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” 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 out of balance; when those in positions of political, economic, and social power abuse the public trust in some way. This can include economic policies that seem to favor the rich over the poor; situations of repeated indiscriminate police violence; conditions of unchecked racial tensions stoked by the government; and circumstances of perceived inequities in public amenities, social programs, and opportunity, to name just a few factors that provoke resistant action. As sociologists Jocelyn A. Hollander and Rachel L. Einwohner assert, resistance always describes directed action of some kind and embodies oppositional intent. It is “expressive behavior that inverts, contradicts, abrogates, or prevents alternatives to cultural codes.”11 Expressions of resistance can take many forms; everyday resistance can range from foot dragging to throwing a spanner wrench in machine works, or from marching in the streets to spraying graffiti on urban surfaces. It can involve online actions like tweeting opinions and images, posting material on Facebook and Instagram, and signing and sharing online petitions. In the arts, resistant activities can range from creating slogan-bearing posters to found-text collages, from composing silent performance art to catchy songs, from writing poetry to painting, from building installations to shooting film; in short, any medium can become the vehicle for a message of resistance if deployed with oppositional intent.12
Hollander and Einwohner also identify intent and visibility as critical elements in the sociological literature on resistance. Resistance has two different audiences: “targets (i.e. those to whom the act is directed) and other observers (who may include onlookers at the time of the resistance, the general public, members of the media, and researchers).”13 Early scholarship on resistance, which focused on large-scale protest movements and revolutions whose members confront their targets directly and openly, took for granted that resistance is visible and easily recognized as resistance.14 Yet the everyday resistance that James Scott studied from his political science point of view, and in fact much of cultural resistance, is often quietly subversive and largely invisible except to those in the know. Scholars debate whether visibility and recognition are necessary to classify an act as resistant. Here, intent plays a role; if an action was meant to be resistant but was not recognized as such by its target audience or by others, some scholars like Scott still accept it as resistant; for them, some forms of quiet resistance are intentionally concealed but might still have a subtle impact, like stealing from an employer as retaliation for substandard wages, thus, a quiet mode of resisting the power structure of an entrenched class system.
For over sixty years, historians have debated the meaning of “resistance” in a particularly nuanced conversation in relationship to the National Socialist regime, in which they have debated whether or not resistance was even possible for Jews and non-Jewish Germans and, if it was, what it looked like under those particular conditions of extreme pressure.15 Many of the leading figures writing on German history contributed to this long tradition of resistance studies, including Hans Mommsen, Martin Broszat, Ian Kershaw, and Detlev Peukert.16 Like their colleagues in political science and sociology, they considered power relationships, violent and non-violent actions, and visibility of actions and intent, but the special circumstances of the Third Reich and Holocaust have added dimensions to their discourse, particularly in relation to the question of what constitutes resistance within the Nazi context, the moral implications of specific types of action, and potential risks or consequences for a resister. Since overt opposition to the regime was extremely dangerous, much resistance was covert and relatively small in scale, although Jews in the Warsaw ghetto did mount a relatively large armed resistance in 1943.17 Resistance also took myriad forms, including individual and group activities, planned and spontaneous actions, small-scale subversions—such as the postcard protests Peter Chametzky discusses in this volume—and complicated plots, like attempts to assassinate Hitler. These debates make clear how difficult it is to define resistance in a narrow way. And because so many who resisted either subsequently fled Germany or did not survive the Nazi period, ensuing political resistance in Germany often drew on models from outside of the country, even as those activists were, in part, still struggling with the Nazi past that was all around them but largely suppressed in favor of a narrative privileging the “Wirtschaftswunder”—the economic miracle of a country that rebuilt itself to become a capitalist powerhouse.18 Debates in German history also chart how essential the subject of resistance is to Germany past and present, and they underscore the rich and varied types of resistance that exist and can be implemented across different media, including the arts.
Turning to the question of cultural production, the definitions and debates from the fields of political science, sociology, and history give structure to considering art as resistant. Yet cultural production also has its own specific properties. For example, while intent can be debated in many realms, the question of intent is less contentious in the arts than in other areas, since art is always intentional. Art today has a very broad range—it encompasses traditional media like drawing, painting, and print making and newer media like photography, collage, and film, high art like opera, ballet, and classical music as well as popular art like posters, cartoons, memes, and advertising. Resistance can, and has, been incorporated into every artistic medium conceivable.
