Art and Resistance in Germany

Deborah Ascher Barnstone,Elizabeth Otto

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501344879
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art & Politics

In light of the recent rise of right-wing populism in numerous political contexts and in the face of resurgent nationalism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and demagoguery, this book investigates how historical and contemporary cultural producers have sought to resist, confront, confound, mock, or call out situations of political oppression in Germany, a country which has seen a dramatic range of political extremes during the past century. While the current turn to nationalist populism is global, it is perhaps most disturbing in Germany, given its history with its stormy first democracy in the interwar Weimar Republic; its infamous National Socialist (Nazi) period of the 1930s and 1940s; and its split Cold-War existence, with Marxist-Leninist Totalitarianism in the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany's barely-hidden ties to the Nazi past. Equally important, Germans have long considered art and culture critical to constructions of national identity, which meant that they were frequently implicated in political action. This book therefore examines a range of work by artists from the early twentieth century to the present, work created in an array of contexts and media that demonstrates a wide range of possible resistance.

1

How Art Resists

Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Elizabeth Otto

Imagination is the chief instrument of the good.… Art is more moral than moralities. For the latter either are or tend to become, consecrations of the status quo, reflections of custom, reinforcements of the established order. The moral prophets of humanity have always been poets even though they spoke in free verse or by parable.… Art has been the means of keeping alive the sense of purposes that outrun evidence and of meanings that transcend indurated habit.

John Dewey, Art as Experience¹

In November of 2014, 250 Neo-Nazi activists again converged on the tiny town of Wunsiedel, Bavaria, for their annual pilgrimage to the former burial place of the Nazi Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess. After years of anguish and ineffective attempts to stop the annual invasion, locals decided to meet this unwanted political agitation with creativity and humor. Their clever gambit was to initiate a clandestine walkathon, for which local individuals and businesses could “sponsor” one of the right-wing activists—without the invading marchers’ knowledge or consent—at ten Euros per kilometer. The Neo-Nazis unwittingly raised 10,000 Euros through participation in the event the villagers named “Rechts gegen Rechts” (Right against Right); all funds were donated to an organization that supports those seeking escape from such extremist groups. The organizers were able to transform the political march into a performance-art piece by meeting marchers with a set of banners with double meanings and puns like, “If Only the Führer Knew,” the name of a famous satirical novel about Adolf Hitler (Figure 1.1).²

Bananas passed out to the unwitting walkathon participants were labeled, “Munition 1” and “Mein Mampf” (local dialect for “my chow”) a play on the name of Hitler’s memoir Mein Kampf (My Struggle).³ This reframing leant a deep sense of ironic comedy to a situation that, for years, had been a local source of tension.⁴ Yet the Rechts gegen Rechts action can also be considered as a form of public performance that borders on art. Seen in this light, it is also an example in a long-standing tradition of using media culture and art as political weapons, tools wielded powerfully against fascism by myriad artists like John Heartfield in his photomontage Adolf the Superman Eats Gold and Spouts Junk (1932), Max Beckmann in his painting Birds’ Hell (1938), Charlie Chaplin, with his daring 1940 Hitler spoof The Great Dictator, and Walt Disney Productions’ 1943 pro-US animated short, Der Fuehrer’s Face, which, improbably, starred Donald Duck. While artistic interventions may not eliminate offensive political groups or politicians, they help diffuse tensions and raise awareness, and they may also increase participation from people who are reluctant to engage in overt political demonstrations but wish to have their resistance and opposition recognized.

Figure 1.1: “If only the Führer knew!” Banner flown during the marches in Wunsiedel, Bavaria in 2017. © Rechts gegen Rechts.

The marches in Bavaria are symptomatic of what appears as a stark, worldwide lurch to the right that has seen the election of right-wing populists such as Rodrego Duterte in the Philippines and Donald Trump in the United States, and center-right politicians like Norway’s Prime Minister, Erna Solberg, collaborating with that country’s far-right “Progress” party. Shortly after Britons marginally voted to leave the great experiment of the European Union with “Brexit” in 2016—a move fueled in part by anti-immigrant and nativist sentiments—the far-right Austrian Freedom Party won more than twenty-six percent of the votes in that country’s 2017 elections, and the anti-immigrant and radically homophobic Jobbik party continued to make news as Hungary’s third largest. Only one year later, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany)—with its platform of thinly veiled Neo-Nazism—entered the national parliament for the first time, with record results and over twelve percent of the seats, making it the third largest party. Both France and the Netherlands likewise have recently witnessed serious leadership challenges from their right-wing parties, Le Front National (FN, The National Front) and De Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, The Party for Freedom). While they are located in countries that have very different cultural and political traditions, these candidates and parties share a nationalist, anti-immigrant, and populist approach that seems to have growing appeal. Citizens, politicians, and academics on the left have been reeling as they wonder why what used to be fringe beliefs—seeming relics of a politically backward past that would soon die out—are instead gaining currency. And while the trend is global, the turn of events is perhaps most disturbing in Germany, given its dramatic history; it began the twentieth century as a monarchy, but after the First World War turned quickly to a lively experiment in democracy, which was cut short by the rise of National Socialism. Once Germany was again defeated in the Second World War, the period of the Cold War saw the country split into the German Democratic Republic, a member of the Eastern Bloc that was wholly dominated by the Soviet Union, and the Federal Republic of Germany, democratic and capitalist, yet with barely-concealed ties to the Nazi past.⁵

Resistance

“Resistance” is a now oft-used term across disciplines including sociology, political science, German history, art theory, and art history, yet scholars share little consensus on its meaning, which makes it difficult to construct an analytical framework for its use. In spite of the lack of consensus, political scientists, sociologists, and historians still have a more developed vocabulary of resistance than historians of art, architecture, film, and media culture, so it is helpful to look to their literature first.

Scholar of political resistance James C. Scott offers a simple but incisive definition of resistance as one way people respond when they feel oppressed by the more powerful in society.⁶ Scott sees at least two types of resistance: what he calls “everyday resistance,” which is informal and often spontaneous, and resistance that is organized, formal political activity. Both forms of resistance attempt to register disagreement with public policies or particular politicians. In addition, resistance can occur at the individual level or in groups.⁷ In Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Scott distinguished between public acts of resistance that are easily recognizable, and covert acts that are private critiques of power made in political contexts where criticism and resistance cannot be expressed in public because the oppressed group lacks political power. These categories of resistance—spontaneous vs. organized, individual vs. group, and public vs. covert—are of particular use in analyzing Germany’s National Socialist period, when overt resistance was often difficult if not impossible. Lastly, Scott identified three qualities that many acts of resistance share, including creative works made with resistant intent: a response to injustice; an engagement in an “ideological struggle”; and a reaction against the “appropriation of symbols” in a way that rankles.⁸

Political scientists and sociologists have other important tools for distinguishing types of resistance, namely as either violent or non-violent, the latter also referred to as “civil resistance.” The sociologist Kurt Schock defines resistance as “the sustained use of methods of nonviolent action” and “non-routine political acts” against oppression and injustice.⁹ And according to Erica Chenoweth and Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, non-violent methods can include protests, marches, strikes, boycotts, and demonstrations that are “outside the defined and accepted channels for political participation defined by the state” including forms of artistic expression.¹⁰

As several scholars in sociology have revealed, dissident culture appears when power relationships are ...