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CULTURE

Top German art show starts amid anti-Semitism row

Break-ins and vandalism, accusations of racism and anti-Semitism and a giant compost heap: Documenta, one of the world's biggest art fairs, opens this week under a cloud of controversy.

Published: 17 June 2022 09:49 CEST
Documenta art festival
A visitor at Documenta looks at a large work by the Indonesian art collective "Taring Padi" in the Hallenbad-Ost in Kassel. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Boris Roessler

The exhibition, which turns the sleepy German city of Kassel into the centre of the art world once every five years, kicks off Saturday after months of bitter rows.

“Documenta has always been a place of exchange and heated debates,” Hesse state culture minister Angela Dorn said ahead of the 15th edition.

Over 100 days the wildly disparate works of more than 1,500 participants will be displayed at 32 sites across the city, with more than one million visitors expected.

For the first time since its launch in 1955, the show is being curated by a collective, Indonesia’s Ruangrupa.

The group’s decision to turn the spotlight overwhelmingly on artists from the Global South rather than Europe or the United States has opened up the event to a much broader range of perspectives.

“Documenta promises to be radical, from who is invited to the art, to the venues,” its director Sabine Schormann told reporters.

However the inclusion in particular of a Palestinian artists’ group strongly critical of the Israeli occupation has sent sparks flying.

READ ALSO: Kassel opens 13th ‘documenta’ art show

‘A big problem’

An anonymous blog posted by an “Alliance Against Anti-Semitism Kassel” in January accused the collective called The Question of Funding of having links to the BDS boycott Israel movement.

BDS was branded anti-Semitic by the German parliament in 2019 and barred from receiving federal funds. Around half of Documenta’s 42-million-euro ($44-million) budget comes from the public purse.

Several German media outlets picked up the criticism, prompting Ruangrupa to release an open letter condemning “bad faith attempts to delegitimise artists and preventively censor them on the basis of their ethnic heritage.”

Last month unknown vandals broke into the Palestinian exhibition space, leaving threatening graffiti scrawled on the walls.

A visit this week showed that at least one of the tags was still visible among a series of paintings and photographs documenting the hardships of life in Gaza.

A series of collages by Mohammed al-Hawajri combines the pictures from Gaza with Picasso’s anti-war masterpiece Guernica and other classic images of Western art by the likes of Delacroix, Chagall and Van Gogh to explosive effect.

Documenta art festival Kassel

Visitors look at works from the art collective “Avis Rezistans – Ghetto Biennale“ from Haiti in a Kassel church. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Boris Roessler

Federal culture minister Claudia Roth has thrown her weight behind Ruangrupa and its guests, saying that while Germany understood its responsibilities due to its Nazi past, politically minded Muslim artists should be welcome.

Noting that Indonesia did not have diplomatic relations with Israel, she said: “I may not like that. But that can’t mean that an artist or collective from Indonesia is suspicious per se.”

News magazine Der Spiegel called the affair an embarrassing spectacle, saying “the German cultural sector has a big problem” with the tensions between artistic freedom, respect for minorities and the burden of the country’s dark history.

READ ALSO: German artist turns dirty walls into art via ‘reverse graffiti’

Repurposed sex club

Documenta began in 1955 in Kassel, which was home to a vast forced labour camp during World War II and was heavily bombed by the Allies.

It aimed to put Germany back on the cultural map after the Nazis’ campaign to crush the avant-garde.

Documenta now ranks with the Biennale in Venice among the world’s premier showcases of contemporary art. 

At one of the main venues, Kenya’s Wajukuu Art Project has installed a new entrance made of corrugated iron recalling Nairobi’s vast slums.

Return to send Kassel

An installation made from old clothing entitled “Return to sender”. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Boris Roessler

Its pitch-dark tunnel is disorienting for visitors on arrival, an effect replicated in many of the Documenta venues including a repurposed cellar sex club.

In a park in front of the city’s baroque Orangerie, Nairobi’s Nest Collective has dumped textiles and electronic waste in a work entitled “Return to Sender”.

READ ALSO: Q&A: The Berlin duo encouraging people to ditch fast fashion

On the same field — and certain to draw the sniffs of Documenta sceptics — a compost pile complete with a toilet for guests to help fertilise the soil has pride of place, underlining a message of creative renewal.

Alongside sculpture and video installations are a Vietnamese herbal sauna, a halfpipe ramp for skateboarding and multimedia works documenting freedom struggles of Algerian women, black people in the Netherlands and Australia’s Indigenous communities.

Documenta runs until September 25th.

By Deborah COle

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DISCOVER GERMANY

Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

With thousands of years of history in Germany to explore, you’re never going to run out of museums to scratch the itch to learn about and fully experience the world of the past.

Published: 5 April 2024 10:46 CEST
Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

Here are eight of our favourite museums across Germany’s 16 states for you to discover for yourself. 

Arche Nebra

Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt

One day, around 1600 BCE, local Bronze Age peoples buried one of their most precious objects – the Nebra Sky Disk, a copper, gold, and bronze disk that acted as a calendar to help them plant crops. This was a matter of life and death at the time. 

