The Berlinale film festival was always political. In fact, it emerged as a vehicle for Cold War soft power: ‘cultural freedom’ as a cudgel with which to beat the allegedly more restrictive and censorious groupthink of the Soviet Bloc.
It was started by two men. One, Oscar Martay, was the Film Officer for the US military occupation. The other was Alfred Bauer, a film historian and jurist who—surprise—had been a high-ranking Nazi official, helping make films while ratting out colleagues in the industry (Berlinale suspends award over first director’s Nazi past).
Bauer became the first director of the Berlinale and held that role until 1976, miraculously hiding in plain sight until his role in the Third Reich was belatedly ‘discovered’. It’s hard to imagine anything more political than a film festival started by a military bureaucrat and a Nazi propagandist.
This year’s fracas over whether the Berlinale might inherit some responsibility for the nefarious activities of its largest sponsor—the German government—is by no means the first political scandal to rock the festival. In 1970, the Berlinale fell apart amid the stench of hypocrisy and napalm fumes when the Jury tried to cancel a Brechtian docudrama about an atrocity committed by US soldiers in the Vietnam War from the program.
I hate to break it to you, but if you’re reading this brochure, you are now a member of a foreign extremist organisation. This diagnosis might come as quite a shock. You might not even think of yourself as “foreign” or “extremist”—few people do. However, at least one in five people experience some form of Foreign Extremist Syndrome over the course of their lives.
Rest assured that, with the right help, many people with foreign extremism go on to lead rich and fulfilling lives: playing badminton, collecting stamps, shopping at H&M, all the things normal people do. The point is: foreign extremism is no longer a death sentence. At least, not now, not yet.
Why me?
Alexander Dobrindt, German Interior Minister. Picture by Martin Rulsch, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Perhaps you’re asking, “Why me?” Well, why not you? Foreign Extremism touches people from all walks of life. For instance, last month Germany’s domestic spy agency listed the activist group “Jewish Voice for Just Peace in the Middle East” (Jewish Voice) as a “foreign extremist” organisation.
In fact, almost anyone can succumb to this dangerous malady. Except that, despite having the most baroque, violent imaginations and willingness to fund, cheerlead and even carry out acts of mutilation and killing, the German media and political class, the police, the weapons manufacturers, and the military, seem somehow immune to “extremism”.
Weird.
Well, there was that one chap—kooky moustache, liked to yell and gesticulate with his hands. But that was a long time ago. Those kinds of extremists are very much dead or completely cured. Move along. Nothing to see here.
Acceptance
The good news is: you can be cured too.
The first stage of getting healthy is acceptance. Look in the mirror at that hideously extreme and foreign face of yours and whisper, “I am a foreign extremist”.
Then self-isolate so that your disease does not rub off on other people. It would be courteous to inform your neighbours, your employer, your bank, the immigration office, anyone who needs to take the proper precautions. And if you don’t, perhaps the Bild Zeitung will do it for you, or some lonely creep with a camera, you know, the kind of guy who lurks on the perimeter of demonstrations pointing his big lens this way and that—I’m sure he’s willing to spread the word.
And don’t forget—self care is important. Run a bath, light some candles and take care of you, because when word gets around about your little pestilence, no one will go near you.
Getting healthy
The next step is to learn what “healthy” means. Like whiteness, healthy is ubiquitous, yet transparent and hard to grasp. Healthy is the radical center against which every other state is defined. The way things are supposed to be. It is therefore the complete opposite of everything you are. That’s the key.
So take out a piece of paper and make a list of all the things you like to do, the kinds of opinions you’re inclined to have, the sorts of lowlives and degenerates you like to hang out with, and just do the opposite.
1) Be generous to the genocidaires
Let’s take the example of Jewish Voice. First of all, I’m reading a lot of really unhealthy things on their Instagram account about the genocide in Gaza. This might be surprising to someone like you, but it is very foreign and utterly extremist to be against genocide. In order to be a good normie, you need to be in favour of genocide. Or simply willing to ponder the mysterious orb of genocide and mutter, “It’s complicated.” At the very least, deny that a genocide is happening. Hundreds of thousands of people simply vanishing for no apparent reason. Just like that.