Political activism in Germany has long been abetted by artistic production. Art can be used as an instrument of political activism to provoke a response in the body politic, register a protest, or resist or attempt to change unwanted policies and opinions. Since dissident culture appears when power relationships are out of balance, when those in positions of political and social power abuse the public trust in some way, art—with its powers of multivalent communication and opportunities for double-speak—becomes an ideal instrument with which to challenge existing mechanisms of power and cultural dominance. As art historian Ariane Della Dea points out, “Art condenses meaning and demands and draws supporters to the cause through metaphors for and depictions of oppression or the oppressor.”19 This property is part of art’s potency as a tool; it allows artists to embed many levels of meaning in a single work, including meanings the artist might later disavow. It thus provides cover against potential persecution in certain instances, and it allows viewers to choose their level of engagement and understanding.
There are four primary ways that artistic resistance can operate.20 First, artists can make objects that help us see the world in new ways—that literally alter our Weltanschauung or world view. They do so through framing devices that alter viewer perceptions or through commentary that calls our attention to aspects of a situation or event that we may not have considered before. A second type of resistant art has the potential to inspire people to organize and to act. Third, artistic resistance can also itself function as political resistance when it critiques a set of accepted conventional cultural symbols and meanings. Fourth and last, art-making can be a form of political resistance in and of itself. Of course, resistant art often performs multiple functions simultaneously; nevertheless, these four categories are a useful way of evaluating differences and similarities in artistic strategies of resistance.
The confluence of Germany’s charged political landscape since the early twentieth century, a period known for its deep national veneration for the arts, culture, and intellectual pursuits, makes Germany rich in examples of artistic resistance. Berlin in particular has been the site for many activist protests and installations, and for the production and exhibition of resistant art of all kinds. Its status as the capital city before 1945 and since 1990, its location as ground zero of divided Germany during the Cold War, and its status as Germany’s center for experimental culture for nearly the entirety of the past hundred years—with the exception of the Nazi period, during which culture was regulated and weaponized—has made Berlin an obvious site for political activists of all kinds.
Tracing a range of types of artistic resistance created during disparate time periods and in a range of locations allows us to illustrate the breadth and depth of work made in Germany, work that makes the subject of this volume so compelling to students and scholars of culture both inside and beyond Germany. In the rest of this essay, we will explore examples of the four ways that art can resist: art that alters viewers’ worldview; art that intends to inspire action; art that critiques conventional symbols; and art that is forged in the act of resisting itself.
There are many instances of art created in order to provide a different, or corrected, view of the world as a means of political resistance. Two examples from very different moments in German history illustrate the range of such work: Georg Grosz’s art from the 1920s exposed the depravity of the Weimar Republic’s politicians and the struggles of everyday Germans in post-World War One Germany; by contrast, Josephine Meckseper uses contemporary art installations and photography to critique and resist the neoliberal order.21
Born Georg Ehrenfried Gross, the artist Anglicized his first name to “George” and changed his last name to “Grosz” shortly before his friend Helmut Herzfeld became John Heartfield; both were protesting the nationalism that they experienced in the First World War, in which they served. Grosz’s many lithographs, paintings, and pen and ink drawings, sometimes embellished with watercolor, showed brutally honest aspects of the war’s aftermath to his countrymen, who were largely shielded from the true state of things. Although some critics and historians refer to Grosz’s work as satire, others recognize its utter seriousness as social critique.22 Grosz wrote of the situation in Germany after the First World War, “All moral codes were abandoned. A wave of vice, pornography, and prostitution enveloped the whole country.… The streets became ravines of manslaughter and cocaine traffic, marked by steel rods and bloody, broken chair legs.”23
Works like Grosz’s 1922/3 folio of eighty-four offset lithographs and twenty-six watercolors titled Ecce Homo epitomizes his approach. The name means “Behold the Man,” an ironic commentary on the subjects of Grosz’s images, which show the worst sides of humanity, a subject rarely shown in art—the things we normally wish to avoid beholding. The name is also a traditional subject in Christian art, where Jesus Christ is shown as mocked prior to his crucifixion, and he is often shown wearing the crown of thorns. By referring both to Christian iconography and his own contemporaries, Grosz casts both church doctrine and his contemporaries in an unflattering light by sarcastically portraying the very human vices Jesus supposedly died to redeem. Plate XVI is a watercolor from the series that pictures a group of urban figures, rendered in line work and bright colors (Figure 1.2).
Figure 1.2: George Grosz, “Print XVI,” Ecce Homo, 1922/23. Offset lithograph, 10.4 × 7.9 in., 26.4 × 20 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, NJ / VG Bild-Kunst. Copyright Agency, 2018.
