BREAKS IN HISTORY: TURNING POINTS THE ARTS HAND-IN-HAND WITH RECENT HISTORIC UPHEAVALS1

JULYA RABINOWICH

Before we go plunging fearlessly into the maelstrom of history, let me tell you the fine print: I’m not a historian, I’m not a researcher, I’m not a musician, and I don’t make films either. So right up front, I’d like to ask you to excuse me for any missteps, misinterpretations, or gaps in my knowledge: as an author, I can only draw on those things that reveal themselves to me. And I’m an author who’s driven by the collection and formulation of images in words. But like any other artist, I’m also a contemporary witness to my own writing. As well as an observer of all those things that influence and challenge my artistic work. Like any other artist, I try to become and to function as a seismograph for upheavals and watershed events, capturing and recording fragmentary moments that will shape the years to come. Viewed this way, artistic work is always also work to capture and record the seismic oscillations of history, sea changes knocking at the doors of society, structures, or geopolitics, whether they take place in a macrocosm or a microcosm, whether they affect a minority or the overwhelming majority. As echoes of both political events and breaks that will impact our everyday existence, be they war or peace. Be they deafeningly loud and impressively huge, or quiet, inconspicuous and small. So one can assume that art is always a reaction to such a tremor, always a sympathetic vibration, impacting both the outer and the inner. Artists have to manage this transformation of themselves into something like a mobile uterus, within which new ideas, new images and new sounds can mature in the fragile weightlessness of its protection. And with them new realities. That which one cannot name or reflect upon in the outside world cannot possibly exist within the inner cosmos. But conversely and paradoxically: that which isn’t dreamed will never come to pass. Music, motions, images and words are hallmarks of our history. They’ve accompanied us from humanity’s very beginnings. As magical thought, as desperate attempts to survive in the great dark unknown, as a consolation for loneliness and the fear of death, and as chroniclers of our millennia-long journey on this planet. But this system of comprehension and survival has not always been used to facilitate comprehension and survival. Various turning points in our history have seen art instrumentalised as propaganda, as a means to an end. Dark stains on the gleaming-white robes of the muse. This repurposing from a thing of beauty to a precursor of horrors represents a line of demarcation between philosophical reflection and a pathologically deranged system, between peace and war, and needs to be looked at more closely: the enthusiasm for war, the intoxicated inspiration of European artists in 1914 as well as the aesthetics of National Socialism with its book-burnings and degenerate art, with Riefenstahl’s images of strength and beauty that, as we know, ended in “Arbeit macht frei“ – “work brings freedom”; Communism’s institution and enforcement of socialist realism, the artistic work in secret to which many artists had to resort as a result, and not to forget the risky, insanely courageous dissemination of forbidden literature and films from the West, and all the consequences for the art world up to the fall of the Iron Curtain. Wherever strict regulations banished playfulness from art, art all the more quickly descended into the realm of propaganda, ossifying in its service to a particular clientele, turning away from what was originally its sense and purpose: pointing out the beautiful and the true. In any coercive structure, playfulness is taboo – as are the freedom of art and the freedom of speech. But it is precisely the species of homo ludens that will continue to develop itself with ease. And in essence, all art is also playful development, no matter how seriously it is meant and lived, no matter how hard the work entailed by its creation, and all the more so if it takes on serious themes. The playful element consists in the testing of one’s own abilities, the coordination of one’s own talents. It’s learning within one’s social environment: Adults who lose this ability also lose an indispensable wellspring for their own selves. And I do assume that all artists wish not only to be seismographs of society and its changes, but also to involve themselves in the playful development of aesthetic and social norms.

In order to have stated it clearly at the outset: Europe’s integration should be regarded as a project of peace. Art, on the other hand, should be regarded as a conveyor of that which is unknown and cannot be understood by means of logic. Music and images and words are associated with a different category of neurotransmitter. They’re vehicles of information that speak to the brain and to the heart in equal measure. They’re an overall whole formed by the sum of many small parts. An interweaving of information, of feeling, of inner images and outer views. Art conveys the authentic, art reveals that which is hidden. Art can be abused in order to mobilize and agitate the masses, with especially perverse results thanks to its sure aim at the subconscious level – but this marks art’s transformation into its dark sibling: propaganda. More on that in a moment. Art, in any case, also functions as a sort of glue that, repeatedly and across borders, has held Europe together and formed our European identity, which is ideally a greater common identity as opposed to the rising nationalism that threatens to devour, digest and assimilate any structures other than its own.

The absence of art’s freedom is a telling indicator of dictatorship, something like a litmus test of the society in question. Without fail, it is dictatorships that seek to tame art like some mythical beast that might pose a danger to them in the future. But mythical beasts cannot be tamed: they exist outside applicable norms. There are no domesticated mythical beasts. If you put a unicorn in an enclosed pasture next to a cow, its horn will immediately rot off should it fail to flee. And it is with this thought that we begin to approach the dark side of creativity, namely institutionalized art, propaganda.

This year’s edition of isa takes on three major upheavals, three massive earthquakes in the history of Europe: the redistribution of territory following Napoleon’s defeat, the outbreak of World War I, and the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. I’ll be placing a greater emphasis on more recent history, not only because the most recent of these upheavals has directly impacted the participants’ lives right up to the present day, but also because I myself bore witness to it, on location in Berlin during the weeks after the Wall had fallen. At that time, I, too – like most of today’s participants – stood at the dawn of my adult life, with all its questions and confusions. So let’s start with the year –

1814: The Battle of the Nations near Leipzig saw Napoleon suffer a decisive defeat. And following the revolution that ensued in France, the Congress of Vienna was called in 1814/15 in order to establish a new order in Europe. There, Europe was remade yet again, with borders shifting once more. The basic idea behind this set of political negotiations between the European powers is commonly referred to as the “Restoration”, meaning the reinstatement of the status quo from before the French Revolution. And that revolution, having already eaten its own children, now began the process of digesting them. The dessert in such a meal is that coveted cake, the land that is to be carved up. The chairman of the Congress, Prince Metternich, referred to himself in this function as “Europe’s Coachman” – which brings up peculiar associations with Taurus the bull, who was approaching precisely that Europe. A Metternich who viewed himself as a string-puller, teamster, broncobuster of the gods – not exactly a modest self-conception. In any case, the balance between the five great European powers of Russia, Great Britain, Austria, Prussia and France was successfully restored. And alongside matters of power politics, there was no shortage of music and other entertainment: those who are on the move politically hardly want to get rusty in other respects. So the Congress danced. Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park was published, and Vienna saw the première of the newest and final version of Ludwig van Beethoven’s opera Fidelio – a work of liberation, as the composer himself put it. This story of a blameless person rescued by the principles of equality and fraternity represents the greatest possible counterweight to propaganda, standing in opposition to tyranny of any and every sort. And it is said that Beethoven was also quite interested in the story of Leonore, which is thought to be based on a real-life event from the period of the French Revolution. Leonore disguised herself as a man in order to liberate her husband, who had been imprisoned for political reasons. Fidelio, however, was to remain Beethoven’s only opera. The year of 1814 may have definitively drawn Europe’s new borders, but these borders were subjected to a massive challenge in 1914. A challenge in the face of which hardly any room remained for artists’ dreams of liberation. What was called for in 1914 was the mobilisation of the masses, rather than the audience’s subtly entertaining edification. Because now, after all, it was no longer humanity, but its opposing force – hate – that was to be heaved onto the European stage.

1914: Let’s take a look at the propaganda, and at the corruption of...