Brecht House – Literature Forum: In the name of law and order

All of Berlin is interested in the police? Not all of Berlin, but there were a few interested people who gathered in the literature forum in the Brecht House in mid-November for the “Policey” themed evening. The ancient spelling is not only an alienation effect borrowed from the owner of the house, but also evokes a literary tradition that extends to the Weimar Classic. Friedrich Schiller, who had already been on the trail of crime with “The Robbers” and “The Criminal of Lost Honor,” wanted to write a major drama called “The Police.” However, it remained an attempt; the piece only exists as a fragment.

By “police” Schiller meant much more than what we imagine today by the police, namely the entire administration of a modern territorial state that serves to enforce civil law. This was noticed by some French philosophers in the late 20th century, who asked themselves what kind of mood people have to be in order to actually do what power demands of them. Michel Foucault dug up Schiller again in his observations on governmentality. And Jacques Rancière also revived this broad concept of the police in his classic work “The Disagreement” as a counter-concept to politics.

The evening in the Brecht House covered an intellectual arc from Schiller’s times to the present. And that with the means of art and theory. The play “The Police” was written by the playwright Björn SC Deigner and contains the Schiller reference in the title and is seen as a continuation up to the present day. It premiered at the Bamberg Theater in 2020, shortly after a young black man was once again killed by police in the USA and there were huge protests across the country. Luise Vogt turned Deigner’s text into an award-winning one radio play made that was presented that evening.

“The Police” by Deigner and Vogt begins in Paris after the French Revolution, when the police emerge as a modern institution and replace the local jurisdictions from the feudal era. And as one suspects, the birth of such institutions is not a biblical division between day and night, but rather a diffuse area beyond good and evil. As in Balzac, where the biggest criminals become the police chief, the police appear as the one among the armed gangs and cliques that are supported by the state in order to monitor the other gangs that do not take the state’s monopoly of violence so seriously and to pursue.

Through functional differentiation, the enforcement of the monopoly on violence and the surveillance of the “social body” lead to the police becoming a state within the state – violence beats law, in the name of law and order. This leads to the police repeatedly attracting attention by attacking individuals or groups who do not fit into civil society or who are shaking it up because they carry the idea of ​​a better society from their heads to the streets. In the radio play you learn how the police participate in the crimes of the Nazis, join forces with neo-Nazis or turn a blind eye to their crimes. Shocking.

In his drawings, Johannes Weilandt captured the independence of the police force. Using fine strokes, the visual artist created shadowy scenes of police operations. Weilandt deliberately left out those who are currently being wrestled down or knocked down. Through this blank space, the violence of such operations becomes clear, aesthetically alienated. This, in turn, raises the question of what the police are dealing with, who are supposed to receive more and more resources in Berlin in the future, while culture – after all a very large economic sector in Berlin – is being cut back by the government.

Debora Darabi approached the police not through art, but through theory. In her dense lecture she lists Marx, Engels and Luxemburg to show that the violence of the police cannot be separated from the violence of the capitalist mode of production. Their argument: Where people without property are forced to work for wages on other people’s private property, coercive means are needed that work even if the ideology does not take hold. Their main theoretical enemies: reformism and abolitionism, i.e. the ideas that there could be a better police force or no police force at all under today’s conditions.

In the end, as a viewer and listener, you are two things: on the one hand, you are confronted with the history of the police through art, and on the other hand, you are enlightened about their function through theory. And even those who thought they would find out everything they needed to know about the police in the 21st century in David Simon’s brilliant television series “The Wire” will be proven wrong this evening, moderated by nd editor Erik Zielke. At a time when “police logic” is spreading into everyday life, it is urgent to think about the police, their history and their function – Schiller or Marx, Foucault or Rancière can help.