Over three thousand years later, in 1999, it was uncovered by black market treasure hunters, becoming Germany’s most significant archaeological find. 

While the Sky Disk itself is kept in the (really very good)  State Museum of Pre- and Early History in nearby Halle, the site of the discovery is marked by the Arche Nebra, a museum explaining prehistoric astronomy and the cultural practices of the people who made it. 

Kids will love the planetarium, explaining how the disk was used. 

Atomkeller Museum

Halgerloch, Baden-Württemberg

From the distant to the very recent past – in this case, the Nazi atomic weapons programme. Even as defeat loomed, Nazi scientists such as Werner Heisenberg were trying to develop a nuclear bomb. 

While this mainly took place in Berlin, an old beer cellar under the town of Halgerloch, south of Stuttgart, was commandeered as the site of a prototype fission reactor. 

A squad of American soldiers captured and dismantled the reactor as the war ended. Still, the site was later turned into a museum documenting German efforts to create a working reactor – one that they could use to develop a bomb.

It’s important to note that you don’t need to be a physicist to understand what they were trying to do here, as the explanatory materials describe the scientist’s efforts in a manner that is easy to understand. 

German National Museum

Nuremberg, Bavaria

Remember that scene at the end of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, where an unnamed government official wheels the Ark of the Covenant into an anonymous government warehouse? This could possibly be the German equivalent – albeit far better presented. 

The German National Museum was created in 1852 as a repository for the cultural history of the German nation – even before the country’s founding. In the intervening 170 years, it’s grown to swallow an entire city block of Nuremberg, covering 60,000 years of history and hundreds of thousands of objects. 

If it relates to the history of Germany since prehistoric times, you’re likely to find it here.

Highlights include several original paintings and etchings by Albrecht Dürer, the mysterious Bronze Age ‘Gold Hats’, one of Europe’s most significant collections of costuming and musical instruments, and a vast display of weapons, armour and firearms. 

European Hansemuseum

Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein

In the late Middle Ages, the political and economic centre of the world was focused on the North Sea and the Baltic German coasts. 

This was the domain of the Hanseatic League, one of the most powerful trading alliances in human history. Centuries before the Dutch and British East India Companies, they made in-roads to far-flung corners.

The European Hansemuseum in the former Hanseatic city of Lübeck tells the story of the league’s rise and eventual fall, its day-to-day operations, and its enduring legacy.

This museum is fascinating for adults and kids. It uses original artefacts and high-tech interactive elements to tell tales of maritime adventure. Younger visitors will also be enchanted by the museum’s augmented reality phone app that asks them to help solve mysteries. 

Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum

Augsburg, Germany

The Hanseatic League was not the only economic power in the late Middle Ages. The Fugger and Welser families of Augsburg may have been the richest in the world until the 20th century.

From humble beginnings, both families grew to become incredibly powerful moneylenders, funding many of the wars of the 16th century and the conquest of the New World.

The Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum not only explains the rise of both patrician families but also the practices that led to their inconceivable wealth—including, sadly, the start of the Transatlantic slave trade. 

The museum also documents the short-lived Welser colony in Venezuela, which, if it had survived, could have resulted in a very different world history.

This museum has many high tech displays, making it a very exciting experience for moguls of any age.

Teutoburg Forest Museum

Kalkriese, Lower Saxony

Every German child learns this story at some point: One day at the end of summer 9 AD, three legions of the Roman army marched into the Teutoburg forest… and never came out. 

Soldiers sent after the vanished legions discovered that they had been slaughtered to a man.

Arminius, a German who had been raised as a Roman commander, had betrayed the three legions to local Germanic tribes, who ambushed them while marching through the forest. 

Today, the probable site of the battle – we can’t entirely be sure – is marked by a museum called the Varusschlacht Museum (Literally ‘Varus Battle Museum’, named after the loyal Roman commander). 

The highlights here are the finds – made all the more eerie by the knowledge that they were looted and discarded from the legionaries in the hours following the ambush. 

German Romanticism Museum

Frankfurt, Hesse

The Romantic era of art, music and literature is one of Germany’s greatest cultural gifts to the world, encompassing the work of poets such as Goethe and Schiller, composers like Beethoven and artists in the vein of Caspar David Friedrich.

Established in 2021 next to the house where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born, the German Romanticism Museum is the world’s largest collection of objects related to the Romantic movement. 

In addition to artefacts from some of the greatest names in German romanticism, in 2024, you’ll find a major exhibition exploring Goethe’s controversial 1774 novel, ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, and another on the forest as depicted as dark and dramatic in the art of the period. 

Gutenberg Castle

Haßmersheim, Baden-Württemberg

Sometimes being a smaller castle is a good thing. The relatively small size and location of Guttenburg Castle, above the River Neckar near Heilbronn, protected it from war and damage over eight hundred years – it’s now the best preserved Staufer-era castle in the country.

While the castle is still occupied by the Barons of Gemmingen-Guttenberg, the castle now also contains a museum, that uses the remarkably well-preserved castle interiors to explore centuries of its history – and the individuals that passed through it.

After you’ve explored the museum—and the current exhibition that uses Lego to document life in the Middle Ages —it’s also possible to eat at the castle’s tavern and stay overnight!

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