Weird.
2) Embrace apartheid
So you think that an apartheid regime is bad—that it is somehow uncool to give one group rights based upon ethnicity, while saddling another group with an inferior set of rights. Darling, check your temperature. That must be the fever talking.
Dividing people by ethnicity is perfectly healthy. Germany does it all the time: dangling Damocletian swords above naturalised citizens at home while cheering on an ethnonationalist state in the Middle East. Remember, Germany has a special psychosis, I mean special responsibility, when it comes to the Jewish people. Just last week, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz thanked Israel for doing the West’s “dirty work”. Perhaps he meant dirty wars. Egal.
3) Don’t be foreign (and keep your mouth shut)
Let’s look at the name “Jewish Voice” for a few more clues about how to expel the extremist virus. First, the “Voice” part: the opposite of using your voice is to keep your mouth shut—it’s a very healthy thing to do, not least because it keeps you safe from inhaling even more germs than are already coursing through your system.
And what about the “Jewish” part? I guess the opposite is … don’t be Jewish? But hang on, both the domestic spy agency and the Interior Minister accused Jewish Voice of being antisemitic. Hmmm, so that means you have to be both not Jewish and anti-antisemitic at the same time. Wait, my head is spinning like a dreidel. How do we square this?
Of course! Not being Jewish while accusing Jews of antisemitism? Well, that’s just being German!
Illness as teacher
They say that illness is a teacher, and now we know that the only cure for foreign extremism is to be German. But of course, you will never be German enough. So, run along, be a good foreigner and keep shtum about the massacres.
The other day I heard Bernie Sanders proclaim that “Israel has a right to defend itself”, as he made the case for a Harris presidency. He spoke in his trademark gruff manner, a tone whose charm has long faded since it has been co-opted to the service of empire—of making the empire marginally more progressive.
“…but”, he went on to deliver a call for moderation and limits to Israel’s violence. And then to insist we should still vote for politicians who enable genocide and glory in the lies that justify it. I’m not here to debate whether or not someone should vote. This is a morally and strategically complex issue that is mostly inconsequential to the mad trajectory our planet is spinning along.
What interests me more is the construction of the oath: “Israel has a right to defend itself”, that Bernie and others feel the need to recite before delivering any critique of Israel’s war on Palestine. Curiously, it is the same line used by Biden and Harris to justify sending the weapons that are doing the killing that Sanders claims to find abhorrent. And it is used by the genocidaires themselves, Netanyahu and others, along with their cheerleaders. This should be enough to make us pause and consider what this supposedly self-evident truth says and does not say.
So, once again: “Israel has a right to defend itself.”
Let’s start with the “Israel” part. In what sense does the identity of being Israel constitute a set of rights? Is it that Israel, as a nation-state, has a right to defend itself, because, apparently, nation-states have a right to self-defence?
A lot of legal minds don’t think international law supports what Israel has done to Gaza. In any case, I doubt that many people are weighing the UN charter in their heads when someone is droning on about Israel’s righteous violence. They are more likely to reach for whatever commonplace ideas of fairness they have accumulated in their everyday lives.
For instance, the way I typically understand self-defence is that, when someone is attacking me, I have the right to use violence to repel their violence. So if someone comes into my house and strikes me with a baseball bat, I can use the counter-violence of my cast iron wok or electric fly swatter until they stop, and preferably leave. The right to self-defence does not endorse finding out where my attacker lives and blowing up their house, killing them, their families and their neighbours as well.
This is obviously not a perfect analogy for many reasons. Individuals and nation-states are different kinds of entities, and also, the Hamas attacks on October 7 took place in the context of Israel’s long genocidal campaign against Palestine. It is not some random home invasion.
I make the analogy to show that even if we were to agree that nation-states have a right to use violence to make themselves safe, in the case of Israel, this right applied only when Hamas was attacking the rave, kibbutzim and military bases along the borders of the Gaza concentration camp. Once Hamas left, that licence expired.
What about the rockets? Given that they have caused very few civilian casualties, the right to self-defence does not extend to obliterating apartment buildings, schools, universities and hospitals on the faintest whiff of conjecture that someone is hiding a rocket launcher in an MRI machine.
Perhaps Israel does understand self-defence to mean that when someone attacks you, you have an unlimited right to strike back with no consideration of proportionality. An eye for an eye doctrine, or at the latest count 250 eyes for an eye, according to the Lancet journal (and not just eyes, but arms, legs, jaws, skin–hundreds of thousands of human lives obliterated).
If this is the case, then the right to violence extends in all directions—physical, temporal—and to all actors in the bloody drama of human existence. Israel justifies its violent war on Gaza based on the October 7 attack. Fine. But in this infinite regress, Hamas can then say the October 7 attack was justified by, for instance, Israeli snipers shooting out the knees of peaceful protesters. Or the kid you pushed around when you were 13 can show up at your work and break your legs, so you can never ever bully them again. This concept of self-defence bloats and degenerates to the point where it can justify virtually any act of violence, by anyone, committed anywhere—because there will always be some act of violence preceding it.
I don’t think that’s what Israel or its defenders want to imply. In fact, I see the outlines of something much more ominous lurking beneath the surface.
Let’s circle back to the question of what “Israel” signifies. Perhaps they are saying that Israel has a right to defend itself not as any old nation-state, but because it is Israel. What then is the elusive quality of “being Israel” that grants it special rights to use violence against its perceived enemies?
The way I see it, Israel’s right to self-defence is not about the October 7 attacks or the fleeting barrages of rockets that disturb the sky over Tel Aviv. Rather, it is coiled with a desire to repress the memory that Israel was created very recently on lands upon which others lived and who were violently expelled. The Nakba haunts the lands upon which the nation-state of Israel stands.
So it is the mere existence of Palestinians at all that constitutes a psychic and existential threat to the state of Israel, against which Israel feels emboldened to unleash unending waves of slaughter until those they perceive as a threat escape into permanent exile or turn into dust. This would go a long way to explain why so many fading empires and settler-colonies are backing Israel’s genocide with moral support and military aid. Also, why Israel’s war on Palestine has no end in sight; why parents carry their children home from school as bags of meat; why Gaza sometimes looks less like a city under siege and more like the cratered surface of the moon.
However you interpret it, none of the many implications of the dirge that “Israel has a right to defend itself” withstand scrutiny—unless you are inclined to partake in a nihilistic orgy of retributive violence, or you think that certain ethnic enclaves possess special rights to commit genocide.
A THIRD RAIL drag show on the slippery ubiquity of fascism.
With her satellite dish tilted towards the void and her mascara bleeding from the humidity, “THE 4TH REICH” is Trish’s latest, desperate broadcast— a feverish dissection of modern fascism’s vapid face.
From pubic lice to the Epstein saga, from gooning to Germany’s fake-ass denazification, from karaoke bar to soapbox, Trish dices the highbrow and the rock-bottom lowbrow into a fever chart for our political moment: where deep states corrode into our entombed traumas, manifest as ripples on the atmospheric surface of our own disintegrating selves.
Part camp exorcism of elite fuckery, part breaking-news breakdown – bring an umbrella, because it’s getting crazy out there.
“Is it just me, or is it a little moist down south?”
A fever-dream hybrid of Network’s Howard Beale and the suburban delirium of Kath & Kim, Trish is an 80s Sydney weatherwoman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
This bleached-blonde Cassandra clawed her way to Channel 6’s morning forecast. All she wants? One. Flawless. Broadcast. But a great stinking hole has opened up in the ozone layer – a rupture in the fragile membrane holding reality in place. Can she nail one forcast without her monsoon of desire and rage raining all over her dreams?
