Updates from the Censorship Capital
Berlin is transforming from a cultural capital to a capital of censorship: artists who show solidarity with Palestine are being canceled, monitored, and criminalized—while institutions look the other way, the media stokes tensions, and the culture budget is being radically cut. The text by cultural workers from the Arts & Culture Alliance Berlin paints a dense picture of intimidation, press campaigns, and police violence—but also of new solidarity from below. A growing network of solidarity collectives is standing up to cultural devastation. Between reasons of state and austerity policies, it is becoming clear that where gatekeepers fail, a new, transnational cultural movement is organizing that does not negotiate cultural freedom, but defends it.
This article originally appeared in German on October 18, 2025.
Reading time ~30 minutes
Version: english|deutsch
[Note: Since the release of this article, a major scandal related to Berlin funding for antisemitism prevention has transpired. See our new article on the scandal here, and on one of the controversial funding recipients here.]
In just a few years, Germany’s cultural landscape has changed radically, with Berlin transforming from an internationally admired place of longing into a dystopia—a capital of censorship rather than a capital of culture. Following current reactionary trends internationally, art and culture have become a bogeyman for the German political and media class across the spectrum from the right (including the pro-Israel Antideutsche who initially came out of German communist groups) to the supposed center. Meanwhile, the cultural scene in Germany has split, shrunk, and renewed itself, becoming politicized. As more and more fundamental rights are restricted in the name of genocidal so-called Staatsräson, culture workers speaking out in solidarity with Palestine have been systematically targeted. Careers and livelihoods have been damaged in a way that would be nearly impossible in any other industry, due to the largely precarious working conditions endemic to the cultural sector. On the other hand, in a field and market characterized by extremely fierce competition, gestures of solidarity and unity emerge from the cultural scene that are also rarely seen in other industries in Germany.
Berlin is Post-Over
Alongside the US, UK, France, and Switzerland, Germany was among the most prestigious sites of cultural production, including performing and visual arts, both in the commercial and (generously funded) state-subsidized sectors. Aspiring young artists were willing to do anything to get into the Städelschule in Frankfurt, while mid-career artists flocked to Berlin en masse to live and work cheaply, to benefit from what was once Berlin’s most desirable feature: freedom. Now, many are realizing that what once passed for freedom was actually just a high threshold for hedonism, and even then, was only permitted when enacted within authorized, designated boundaries. The appeal of hedonism quickly loses its luster when riot police operations become an everyday sight and colleagues, friends, and neighbors are intimidated, harassed, fired, arrested, and beaten because they—like the majority of the world’s population—reject genocide.
After two years of increasingly intense hostility and blanket suspicion from the German media and political establishment toward art and culture itself, budget cuts for culture paired with funding for propaganda, and growing pressure on institutions to censor artists along with anticipatory obedience, the bon mot „Berlin is over“ has taken on a new meaning.
Media as Instigators of Censorship
Those who reject self-censorship but want to continue working artistically often have no choice but to leave the country—especially those whose identities mean they are framed as enemies of the state: anti-Zionist Jews, Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, People of Color. An exodus is underway, and it is difficult to say whom it pleases more—the anti-woke culture warriors of the Axel Springer media conglomerate or the neofascist AfD party and the metastasizing fraction of the conservative party CDU that has adopted neofascist positions. Those culture workers who stay in Germany often say they have no choice: they have frail parents to care for, children in school, partners with jobs tied to the location. And of course, there are those who stay to fight for those who cannot leave.
The contingent that does not or cannot reject (self-)censorship, and considers it a necessary price to pay for participating in Germany’s dwindling cultural life, must accept a number of precautions and conditions. Cultural workers should expect their social media posts and likes to be surveilled by pro-Israel journalists and activists, even if they are not public figures. It is not unheard of for journalists to publish texts that frame artists as antisemitic terrorist sympathizers over transgressions such as liking “Free Palestine” posts, or to skip the step of writing and publishing texts completely, opting to wield power in other ways. Artists and the organizations they are affiliated with have been harassed and smeared, as was the case of the Mexican painter Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, whose grant from the Günther-Peill-Stiftung and exhibition at the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum in Düren was canceled after the freelance art critic Kito Nedo launched an e-mail campaign against her political stance on genocide. In fact, most German institutions can be easily intimidated by just a few emails from fringe individuals. It is striking that when pro-Israel journalists actually do publish texts within the framework of their activism against pro-Palestine artists, their targets are frequently Jewish or of Jewish descent, like Toranzo Jaeger, and they do not adhere to the basic journalistic standard of contacting their targets for comment before publication. This was the case when e-mails from the Springer journalist Boris Pofalla to the HfG Karlsruhe and the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science led to the termination of Adam Broomberg’s visiting professorship, or when the freelance writer Jonathan Guggenberger, who once claimed to be Jewish, but has seemingly retired this cosplay, wrote defamatory false statements about the artist Candice Breitz in taz, resulting in the cancellation of her solo exhibition at Saarlandmuseum.
