And do things that are beyond most people’s imagination – and they get away with it, just like that.

Since more than a decade the country’s agenda seems to be about the state gaining control: Control over the military, the police, the judiciary, the youth, schools, universities, civil organizations, women, social networks – basically every aspect of society, and first and foremost over journalists, media and social media. After the mass killing in Suruc and Ankara, after every major violent incident, the government imposed a news embargo – five times, only in 2015.

During the last 25 days, in the run-up to general national elections, state-controlled television channel TRT degenerated into a full-blown government propaganda outlet. This is how TRT allocated its broadcasting time to the country’s major political parties and its president, who is supposed to stay neutral, but in fact isn’t: AKP – 30 hours, RTE – 29 hours (RTE = Recep Tayyip Erdogan), CHP – 5 hours, MHP – 1 hour, HDP – 18 minutes.

It became worse: The day before, police forces with chainsaws gained control over BugünTV – a former government-allied, now anti-AKP turned television channel. All that happens during live news broadcasting, anchors call their colleagues from other media and report live from the occupied newsroom, they again report live on other television channels. The bare obviousness of this Orwellian act, the sheer demonstration of power, the perfidious usage of media appears as a powerful gesture of exercising control and reminds how terrorists are actually using media and social networks to get their message across.

Today, October 29th is Republic Day.

Before breakfast, my mother hangs the republic’s flag right over the table. She was born as a republican native and one year old when in 1935 women obtained the active and passive right to vote. On November 1st, she will take my father, who can barely walk, and they will go to vote.

On Refugees

Georg Diez

25.10.15

8 min

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Conversation

Dear Aman,

Thank you for your mail, which sent me in two different directions. Way back to Mesopotamia, to where everything started. And to a future which is only just beginning to take shape. But that’s the way we live at the moment, time moves simultaneously backward and forward. This in turn – so goes the rapid script for our cascade conversation – reminded me of something that I read a couple of days ago, an article in the New York Times about the new findings of quantum mechanics. According to the report, physicists at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands conducted an experiment in which they proved that objects – in this case, the smallest of particles – affect each other even when far removed from each other.

Albert Einstein always rejected this theory, claiming it was as though God were playing dice. What bothered Einstein was the question of whether, in addition to the universe we know, there could be more – potentially infinite – universes. Whether, in addition to the reality we accept, there are other – potentially infinite – realities. Whether, in addition to the world we call our own, there are other – potentially infinite – worlds. Or as John Markoff describes it in the New York Times: ‘……the existence of an odd world formed by a fabric of subatomic particles, where matter does not take form until it is observed and time runs backward as well as forward.’

The wording is fascinating in many ways. Particles that take shape, in other words become reality and are therefore perceptible only when observed. Perception constitutes reality. And time that runs backward and forward. Here we have the question of whether time that runs backward processes all that went before. The modern in reverse – the results, forms and triumphs of the modern age change back into what was there before. However, what would this mean for democracy, human rights, individualism, secularism, nation and state? Is this what you mean when you speak of the crisis of the idea of the state, of a new way of thinking, other words, other philosophies and a freedom that does not come from the arbitrariness of a nation or from ‘German’ being randomly attributed to one who is born as a German and ‘Syrian’ to one born as a Syrian? That suffering, to some extent, must be accepted by birth and that freedom applies only to those who are free to claim it?

Yet atoms, particles that are separated, correspond, react to each other even when they are thousands of kilometres apart, as proved by the tests conducted by the physicists from Delft. Yet what does this mean for the way we think? What you said was right – money flows freely, people falter at borders. This is an untenable situation, a personal and moral insult representative of all of humanity. For a long, long time, columnists and other professional know- -alls have been saying that everything is linked to everything in a globalised world. But this reasoning was shaped purely by an economic perspective and it reduced everything to economics. It simply blanked out what it would mean if people were also to move as freely as capital. Money was released, and that had consequences. Now it is being followed by people. This has consequences too. In a certain way, both stand naked today, drastic in their existential rigour: the market and the human being.