Using a technique almost akin to collage, Grosz superimposes partial images of six figures onto a fractured urban architecture that suggests the broken society he portrays. The figures are types that populated many of his interwar images: a crippled, unshaven, blind man, dressed like a proletarian; a strutting officer in decorated full regalia; two smoking businessmen—one who looks positively sinister and another who seems self-satisfied; and a woman—likely a prostitute who may have the start of venereal disease—in a fashionable hat with crooked teeth and her eyes rolled back into her head to form a frightening expression. Emerging from the unclear mist at the composition’s center is the faint outline of a man who appears to be in a military coat and the Pickelhaube, the helmet German soldiers wore in the First World War. Grosz has collapsed perspective in a way that eliminates spatial and, by implication, social hierarchy. The two most respectable looking of his subjects are the soldier and the beggar; their more serene profiles tie them together and suggest that the apparent distance between the economically fortunate and unfortunate, as well as the politically powerful and the disenfranchised, may not be so great. This cautionary political message is aimed at both the average German and the elites, who Grosz believed were abdicating their constitutional obligations to the people. By speaking truth to power, Grosz hoped to raise awareness of the plight of many of his fellow citizens.
Josephine Meckseper takes a very different approach to Grosz, by directly engaging the political system and revealing it and historical events in a new light. In 1998, the artist mounted an unsuccessful bid for a Senate seat in the United States, not because she expected to win, but in order to make a statement about the nature of contemporary politics. As John Reed asserted, Meckseper’s “qualifications” for office included having “two grandfathers in the SS, an uncle who was a radical leftist and member of the West German communist party, and an aunt who at 16 became involved with the ill-fated Baader-Meinhof gang.”24 The run for Senate was intended to change notions of who should have political power; instead of the typical white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant man, she presented a white, German-born immigrant woman who was an artist.
Meckseper’s work inserts itself in the space between the political right and left in order to alter perceptions of the political landscape. According to Meckseper, “Artists face the obvious accusation of elitism. The fundamental principle of my work is that it critiques capitalism in very specific ways.… Instead of ‘aestheticizing’ political issues, I try to change perspectives.”25 The bid for office was part of a larger project in which she also staged photographic images of political protest and counterculture to re-frame how these function in contemporary society (Figure 1.3).
In the photographs, such as RAF Tray (Red Army Faction Tray), in which she inserts herself into an historical image of her aunt who was close friends with Ulrike Meinhof, co-founder of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group, Meckseper shows protest culture as a form of youth fashion.26 Meckseper’s aunt sits in the foreground, a stunning blonde woman dressed in a black evening gown; Meckseper stands behind, dressed in a low-cut, sparkling, black, sequined dress. Meckseper offers her aunt a silver tray with a matchbox that has the RAF logo on it, literally tempting her with fire.27 The curls of smoke behind the women recall the early RAF actions—bombings of the Frankfurt Kaufhof and Schneider department stores in 1968. The RAF initially sought to attack what it saw as the abhorrent capitalist culture in 1960s and 1970s West Germany in order to “disrupt authoritarian structures of politics and society.”28 The image acts in multiple ways. On the one hand, it ties the RAF’s anti-capitalist stance to Meckseper’s own work, which begs the question, what is more effective—non-violent artistic expression or terror? At the same time, the image aestheticizes and objectifies the radical women of the movement, which calls into question their motivations and their cause. If radicalism is only fashion, what purpose does it serve? If it does not serve a legitimate political purpose, perhaps other forms of resistance would be more effective.
Figure 1.3: Josephine Meckseper, RAF Tray, 2002. C-print (cebachrome), 20 × 16 in., 50.8 × 40.6 cm. The picture shows showing Meckseper as a cigarette girl (background) with her aunt, a member of the RAF, in the foreground. © Josephine Meckseper / Courtesy Timothy Taylor London/New York.
