Der Bevölkerung - A Conversation

60

Hans Haacke. DER BEVÖLKERUNG(To the Population), 2000. Reichstag(German Parliament Building),Berlin. Detail, June 2001. All worksby Haacke © Hans Haacke/VG Bild-Kunst/Artists Rights Society.

Grey Room 16, Summer 2004, pp. 60–81. © 2004 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 61

DER BEVÖLKERUNG:A ConversationROSALYN DEUTSCHE, HANS HAACKE, AND MIWON KWON

Rosalyn Deutsche: Participants in today’s widespread debates aboutmemorials, in Germany and elsewhere, often assume that memorials, simplyby their presence, will help prevent the recurrence of past disasters. Othersare asking exactly how memorials to historical traumas might take respon-sibility not only for remembering but for transforming past injustices.What kind of memory might offer such hope? Since DER BEVÖLKERUNGis a mnemonic representation, would you call it a Holocaust memorial,if a nontraditional, countermonumental one? How do you think of DERBEVÖLKERUNG in relation to Germany’s current “memorial culture”and, especially, the tendency of the state and other institutions to treat artists(and architects) as “memory experts”?

Hans Haacke: As you suggest, DER BEVÖLKERUNG commemorates thosewho were deprived of their civil rights, persecuted, and murdered dur-ing the Nazi regime “im Namen des deutschen Volkes” [in the name ofthe German people]. It is not generally known that the bronze letters ofthe Reichstag inscription were cast in the S.A. Loevy foundry in Berlin.Last year the Jewish Museum in Berlin devoted an exhibition to the his-tory and the fate of the Loevy family. Five members of the family per-ished in concentration camps. Three were executed, accused of havingparticipated in the plot to assassinate Hitler. About two years ago, in thepresence of one survivor of the family, who is now living in New York,the speaker of the Bundestag, Wolfgang Thierse, unveiled a commemo-rative plaque at the public entrance of the Reichstag. The model for DERBEVÖLKERUNG and images of the work in situ were included in theshow; I participated on a panel with the title “How German should thepopulation be?”

Franziska Eichstädt-Bohlig, the Green Party member of the Bundestagwho—in contrast to her party colleague Antje Vollmer—spoke and votedin favor of my proposal, called it a Denkanstoss (impetus to think). Shealso referred to it with the untranslatable neologism Denkwerk. Its mul-tiple allusions include that it is a work of art, the result of a deliberativeprocess, and that it not only commemorates but makes us think about thepresent—and the future. By profession she happens to be an architect.

62 Grey Room 16

Memorials risk eventually blending into the landscape like street fur-niture. One gets used to them. We have seen that they can be co-opted forpurposes which were foreign to their creators. Memorials tend to directour thoughts primarily to the past. Rarely do they cause us to considerthe present and how we want to shape what’s to come.

RD: One way in which DER BEVÖLKERUNG avoids fulfilling the demandsof the official memorial culture, which often aims at closure and nor-malization and results in familiarization and other kinds of forgetting, isthrough its overt challenge to nationalist sentiments. It thus avoids thedanger, first identified by Adorno, of producing a work about the Holocaustthat, in becoming part of the cultural heritage, feeds the very nationalismthat caused the disaster. (This is similar to the question of whether andhow any memorial at Ground Zero can escape assimilation to triumphalistsentiments.) DER BEVÖLKERUNG rejects the demand placed on artiststo provide a cultural basis for a new German nationalism. I view it as a kindof Benjaminian memorial, one that “seizes hold of an image as it flashesup at a moment of danger.” The danger in this case is authoritariandemocracy, in which the image—and language—of democracy becometools of oppressive, in this case, anti-immigrant, forces. It also, like somuch of your work, brings the past into a constellation with the present,revealing the continuity underlying apparent discontinuity. I’m referringin particular to the connection it draws between the Nazis’ treatment ofJews and other “foreigners,” on the one hand, and the current neo-Nazitreatment of Turkish people and other immigrants, on the other. In makingthis connection, the work challenges Volker Kauder’s contention, madein the parliamentary debate, that the problem of fascism is confined to“the terrible twelve years of National Socialism.”1

HH: Kauder, who started the campaign against my project, rhetoricallyasked in his address to the Parliament, “When . . . will we Germans learn to behave normally, as normally as the French and the British,” andurged no longer to reduce das deutsche Volk to “a short time in its history.”

Such sentiments are common among those who wantto forget that this shameful period has left an indeli-ble mark on German history. The Bundestag recordmentions catcalls from the SPD [Social DemocraticParty] and the Greens in response. It is not surprisingthat Kauder was also a fervent opponent of the lib-eralization of the German immigration laws, whichhad been passed in 2002 by the governing coalitionof the SPD and the Greens in the Bundestag. Their

Hans Haacke. Project model forDER BEVÖLKERUNG, 1999.

Deutsche, Haacke, and Kwon | DER BEVÖLKERUNG: A Conservation 63

enactment was blocked in the Bundesrat [German Upper House] wherethe CDU- and CSU- [Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sisterparty, the Christian-Social Union] governed states command a majority.2

Last fall Martin Hohmann, one of Kauder’s fellow CDU members of theBundestag, called Jews a Tätervolk (people of perpetrators). It took enor-mous public pressure to get the CDU Bundestag faction to expel him.However, he still has a considerable following in his party. Let me alsomention that the CDU in the state of Hesse, where Hohmann comes from, hadadroitly used racist innuendo in its election campaigns. It’s an old andugly technique, not only in Germany—and, as we know, not only directedagainst Jews.

