Frank Raddatz: Mr. Malzacher, during the 2013 Impulse Festival, you invited Yael Bartana to present her Two Minutes of Standstill, an art performance to commemorate the Holocaust. What did this mean to you, or the Impulse Theater Festival?
Florian Malzacher: Yael Bartana’s underlying idea is pretty simple: that of transferring the Yom haShoah ritual to Germany and of interrupting the city’s everyday life for two minutes. This ritual from the country of the victims is transferred to the country of the perpetrators. For Yael, who moved from Israel to Germany and who is living here, it is about our shared history. Although we obviously have extremely differing perspectives, we share this memory.
Against this background, we and Yael Bartana wanted to ask the question of how we can update our memory of National Socialism. The sheer fact that increasingly longer periods of time are separating us from this era makes remembrance inevitably more abstract. Today, you will hardly meet people anymore who have experienced this horror or who perpetrated it. In a couple of years, there won’t be any contemporaneity left. So shall we confine ourselves to the victims of historic German fascism, or don’t we also have to show where right-wing extremism is still alive today in order to move remembrance into the present time? Especially in Cologne, it was obvious for Yael to talk about the NSU and the attack committed in Kolbstraße.
This raises the question as to whether an update like this puts the Holocaust at risk of being relativized. And anyway, who decides how the victim groups are defined? That was the basis for a – partly extremely aggressive – criticism of the project. There were those who asserted that this performance mainly showed Yael’s anti-Israel attitude. During one discussion, she was literally called a “useful Jewess”. Although the concept is clear and very simple, it provoked lots of complicated questions and very heated emotions. This led to increased caution on the part of municipal offices and to the beginning of an extreme slowness in some areas of the administration. Instead of a discussion about two minutes of standstill, the result turned into six months of standstill. The coming into being of this torpor says a lot because torpor prevents any kind of remembrance.
It is of course much easier to limit remembrance to a period of time that is long behind us.
I believe that this attitude, this restriction of view, also contributes to the fact that it took such a long time until it was even realized that those murdered by the NSU were victims of right-wing violence. Until then, people apparently thought that right-wing violence must appear in exactly the form as it was known historically and that it would show itself accordingly.
Now “Impulse” is a theater festival, so what has remembrance of the Holocaust got to do with theater?
I’m interested in the core of theater, even beyond the bourgeois-dramatic conventions that are still claiming general validity today. Whether text-based or not, whether contemporary or in historical retrospective, the question is what is at the center of the theatrical event. In this context, ritual, collective meeting and remembrance are main aspects: the shared look back. We found it a very fruitful idea to come together in Cologne for a performance in which there are no differences between actors and spectators, performers and recipients, where all perform a ritual act together. In the art context, we wanted to address the question about the form of remembrance and how it is done. It’s basically a humble proposal. We were less interested in the idea of establishing a new ritual, and more in questioning what it means to come together as a community. This also implies the idea of collectiveness; Yael’s activities often deal with rituals, above all mass rituals. The collective as a mass. Here the ambivalence in question instantly becomes obvious. Of course, the distrust of the collective as a mass is justified; on the other hand, there is the ideal of a community in which the individual feels attached to the others.
In this case, the public space is certainly better suited than the four walls of a theater.
Particularly since it was meant to be a statement. After all, a few hundred people were on site in the end. You position yourself publicly with your physical presence. Other than with a click on the Internet, you make yourself visible. Our concern was to make a contribution to dealing with history – and not, in point of fact, to forget what has been or to relativize it. The aim is to draw consequences from history for today.
Interruption is also a gesture directed against the omnipresent acceleration.
As a matter of fact, you will quickly reach a limit with a festival because you go away again very quickly. You are only visible temporarily. You should, of course, devise a continuous discourse on this issue. The critical reactions in particular highlight the necessity of this project. As it is difficult to classify, you need to start thinking for yourself and do not stand on the right side automatically. It depends on what you make out of it; and on the way each individual makes his own arguments.
The belief that you can say “That’s not my problem” with a clear conscience is only possible if you believe that you can distance yourself easily. When I was jobbing in Israel for a year twenty years ago, one of my tasks was to organize a youth exchange with Israel. I perfectly recall my shock when, during this exchange in Israel, a group of youngsters from the new federal states brushed aside the historical relationship between Germany and Israel as if it were not their concern. Instantly and – in my eyes – with striking arrogance, they started talking about Israel in the role of the aggressor against Palestine. That was how they had learned about it in the GDR, and now it was just an opportunity to assign blame for any ethical wrongdoing to others.
Years ago, I had a discussion with a popular migrant who took the view that we are all Germans. I asked him if he also experienced Germany’s fascist history as a festering wound: a suggestion he rejected indignantly.
With the “steirischer herbst” festival, we initiated the Rebranding European Muslims project by the Israeli group of artists Public Movement: an imaginary rebranding campaign for Islam. In this context, we held discussions with many Muslim groups in Austria, including the “Muslim Youth of Austria”. A young Austrian guy of Egyptian origin whose parents had not been born in Austria, while he himself was born there, told us: “We need to face up to the responsibilities that we as Austrians have for the Holocaust!” For him, it was clear, it is not the question: Did my family take part in it? But he had entered into a community and, in doing so, he had taken responsibility for what was done in the community’s name. That’s an interesting question to me: Must migrants who enter a new community also assume such co-responsibility? For me, Yael’s project was also an attempt to bring the different experiences with right-wing extremism into a dialogue and, in doing so, look for a basis for shared remembrance.