For the people who are coming, are reduced. They are no more than what they are. They have nothing more than what they have and if even their dignity were to be taken from them, they would be left with nothing more than a plastic bag with which they have been on the move for months. They are naked existence, devoid of all civilisation. And civilisation responds by pretending they don’t exist. Some at least, and I fear there could be more. This is the daily shock of the images, the daily pain when looking at them. The people in long lines, wandering through no-man’s land, sometimes Slovenia, sometimes Croatia, sometimes Austria, the rain, the mud, the green of the landscape cruel, almost cynical, immobile, eternal, while the human being, the people, the families move on, vulnerable and in vain yet defiant, uncertain of what lies ahead, certain only of the fact that what they have left behind was what they found frightening, painful and threatening.

A trek of nomads in a world that left the nomadic way behind thousands of years ago. At least that is what is said. But perhaps it is different. And what you say is correct: the human being is old, something stirs in him, he sets forth, again and again, an old story currently being repeated. Time is there throughout, the entire history of mankind, in these pictures, breaking through the surface of the present that wanted to forget – and forgot – the multi-layered anthropology. Something is forcing its way through, and we are afraid. They walk and walk and walk, and it seems this is the way people originally were, walking, and yet to see it like this is surprisingly new and unexpected.

We must allow this shock to enter our language and thought. Only then can we perhaps understand what we are seeing, what is happening. Yet Europe is resisting the shock, in word and thought. We see destinies being transformed into policies, suffering into rules, need into measures. It is a sad, tragic spectacle, oppressive like Greek tragedy.

The six-year-old boy sleeping on the pavement, he is this boy and he is all boys, he has just arrived and he was always here. His mother, tired, his father, can he protect him? They are all parents, always have been, and are still pushing a rickety baby stroller through the dirt, right here, in the centre of Berlin, where we see scenes familiar only in Hollywood’s dark films, the end of civilisation as a fable, best enjoyed with plenty of popcorn.

Man is afraid of nothing as much as he is afraid of himself. Who is this musafir you talk about? A refugee, a wanderer, a traveller, a guest? Why is he travelling? What drives him? These are old, fascinating questions. The newspapers that write against the refugees no longer speak of ‘refugees’ but of ‘migrants’. This makes the masses controllable, bureaucratically manageable. They have started questioning basic human rights. They say this cannot continue, yet have no ready answer other than fences where people will die, and camps in which people will wait, wait, wait until they wait no more and run away.

I don’t know if this, what we are witnessing, is a ‘Völkerwanderung’ or rather a concrete reaction to concrete circumstances that have come about in the last 10 to 15 years, because of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, of the failure of the West, of the iron hand of rulers in the Middle East, of poverty and injustice, of a war in Syria that was ignored, refugees who should stay where they are, that was the plan, the mistake, the moral betrayal. The countries there have already collapsed, the state here, in Germany, is also under threat, or so they say. I don’t believe it. It seems to be some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, almost like conjuring up a state of emergency, that’s how extreme vocabulary is here now. They are talking yet again of Weimar, because here Weimar is the great shock of the past century. Those are the images they can recall. But the new events escape them. As does humanitarianism.

Yet there is so much that could be done now, that one could learn, there is so much that gives us courage. This is an old country in an old continent. It could open up, could re-invent itself. What does it mean for thought and thus also for politics if there is a shift in the world view? When things, people, separated by thousands of kilometres start to move? Does something like the discovery of a multiple truth, as shown by quantum mechanics, also have consequences for a different code of ethics? Many worlds exist only if observed by us. That is the shock that is starting to make itself felt, that is what explains the hatred and the aggression that are coming to the fore once again.

That’s the situation. And winter has yet to come.

All the best,
Georg

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On Refugees

Aman Sethi

22.10.15

5 min

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Conversation

Dear Georg,
I read your mail with great interest. The current situation across Europe is very intriguing, and I look forward to more details on how Germany is engaging with this sudden arrival of over a million people.
This morning I saw this arresting image (attached with this mail) of thousands of men, women and children walking in an orderly file through Slovenia en route to Germany. Clearly we are only just beginning to understand the origins and repercussions of this great migration.
I am also fascinated by the resurrection of old phrases and categories like “Abendland” or “the Occident”, and by this wonderful sentence where you say, “no sooner do I start than the entire vast history of the world washes over me.” It sent me down a digression that may be relevant in our thinking about the present moment in connection with the “new Völkerwanderung”.
You mention that many of the people moving through Europe come from Iraq, Syria, and the Turkish Syrian border, which correspond to the region once known as Mesopotamia – home to one of oldest recorded urban civilisations. The early Mesopotamian settlements traded extensively with the Harappan civilization, the ruins of which were found in present day Pakistan (another country you mention in your mail).
Recently a friend alerted me to historical research that contemplates the existence of a Harappan enclave – i.e. a colony of migrants from what is now called Pakistan – founded in in Lagash, a settlement in present day Iraq, in the second half of the third millennium B.C. It seems that the dawn of urban civilisation as we know it carries within it the seed of migration, and the history of the world is a chronology of struggle between the entropic, or disorderly, desires of people and the negentropic, or order-seeking, impulses of states.
Perhaps Europe’s current “crisis” signals a new moment in our shared histories? Perhaps this moment – when nation states in some of the oldest continually inhabited regions of the world (like Syria and Iraq) collapse – shall result in a re-fashioning of the critical categories of thought and language that we are accustomed to.
There are signs of this re-ordering already, with journalists, politicians and policy wonks wondering how to refer to this tide of humanity – are they migrants, or immigrants, or expatriates, or refugees, or asylum seekers?
Perhaps for the sake of this conversation we can refer to them as “Musafir” – an Urdu word common to Arabic, Persian and Turkish with slightly altered meanings in each language – A musafir is a traveller from a strange land, in some languages she is a pilgrim, a seeker of paths and truths, and in Turkish (I could be wrong here) I think, a musafir is a guest.
But why does this Musafir travel? Here we may consider a wonderful Persian phrase – of the concept of the ashina-zada, which refers to the feeling of tiring of all one’s acquaintances and desiring the company of strangers.
Perhaps this fluid category – of the Musafir, motivated by impulses that are not always obvious – is helpful in alluding to the long journeys taken by these people without diminishing the hardships they have suffered, or pre-judging the reception they will receive in Europe (as you mentioned, in some cases they have been met with violence, and in other cases with solidarity).
Your mail sent me down another line of inquiry, which is the narrative of the desperation of the Musafir – of course I have seen the pictures and read the harrowing accounts of boatloads of people drowning, of death by asphyxiation in abandoned freight trucks; the horror is real, visceral and immediate.
The amplification of this horror makes clear that the only politically feasible way Europe can engage with this situation is through the trope of humanitarianism. This narrative obscures the fact that in the years after World War One, it became a criminal offence to seek one’s fortune in a foreign land. While finance capital moves across the world with ever increasing velocity, we are fettered by our passports. There is, of course, a parallel imperial history of the passport – which we can consider another time: Who is to decide that I am Syrian, or German, and what does the act of name and fixing entail?
The current narrative of “rescuing the desperate” allows European nations and commentators to speak of humanitarian rescue and “European Values” without engaging with the strange, policed landscape that we live in, and accept the eternal policing of borders and residents as normal. What is the process by which it became normal and desirable for BMW to invest in a automobile factory in South Africa, but almost impossible for a young woman in a village somewhere in southern Africa to gather money from her network of friends and family, catch a flight to Germany, walk into a government office and register herself as someone seeking a job without constantly fearing imprisonment and deportation?
I think this “march of the musafir” offers us a moment to reflect on the long shadow of the twentieth century and the strange new categories it presented us with – borders, aliens, people smugglers, camps for those who cross a border without permission. It’s all a bit bizarre isn’t it?
Thank again for your thought-provoking email. I really look forward to this conversation and your descriptions of what’s happening on the ground in Germany. It is these details, after all, that shall help us think further and deeper.
Yours
Aman

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(W)hole III: Human Life To-Do List

Agostina Rufolo

20.10.15

3 min

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I remember my first kiss. I was 14. I kinda wanted to live the experience at last. I’ve waited long enough. I felt like a really late bloomer. We’ve been going to the municipal pool with two friends, everyday riding our bikes, during the whole summer. Only “My Girl” as the soundtrack was missing. I’m sure we sang it a few times while riding our bikes, though, or it definitely played in my mind. We would meet boys there and have fun. Although they wanted to be around the place and I really wanted to be in the pool all day long.

So I met E. He wasn’t what I would call something special, but he was the one I liked the most in that group. And so did my friend M. I didn’t know that at first. But I had something personal to get through with. The whole summer went by, he sorta had to decide between the two of us. The whole situation started feeling really pathetic, so even though I liked him and even though I am incredibly stubborn and capricious, I thought he’d of course choose my friend instead of me, because she was blonde and had an amazing hair and was more experienced than I was. I’d never kissed anybody before! Why would he want that? So I stepped aside and waited to see how everything with my friend would start to develop and focused on enjoying the pool.

