The cultural scene in Germany has been on fire for six months. The still-smoldering aftermath of documenta 15—where accusations of antisemitism cast a shadow over a major exhibition of contemporary art—has been reignited in the face of the current turmoil in Israel and Palestine, leading to cancellations, boycotts, defunding and high-profile resignations across the country’s cultural institutions. Museums, biennial exhibitions and festivals, usually at the vanguard of progressive beliefs, have been transformed into crucibles where state values clash with the voices of artists, curators, and other cultural producers, creating a culture of fear where an Instagram post or a signature on an open letter can lead to immense pressure or even immediate cancellation. The blurring lines between art institutions and state politics has called into question the future of Germany’s position as a central node in the art world and a supporter—intellectually, structurally and financially—of culture across the globe.
But of course, documenta wasn’t the beginning: the painful, complex and traumatized relationship between Germany’s cultural scene and the question of antisemitism has been unfolding for decades, becoming increasingly thorny and unbearable in the face of the nation’s broader societal shifts, including the aftershocks of the refugee “crisis” of the mid-2010s, the increasing diversity of Germany’s population, and political shifts to the far-right across the nation. Although there are many layers to the ongoing situation, at the heart of this conflict is the conflation of, and a poorly-defined boundary between, anti-Zionism—a political, moral, or ethical opposition to the existence of the state of Israel—and antisemitism—hostility towards or prejudice against Jewish people, which is illegal to express publicly or act on in Germany—in contemporary Germany.[1] As the heir to the perpetrators of the Holocaust, the Federal Republic of Germany understands itself as bearing a historical burden to protect Jewish life and culture. But what does this mean in the frame of the present crisis in Gaza and its aftershocks in Europe? And what happens when a confluence of factors tests the limits of the political apparatus and the cultural institutions it funds to tolerate freedom of speech and diversity of perspectives? This article examines where the institutional landscape in Germany is now, how we got here, and where we might go.
Since October, Germany has been in a state of upheaval on almost every level as a result of the ongoing crises in Israel and Palestine. Immediately following the events of October 7, Germany’s public sphere was drawn into the fray: stones were thrown at synagogues, Israeli flags were burned, and Holocaust memorials were vandalized. Simultaneously, police brutally shut down pro-Palestinian protests across the nation, labeling acts as innocuous as wearing a keffiyeh as antisemitic, and leading to renewed claims of “imported antisemitism,” a term that ascribes contemporary antisemitism solely to Germany’s burgeoning Muslim communities. Esra Özyürek, professor at the University of Cambridge specializing in antisemitism prevention and Holocaust education programs for Muslims in Germany, has highlighted that while the vast majority of attacks targeting Germany’s Jewish communities are carried out by far-right activists, primarily of white descent, the concept of “imported antisemitism” underscores a prevalent belief in Germany that Muslims hold distinct cultural values that are perceived as incompatible with German and European culture.[2]
However, Germany’s self-perception as being critically aware of, and defensively positioned against, its National Socialist past has been deeply challenged not only by the Hamas-led attacks of October 7 but also by the subsequent and ongoing flattening of Gaza by Israeli military forces. In an environment where critique of Israel and its politics is frequently categorized as antisemitism, the current political situation has bled into the realm of culture, endangering freedom of the arts to such a degree that it is hard to imagine where to go from here. Cultural institutions and organizations in particular have been forced to confront and engage with sensitive political debates surrounding issues such as antisemitism and contemporary Jewish life in Germany, as well as less visible but equally dire questions of racism, immigration, xenophobia, and the broader historical legacy of the Holocaust for Germany’s marginalized communities. Creating a brief overview to understand how these events have unfolded emphasizes the degree to which cultural institutions have become the primary arena for these battles about identity and belonging, past and future, acting simultaneously as epicenter and periphery that experience aftershocks.
The circumstances of the last documenta in 2022—the subject of Mezosfera’s last issue[3]— offers some critical context in setting the stage for the current situation. Beyond the heavily debated content of the exhibition itself, the mediation of the exhibition also faced issues related to supposed antisemitism. A series of talks aimed at discussing the role of art and artistic freedom in the face of antisemitism, racism, and Islamophobia, entitled “We Need to Talk! Art, Freedom, Solidarity” were canceled after criticism from Germany’s conservative Central Council of Jews due to accusations of antisemitism surrounding the speaker’s support of the BDS movement.[4] Artist Candice Breitz, a Jewish South African and a vocal critic of the Israeli regime, and American literary scholar Michael Rothberg planned to organize a symposium on German memory culture and the relationship between antisemitism and racism that was provocatively entitled “We Still Need to Talk: Towards a Relational Culture of Memory” and was to be held in Berlin in November 2023. Following the attack by Hamas on Israel and the subsequent Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, the Federal Agency for Civic Education made the decision to cancel the conference due to their self-proclaimed inability to engage in a constructive manner with the current situation, kicking off a series of cancellations across the cultural sphere.[5]
The tensions in the cultural scene which began in October bled into November: high-profile artists and intellectuals faced censorship, cancellation, and defunding. Among these is the Russian-American writer Masha Gessen, who in her article in The New Yorker, “In the Shadow of the Holocaust” drew a comparison between the current situation in Gaza and that of the ghettos established by Nazi Germany, leading to the withdrawal of the Heinrich Böll Foundation from the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought that Gessen was to be awarded. Adania Shibli, a Palestinian author due to receive an award for her novel, Minor Detail, a book about the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, had her prize postponed at the Frankfurt Book Fair due to the political situation; the organizers of the fair instead decided to “make Jewish and Israeli voices particularly visible.”[6] Other public intellectuals and cultural producers, such as the Haitian curator Anaïs Duplan and Breitz herself have had long-planned exhibitions in German state museums canceled due to political statements made in support of Palestine on Instagram and other social media platforms.[7] These cancellations overwhelmingly effect Palestinian, Jewish, Arab, and POC cultural actors, opening up new questions about Germany’s willingness to protect diverse voices in the realm of culture.
