Culture Committee reprimands management: Documenta Angst

Does the suspense get lost if you start by saying that two of the three main people responsible for the Documenta scandal didn't even show up for the hearing in the Bundestag's Culture Committee on Wednesday afternoon and the third excused himself with absurd comparisons?

Stefan Trinks

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The mayor of the city of Kassel, which bears a large part of the costs of the Documenta, had far more important things to do in his city's budget committee than getting into the Bundestag.

After Christian Geselle announced that the city of Kassel could finance the documenta alone in the future (FAZ of July 1), the budget committee appointment could not be postponed.

The general director of the documenta, Sabine Schormann, had called in sick, and just like in the first public discussion about the anti-Semitic pictures at the documenta, only one of the many members of the Ruangrupa curating collective spoke, Ade Darmawan.

As it fits with the collective basic idea of ​​this fifteenth documenta,

the fact that in decisive situations an individual shows up and takes the floor on behalf of everyone else remained an open contradiction.

This was not diminished by the fact that Darmawan, when asked about the neglect of the curation and the slipping through of the anti-Semitic hate images, blamed everything on the "self-organization of the exchange" and the "mediation through councils".

They wanted to break through hierarchical structures with the collective because they basically had "problems with an authoritarian state" and only saw organizational risks.

According to Darmawan, the images in question were not even noticed.

asked about the neglect of the curation and the slipping through of the anti-Semitic hate images, everything was blamed on the "self-organization of the exchange" and the "mediation by councils".

They wanted to break through hierarchical structures with the collective because they basically had "problems with an authoritarian state" and only saw organizational risks.

According to Darmawan, the images in question were not even noticed.

asked about the neglect of the curation and the slipping through of the anti-Semitic hate images, everything was blamed on the "self-organization of the exchange" and the "mediation by councils".

They wanted to break through hierarchical structures with the collective because they basically had "problems with an authoritarian state" and only saw organizational risks.

According to Darmawan, the images in question were not even noticed.

The curators are sorry for the pain and fear caused by the huge "People's Justice" banner on Kassel's main square, the suspension was inevitable, said the Ruangrupa representative.

But: "If

look at the picture,

a different experience." During the uprising in Batavia in 1740, the Dutch colonial rulers brought racist ideas into the country and applied them to the Chinese minority there.

You had heard correctly, because in order to avoid translation losses, Darmawan's statements were interpreted directly from Indonesian.

The culture from which Ruangrupa comes has its own history of racism, the evil images were imposed on the Indonesians by Europeans.

An apology of the purest water, which makes one wonder what the uprising of 1740 has to do with today's anti-Semitic slander - the incriminated banner was created in 2002.

Be dismissive and point fingers at others

Such skewed historical comparisons are particularly painful because the director of the Central Council of Jews, Daniel Botmann, spoke crystal clear words in the culture committee on behalf of the Israeli artists who were completely excluded from this documenta.

Jewish artists in Germany are in "fear and reasonable concern": If they revealed themselves as Jews, this often meant, for example, that they were no longer invited to concerts.

The BDS ideology of Israel boycott plays a strong and structural role in arts and culture;

for example, at the "Hijacking Memories" conference of the House of World Cultures in Berlin, the Shoah was put into perspective.

Its director, Bernd Scherer, is one of the supporters of the “GG 5.3 Cosmopolitanism” initiative, along with many other people responsible for culture.

criticizing the Bundestag's BDS resolution.

Looking to the future, Botmann explained that one had to ask what role BDS sympathizers played in the German cultural landscape.

These should not be tolerated.

Clear words came this time from Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth.

She accused Schormann and Ruangrupa of "breach of word" because the former in particular, who now referred to their allegedly exclusively administrative area of ​​responsibility, had already given her a guarantee in January that there would be no anti-Semitic works in Kassel.

In addition, according to Roth, the anti-capitalist and post-colonial discourses urgently need to be questioned.

Hesse's Minister of Art, Angela Dorn, said that responsibility "must of course be clarified";

She rejected Geselle's solo effort.

On Thursday evening after the editorial deadline, the Bundestag debated at the request of the CDU parliamentary group.

After its member Gitta Connemann had already asked sharp questions about the events in Kassel in the culture committee, there will be a lot to report from the meeting.