Institutions as Censorship Enforcers
Cultural workers should also expect any open letter they have signed in the last twenty years to be scrutinized in very bad faith. They should expect contracts to include NDAs and clauses that permit their rights to be rescinded with ease. What they should not expect is to be the first person to learn they have been cancelled, censored, or defamed. They should also not expect solidarity or protection from any institution—on the contrary, the institution, as a rule, expects their solidarity, meaning silence and compliance. The ideal censorship or cancellation should be executed discretely behind closed doors, without fuss, and certainly without any publicity. The artist should accommodate their own gaslighting within the framing of the cancellation as a collaborative decision. This variant of censorship was alleged by at least one artist in this year’s widely panned 13th Berlin Biennale. Like the vast majority of cases, it made no press, no waves—not even a social media post. While initiatives such as Archive of Silence or Index of Repression (run by ELSC/Forensis) document hundreds of public cases of censorship, they represent just the tip of the iceberg: fear of retaliation keeps most censorship victims from going public—and the higher one’s professional status is, the more discretion is key to retaining it. Those who are willing to share their experiences with press often find no journalist willing to cover their story. With much of the German press either actively defaming and canceling cultural workers, in denial of censorship, or simply unable to report on it due to fear of legal retaliation or being the object of smear campaigns themselves, acknowledgement of this pervasive censorship is restricted to the collective consciousness of Germany’s arts community, gleaned from personal conversations, fleeting Instagram stories, chat groups with the disappearing messages setting activated, or other ephemeral forms of communication.
Professors in the Bully Pulpit of Philosemitic McCarthyism
The term Philosemitic-McCarthyism, popularized by the philosopher and essayist Susan Neiman, may provide the astonished onlooker with a useful paradigm for understanding the collateral of Staatsräson.
In early 2024, German art world notables such as Jörg Heiser, Manfred Pernice, and Hito Steyerl attempted to garner German respect while losing international credibility by signing a letter published on the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) website, where they then all held professorships. The statement designated campus protests as antisemitic by conflating antisemitism with valid critiques of Israel.
“We reject narratives circulating at the university that present antisemitism and racism as opposites, that classify Israel’s defensive war as a colonial mission and Israel as an apartheid regime through an oversimplification of postcolonial theory, and that disguise Hamas’s terror as a struggle for freedom.”
– excerpt from Statement by Faculty and Staff Against Antisemitism at the Berlin University of the Arts
Following the statement’s release, Steyerl defended German Staatsräson against what she claimed to be the ignorance of “expats,” before largely going quiet, having torpedoed her own massive reserve of international prestige. Eventually, she and Heiser quietly removed their signatures from the open letter without explanation, despite the glaring hypocrisy of her previous attacks on artists who had removed their names from the Artforum letter that famously got David Velasco fired.
The UdK has been the site of some of the most vicious press campaigns against student activism, fueled by statements made by then president and current professor at the UdK, Norbert Palz – who was in theory responsible for protecting his students. A Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article by Claudius Seidl has received an official reprobation from Germany’s press council, which reveals that Palz defamed not only his students to the press, but also staff of the university. An excerpt from the article reveals Palz’s attitude of patronizing disrespect bordering on paranoid hatred toward his students:
“Norbert Palz says he looked into an abyss—an abyss, however, that he had long suspected existed. Many students reject the entire system as racist and colonialist, but without analytical tools or any idea of what they want to replace it with. The main objective is its destruction, but until then, they can still apply for a scholarship.”
