CHAPTER 6: Between Politics and Ecology: Green Ideas on Art and Culture

One might wonder why the Greens and the ecology movement they represent should be singled out for individual attention from the broader context of the alternative culture. Many aspects of the Greens and their history justify a detailed analysis of their aesthetic ideas and cultural politics. First and foremost from a historical perspective, the ecology movement had, next to the women’s movement, the most lasting impact. The ecology movement raised the level of public consciousness in West Germany from complete indifference and ignorance of environmental issues to the current widely held belief that the preservation of nature has to be a top priority. Furthermore, it successfully transformed itself from a movement into a viable party that forced a reorientation of the traditional parties toward more environmentally friendly policies.

The Greens had entered several state legislatures even before they participated in the election of the federal parliament in 1980, which initially did not meet with the same success. Most election analysts impute the Greens’ failure to enter the federal parliament at that time to the candidacy of the late right-wing Bavarian politician Franz Josef Strauβ (CSU) for chancellorship and not to a lack of support for the Greens. In order to avert a victory for Strauβ and the center-right parties (CDU/CSU), many supporters of the Greens cast their votes for the Social Democrats and their candidate, incumbent Helmut Schmidt, whom they saw as the lesser evil. While the alternative movement reached its peak by 1983 — reflected, for example, by the transformations of the taz, which cannot legitimately be perceived as a mouthpiece of the alternative culture after this date—the Greens kept on flourishing. Since 1983, when they won 5.6 percent of the vote in the federal election, the Greens have been the fourth party in the federal parliament, allowing us to pursue our investigation of the correlation between countercultural concepts of politics and aesthetic ideas into the mid-1980s.1

The Greens in many ways incorporated the demands of other new social movements, as a brief look at the their founding program on the federal level (Bundesprogramm) shows. This platform spells out the four fundamental principles—“ecology, social responsibility, grass-roots democracy, and nonviolence”2—on which all Green politics rests and that exhibit at the same time the continuities and breaks between the green-alternative and the student movement Though ecology was not an invention of the Greens but had been around for over a century, it distinguished the Greens most clearly from its countercultural predecessor, the student movement. The principle of ecology meant that the Greens not only articulated environmental concerns but also called for a transformation of the hegemonic paradigm of permanent progress and unrestrained economic growth in favor of conservation in order to avoid irreversible ecological losses and environmental catastrophes.

This concept of conservation extended well into the areas of peace and civil liberties, which the Greens perceive to be in jeopardy.3 The platform’s section on the individual and society demonstrates the impact terrorism had on left-liberal quarters, referring specifically to antiterrorism legislation passed in the late 1970s, and expressed the fear that the Federal Republic was developing into a country whose government put the entire population under constant surveillance.4 The Green principle of nonviolence has to be understood in the context of terrorism as well, which overshadowed West German society during the 1970s. Nonviolence had, however, both a domestic and an international component. As to the latter, it articulated the Greens’ commitment to the goals of the peace movement. With respect to the domestic situation, it upheld the legitimacy of civil disobedience as practiced by many ecological and peace activists.

Although the term sozial, which is perhaps best translated as “socially responsible,” had a broad meaning for the Greens, it addressed primarily the question of fair distribution of national and internationally produced wealth and in many ways shows most clearly the influence of the student movement on the Greens’ programmatic framework. The Greens perceived themselves from the very beginning as the representatives of such marginalized social groups as women, children and teenagers, old people, gays and lesbians, the Sinti and Roma community, and especially foreigners—those who migrated since the mid-1950s to West Germany to fill the labor shortage, as well as the asylum seekers, whose numbers increased during the 1980s. In terms of the global North-South divide, the Greens demanded policies that would lead to a just cooperation of the First World with the underdeveloped Third World, arguing essentially along the lines of the West German Third World Movement, which was much more vocal during the 1970s than today.

Yet the Greens’ idea of social responsibility went further than welfare programs and new modes of aid to developing countries, it encompassed a vague notion of a better, nonalienated life, in which the human being will be restored to his or her full creative powers. Green politics strove for a society in which the subject is not reduced to a passive recipient either of food stamps and unemployment checks or of the commodities that the market economy provides. In contrast, the Greens advocated a model of a society in which everybody has a chance for self-actualization and political, social, and cultural participation. Naturally, this participatory model clashed with a political system based solely on representation.

At the heart of the Greens’ understanding of democracy lies the paradigm of the politics of the self, now conceptualized in collective terms as a participatory versus a mere representative model of politics. The Greens did more than other new social movements in publicizing this idea of a participatory politics under the label grass-roots democracy, which represents also the fourth pillar of their politics. “Our internal organisational life and our relationship to the people who support and vote for us is the exact opposite of that of the established parties in Bonn. They are neither able nor willing to accept new approaches and ideas, nor the concerns of the democratic movement. Because of this we have decided to form a new type of party organisation, the basic structures of which are set up in a grass-roots-democratic and decentralised way; the two things cannot in fact be separated.”5 Decentralization means small and comprehensible political units at the grass roots, since “political decisions should always be taken on the lowest possible levels, thus facilitating a maximum of direct involvement of those who will be affected by the decisions.”6

With regard to internal party organization, the Greens initially tried to secure grass-roots democracy through separation of party office and mandate, prevention of office accumulation, rotation of office holders, collective leadership, and openness to the public on all inner-party levels. Not only did this apply to the Greens’ organizational structure, but they understood it as a “model for society as a whole.”7 The social groups and issues that the Green platform addresses are essentially the same as those the taz covered, and the Greens can therefore be viewed as another mouthpiece and the parliamentary arm of the new social movements.8

This leads us to another reason why an in-depth analysis of the Greens is a worthwhile undertaking. Since the ecology movement coalesced into a party, it had the strongest programmatic framework and came closest to the theoretical articulation missing in the case of the alternative culture. In addition, a holistic approach characterized the ecological thinking from which the Greens sprang, ande on would expect them to pay attention to aesthetic and cultural issues a tools for bringing about a change of consciousness. Finally, we can discern a strong continuity between the generation of the student movement and the founders and supporters of the Green party This allows for verification and sharpening of our prior observation about the development of the West German counterculture since the late 1960s.