Miwon Kwon: In the shift—Volk to Bevölkerung—you’re obviously call-ing into question what the project’s opponents are comfortable accept-ing: that the German Constitution already guarantees equal treatmentbefore the law for all human beings [der Mensch] and that the concept of“Volk” has by now been purged of the atrocities perpetrated by the Naziregime in its name (hence, several speakers pointed out that the call “To thePopulation” is redundant). In this last regard especially, and given Germany’sparticular historical trauma and burden, I think Rosalyn’s suggestion thatwe think about DER BEVÖLKERUNG as a Holocaust (counter)memorial avery appropriate provocation.

But I am also concerned to think about the implications of your project—particularly the call to the population instead of the Germanpeople—in relation to the current reorganization of national identity,transformation of the function of nation-states, and issues of sovereigntywithin the context of a pan-capitalist internationalism that is being forgedby, among others, the German state. While I understand that your inten-tion is to displace an exclusionary call of national unity based on purityof blood with an inclusive call of a more heterogeneous human collec-tivity based on place/soil, I am a little disturbed by the ways in which theterm population, defined in English at least as simply the number of people within a country or region (devoid of considerations of language,cultural heritage, history, etc.), conjures the systemic rationalism of sta-tistics, the world of computation (of bodies) and demographics, the verytools of economic prediction and reorganization. “To the Population,” inother words, in dropping the nation-identifying adjective “German,” opensonto a more pluralistic conception of humanity while at the same timeneutralizing the specificities of cultures and histories that constitute it.What your project highlights for me is the difficulty of distinguishing theliberatory from the authoritarian effects of the democratic discourse inthe processes of consolidation of global power alignments and economic

64 Grey Room 16

networks today.Let me try to compose a question out of these concerns. In the project

proposal you mentioned the importance of Bertolt Brecht’s 1937 state-ment in conceiving your project: “In these times, the one who saysBevölkerung instead of Volk . . . already does not support many lies.”How do you think this statement speaks to the year 2004? That is, evenas old lies persist, are there not new lies for us to identify and resist?

HH: Both in English and in German the word population has a dry, soci-ological, and somewhat bureaucratic ring. It does not make our heart beatfaster and rally behind the flag. This is why Brecht preferred it to themythic and tribally inflected Volk, and that is also why I introduced it atthe Reichstag. It puts the notion of the “Volk” into historical perspective,particularly when it is linked to the qualifier deutsch. I believe it is impor-tant not to lose sight of the very specific political and historical contextfor which this work was conceived and not to get sidetracked by unre-lated issues, however important they may be in another context. Differentfrom the common and more casual reference to “the American people,” whoare all of immigrant stock (with the exception of Native American Indians),even today there is still a certain hesitancy in Germany to use the locu-tion “das deutsche Volk” instead of simply speaking of “die Deutschen.”Those who do so in other than solemn declarations of legal significance—like the preamble of the constitution—more often than not are on theconservative end of the political spectrum or on the radical right. Theinvocation of das deutsche Volk can or is meant to have ethnic and exclu-sionary overtones. It is on the lips of every neo-Nazi skinhead who beatsup on people who do not look sufficiently German to him. An antiracistnongovernmental organization in Berlin calls itself Amadeu AntonioStiftung. In its name it commemorates an Angolan who was murderedbecause he was not white and certainly not German in the killers’ view.He is not the only one who paid with his life. Shortly after the first salvoin the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung against my project, written by ajournalist who is close to the conservative wing of the CDU, the coverheadline of Die Junge Freiheit, a notorious rightist weekly, alerted thetroops with a preposterous cover headline that I was planning to get ridof the German people (“Das Deutsche Volk abschaffen”). It is important

to recognize that Germanyis well on the way to being animmigration country. By now,9 percent of the permanentresidents are not natives. Alarge portion of them come


from Turkey. Ironically, their numbers must increase if the famed Germansocial security system is to survive and the country is to have a chancein today’s global competition.

You voice concern about the cold rationalism of statistics, demo-graphics, and economic calculations. It is true, they can turn us into mereciphers and can be used for global economic and political domination.But it would be stupid, I believe, and utterly irresponsible to forgo thesetools in making the future more livable by those who resist hegemony,fend for equal rights, and do away with age-old hatreds between nations,religions, and ethnicities. The entire population, irrespective of an indi-vidual’s citizenship status, pays taxes, social security dues, and is subjectto the law. I would also argue that the mixing and cross-fertilization ofcultures and the incorporation of formerly alien histories is not synony-mous with cultural homogenization and the abandonment of a “home-grown” culture. Germany has seen many migrations. Without them thecountry would not only be culturally but also in many other respectspoorer. Let me cite a folksy example: Grimms’ fairy tales. One generallybelieves they are deeply rooted in German culture. They are in fact, forthe most part, French, imported by Protestant Huguenots, who had beendriven out of France and settled not far from Kassel, wherethe Grimm brothers had collected them. Beginning in 1791,Goethe, Mr. German Culture if there ever was one, producedShakespeare in the theater he directed in Weimar. Thebard has been a mainstay of the German theater ever since.The cultural tradition of German-speaking countries isunthinkable without the contribution Jews have made. Now,young, German-born Turkish writers and filmmakers arebeginning to be recognized. In Britain, in France, and inother European countries with a sordid colonial past, someof the most creative cultural figures today trace their heritageto the former colonies. Cultural amalgamation also has a long history in the United States. To mention only oneobvious example, a significant part of its “population” areAfrican Americans. Since their arrival as slaves, far frombeing culturally “neutralized,” they have had and continueto have a profound influence on “American culture.” Andwe are all richer for it.

RD: Earlier, when I calledDER BEVÖLKERUNG acounter-monument, I meantthat it engages in a dialogue

Top: Norman Foster. Glass cupolaatop Reichstag, 1993–99. Publicviewing platform. Photo: DennisGilbert.

Opposite and bottom: Portico,Reichstag (German ParliamentBuilding), Berlin. Photo: StefanMüller.