Käthe Kollwitz used her art to promote an anti-war agenda and hoped that, through it, she could draw more of her fellow citizens to the anti-war cause.29 As historian Ingrid Sharp argues, Kollwitz intended her art to bear witness to the effects of war and thereby to persuade other Germans of the need to avoid another war at all costs.30 Most anti-war art Kollwitz produced in the 1920s took precisely this home front as its subject. As Sharp persuasively argues, the pain caused to those at home was as real and as deserving of representation and consideration as that of soldiers at the front, since the war affected all Germans. Whereas many have interpreted Kollwitz’s work in an overly reductive manner—as, for example, merely bearing witness, or as a “woman’s perspective”—Sharp shows that Kollwitz portrayed far more complex responses to the war, and that she was an effective moral and emotional witness.31
Not long after the start of the First World War, in 1914, Kollwitz’s younger son Peter was killed; this traumatic event caused the artist tremendous pain and grief, and it inspired doubt about the logic of war.32 Kollwitz had been torn between conflicting emotions when Peter requested his parent’s permission to enlist; at the time, she believed in the notion of sacrifice for the nation.33 She only changed her mind slowly after Peter’s death. Kollwitz had contributed pro-war prints to Paul Cassirer’s broadsheet Kriegszeit (Wartime), which initially used lithographs by well-known German artists to support the war effort. By 1916, however, Kollwitz had lost her pro-war stance; by the war’s end she had adopted a strong anti-war position. Krieg (War), her series of seven woodcuts, was exhibited in 1924 at the pacifist Ernst Friedrich’s International Antiwar Museum in Berlin. Large-format woodcut was a relatively new technique for Kollwitz at that time; she had decided to learn it after seeing Ernst Barlach’s work at the Berlin Secession exhibition of 1920.34 Adapting this technique to convey her own message, woodcut’s rough-hewn imagery allowed Kollwitz to create evocative images using large areas of black ink, bold line, and minimal detail.
There are only seven prints in Kollwitz’s Krieg series, and they largely depict the war from the perspective of its victims at home rather than on the battlefield. Although Kollwitz has radically limited the number of subjects she addresses and abstracted them through her rough-hewn technique, these are deeply personal portraits. The prints bear the straightforward names of their subjects: Die Witwe I (The Widow I), Das Opfer (The Sacrifice), Die Eltern (The Parents), Die Witwe II (The Widow II), Die Mütter (The Mothers), Das Volk (The People), and Die Freiwilligen (The Volunteers) (Figure 1.4).
Figure 1.4: Käthe Kollwitz, Die Freiwilligen (The Volunteers), 1922/23. Woodcut, 18.0 × 25.75 in., 47.5 × 65.4 cm. The print shows five volunteer soldiers who have all given their lives to the cause, with Kollwitz’s son Peter in the upper left, in Death’s embrace. Woodcut. Museum of Modern Art, New York/Digital Image. © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA/Art.
Only Die Freiwilligen pictures soldiers. It is the image of six figures emerging from an inky black background. Kollwitz’s son, Peter, is next to Death at the far left, wrapped in his arms in a cold embrace, looking upward, and rising towards the upper left-hand corner, while four other soldiers are depicted in various stages of agony and death. Curved lines above the heads combine with the angular positions of the faces and with jagged strokes above and below the figures to animate the soldiers’ visible anguish. By restricting her depiction largely to the figures’ heads, Kollwitz focuses the viewer’s attention on the emotion of each of her subjects. The central figure, who is propped up by hands belonging to an invisible source, appears to be almost floating in his peaceful repose. In contrast, the three figures to his right all seem to be screaming in distress. The image conveys the agony of war in visceral terms and suggests that, in place of the glory usually associated with the term “volunteers” and pictured in the heroic genre of war art in general, this is a scene of young men who have inadvertently volunteered for death.
In Die Eltern, another image from this series, Kollwitz captures the raw grief so many shared over the loss of a child during the war.35 A husband and wife are wrapped in each other’s arms, doubled over in agony. Both kneel on the ground, the wife is bent into her husband’s lap; he holds her with one arm and covers his face with his other, large, gnarled hand, in a gesture of profound grief. Kollwitz renders the figures in solid black fields with white lines that emphasize their form and suggest light and shadow. Revealing these figures’ profoundly embodied pain, Kollwitz manages to convey the distress these two people share without showing either face. The question posed to the viewer is, is war worth this pain?
Krieg was not the only work that Kollwitz made in the service of the anti-war cause. Once she became determined to oppose war she made other prints and a series of anti-war posters which included Nie wieder Krieg (Never again War) from 1924, as well as a 1942 lithograph showing a mother protecting her children. This latter piece was made to protest the resumption of military recruitment. Kollwitz hoped to use her prints to influence her fellow Germans to renounce war as a political instrument. While it would be difficult to know for certain that her efforts had a direct impact, what is clear is that she created a powerful set of images of human suffering that still convey war’s aching grief today.