But quite in contrast to the student movement, the Greens were weak on aesthetic and cultural issues and did not generate any extensive discussion on aesthetic culture until the mid-1980s. This lack of thorough debate of a cultural program is surprising for two reasons First, the Greens’ members and constituency came from the old and new middle class, which has traditionally been most supportive of the arts and which provides for an aesthetic education. Second large parts of this constituency were socialized in the context of the 1960s counterculture, with its emphasis on sensuous and aesthetic experience.9

The Greens’ reticence on aesthetic issues is also surprising in light of the fact that they received tremendous support from artists — among them such prominent figures as Joseph Beuys —and successfully used artistic means for their election campaign in 1983. The Greens arranged a professional concert tour called “Green Caterpillar” (Grune Raupe), which included artists such as the songwriter Konstantin Wecker and the rock bands Kraan and Ostro, traveling the entire Federal Republic on behalf of the Greens. The show was interrupted by short election statements by seven Green politicians, but their contributions did not take up more than 15 percent of the show’s time.10 In comparison to the heated dispute about “Rock against the Right,” discussed in the previous chapter, the Greens did not seem to have any qualms about using music or art in general for advertising themselves and their agenda. At the same time, frustration rose among those artists who strove for an integration of their political (i.e., support of the Greens) and artistic life, because aesthetic ideas played almost no role in Green thinking. For example, Peter Altendorfer, a musician and composer from Austria who was himself involved in ecological politics, expressed this frustration by calling the Greens philistines (Kunstbanausen) and scolded them for their “lacking relationship to art.”11

Instead of joining Altendorfer in his finger pointing, it is more fruitful to ask whether the ecological principle itself was at the root of the Greens’ lack of a coherent discussion of art. In the beginning, the Greens dealt very little with aesthetic issues and stuck instead to the immediate problems of cultural politics with which they were confronted as elected representatives and administrators. Within the larger and more diverse framework of the ecological movement, we can nevertheless find some statements moving in the direction of an aesthetic theory. In particular, those environmental activists for whom ecology was not simply a pragmatic political program but rather an overarching philosophy were more inclined to address aesthetic issues because of their holistic approach. They saw not only environmental problems but all other social ills as a result of humanity’s spiritual alienation from nature. These activists therefore aimed at a new cultural revolution, leading to an ecological paradigm that would supersede the dominant mechanistic worldview in favor of an organic, cyclical, and natural understanding of the universe.

Stephen Elkins aptly dubbed this particular brand of ecological thinking in America “deep ecology”—a term that fits the West German equivalent as well.12 The latter’s ideas exerted influence on ecological thinking in general during the early 1980s and were present in the fundamentalist wing of the Greens, although deep ecologists were not necessarily members of the party. The following analysis is thus based less on the party platforms of the Greens than on other articulations of ecological thinking.

The Greens’ Dilemma: Nature versus Art

The greatest obstacle to a green aesthetic was at the same time the very premise on which all ecological thinking and the politics of the Greens rests: nature. Precisely the fact that ecological thinking place absolute priority on nature, above all the conservation of nature in view of a pending ecological catastrophe, obstructed aesthetic conceptualizations. The concepts of nature and art or culture are closely entwined, since each term can be defined only in opposition to the other. Art represents the utmost opposite to nature, since it is nothing if not human made.13 The individual work of art is the product of human creativity and labor, or in other words, is often literally wrested from nature, a circumstance most apparent in architecture and sculpture. The course of human history is marked by the transgression of natural boundaries and limitations, a trend that articulated itself in the aesthetic realm as well. The concept of the beauty of nature has also changed in synchronism with humankind’ ever more exploitive grip on nature. Though the beauty of nature and the aesthetic experience of the sublime occupied a prominent position in Kant’s ethics and Schiller’s ethical as well as political theory, it became secondary after Hegel’s privileging of the beauty of art (Kunstschdne), culminating in modernity’s distaste for the beauty of nature as trivial, even if single philosophers such as Adorno tried to redeem this concept for contemporary aesthetics.14

The aesthetic notion of nature is as much socially mediated as any other concept and is equally doomed to serve an ideological function. The concept of nature as ideology has therefore both progressive and regressive tendencies. It is progressive in its potential to evoke a utopian vision of a better world based on its criticism of the existing order, as Jorg Zimmermann points out in his historical survey of the aesthetic concept of nature: “Idealized images of nature satisfy in fictional form needs denied in reality. They are expressions of a lack, the experience of which does not lead to political practice aiming at change, but is compensated for aesthetically.”15 Zimmermann’s definition of the utopian potential of the depiction of nature raises its problematic status as merely representing an aesthetic compensation. In this case art becomes affirmative in Marcuse’s sense, and the concept of nature takes on a regressive tendency. As an idyllic depiction it projects a reconciliation of humankind and nature into prehistoric times or compares this state of being with the child’s innocence.16

The privileging of nature in deep ecology runs counter not only to an aesthetic notion of nature but to the entire history of Western culture. Deep ecology attacked first and foremost the Western belief in progress through technology as well as the technological transformation and secularization of the perception of the world that the Renaissance had brought about. The Renaissance liberated the concept of nature from its religious context as a divine order and opened it up to further inquiry. This process culminated in the replacement of a metaphysical idea of nature with a scientific one, which by the end of the nineteenth century insisted on the objectivity of the laws of nature and excluded aesthetics from nature. The result was, on the one hand, an ultimate belief in science and technology’s omnipotent function and applicability, and on the other hand, a critical evaluation of technology’s influence under the auspices of capitalism in the twentieth century.

Horkheimer and Adorno are the paradigmatic proponents of this latter, critical position, which focuses on the correlation between the domination of nature and social structures of domination in modern capitalist society. In their Dialectic of Enlightenment they argue that the more humankind gained control over nature, that is, substituted mythical and mimetic approaches with rational inquiry and technological domination over nature, the more humankind became alienated from it: “Nature must no longer be influenced by approximation, but mastered by labor…. In thought, men distance themselves from nature in order thus imaginatively to present it to themselves—but only in order to determine how it is to be dominated.”17

The first federal platform of the Greens was reminiscent of Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s analysis of contemporary society in vehemently rejecting the domination society exercised over nature and the human being. Moreover, it lamented the total commercialization of nature as well as leisure time and the resulting alienation of the individual from nature. Finally, the platform protested the bondage of human beings to the dominant economic system.18 Although the Greens’ criticism of contemporar y society resembles that of Horkheimer and Adorno, even pointing out the necessity of safeguarding civil liberties and the democratic structure of the Federal Republic, the issue of the survival of the planet Earth was at the heart of their politics. Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s interest in the correlation between the domination of nature and of humankind, in contrast, is based on the question of freedom and autonomy for the individual and not on the conservation of nature. Quite in contrast to the Greens, Horkheimer and Adorno emphatically assert the freedom of the individual, even if this means disregarding nature.

The difference between Horkheimer and Adorno and the Greens can be explained in historical terms. The Dialectic of Enlightenment was written at a time when environmental problems had not yet become as blatantly visible as since the 1970s and, most importantly, would have paled in the face of fascism and the Holocaust—the historical points of reference for this study. The Greens’ platform gives, however, a taste of the party’s problems in shaping a coherent social and aesthetic theory out of the multitude of often opposing traditions on which the Greens drew.

The 1980 platform also illustrates the Greens’ difference from the student movement. Whereas the Greens showed an apocalyptic thinking that denied any possibility for progress, since it would only lead us further along the road to ecological catastrophe, the student movement did not condemn all technological advancement but still believed in social progress driven by the technological improvement of human life. Looking at it from a Marxian perspective of class society, the students attacked only technology’s undemocratic application in the service of capital as wrong. Hence the proletarian revolution represents the prerequisite for the peaceful and beneficial use of technology.

The concept of revolution played no role in the ecological movement, which favored a model of social evolution that paralleled evolution in nature. Ecological thinking therefore represented a new step in the historical development of the concept of nature, which Konrad Paul Liessmann summarizes in his analysis of the relationship between ecology and aesthetic: “The more nature actually disappears in the process of the technological transformation of the earth, the more it is stylized as a value in itself within the discourse about its end.”19 In ecological thinking, nature, that which is organically grown and untouched by the human being, stands for all that humankind has lost. Nature represents the meaningful cycle of birth and death and rebirth, in contrast to the meaninglessness of destruction. Nature is a harmonic universal network in which each particularity has its specific and necessary place and function; thus it is unity in diversity. Nature represents the unity of body and intellect or matter and spirituality. Nature is movement and change as a dialectical process, peaceful evolution instead of violent revolution. Finally, nature equals sensuality or an aesthetic experience that is repressed in contemporary society.20

From a green perspective, the demise of nature can be halted only by an “active partnership with nature and human beings.”21 The Greens’ choice of words is not random, but an expression of the new status nature had gained by the end of the twentieth century. The term partnership usually denotes an egalitarian and cooperative relationship between human beings, or entities built and governed by human activity. The perception of a partnership between nature and humankind had, however, further repercussions, namely, that autonomy, “which modernity had reserved for the phenomenon of the aesthetic and for the self-conscious subject,” was slowly but surely transferred onto nature itself.22 Nature was no longer seen to be at the service of humankind, but the other way around. For deep ecologists humankind now has to be at nature’s service for the sake of nature’s survival. It means that humankind has to give up its autonomy and integrate itself into the predetermined cycle of nature.

In the most radical expression of this position nature gains an almost spiritual or religious quality. One of the earliest and also controversial theorists of the Green movement, Manon Maren-Grisebach, for instance, uses both the personification of nature we have already observed in the Greens’ election platform and a religious rhetoric in describing the relationship between nature and humankind. She invokes the biblical image of Noah’s ark and the notion of guilt, which like partnership applies primarily to interpersonal relationships.23 “We are no longer free in our devotion to nature; we are deeply in debt.… The feeling of the unity of humanity and nature has been lost, overshadowed by guilt and also by the recognition that no unity can exist in the face of so much destructive potential.”24 Most importantly, she, like many other deep ecologists, attributes today’s environmental problems not to structures of domination but predominantly to humanity’s spiritual alienation from nature.

Her description of this spiritual alienation is reminiscent of Peter Handke’s novel The Moment of True Feeling, discussed in chapter 3. As the title indicates, Handke addresses in this novel the problematic status of sensate experience, that is, the lack of receptivity for sensations and feelings within contemporary society. As soon as his hero, Gregor Keuschnig, becomes aware of his indifference regarding “true feelings,” he is at a loss and experiences total alienation. Maren-Grisebach locates the same loss with respect to nature, as a repression of human sensuality or a loss of a feeling for nature (Naturgefuhl): “In a written questionnaire directed to students regarding how they feel about nature, everybody wrote something about their empathy and their otherwise repressed senses. They recalled smelling the wet forest ground, blooming bushes, freezing in the icy wind; tasting roots coming straight from the ground of the earth full of sand, or strawberries on a warm mountain slope, and feeling moss and stream pebbles under their bare feet.”25 She perceives nature as the placeholder for immediate sensate experience, or ultimately for sensuality, without considering the problem that a concept such as nature is not authentic, but to the highest degree historically, that s, socially mediated.

