Archive Newsletter No. 11

April 2023

In preparation for the upcoming 200th anniversary of the Kunstverein München, I would like to turn the spotlight in this newsletter on a series of events that took place 30 years ago at the Kunstverein and elsewhere under the title faschismusersatz (Ersatz Fascism). faschismusersatz was, much like this year's anniversary program, a negotiation of how to deal with the past and the product of a specific discursive landscape, which I would like to elaborate below.

WHAT’S LEFT?

The 1990s, especially the first half of the decade, are often seen as paradigmatic of a tendency in the German-speaking art field that has been described—not infrequently by its actors themselves—as its “politicization.” According to this view, art moved closer to the practical field of political activism and many artists started to feel the need to position themselves politically both in and beyond their field. This trend was also evident at the Kunstverein München and gave rise to various discourses, methods and formal languages whose historical context can be described as a time of setting a new course: certain aesthetic strategies and a new understanding of institutional critique took root, as did the powerful positions of new institutions and individuals that continue to determine the framework of the German-speaking art field to this day (think, for example, of Berlin’s Kunstwerke, now the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, founded in 1991, or the Texte zur Kunst magazine, founded in 1990). Below, we will take a closer look at the discourses of the time and how they still resonate today.

faschismusersatz (Ersatz Fascism), the film and event program, which this essay is about, took place in 1993—three years after Germany’s so-called “reunification”—at the Kunstverein München and other venues. A scan of an 18-page booklet subtitled “texts, films, discussions on fascism, resistance and post-democratic control systems” is all that has been archived. It is the subject of this investigation. faschismusersatz came about in response to the pogroms by right-wing extremists in Hoyerswerda (1991), Rostock-Lichtenhagen (1992), and other cities of the newly reunited Federal Republic of Germany, as its initiators—Stephan Gregory, Ingrid Scherf, Helmut Draxler, and Katja Diefenbach—explain in a 2020 interview with artist Laura Ziegler: “It was an attempt to update the theory of fascism” and “respond to these incidents, maybe also respond differently than before.”

The project looked for the “remaining fragments of fascistic politics in modified forms … fifty years after the destruction of National Socialism,” [1] adopting a strikingly natural interdisciplinary approach. In addition to quoting passages from Slavoj Zizek, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer on anti-Semitism, the collection of texts also includes an excerpt from City of Quartz, sociologist Mike Davis’s study on architectural marginalization of, and mechanisms of control over, the lower classes in the contemporary urban space of Los Angeles. The thematic transition to this is provided by a passage from Peter Reichel’s book on Nazi architecture (Der schöne Schein des dritten Reiches: Faszination und Gewalt des Faschismus [The Third Reich and its Deceivingly Beautiful Appearance: The Fascination and Violence of Fascism]). While the first part of the booklet focuses on Jewish resistance to Nazism, the latter part has the authors’ attempt to explain the phenomenon of fascism. They examine its connections to philistinism and petite-bourgeois normality, reflect on their own strategies of anti-fascist action, and conceptualize the “ubiquitous and inevitable” media exposure of the television age as “post-fascist desire manipulation.” [2] Printed on the last page is the program, which extended over four months and consisted of film screenings, readings, and discussions at the Kunstverein, the Backstage Club, and the Neues Theater in Munich.

faschismusersatz shared this method of knowledge production—creating unexpected constellations using the sample technique—with several other projects of the period. Employed in instances where discourse was produced through artistic means, it is typical of the very politicization of the art field in the early 1990s. Examples worth mentioning here include the events, exhibitions, and publications produced during that time by the Zurich Shedhalle and the magazine A.N.Y.P., whose beginnings are closely linked to the Kunstverein München and in whose pages one could find discussions not only of art but also of money, genetic engineering, and sexism. The instrumental relationship between project and institution is exemplary of the period as well: rather than appearing as the entity in charge of the project, the Kunstverein is merely one of several venues for faschismusersatz. The organizers used the publicness and infrastructure of the Kunstverein for their own purposes without being co-opted by the institution as an official part of the main program—a relationship described by art historian Lucie Kolb, with a nod to Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, as “in but not of it.”

In their introduction to the faschismusersatz booklet, the initiators position themselves within a memory-political discourse that is being negotiated against the backdrop of an alarming increase in neo-Nazi activities in German cities, a new pan-German national consciousness perceived by the authors, and the aftermath of various Schlussstrichdebatten (debates about drawing a line under the past) of the 1980s. In this “fight for concepts and memory,” [3] the position of faschismusersatz is defined by three coordinates: the description and rejection of a German identity perceived as dangerous on account of its military power and “longing for a new national consensus, for cleanliness, order, and silence,” [4] a focus on fascist continuities in Germany after 1945, and the emphasis on the singularity of the Holocaust.

In the short introductory text, the resulting incomparability of the Nazi genocide is addressed not once but twice—an insistence described by historian and genocide researcher A. Dirk Moses as one of five points of the “German Catechism.” According to Moses, this catechism established itself as the hegemonic moral legitimation of the Federal Republic by the turn of the millennium when an entire generation in Germany internalized it as an identity-forming self-image. [5] As per the ecclesiastical logic of the concept of catechism, it alone allows the Germans to find redemption from the sinful past. To continue the metaphor, this is why the Holocaust is a “a sacred trauma that cannot be contaminated by profane ones—meaning non-Jewish victims and other genocides—that would vitiate its sacrificial function.” It superseded an old catechism with conservative roots that interpreted the Holocaust as a historical calamity perpetrated only by a “small group of ideological fanatics.”

