Post #948236

@adam_harvey Because all of this was based on a fundamental misunderstanding from the beginning on. "All art is political" in the past meant to welcome lefty Western "expat" artists as an exorcism and redemption of Germany's Nazi past, to be the tokens for the country having shed nationalism. When those same international artists voiced their solidarity with Palestinians, this disturbed a German post-war narrative in which the state of Israel is the even more significant redemption of the Third Reich and the holocaust. In the mainstream German perception - which reaches from the conservative right, includes the liberal-progressive center up to parts of the radical Antifa left -, those "expat" artists violated the German social contract which includes to purposefully not differentiate between Jewishness, judaism, zionism and Israel, and consider any attack on the latter the violation of a cultural and political taboo. "All art is political" in Germany thus means to be intentionally silent on Gaza. Questioning the legitimacy of that war and Israeli sovereignty would, in the end, wreck the German identity which depends on this redemption trope as well as its larger narrative of "Germany's (postwar) way to the (liberal) West". The international artist community in Berlin was a very powerful token of that narrative.