Berlinale: “Strike Germany”: You can’t fire me, I’m quitting!

The German cultural scene has been shaken up as a result of the Hamas massacre on October 7th and the subsequent war between Israel and Hamas. Whether in the art world, in the music scene or in the film business: artists and cultural workers everywhere are commenting on the war; Many of them take one-sided pro-Palestinian positions, for example seeing Israel as a colonial state. This was also the case recently at the Berlinale – there, at the awards ceremony, there was hardly any talk of the atrocities committed by Hamas, but there was even more talk of the “genocide” that Israel is committing against the Palestinians. Anti-Israel content was shared on an official Berlinale Instagram account; the authors have yet to be identified.

Before the Berlin Film Festival began, there had already been a number of rejections from filmmakers who did not want to show their productions in Germany – because the Germans were too Israel-friendly. With their rejections they were referring to the international “Strike Germany” campaign. The campaign now seems to have been somewhat forgotten in the public consciousness. What’s it all about?

Also read: Normalization of political censorship – Raul Zelik on allegations of anti-Semitism at the Berlinale

In mid-January of this year, a boycott call with the title “Strike Germany” appeared on the Internet for the first time. The call attracted greater public interest because the signatories included the Nobel Prize-winning writer Annie Ernaux and the philosopher Judith Butler. Butler has since withdrawn her signature without giving reasons, as “Spiegel” reports. The signatories undertake to “keep their work and presence away from German cultural institutions until the strike demands are met.” The demands are, firstly, that cultural institutions do not interfere in the attitude of their artists towards Israel and Palestine. Second, they should abandon the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of anti-Semitism in favor of the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism (JDA). The latter is considered to be more lax on Israel-related anti-Semitism. And finally, thirdly, they should campaign against the Bundestag decision not to provide any funds or rooms to the anti-Semitic boycott movement BDS.

Only when these demands are met will the strikers make their labor available to the local cultural institutions again. There are around 1,600 names on the list. Hardly any of them will be familiar to laypeople outside of the cultural scene. It is more the second, third or even fourth guard of the cultural sector that commits itself here. Some also have completely different professions such as bankers, engineers or physiotherapists. The authors of the list are not transparent and the site has no legal notice. However, the FAQ states that there is a broad coalition of cultural workers from Berlin behind it. Judging from the list itself, this isn’t an exaggeration. 405 of the signatures alone state that they are based in Berlin.

Also read: “As always, German sensitivities are the focus.”
Emilia Roig, Candice Breitz and Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus on anti- and philo-Semitism in the German debate after October 7th

That raises questions. It may be easy for a Canadian writer or a British architect to boycott German cultural institutions, but there may be no possibility or temptation to break the boycott at all. But how the quarter of the list from Berlin is supposed to achieve this is a mystery. In fact, samples give the impression that the boycott is not really being respected either. DJs are still on the program of their clubs, artists continue to offer workshops, dancers remain listed with their company. The cancellations are manageable and, in addition to the Berlinale, seemed to affect primarily the media art festival Transmediale and the associated CTM festival for experimental music. The willingness to put one’s own livelihood at risk so that cultural institutions align themselves with the JDA instead of the IHRA is apparently limited. It probably wouldn’t go down well if the cultural institutions took the boycott more seriously than the boycotters themselves and stopped working with the 1,600 signatories.

However, this will probably not happen, as the Cosmopolitanism GG 5.3 initiative at the end of 2020 showed that considerable parts of the cultural scene seem to be interested in maintaining the scene that is centered around the Israel boycott campaign “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” ( BDS) has gathered. At that time, an unprecedented coalition of managers from renowned cultural institutions formulated a statement against the Bundestag’s BDS resolution. The call for a boycott from “Strike Germany” is paradoxically directed against the very institutions from which we have repeatedly heard that the boycotters should not be excluded. What’s the point of all this then? Why put out a boycott call that temporarily creates small gaps in the program for a handful of organizers, but is apparently not even taken seriously by all those who sign?

The call plays on a fear in the local cultural sector that is also echoed in the statement from the Cosmopolitan Initiative: the illusion is being fostered that one would isolate oneself globally if one stopped criticizing Israel. At the same time, the authors of the call themselves seem to have fallen prey to this fear. In their political contextualization, in addition to the usual demonization of Israel, they paint a picture of the German cultural sector in which criticism of Israel no longer has any place. An example is the author Masha Gessen, who received the Hannah Arendt Prize despite an infamous comparison of Gaza with the Nazi ghettos, but not in the Bremen town hall as planned.

There are of course other cases of disinvitations or postponements. The Hamas massacres of October 7th not only led to global anti-Semitic disinhibition, but also to some extent to an appropriately increased sensitivity towards Israel-related anti-Semitism. However, the strike call does not dwell on such developments, but instead flees forward: You can’t fire me, I’m quitting! Knowing full well that the arms of the cultural sector remain open and that most of the signatories probably have little to fear, despite their sometimes brutal social media presence. In any case, this call will probably soon be buried under a flood of other calls and open letters on the subject of the Middle East conflict, like the many before it. And the events at the Berlinale will soon be forgotten in view of the likely further derailments on the subject of Israel.