Die Kunst, Viele zu bleiben

When I was eight, a new Asterix film came out. A girl was sitting next to me who had already seen it, and she was constantly whispering in my ear what would happen next. Ever had this problem? It was highly irritating. There are people who can be as silent as the grave. And then there are all the rest who just can’t deal with having more information than others. The girl belonged to that second group. So did I. I am a spoiler in persona.

Die Kunst viele zu bleiben: this is the title of the film that we are about to watch together. I had the privilege to already see it on the weekend, per vimeo link. I will engage all my willpower and try not to reveal too much. The film is reminiscent, and this much I will say, of a type of merely intellectual travel books so prevalent in German literature. In a Wilhelm-Meister or Faserland dramaturgy, two people – Hauke Heumann und Tina Pfurr – journey through a Germany that seems foggy, vast and strangely deserted. They travel from one festival to the next, from the West to the East and back. It is a peaceful, somewhat melancholic, naturally also philosophical film, since it’s about a way of life: It’s about the Kunst, viele zu sein und zu bleiben. “It isn’t a completed narrative that determines the plot, but rather the act of listening,” is explained in the voiceover.

The longer the film lasts, the more it reminds me of a different book: Lenz. Georg Büchner’s wanderer is a character who, by virtue of his clairvoyance, emerges from the Grimm brothers’ Germany straight into our era: from idealism to realism, from romantic irony into the ice-cold waters of capitalism as Marx would write about in his Communist Manifesto only nine years later. “He sometimes felt uncomfortable that he couldn’t walk on his head,” is mentioned in Büchner’s novella, while Marx, as we know, wanted to turn the world – or at least philosophy – from its head onto its feet. But often idealists are the true realists: because they measure their reality on the basis of their yearnings, because maybe reality itself has yearnings as well, I think. Lenz thus wanders, while he moves through its peripheries, into the center of the world, of reality, and into its burning heart. He is not a madman, but rather a metaphysically uprooted person.

Something similar happens to the two travelers in the film, whom we will take a look at soon: They are idealists in a world that is about to fall prey to a new realism. They are confronted by a Germany in which open society, so-called liberal values, literally stand around in the landscape like sad ruins – you'll see it in a moment. I don't know if this was intentional or simply a coincidental stylistic device: Attending theater festivals seems to me a bit like secret society meetings with small groups of those enduring people – practically the gatherings of 21st century swing kids. The discussions exude anger, but also helplessness. These two Lenzes, Heumann and Pfurr, wander through a country that is seemingly slipping into the abyss, both for no reason and simultaneously unconnected with its own historic fate. They are confronted with a kind of second fascism that doesn't need mass unemployment, or a lost war, or racial madness, or hyper-inflation to come to power. In a country, a present day, in which the "majority’s" vague feeling of "not existing in dominant discourse" suffices in order to reject democracy - as a sociologist says at one moment in the film.

To be honest: Up until a few years ago, I would have considered the film that we are about to see and that celebrates reconciliation, diversity and humanity, in which only educated, clever, likeable, funny and thoughtful, in short: talented people have a voice, to be humanistic kitsch. From a sociological perspective, the film Die Kunst, viele zu bleiben shows all of us sitting here the Lenzes of the 21st century. Similarly uprooted overnight, we try to deal with our convictions – and finally ourselves: democracy, the liberal society – currently being thrown onto the garbage heap of history in half of Europe. A society, as described in Büchner’s Lenz, that " does everything the way the others do it", the way one always did it – you go vote, you make art, you debate, you give speeches: But it is, as Büchner writes, "a horrendous emptiness" in everything, right? As though one were waltzing on a sinking ship.

Yes: it’s my class, it’s my age group, these are my convictions that the film is addressing – along with their ghostly disappearance. I was raised with the idea that history – even if it lacks a plan, that it at least steers towards the benefit of all, or at least most, with a certain gentleness. My mother was the child of Italian immigrants, typical economic migrants. My mother’s last name is Larese, but at 18 I took on the name of my first father, Rau: That sounds more serious, and then I stuck with it. My grandmother on my father's side, on the other hand, was a Jew, emigrated from Germany in the mid-1930s, out of wise foresight. Both of my parents were extreme leftists, basically they were anarchists, and my first name, Milo, is the name of a Serbian friend of my parents who, like my parents, dreamed of a "third way" in the 1970s and 80s.