The last day of summer you could smell the nostalgia in the air, you could see the bright colours fading like a retro Instagram filter slowly into the autumn palette. This guy, the Paraguayan we called him because that’s where he was from said he wanted to talk to me. He asked me if I still liked E, if I wanted to make out with him. I was confused, I thought he had chosen my friend already, I thought he didn’t want to kiss me after all. I didn’t know what I wanted anymore, I was all nerves, but I had to get through with it and it had to be that summer, I wouldn’t wait any longer.

His friend told me he was waiting for me passing a long row of trees. I walked there, almost shaking, but pretending with a firm and steady walk. I sat down next to him and I told him I’ve never kissed anybody before, I had no idea how to proceed. He told me not to worry, that it was easy and to close my eyes. He just leaned toward me and our lips touched, our mouths were wide open and our tongues danced. I opened my eyes, his were closed. He seemed to be into it. I didn’t get what the fuss was all about, I felt nothing, I just mechanically but willingly moved my tongue and my lips like I would perfect a choreography at my dance classes. Think I did pretty well. Then we stopped and we sat there for a little longer, although it was kinda awkward and I didn’t really know what to say. Then we went back to the group. I felt nothing, I felt the same, but somehow accomplished. I’ve crossed that off of my human life to-do list.

I never hanged out with my two friends nor him anymore after the summer ended. Then found out my friend and him were a couple. I didn’t really care.

On Refugees

Georg Diez

15.10.15

5 min

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Conversation

(In cooperation and with the generous support of Goethe Institute New Delhi / Max Mueller Bhavan)

Dear Aman,

I’d be happy to describe to you what’s going on in Germany at the moment – at least I’d be happy to try, because actually I don’t understand it myself. And incidentally that’s the way it is for most Germans – except for the ones who set refugee homes on fire: at least they know that they hate, and hate is what they’re looking for because they often have little to hold onto in their lives.
Everyone else, on the other hand, finds it difficult to say what kind of country they live in. Sometimes it seems like a dark Germany that scares them because the citizens flock together to form an obtuse mass. Then again it seems like a bright Germany that gives them courage because the citizens unite in solidarity. And then it seems like a dark Germany again in which the politicians cut their values and their humanity down a notch while the citizens provide the necessary help for everyone who needs it.
And there are many – 40,000, 80,000, 1.5 million people, from Syria, from Iraq, from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Eritrea or the Balkan states. They come because they’re fleeing from war and persecution in their homelands or in search of a better life for themselves and their children. Those are the numbers for this year, for Germany alone, and as always politics are made with those numbers, images are used to manipulate opinions, the media come under suspicion of being biased, etc.
Could we have known that these people were coming? No, say the politicians who have been looking the other way for years, who have ignored the war in Syria, who were hoping the refugees would stay in the camps in Jordan or Lebanon, who thought the journeys would be too far and the ocean too wide and the fences too high – they didn’t know human nature very well, that’s evident once again; they’re not acquainted with the despair, they don’t know what volition all those people have who set out with only a plastic bag in their hand.
Yes, say those who’ve been dedicated to the refugees’ cause for years, who’ve been interested in the war in Syria, which has been like a gaping moral wound in the West for four years; yes, say those who think in historical dimensions and understand the large-scale geo-political devastation wrought by the Americans since they invaded Iraq and threw the country into turmoil because they weren’t willing or able to create a democratic order there the way they did in Germany after World War Two.
We could go back even further, to 1919 and Woodrow Wilson’s betrayal when, after World War One, he broke his promise of independence for many countries, or back even further to the nineteenth or even the eighteenth centuries to the havoc caused by colonialism, and perhaps we’ll get there in the course of our correspondence: as you can see, I really just want to tell you what’s happening here right now, in Berlin, where I live and where the refugees find themselves confronted with a bureaucracy that often comes across as sadistic in its Kafkaesque opacity – and no sooner do I start than the entire vast history of the world washes over me.
But perhaps that’s also quite apt for the current situation: because the fates of the individual human beings who come here mingle with fears that are older, raise questions that are more fundamental, open dimensions that are more permanent. When there is talk – rightly or wrongly – of a “new Völkerwanderung”, then already that choice of words alone suggests that we’re facing something between the Mongol invasions of Europe and the Turkish march on Vienna. And indeed, the fears that are often invoked are fears of “Überfremdung” (foreign infiltration) and in particular the “Islamisation” of the so-called “Abendland” (occident) – another word I haven’t heard for a very, very long time.
In a certain sense it’s as if Europe had woken up out of a slumber that lasted twenty-five years – and now that reality is breaking over this languishing continent in all its vehemence, many people seem overwhelmed. Until now, for example, Germany has had a hard time admitting that it’s an immigration country – at least conservative politics have refused to accept that reality. In the present situation that’s backlashing, because the country that essentially grants unqualified right of asylum – a circumstance rooted in the history of Nazi Germany – has no immigration law that corresponds to the current needs.
So much for today. There’s plenty I can still tell you: about our chancellor, who confuses everyone except herself, about scenes of the kind I’ve never seen in Europe, scenes of readiness to help and scenes of chaos, about my hopes and doubts, about optimism and pessimism. But I’d be more interested in your perspective on all this, which seems to Germany like a historic watershed, but to many parts of the world naturally doesn’t.
Warm regards,
Georg