Furthermore, both Handke’s novel and Maren-Grisebach’s essay suggest the same problematic remedy for resolving the contested status of the individual’s sensuous experience in a world of alienition. Both call for a passive devotion (Hingebung) of the subject o its environment —the object world in the case of Handke and nature in the case of Maren-Grisebach. A pocket mirror, a leaf from a chestnut tree, and a child’s barrette symbolize the object world hat triggers the moment of revelation and thus the “true feeling,” reconciling Handke’s hero with the world. For Maren-Grisebach, regaining a feeling for nature represents the liberating force that ‘econciles humankind with nature and thus with itself.

When nature becomes the ultimate point of reference as in deep ecology, art logically has to be subjected to the primacy of nature. This means that art can relate to nature only through mimesis. It is therefore not surprising that we can find voices calling for a return to a naturalist-figurative art among deep ecologists such as that of the painter Wassili Loukopoulos-Lepanto, who rejects all abstract art: “Abstract art excludes any relationship with nature. The abstract artist does not stand within nature but opposed to nature. For him, art and nature are two separate spheres. Abstract art leaves the ‘skin’ of nature and its laws behind. A loss of a center is characteristic for the abstract artist. His soul is clouded and his vision is blurred. Like an orphan, he only appears to live after he has separated himself from Mother Nature. Full of envy, he gazed at her beauty, and because he was unable to imitate her radiant beauty, and he was unable to praise this beautiful glow, hatred arose in him, hatred for everything which is beautiful.”26 Loukopoulos-Lepanto summarizes his ideal of an ecological art in seven demands, which range from its definition as a naturalist-figurative art organically springing from the “inner experience” (innere Erlebnisse) to art’s liberation from mass media and “propaganda of art” (Kunstpropaganda).

His two essays, even more so than Maren-Grisebach’s book, are bursting with a religious, spiritual rhetoric that, for instance, compares abstract art to “idols” (Gotzenbilder) and denounces cubism as “soulless geometry” (entseelende Geometrie), dada as “aesthetic nihilism” [asthetischer Nihilismus), futurism as a “cult of elitism and compulsive excess” {Kult des Elitaren und des Zwanghaft-Mafilosen) and all other avant-garde art movements of the twentieth century as a glorification of chaos and insanity.27 All art since the emergence of the historical avant-garde is destructive, from this deep ecologist’s perspective. Loukopoulos-Lepanto represented, however, a minority position even within the deep ecologist camp. As already pointed out, the majority of the ecologically inclined came from the educated middle class, whose identity was shaped by the cultural heritage of the West. Consequently, they appreciate abstract art and therefore would not go along with Loukopoulos-Lepanto’s call for a return to premodernist art.

Maren-Grisebach’s sketchy remarks are more characteristic examples of green aesthetic ideas. Although they show a much higher sensitivity to the question of the cultural heritage and to the shortcomings of current, ecologically motivated art, they do not amount to a coherent green aesthetic. Quite in contrast to Loukopoulos-Lepanto, Maren-Grisebach does not reject avant-garde art but cites artists from historical avant-garde movements such as Georges Braque and Andre Breton, taking a Lukacsian position that argues for the critical appropriation of one’s cultural heritage. Aside from her positive stance toward Western culture, Maren-Grisebach tried to confront genuine aesthetic problems which Loukopoulos-Lepanto simply ignored.

For instance, she addressed the issue of the form-content dichotomy and the question of the social function of art. Based on a critical assessment of historical predecessors—idealism and materialism —she rejected the reduction of art to either form or content. “It cannot be the goal of a Green aesthetic to promote a second kind of blood-and-soil art, or even a simple realism, be it critical, socialist, or a return to a pure naturalism. A poem is not necessarily successful as soon as it criticizes and moans about humans’ dealings with the environment or when it complains about exhaust fumes on a summer meadow; a picture is not necessarily superb if it simply depicts the tin cans left behind at a forest pond. Green aesthetic theory will not delight in such eco-art because it is too good for such superficial content.”28 She criticized idealism and materialism as theories that merely reflect the reductive and destructive Western thinking in binary oppositions. On the other hand, her critique of historical aesthetic positions did not result in a convincing theoretical synthesis of form and content either. She ultimately had to resort to nature, which always exists as a coherent whole and thus forbids the compartmentalization characteristic of today’s world. “Good” ecological art strives precisely for this holistic representation. She too models her understanding of art on nature.

Unlike Loukopoulos-Lepanto, who used the concept of nature only in the most regressive fashion for his concept of art, thereby excluding the latter’s social function, Maren-Grisebach addressed this problematic aspect of art as well. Using Braque, who compared his work to nature, and Breton, who compared his to social misery, Maren-Grisebach called for a comprehensive art that not only synthesizes the beauty of nature and that of art but also reintegrated ethics into aesthetics. “Regarding nature, the beauty of nature and of art would move closer together and reunite an aesthetic torn apart by analytic modes of thought into formal-abstract and concrete-content principles. With regard to social misery, ethical considerations would be integrated, which would agree with our consciousness of the responsibility for the entire ecosystem of the earth. Therefore, ethical and aesthetic aspects are entwined in our philosophy of art.”29

From behind her aesthetic ideas lurk pretty much all the major names of German aesthetic theory except for Hegel, since it was the latter who put the beauty of art on the highest pedestal of bourgeois culture. Maren-Grisebach failed to fulfill her own Lukacsian postulate. She did not critically appropriate these historical positions but simply lined them up by using their rhetoric, as the following quote demonstrates: “In play we approach such a disinterested activity, not in a rigidly regulated game, but in one of purposelessness, imagination, dreams, and surprising novelties. … To play is a curative for the mentally sick, comfort for learning children, source for artistic creation.”30 She borrows from Kant a comprehensive notion of aesthetic, which still includes ethics and the definition of art as the only mode of disinterested perception. Her notion of play recalls in a vague sense Schiller and Nietzsche, but she also draws on Freud’s concept that art represents the sublimated fantasies, desires, and dreams of humankind.

