German-Israeli series of talks

 

“Of fracture lines and wounds”: Federal Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier talks with artists about violence in the Middle East and German-Israeli relations.

 

Looking back hurts. And despite the delight about rapprochement, exchange, and understanding, it too has played a major role in 50 years of diplomatic relations between Germany and Israel. For this reason, in the penultimate round of the series of talks marking the anniversary of the relations, in the Babylon Cinema in Berlin, Federal Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier talked with authors Esther Dischereit and Sherko Fatah as well as film directors Ari Folman and Andres Veiel about “Bruchkanten und Wunden”, fracture lines and wounds: about the current wave of violence and conflicts in the Middle East, as well as the dismay at right-wing extremist groups in Germany such as terrorist group “Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund” (Nazi Underground, NSU). At the event on 3 November 2015, which the Federal Foreign Office organised in collaboration with the German Academic Exchange Service’s Berlin Artists-in-Residence programme, they addressed in particular the question of the impact these conflicts have on societies and art.

 

The need to have a keen eye

 

In his welcoming address Frank-Walter Steinmeier stated that the intention behind the German-Israeli anniversary year had been to “showcase the diversity of the relations between our two countries.” And indeed the evening in Berlin spanned a broad spectrum – from a murder with a right-wing extremist background in Brandenburg, which Andres Veiel made the theme of his film “The Kick”, to the shock triggered all over the world by floods of refugees to terrorism as reflected by the protagonists in Sherko Fatah’s novels. What Fatah, Veiel, Folman, and Dischereit have in common is that they do not just accept violence and atrocities: Their works counter such like with something that, despite everything, gives rise to hope.

 

“How can we make sure that anti-Semitism and xenophobia do not become socially acceptable again in Germany?” was a question Frank-Walter Steinmeier posed at the beginning of the evening. For “The Kick”, Andres Veiel probed the murder in 2002 of 16-year-old Marinus Schöberl by three neo-Nazis of almost the same age. The film is an adaptation of the eponymous play by Andres Veiel and Gesine Schmidt, which is based on 1,500 pages of transcript. An excerpt shown during the event played back statements made by the murderer and the victim’s mother, as well as voices from what is presumably a “normal environment”. Just how necessary a keen eye is for the causes of violence becomes oppressively clear.

 

Several truths

 

Filmmaker Ari Folman describes how this work can also be frustrating. His very personal film “Waltz with Bashir” is about the traumas that Israeli soldiers suffered in the Lebanon War in the early 1980s. Folman said in Berlin: “I only convince people who are already convinced.” Despite all the recognition his work has received, he continued, he could not say that it had actually changed anything. Andres Veiel contradicted him, and described the difficultly he had confronting his father about the latter’s time as a German soldier during the Second World War. Addressing Folman, Veiel said: “The images of your war made possible a discussion that had previously been impossible.”

Federal Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was not prepared to leave the resignation raised by Folman unchallenged either: “Particularly given the state of the world, we cannot adopt this attitude.” The conflict in Syria, for example, he added, was a “chronicle of missed opportunities”. As such, negotiations were all the more important, no matter how deadlocked the situation. The Middle East was an example of how “several truths existed alongside one another,” Steinmeier commented.

 

Incomprehensible, but tangible

 

Changes in perspective are also a defining feature of Sherko Fatah’s work. In his books he shrewdly described war traumas, Islamic terrorism, and the fate of refugees – long before the current floods of refugees drew enormous attention to them. “Violence is also a tool. You have to understand this,” he urged during the panel discussion. He then read an impressive passage from his multi-prizewinning 2015 novel “The Last Place”, in which a jihadist’s blind fanaticism is incomprehensible, but tangible.

 

Finding ways where they seem impossible, not falling silent, but taking action – these are also major concerns of German-Jewish author Esther Dischereit. In the Babylon Cinema she read from “Flowers for Othello”, the first literary work to address the series of murders committed by the NSU, and which was published in 2014. On repeated occasions Dischereit listened to the questioning of witnesses by the “NSU Commission of Inquiry” set up by the German Bundestag. “It was a very long time before the victims of the Holocaust were mourned in public,” she said, and urged that another 40 years not be allowed to pass, “until it is clear what racist murder is, what racist structures are.”

The evening in the Babylon Cinema revealed how painful the work involved in preserving memories can be. Yet it also confirmed how important this work is in finding a common path.

 

Link to the address given by Federal Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier