PREFACE
“Country” – the title of this issue of TEXTE ZUR KUNST – is distinctly ambiguous. On the one hand, it explores specific ideas of rural life and the cultural-historical implications associated with them, which are closely linked to the ongoing exodus of Berlin’s cultural workers from the city. On the other hand, its articles address the political situation in our own country: the issue was conceived under the shadow of upcoming state elections, in which the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) – a party with some factions that are considered by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution to be right-wing extremist – is threatening to emerge as the strongest political force in the states of Brandenburg, Thuringia, and Saxony. Although many places in the world are seeing steady growth in the popularity of right-wing and extreme right-wing positions, the focus on our own location in Germany enables us to adopt a spotlight approach, homing in on individual cases and their cultural-political impact.
Against this backdrop, the title is by no means intended to suggest that the city serves as a bastion against right-wing ideology. Rather, the aim of this issue is to draw attention to the relation between rural life and right-wing propaganda, a relation that has emerged and developed over time. In this context, we see again and again how right-wing figures, in keeping with their völkisch rhetoric, position an ostensibly pure and uncompromised rural culture against the supposedly woke cultural imperialism of the big cities. However, here we focus not only on the ideological instrumentalization and glorification of regions generally regarded as rural but also on the function of the countryside as a place of longing.
In his portrait of Theaterhaus Jena, Peter Laudenbach outlines how municipally affiliated cultural institutions are coming under pressure from the Far Right but can manage to maintain freedom by opposing conservative ideas of institutional organization through a collective model consisting of flat hierarchies. The case of Sophia Süßmilch, whose exhibition was recently the focus of a boycott campaign by the Osnabrück branch of the Christlich Demokratische Union (Christian Democratic Union, CDU), highlights how publicly funded museums, theaters, art associations, and memorials can also be instrumentalized by more moderate political groups. In conversation with Antonia Kölbl, the artist discusses, among other things, the misogynist characteristics of this attack on artistic freedom.
The appropriation of the supposed idyll of rural regions by socially conservative or right-wing forces stands in contrast to the creatives who – not only since the pandemic years or because of constantly rising rents in the cities – have moved to the countryside or temporarily use the areas outside urban centers as spaces for alternative social concepts. On the one hand, the flight from the city is clearly sometimes accompanied by an idealization of rural life and a lack of reflection on one’s own privileges. On the other, initiatives such as music and cultural festivals or artist’s residencies claim that they strengthen sociocultural infrastructures in rural areas and boost economically weak regions. This is also the case with the UM Festival, staged biennially since 2008, which invites contemporary artists to the Uckermark region, one hour outside of Berlin. The festival’s cofounders include the Berlin musician Gudrun Gut, whose country life is the focus of an eponymous miniseries on German television. The series presents itself as an “anti-documentary,” a claim critically examined by Anna Sinofzik in the context of conventional nature documentaries, documentary portraits, and (sub)cultural narratives of the rural region.
By now established as a brand, the Uckermark, as Claudia Stockinger argues, has explicitly been promising newcomers “the good life” since the turn of the millennium and has long since become a popular (second) residence for many of Berlin’s artists, academics, and cultural entrepreneurs, and for some TZK board members. Christian Boros, our cover boy for this issue, has also bought an old farmhouse in the area, redesigned by Ólafur Elíasson and complete with farmyard chickens. Stockinger suggests that while the Uckermark has been positioned as Berlin’s antithesis in an urban-rural narrative established as far back as the 1990s, the wishful thinking that goes along with this can at times distort views of local conditions.
German art history has also projected its preconceptions onto rural areas: the idealization of the rural is a thread running through 19th- and 20th-century art, especially Romantic painting, including the reception of that movement in the Nazi era and continuing through the Socialist Realism favored in the German Democratic Republic. At the same time, as Eckhart J. Gillen outlines, East German painters such as Wolfgang Mattheuer made use of landscape and landscape painting to (covertly) criticize the system, as the genre was superficially regarded as apolitical. Tom Holert, however, addresses more obviously political appropriations of landscape (painting). Starting with the way Caspar David Friedrich’s work has been co-opted in the name of ethno-racial ideologies, Holert analyzes the various methods by which a seamless, indigenizing relationship between “Germans” and “their” landscape was historically claimed and imposed during the Nazi era.
According to Eva von Redecker, a central element of this fascist occupation of the landscape is the reifying transformation of nature into a völkisch conception of property. She contrasts this conception of nature with Fritz Winter’s cycle of pictures entitled Driving Forces of the Earth, created during the Second World War. Winter’s representations, von Redecker suggests, are “anti-fascist abstractions,” which counteract ideas of authoritarian reification by depicting dynamic processes. The human beings these paintings represent – unlike those in Friedrich’s work – are understood to form an essential part of nature.
When political threats are as great as they are today, turning the spotlight on smaller cultural fields, away from already well-publicized locations, allows for both social dangers and social possibilities to be seen more clearly. The contributions in this issue are dedicated to individual actors and to specific themes, topoi, and terrains. In this way, they push back against tendencies toward generalization while also demonstrating concrete possibilities for action, both in this country and in its countryside.
Translation: Brían Hanrahan