Conceived as Berlin’s art scene ices over into complicit silence in the face of rearmament and genocide, Trish—”your lovable, fuckable, yet fundamentally attainable weathergirl”—is the unhinged tornado they deserve. Part camp spectacle, part soap box tirade: her manicured hands point to stormfronts while tracing the contours of institutional complicity.
In terms of books, I rely on Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley for scenes that map the arc of surveillance from counterinsurgency in Vietnam to the Internet.
The show features “Zombie” by the Cranberries, “Total Control” by the Motels and “Smooth Operator” by Sade, but with fucked up lyrics, and of course “Crazy” by Seal. From Freesound I used the song Weather Forecast Type Beat by YellowTree (License: Attribution 4.0). There are also snippets of the movies Blade Runner, Twin Peaks, and the T.S. Eliot poem “The Hollow Men”, read by Jeremy Irons.
A special thanks to Mad Kate for their dramaturgical insight.
Lastly, thanks to PAF for hosting the writing process over the Winter 25/26–get back on your feet soon dear, we need you!
As bombs fell on Beirut last night, I was alone in my apartment, with a cold, feeling useless and afraid of the slide slide slide into war and fascism. To distract myself, I dove into the expansive archive of the Soviet movie studio Mosfilm, restored and freely available on YouTube. I watched I am Cuba, (dir: Mikhail Kalatozov) a film that weaves together four vignettes of everyday life in a society on the brink of transformation.
As I watched, I thought, I need to adjust how I see myself and the society that I live in. I still carry the programming of growing up in a liberal democratic society: the belief that we live in a society of rules and norms impartially applied to all, that justice exists, that power is subject to checks and balances, and that when there is overreach or abuse–say by police or politicians–it is isolated. No-one is above the law; wrongdoers will be brought to justice, even when they wear a blue uniform.
(And also that we have a free and indepenedent media, yada yada yada, fourth estate, blah blah, I can’t even be bothered to finish that sentence, because it is so worthless).
We don’t live in that fantasy. The zone we live in is much closer to the world of I am Cuba, a dictatorship where power is exercised through control over the police, security services, consumer goods and the media. Of course, Cuba and Germany were and are on different ends of the chain of extractive capitalism, and I am not hopeful that we have revolutionary energies just waiting to be unleashed. Nevertheless, this vision of Cuba under dictatorship help me let go of the illusion of a free society.
The film’s third vignette resonated most with me, and challenged me deeply. Perhaps because the protagonist, Enrique, is a middle class student revolutionary, while the other vignettes deal with the struggles of the proletariat and peasant classes. Enrique is wrestling with his desire to enact violent revenge after Castro is falsely reported to have been killed, and a friend is captured and murdered by the police. His comrades counsel him against what might sometimes be called “adventurism”–essentially saying, take out one guy and another functionary will take his place, just as violent or worse. Better to act rationally, strategically, and wait for the right, revolutionary moment.
Nevertheless, Enrique follows his emotions to the top of a building, picks up a sniper rifle from its hiding place and aims at a palace in the distance. In his sights he finds someone I believe is the chief of Havana’s murderous police, enjoying a breakfast of fried eggs with his family on a terrace, laughing, smiling, and kissing his children. Faced with this domestic scene, Enrique puts down his rifle and falls into despair.
As I watched, I observed that my mind was searching for a moral. A warning against acting on one’s own, perhaps, or a cautionary tale against impulsivity and adventurism. Yet Enrique’s hesitation seem less rooted in loyalty to the Leninist revolutionary cell, than a rush of sentimentality, of not wanting to shoot the man in front of his children. Maybe it has something to do with the dominance of the pater familias, a deep conditioning that prevents us from killing our fathers, lords, teachers, rulers, oppressors, literally, or metaphorically.