– Claudius Seidl, “Die Politik der Verdammnis,” FAZ, 2023
In universities throughout Germany, pro-Israel professors have sprung into action against their students in coordination with various so-called antisemitism commissioners often with total impunity as was the case at Braunschweig University of Art (HBK) in the spring of 2025 when an art professor allegedly entered a student exhibition and ripped one artwork off of the wall and threw it on the floor, and then vandalized a second artwork by throwing it across the room, justifying his vandalism by equating the works’ expression of pro-Palestine positions with antisemitism. Rather than facing punitive consequences for damaging student artworks, the professor was rewarded with additional funding to invite other pro-Israel voices to a panel discussion.
When Censorship Doesn’t Work, Try… Criminalization Teamwork
“Places of diversity, encounter, exchange, and conversation: KBB brings together the Berlinale, the Berliner Festspiele with the Gropius Bau, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW).” (KBB website)
When the art student and temporary employee of the Berlinale 2024 Rami Parviz (name changed) included the phrase “from the river to the sea” in an internal email to other staff of the film festival, they were not only fired, but also reported to the police for “suspected criminal behavior,” leading to a foreseeable spiraling of consequences that have endangered Parviz’s future. According to an email by Berlinale Chief of Staff Florian Weghorn, the management board of the KBB (Kulturveranstaltungen des Bundes in Berlin GmbH)—Tricia Tuttle, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Matthias Pees, and Charlotte Sieben—unanimously decided to report Parviz to the police. This case of denunciation was made public via a series of Instagram posts by Strike Germany, but received no further coverage, despite many remarkable aspects to the case. Parviz, who has since graduated, was once a student of Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, the current HKW director, at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. They are now stuck in a legal limbo: their application for a visa was suspended due to the charges pressed against them. If convicted, they may face deportation—but there is no end to the legal proceedings against them in sight, with their trial postponed indefinitely—meaning they are not able to seek full-time employment in Germany.
“Germany’s ongoing suppression and punishment of pro-Palestinian voices reveals once again how deep its structures of control and censorship run. The cancellations, funding cuts in culture, juridical punishment and police violence against peaceful protesters lay bare the fact that its historically relevant oppressive systems of control never (fully) were dismantled, but rather transformed into the pro-Palestinian repression and racial discrimination we are facing today.” – Rami Parviz (name changed)
When the Hamburger Bahnhof saw two pro-Palestine interventions on the same day during Tania Bruguera’s participatory reading of Hannah Arendt, Staatsräson worked its magic again. Like Parviz, several of the Hamburger Bahnhof protestors received official criminal allegations from the Berlin police for using a “slogan of a banned terrorist group,” referring to “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Protestors who were only present at the first action, explicitly invited by Tania Bruguera, also face charges over the slogan, despite the fact that it was not part of their intervention. In court cases across the country, the slogan has repeatedly been found to not violate any laws.
READ MORE: Staatsfeindin und Staatsräson
The Berlin public prosecutor’s office has filed circa 6,400 cases in the last two years within the context of the so-called Middle-East conflict, with more than half of them dropped over a lack of reasonable suspicion, many dismissals or acquittals, and hardly any serious sentences—so far, there have been only three prison sentences and sixteen parole sentences, with some of those likely to face appeal. But what the deluge of frivolous charges brought by prosecutors, presumably meant to intimidate, does do effectively is paralyze the justice system.
Languishing in Staatsräson
As people around the world rose up in solidarity with Palestine in mid-2025—Italy went on general strikes, dockworkers across Europe shut down weapons deliveries, flotillas headed to Gaza to break the siege with people from all over the world, including Berlin cultural workers, and mass demonstrations surged across the globe—the new Berlin Senator for Culture Sarah Wedl-Wilson posed for a photo-op with the Israeli ambassador Ron Prosor at the height of the famine, seemingly oblivious to the ongoing genocide.
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Wedl-Wilson follows in the footsteps of her disgraced predecessor, Joe Chialo, who failed in his attempt to push through an immensely unpopular “anti-discrimination clause,” which would have forced all funding recipients to comply with Germany’s expanded IHRA definition of antisemitism, equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. How will history look back on such images of a politician shaking hands with the representative of a country actively and flagrantly committing genocide?