If Kollwitz used her art both to resist political authority and to attempt to convince others to join in her resistance to militarism, installations at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin operate by reconfiguring a national symbol to create new meaning and, often, resistant statements about contemporary politics. Considered a symbol of Germany’s complex history and especially its division into two countries during the Cold War, the Brandenburg Gate has been the site of interventions of many kinds over the years. It is simultaneously a piece of urban architecture, a political symbol, and a canvas on which artists have created resistant work. Designed by the German architect Carl Gotthard Langhans and erected by the Prussian king Frederick William II in 1791, the gate sits at the juncture between the Tiergarten park and the majestic promenade along Unter den Linden, which leads to the museum island and Prussian Royal Palace, now newly rebuilt.
Langhans modeled the gate after the Propylaea in Athens, the monumental entry to the Acropolis. Constructed from sandstone, it features twelve Doric columns that frame five portals; the central one is wider than the others and was originally reserved for the royal family. Gottfried Schadow’s famous copper Quadriga sits atop the gate; it depicts a goddess riding a horse-drawn chariot. As Brian Ladd emphasizes, “the Brandenburg Gate, with its Quadriga, has long been Berlin’s most famous symbol rivaled only by the more ephemeral Wall.”36 The gate replaced an older one that was more practical, less ornamental, and flanked by customs houses. Originally called the “Gate of Peace,” it has been employed over time by rulers and politicians for differing purposes: victory marches; military parades and ceremonies; and royal processions passed through its portals. After Napoleon’s defeat in 1814, the gate was renamed “Gate of Victory,” and Karl Friedrich Schinkel made several modifications to the Quadriga to symbolize its new name.37
At the end of the Second World War, when the Allies partitioned Berlin, the Brandenburg Gate stood just inside the Soviet Sector and thus some distance behind the inner Wall when that was constructed in the 1960s.38 For this reason, the gate was visible but impassible for thirty years, a casualty of Berlin’s partition that nevertheless had a strong physical presence in the city. It therefore became a symbol of the division of the country.
Since unification, the Brandenburg Gate has only gained symbolic significance; it functions as the locus of important political events, often laden with larger symbolic meaning, as well as numerous art installations to commemorate historical moments or to comment on or criticize contemporary politics. Typical events at the Gate include President Bill Clinton’s 1994 speech celebrating unity and freedom, an event that emphasized the Gate’s proximity to the Reichstag, where Ernst Reuter and John F. Kennedy delivered their famous speeches on freedom; and, more recently, the 2015 all-night vigils protesting the right-wing, reactionary party Pegida (an acronym for “Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes” or “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West [Occident]”), attended by German prime minister Angela Merkel.39
Art installations at the Gate have varied in scale and in intention. In 2015, Mexican artist Gustavo Aceves installed Lapidarium, a group of twenty-two enormous horses on Pariserplatz at the Brandenburg Gate (Figure 1.5). Aceves’ piece was rich in layered associations. The horses were fractured and broken constructions made of combinations of Italian marble, granite, bronze, and cast iron on Leonardo da Vinci’s enormous but unfinished commissioned horse sculpture, the Gran Cavallo.40 In this way, Aceves reinforced the connection between his art, the architecture of the Gate, and Europe’s echoing play of classicism and neo-classicism. A Lapidarium is a repository for stone monuments and fragments of archeological interest; with the name, Aceves connected his installation and the site at the Brandenburg Gate, to broader histories and evoked connections ranging from the Greek Trojan horse to the vaunted Prussian cavalry that dominated European battles until its defeat by Napoleon. Not only did the horses refer to Da Vinci’s sculpture, but they were in direct conversation with the Quadriga. Yet in contrast to the horses atop the Gate, these were broken, stitched together horses, incomplete and severed. The partial structures recalled the devastation of war, particularly the separated heads, skeletal iron supports, and skulls embedded in some of the horses. In juxtaposition with the triumphal horses of the Quadriga, Aceves’ creations reminded the viewer of the mixed nature of history and the fleeting duration of victory. This work transformed the space around the Gate, thereby altering and layering meanings of the Gate itself. Installed at the peak of the Greek fiscal crisis, this piece, which drew on and highlighted the site’s deep debt to classicism, evoked Greece as the birthplace of European Culture. This reframing of the highly symbolic Brandenburg Gate thus complicated the official political relationship between Germany and Greece and subtly resisted the notion propagated by German politicians that the debt was only a Greek one.
Figure 1.5: Gustavo Aceves standing next to one of his horses in Lapidarium, in front of the Brandenburg Gate, 2015. © Australscope.