Whatever the reason, this hesitation proves costly. In the very next scene, the police raid the apartment where his comrades are printing pamphlets confirming that Castro is alive. One of his friends is shot as he sends papers cascading from the balcony, his body landing in the street. Another is shot in the back after he dares to mouth a revolutionary slogan at the police. His killer? The same man Enrique had in his crosshairs.
That afternoon, Enrique delivers a speech at a demonstration before the police forcibly clear the square. A dove is killed by a police bullet and falls near where Enrique stands. With the dove in one hand and a rock in the other, Enrique leads the demonstrators forward against the massive violent force of the state, manifest as water bursting fourth from cannons. Enrique spots the Chief of Police leaning on a car and he edges relentlessly forward. The Chief of Police sees Enrique approach and fires. But Enrique staggers on as bullet after bullet strike his body until he collapses on the ground.
The vignette concludes with Enrique’s funeral, which becomes a sombre rally through Havana’s streets. It seems as if the whole city is observing his death, is galvanised by it. From balconies, endless streams of petals fall, and a vast Cuban flag is unfurled by cigar rollers from the top floor of their factory. Enrique’s pointless, irrational death–walking into bullets–in the end serves a strategic purpose: he becomes a martyr whose death galvanises the movement he died for.
What does this say about our situation? That acts of symbolic sacrifice have their place in a revolutionary struggle. Decisions made in the heat of violence can resonate in ways that cannot be predicted or mapped out through rational analysis alone.
I salute all the comrades right now, putting their soft, vulnerable bodies up against the armoured, weaponised bodies of the police—strangled, kicked, punched, insulted, pepper sprayed. When you see these sneering bipedal tanks in action, it is hard not to think that a crypto-Nazi movement has integrated itself within the ranks of the police.
Yet Enrique’s death resonated among the population of Havana because the population were willing and able to allow their bodies to resonate with his sacrifice. I do not see anything like this from where I sit in Berlin. In this way, our situation and that of I am Cuba could not be more different.
It is justified to feel angry at people who refuse to feel outrage after 12 months of killing in Gaza and now Lebanon supported, funded and legitimised by the German government. I understand—and I experience—the anger at a populace who justify, or by and large simply ignore mass rape in Israeli detention camps and city blocks in Beirut flattened by bombs.
As people who desire revolution, we can feel these things in our bodies, but resentment cannot guide our politics. The task of changing society is changing society. And we don’t get to choose the material that we work with. Our task is to find the best way to work with we’re given.
I’m not convinced that walking into gunfire from the Berlin police will spark a revolution, should it to come to that, because we are dealing with a very different time and place: a decadent Western empire, with just enough treats and fear to keep the population more or less invested in the status quo (whether that status quo be a coalition of social democrats, greens and liberals, or the far-right and ultra right–there’s not a lot of sunlight between them). The death of a demonstrator will be written over by the media and largely ignored.
There is a role for strategy and a role for symbolic sacrifice. The question is timing. And the time may come when enough of our fellow humans become disenchanted with the status quo, and we can present an alternative that is worth fighting and dying for.
The task now is to become ready to take on that role. I am not ready, but I want to be.
Come and See
I also watched Come and See (dir: Elem Klimov), the Soviet anti-war film, for the first time—alone. It’s a film best watched with someone else so you can process afterwards. But it is definitely worth seeing, especially if you need to be shocked out of apathy.
Briefly, its about a young teenager named Flyora who joins the Belarussian partisans and is physically and psychologically transformed by the German and Nazi atrocities that he witnesses. I keep wondering how many children are living a similar nightmare in Gaza and Lebanon and other lands turned into hellscapes by war.
The film is also a useful reminder that German violence in the Second World War was not limited to Jewish victims, nor even to the Sinti and Roma. Millions of Slavs, were murdered in violent, slightly less systematic ways, because they were also considered sub-human. And it was not only the SS carrying out the violence, but the regular German army.
This is something that German zionism conveniently sweeps away. It may even be one of the key psychological pillars for the morbid philosemitism of the German media, political and cultural elite.