The commitment of the SPD and CDU (the ruling federal and Berlin state coalition) to Israel’s far-right, genocidal policies does not end with photo-ops: The federal budget has allotted nearly 9 million euros to Mansour-Initiative für Demokratieförderung und Extremismusprävention (MIND), a pro-Israel organization that appears to portray Muslims as uniformly vulnerable to radicalization, and seeks to frame anti-Israel sentiment in the Arab and Muslim communities as stemming from an inherent, religious problem rather than from legitimate opposition to the concrete illegal actions and policies of Israel.
Also funded by German taxpayers is DIG (Deutsch‑Israelische Gesellschaft), a pro-Israel lobby organization famous for virulent statements made by its president, Volker Beck, where he likens Palestinians to Hitler or suggests that Gaza deserved its complete destruction. The Auswärtiges Amt awards DIG a grant of over €540.000 yearly to top up its ca. €290.000 in membership dues; the Berlin Senate Department of Culture awarded it €200.000 in 2025. How lobby work on behalf of a foreign state is equated to “culture” remains a mystery. Meanwhile, DIG’s leadership is becoming known for its association with another genre of moral turpitude: pedophilia. A Der Spiegel investigation in 2013 uncovered that Beck had authored a 1988 article for the Green parliamentary group calling for the „urgent decriminalization of pedosexuality.“ Now, just this year, DIG’s treasurer Hartmut Ebbin has resigned after allegedly sexually assaulting a seven year old. It was also revealed that he maintained his position at DIG even after a separate child pornography conviction in 2025.
Since October 2023, millions of euros more of funding were allotted to projects within the frame of an “action fund to support projects against antisemitism.” This funding has gone to a laundry list of vehemently pro-Israel hasbara projects by groups such as JFDA (Jüdisches Forum für Demokratie und gegen Antisemitismus), a self-appointed Islam watchdog that monitors pro-Palestine protests (see the video they posted of their supporters aggressively chanting anti-Palestinian obscenities at passersby in Neukölln, a Berlin district with a significant Muslim population). Other funding recipients include the Nakba-denial association Masiyot, responsible for the highly controversial Mythos#Israel1948 pamphlet produced for Berlin schools, and two separate projects by Düzen Tekkal, self-positioned figurehead of pro-Israel securitized integration discourse.
One jury member for the 2025 projects was the antideutsch journalist and taz editor Nicholas Potter, who has garnered infamy with his writing, such as the article “When Journalists Can Also Be Terrorists,” which portrayed journalists working amid the Israeli occupation and genocide as viable military targets. After outrage, the title of the article was changed to „Can journalists be terrorists?“ but the article was left intact and no title change is publicly noted. Taz newspaper also came under harsh criticism in September 2025 for publishing a grotesquely sadistic, satirical article that trivialized genocide and made jokes about Palestinian suffering. (A full English translation has been posted here.)
Additionally, the city funded the atrocity propaganda Nova Exhibition at Tempelhof to the tune of €1.4 million, seen here as another CDU photo-op where the Berlin Senate Department of Culture’s new antisemitism commissioner, Georg Gremske, posed with Ambassador Prosor. Also depicted is the Berlin mayor Kai Wegner, who infamously responded to a question about the Gaza genocide with “Findet nicht statt. Punkt” (It’s not happening. Period).
Note: Since the original publication of this article in German in October 2025, a major scandal has transpired related to Berlin funding for antisemitism prevention. See our new articles shedding more light on it here, and on one of the most controversial funding recipients here.
Antisemitic Anti-Antisemitism: Austerity’s New Battering Ram
Cross-party virtue signaling around anti-antisemitism by German politicians—replete with frequent antisemitic gaffes like Chancellor Friedrich Merz referring to the Israeli flag as “the Jewish flag”—is now being wielded by the right as a battering ram to smash down any resistance to social and cultural austerity measures.
While it is no secret that the far-right AfD and the conservative-right CDU/CSU have always included actual antisemites and fascists, performative anti-antisemitism provides them with a convenient tool to attack not only their preferred scapegoats—Muslims, PoC immigrants, and leftists—but anyone and anything in solidarity with Palestine. Paradoxically, this includes a vastly disproportionate number of Jews. In fact, while the Jewish population of Germany has never recovered from the Holocaust and now hovers around a mere 0.2 percent despite postwar policies encouraging Jewish immigration, it is estimated that over 20 percent of artists and culture workers publicly canceled in Germany for holding pro-Palestine positions are Jewish.
