The Art of Staying Many: What role does art play in our times?

In the summer of 2018, Chemnitz became synonymous with a disturbing social reality in Germany: Following the violent death of 35-year-old Daniel H., who was stabbed to death during a festival in the city on the night of August 25 of that year, an aggressive, racist mob quickly formed and swept through the streets of the city, openly harassing people they deemed “foreign.” The two alleged perpetrators were a Syrian and an Iraqi. The protests were initially classified as “overwhelming” by local police and security forces; however, a total of around 120 investigations were later launched for breach of the peace, bodily harm, and the use of anti-constitutional symbols (e.g., the Hitler salute). In addition, up to 2024, numerous trials were held against alleged perpetrators of violence – including for breach of the peace –, although some of the hearings were canceled due to a lack of evidence. These events made clearly visible what left-wing analyses have been diagnosing for years and what is now also being communicated by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution: Public space in Germany is increasingly bowing to pressure from an authoritarian-nationalist mobilization in which racist violence is not the exception but a structural component. Chemnitz was not an isolated case. It was a crystallization point for a social dynamic in which democratic norms, principles of solidarity, and the idea of the equality of all people have come under massive attack. Amid this escalation, a central question arises: What role can and must art play in such a political and social situation? Is it part of the defense of pluralism, or has it long since become toothless and purely decorative? Precisely because authoritarian movements are increasingly claiming cultural spaces for themselves, art itself

Five years later, on May 21, 2025, at the Hartmann Factory in Chemnitz, this question will be the focus of a discussion event organized by the Fonds Darstellende Künste. Why Chemnitz? Because Chemnitz is the 2025 European Capital of Culture. Is this “distinction” Western adulation or honest recognition? This evening’s event cannot answer that question, nor does it seek to do so. A quick survey of the audience also shows that hardly anyone here is from Chemnitz. So, who is discussing diversity in Chemnitz? Under the programmatic title “The Art of Staying Many,” playwright and writer Sascha Marianna Salzmann, action artist and founder of the Zentrum für Politische Schönheit Philipp Ruch, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s features editor and author Simon Strauß discussed the role of artistic practice in a divided society, moderated by journalist Natascha Freundel from the TV channel rbb.

However, the evening didn’t start with the discussion, but with speeches by the participants. Philipp Ruch shocked the audience with an uncomfortable insight: Art has no power against the nascent fascism. It cannot prevent the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) from potentially assuming government responsibility in Germany. Ruch debunks an illusion cherished by many artists and democrats: the idea that art can be an effective bulwark against hatred and violence.

Art remains vulnerable, fragile and often meaningless in the face of brutal power. Nazis burned works of art and persecuted artists, not because art posed a danger to them, but because they were deluded into believing that it was dangerous.

This may sound paradoxical, but Ruch warns against overestimating art. It has no direct power, only the power to reflect reality or make it visible in a different way – sometimes comforting, and sometimes unbearable.

The real power lies in society, in its willingness to engage in “humanistic militancy,” a clear and determined commitment to freedom and human dignity. According to Ruch, this approach must be reanimated – not with artistic pathos, but as the citizens’ political power. Especially in the East, where the “second German democratic revolution” began in 1989, this spirit of freedom and resistance against authoritarian structures could be mobilized once again, he argues. Ruch, who was born in Dresden and grew up in communist East Germany, thus recalls the democratic potential that once emanated from the East German citizens. Art can inspire or provoke, but it alone will not save democracy.

Sasha Marianna Salzmann's contribution sets a different tone to the evening. It’s not a speech in the conventional sense, but more a performative essay that radically combines form and content with quotations and lyrical interludes: her speech gropes, stumbles, and resists. It’s about the experience of being confronted with violence in an existential way and yet having to speak out because art can save us. Salzmann speaks from the point of view of a witness. Not in a legal sense, but in a cultural-political sense. Witnessing here means finding a language for those affected. For experiences of racist violence and erasure, colonial continuity and structural invisibility. Salzmann does not merely speak about marginalized perspectives, but from one. Born in Moscow as the child of Jewish Soviet migrants and raised in Germany, Salzmann brings her own migration history to bear – and thus stands in contrast to the paternalistic gestures to which an evening like this is potentially prone.

Central to Salzmann's literary work is her encounter with the poet and activist May Ayim. Ayim was one of the most important voices of the Afro-German movement, whose poems dealt with racism, belonging and memory.

Salzmann does not view language as a mere means of representing an already established identity, but as something that allows identity to emerge through speech itself – as an existential condition of becoming a subject. Salzmann really only found herself through art and was only able to find her own voice through her encounter with literature such as that of May Ayim. Those who don’t appear in hegemonic narratives cannot simply speak “just so,” but must first find themselves in art. Art thus becomes a practice of subjectivation or, in the words of Gayatri C. Spivak, the answer to the question: “Can the subaltern speak?” Yes – they can speak if they are given space, e.g., through art.

What Salzmann creates is thus a decidedly political poetics, but not an agitational one. Salzmann seeks perceptibility: a space for thought in which different experiences of violence can be remembered. Salzmann speaks of the institutionalized violence of the normal. And she speaks in a language that doesn’t conform to this violence.

What’s crucial is the fact that Salzmann reports what happened, drawing on real violence and experiences of exclusion – such as the racist murders committed by the far-right terror group, the NSU, institutional failure and her own experiences of marginalization as a migrant. In her talk, Salzmann thus approaches the truth about our fragmented reality, one that is riddled with power.

1This perspective is reminiscent of the insights of poststructuralist and postcolonial theoretical traditions, in which language is not merely representation but rather constitutive violence: What can be said is possible, and what remains unsayable exists only as a gap in the imaginary. But they exist, the witnesses. Just as May Ayim's poetry exists and just as Salzmann gave this speech at this event.

When Simon Strauß starts to speak, the temperature of the evening shifts again. This time toward a classical humanistic pathos. In other words: pretentiously elitist. He quotes Pasolini, speaks about ancient philosophy, sacred contradictions and aesthetic mannerism.

We zoom out again, his words distancing us a little from the immediacy Salzmann had led us to. Strauß, a features writer for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, is presenting himself as the custodian of a cultural heritage that invokes the sublimity of the aesthetic to counter the disintegration of social cohesion. Strauß believes that if all of us were to see the same great art, read the same old literature and share the same aesthetic values, then we could feel connected as a society again.

His speech is marked by an elegiac longing: for depth, for inwardness, for a lost language for the human in the midst of a hyper-medialized world. In short: for Pasolini. Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian poet, director, and intellectual, was one of the most uncompromising voices of the 20th century – uncomfortable, radical, political. He combined Marxism, Catholicism, queerness, and cultural criticism in his own idiosyncratic way. In his speech, Strauß imagines Pasolini with insistence and fascination as an exemplary artistic figure of our time. As someone who never submitted to consensus, who valued form over program and, above all, ambivalence over attitude. In Strauß's view, Pasolini appears not primarily as a political intellectual, but as a figure of stylistic radicalism and unavailability. However, there’s a fundamental problem in Strauß's appreciation of this kind of ambiguous thinking: He universalizes aesthetic autonomy without situating it historically or socially. Those who were poor, persecuted, migrants, female, racialized, may never have had access to this “free art.” In general, this “virtue” cannot simply be applied to our own time, because today there are other social realities. Furthermore, his idea of art as a “spiritual refuge” follows a concept of humanity that doesn’t distinguish between subjects and thus ignores those who have historically never had the opportunity to enter art as a profound place. He speaks of humanity, but ignore

What's more, Strauß understands art as being in opposition to political acceleration, as a sphere of deceleration. This idea may seem attractive in view of the current overload caused by digitality and crisis – but it also contains an ambivalence: By shifting the political into a primarily aesthetic form and attitude, there’s a danger that concrete experiences of social exclusion will be overlooked, precisely where art is a survival strategy for many.

His plea for the independence of form from any political function undoubtedly has analytical value, but this fixation on form remains blind to the structural violence that can accompany aesthetic autonomy if it’s not critically reflected upon. Strauß admires Pasolini because he refused to be pigeonholed. Pasolini was an outcast, criminalized, slandered and ultimately murdered. His art was not a safe haven, but a place of existential confrontation.

With Strauß, this tension remains underexposed: Although he calls Pasolini a “defendant” in over 30 trials and mentions his murder, he turns this primarily into a narrative of outsider status, rather than an examination of the political body that epitomized these attacks. Strauß reads Pasolini primarily as an aesthetic figure, a symbol of anti-conformism, rather than as a vulnerable human being in the midst of real societal violence.

Simon Strauß idealizes art as an inner refuge beyond politics. But as theater scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann has shown, political art does not arise through escape, but through disruption and caesuras that interrupt perception and discourse. Where Strauß romanticizes aesthetic autonomy, Lehmann asks: Who is allowed to speak and who remains excluded?

In contrast to Salzmann's remarks, which start from the fault lines of social representation, Strauß operates with an aesthetic abstraction that circles around the political rather than touching it. He defends ambivalences, but not those that arise from real threats.