It must have been the summer of 2022 that I learned that the annual Nakba Day demonstration had been officially forbidden in Berlin. The global march commemorates the events of 1948 when Israeli forces drove at least 750,000 Palestinians into exile and killed more than 15,000, seizing control of 78% of historical Palestine. This genocidal war continues not only through physical violence, but also through an insidious manipulation of the very categories of thought in Palestine and around the world: that war is peace, that aggression is self-defence, that there were no people here when we arrived, but if there were then they deserved what they got.
Shocked by how just how blatantly fascistic the Berlin authorities were behaving, I shared the news with a couple of close friends. We shook our heads, muttered our disbelief – and moved on. There were projects to complete, applications for funding that would not write themselves, and, after all, we were burnt out. And afraid. The 2019 anti-BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) law in Berlin had sent a clear message: solidarity with Palestinians could jeopardize any chance of receiving state funding or resources. In corona times, I had my first (and perhaps only) taste of arts funding. I had overblown fears that if I stuck my neck out for Palestine they would snatch this away. To my anxiety-ridden brain, this would mean not having enough income, which would in turn annihilate my dreams of obtaining permanent residence in Germany. I would be condemned to the Sisophysian grind of bi-annual visits to the immigration office to prove that I am a loyal, timid and self-sufficient worker-consumer in the glorious fatherland.
There was also pushback from outside. A friend invited me to contribute a few minutes to a video about the challenges facing freelance artists in Berlin, that would ultimately be shown to representatives of arts funding organs in Berlin. I said I wanted to talk about the anti-BDS law and its chilling effect on the entire ecosystem of free expression.
We sat in a park on the canal, and I remember the gentle sun on our faces as my friend turned to me with resignation and said “no, we tried already, we made so many representations, we’ve told them over and over again, they won’t listen.”
“But this is the only chance I will ever have to talk right to their faces.”
“My love, find something else that’s important. Say that instead.”
I twisted like a leaf. In my mind, these kinds of clashes get reduced to a simple question: “either they are the crazy ones, or I am crazy.” I become a child again faced with the authority vested in a parent of a teacher; seeing something unjust and being told to sit down and shut up unless I really want to find out what injustice means.
So when my friend held a phone up to my face and pressed record, I talked about something else. What it was, now, I have no idea. Because it was not something that needed to be said. Because the words have been buried in shame.
Which brings me to my drag character, Trish.
Image: Loup Deflandre
Trish arrived like a deranged thought in my mind a year and a half ago. Deranged, yet crystal clear: I would become a late 80s/early 90s Australian weatherwoman. The how and the why would come later – the aching necessity of Trish was beyond question.
Over the winter I developed Trish as a lucky member of the König drag scholarship which provided a crucial space to birth new personas through workshops in movement, voice, character development, props and costumes.
When it came time for my debut performance, I decided I would speak about the genocide in Gaza. I got push back from some colleagues, who looked at me aghast. “It won’t work,” they insisted. “What if someone freaks out? Then the whole show is over.”
The acquiescent child in me curled up in a corner.
“Okay, I will do something else.”
I felt sick inside. I felt like my guts were turning rotten. I could not imagine how I could possibly do a performance and not say the words burning in my mouth
I told the story to two dear ones, both of whom up-ended the “who is the crazy one” equation I had grown used to. Their arguments were sophisticated but can be summarized, simply, as “that’s bullshit.”
Later that night, as I washed dishes: a revelation. This was the show. The silencing itself. The silencing we do to ourselves and to others and how it hollows us out from the inside.
For those of you who missed it, the performance begins with Trish grinding through another weather forecast, before realizing that the emergent hole in the Ozone Layer (this being the late ’80s) is a metaphor for a vast absence that she is covering over: “that Australia (wink wink) is carrying out an act of….” Trish approaches the breach again and again but can’t make the leap, can’t say it, and is instead condemned to the brutalizing effects of her self-censorship “an abscess-like absence in the sky that will suck you up and destroy you because you can’t say a word that starts with G and ends with enocide.”