There is now growing acknowledgement that false antisemitism accusations have been weaponized in an incredibly dangerous way, diluting and delimiting the term antisemitism to the detriment of the fight against actual antisemitism. Yet the tactic continues unabated and remains fruitful for the justification of budget cuts.
In 2025, Berlin slashed its culture budget by 13 percent, a decrease of €130 million, with a further estimated €90–140 million to be cut in 2026. This will lead to massive staff layoffs, the potential closure of venues, loss of artist studios, and further disenfranchisement of working-class artists. Meanwhile, universities face a cut of €370 million, and funding for public interest and climate protection-related investments in public infrastructure has also been significantly reduced. These cuts are clearly ideologically motivated, fulfilling the AfD’s long-term stated goal of defunding projects that promote cultural pluralism, anti-racism, feminism, LGBTQ+ themes, post-Marxism, decolonial theory, climate justice, and anything that challenges their regressive nationalistic values. In pro-Israel policy, the AfD and CDU have found a winning formula to make Islamophobia socially acceptable, employing Germany’s perverse variant of philosemitism to legitimize themselves as a vanguard against antisemitism while forcing the SPD and the Green party into a competition over who is Israel’s greater ally. It is no coincidence that the AfD was the first party to officially propose a ban on the BDS movement in 2019, which was then rapidly rewritten and adopted by the SPD, CDU/CSU, FDP, and Greens. There is now conclusive research that Germany’s far-right is setting the agenda.
As cuts targeting the cultural field ramp up, so does the budget for the Berlin police. Officers have racked up massive overtime hours, instigating nearly every violent incident at pro-Palestine demonstrations under the guise of “preventing banned slogans” and making international news by regularly beating protestors until they require hospitalization, severely abusing women while arresting and traumatizing minors. On October 16, a group of six UN special rapporteurs reprimanded Germany, demanding that it “stop the criminalization and police violence against Palestine solidarity activities.” For example, in just one week in October 2025 several outrageous instances police violence took place: the racialized father of a three-year-old was arrested while holding his small child, and then beaten to the ground as his child looked on, wailing in terror. Two separate members of parliament who attended protests to observe them were punched in the face by officers; one was arrested. The list goes on and on, with countless incidents like these occurring weekly since 2023. In Germany, there is no federal authority tasked with independent oversight of the police. This means that the police can generally act with total impunity, resulting in the wide-scale use of excessive force, often justified by false claims that go unpunished even when disproven.
“Freedom of Brutality”, © Ann Kiernan
The absurdity of diverting more public funding to this theater of violence masquerading as law enforcement reached tragicomic proportions when the Berlin police commissioner Barbara Slowik claimed that most antisemitic violence is directed against the police—a demographic overwhelmingly composed of non-Jewish white Germans, many of whom are engaged in serious far-right extremism. These types of claims are illustrative of the widespread misrepresentation of antisemitism statistics by German organizations such as RIAS, a phenomenon investigated by Diaspora Alliance in their in-depth report.
Where Are the Cultural Organizations?
Organizations and institutions that would have normally joined forces to resist such massive cuts have floundered under the fear of antisemitism accusations. At the start of the Gaza genocide, the staff and membership of most1 German institutions and organizations fractured, often directly along the fault lines between white Germans who have never lived abroad, and those workers who have an international background.This rift caught much of the international community in Germany completely off guard and severely weakened institutions. While most of them presided over a forced, sterile silence around the issue of Palestine, maintained by behind-the-scenes silencing, staff purges, and conflicts successfully kept out of the public eye, some occasionally sought to shut down dissent publicly.
One such example was the Berlin ist Unkürzbar (Berlin is Uncuttable) protest, organized in February 2025 by ver.di, Germany’s second largest union, where the pro-Palestine block of culture and social workers was kettled by organizers and handed over to riot police. Several arbitrary arrests were made, such as one involving the racial profiling of a filmmaker who was only in town for the Berlinale. He recounted that he was arrested by police and falsely accused of a robbery that had taken place in Berlin months prior—a date when the filmmaker was not even in Europe. A scheduled speech by Louna Sbou from Oyoun, a beloved Berlin cultural center famously punished with defunding for resisting censorship, was canceled at the last minute, after she was told no Arabic words could be used. Here, ver.di echoed the blatantly racist repressive strategies used by police, who have repeatedly forbidden the use of languages—including Hebrew—other than German and English at protests, resulting in arrests for speaking Arabic, Irish, and other languages at various demonstrations. Not a single organization participating in the Unkürzbar protest condemned the severe actions, even when requested to do so by affected members.
“Speechless” and Out of Touch
When not persecuting or silencing their pro-Palestine colleagues or members, the German front against the budget cuts organized by unions and culture interest groups, like those that comprise the Independent Art Coalition (Koalition der Freien Szene), offered up inappropriate, tone-deaf demonstrations such as November 2024’s Trauermarsch (Mourning Procession).
While thousands of Berlin culture workers had been taking to the streets for over a year to protest against an actual genocide supported by Germany, mourning the deaths of what by September 2025 amounted to over 20,000 children and over 50,000 adults, organizations representing culture workers were conspicuously absent. So when they decided to hold a protest called We Bid Farewell to Art and Culture: Berlin Mourns, their framing of budget cuts came off as defeatist as well as completely oblivious to the grief and mourning of the many Palestinians in Berlin who have lost family members and friends, and those who grieve alongside them. Ironically, the hashtag of the demo was #WirSindSprachlos (We are Speechless), which exactly describes their failure to speak out about the genocide as well as the situation of culture workers in Berlin facing extreme repression for supporting Palestine.
The fact that these cultural organizations often seem surprised that more people do not attend their protests should be interpreted as a sign that their leadership is dangerously out of touch. During the October 27, 2025, demonstrations United For Liberation and Zusammen für Gaza (United for Gaza), the largest ever pro-Palestine protest in Germany with over 100,000 participants, BerlinIstKultur held a simultaneous “Protestfest” in Charlottenburg co-sponsored by a dozen organizations and co-promoted by dozens more. However, the large stage in an open grass park drew only around 40 people, possibly fewer than the number of supporting organizations.
A Self-Inflicted Wound: The Inability to Mobilize
This seems to be a systemic problem: cultural interest groups fail to draw large numbers or have any political impact because they themselves contribute to marginalizing and silencing the positions of their own community. The Independent Art Coalition (KdFS) proudly describes itself as “rejecting cultural boycotts,” and platformed the CDU politician Robbin Juhnke at their Summer Plenary. Juhnke is an enthusiastic German Zionist and (until recently) member of a scandal-ridden extreme-right network.
Meanwhile, bbk berlin (berufsverband bildender künstler*innen), the association representing Berlin’s visual artists, censored their antifascism working group over posters that criticized the far-right policies of the CDU. They also issued a statement in 2024 denouncing their own pro-Palestine board members for having “extreme opinions” and stating, “We therefore categorically oppose boycotts, divestment, and sanctions.” In the aftermath and fallout of the statement, all board members who were not white Germans either stepped down from the board or decided not to run as candidates for another period. The bbk refused to publish the resignation statement of a board member.
Several organizations have issued robustly worded statements in solidarity with the right-wing CDU Senator Joe Chialo (responsible for the budget cuts) when his apartment building was splashed with red paint, yet explicitly refused to make statements of solidarity with Palestinian or allied members of the local cultural community, including their own members, who faced censorship or arbitrary, extreme police violence at demonstrations. This hypocrisy has diminished the organizations’ base of supporters, with many disgusted by such uninspired opportunism. The tactic of pandering to CDU/SPD bureaucrats in charge of cultural funding has proven grossly unsuccessful in every strategic way, leading to a simultaneous fracturing of Berlin’s culture interest groups’ own bases while being utterly ineffective at preventing funding cuts.
Solidarity Wins
While prospects for solidarity and unity are dismal among gatekeepers, organizations, and institutions, collective, spontaneous bottom-up actions of cultural workers provide a ray of hope.
The liberal comedian Jan Böhmermann, inexplicably invited to organize an exhibition at HKW (Haus der Kulturen der Welt), formerly among Berlin’s most progressive venues for intellectual discourse and cultural production, selected odd bedfellows for his program of events. Several concerts with young, cool, mostly non-ethnic German rappers and pop musicians were planned, as well as two discussions where Böhmermann was joined by other middle-aged white German men, respectively the lawyer Christian Schertz, famous for aggressively shutting down #metoo allegations against his elite clientele, and Wolfram Weimer, the Federal Commissioner for Culture, famous for blood-and-soil diatribes against multiculturalism.