66 Grey Room 16

or contest with an existing monument, the Reichstag building, with itsimperialist sculptures, as well as with the other monuments and the broaderspatial organization of the city as it is seen from the Norman Foster dome.By “talking with” the Reichstag,3 DER BEVÖLKERUNG re-signifies it,disrupting the authoritarian messages and seeming solidity of what youcall, referring to the architecture, “an imperial palace,” an appearancethat belies the Reichstag’s democratic history.4 DER BEVÖLKERUNG usesthe building’s architectural language to make the building speak differ-ently and I would say more democratically, because the building itselfnow becomes the site of a democratic questioning of power and a contestover the meaning of the social order. But the questioning takes placearchitecturally. It occurs to me that works like DER BEVÖLKERUNG offera democratic model for what is sometimes called “art in the publicsphere.” Critics often use this phrase to describe art that engages in polit-ical struggles that are extra-aesthetic. They thus shore up the idea that artand politics are essentially separate. By producing debates among andwithin buildings, statues, and art, a work like DER BEVÖLKERUNGreveals that aesthetic structures and traditions are already part of thepolitical public sphere.

HH: Yes. It is naive if not pernicious to claim that art and politics aretotally separate, that there is an art without political implications. Tomake such separations and ghettoize so-called political art is, in itself, a political act. In the context of GERMANIA, my work at the 1993 VeniceBiennale, I was asked whether I thought the German pavilion, which hadbeen given a martial makeover under Hitler, should be torn down andreplaced by a new structure. I said no. That’s not how we grapple effec-

tively with the history inscribed in this build-ing. I also don’t promote taking the letters fromthe Loevy foundry off the façade of the Reichstag.In both instances juxtaposing two statementsthat are at odds with each other causes produc-tive friction.

Let me add, in passing, a note about SirNorman Foster’s rehab of the Reichstag. Hisoriginal winning design called for a thin flatslab on stilts over the entire building, similar tothe roof of a gas station. The Bundestag insistedthat the building again have a dome, as it didwhen it was built by Wallot in the late nine-teenth century. Grudgingly Foster complied.The result is absolutely magnificent. Even though

Hans Haacke. GERMANIA, 1993.Installation in German pavilion ofVenice Biennale.


the imperial imagery is still crowding the architrave, his dome has madethe building lose its pompous weight and its attendant political implica-tions. As you know, the roof is open to the public. Inside the glass domeone can walk up to the very top and enjoy an unobstructed view overBerlin. One sees the Brandenburg Gate, the synagogue, the new corpo-rate towers and consumer palaces of Potsdamer Platz, the Siegessäule[Victory Column], the new chancellery, and, behind the Akademie derKünste, which is being rebuilt next to the Brandenburg Gate, anotherconstruction site, Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust memorial. By far the talleststructure around is an elegant TV tower, built decades ago by the EastGerman Government on Alexanderplatz. I could add a long list of othertelling sites that are visible from the roof of the Reichstag. Lookingstraight down into one of the two open-air interior courtyards of the build-ing on the bottom one can also see DER BEVÖLKERUNG.

RD: One of the most important achievements of DER BEVÖLKERUNGhas been to inspire a democratic contest over the meaning of democracy,both in the seat of representative democracy, where MPs look at thecourtyard from the assembly hall, and among the public, which sees thework from the roof, thereby encouraging a public sphere of direct democ-racy. With respect to this debate about democracy, I’m having some diffi-culty reconciling the necessity of respecting the work’s specificity to theGerman context with my desire to relate the debate to broader questionsabout democracy. My difficulty centers on the term Volk.

Early in the parliamentary debate, Gert Weisskirchen of the SPD asked,“What is the basis of democracy?” Speakers responded in various ways,both explicit and implicit. Weisskirchen, for instance, argued that thefundamental democratic principle is the inviolability of human dignityand equality before the law, an argument echoed by others. He alsoargued against the notion of democracy as simply a majoritarian dis-course. At least, that’s how I understand his statement that “Before anyelections and ballots, democracy is based on acknowledging that somethings cannot be voted on.” By contrast, Volker Kauder of the CDU/CSUrefers positively to the “normalcy” of what he sees as the French andBritish idea that democracy is “based on liberty for the sovereign people oftheir states” and “dignity” for noncitizen residents. (Does this mean unfree-dom for noncitizens, and, if so, can there be dignity without liberty?)

Certain theorists of radical democracy, however—such as Claude Lefort,for whom democracy is not only a form of government but a whole newform of society—argue that the basis of democracy is the disappearanceof certainty about the meaning of “the people,” a disappearance that legit-imates debate about who constitutes the people and makes it possible to

68 Grey Room 16

question democratic power, whose source resides in the people. This is whatLefort calls “the question of democracy,” which, he says, emerges withthe disappearance of authoritarian references to an extra-social, unim-peachable ground of the people.

Two years ago, in an interview with Chantal Mouffe, I used Lefort’sideas to interpret DER BEVÖLKERUNG as a performance of the democ-ratic contestation of what “the people”—the political community—is,what constitutes its unity.5 The work still seems consistent with radicaldemocratic theory in its expansion and deepening of democracy througha kind of declaration of rights for noncitizen permanent residents andnon-German citizens. But now, given the stress you place on the differ-ence between the German Volk and the English the people or the Frenchle peuple, I’m no longer sure about the correctness of my earlier reading.As you stress, Germans have historically defined themselves in terms ofethnic rather than political identity, a tendency intensified by the Nazis,when, as you say in the project proposal, “Whether a person was consid-ered German or not became a matter of life and death.” The racial conno-tations of Volk, especially when the adjective deutsch is attached, wouldseem to preclude interpreting DER BEVÖLKERUNG’s challenge to “DemDeutschen Volke” as part of a perpetual democratic questioning of whoconstitutes the people, understood in the sense of the political communityand the source of democratic power. Yet German history, especially twentieth-century history, certainly necessitates keeping the identity ofthe people open to question (which, indeed, your work seems, to me, to do).How can this problem be resolved, linguistically or otherwise? “Population,”a forceful challenge to the people in its ethnic, nationalistic sense, doesn’treally challenge the constitution of the people, in its political sense. Indeed,the German specificity of Volk would seem to preclude this challenge.Could one say that in challenging the term Volk, and, in particular,deutschen Volke, DER BEVÖLKERUNG supports transforming Volk intothe people in the political sense?