The above quote is characteristic of the eclectic and random approach to aesthetic issues within green culture. By only alluding to these aesthetic concepts dominant throughout centuries of Western thought, Maren-Grisebach can evade the problem that some of these concepts cannot easily be brought together into the organic whole so dear to ecological thinking. For instance, she does not explain how to reconcile Kant’s ethical view of aesthetics with Nietzsche’s notion of art as an amoral liberating force or with Freud’s insistence on repression as a necessary constituent of all culture.

The Notion of Play

It is a futile effort to make sense of Maren-Grisebach’s vague and indiscriminate pillaging of the wealth of intellectual history. Instead, we might want to focus on the element of play, which is featured prominently in her statements on a green aesthetic culture. She endorses the concept of play as the foundation for a green aesthetic, since play resembles nature. Like nature, play does not pursue any utilitarian purpose in its creative endeavors. In addition, though creation takes place purposefully in nature as an ecological system, it does not serve any particular interest. Hence nature and play are equally opposed to the intentionality and vested interest that characterize capitalist society. “Also because we like the element of uselessness in playing, because we therein oppose in an almost revolutionary manner the economic thinking of profit maximization. Breaking out of the rules of the market economy and the use value, and playing against the superior force of money, against technology’s utilitarian rationality.”31

This emphatic praise for the subversive potential of play, based on the Kantian definition of beauty, is not, however, convincing in a society that has successfully managed to subject almost all artistic production to the laws of the market economy. What is more, play does not seem to have quite the anti-instrumental character that deep ecologists such as Maren-Grisebach claim. If it has healing powers, as Maren-Grisebach implies, then perhaps it turned into a therapeutic means that compensates for the mental and physical disorders generated by the social system and forms a profitable sector of the economy to boot. Play can be just as affirmative as art.

The notion of play fits well into the general trend toward a concept of art as a nonprofessional and participatory cultural activity popular with the entire alternative culture. As Maren-Grisebach defines play, namely, without rigid rules, it does not require any knowledge, especially not professional knowledge. In other words, the Greens too leaned toward the do-it-yourself culture, discussed in the previous chapter. Maren-Grisebach’s aesthetic theory combines the concept of a participatory culture with the idea of a material asceticism also typical for the entire alternative culture: “to reduce one’s possessions and wealth as much as possible, to give things away, to like only very few things around, homemade things, whose production we can reconstruct and which are closer to the heart than to one’s wallet.”32

This notion of a participatory culture for everybody leaves no space for professional art and explains why the Greens had no relationship to art. Green thinking in this most radical fashion claims that the replacement of “shopping,” that is, buying whatever one needs, with homemade and handmade products liberates one from alienation. This line of argument ascribes to homemade products an aura of immediacy and therefore of authenticity that allows for the individual to experience itself as a subject and thus promotes self-actualization. We can discern a fetishization of “self-production” and “handmade” within the entire ecological movement, expressing not only an antitechnology stance but also a deep-seated yearning for a premodern life imagined as that harmonious cohabitation of humankind and nature. Ultimately, the green-ecological milieu thus replaced art with crafts.

The Greens on Art, Culture, and Politics

The founding platform of the Greens, the Bundesprogramm of 1980, was perhaps not the best place for an elaborate theoretical discussion of aesthetic. The Greens’ apparent lack of interest in aesthetic culture, however, seems to have rendered them oblivious to the importance of this battleground in their wider struggle against all modes of social hegemony. The platform’s section on culture was squeezed onto one page, a third of which was taken up by a photograph of two street musicians in front of a happily smiling audience in some urban center.33 The cultural section of the platform was not brimming with innovation, but represented rather an eclectic collection of ideas taken from the alternative culture at large. For instance, the platform picks up on the alternative culture’s criticism that the government-subsidized hegemonic culture caters only to the interests of a small part of the population and that its institutions are exclusively located in the cities, neglecting those living on the periphery. Consequently, the Greens call in their platform for a decentralization of cultural offerings by way of traveling exhibits and events by traditional cultural institutions such as the museum or theater, and for support for the creation of neighborhood and community-oriented cultural centers. In addition, they want to strengthen those cultural initiatives that specifically address the needs of children, senior citizens, women, foreigners, those suffering from substance abuse, recently released convicts, and other at-risk social groups. In contrast to the discussion within the alternative culture, the Greens did not seem to be concerned that the alternative cultural projects might become cheap substitutes for welfare programs.

Although the cultural section opens with a reference to the diversity of cultural production in society, behind its pluralist approach lurks an attitude typical of the educated middle class (Bildungsbürgertum), which is not surprising considering the social makeup of the Greens. As a result, the Greens stress the significance of education for the appreciation of aesthetic culture. At the same time, the platform operates with the binary model of a society divided into two cultures—mainstream and alternative—which Peter Glotz had originally introduced and with which the Spontis had readily identified. The platform contrasts the publicly subsidized hegemonic and professional culture with a “democratic cultural movement at the grass-roots.”34

The key criterion distinguishing the grass-roots culture from the hegemonic culture is, of course, its participatory nature. The Greens’ platform thus articulates the primary goal of the alternative culture, which focused on removing the barrier between the production and the consumption of culture in favor of a model in which everybody becomes a cultural practitioner and artist. Without any hesitation, the Greens demand more public funding for this grass-roots culture, siding with those voices of the alternative culture that favored accepting government pork (Staatsknete) for alternative projects.

Finally, the platform uses the Adornian term culture industry. This term remains vague, however, in comparison to the Tunix flier’s “Coca-Cola-Karajan culture.” The Greens do not make clear whether they see both “low” and “high” culture as the culture industry, or only “low” culture. The platform’s more specific criticism of the culture industry follows the student movement’s line of argument: the culture industry fosters a consumptive and passive attitude on the part of the audience, promotes stardom and the commercialization of culture, and adjusts and compensates for cultural underdevelopment instead of trying to change it. Even if a party platform is not the place for elaborate theorizing, it cannot be excused from clarifying the concepts it employs. On the other hand, the vagueness of the platform’s cultural section was characteristic of the Greens, who had to forge at least a minimal consensus from the broad and diverse range of positions and ideological preferences within it.

While the Greens’ platform matched their silence on cultural issues on the federal level, cultural committees had formed on the city level during the early 1980s. As a result, the Green cultural committees in Hamburg and West Berlin, which held quite opposing views, dominated the first Green congress on culture in January 1984, where the Federal Cultural Committee (Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft Kultur) constituted itself.35 The Greens’ involvement with cultural issues intensified by the mid-1980s and was briefly pushed into the limelight by a controversial position paper that Christoph Strobele and Udo Knapp delivered in March 1986 in the context of the federal parliament’s ongoing discussion on culture. This paper triggered much debate and a publication by the Greens that collected the various Green positions on art and culture.

This publication —entitled “Brushing through the Struwelpeter’s Hair: Toward a Green Cultural Politics”36 —represents the state of the Greens’ aesthetic discussion and its cultural politics in the mid-1980s. Jost Hermand’s evaluation of this brochure sums up its problems. He argues that the Greens’ analysis of the situation of contemporary culture is quite accurate, but that they are rather weak on articulating alternatives. He also points out another important aspect: “One can clearly see that this brochure was produced because of the pressure of the other parties’ cultural-political offensive rather than because of their [the Greens’] own initiative.”37 Since the shift toward the issue of culture was not self-induced but the result of pressure from outside, we need to contextualize the Greens’ discussion by examining why the Greens started this short but intense discussion on culture in the mid-1980s.

For one, the Greens’ success in entering city councils and municipal administrations forced them to confront this issue, since West German cultural activities are in large parts publicly funded. This posed a challenge for which the Greens were little prepared, as the taz critically commented: “Their self-understanding was based on the fact that they had to decide about the allocation of money, which does not necessarily go hand in hand with competence. Rubbing their hands with glee, joyfully awaiting a rich flood of money, the independent artistic groups line up; on the other hand, the Greens have to watch helplessly as the budget for culture is cut.”38 However, Bernd Wagner, himself a member of the Greens and deeply involved in the Greens’ search for a coherent aesthetic and cultural politics, contradicts the taz‘s assessment of the budgetary situation. He argues that the overall spending for cultural affairs increased on all levels—municipal to federal—during the 1980s.39

These two observations are not as mutually exclusive as they appear at first glance to be. Even if the total amount spent on culture increased, this did not necessarily mean that the alternative culture benefited from it. In many cities, and particularly on the federal level, large sums of money were allocated to such prestige projects as the two new historical museums in Bonn and Berlins which the CDU chancellor Helmut Kohl commissioned when he took office in 1982.40 While the new emphasis on culture started in the 1970s on the municipal level and was driven by economic considerations—the growing competition of the cities to attract business headquarters—Wagner interprets the increased funding of culture on the federal level as a part of the neoconservative offensive in the struggle over cultural hegemony. He explains the renewed interest in culture in general as an attempt to distract from the economic, ecological, and political crisis of West Germany and in particular an attempt by the CDU/CSU to instrumentalize culture for creating a new national identity.

Wagner cites as one example the attacks on the West German cultural institutions abroad, the Goethe Institut, by the late csu politician Franz Josef Strauβ. According to Strauβ, the Goethe Institutes operated with too broad a concept of culture, which included all aspects of daily life from environmental pollution to minority issues. In addition, Strauβ criticized the institutes for focusing too much on the problems of West Germany instead of sticking to the eternal values of high culture, as the institution’s namesake might suggest, and instead of emphasizing the achievements of the Federal Republic. Strauβ’s far-right position was complemented by Helmut Kohl’s own agenda for a new positive perception of German history freed from the shadows of the Nazi past and thus as a tool to generate cultural and political meaning.41 Kohl’s agenda was indeed supported by historians, first and foremost Michael Sturmer, who functioned as advisor and speech writer for the chancellor, and Ernst Nolte, who taught during the 1980s at the Free University of Berlin and ignited the Historians’ Debate with his article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that tried to dispel the singularity of the Holocaust.42

While this hard-core conservative position was exclusive, attempting to return to a 1950s notion of culture as truth, beauty, and goodness, the CDU’S modernization wing proposed an inclusive approach to culture similar to that of the SPD. Since the 1970s the SPD had been under pressure by the new social movements and finally by the Greens, which emerged to the SPD’S left and posed the danger of taking away constituencies. The SPD tried to reintegrate the growing alternative culture according to the concept of culture for everybody (Kultur fur Alle!), which Hilmar Hoffmann, the longtime head of cultural affairs in Frankfurt and a SPD member, had developed and tried to implement in his city.

