Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Politics and Culture in Germany and Austria Today
- Writing the European Refugee Crisis: Timur Vermes’s Die Hungrigen und die Satten (2018)
- Pluralized Selves and the Postmigrant Sublime: Isolde Charim’s Ich und die Anderen (2018) and Wolfgang Fischer’s STYX (2018)
- “Never an innocent game”: The Center for Political Beauty and “Search for us!”
- Irreconcilable Differences: The Politics of Bad Feelings in Contemporary German Jewish Culture
- Geography, Identity, and Politics in Saša Stanišić’s Vor dem Fest (2014)
- Precarious Narration in Anke Stelling’s Schäfchen im Trockenen (2018)
- Limited Editions: Politics of Liveness at the Berliner Theatertreffen, 2017–19
- The Akın Effect: Fatih Akın’s Cultural-Symbolic Capital and the Postmigrant Theater
- Goodbye, Sonnenallee, Or How Gundermann (2018) Got Lost in the Cinema of Others
- Ruth Beckermann’s Reckoning with Kurt Waldheim: Unzugehörig: Österreicher und Juden nach 1945 (1989) and Waldheims Walzer (2018)
- Burschenschaft Hysteria: Exposing Nationalist Gender Roles in Contemporary Austrian Politics
- Notes on the Contributors
“Never an innocent game”: The Center for Political Beauty and “Search for us!”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 April 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Politics and Culture in Germany and Austria Today
- Writing the European Refugee Crisis: Timur Vermes’s Die Hungrigen und die Satten (2018)
- Pluralized Selves and the Postmigrant Sublime: Isolde Charim’s Ich und die Anderen (2018) and Wolfgang Fischer’s STYX (2018)
- “Never an innocent game”: The Center for Political Beauty and “Search for us!”
- Irreconcilable Differences: The Politics of Bad Feelings in Contemporary German Jewish Culture
- Geography, Identity, and Politics in Saša Stanišić’s Vor dem Fest (2014)
- Precarious Narration in Anke Stelling’s Schäfchen im Trockenen (2018)
- Limited Editions: Politics of Liveness at the Berliner Theatertreffen, 2017–19
- The Akın Effect: Fatih Akın’s Cultural-Symbolic Capital and the Postmigrant Theater
- Goodbye, Sonnenallee, Or How Gundermann (2018) Got Lost in the Cinema of Others
- Ruth Beckermann’s Reckoning with Kurt Waldheim: Unzugehörig: Österreicher und Juden nach 1945 (1989) and Waldheims Walzer (2018)
- Burschenschaft Hysteria: Exposing Nationalist Gender Roles in Contemporary Austrian Politics
- Notes on the Contributors
Summary
Political Beauty?
ON MONDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2019, the controversial German art collective “Zentrum fur Politische Schönheit” (Center for Political Beauty, henceforth ZPS) erected a thick steel pillar in the center of Berlin's government district. The location on Heinrich von Gagern Street was the unmarked site between the Reichstag and the Federal Chancellery where the Kroll Opera House—badly damaged during the Second World War and eventually demolished in 1951—had once stood. Over two meters high and dark gray, the pillar's most immediately striking feature was its centerpiece: a glass “window” enclosing a display of ashes embedded in amber-colored synthetic resin. This was “Sucht nach uns!” (Search for us!), the ZPS's latest political-aesthetic intervention in the memory politics of the Berlin Republic. The installation was destined to be short-lived because of the controversy it created (more on which below); by January 2020 the local authorities had already removed it.
The collective claimed in a press release and on their project website that the pillar contained the ashes of Jewish Holocaust victims. Over a two-year period, ZPS activists had reportedly taken around two hundred soil samples from twenty-three sites of atrocity near concentration camps in Germany, Poland, and Ukraine. The samples had then been tested in laboratories and were found in over seventy percent of cases to contain human remains. The remains that featured in the pillar came from the area surrounding Auschwitz, where members of the collective searched rivers, dams, and fields. This area is the subject of a forensic-historical analysis of body disposal techniques at Auschwitz-Birkenau commissioned by the collective and available on the project website, Die Wege der Asche (The Paths of the Ashes). The title of the campaign itself, “Sucht nach uns!,” expressed an imperative from the Jewish victims of the Holocaust to posterity to “search for us.” It was inspired by the few victim testimonies that Soviet soldiers had discovered in Auschwitz in 1945. These testimonies bore witness to body disposal by mass incineration and feature in a further document on the project website, An die Nachwelt (To Posterity), a compilation of Jewish victim accounts including the Auschwitz materials and other testimonies that the collective researched and assembled over a twoyear period.
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- Information
- Politics and Culture in Germany and Austria TodayEdinburgh German Yearbook Volume 14, pp. 58 - 74Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021