In the discussion that follows the speeches, two camps begin to emerge. While Salzmann and Ruch emphasize the return of fascist movements, Strauß sees the greatest danger in surrendering our souls to Silicon Valley. By this he means technological alienation, algorithmic cynicism and digital self-optimization. All of this destroys the internal space in which compassion and language arise. Only art that creates awareness can help counter this. But can art still be the guardian of humanity today, or is that just another romantic ideal? Salzmann points out that art gives a voice to those who otherwise don’t have one and can exist independently of stages, theaters and awards. In the trenches. In the psychiatric wards. In exile. The discussion culminates in the question of art's political responsibility, especially in dealing with the rise of far-right forces. Philipp Ruch refers to his comprehensive documentation of the anti-constitutional nature of the AfD and warns urgently against its strategic normalization. – in Russia, for example, or Iran? At a time when authoritarian tendencies are reemerging even in democracies such as the United States? Can one also conceive of the “art of staying many” in Moscow? Salzmann advocates asking questions such as: “Who is not in the room?” or “Who can I bring onto the stage?” Solidarity can thus be an art form in itself, both aesthetic and political.

On the question of aesthetic renewal, Simon Strauß calls for a new paradigm of form – inspired by Pasolini's mannerism, which he praises as a disturbing yet honest art form. At the same time, he would like to see a collective movement like Dogma 95, not in the sense of a return to realism, but as a rebellion against aesthetic routine and convention. But instead of this kind of momentum, he often sees the current theater scene as celebrating self-referentiality or, as in the case of Florentina Holzinger, staging pornography. Strauß's appeal to mannerism as a new form, as a disconcerting alternative to “realistic” or documentary art, is intended to provoke. But it remains unclear where this new form is supposed to come from, whom it serves, or whether it can even be understood. Lehmann would say: Form alone is not enough – an analysis of its situational effectiveness is needed, especially in relation to the audience's habits of perception and discourse.

Salzmann and Ruch disagree: New forms do not arise out of will, but out of necessity. Poets such as Serhij Zhadan and Maria Stepanova do not need dogmas. They write because they have to. Their language changes with the onset of war. “Look at the sky” is no longer a romantic phrase, but a reference to missiles.

The title of the evening’s event – “The Art of Staying Many” – has to be more than a dazzling slogan. It formulates a cultural program that is radical in its claim: the defense of difference against the urge toward uniformity. At a time when political polarization, media sensationalism and authoritarian longings for clarity are on the rise, this sentence seems like a paradoxical provocation. What’s at stake is nothing less than the cultural constitution/functionality of democracy. In this sense, the art of staying many is not merely an aesthetic challenge, but a civilizational necessity.

But what does it mean today: “the art of staying many”? The discussion revolves around the questions that preoccupy us today: What can, should, or must art achieve in the face of crisis, war and upheaval? How can it not only represent diversity, but also enable it? And: Is it a place of refuge – or an attack? There is initial agreement on the need to think about art in its social and political contexts.

Sasha Marianna Salzmann emphasizes the fact that art is not powerless. It makes life bearable, even in unbearable situations. Salzmann recalls people who survived concentration camps because they memorized, shared and translated poems. Art does not have to go to war. But it can help us survive war. Philipp Ruch agrees: Art nourishes our sense of beauty and humanity. And precisely because this sense is endangered, it needs to be nurtured. But there are also people in whom brutality dwells in what Ruch calls the “district of the soul,” and against whom beauty alone can do nothing. What then remains? Ruch sees art in a contradictory role: powerless in the political struggle, but irreplaceable as a preserver of empathy and dignity. Art stands against the technologized, capitalist developments of our time. Perhaps it is the last bastion of humanity. For Simon Strauß, art today faces a double challenge. On the one hand, it must become independent of the present, and on the other, it must stand up to it. He refers to ancient theater, which did not dictate social change but accompanied it in a mediating role. Tragedies helped people endure the new without destroying the old. Art must do the same today. In that it should not overwhelm, but neither should it reassure.

In the end, all three participants emphasize the importance of responsibility and sensitivity to the present – and at the same time their own individual, artistically elaborate ways of articulating this. In a city like Chemnitz, which is the European Capital of Culture in 2025, this sounds like a necessary aspiration. But when an audience that has traveled here specifically for this event and art-savvy voices from outside the city talk about staying, about diversity and about art, the question arises as to how this debate relates to those who are actually affected by it. The event is explicitly aimed at an engaged, culturally and politically aware audience, and yet the language used is at times academic and full of assumptions. This tension also applies to this text: it is part of the same discourse it questions. In a city like Chemnitz, where questions of participation and belonging mark real conflicts, it therefore remains an open question how this kind of debate about art and society can really reach many people – or whether it ultimately remains an intellectual ritual among like-minded people.

C the Unseen – the motto of the European Capital of Culture Chemnitz was the invitation extended to students enrolled in the Master's program in Cultural Journalism at the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich to attend the Fonds' program “The Art of Staying Many: Forum for Art, Freedom, and Democracy: Germany and Europe” and explore Chemnitz for two days. Read, watch, and marvel at their impressions, encounters, and experiences.