This SPD concept simply meant recognizing the diversity of cultural needs and interests in contemporary society and distributing public funding in a more equal manner. Instead of subsidizing only such established cultural institutions as the theater, opera house, and museum, the SPD supported community-based sociocultural centers (Sozio-Zentren) such as the adult education centers (Volkhochschulen) and youth centers or even alternative projects like the Factory for Culture, Sports, and Crafts in Berlin.43 The SPD picked up on the demands of those within the alternative culture who wanted to have more public subsidies forthcoming for their projects. Wagner criticized the SPD’S concept of culture for everybody on the same grounds as the conservative CDU position. Both, in his opinion, turn to culture as a means to substitute for the loss of meaning and social cohesion in a society whose traditional codes of identification—labor and economic success—are in crisis.44

By the mid eighties the cultural and political lines of confrontation had sharpened even within the federal legislature, which had to decide on numerous cultural issues. Among them was one of the most significant changes for postwar West Germany, the opening up of the hitherto state-organized radio and television markets to private competitors. The Greens were forced to show their colors and did so with the infamous Strobele/Knapp position paper “Art and Culture—This Is Like Mustard and Whipped Cream,”45 which was written mainly in response to the SPD.

Strobele and Knapp criticized the SPD’S cultural politics first and foremost as an attempt to depoliticize art and trap it in the ghetto of leisure time activity or on an elitist playground separate from the sphere of politics. Instead, they defined art in terms similar to those of the student movement, namely, as an articulation of the repressed desires and dreams of the people and artistic creativity as a means of resistance and opposition. Second, the antitechnology stance of many Greens found expression in the position paper’s rejection of the SPD’S call for equal access to the newly privatized media instead of condemning the media altogether. Strobele and Knapp viewed the media merely as government-sponsored thought control and suggested that citizens disconnect themselves from the media, Third, they attacked the affirmative character of the government-ponsored cultural activities, particularly the proliferation of musems and historical exhibitions, since they smoothed over historical nd social contradictions. Finally, they demanded the separation of rt and government. No longer should government officials but the rtists themselves have the power to determine how public funds for ultural and artistic activities and projects be spent.

These are only the core demands of the position paper, which was immediately challenged by other Greens. The distinction that trobele and Knapp made between art, which they defined posiively as a mode of resistance, and culture as the government’s intrumentalization of art for its own ideological ends came under pecial attack for setting up an artificial binary opposition between rt and culture—or rather cultural politics—instead of recognizing ow they are mutually entwined.

Aside from all its shortcomings, it was no surprise that the Knapp/ trobele paper was controversial from the very beginning. The disute about it only attests to the Greens’ diversity, which rendered leorizing and programmatic statements much more complicated lan for other parties, especially since the Greens aspired to act ased on a consensus rather than on simple majority rule. This minnal consensus resulted in the idealized image of a green-alternative ilture as the “totally different” defined by such categories as “decenalized, grass-roots oriented, democratic, contemporary, provocave, lively, and self-determined.”46 Certainly every member of the ireen party could subscribe to these categories, since they did not efine aesthetic culture in itself but described its formal frameork.47 Beyond this minimal consensus, the different factions within le Greens all made their distinct contributions to the debate on ilture with one exception. The fundamentalists, which represented eep ecology within the party of the Greens, did not contribute luch for the reasons discussed earlier in this chapter. Their priveging of nature made it ultimately impossible for them to develop coherent aesthetic or cultural theory. Green aesthetic and cultural atements on art and culture show traces of various political tradions and persuasions, from hard-core socialist to more pragmatic id reconciliatory ones.

Eco-Socialist and Eco-Liberal Ideas

The most ideologically distinct contribution was the eco-socials position on art and culture presented by the Green-Alternati Alliance Hamburg (Grün-Alternative-List Hamburg or GAL Harburg). The concept of culture put forth by the GAL Hamburg for lowed a standard Marxist line of argument. It conceptualized West German society as a class society in which aesthetic culture fulfills a specific social function, namely, as an instrument of repression “We assume that the masses are culturally deprived; that means we want to tear the privileges and exclusive monopoly over art and cultural institutions from the hands of the ruling classes of this society.”48 This did not, however, mean that the gal Hamburg views aesthetic culture as inevitably affirmative. It argued that those power control the access to cultural institutions in order to prvent a dissemination of aesthetic culture’s potentially critical and emancipatory quality. In addition, aesthetic culture is neutralized through open censorship by integrating works of art and artists into the mainstream through commodification and by strict separation of art and politics.

This position followed the Adornian equation of mass culture with mass deception. Consequently, it attributed the differentiating of aesthetic culture into “low” and “high” to the class structure of society and rejected any kind of integration of “low” and “high” culture or alternative and hegemonic culture, particularly if it took on the form of cultural education in order to make high culture accessible to those who had been excluded from it. Instead, t proponents of this concept of cultural class struggle argued for culture “of and with many and against the few (namely, the ruling classes of this society).”49 They called on the Greens to promote the artistic creativity of the people in order to develop genuine collecting cultural and artistic practices. The gal Hamburg did not address aesthetic problems like form and content, but claimed that all the questions about qualitative criteria for aesthetic culture would fall into place without the authoritarian judgment of the professional critic characteristic for bourgeois culture.

At the center of this position, which opposed in particular Hilmar offmann’s (SPD) concept of culture for everyone, was the demand seize power over cultural institutions in order to break the social ructures of domination permeating all cultural production and ception:

The target of cultural politics are the institutions of cultural production and dissemination in the broadest sense in their role as instruments of domination or emancipation in the class struggle. If it is the task of green-alternative cultural politics to safeguard the freedom of art, it always means the emancipatory side of culture, and not the freedom to make stupid, to distract or neutralize by ghettoizing art as the playground of the elites. Thus, we cannot stop with the idea of “culture for everybody” in the sense of a wider distribution of leisure time activities.50

Though this position refrained from prescribing the proper form sthetic culture should take, its argument gained a normative diension nevertheless. For one, the GAL Hamburg suggested a reoriitation of Green aesthetic and cultural theory and practices toward e tradition of working-class culture during the Weimar Republic, irticularly toward the Communist party’s cultural concepts at that Tie. Secondly, it called on the artists to take a partisan position, that that artists join relevant social movements.’51 In other words, it arled for artistic production that actively promotes the class struggle, lite similar to the student movement’s notion of art as a means of itation and propaganda. The category of class was decisive for this ing of the Green party; nature as a significant concept was absent am its aesthetic conceptualizations.

The eco-socialist position on culture was not well received by e majority of the party, which quickly rejected it as a mechanical ilgar materialism.52 Bernd Wagner, for example, took issue with e suggestion that a Green cultural politics should model itself after e Communist party during the Weimar Republic, pointing out at the Communist party’s aesthetic was rather conservative and itially rejected such artists as John Heartfield and Georg Grosz erished today by the entire left. Furthermore, he chided the GAL Hamburg for a simplistic approach that reduces culture to art and cultural politics to budget politics. This criticism refers already to the position of the Alternative Alliance West Berlin (Grün-Alternatrve Liste West Berlin or AL West Berlin), which shaped up as a challenge for the GAL Hamburg’s understanding of art as an instrument of the class struggle, although eco-socialist positions were not alien to the AL West Berlin.

The AL West Berlin’s approach to art and culture was influences both by the presence of a strong alternative culture in West Berlin and by a bourgeois understanding of culture, while it still engaged in some Marxist rhetoric. The AL West Berlin represents thus in a nutshell the fundamental problem of the Greens—their heterogeneity. Sabine Weifiler articulated the alternative culture’s ideas and demands more aggressively than her fellow activist Hajo Cornel, who was the other leading figure on the cultural committee of the al West Berlin.53 Weiβler still applied Marxist theorems, viewing capitalism as the source of all alienation and stifling of human creativity. In addition, she used the Adornian notion of the culture industry but emphasized that the culture industry was itself only a product of capitalism and should therefore not be held solely responsible for the cultural passivity of the people.

The influence of the alternative culture on the al West Berlin was evident in two ideas that Weifiler adopted for a Green nation of culture: cultural self-determination and a broad concept in culture with an antiprofessional tendency. The notion of culture, self-determination, which was originally put forth by the Greens : Hessen, endorsed the idea of a participatory culture. Weiβler pushed this concept, however, beyond the deep green or fundamentali fetishization of do-it-yourself culture, arguing that the reception cultural and artistic events or products represents a form of partic pation as well. “Autonomous cultural activity also occurs —and th is often forgotten—when someone reads a book, watches a movi or writes a letter. It is everything that allows a person to reflect c his/her personal situation and to relate it in some way to the sta of his/her environment.”54 Weiβler defines culture in the broade terms as encompassing the entire life world. Therefore, everybody a cultural practitioner as soon as one recognizes oneself as an actii subject, recognizes one’s own needs and desires, and reflects upon them with respect to one’s entire environment.

Weiβler is not interested in the objectification of culture, that is, art in the narrow sense produced by professional artists, but in culture as a process of reflection because “permanent reflection on the existing everyday world enables humanity to develop projections of a society that transcends the existing reality and becomes utopian. Every person in whatever social position is in principle able to do this, and not only artists and scientists, as the bourgeois understanding of culture would have us believe.”55 Weiβer did not stop at a simplistic reflection theory but maintained that aesthetic culture projects at the same time a utopian vision of a better life as an alternative to the contemporary life of alienation. Weiβler’s position moved toward a bourgeois understanding of art and culture as a refuge for the desires and dreams of a better life, but at the same time she breaks with the bourgeois tradition that gives the artist a privileged position for cultural production.

Hajo Cornel’s contribution to the discussion represented the influence of bourgeois concepts on Green cultural politics. For one, he took the green-alternative culture to task for its ghetto mentality, which looked only at its own countercultural navel and did not address pressing issues within the hegemonic culture. Second, he opposed the instrumentalization of aesthetic culture and argued instead for the autonomy of art. His idea of the autonomy of culture was distinct from conservative attempts to depoliticize culture in order to return it to the higher sphere of truth and beauty. Cornel was concerned with the destruction of a genuine bourgeois public sphere that raised the possibility of censorship by government and business. He argued that only the autonomy of culture allows art to be oppositional. Cornel’s definition of culture as founded on a functioning public sphere thus encompassed such classical bourgeois values in the tradition of the Enlightenment as the ideas of emancipation, plurality, tolerance, difference, and democracy.

The return to the concept of the autonomy of art and culture within the Greens’ debate did not abstract from culture’s embeddedless within a particular sociohistorical context including structures of domination. The insistence on the autonomy of the sphere of culture grew out of the disenchantment with the late student movement’s reduction of art to a means of propaganda and agitation for the class struggle. Traces of the latter’s approach could be still found in the eco-socialist position of the gal Hamburg. The dispute between the two most distinct positions, the gal Hamburg’s eco-socialist one and the al West Berlin’s eco-liberal one, which one might want to describe as a pragmatist or integrationist position, was nothing new but simply a replay of an old controversy. “Art instrumentalized as a weapon in the class struggle and art as an autonomous force of resistance are only the two sides of the same coin, which in all its various nuances permeates almost two centuries of our history in the discussions of I’art pour I’art versus committed art, but remained fruitless, because the question it posed was and still is reductive and beside the point.”56

Though Bernd Wagner was in general right in his critical assessment of the Greens’ debate on aesthetic culture, the reconciliatory position cannot be compared to an art-for-art’s-sake paradigm, since this position showed itself to be aware that culture does not develop in a social and historical vacuum. It represented rather an attempt to mediate between opposing cultural needs and demands. The eco-liberals’ pragmatic position worked well, for instance, in securing funding from municipal and state administrations for alternative cultural projects, but did not and could not succeed in articulating a genuine green aesthetic theory beyond the call for the absolutely different, whatever that might mean.