HH: Our discussion of Volk and Bevölkerung touches on intricacies ofnational and supranational histories and projects, on lived experiencesand political philosophy. The latter sometimes risks being an abstractdiscourse, divorced from social reality “on the ground” and diverting us from examining how to use that very particular reality’s potential forshaping the future. Of course, these things are all interrelated, laced withuntranslatable linguistic nuances and expressed, inevitably, in histori-cally contingent language. In conversations with non-Germans, who arepuzzled by what appears to them to be an innocuous word, I point outthat, because Germany became a unified nation very late, the German


notion of “the people”—rather than politically—is invested more withreferences to a common language, culture, and ethnic unity, even thoughto a degree only imagined. The predominantly cultural and tribal versuspolitical meaning of the Volk is a form of nativism that exists also inother countries. It is a potentially volatile brew that the Nazis exploitedwith deadly consequences. The nationalist and ethnic, if not outrightracist, inflection of the Volk, however, was not the only one with cur-rency in Germany. The French Revolution had given le peuple a decid-edly political connotation that spread across Europe and inspired manysubsequent revolutions, including the failed German revolt in 1848.Sixty years later the Kaiser was toppled and the first German republicwas promulgated in 1918. The Volk finally proclaimed itself the sover-eign—from the Reichstag. The post–World War II constitution of 1949speaks of the German people in the terms of this republican tradition. InArticle 1 it covenants the inviolability of human dignity, and the Germanpeople professes its allegiance to “inviolable and inalienable human rights(Menschenrechte) as the foundation of every human community, of peace,and of justice in the world.” In Article 3 it declares that all people(Menschen) are equal before the law. In both instances, please note thechoice of the word Menschen [people] rather than Germans. Article 3continues stipulating the equality of men and women and prohibits discrimination, both positive as well as negative, because of a person’s gender, familial background, race, language, place of origin and heritage,a person’s creed, and religious or political opinions. Probably in view ofthe great number of people who were maimed in Hitler’s war, it alsoexpressly prohibits discrimination against the handicapped. Seen fromthis perspective, I have no quarrel with the invocation of the Germanpeople. In a letter to the editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,I followed the thinking of Habermas about these matters and declaredmyself proudly a “patriot of the constitution.” One of the first bags of soilaround the dedication “To the Population” was collected by the thenMinister of Justice, Herta Däubler-Gmelin, from the grave of Carlo Schmid,who was one of the major framers of this constitution.

RD: I’m glad that you mentioned the influence of the French democraticrevolution and its notion of le peuple in Germany. It confirms my feelingthat theories of the people as the democratic political community (bycontrast with the people as a racial unity), one that remains democraticso long as it questions its basis, far from being abstract in relation to DERBEVÖLKERUNG, are highly relevant to the specificities of the Germancontext. Your work poses the problem of how to articulate the two. Yourintroduction of another term, Menschen, is also important, since it raises

70 Grey Room 16

equally urgent questions about the meaning of humanity and of humanrights whose source is not citizenship. Can such rights be exercisedwithin the parameters of the nation-state? Or do such rights claimsrequire the agency of transnational institutions? Interestingly, in the Germancontext, Giorgio Agamben writes that it was precisely the Nazis who raisedthe question of the meaning of humanity when they attempted to separatethe nonhuman from the human (in the human) in the concentration camp,which he considers the paradigm of modern power.

MK: I’d like to go back to Weisskirchen’s comment from the parliamen-tary debate, which I found extraordinary, not least because art was heldas exemplary of those things that “cannot be voted on.” This is even moreexceptional given the kind of debates about public art in the UnitedStates wherein art is described as needing to please “the people,” servic-ing a mythic social will. If I understand Weisskirchen and similarlyminded speakers correctly, elected government officials are supposed to facilitate social will, but this will cannot override an individual’s artistic will. Art does not and should not fall under the rules of popularsovereignty, in other words, and the Arts Committee is charged to pro-tect the paradox—the sanctity of artistic will as the very expression of ademocratic social will. What are your views on this point that democracymust acknowledge that art is exempt from the necessity of popular con-sensus? Does this mean that social will and artistic will are, and shouldremain, incommensurate?

HH: I believe in the background of Weisskirchen’s position is the memoryof the shameful Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munichthe Nazis organized in 1937. They attached a tag to each of the works theyhad pulled from public museums. It reminded the viewer that taxpayers’money had been wasted on it (language we have more recently heard inthe culture wars of this country). The Nazis claimed to follow the GesundesVolksemfinden (good/healthy sense of the people)! Indeed, it is probablytrue that the majority of the Germans, like the majority of Americanstoday, are skeptical if not hostile to art they don’t understand, that theyfind offensive or suspect of being a fraud. Since the late 1980s, populistdemagogues have succeeded in having Congress pass legislation that hascrippled the NEA and led to self-censorship in many institutions. Just afew years ago Rudolph Giuliani appealed to these sentiments when hethreatened the Brooklyn Museum. It probably was such apprehensionsabout leaving decisions on art open to populist exploitation that moti-vated Weisskirchen. When I spoke to the parliamentary caucus of theGreen Party just before the Bundestag debate, several Green MPs emphat-


ically declared they would abstain from voting on the project becausethey object to voting on art. As principled as this position is, it almostdoomed the project. Let me add this: Rita Süssmuth, the former CDUspeaker of the Bundestag, is rightfully credited for establishing theKunstbeirat as a buffer and a forum where decisions on art in Bundestagbuildings are shielded from populist drives in the Parliament. It is com-posed of twelve MPs, representing all parties in proportion to their num-bers in the Bundestag. The committee is aided in its deliberations by agroup of experts (museum directors, curators, a former Documenta head).Volker Kauder is a member of that Committee, as is Antje Vollmer. Itvoted twice overwhelmingly in favor of my project. Had the Bundestag,in fact, overridden this vote, the Kunstbeirat would have found itself ina very difficult spot. Also, this concern is behind the speeches of Süssmuth,Weisskirchen, Thierse (present Speaker) and others, who supported theproject. In many countries mechanisms have been put into place to pro-tect the dispersal of public money for cultural projects from becoming apolitical football. There appears to be a contradiction between this sortof protection and an unfettered exercise of decision making by majorityvote. Whether it amounts to an undemocratic practice when it is, in fact,based on a wise decision arrived at by a democratic vote is debatable. I happen to belong to the constituency that benefits from this arrange-ment; and there are many others (for example, universities, libraries,medical facilities, to name only a few). The freedom of speech guaran-teed in the Bill of Rights and in the German Constitution’s stipulation“Art and science, research and teaching are free” further compound thecomplexity of these issues.

MK: Antje Vollmer, a Green Party member and an opponent of your pro-ject, was the only speaker to make mention of the art market during thehearings. She makes a point of underlining the fact that the art that hasbeen commissioned or bought by the German state thus far are the sameworks found in major contemporary art museums. Vollmer’s conclusionis that certain “exclusive clubs and groups that mutually advise and pro-mote each other” (implicating the members of the Arts Committee here)are monopolizing not only the marketplace but the state’s national artprogram as well. Her basic complaint is that the state’s exclusive patron-age of a narrow roster of already established, internationally recognizedartists leaves little chance for unknown artists or artists of future genera-tions to find state support. What is your sense of the current relationshipbetween the art market and official state culture in Germany?

If it is true that there is a confluence or continuity between the inter-national art market and the state’s official nation-building cultural policy,

72 Grey Room 16

then could Vollmer have missed a bigger point? Does the situation notindicate that the very premise of nation-building now avoids overt cham-pioning of “German” artists (the weight of past nationalist endeavors per-sist) in order to secure the nation’s position as a Euro-internationalcultural leader? Simply and crassly put, patronizing the “winners” of theinternational art market is a means to become a “winner” nation (we seethis logic at play in international biennials, triennials, and other mega-exhibitions also). In the new Reichstag renovated by a British architect(Foster), artists from Germany (Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, UlrichRückreim) are put in company with artists of “international recognition”from the United States (Jenny Holzer), France (Christian Boltanski), andRussia (Grischa Bruskin; Ilya Kabakov’s proposals were rejected). Youhave a more ambiguous national affiliation within this collection ofartists from elite Western nations; you are both German (by blood) andnot German (by soil). Could you speak a bit about your sense of both your

work’s function and the function of your ambiguousnational identity in the context of the German state’snation-building effort?

HH: I am German by “blood” (that is, my parents wereGerman), and having been born in Cologne, I am alsoGerman by “soil.” According to this logic, I am a full-blooded German and “soiled.” I have had reason to beamused by the ambiguity of my current “status,” hav-ing now lived outside of Germany for forty years. I was invited to the Whitney Museum’s centennialexhibition “The American Century: Art and Culture1900–2000” (a triumphalist title) and, in the same year,under the auspices of the National Gallery in Berlin,to “Das XX. Jahrhundert: Ein Jahrhundert Kunst inDeutschland.” After dispensing with this biographicalaside, let me tell you about Antje Vollmer. And then Iwill try to address the core of your question. From dayone she ridiculed the project as “Biokitsch,” a catchyword the press eagerly picked up. And she announced

for everyone to hear she wouldnot make a fool of herself bybringing soil from her electiondistrict to Berlin.6 In heraddress to the Bundestag sheconfidently declared she couldnot imagine that certain MPs

Top: Gerhard Richter. Installation atReichstag. Photo: Dennis Gilbert.

Bottom: Sigmar Polke. Installationat Reichstag. Photo: Richard Bryant.


whose names she picked as examples, would stoop to such a silly exer-cise. Two of those named did just that in the week of the project’s inau-guration. By now some 220 MPs have participated, and, according toVollmer’s sense of decorum, they all behaved like “fools.” Before the pro-ject was approved with the slimmest of margins, she tried to derail itthrough a backroom maneuver. German television reported that shetoured the site with the collector Egidio Marzona and floated the idea thatMarzona sponsor a work by Bruce Nauman instead of the Bundestagcommissioning me with public funds. Her fellow MPs were not amused.Given the Nauman episode, in which the artist most probably had nohand, Antje Vollmer’s worry about neglect of artists who are not stars inthe art market may be a bit overdrawn. Earlier she had been in the newsfor qualifying Gerhard Richter’s work in the Reichstag entrance as “char-latanerie.” The Art Committee’s publicly announced reasoning behindcommissioning Jenny Holzer, Christian Boltanski, Foster as the architectof the Reichstag, and Grisha Bruskin was that each of the former occu-pation powers were to be represented in the Reichstag by a prominentartist and that the German artists have national if not international recog-nition. It also devised a policy for three other large new buildings that housethe offices of the MPs, committee meeting rooms, the staff of the Bundestag,and other support facilities. Works for these buildings, with a few notableexceptions, were chosen on the basisof competitions among invited andmostly German artists. Many are notwell known and represented by hotgalleries. I don’t believe their marketshare will increase on the basis ofthese commissions. Representation ingovernment buildings does not rankhigh among the art mongers. I have notseen collectors beating down my door,and it’s hard for me to believe that theauction prices of say Polke or Richterhave been affected. Germany, like othercountries, has institutions and publicagencies that are charged to projectGerman culture abroad. The most vis-ible of these are the Goethe Institutesand the Institut für Auslandsbezie-hungen in Stuttgart. But I am not awareof a nationally coordinated policy topush the fortunes of German artists in

Top: Jenny Holzer. Installation atReichstag. Photo: Rudi Meisel.

