Re: <nettime> the silence on the rising fascism

[Andreas Broeckmann via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Folks,

please, can somebody here enlighten us on the case of the Berlin 
cultural centre Oyoun, and how the discontinuation of its funding by the 
new christian democrat (CDU)-led Berlin culture administration is part 
of the "right-wing attack ... enthusiastically carried out by the left 
in Germany"; it would be interesting to learn how this case is not 
mainly a conservative attack on a pet-project of the local Greens in 
Kreuzberg and Neukölln, at a site (formerly Werkstatt der Kulturen) 
which has been the target of conservative anti-wokeism sentiments for 
over a decade; in passing, the people who are in the know about how this 
case relates to the IDF campaign in Gaza and the global "rise in 
fascism", can perhaps also explain how it is not also an application of 
the anti-BDS resolution of the German federal parliament in 2019 
(pre-documenta 15, then supported both by the CDU-led Merkel government 
and the Green Party) which is legally binding for public administrations 
and for institutions receiving public funding, for better or worse; and 
maybe somebody can also share insider-knowledge on how the socialist 
Linke and the Green parties are masterminding this "attack" by cunningly 
_not_ being in the city government any more since they lost the 
elections in February.

Excuse the pettiness of this argument. The more relevant point is that I 
have doubts about how people in their statements here on the list 
extrapolate from local cases which in fact often have less grandiose, 
local reasons. No less problematic perhaps on the local level. But to 
casually read them as symptoms of global trends is like interpreting 
statistics without knowing how these were put together... Many of us 
know stuff about the twisted reasons for local political events in 
Vienna, Chicago or Rotterdam, and how they are complicated in a local 
kind of way, and not easily relatable to a global picture without 
distortion. (What do we know about the personal relations between the 
doctors in Gaza hospitals and the tunnel-digging Hamas engineers?)

The street where Oyoun is located was formerly called Wissmannstraße, 
named after an awful German colonial officer; in 2020/2021 it was 
renamed Lucy-Lameck-Straße, after a Tansanian feminist politician. This 
name change was decided by the votes of the SPD, Linke and Greens in the 
local parliament in Neukölln. The representatives of the local 
conservative CDU, liberal FDP and far-right AfD voted against.*
Maybe what we are seeing is part of a local tit-for-tat (a 
'Retourkutsche'), and Oyoun would be better served by reading their 
current situation in the local rather than in the global political 
context. (For the locals: talk to their critics in Rathaus Neukölln and 
Rotes Rathaus, in Niederkirchnerstraße and Brunnenstraße, because that's 
where the money-flow has to be reactivated.)

What I'm questioning is whether the sweeping statements we are served 
here are grounded in knowledge about the specific cases they draw on, 
and whether what we get to read aren't reflections of the respective 
author's personal preoccupations, rather than the "analysis" they claim 
to offer.

Best regards,

-a


* 
https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/aus-der-wissmann-wird-die-lucy-lameck-strasse-3299224.html


Am 21.12.23 um 00:25 schrieb Felix Stalder via nettime-l:
> The attack on art institutions is part of a larger right-wing attack 
> (enthusiastically carried out by the left in Germany, an issue in and of 
> itself that requires as much psycho-analysis and political analysis) on 
> critical discourse itself, well any kind of what used to be called 
> “public discourse”. 
>
> On 12/19/23 21:19, Brian Holmes via nettime-l wrote:
> > Seriously, how to live in this time? And how to talk about it? What's
> > happening to the Oyoun space in Berlin is one of the many closures that
> > public silence permits. 
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