Make Art Not War
This is mostly just an announcement for my Berlin readers, but I’ll throw in a wee bit of history for the rest of you.
I’ve been invited to give a speech at the opening of this art exhibition on April 26. So I’m going to do that. The exhibition is called Make Art Not War. It’s being presented by the IAFF. No, not the International Association of Firefighters, the Internationale Agentur für Freiheit, a Berlin art and cultural association founded by freedom-loving artists and art lovers. The details are here on the IAFF website.
The exhibition venue is the Musikbrauerei, that rather dramatic-looking building in the picture above. It’s a former brewery, built in 1888. Rumor has it, during the GDR era, it housed a Stasi “listening station.” There are still WWII air-raid bunkers in the cellar. Around the corner, in 1931, Walter Ulbricht and Joseph Goebbels engaged in a debate in the Saalbau Friedrichshain, which culminated in a Nazi vs. Communist riot.
The story goes, after Walter Ulbricht’s speech, the Communists (i.e., the KDP) began singing the Internationale to drown out Goebbels, or, as the kids say these days, “to deny him a platform.” The Nazis didn’t like that. So they attacked the Communists. And all hell broke loose. Goebbels jumped out of a window and limped off into the night, and infamy. I think the Communists won the riot.
After the war, Walter Ulbricht returned from exile, became General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, and got right to work protecting the East German proletariat from The Beatles and other capitalist influences, and erecting the Berlin Wall, and otherwise oppressing everyone for the good of humankind. He ruled East Germany until 1971, when he was finally replaced by Erich Honecker, who you may recall from this tender rendition of him and Brezhnev in a mural on the Berlin Wall.
Joseph Goebbels of course went on to become the Nazi Minister of Propaganda and fanatically mass murder millions of people. Then he murdered his own children and had one of his Nazi flunkies shoot him and his wife in the head.
I used to teach English down the street from where that happened. And I used to live around the corner from the Musikbrauerei. That was back in 2004, when there were still bullet holes in the facades of buildings from the fighting between the Red Army and the Nazis. The neighborhood has been gentrified since then.
On December 15, 1942, on Hufelandstraße, where I used to do my laundry, Gertrud and Max Gehr were taken from their home and transported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, and then later to Auschwitz, where they were both murdered. These are their Stolpersteine (“stumbling stones”). There are Stolpersteine like these all over the city.
If there is one thing Berlin is not lacking in, it is history.
I’ve been reading and thinking about history a lot lately. I don’t know why. Maybe it has something to do with my frustration with how quickly most of us forget how we got where we are and thus can’t see where we are going, which is around in circles.
Anyway, if you’re in Berlin and you want to hear me say a few more things about art, and war, and totalitarianism, and take in some art, and music, and history, come join us at the Musikbrauerei next Friday.
Oh … and apologies in advance for my funny-sounding German!
The sociopaths who run things are unimpressed by our cleverness, our word games, our cute memes, our tightly reasoned arguments and close readings of texts, unmoved by facts, logic, evidence or morality, as long as they have force on their side, as long as the cops and army will shoot when ordered to do so.
It's like trying to reason with a schoolyard bully. Truly, this never grows old:
"A WOLF, meeting with a lamb astray from the fold, resolved not to lay violent hands on him, but to find some plea, which should justify to the lamb himself, his right to eat him.
He then addressed him: Sirrah, last year you grossly insulted me.
Indeed, bleated the lamb in a mournful tone of voice: I was not then born.
Then said the wolf: You feed in my pasture.
No, good sir, replied the lamb: I have not yet tasted grass.
Again said the wolf: You drink of my well.
No, exclaimed the lamb: I never yet drank water, for as yet my mother's milk is both food and drink to me.
Upon which the wolf seized him and ate him up, saying: Well! I won't remain supper-less, even though you refute every one of my imputations.
Moral: The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny, and it is useless for the innocent to try by reasoning to get justice, when the oppressor intends to be unjust."
My computer art against war: https://youtu.be/dP808Qc9lgM