I suppose one useful thing about art, and drag in particular, is that its a kind of alchemy where you take the shit in your life – your failures, the blows you inflict on others, the blows you inflict on yourself – and transform it into something else: in my case, an awakening.
For two nights, in front of 300 people at Delphi Theatre, I made a solemn oath – via the psychic parasite of Trish – to forego silence as Israel’s 70+ years of violence takes an even more accelerated and monstrous form, while the German state punishes anyone seeking to stop this slaughter. And I asked that audience to look at their own silence, their own complicity, and say: No more. Never again. Together we discovered that we have to let go of the one illusion that holds us in place: that if you curl up into a ball, the storm will pass.
There was a time, almost 8 or 9 years ago, when my duo HYENAZ was invited to perform at a festival in the Baltics. On the phone with the organizer we discussed the logistics of our travel to the festival until the conversation took on a conspiratorial tone.
“You know,” their voice lowered to a whisper “this is rather last minute because we were trying to get [a more successful queer artist] and in the end we couldn’t afford them. So we asked you.”
“Oh… that’s… nice of you to tell us.”
“Yes, but that’s not the point. What I want to say is. We are sponsored by [a German cultural funding organisation], but they didn’t want to support you. They only agreed to pay because there was no time to find anyone else. I thought you should know.”
This was my first experience of the state ideological apparatus known as ‘arts funding’. Hegemony through the purse strings. The effect it has on you is subtle. You get a bit of money from a grant and you want a bit more. You start to see yourself as a player, as an insider, as successful – until the day time comes when you want to say something, but you can’t, because your new patrons wouldn’t like it.
The festival organiser wouldn’t say the exact reason we were queers non grata, but we surmised it had something to do with the fact that we were pro-porn at a time when that wasn’t fashionable.
I thought of this moment when I learned that, in the wake of Israel’s genocide against Gaza1 we hear that organisations in Berlin are being threatened with funding cuts if they make statements in support of the Palestinians. It even emerged that the Neukölln cultural organisation Oyoun was pressured by the Berlin Senate to drop an event by the group Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East because, in supporting both peace and justice in Palestine, the group’s Jewish and Israeli membership are considered anti-Semitic by the white German anti/philo-semites who police free speech in Germany.
As an artist, opposing Israeli genocide places you in direct opposition with the German state. Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), which seeks to replicate strategies that helped end apartheid in South Africa, is for all intents and purposes, officially banned in Germany. In 2019, the German parliament passed a non-binding anti-BDS resolution calling the movement and its supporters ‘antisemitic’. The resolution also prohibits state organisations from supporting individuals, events and institutions that support BDS or question Israel’s right to exist as a homeland for only some of its citizens, those classified as Jews.
This not only impacts public supporters of BDS, rather it has a chilling effect on the arts scene as a whole. Artists ask themselves, if BDS is beyond the pale, does a Palestinian flag emoji on your Instagram bio make you unfundable? Or attending a demonstration? Or writing this article?
No one really knows, and when no one knows, the urge to censor yourself “just in case” is strong. What if curator X at gallery Y sees my activism and pulls the show because they are afraid of the consequences on them – then my show is toast and I can’t pay my rent.2 The very act of thinking these anxious thoughts means that the strategy of sowing uncertainty places powerful limits on freedom of expression.
In low-pressure moments, it’s easy to feel that taking money from the state won’t compromise you, that you’ll always be brave enough to act outside state influence. But in extraordinary moments like the ones we are living now, our state patrons can pull the strings to ensure that we artists think, speak and act as we are told.
Or at least they can try. Oyoun has so far resisted the heat and the event is still scheduled to take place. And as more and more of us realise that silence is no longer and never was a viable strategy, we have a unique opportunity to take back the freedom to call out injustice in the world where we see it.