Bottom: Christian Boltanski.Installation at Reichstag. Photo:Richard Bryant.

74 Grey Room 16

the national or international art market. If there were such an attempt, Idon’t think it could rival in any way the existing transnational networkof art dealers, curators, collectors, and writers.

RD: Volker Kauder’s comment that reversing the decision to install DERBEVÖLKERUNG doesn’t threaten the “freedom of art” because the workcould be installed anywhere in Berlin not only reveals his lack of under-standing of the principle of site-specificity but, at a time when site-specificity has been neutralized and academicized, reminds us of thesubversive possibilities of disruptive site-specific practice. Your previoussite-specific interventions have largely been temporary works, which aresubsequently kept alive by the controversies they spawn and by yourcontinual updating of the documentation of your projects. Does yourdecision to do a permanent site-specific work bespeak a commitment toremember permanently the Nazi past? I realize of course that permanencewas one of the terms of the commission, but what do you foresee as theconsequences of the work’s permanence? Permanence would of coursebe a positive feature if the work can be seen as performing the questionthat must be permanently kept alive if democracy is to survive: What isthe people?

HH: The work is “permanent” in the sense that it remains in the sameplace until, as I stipulated, a democratic Parliament no longer meets inthe Reichstag building. But it changes constantly. It is a process. The leg-islative term during which it was approved and inaugurated ended in2003. Federal elections brought a number of new MPs to Berlin. As I stip-ulated in my proposal, they were also invited to contribute soil, as thenext generation of MPs will be. Among the newly elected was a forestranger from the Bavarian CSU, which had solidly opposed the projectlike its sister party, the CDU. (The only notable exception was the ArtCommittee member Renate Blank from Nürnberg.) One of the first sym-bolic acts of this freshman CSU MP was to break ranks and plant a youngapple tree in the courtyard. Apple orchards apparently are common inhis election district. But his choice also reminded me and others of a remarkby Martin Luther: “Even if the world were to end tomorrow, I would stillplant an apple tree today.”

RD: Kauder (whose parliamentary speech represents the extreme conser-vative argument against the work) calls you “our self-declared patriot ofthe constitution,” who doesn’t understand that “all power derives . . .from the German people”—which seems to me to be a real case of begging the question! To support his assertion he cites a press report


of February 13, 2000. Which report is he referring to and what did yousay there?

HH: He refers to a letter I wrote to the editor of the FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung in response to a front-page editorial by Karl Feldmeyer,in which the Arts Committee and I were accused of plotting against theVolk. He compliments Kauder for alerting the republic of this danger.Aside from his claim that I am a sympathizer of Stalinism, Feldmeyerrefers to an unsolicited expert opinion rendered by Dietrich Murswiek,a Freiburg University professor of constitutional law, in which he warnedthat the project violated the German Constitution. The professor did notreveal who commissioned him to offer his opinion. It was probably ini-tiated by Kauder, whose election district is near Freiburg and whodumped copies of the tract into the mailboxes of his colleagues in Berlin.Another professor of constitutional law, Hans Meyer, who was for manyyears president of the Berlin Humboldt University, later expertly rippedit apart. He deliciously titled his critique “How a professor of constitu-tional law shoots with cannons at sparrows—and misses.” In my letter tothe editor I call myself a “fervent patriot of the constitution.” To myknowledge, so far no complaint has been filed with the German SupremeCourt against me or any of the Members of the Bundestag who presum-ably condoned or even participated in violating the constitution.

MK: Another point of objection to DER BEVÖLKERUNG was your stipu-lation that the 669 legislators become participants in the artwork, thatthey each provide fifty kilograms of soil from their home districts.Clearly, the garden is meant to be a perpetually transforming “picture”of Germany, emphasizing a provisional unity that is to be made andremade over and over again by the collectivity of heterogeneous compo-nent parts. According to your plan, this heterogeneity, in turn, supportsthe growth of new and unexpected life that can only be sustained throughcontinued vigilance and commitment. But I am curious. Why was it so important that the garden’s soil composition mirror the Bundestagmembership? If the project is a new kind of symbolic representation ofthe country, as you have written, why affirm the existing structure of thelegislative state apparatus as its blueprint? Was this a matter of site speci-ficity for you?

HH: Your use of the word garden could make one believe that the plantsaround the neon letters are taken care of by a gardener. I expressly statedthat no watering, weeding, or other sort of tending should occur.7 My pro-ject is not to be understood as a critique of “the existing structure of the

76 Grey Room 16

legislative state apparatus.” Your choice of words seems to have a nega-tive ring. If that is so, I don’t share your opinion. No matter how much I disagree with certain decisions and laws it passes, a democraticallyelected parliament is one of the most important constitutional pillars of ademocracy. Also in this respect, I am a “fervent patriot of the constitution.”