These cancellations have had an intense impact on cultural institutions both in Germany and globally: the finding committee for the next iteration of documenta collectively resigned via open letter after the writer, cultural theorist, art critic, and curator Ranjit Hoskoté, who was also on the committee, came under fire for critique he had signaled by signing a letter against Israel in 2019, relegating the future of the documenta exhibition as almost impossible to imagine.[8] Tensions in Berlin escalated to a record high when the land government announced the implementation of an “antisemitism clause” for cultural funding applications, demanding that applicants adhere to the highly-criticized IHRA definition of antisemitism before receiving any funding from the state of Berlin.[9] Following widespread protests in the cultural scene, the Berlin senate reversed its decision on the clause, citing legal concerns, but it is widely understood in Berlin’s cultural circles that a re-introduction of this in some form is not off the table.
Cancellations and difficulties continue to pile up in the present, gesturing to the precarious position of cultural institutions in this moment: in February 2024, the cultural center Oyoun was defunded by the state of Berlin due to a planned event co-hosted with the Jewish anti-Zionist group Jüdische Stimme; at a performance by Cuban artist Tania Brugera at Berlin’s contemporary art museum Hamburger Bahnhof in March, subversive action by pro-Palestinian protesters caused the event to be shut down early. At the Berlinale, Berlin’s iconic film festival, tensions flared up when the Palestinian–Israeli filmmaking duo Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham used their award acceptance speech at the Berlinale documentary award ceremony to highlight the ongoing conflict in Gaza and the unequal treatment of Palestinians in the region.[10] Adra called on Germany to stop sending weapons to Israel, while Abraham emphasized the stark differences between the respective rights and freedoms of Israelis and Palestinians living in the same area. They both called for an end to the inequality and injustice faced by Palestinians, leading to both the Palestinian Arab and the Israeli Jew to be labeled as antisemites in the German press. Germany’s Cultural Minister Claudia Roth was also lambasted in the press and by the public after she insisted that in her applause after their acceptance speech she was only clapping for the Israeli Abraham and not for the Palestinian Adra. Germany’s cultural scene has reached a crossroads.
These instances are only a small sample to illustrate what now seems to be at stake in and for the German cultural scene. Beyond state and cultural apparatuses, the German media, particularly outlets owned by the conservative Axel Springer publishing house, have been fanning the flames of this conflict, necessitating the questions of who is speaking, for whom, and on whose behalf. Berlin in particular has been an epicenter of these tensions: the city has both one of the largest Palestinian communities outside of the Middle East with about 1% of the city’s population being of Palestinian origin as well as a Jewish community estimated to be of about the same size (in 2014, the estimated population of 30,000–45,000 Jewish residents contained approximately 12,000 who were registered members of religious organizations). Berlin is also the cultural heart of Germany: divided into two from 1945 until 1990, the city once again became the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany after reunification, marking a new era of cosmopolitan cultural globality. As of 2023, there are around 170 museums in Berlin, including Germany’s three national galleries. Why have this city and its museums become an epicenter of this struggle? Museums are home to cultural narratives, producing and enacting the memories of a nation. And in Germany, a place where memory carries more weight than most, the culture of remembrance is becoming more complex and fraught by the day.
German memory culture, as it exists in contemporary times, did not emerge abruptly but rather evolved through a lengthy, fractured, and painful process. The memory of National Socialist fascism was treated differently in East and West Germany: while capitalist West Germany went through an initial and superficial process of “de-Nazification” at the behest of the Western allies, socialist East Germany positioned itself, by way of opposition, as the first victims of fascism, leading to a splintered understanding of historical responsibility and burden. In West Germany, the social movements of 1968, particularly the student uprisings and the emergence of the Red Army Faction, prompted a questioning of the roles played by individuals’ parents during the Nazi era, leading to increased scrutiny and bitter self-reflection. This culminated in a more prominent Holocaust memory culture taking shape in the 1990s. In East Germany, the 1990s signaled a first attempt at dealing with this displaced trauma of perpetratorship. At the same time that Berlin was once again becoming the capital of reunified Germany, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was built next to the Brandenburg Gate, symbolizing a post-Wall cultural politics that sutured a new German identity together with a critical awareness of generational responsibility for the Holocaust. It was in this milieu that Germany’s culture, as we recognize it today, was developed. The German phrase “Vergangenheitsbewältigung”, or “the struggle of overcoming the past,” is a reminder that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. And in the scope of this, other perspectives or vantage points of the past are flattened or ignored in Germany, creating a dominant leitmotif that can be inaccessible to those who do not share the same historical experiences.