(In cooperation and with the generous support of Goethe Institute New Delhi / Max Mueller Bhavan)

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Refugees in Reality

Georg Diez about the 60showcase

11.10.15

4 min

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Salon | 60showcase

It had happened in the middle of the evening or maybe already towards the end of the event, the people who had come with their children in the afternoon and had swam in the pool after the rain had subsided had left and the people who had had other places to go to on this last day of the art crazy in Berlin had also left to attend another boring dinner and talk about another boring artist, and we had had a fire burning in the court-yard, sort of, the place where everybody gathered who was not listening to one of the readings or eating some of Gordon’s fish tacos or looking at this strange and beautiful area, a mix of the Palm Springs of the 1960s and the East Berlin of the late 1980s.
It belongs to Jonas Burgert, a painter with the force and gesture of a Renaissance man transposed into a post-apocalyptic playground of hedonism and war. He had liked the idea to host this first ever 60showcase, a sort of salon without salon, a bit like the internet turned off, this was the idea, the feeling of surfing between texts, stories, memories, thoughts, drifting, floating, getting lost and finding common ground again, there would be music and food and films, Christopher Roth and Alexa Karolinksi and the still magical soccer game between Germany and Brazil that ended after 30 minutes because Germany was already five goals ahead; the rest was not defeat, it was the mutual attempt to avoid total humiliation, in a way one of the greatest achievements in international soccer because they pulled it off, and pleasant to watch, again and again.
It was cold that day, September 20th 2015, it had rained the whole day, it had felt at times like Manila was a suburb of Berlin, a Manila where somebody had taken away the sun and replaced it with a four Watt lightbulb and the whole tropical chaos was turned into a constant wondering if this was how it was going to be like for the foreseeable future, the weather in amok modus and people pretending that nothing really was going on that would necessitate commenting upon. Was it? Or wasn’t it? Would we all be prepared for it? Or was it just a lack of imagination?
And when it happened, late in the evening, as I have said, or maybe almost towards the end, it was like a kiss from reality, it was the epic energy which was stored away in single letters that formed a text, it was a moment of truth which was as unexpected as any moment of truth these days. Sam was standing there, in his camel hair coat he looked like a metaphysical warrior without a battle to wage and without an army to follow, a lonely, handsome man stuck in his own dream, in his own reality, who is to say, there is a difference, he knows that, we all know that, the people watching that evening knew it, and still, it was confusing to tell one from the other. Why seperate? Why decide? And who is to tell?
What had really happened was hard to say. It had been Christopher’s idea and he and Helene Hegemann and Jasna Fritzi Bauer and Anne Philippi and Armen Avanessian and Andrea Hanna Hünniger and Mavie Hörbiger also known as the 60pages All Stars had read a text that Sam had written, a part of his take on sharing, his philosophy of the politics of pleasure, and as …
Later, when Igor Levit was playing the last movements of Beethoven’s last Sonata and everybody was gathered around the grand piano which had been placed in the middle of a large room with parts of the ceiling hanging down in a very fashionable way,

Brace Brace "Life Ring" (2015);
part of "Produktion" – curated by Kolja Reichert; Gallery nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder

The art of the contemporary 4

Marie-France Rafael about the aesthetics of fear

08.10.15

6 min

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INT. GALLERY – DAY

M comes rushing through the entrance of the gallery, passing by the artworks in the first room and stopping before the desk of the gallery assistant in the second room. She introduces herself, explaining that she has an interview-appointment with Annika Kuhlmann and Christopher Kulendran Thomas (Brace Brace), but apparently the two aren’t here yet. M is invited to sit down and wait. She takes out her computer and transforms the little waiting space almost immediately into a working office. After a while Annika and Christopher arrive and the three of them sit down to talk.

