Fearing a New Age of McCarthyism, German Cultural Workers Call for a Strike

Following the January 4 implementation by Berlin culture senator Joe Chialo of aclauserequiring artists applying for public funding to renounce “any form of anti-Semitism,” more than four thousand German cultural workers have signed anopen letterwhile others are calling for aninternational strikeon the grounds that the clause chills free speech and punishes those who speak out on behalf of Palestinians. The clause defines anti-Semitism in accordance with the workingdefinitionlaid out by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in 2004, and casts “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” as discriminatory. As well, it decries “comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis,” and forbids “applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”RelatedCHRISTIE’S COMMUNICATIONS CHIEF DEIDREA MILLER EXITS AFTER JUST TWO YEARS IN ROLEKEVSER GÜLER APPOINTED DIRECTOR OF THE ISTANBUL BIENNIAL The IHRA definition, which was created to allow European data collectors to monitor antisemitism on the continent, was drafted by Kenneth Stern, who in 2019publicly expressed concernthat it would be used on US campuses to suppress free speech under the administration of then president Donald Trump.

Following the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel, in which some1,200 citizens were killed and about 250 taken hostage, and in the wake of the ensuing retaliatory efforts by Israel, which are ongoing and to date havekilled nearly 23,000 Palestinians and displaced 2 million more, some have leaned on the definition in order to quash cricitism of Israel, by artists and others. Recent months have seen thecancellation, by the German Saarland Museum’s Modern Gallery, of an exhibition by South African artist Candice Breitz after she refused to use the wordZivilizationsbruch, typically used in association with the Holocaust, to describe the October 7 attack, which she had publicly condemned. “To demand that such an equivalence be pronounced, as a condition for exhibiting my work, is to effectively demand that I relativize the Holocaust,” Breitz, who is Jewish, toldThe Guardian. “In order to comply, I would have to betray my fundamental understanding of the Shoah as a singular historical event.” Among the demands of those who signed the letter—whose ranks include Breitz, newly mintedTurner Prize winnerJesse Darling, and Iranian artist Natascha Sadr Haghighian, who represented Germany at the 2019 Venice Biennale—are the protection of the constitutional right of artistic freedom, “including the rights of freedom of opinion, freedom of association, and participation in cultural life.” As well, the call for a strike is pressing for cultural institutions to adopt the anti-Semitism guidelines laid out in theJerusalem Declaration of Anti-Semitism, proposing these replace the IHRA definition.

That definition, they claim, “is increasingly becoming state policy, effectively censoring criticism of the state of Israel and anti-Zionist perspectives from the German cultural sphere, furthering a dangerous false equivalency that ultimatelyharms the fightagainst anti-Semitism.” Lastly, the strikemongers are calling on German cultural organizations to ditch the anti-BDS resolution of 2019, charging that it is “effectively an instrument of structural racism that distorts, maligns and silences marginalized positions” and that it has “contributed specifically to anti-Palestinian repression, as well as a climate of anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia already widespread in German society.” The anti-BDS resolution (the name refers to the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement, an initiative aimed at ending the Israelioccupationof Palestine through nonviolent means) disallows financial support for any project actively calling for a boycott of Israel or otherwise supporting the movement’s efforts. “German post-reunification ‘remembrance culture’ (Erinnerungskultur)—the state campaign to address Germany’s genocide of the Jews—acts as a repressive dogma, reinvigorating the oppression that real ‘remembrance’ should work against. Rather than reckon with their own racist increasingly neo-fascistpolitics, German media and politicians rush to blame Arab and Muslim populations in Germany for so-called ‘imported anti-Semitism,’” wrote the strike organizers.

“The German state cannot continue to consolidate further authoritarianism against voices opposed to racism, colonialism, and genocide.”.