In some ways, it is not surprising that spaces of culture are the ones that have been most directly affected. Museums and cultural institutions have long been the spaces where these conflicts over the values of the nation play out: they were the arenas where battles over the legacy of socialist East Germany and its forty years of cultural production were fought following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Likewise, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, museums across Germany once again took up the role of soft-power apparatus, in many cases boycotting Russian cultural production and producers in their exhibitions. Instead of serving as places where dialogue can take shape and opposed voices can meet and debate, these museums, like the societies that surround them, are becoming echo chambers, where it is increasingly difficult to speak and listen at the same time. These spaces, in which history is written and where identity takes shape, must re-orient themselves in order to not only survive, but also to thrive into the future.
How can cultural actors and institutions contribute to the development of a polyphonic memory culture in the present that allows us to hold ourselves simultaneously open to all the complexities of our contemporary moment? How can this address the growing cancel culture that seems to fill the void left by the dissatisfactory conditions of the present? And what options do we have going forward? There is a significant need for a dialogue to take shape, where the voices of all — Palestinians, Jews, Arabs, Israelis and Germans— can speak, and most importantly, must listen. But the cultural world in Germany, which has long seen itself as operating independently from the political sphere, must understand that the ground beneath it has shifted and needs to look for new strategies for the future. Perhaps these can be found by looking to the example of cultural contexts which have been operating in a state of emergency for years or decades now: instead of New York, Budapest; instead of Paris, Bratislava. In Germany, where the far-right populist party Alternative für Deutschland is growing in strength with each election, it is critical that we learn from these contexts so that progressive politics from every side are not swallowed up by the void of populism. What is most clear is that while spaces of culture have a special responsibility towards the public, they must now focus on becoming spaces where the present and the future hold as much power and sway as the past.
[1] Indeed, the definition of antisemitism is at the center of several recent debates surrounding cultural funding, as this article will later explore.
[2] Esra Özyürek, “Germany Should Stop Outsourcing Its Shame Over Historic Antisemitism to Migrants,” Jacobin, December 5, 2023, https://jacobin.com/2023/12/germany-holocaust-memory-migrants-islamophobia-antisemitism-israel-gaza
[3] Dóra Hegyi and Gyula Muskovics, eds., Mezosfera, no. 12 (August 10, 2023), http://mezosfera.org/category/12-documenta-15/
[4] ruangrupa, “Anti-Semitism Accusations against Documenta: A Scandal about a Rumor,” May 7, 2022, https://www.e-flux.com/notes/467337/diversity-as-a-threat-a-scandal-about-a-rumor
[5] “Konferenz von Künstlerin Candice Breitz abgesagt,” Monopol, October 30, 2023, https://www.monopol-magazin.de/konferenz-von-kuenstlerin-candice-breitz-abgesagt
[6] Stefan Dege, “Frankfurt Book Fair Postpones Award for Palestinian Author,” Dw.Com, October 13, 2023, https://www.dw.com/en/frankfurt-book-fair-postpones-award-for-palestinian-author-adania-shibli/a-67093842
[7] Alex Greenberger, “German Museum Cancels Candice Breitz Exhibition After ‘Controversial Statements’ on Gaza,” ARTnews, November 28, 2023, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/candice-breitz-german-musuem-canceled-show-gaza-statements-1234687722/
[8] documenta 16 Finding Committee, “Press Release: Documenta 16 Finding Committee Resigns,” documenta, November 16, 2023, https://www.documenta.de/en/press#press/3323-press-release-documenta-16-finding-committee-resigns
[9] Eliza Levinson, “Inflamed by the War in Gaza, Germany’s Art Scene Is Tearing Itself Apart,” ARTnews, April 4, 2024, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/germany-art-scene-israel-war-gaza-1234700551/
[10] Oliver Maksan, “Antisemitismus auf der Berlinale: Claudia Roth steht in der Kritik,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, February 27, 2024, https://www.nzz.ch/international/antisemitismus-auf-der-berlinale-claudia-roth-steht-in-der-kritik-ld.1819590
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documenta 16 Finding Committee. “Press Release: Documenta 16 Finding Committee Resigns.” documenta, November 16, 2023. https://www.documenta.de/en/press#press/3323-press-release-documenta-16-finding-committee-resigns
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Özyürek, Esra. “Germany Should Stop Outsourcing Its Shame Over Historic Antisemitism to Migrants.” Jacobin, December 5, 2023. https://jacobin.com/2023/12/germany-holocaust-memory-migrants-islamophobia-antisemitism-israel-gaza
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Emily Finkelstein is a researcher, curator, and art historian based in Berlin.