When two authors from the far-right media platform NIUS (pro-Israel blogger Claudio Casula and Betar Germany co-founder Amir Makatov) wrote a smear article attacking the rapper Chefket over the “antisemitic” offense of wearing a T-shirt with small decorative motifs showing historic Palestine, as well as several other artists who were booked for Böhmermann’s concert program at HKW, Weimer publicly pressured Böhmermann and HKW to cancel Chefket’s concert. They obliged, implicitly espousing the ridiculous antisemitism allegations against artists they had invited by referring to “objections from the Jewish quarter” as the reason for the cancellation. In response to this cowardly deference to the censorship prompt from NIUS and Weimer, every single other band and artist from the concert series cancelled their appearance in solidarity with Chefket and/or Palestine, including Blumengarten, Tape Head, NONI, Domiziana, Wa22ermann, Drunken Masters, Mine, and Akryl.
One wonders whether censorship could ever have established itself so comfortably in Germany—or at all—if artists regularly responded with such resolute collective action. In any case, their principled decision provides an example for artists in the future, as well as a lesson to institutions. Taking the media reactions and reputational damage both to HKW and Böhmermann into account, it is safe to say that the price of enforcing censorship can easily be higher than the price of refusing it. And artists are the ones who determine this.
The Old World is Dying, and the New World Struggles to be Born
As the bureaucratic arts organizations and institutions heavily beholden to public funding still struggle to find their footing on the issue of genocide, grassroots organizing has yielded some results. The association 3ezwa was born from a crowd-funding initiative to help with the legal costs for those facing charges for pro-Palestine activism. It now offers regular consultation hours to assist with residency issues and options to help cover 50 percent of legal costs related to Palestine support.
Strike Germany generated international headlines as thousands of artists signed on to their call to boycott Germany. Arts & Culture Alliance Berlin, whose members have authored this essay, successfully mobilized against Joe Chialo’s anti-discrimination clause, and continues to organize at the intersection of culture and politics. There is now a Students for Palestine or similar group at nearly every university in Germany. New strike funds are created regularly, such as for the striking freelance writers at The Berliner (formerly known as Exberliner). A decentralized network of hundreds of autonomous groups transcends national borders, generating the framework for a new era of international culture worker organizing.
The chasm that has opened up between mostly obedient, white, Staatsräson-oriented German cultural workers and their international colleagues has been instrumentalized both by the corporate class looking to privatize every aspect of public life, and the far right, which seeks to abolish all culture other than perhaps Wagner, atrocity propaganda, and the neocolonialist Humboldt Forum. The inefficacy of traditional German cultural institutions and organizations to muster solidarity while denying it to those most vulnerable has been illustrated by the lack of popular support for their political initiatives—their policies of appeasement have failed in every way possible. While funding cuts should be an easy issue to rally against, failing to recognize that censorship and austerity are two sides of the same coin, which threatens culture as a whole, has rendered organizations completely unable to realize their primary objectives.
The solution proposed by the fence-sitters and defenders of the status quo is for their pro-Palestine colleagues to keep quiet and join them in rescuing cultural funding, while ignoring the suffering of our peers in Palestine and elsewhere. But if our struggle for better cultural production conditions in Berlin depends on turning a blind eye to atrocities supported by our government, as this demand for unity suggests, then our culture is worth absolutely nothing. Only strong, collective initiatives with the moral clarity to speak truth to power can preserve its integrity.
For those not fleeing Berlin, there is much work to be done. The horrors of our time, including the Gaza genocide and the expansion of the occupation, necessitate the forging of new alliances to mobilize and organize against complicity, denial, and apathy. Despite ongoing repression, there are Palestine solidarity events and fundraisers nearly every single day in grassroots spaces across Berlin, reaching a critical mass of solidarity and partnerships between unlikely segments of society—the countless initiatives, collectives, organizations, and spaces that do not rely on the public funding system of an inhumane government. Where the older organizations have lost relevance, novel constellations are rising in their place. A new cultural movement—independent, collective, and transnational—must turn a fresh page in history and in Berlin’s long struggle against injustice.
- (We’re talking about most German institutions, not all. We’d like to praise the few exceptions by name, but that would likely jeopardize their success.) ↩︎
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