M

We could start by who and what is Brace Brace?

Christopher Kulendran Thomas

(Smiling at Annika)

Brace Brace begun as the artistic collaboration between the two of us.

Annika Kuhlmann

We decided to found a luxury life gear brand. Life gear is the term we coined for safety and emergency equipment. We started this as a way to investigate the aesthetics of safety and what they could be in relation to the aesthetics of fear.

M

The aesthetics of fear, like in being afraid?

Christopher gives Annika a little nod with the elbow that she should answer the question

Annika Kuhlmann

The objects we engage with….

Annika is suggesting to go find a quieter place in the gallery, as people are constantly passing by and interrupting the discussion. Everyone gets up and grabs their things. Finally they sit down around a little table in the back of the gallery continuing their talk.

Annika Kuhlmann (CONT’D)

When I say aesthetics of fear, I think about the objects we are engaging with – like the life-ring we made for this show – which are perfect symbolisations of existential fear on the one hand and an almost transcendental hope for rescue and salvation on the other. You would only use these objects like life-rings and life-wests, but also fire extinguishers and many others, in a moment of total catastrophe, when you are faced with the danger of loosing your life. And you use them while putting all your hope for rescue into them – and we are talking about the most existential kind of hope. I am very interested in how those two extreme feelings are manifested in these objects.

M

And would you say that those objects become images of those feelings, of what you called the aesthetics of fear and safety?

Christopher Kulendran Thomas

Beyond image production the whole branding operation of Brace Brace is an operation of fetishising safety and rescue as a luxury commodity in an economy of fear. The functional art works such as the life ring of Brace Brace is an object of beauty that could hold the promise of a future at a moment of existential crisis.

M

So there is on one side the aesthetization of the idea of branding combined with an ‘aesthetic of fear’, could you describe how those two go together in your artistic strategy. I mean are you actually using economic strategies in order to develop your branding. Or to phrase it differently how is your brand working?

Christopher Kulendran Thomas

We are currently in the research phase of launching Brace Brace and the strategy is to develop it as a luxury brand within the art field but with the potential to create a new market beyond the field of art.

Annika Kuhlmann

(Continuing the thoughts)

But there is even more to that. I think luxury goods deal so much with escapism – it’s all about the illusion of the better world, one that you can actually buy, right here and now. So Brace Brace is also an investigation into how a luxury brand can directly engage with a world of fear, danger and crisis – in our case by rethinking safety and rescue as luxury commodities. At the core it is about positioning yourself differently to what is immanent – and that’s the crisis. I like to think of us as a generation that understands itself as ‘pre’ rather than ‘post’, i.e. ‘pre’ as in preparation for whatever we want to see happen. So in that sense what is the world we are looking at, what do we want to salvage and, maybe more importantly, what do we want to, but also what will we need to leave behind?

M

One of the main critics contemporary art encounters is that of becoming more and more a commodified good. Now it seams to me, that this might be the starting point of your work, saying that if that is anyhow the case, why not just start from there and create actually a brand, with commodified goods in the art field. Is that your attempt to rescue art?

Christopher Kulendran Thomas

There are two art historical trajectories that we talk about a lot in relation to this. One is a kind of potential for reversing the Duchampian logic of the ready made, which is about taking artifacts of the commercial world into the gallery and making it art by framing it as such. We are interested in reversing that process, which is the potential of taking artistic operations outside the context of art, potentially to the extend where it’s framing as art becomes irrelevant. That’s the potential of doing art through commercial processes. But there is also an issue of the very form of the artist. We talked about this as perhaps an alternative to conceptual art’s strategies of dematerializing the artwork, which kind of failed to evade its commodification.

