With this open letter we turned to the Minister-President of the Land of NRW, Armin Laschet, the Minister of Culture Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen and the Antisemitism Commissioner of the Land of NRW, Ms Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger:Dear Minister-President Laschet,
dear Minister Pfeiffer-Poensgen,
dear Ms Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger,
dear Mayor Eiskirch,
this year too, the artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale, Ms Stefanie Carp, is causing irritation with an invitation that reminds us very strongly of the Ruhrtriennale scandal surrounding the band “Young Fathers” in 2018. There must be no stage for hatred of Israel and antisemitism at the Ruhrtriennale; we urgently appeal to you: the opening speaker Achille Mbembe must be disinvited and the artistic director Stefanie Carp must be dismissed.
At that time there were signals from politics that something like this would not be repeated. As early as September 2018 the Land of North Rhine-Westphalia unanimously adopted a resolution directed against the antisemitic BDS movement. The Deutscher Bundestag, too, clearly spoke out against the BDS campaign in its resolution “BDS-Bewegung entschlossen entgegentreten – Antisemitismus bekämpfen” of May 2019 and left no doubt about the antisemitic character of calls for a boycott of the Jewish state.As a consequence, the Ruhrtriennale installed a deputy, and Ms Pfeiffer-Poensgen was convinced that Carp “now has the significance of the issue more firmly in view and that antisemitic actions and groupings will find no platform within the framework of the Ruhrtriennale”.
In view of Ms Carp’s invitation policy, however, we are protesting again today. The historian and sociologist Achille Mbembe is to give the opening speech at this year’s Ruhrtriennale. Mbembe has in the past signed a call for an academic boycott of Israel. At the end of 2016 an essay appeared entitled “The society of enmity” (“Die Gesellschaft der Feindschaft”), in which he even outdoes the antisemitic accusation of an apartheid allegedly prevailing in Israel:
- “[…] apartheid does […] not fully take account of the specific character of the Israeli separation project. […] The apocalyptic and catastrophic elements […] are far more complex and stem from a longer historical horizon than the elements that formerly supported South African Calvinism.
- Moreover, given its “hi-tech” character, the effects of the Israeli project on the Palestinian body are far more impressive than the relatively primitive operations carried out by the apartheid regime in South Africa between 1948 and the early 1980s.
- This is evident […] in the various techniques of material and symbolic erasure. […] also in its procedures and techniques of destruction […] and in its fanatical policy of destruction aimed at turning the life of the Palestinians into a heap of rubble or a rubbish heap destined for clearance. In South Africa the heaps of rubble never reached such an extent.“
In the same essay Mbembe moreover compares the former South African apartheid system with the Shoah.
Since Mbembe accuses Israel of apartheid and compares the former South African apartheid system with the Shoah, this leads to the justified assumption that he equates the attitude of the democratic state of Israel towards the Palestinian Arabs with that of the National Socialists during the Shoah. An antisemitic image in its purest form.
Calls for a boycott of the Jewish state have a long tradition. From the National Socialists’ “Kauft nicht bei Juden” campaign through to Israel boycott campaigns by German neo-Nazi groupings such as “Der III. Weg”: no state in the world is exposed to such calls with this permanence. Coincidence? No – the problem is called antisemitism, and it is out of the question to trivialise it, for example by means of catchwords such as “artistic freedom”.
In this recurring situation, however, the Land of North Rhine-Westphalia must seriously ask itself whether it wishes to fund an art festival whose artistic director does not resolutely oppose calls for a boycott of the Jewish state but instead promotes them as part of artistic freedom and invites a speaker who expresses himself in a way that relativises the Shoah. We are firmly convinced that something like this must not be given any publicly effective space in Germany.
Ms Carp’s actions cannot be put down to chance. Ms Carp, who as a result of the protest in the context of the Ruhrtriennale 2018 already staged herself as the victim of a “witch hunt”, is this year too defaming as false the detailed and well-documented letter of protest by the FDP state parliament member Lorenz Deutsch and declared herself convinced that Mbembe will give the opening speech at the Ruhrtriennale. She did not, of course, address the substantive criticism.
Through her conduct in the course of her directorship, Stefanie Carp has caused considerable damage to the art festival. With her decisions she is harming not only the Jewish community, by aiding and abetting antisemitic images and patterns of argument through her invitation policy, but also her own funding bodies and thus the Land of NRW. Several high-ranking politicians as well as the Federal Government Commissioner for Antisemitism have already spoken out and clearly criticised Mbembe’s appearance.