In short, my parents were typical representatives of their generation: They fought against nuclear power and capitalism and Stalinism, for the rights of minorities and peace. I spent my entire childhood at demonstrations; we moved constantly because the police were after my mother’s second husband who belonged to a splinter group called the "Revolutionary Marxist League" – because back then as well, the police didn't chase the rightist realists, but rather the leftist idealists. Today, people joke about my parents’ generation, the so-called boomers, but in truth they were a heroic generation: My mother had no voting or electoral rights, because it was only introduced in Switzerland in 1971. Just like millions of other women and men, she stood up for her rights with her body and reputation. Today, the voting documents that the Swiss state sends to my mother in four languages is gendered. When I was a child, when we were too loud in school they said: This is not a Jewish school. Even in the 1990s, I was a teenager then, there was a respected intellectual in my neighborhood who considered the murder of European Jews a historical lie.

Today, Holocaust denial and racist remarks in general are punishable by law in Switzerland, as a constitutional principle. All nuclear power plants in Switzerland were taken from the grid; bank secrets revealed; the army was almost eliminated. In Germany, where I have been living for the past 20 years, it all looks similar. This was all achieved by our parents’ generation. We are standing on the shoulders of giants: we, Generation X or the millennials. We, the Golden Generation. My Italian grandfather hadn't studied; my mother hadn't studied; but I could study. Even though it was completely without success: That I should study was not even a question, and I don't know if we here are aware of these privileges. At the age of 12, I boarded a bus for the first time from by suburb and went to the theater. I felt uncomfortable in the building, out of place, and up to the present day my body has not been able to get used to theater and opera houses. But I still work in them, as a matter of course, and I still showed three productions on this stage and also on other stages in Berlin, but today I direct a festival. How was that possible? But above all: How was it possible that all of this, all of these heroic conquests were not followed up by the completion of the enlightenment mission, that all of our battles and debates, the identity politics, the debates about race and gender that our generation had wasn't the apotheosis, but rather – and this is how it currently seems and this is how the film we are about to see communicates it – the last flickering of the torch that our parents carried from the 1960s up until the end of the millennium? How could it happen that the "glamourous roaming around in strange places where absolutely no one knows you" – as quoted from Faserland – could become something disappearing, endangered, minoritarian, almost dangerous, as we learn in the film that we are about to see? How did the theater become a cultural practice of the mad and woke; how had the Vielen, the many, become so overtaken, isolated, discouraged, scattered?

We live in confusing times. I came to you from Austria today; their largest party, the FPÖ, wants to have my festival banned. And not because it isn't financially viable, or because budget cuts had to be made – that would have been a practically middle-age neo-liberal argument – but because the Wiener Festwochen is a "woke" event, as activism disguised as art. Independent art must pay off was what I was taught in the noughties. Today, word is: Independent art belongs on the garbage heap of history, like silent film or Gregorian chants. Whereby the question is raised: What direction are we heading, if the idea – and the reality of life – of my parents’ generation and also mine, namely that in a democracy, the goal is to maximize participation and distributive justice, that this was wrong, erroneous and elitist? What can we learn from a time – ours – in which a member of the largest Austrian party, the FPÖ, a man named H. C. Strache, sings the SS song in the morning "We will take care of the seventh million" and then visits the Yad Vashem memorial in the afternoon, where the Holocaust dead are commemorated? What can we learn from a time in with the president of the largest democracy in the world calls for the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip, betraying Ukraine to Russia and annexing Greenland? What kind of present day is this, for a realism in which the answer to all of this - from Zizek to Merz, from Münkler to Macron: Europe must finally form an army, Germany must finally become a nuclear power?