Annika Kuhlmann

Brace Brace plays with the notion how the frame for contemporary art has become very confined to the object tradable in the market. Yes, maybe we can ‘rescue art’. But what would that mean? What is the post-contemporary art and how are we ‘pre’? Maybe there is a future for an art outside what we call contemporary art that doesn’t understand itself in the relationship between the artist and the object and the spectator – and maybe then production can work differently.

The camera zooms on the life-ring until the image fades to black.

Ein Sylter Schicksal im Spätsommer

about the hateful wealth and boredom of this Super Spießer Island

07.10.15

2 min

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Ganz klar ein Männchen: Rote Cordhose, grüne Steppjacke, gelbes Hemd, ein strenger, lächerlicher Scheitel. Ganz klar ein Weibchen: Pinke Cordhose, rote Steppjacke, weiße Bluse, Perlenohrringe, Schühchen mit vergoldeter Plastikbrosche. Ganz klar der Junior: Blaue Cordhose, roter Cashmere-Cardigan, grünes Hemd, ein Polo-Golf-Cappy. Ein glänzender, gestriegelter Labrador, ein glänzender, gestriegelter Rhodesian Ridgeback.
Da sitzen unsere Drei, rauchend, süffelnd, lästernd und echauffierend in einem wohlstandsdeutschen Snob-Strandkörbchen unter zig anderen des gleichen Edelspießer-Schlags im Fischfastfood Gosch Sylt, der zehn nicht heimische Fischsorten im gleichen, billigen Buttersud zerbrät und in fünferlei Mayonnaise ertränkt.
Sie scheinen einfach zu warten, bis das Leben vorbei ist, und richten ganz nebenbei unendlichen oder gar keinen Schaden an. Man weiß es einfach nicht, ob sie die feigsten und größten Uniform-Konsumaggressoren oder schlicht harmlose Tunichtgute sind. Sie haben sich, weil Meer irgendwie chic ist und hier soviele andere abschätzig glotzende ehemalige Rechtsanwälte, höhere Beamte und Zahnärzte-Schnösel aus Duisburg und Hannover lungern, in den äußersten Nordwesten verdrückt, und bilden hier einen der gruseligsten Pseudo-Elite-Rückzugsorte weltweit.
Die einzige, die ganze Insel verbindende Straße ist voller Rentner-Mittelklasse-Limousinen, die alle im gleichen Tempo und wie computergesteuert und durch eine andere Planeten-Landschaft aus gelben Dünen und braun-beige-schwarzen Hügel-Steppen dahinschleichen.
Wie auf einem großen Teich, auf dem hunderte Stockentenpaare ziellos umherkreisen, schlendern unsere reichen Schöne-heile-Welt-Pensionisten um die Edelboutiquen in Reetdach-Häusern. Ein simpler Gleichklang von bedauernswertem Glück und Routine.
Blaugrau donnert der Himmel mit der Wucht der Erdumdrehung vom unendlichen Meer kommend über das hohe und feste, vom Wind gebogene Gras, hinein in die harten, schwarzen Dornen, die rotglühende Beeren tragen, durch die Moose und Gewächse, die sich tief geduckt wie ein dichtes Netz im Boden verbeißen.

Ein Schmankerl aus Übermorgen

about Flucht. Nur eben hier raus!

07.10.15

1 min

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Ein kleines Schmankerl aus Übermorgen:

In 50 oder 100 Jahren packen unsere Enkel die Sachen um nach Syrien, in die Ukraine, in den Iran, nach Russland zu ziehen. Heute noch haben wir Angst und ekeln uns vor diesen Ländern, begaffen sie nervös und hilflos, warten ungeduldig auf deren Erlösung. Aber dann wird dort das leichte, quellende, blühende Leben stattfinden.

Als Flüchtlinge werden unsere Enkel dorthin gehen um die mediterrane Küste Algeriens, die Weiten des Sudan und Malis zu besiedeln, um in den urban gardening Siedlungen Ägyptens und West -Chinas zu leben, um Teil sein dürfen der pulsierenden Party – und Kunstszene Islamabads, Kingshasas und Damaskus´, um Teil der quirligen, jungen Demokratien Somalias und Yemens sein zu können.

Die Mehrheit hat entschieden ins Internet zu ziehen und hat nichts dageben, dass Maschinen besser als sie selbst wissen was sie als nächstes tun werden, unseren Enkeln aber reichts, die wollen weg.