One of the most emotionally charged and controversial installations at the Brandenburg Gate was created in 2017 by Syrian artist Manaf Halbouni. The piece consisted of three twelve-meter high red-and-white buses standing upended in front of the Gate to recall the barricades erected in Aleppo as shields to protect civilian non-combatants against gunfire during the Syrian Civil War.41 This provocative installation was first placed in the former East German city of Dresden where it inspired heated opposition from right-wing groups like Pegida and the AfD. Halbouni intended his piece, Monument, primarily as an anti-war statement but also as one about the possibility to end war and reconstruct cities and nations, something Germans were able to do in Dresden and in Berlin. This second installation in Berlin was a forceful act of resistance against the right-wing groups that had loudly opposed the piece in Dresden—likely inspired by their opposition to Germany’s hosting of so many Syrian refugees—and their nationalist, anti-immigrant rhetoric.
German artist Anne Imhof’s installation, Faust (Fist) (Figure 1.6), installed at the 2017 German Pavilion in Venice, is a powerful example of interactive performance art in which the act of participating created the message, a myriad of interpretations dependent on each viewer, and the associations he or she brought to the work.42
A self-described painter, Imhof’s piece combined performance, architecture, installation, painting, sound, and sculpture in a single work performed over a five-hour period each day. She used the audience and performers’ body positions in space to create changing hierarchical relationships between bodies and her installation and among the bodies themselves. For Imhof, the overt intent was to convey and embody her message of resistance to existing power structures. The piece’s name, Faust, is a double entendre that refers to the clenched human hand used to indicate resistance and the name of the famous literary figure who made a bargain with the devil, selling his soul in exchange for knowledge and power. Faust is also considered the magnum opus by the great German writer, Goethe, who is a symbol of the German bourgeois culture against which Imhof situated her work.
The Venice installation transformed the 1938 German Pavilion, long a contentious piece of architecture with its ties to the National Socialist era, into an other-worldly set. With steel caging and transparent glass barriers and floor, supported by a grid of steel columns and beams suspended one meter above the actual floor, Imhof divided the historic building into discreet new spaces. Imhof’s sleek, modern materials and large canvases printed with her screaming visage sat in contradictory juxtaposition with the neoclassical architecture, with its pediment, Doric pilasters, and marble floors. The new architecture recalled transparent structures emblematic of the new German democracy as well as the glass towers of neoliberal corporatism, demonstrating the positive and negative associations tied to glass.43 The glass panels also acted to circumscribe the space for viewers while its surfaces reflected light, people, and objects; it thus collapsed everything into a series of ever-changing, even at times painterly, images.
Figure 1.6: A view from underneath the glass floor of performers, with audience above, Anne Imhof’s Faust, 2017. © ANSA.
Imhof’s project was resistant to the established political order by implication, by the situations that it created. Viewers entered the pavilion a meter above the actual floor, walking on Imhof’s transparent glass surface. This meant that viewers literally stood on top of some of the performers and tread over them, in an unsettling relationship that simultaneously recalled both the National Socialist control of the German nation with its distain and harm of certain bodies, and contemporary corporate abuses of economic power. The mise en scène called attention to problematic power relationships between people and also suggested that action was called for; if audience movement and relocations altered the power structures in the space, perhaps they could change in society as well. If Imhof’s intentions were ever in doubt, she articulated them explicitly in a press release: “Only by forming an association of bodies, only by occupying space can resistance take hold … on the balustrades and fences, underground and on the roof, the performers conquer and occupy the room, the house, the pavilion, the institution, the state.”44
Built into the piece was not only horizontal movement, but vertical as well. In Imhof’s words, performers were not restricted to the “underworld.” They also performed amongst the audience and on perches above them. Performers were dressed in everyday attire, tracksuits, jeans, sweatshirts, and T-shirts; this attire too made them clear extensions, or even mirror images, of the audience. These elements of the piece furthered the sense that audience and performers were one and the same so that audience participants could feel that they were acting together with the performers; this could enable their own sense that they were empowered to resist the status quo and effect change.