Moses’ socio-structural analysis thus offers an explanation for the emphatic rejection of the global historical research approaches of authors such as Michael Rothberg and Jürgen Zimmerer, who advocate a multidirectional memory and use comparative perspectives to identify both the colonial-discursive continuities of the Nazi genocide and its singular elements. The only thing hinting at a multidirectional understanding of memory in the event program is the reading by author Darius James from Negrophobia, a novel about US-American anti-Black racism. Inside the booklet, however, this aspect goes unmentioned.

In faschismusersatz, the process of negotiation between the two German catechisms takes an early turn towards a way of dealing with the Nazi past that continues to dominate the German memory discourse to this day. At the same time, and noticeable in the faschismusersatz booklet, an extreme form of this attitude unique to the German-speaking countries, that of the so-called Antideutsche (anti-Germans), emerged among the radical left. To them, reunification posed the danger of a “Fourth Reich,” which would ultimately lead to German imperialist aggression abroad and to a war of annihilation against foreign ethnic groups at home. faschismusersatz is an ambivalent child of this context: while the position outlined above is consistent with an anti-German attitude, the authors explicitly distance themselves from the “Fourth Reich” theory in their introduction, instead pursuing a rather undogmatic search for new explanatory models.

Nevertheless, the following years saw the emergence of a deeply Germanocentric identity within the radical left that, with the slogan “Nie wieder Deutschland” (Never Again Germany), espoused uncompromising solidarity with Israel and Islamophobia and stood out for its essentializing view of “the Germans” and seductive fetishization of the evil in them. The many points of contact between left-wing militants and artistic contexts in the 1990s meant that those anti-German explanatory reflexes can be encountered to this day in the German-speaking art world. Hence, it is not surprising how Texte zur Kunst positioned itself with its 2021 issue on anti-anti-Semitism, which, under the pretext of addressing anti-Semitism in its own (left-wing) ranks—in line with the similar resolution passed by the German Bundestag invoking Germany’s reason of state—primarily sought to discredit the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

In other words, faschismusersatz is many things: multidirectional in its interdisciplinarity, unidimensional in its isolating view of the Holocaust; centering continuities post-1945 and ignoring continuities pre-1933, specifically those pointing to functional equivalences between colonial and Nazi practices. In 2023, when the Kunstverein Munich marks its 200th anniversary by making its own history part of its program and using much of its resources to position itself memory culture-wise, critical examination of this instance of past dealings with the past is, at best, intended to contribute to a vocabulary allowing for reflection on, and criticism of, its own historical and curatorial practice, including its blind spots and conditioning.

Text: Jonas von Lenthe
Editing: Maurin Dietrich, Gloria Hasnay, Lea Vajda

In order to have the website grow, we would gladly receive material such as photos, flyers, articles, or films on past exhibitions and events. Feel free to contact us at archiv@kunstverein-muenchen.de.


A scan of the faschismusersatz booklet can be downloaded here.

Text: Jonas von Lenthe
Editing: Maurin Dietrich, Gloria Hasnay, Lea Vajda

In order to have the website grow, we would gladly receive material such as photos, flyers, articles, or films on past exhibitions and events. Feel free to contact Jonas von Lenthe at archiv@kunstverein-muenchen.de


%%FOOTNOTES%%
Footnotes:
[1] faschismusersatz. film- und veranstaltungsprogramm. texte, filme, diskussionen zu faschismus, widerstand und postdemokratischen kontrollsystemen (ersatz facism. film and event program. texts, films, discussions on fascism, resistance and post-democratic control systems), München: Selbstverlag, 1993, p. 4.
[2] Ibid., p. 13.
[3] Ibid., p. 3.
[4] Ibid., p. 4.
[5] Other articles of faith of the new left-wing liberal catechism are that the memory of the Holocaust, as a Zivilisationsbruch (rupture in civilization), is the moral foundation of the German nation; that Germany bears a special responsibility for the Jews in Germany and for the security of Israel; that anti-Semitism was a specifically German phenomenon not to be confused with racism; and, finally, that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. See A. Dirk Moses, The German Catechism, 2021. https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/the-german-catechism/ (accessed February 15, 2023).

Fußnoten

[1] faschismusersatz. film- und veranstaltungsprogramm. texte, filme, diskussionen zu faschismus, widerstand und postdemokratischen kontrollsystemen, München: Selbstverlag, 1993, S. 4.
[2] Ebd., S. 13.
[3] Ebd. S. 3.
[4] Ebd. S. 4.
[5] Weitere Glaubensartikel dieses neuen linksliberalen Katechismus sind, dass die Erinnerung an den Holocaust als Zivilisationsbruch das moralische Fundament der deutschen Nation bildet, dass Deutschland eine besondere Verantwortung für die Juden in Deutschland und die Sicherheit Israels trägt, dass der Antisemitismus ein spezifisch deutsches Phänomen war und nicht mit Rassismus verwechselt werden darf und zuletzt, dass Antizionismus Antisemitismus ist.
[6] Ebd. S. 3.

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