Please – despite the understandably dominant topic of “coronavirus” – take this matter seriously. Prevent Mbembe’s appearance and show Ms Carp where the limits lie: the dismissal of Ms Carp and the appointment of an interim artistic director are necessary in order to repair the damage to the festival’s image that has arisen so far.
We politely point out that we will communicate this letter and your reply publicly, unless you require otherwise of us. Personal contact details and signatures would be redacted in the process.
Yours sincerely
Dr Elio Adler
– Chairman -Dear Dr Adler,
thank you for your letter of 20 April 2020, which you also addressed to Minister-President Armin Laschet, who has already replied to you. Even though some time has passed since your letter, for which I ask your forgiveness, I would nevertheless like to reply.
This year’s Ruhrtriennale was cancelled on 22 April 2020 because of the coronavirus situation, by a unanimous resolution of the supervisory board of Kultur Ruhr GmbH. In the period that followed there was, as you know, a lively debate in the arts pages about Prof. Mbembe’s positions on Israel, but also fundamentally about the substantive positions of the scholarly postcolonial discourse. Much has thereby become clearer and been discussed in a more differentiated way.
Prof. Mbembe has affirmed Israel’s right to exist and distanced himself from every form of antisemitism. He has also stated on several occasions that he does not support the BDS movement and has changed his opinion on the academic boycott of Israel. He now rejects this boycott. All the same, his patterns of argument regarding the apartheid comparison with Israel and his comparisons of the Holocaust with the racial segregation of apartheid are not only academically open to attack but are indeed objectively liable to run the risk of relativising the Holocaust.
I readily concede that the artistic director Dr Carp acted unfortunately in her communication. It should not, however, be imputed to her that she advocates a boycott of Israel or is open to antisemitic positions. She has also credibly assured us that the opening speaker Mbembe whom she invited did not want to speak about Israel or the Middle East conflict, but about his assessments of how the crisis of humanity can be overcome. The text has meanwhile been published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung and confirms this. Dr Carp therefore did not, as you suspect, want to give a forum to the BDS campaign.
Let me assure you that I take the concerns you describe about growing antisemitism in Germany very seriously. Antisemitism, right-wing extremism and discrimination must have no place in our democracy in any variant or disguise. Here it is a matter of resisting the beginnings and of decisively counteracting them. This has the highest priority for the policy of the state government. In this respect I expressly associate myself with the remarks made to you by Minister-President Laschet.
Yours sincerely
Isabel Pfeiffer- PoensgenIn the run-up to the Ruhrtriennale 2020, the artistic director Stefanie Carp and the opening speaker she had planned, Achille Mbembe, were confronted with the latter’s statements in relation to the state of Israel. Mbembe and Carp emphasised that these were insinuations. These insinuations, however, would hardly stand up to examination, because reality looks different. We took a closer look:Mbembe wrote the foreword to the book “Apartheid Israel – The Politics of an Analogy”. Not, of course, in order to contradict the texts that follow in it, but in order for his part to give them the right framing.
“To be clear, it is not apartheid in the South African style. It is much more lethal.”
“…the time for a global isolation [of Israel] has come.”All proceeds from the book go to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). PACBI is an official part of the BDS campaign.Speech on 12 May 2019 at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus:
The comprehensive, or even merely relative, closing-off is accompanied by periodic military escalations and the constant use of extralegal killings. The violence exercised over the space, humanitarian strategies and a special biopolitics of punishment for their part bring forth, in combination, a peculiar prison space in which domination is exercised over people who are regarded as surplus, unwanted or illegal, while any responsibility for their lives and well-being is disclaimed.
This is what classic demonisation and the application of double standards look like. Hamas tortures and kills its own population and its opponents and attacks Israel continuously with rockets. With Mbembe, however, only Israel is responsible for “extralegal” killings and only Israel engages in “military escalation”.CONCLUSION:
It may be that Mbembe has never explicitly signed an official call of the BDS campaign. However: what distinguishes the demand for a global isolation from the demands of the BDS campaign?
Why does one write a foreword for a book whose proceeds benefit parts of the BDS campaign?
He stands for opinions that damage the peaceful coexistence of people and peoples. His distancing from the antisemitic BDS campaign is completely implausible. He uses its narrative and contributes to its funding.
Mbembe is NOT a suitable opening speaker for the Ruhrtriennale. We stand by our demand for him to be disinvited and for the artistic director Stefanie Carp to be removed from office.