As John Dewey recognized, “The moral prophets of humanity have always been poets even though they spoke in free verse or by parable …”45 Dewey suggests that, art is more effective as a form of resistance than we might expect. During the 2016 presidential campaign, cadres of Americans organized to express their support for Hilary Clinton. Some saw their actions as resistance to the male-dominated norms of American politics; others were inspired to action by what they perceived as the virulent sexism and racism central to Trump’s brand of authoritariansim. One action, called Pantsuit Nation, was a group of 170 dancers of multiple races and ethnicities, many but not all of them women, dressed in multi-colored pantsuits; they were a flash-mob performance in New York City, dancing to Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling.”46 The act of dancing in the flash mob—performing for the surprised local audience and for cameras that would be used to make a slick, upbeat video for the internet audience—was an affirmation of support of a political candidate. But it was also a strong statement about belief in the efficacy of artistic resistance in the face of a campaign by Clinton’s opponent Trump that was characterized by calculated racism, nativism, and sexism. The video’s statement was made even stronger by the context into which it emerged; it dropped on October 7, 2016, just before The Washington Post published the story and audio recording of Trump’s boasts of sexually harassing women to then “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush.47
The efficacy of art’s power to resist is also evident in a recent example in Germany, in the small, formerly East German village of Bornhagen, where a group called the Center for Political Beauty constructed a replica of Peter Eisenman’s 2004 Berlin Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe directly adjacent to the home of right-wing politician, Bjorn Höcke.48 Eisenman’s iconic field of concrete blocks, or stelae, of varying heights is seen as grimly abstract or, to some viewers, as representative of a massive cemetery. The replica was erected in order to protest the politician’s assertion that Germans should stop feeling guilty for the Holocaust. Stelae in the new installation were rotated 180 degrees to symbolize the “180-degree turn” that Höcke called for in the way that Germans viewed their history to suggest that no change of view could alter the past. In this case, as in so many others, people believed that art could speak more effectively than plain language or more traditional forms of political protest.
The arts and related forms of cultural production function on multiple levels; they engage both the imagination and the rational mind; art is non-violent yet forceful. The scholar and professor of political science Gene Sharp recognized the power of non-violent resistance and protest and devoted his lengthy career to its study. He famously identified 198 forms of non-violent protest in The Politics of Nonviolent Action.49 On his list is every form of art discussed above and included in this edited volume, from caricatures and symbols to film and performance art. Although Sharp did not focus his work exclusively on the efficacy of art per se, he recognized its power. So should we.
1John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin, 1934), 362; cited in James M. Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 2.
2Otto Basil, Wenn das Führer wüßte (Munich: Molden, 1966) (Vienna: Milena, 2010).
3Jon Blistein, “Neo-Nazis Tricked into Raising Thousands for Anti-Extremism Charity,” Rolling Stone, November 18, 2014, https://www.rollingstone.com/
4Elena Cresci, “German Town Tricks Neo-Nazis into Raising Thousands for Charity,” The Guardian, November 18, 2014. Rechts gegen Rechts is now an annual event that has spread to other European countries: http://rechts-gegen-rechts.de/ [accessed February 14, 2018].
5While there is extensive scholarly literature on each of these historical periods, a nuanced overview is available in: Mary Fullbrook, A History of Germany 1918-2014: The Divided Nation (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015).
6See James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), xv–xxiii and James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
7Scott’s The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale, 1977).
8Scott, Weapons, xvii.
9Kurt Schock, “The Practice and Study of Civil Resistance,” Journal of Peace Research, 50: 3 (2013), 277.
10Erica Chenoweth and Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, “Understanding Nonviolent Resistance: An Introduction,” Journal of Peace Research, 50:3 (2013), 271.
11Victoria L. Pitts, “Reclaiming the Female Body: Embodied Identity Work, Resistance and the Grotesque,” Body ad Society, 4:67, cited in: Jocelyn A. Hollander and Rachel L. Einwohner, “Conceptualizing Resistance,” Sociological Forum, 19:4 (2004), 538.
12Hollander and Einwohner, “Conceptualizing Resistance,” 533–54.
13Hollander and Einwohner, “Conceptualizing Resistance,” 541.
14Hollander and Einwohner, “Conceptualizing Resistance,” 539.
15Martyn Housden, Resistance and Conformity in the Third Reich (London: Routledge, 2002) 160–99; Michael Geyer and JohnW. Boyer, “Introduction: Resistance against the Third Reich as Intercultural Knowledge,” The Journal of Modern History, 64, Supplement, Resistance Against the Third Reich (1992), 1–7; Alf Lüdtke, “The Appeal of Exterminating ‘Others’: German Workers and the Limits of Resistance,” The Journal of Modern History, 64, Supplement, Resistance Against the Third Reich (1992), 46–67.
16Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life (New Haven: Yale, 1989); Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); Martin Broszat, “A Social and Historical Typography of the German Opposition to Hitler,” ed. David Clay Large, Contending with Hitler: Voices of Resistance in the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Hans Mommsen, “Resistance against Hitler and German Society,” in From Weimar to Auschwitz: Essays in German History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) 208–23.
