Does art only deserve freedom when it is right?

It’s not May that brings this impure air, 
makes the darkness of the foreign garden 
darker still, or dazzles with the glare

of blind sunbursts . . . this frothy sky 
over pale-yellow penthouses
in vast semicircles that deny

a view of the Tiber’s meanders and
Latium’s deep-blue hills . . . Between these old 
walls the autumn May extends

a deathly peace as unloved as our 
destinies. It carries all the grayness
of the world, the close of a decade where

we saw our keen, naive attempts
to remake life end up among the ruins 
and a sodden, sterile silence . . .

In the May of your youth, when to be mistaken 
was still part of life, in that Italian
May when life had yet its share of passion,

you, less reckless and impurely healthy 
than our fathers—no father but a humble 
brother—already with your slender hand

you outlined the ideal that sheds
its light upon this silence (but not for us: 
you are dead and we are likewise dead

with you, in this humid garden). Only
here, you see, on foreign ground, may you rest, 
still the outcast. Patrician ennui

is all around you. The clanging of anvils,
faint in the late afternoon, is all
that reaches you here from the mills

of Testaccio, where between run-down sheds, 
stark piles of sheet metal and iron scraps,
a shop-boy sings playfully, already 
ending his day as the rain outside stops. 

“Gramsci’s Ashes” is a poem from 1954. The poet, conversing with the grave of Antonio Gramsci, mourns the fact that the “Italian May” in which the young Gramsci defined the contours of the “shining ideal” is long gone and that today everything is “elegant boredom.” The poet's name is Pasolini, and he explains his position as an artist who wants to be one thing above all else: unclassifiable. He, who identifies with the proletariat and wants to preserve the ancient dialects of Friuli, who loves differently and more roughly than the majority, but still admires marriage as an institution. He, who dreams of a time when “madness was still called life”...

One who loves the world he hates
One who owns history, just as it owns him
One who believes that the mythical is nothing more than the other side of realism
One who loves people and despises them at the same time
One who knows that you have to be in a couple, and yet never manages to form a real bond
One who feels the power of the past and yet is more modern than any trendsetter
One who despises nothing more than consumerism
One who has to vomit in front of television screens
One who fought against conformism – including his own
One who would rather be unjustly condemned than tolerated...
One who, almost 50 years ago, on the night of November 1 to 2, the night between All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day in 1975, was brutally murdered in the Roman port city of Ostia under circumstances that remain uncertain to this day.
 

Pasolini: das ist nicht nur der Regisseur vieler eindrucksvoller Filme, sondern auch der Dichter, Romancier, Journalist, öffentlicher Intellektueller und nicht zuletzt der Angeklagte, der in mehr als 30 Prozessen für die Streitfragen seiner Zeit zu Glauben, Kunst, Politik und Sexualität herhalten musste. Pasolini, das ist heute 50 Jahre nach seinem Tod auch ein Stichwortgeber für die Frage: Was soll Kunst? Was kann sie der Gesellschaft bedeuten? Warum muss sie frei sein und bleiben?

Pasolini antwortet darauf mit seinem Leben und seinem Werk. 
Er lebt in bescheidenen Unterkunft am Stadtrand vom Rom und entdeckt im Subproletariat eine revolutionäre Gegengesellschaft, vergleichbar für ihn mit der frühchristlichen Gesellschaft. In ihm sieht er den Vermittler einer unbewussten Botschaft der Demut und Armut im Gegensatz zum hedonistischen Nihilismus der Bourgeoisie.

Pasolini: He was not only the director of many impressive films, but also a poet, novelist, journalist, public intellectual and, last but not least, a defendant who had to stand trial in more than 30 cases that dealt with the controversial issues of his time concerning faith, art, politics and sexuality. Today, 50 years after his death, Pasolini is also a source of inspiration for the question: What is the purpose of art? What can it mean to society? Why must it be free and remain so?

Pasolini answers these questions with his life and work.

He lived in modest circumstances on the outskirts of Rome and discovered a revolutionary counter-society in the sub-proletariat, which he compared to early Christian society. In it, he saw the bearer of an unconscious message of humility and poverty in contrast to the hedonistic nihilism of the bourgeoisie.

Here in Rome, he discovered his own world, one that would determine his life and work from then on.

His art, which he expressed in films, novels, poems and essays, is impregnated with opposition to what we today call the “Zeitgeist.” On the contrary, his work as an artist is a constant search for images that symbolize the conflict and division between different times and value systems: the sacred and the vulgar, the archaic and the futuristic, Dante's meter and Italian industry.

All his films and texts are political in a fundamental, let us say ancient way: They deal with the all-important question of the endurance of community, of how historic change can be endured without the people changing too much.

Pasolini's hatred of consumerism and the venality that was also to be found in communism stemmed from his view that the law of the market damns art.  Where money and day-to-day politics determine the artist's agenda, he withers away into a worthless service provider.

That’s why he saw the political task of his art as providing relief from capitalist and ideological moral laws. Objecting to the functional imperative: produce so that it may be understood, create art so that it may appease the conscience. Pasolini wanted nothing to do with Brecht or art for political education. When street battles broke out in Rome in 1968, he didn’t take the side of the bourgeois students, but, in line with his “irrational communism,” that of the police, because they were the sons of poor farmers.

Instead of enlightenment, he preferred glorification; instead of solidarity with the utopias of the petty bourgeoisie, he preferred sympathy for the dreams and nightmares of the proletariat – his aestheticized social poetry reflected his conflict between the longing for a new reality embodied by Marxism and his desperate love for the original people, for the Italy of the poor.

Passion before ideology – that’s the best overarching description for Pasolini's work. Emotionality is important insofar as every emotional position allows for contradictions that exclude the use of reason. Passion for one's own contradictions ... PPP was both “decadent” and “socially committed” (Moravia), he was a Marxist and a Catholic, spoke out against abortion and fought alongside Maria Callas for the disenfranchised women of the Global South.

Pasolini's anti-conformism became increasingly wild and desperate over the years. The rapid industrialization of Italy, the social consensus that technology was the only source of progress, that commodity producers were the new kings – Pasolini recognized all of this and anticipated our Silicon Valley era:

1)    The distance between time and art: If you become too involved in your own time as an artist, you become corrupted, a servant to the market and morality – because if the time is that of capitalism, then you produce your films, series and books in such a way that they obey its laws. And when the times smell of conservatism, it's better to go back to Wagner ... Dreams and the past are better sources of inspiration than current affairs, Pasolini tells us.

2)    Aesthetics are more important than the program. The plot is less important than the images. Language, in its coloring and semantic splatter, is a value in itself. Pasolini tells us that mannerism, i.e., the peculiar, alienating style of representation, is the highest and most honest art. The performing arts in this country in particular could gain a lot by breaking away from the dictates of realism and finally countering the post-dramatic “act as if nothing is happening” with a new formal paradigm.

3)    The artistic interest in the country and its people. Pasolini was not only interested in the legacy of the old peasant world and culture, but also in the sex lives of Italians. This is my favorite film of his: “Comizi d'Amore.” Breathlessly amazed at the uptightness and brutality of the concepts of honor. Today, art could take on new tasks in the countryside and villages. Away from the big cities, toward the periphery, toward the nearest strange place. The Theaterhaus Jena has done a theater project about a closed village pub. That's the right direction ... Pasolini's longing for timeless places, for embracing a way of speaking, living and suffering that basically never existed or will ever exist ...; an entire world of instinctive wildness and kindness, the entire context of life and language.

½)     A sense for outsiders, for those behind the broken bridges. He identified with them himself: he who was expelled from the Communist Party, tolerated at best by the authorities and hated by the neo-fascists. He who resisted political confrontation with homosexuality throughout his life, seeing in it rather the heroic, perhaps even artistic sign of the outsider. In an interview in 1973, he said: “A repressive world is more just and kinder than a tolerant world, because repression brings about great tragedies, it produces sanctity and heroism. Tolerance defines differences, analyses and isolates anomalies, creates ghettos. I would rather be unjustly condemned than tolerated.” To our ears, that sounds fatal and wrong. But the question is: Does art only deserve freedom when it is right?
 

Simon Strauß gave this speech on May 21, 2025 as part of the event “The Art of Staying Many. Forum for Art, Freedom and Democracy: Germany and Europe” in the 2025 European Capital of Culture, Chemnitz. The subsequent panel discussion with playwright Sasha Marianna Salzmann and action artist Philipp Ruch, moderated by Natascha Freundel, was recorded by rbb/radio 3 and is available as a podcast in the series “Der Zweite Gedanke” (The Second Thought). The contributions by Salzmann and Ruch are also available to read in our online magazine.

Translation of the quoted poem from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli.