Weimar Art Festival: You can’t prescribe enjoyment

Although Weimar has the greatest German poets as mascots, a renowned university, a music college and a national theater, it does not have an ICE connection. Anyone arriving by train changes in Erfurt or Jena and continues to the manageable city of 60,000 inhabitants. On the weekend of the opening of the Weimar Art Festival 2024 – state elections in Thuringia are in a week! – Japanese tourists, a Russian-speaking mother with her son, two young men with cell phones and Köstritzer in their hands are sitting opposite me in the Regio, and everyone in the compartment is silent while looking at the screen or the landscape.

On the way to the city center on foot, I pass the Thälmann statue, where red flower wreaths are attached, and pass posters commemorating survivors and witnesses of the Buchenwald concentration camp, where tens of thousands of forced laborers, mostly Soviet, were held not far from Weimar. Citizens who were murdered by the Nazis. Election posters for grinning cheeks from all parties hang on the lanterns, although it is noticeable that, at least on the street towards the center, the Greens place their advertising higher up than the Union of Values.

When you arrive at Theaterplatz, the statues of Goethe and Schiller provide shade. Directly opposite is the information stand for the art festival, which is entering its 35th round under the motto “What we are fighting for”. The curator and former cultural journalist Rolf C. Hemke from Cologne has been director since 2019. Next to the stand, the artist Cosima Gopfert was allowed to place her installation “Fake Info-Stelle”, where electronically transmitted, imaginary election survey values ​​are displayed. Ramelow is at the front, Höcke at the back, Wagenknecht’s BSW doesn’t play a big role… wishful thinking. It is questionable to what extent this is encouraging or combative.

An exhibition on the Russian human rights organization Memorial will open in the Bauhaus Museum in the afternoon. She has been committed to coming to terms with the horrors of the Gulag since the Perestroika period. Its members were declared enemies of the state in Russia in 2022, but continue their work worldwide. In the front row sits Oleg Orlov, who was released from prison after two years a few weeks ago as part of the prisoner exchange. The exhibition aims to show that there is another Russia that wants to be democratic and uphold human rights.

The work of Memorial is documented, the effort to give the Gulag atrocities a place in collective memory against state-imposed forgetting, and the severe repression to which the members are exposed. Display cases in the center of the room display objects salvaged from the camps: strings stretched between wooden sticks for cutting bread; Mittens for children aborted against their mothers’ wishes; Letters to Stalin to let the innocent parents come home.

But what German politicians derive from Memorial’s work for our present is a different story: According to the speeches by Volkhard Knigge, the long-time director of the Buchenwald Memorial, and Irina Scherbakowa, who lives in exile in Germany as a Memorial employee, Carsten Schneider is the patron of the art festival and quotes Faust as a “renegade Germanist”. The representative for East Germany is all about swearing: He philosophizes about a “reactionary” core of Russia and its imperialist continuities. He indirectly wishes that Moscow, like Nuremberg, would move from a place of crime planning (racial legislation) to a place of reckoning (trials against Nazi greats). Because Putin’s Russia is evil, trust in the good German institutions should grow. At the official festival opening at Theaterplatz that evening, Schneider demanded: “Enjoy the freedom of art.” As we all know, enjoyment cannot be prescribed.

According to art festival-experienced locals, the opening is “poorly attended” compared to previous years. Thuringia’s Minister of Culture Benjamin-Emmanuel Hoff constantly quotes in his speech because culture is his job and calls for “the enemies of democracy to be laughed at.” This is also difficult to do on command. And moral superiority does not protect against fascist violence. The fact that the task of art is to critically reflect society as a whole seems to be a far-fetched idea. Instead, art should defend this democracy against the right on behalf of its rulers, and thereby implicitly defend the status quo.

Clear announcements are followed by a wordless dance that is difficult to follow mentally. Dancers from the Forward Dance Theater move across the square in white robes, two of them in wheelchairs and on crutches. A tall Weimar man in a suit who likes to shake his head criticizes the music, a somewhat uninspired “deconstructed Carmina Burana” and recommends the Cloud Gate Dance Theater from Taiwan – “world class”. Then he leaves, self-righteous but with an opinion.

The premiere of “S – Skull” took place late at night in the redoubt of the theater on the outskirts of the city: texts by the German-Iranian writer Navid Kermani are “scenically reflected” by actress Eva Mattes and Roberto Cuilli, the theater’s long-time director the Ruhr. They sit on the table, on chairs that are too small, and put buckets on their heads. They tell mythical parables about the creation of time by carrying the dead, and lead absurd loop dialogues about goblins sighing. This absurd theater alternates with reports from Germany’s colonial history, the story of a secret rape and war atrocities. Nobody can deny Ciulli and Mattes’ stage presence, but the scenic text collage lacks the context, a dramaturgy to make it urgent. So nothing remains but brief terror and profound disorientation, a mixture of drama and metaphysics that does not question any social realities.

The following evening things were much more fun at Herderplatz: The Rumpel Pumpel Theater stopped in Weimar and offered an hour of good entertainment with “The Cursed Hotel” with a crime story, puns, vampire fights, singing, pole dancing and a bit Audience engagement in the front row. A strong hour of fun. A large audience came, most of them stayed and laughed hard.

So that was the beginning. The musical theater melodrama “A Survivor from Warsaw” has been widely announced for next week: Arnold Schönberg composed it over 75 years ago, and now the Jewish Berlin author Max Czollek, who has been one of them since his non-fiction books “Disintegrate Yourself” and “Reconciliation Theater,” has become one left-wing celebrity, commissioned to write a libretto. Schorsch Kamerun, singer of the punk band “The Golden Lemons,” will discuss the state of affairs experimentally and performatively with experts on several evenings using controversial terms. And last but not least, the now world-famous actress Sandra Hülser will take part in a concert election remembrance entitled “Come out of you are” – one could add: “but stay governed, good democrat” – on August 31st.

Back to what we’ve already experienced: A friend from Weimar tells me one night in front of a formerly occupied house how, during the baseball bat years, Nazis re-enacted a brutal scene from the film “American History X” in the city with punk heads on the curbs. Even in the new millennium, anti-fascists had their hands full to ensure that bald thugs did not dominate the cityscape. “What we are fighting for” was clear. They did not have to be called upon to do this by careerists, who are generally career opportunistic.

It doesn’t hurt to say that the AfD’s call for peace is “hollow” (Volkhard Knigge). It is right to show how the Russian state apparatus wants to silence the opposition. If the art festival prevents a bio-German boy with weak character from taking Björn Höcke as a role model, that would be nice – but it’s probably not. The people of Weimar best answer the question “What we are fighting for” for themselves. Physical encounters are definitely easy thanks to the art festival, and even if you don’t like the art, you have something to talk about and think about together.

Even if you don’t like the art, you have something to talk about and think about together.

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