17There were numerous smaller Jewish ghetto uprisings in Vilna, Mir, and Lachva, to name just three, but none as large as the one in Warsaw. There was also resistance in the concentration camps. For example, see James M. Glass, Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust: Proceedings of the Conference on Manifestations of Jewish Resistance, Jerusalem April 7–11, 1968 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1971); Shmuel Krakowski, The War of the Doomed: Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland, 1942–1944 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1984); and Joseph Rudavsky, To Live with Hope, to die with Dignity: Spiritual Resistance in the Ghettos and Camps (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1997).
18On all of these points, see Charity Scribner’s “Buildings on Fire: The Situationist International and the Red Army Faction,” Gray Room 26 (2007).
19Ariane Della Dea, “Representation of Resistance in Latin American Art,” Latin American Perspectives, 39:3, (2012), 6.
20We are indebted to Stephen Duncombe for his insights here. Duncombe wrote about “cultural resistance” more broadly but his categories apply to art as well. See Stephen Duncombe, “Introduction,” Cultural Resistance Reader (London: Verso, 2002), 5–7.
21Liam Gillick, “Josephine Meckseper,” Interview, November 21, 2008, https://www.interviewmagazine.com/
22George Grosz, George Grosz: An Autobiography, trans. Nora Hodges (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and McCloskey, George Grosz and the Communist Party, esp. Chapter 1, “War and Radicalization, 1914 to 1918” (11–47), and Chapter 2, “Dada and Communist Revolution, 1919 to 1923” (48–103); and Wendy Maxon, The Body Disassembled: World War I and the Body in German Art 1914–1933, diss. University of California, San Diego, 2002.
23Grosz, Georg Grosz, 119.
24John Reed, “Josephine Meckseper,” Bomb, 84, July 1, 2003, https://bombmagazine.org/
25Reed, “Josephine Meckseper.”
26Pamela M. Lee, Forgetting the Art World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012) 136.
27Scribner, “Buildings on Fire,” 35.
28Scribner, “Building on Fire,” 33.
29Dora Apel, “Heroes and Whores: The Politics of Gender in Weimar Antiwar Imagery,” The Art Bulletin, 79/3 (September 1997) 366–84.
30Ingrid Sharp, “Käthe Kollwitz’s Witness to War: Gender, Authority and Reception,” Women in German Yearbook, (2011), 88.
31Sharp, “Kollwitz’s Witness,” 88.
32Angela Moorjani, “Käthe Kollwitz on Sacrifice, Mourning, and Reparation: An Essay in Psychoaesthetics,” MLN, 101:5, (1986), 1110–34.
33Moorjani, “Kollwitz on Sacrifice,” 1121.
34Jutta Bohnke-Kollwitz, Kathe Kollwitz: Die Tagebücher, 1908–1943 (Munich: btb, 2007), 476.
35The entire series is online at: https://www.moma.org/
36Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 74.
37Ladd, Ghosts of Berlin, 74.
38The Berlin Wall was actually two walls, an outer and an inner one, with a security space in between known as the “No Man’s Land.”
39Paul Richter and Mary Williams Walsh, “Clinton Hails Unity, Freedom in Berlin,” Los Angeles Times, July 13, 1994, Vol. 113, A6; Kurt Kister, “Pulling a Kennedy,” The Guardian, July 14, 1994, 17; and Ben Knight, “Merkel to Join Berlin Tolerance Rally as Pegida Tensions Rise,” The Guardian, January 13, 2015, 21.
40Philip Oltermann, “What the Brandenburg Gate’s Pop-Up Horses Say About the State of Berlin’s Public Art,” The Guardian, May 1, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/
41“Bus Barricade Installed at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate in Tribute to Aleppo,” Reuters, November 10, 2017; “Controversial Anti-War Monument on Show in Berlin,” DW, http://www.dw.com/
42Naomi Smolik, “Conversations: Anne Imhof ‘Faust’ at German Pavilion, Venice Biennale,” Mousse Magazine, http://moussemagazine.it/
43For more on this, see Deborah Ascher Barnstone, The Transparent State: Architecture and Politics in Postwar Germany (London: Routledge, 2005).
44Cited in Nate Freeman, “Anne Imhof’s Bargain Pays off with ‘Faust’ at the German Pavilion,” Art News, May 9, 2017.
45John Dewey, Art as Experience, 362.
46Sarah L. Kaufman, “Pantsuit Power Flash Mob Cideo for Hillary Clinton: Two Women, 170 Dancers and No Police,” The Washington Post, October 7, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/
47David A. Fahrenthold, The Washington Post, Oct. 8, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/
48James Masters, “Holocaust Memorial Built Outside Home of Far-Right German Politician,” CNN, November 23, 2017, https://www.cnn.com/
49Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973).