To paraphrase a poem by W. B. Yeats: The center cannot hold. When I was a teenager, in the 1990s, when Faserland was written, the center seemed so inert, so steadfast, that the Kunst, Viele zu sein (The art of being many) ultimately consisted of challenging this center, shocking it, deconstructing it. The "radical center", that was a joke – because the center reached from the far left to the far right, it was voracious, like Kohl it ate up everything and got fatter and fatter. The history of the Fonds Darstellende Künste is the history of people like me – children of immigrants or small white-collar or blue-collar workers, people from the suburbs, from which a kind of postmodern, non-cynical, probably naive neo-bourgeoisie was created in the democratic welfare state. The path from the suburbs into the city theater, from the off-off-scene to the festivals and into the grant programs, from the periphery to the center was structurally never shorter, yes, almost more compelling than in the last 30 or 40 years. The center craved us, our dissent, our diversity, our strangeness, our revolt – us, these people, who walked on their heads. Pollesch had just performed Heidi Hoh in Lucerne, and then he was already at the Theatertreffen. The same thing happened with Rimini Protokoll, the same thing with Schlingensief, of course, and She She Pop, and Linah Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué, etc. etc. These people were and are my uncles and aunts, my older cousins and older siblings. They made up parties, parliaments, played ping pong on stage, mixed reality and fiction, lecture and performance, deconstructed the classics, the nation, gender, race, age, even death and fascism. Wherever they went, they won, shining, relaxed – and looked cool in the process, like losers. The were the fulfilled promise of postmodernism, fulfilled or at least supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste.

When did it end? When did we suddenly find ourselves at the periphery? When was art declared to be "woke" nonsense, when did its idealism get pushed back again to the biennials, the festivals and finally reserves from which it had escaped in the 1960s to change the world? I don't want to spark a structural debate – the history of neoliberalism, all the budget cuts, etc.; you all in Berlin have as much or more experience with them than I have had in Austria, Belgium or Switzerland. I would like to turn to a question that came to me when I saw the film, which I am spoiling so mercilessly. My question is, quite simply: How can we remain many? How do we escape isolation? What would appropriate resistance be, against this new center that suddenly seeks to get rid of everything that originates from the peripheries? How can we continue to ghost through Germany and Europe, elegantly and relaxed; how do we prevent our Lenz-like, collective stumbling about from turning into a competitive Reinhold-Messner hike? How do we keep art and theater alive?

In a famous interview after the war, which probably most of you here know, Hannah Arendt said: We knew that the Nazis hated us. What destroyed us, was not our enemies’ hate, but our friends’ silence. When the director of the Slovakian National Theater, Matej Drlicka, was fired by the rightist-nationalist cultural minister last August – in Bratislava, hardly an hour’s drive from Vienna – the silence in the western European cultural scene was ear-splitting. Slovakia, Eastern Europe, those were other words for: none of our business. What happens in Bratislava, stays in Bratislava. Thus begins democracy’s destruction: in its fragmentation, in a kind of negative politics of identity, in its friends’ silence. In the same way that we can be many together, we can also – as we know from melodramas – be lonely together. The reason why we founded our Resistance Now Kampagne, why we traveled through over 20 countries, joined together 200 organizations from 50 countries and are working on a new law with the EC to protect the freedom of art in individual countries… the reason is simple: Any destruction that we allow to take place because it doesn’t seem to affect us is a part of our own destruction. Because Hannah Arendt also taught us something else: no matter how many means of expressing power the state may have – in the end, power is always in the hands of the population, civil society. And it has toppled every autocrat. In Slovakia, a civil society movement has emerged that is so strong that it will probably topple the government soon. And in Serbia, the largest uprising in civil society that Europe has seen since 1989 is taking place right now. In short: It’s not too late, not in the least. The battle has just begun.

The Right loves threats - they love triumph before victory. Erdogan is threatening to conquer Rojava. Putin is threatening to use nuclear weapons. Trump is threatening to cede Ukraine to Russia and turn the Gaza Strip into a second Dubai. Alice Weidel doesn't have any nuclear weapons, not yet, that's why she’s threatening to "seal off" the borders and "tear down all the wind turbines". Funnily enough, they all meet in one threat, namely - to quote Weidel again: "to throw out all woke professors". In its election campaign, the FPÖ had a single demand: to cut the grants for "woke events" such as the Eurovision Song Contest and the Wiener Festwochen. But we say: It’s not too late. When the Persians (the Putins and Trumps of antiquity) attacked the Greek city states, they threatened them first. They said: You're better off giving up right away. Because if we conquer you, we will burn down your houses and vineyards, we will kill and enslave you. The Greeks answered with one single word: if. In this respect: despair is ok, so is rage. However, we should save our melancholy or even depression for the moment when it really is too late.