RD: The question of DER BEVÖLKERUNG’s relationship to debates aboutposttraditional identity extends to the earth component of the work. Thesoil refers, both literally and figuratively, to democracy. It literally embeds“the population”—which you propose as the democratic constituency ofthe German parliament—in the material basis of territory, supporting theidea of democratic representation based on geography rather than Germanancestry or lineage. Figuratively, the inevitable mixing of the soil is, asyou’ve written, an “anti-particularist” gesture pointing toward the desir-ability of a hybrid, heterogeneous—which is to say, “impure”—Germanidentity.8 In this light it’s really peculiar that Kauder accuses you of offer-ing “a purifying solution.” In the interview with Chantal Mouffe that Ireferred to earlier, Mouffe argued against Habermas’s universalizing anti-particularism. “I believe,” she said, “that a political community is alwaysa community which is ordered symbolically according to a certain set ofvalues, which I call the ethico-political principles of a regime.” Does theantiparticularism of both the earth and linguistic components of DERBEVÖLKERUNG indicate that for you the political community is not uni-fied by adherence to particular values? Or are you only opposing racialand not other kinds of particularism?

HH: There may be a misunderstanding, which demonstrates how diffi-cult it sometimes is to translate texts from one language to another with-out explaining how history and context can affect the meaning ofcommon words. After the establishment of Germany as a politically con-stituted nation in 1871, there have been and still exist to some degreetoday tendencies of regions to take a particularist course which can go so

far as an outright or de facto separation. As is knownin other countries, also in Germany there is a north-south divide. There are the well-known tensions betweenthe former East Germany and the West. There are religious divisions: traditionally Protestant versusCatholic, but in the background also Christian andnon-Christian (that is, Jewish—and now also Muslim).We are all familiar with the reciprocal suspicions ofurban and rural populations. Some of the political par-ties exist only in one part or even only in a single state

Hans Haacke. Grass Cube, 1967,first exhibited in solo show atHoward Wise Gallery, New York,1967.


of the Federal Republic. The most remarkable example is the FreistaatBayern, the former Bavarian kingdom, where the CSU is the unchallengedgoverning party. In some respects, Bavaria is a state that considers itselfalmost as a nation unto itself. I wonder whether this has anything to dowith what Chantal Mouffe and Jürgen Habermas are quarreling about.

MK: I might say here that I feel a little cautious about embracing this anti-particularist move in a political sense because even as it might facilitate,as you state, “communality and equality” (in opposing nativism andexorcising the ghosts of the Nazi era), it can also have the effect of homog-enizing and collapsing difference (in support of globalism). This is aproblem that I tried to articulate earlier in relation to the dedication “Tothe Population.”

HH: There will probably always be tension between regional identitiesand adherence to common structures and attitudes. I don’t believe theyneed to be in mutually exclusive opposition to each other, as long as precepts that are codified in the constitution, particularly in regard tohuman rights, are observed. A shared respect for these rights, I think, doesnot have a detrimental, homogenizing effect, nor does it promote so-calledfree trade for what often amounts to the exclusive benefit of the econom-ically and politically powerful.

RD: You’ve suggested that there is a relationship between the earth com-ponent of the work and the earth art you made in the 1960s. Could youelaborate on the nature of the relationship?

HH: Not counting my sand castles, Grass Cubeof 1967 is the first example of a work withplants and earth. A year later I collaborated ona proposal by a young New York architecturefirm (Ricardo Scofidio was a partner of thefirm) for Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn. I pro-posed to leave an area ten feet deep betweentwo topographical contour lines unculti-vated for the lifetime of the hilly park.Perhaps the closest precedent for the kind ofplant growth that plays an important part ofthe Berlin project is a piece that developed in1970 on the roof of the East Houston Streetbuilding where I had a studio: Airborne seedssprouted in a small heap of soil. Three years

Top: Hans Haacke. Proposal forFort Greene Park, Brooklyn, 1968 (collaboration with Berman,Roberts & Scofidio, Architects, New York).

Bottom: Hans Haacke. BowerySeeds, 1970. Roof of 95 EastHouston Street, New York.

78 Grey Room 16

later I introduced something similar in a proposal for a complex of newministries in Bonn—with a politically provocative addition: a mountainof soil that was to have been left there untended—and it was to have thestatus of a no-man’s land; that is, no nation was to have had any jurisdic-tion in this enclave. Needless to say, the proposal was not realized. Also,the Brooklyn proposal was not accepted.

MK: I’m also intrigued by the extent to which the soil/earth of the pro-ject functions literally as a micro-ecosystem of Germany, yet exceedsspecificities of national territory to serve as a more abstract or cosmicsymbol of “home.” In your project proposal you make reference to manyinstances of how we, as human beings, maintain deeply ingrained emo-tional ties to the earth as part of knowing ourselves in an existentialsense. You wrote: “In many cultures the earth is referred to as ‘motherearth,’ giving life and periodic renewal. But she also opens herself up asthe grave that takes us in, and we become one with the earth. She doesnot know of power and property. The earth is classless.” Initially, I was abit irked by this passage because it was not clear how this all-too-familiargendering of nature/earth—Mother Nature vs. Fatherland, earth/soil vs.nation/territory—as well as the mysticism associated with such think-ing, figured in DER BEVÖLKERUNG. And if earth is indeed outside thesocial—does not know power (politics or history?), property or class(economics?)—how else do we need to think about the soil in the project?But the passage also reminded me of my grandmother who refused totravel to the United States, not even to spend time with her children orgrandchildren, not even when she was healthy, not even for a shortwhile, because she was afraid she might die in a foreign country. She saidshe wanted to be buried in Korean soil (and she was). I doubt that thiswish was inspired by a nationalistic impulse, a love of country. She simply wanted to stay where she felt she belonged ultimately (which,interestingly, was not with her family). I don’t know quite what to makeof this personal story in light of all that we’re discussing, but the sense ofattachment, maybe even call it allegiance, that my grandmother had tosoil over blood seems a significant expression of a desire for belongingthat should not be forgotten.

RD: In its entirety DER BEVÖLKERUNG does evoke the National Socialist“blood and soil”—that is, the unification of race and territory—but at thesame time disarticulates the two terms. It seems to me that the earth com-ponent counteracts the Nazi myth of the unity of blood and soil by advo-cating soil, as opposed to blood, as the criterion of German citizenship. Isthe fact that participants in the parliamentary debate didn’t seem to rec-


ognize this disarticulation of blood and soil partially responsible forobjections to the earth component of the work, even by some supporters?

HH: In my “Thoughts about the Project” that accompanied the proposalwhen I submitted it to the Bundestag Art Committee, I referred to thesometimes deeply emotional attachment to the soil of the place whereone is born, for which Miwon’s grandmother is an example. I would notsuspect that of nationalism. I also referred to various myths, includingthe Old Testament, shared by Jews and Christians. I did not imply that I am a partisan of these myths nor of the gendering associated with locutions like mother nature/fatherland, etc. I hope the slight sarcasmthat pervades the text is sufficient proof for such a disassociation. Theword metropolis, by the way, and all its derivations (as, for example, inMetropolitan Transportation Authority for the New York Subway Agencyor Métro in Paris) is also gendered. Metropolis in its Latin/Greek originmeans “mother city.” We are straphangers in mom’s trains. I thought itwas necessary to give a brief cultural history in my text because, as somuch else, Hitler had contaminated the symbolism of soil. It was impor-tant to point out that before the Nazis and in other countries, earth had and still has a symbolic significance that is totally unrelated to the useto which it was put during their twelve-year dictatorship. Nevertheless,the art historian Martin Warnke warned the Bundestag not to fall into theNazi trap and argued strenuously for the rejection of the project. Otherwell-known German art historians,Willibald Sauerländer and KlausHerding to name two, passionately sup-ported it in articles and letters to theeditor. A colleague of Warnke at theHamburg University, Monika Wagner,published an article in the BerlinerZeitung in which she described exam-ples of the symbolic use of earth wellpreceding the Nazis. She also informedthe readers about earth works of con-temporary artists. I responded to Warnkein the Süddeutsche Zeitung, where hispolemic had appeared. I reminded himthat symbols are to be read in the con-text in which they are used—a good oldhistoricist practice. I mentioned that ashesand soil from concentration camps arepart of a memorial on a Hamburg cemetery

Hans Haacke. DER BEVÖLKERUNG(To the Population), 2000. Reichstag(German Parliament Building),Berlin. Detail, June 2001.

80 Grey Room 16

and that soil from the East German city of Cottbus was joined, after thereunification of Germany, with soil from a West German site—all thiswithout any Nazi connotations. I made a number of other points andclosed by saying that Hitler could celebrate a late victory, if he were, infact, given the final authority over what earth signifies. I did not mention,as I should have, that the National Socialist ideology promoted dasAusmerzen unwerten Lebens, the eradication of life that’s unworthy. Thatis a terminology associated with eradicating weeds. I anticipated thatweeds would sprout in the Reichstag. They were not to be ausgemerzt.No gardening! I also emphasized in my reply to Warnke that all residentsof Germany, irrespective of citizenship and blood lineage have in com-mon the ground on which they walk and the laws of the territory the bor-ders of which are demarcated by posts driven into the earth. If ever therehad been a danger in associating the project with Nazi ideology, the loca-tions from which the participating Members of the Bundestag broughttheir bags of earth has made it moot. There is earth from concentrationcamps, from Jewish cemeteries, from places where immigrants had beenmurdered, and from constitutionally (or in other respects for the project)significant places.


Notes1. See “DER BEVÖLKERUNG: The German Parliamentary Debate,” in this issue, 82–115.

The original German transcript of the debate is available at www.derbevoelkerung.de.2. In July 2004, after long and bitter negotiations in the conference committee of the

Bundestag and the Bundesrat, a compromise version of the immigration law was finallypassed by both houses. It will be in force as of 1 January 2005.

3. The terminology talking with is knowingly borrowed by Deutsche from KennethGross, “Talking with Statues,” in Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1993), 139–66.

4. Hans Haacke referred to the Reichstag as “an imperial palace” in a lecture at a TateModern conference on “Installations,” London, 5 November 2000.

5. Chantal Mouffe, “‘Every Form of Art Has a Political Dimension’: Interview by RosalynDeutsche, Branden W. Joseph, and Thomas Keenan,” Grey Room 2 (Winter 2001): 98–125.

6. As detailed in Haacke’s proposal for DER BEVÖLKERUNG, members of the Germanparliament are invited to contribute “50 kilos (approx. 100 pounds) of soil to the court-yard, collected from their election districts or the states where they were elected.” HansHaacke’s project proposal, as well as a transcript of the German debate and relevant presshas been collected in Michael Diers and Kaspar König, eds., DER BEVÖLKERUNG: Aufsätzeund Dokumente zur Debatte um das Reichstagsprogekt von Hans Haacke (Frankfurt amMain: Portikus and Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2000).

7. Haacke writes in the project proposal, “Seeds and roots from the places of originare naturally embedded in the soil brought to Berlin. They will sprout, as will airborneseeds from Berlin. They are to develop freely—without any tending. When a legislatorleaves Parliament, a commensurate portion of soil is removed. Newly elected Members ofParliament are invited to contribute to the soil in the courtyard and, in so doing, also tothe vegetation.”

8. Haacke writes in the project proposal, “The gathering and mixing of soil from allregions of the Federal Republic in the courtyard of the Reichstag building is an anti-particularist symbolic action. It affirms communality and equality. A quiet gesture, withoutaccompanying fanfare, flag-waving and torchlight, it is matched by the unspectacularsprouting of the seeds and roots in the soil.”

Hans Haacke. Drawing accompanying proposalfor DER BEVÖLKERUNG, 1999.

Der Bevölkerung - A Conversation

Documents

Transcript of Der Bevölkerung - A Conversation