Like I said: I’ve got nothing against melancholy, I don’t want to talk about toxic positivity here. What I particularly liked about the film was its slowness, its care. The time it is willing to take, even though no time is left. I picked up three terms from the film. Generosity. Hospitality. Love. At one point, two of the most radical positions in the current Near East debate directly one right after the other – the Lebanese artists Linah Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué on the one hand, and then the Federal Commissioner for Jewish Life, Felix Klein, on the other. Somehow the film manages to listen to both of them. Personally, I would question much – actually, almost everything – that Felix Klein did or said, beginning with canceling the South African philosopher Achille Mbembe shortly before Covid. But still: I am strangely thankful that he appears in the film. So, what I mean, and what the film means, when we say hospitality, generosity and love is not hippie love, but rather an active and combative love. A loving that, as bell hooks says, is not a noun, but rather a verb. No generosity that expects a "thank you", like Trump from Zelensky. No generosity from a deal, but rather a generosity out of pure joy in the other’s existence and spheres of action: in our multiplicity.

Are we ridiculous? Are we idealists? Are we fighting a losing battle? I think: yes. Because we are defending the truth and the hopes of minorities against the majority. We are defending what isn’t worth it against what pays off. But we are also realists, maybe we are the true realists: Because what we are defending, all of us here, is the multiplicity of life against the unity, the monotony of death.

Which brings us to the end. Because in the film, which we will watch later, Hauke Heumann somehow sings a song in the last third. It is a beautiful, sad song. One line in particular touched me: Private property is grief, and grief never ends. We are fighting here, I think, we are fighting with our art, out theater, our festivals for a world that belongs to us all and to no one. We are fighting for the victory of the moment over duration, multiplicity over unity. One of my favorite authors, my friend Mely Kiyak, writes in one of her texts that I have learned by heart: When we die, some people remember us because they love us. And then these people die, too. In short: death is certainty.

But as long as we live, as long as we are here together, as long as we sit together and work together and breathe together, we should pretend that death doesn't exist – no grief, no private property. We should not deny them, but overcome them, together. We should not forget, and I'm saying this as an incorrigible leftist, as the child of Italian and Jewish immigrants, who bears the kitschy name of a petty bourgeois Serbian intellectual who is now over 70 years old and happened to be my parents’ friend. This system in which we live, so-called capitalism: it will always confront us with the grief that Hauke Heumann sings about. It will repeatedly serve us fascism as our last supper. It will repeatedly keep the rhetoric of the deal and exclusion, death and submission, losers and winners at hand: Capitalist realism that I would assert causes Lenz, causes any humanist art, to perish.

"The plot is not determined by a finished narrative, but by listening," is said in the film that we are about to see. That would sound cheesy in any other era than our own, right? Kitschy, mendacious, blind towards structural violence. Imagine such a statement in Faserland, in the 1990s, in the 2000s. Why does this statement sound so right here and now? I believe, my friends, that we are at a magical moment in history. I believe that this Spring resistance and love, idealism and realism, listening and criticizing, revolt and fatigue, slowness and panic will not contradict one another. I believe that we should fight for a world in which they no longer and never contradict one another again. And I think, and this is the ultimate spoiler, because I am completely sure: This is a battle that we will win in the end.

But we’re not there yet. This is why, more or less as food for the road, I would like to end with a few lines from The Truth by Pablo Neruda from Isla Negra: A Notebook. I don't know about you, but as the son of two romantic boomers I always have to think of Neruda when I hear of the many. 

So, Neruda writes in "La verdad" ("The Truth"): 

Os amo idealismo y realismo,
como agua y piedra
sois
partes del mundo,
luz y raíz del árbol de la vida.

No me cierren los ojos
aun después de muerto,
los necesitaré aún para aprender,
para mirar y comprender mi muerte.
[...]
Hay que dejar que baile la belleza
con los galanes más inaceptables,
entre el día y la noche:
no la obliguemos a tomar la píldora
de la verdad como una medicina.
[...]
¡A susurrar! ordeno
al bosque puro,
a que diga en secreto su secreto
y a la verdad: no te detengas tanto
que te endurezcas hasta la mentira.

No soy rector de nada, no dirijo,
y por eso atesoro
las equivocaciones de mi canto.

Thank you for your patience and generosity in letting me speak here.  
Enjoy the film Die Kunst, viele zu bleiben. 

Milo Rau ist Intendant der Wiener Festwochen. Sein Rede anlässlich der Filmpremiere von „Die Kunst, Viele zu bleiben" von Felix Meyer Christian ist Teil der „Resistance Now"-Tour.