Category: Thinking

A text written for a workshop under the title  ‘Beyond Us versus Them: The Role of Culture in a Divided Europe‘ held at the Representation of the State of Baden-Württemberg to the European Union, Brussels on 2 May 2017. All the images in this post are by Bill Ming and taken from ‘Bread and Salt: Stories of Art and Migration‘, by François Matarasso (Vrede van Utrecht 2013).

In Les Miserables, Victor Hugo asked ‘Civil war? What does that mean? Is there a foreign war? Is not every war between men war between brothers?’

Perhaps Hugo is saying that the way to go beyond us versus them is to reject the concept altogether. This is not a matter of piety or semantics. If we lose sight of the indivisibility of humankind, how can we defend concepts like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? The crucial importance of that text, however often we fail to meet its obligations, is to make no distinction between human beings.

The effort to establish universal rights was dearly bought. I am a child of those who suffered the massive exercise in self-harm we call the Second World War, the globalisation of violence before the term. My parents’ generation were the victims and perpetrators of unprecedented crimes. This was a civil war between people who had to persuade themselves of their differences in order to kill one another. I regret bringing such sombre reflections into a discussion of culture and its potential for healing, but it is necessary because that conflict is the origin of the post-war settlement that is now falling apart. And the foundation of that settlement is the concept of universal human rights established in the UN Declaration of 1948 and the European Convention of 1950.

The present rise of nationalism is ugly and frightening. But the assault on the idea of universal human rights is worse. The signs are everywhere. Sometimes the attack is formal and legalistic, as in the UK Government’s proposal to replace the 1998 Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights – not universal, by definition. Elsewhere, it is criminal and chaotic, as in the extrajudicial killings taking place in the Philippines since the election of President Duterte. David Armitage, the American historian, writes that ‘around the world, democratic politics now looks ever more like civil war by other means’. In such a context, is that really an over-statement?

There’s no need to itemise the current attacks on democracy, the rule of law and, above all, the foundational concept of human rights. It is a global phenomenon that is all too familiar. Its causes are multiple but, insofar as it exploits democracy itself, the fear provoked by very rapid social and economic change is a decisive and a divisive factor. Many millions of Europeans now believe, not just that their lives have got worse, but that their leaders consider their suffering an acceptable price for prosperity. That is interpreted, not unreasonably, as making them less valuable than other people. Where then is the universalism of the human rights convention?

What is most striking about recent votes – whether you look at Brexit, the American Presidential election or the Turkish Referendum – is how close the results are and how much people’s choice can be mapped on socio-economic conditions such as location, class, education and age. That sharp division makes thinking in terms of ‘us and them’ not just morally and legally wrong but dangerous as well. To say it again, you cannot defend universal rights by dividing citizens into groups. I’m with Martin Luther King here. We must be judged for our acts, not our ethnicity, religion, culture or beliefs. Only our acts are a legitimate basis for distinction.

So how can we act well in such a divided world? And does culture, which concerns us here today, have a particular role to play? Let me say at once that I don’t believe it’s culture’s task – or within its power – to solve such problems. But it does have a valuable role as a space of encounter, dialogue and – perhaps – better understanding. So I will share some examples of how artists – professional and non-professional – are searching for and often finding ways of reaching across those divisions today. 

In Friesland, the agricultural heart of the northern Netherlands, Titia Bouwmeester worked with farmers to create an interactive theatre performance that celebrates their knowledge and labour in dairy farming as they coped with the abolition of EU milk quotas. ‘Lab Molke’ took place on a farm and the process of researching, creating, rehearsing and performing together was an open dialogue about different lives between people from urban and rural communities.

In Porto, Hugo Cruz and Maria João work in theatre with people from different parts of the city, including workers in the cork industry, the deaf community, old people, the gypsy community, refugees and children. After creating several productions with and for each group, they brought five of them together in MAPA, a spectacular community play about the city’s past and future in which their different perspectives were presented at the Teatro Nacional in the city centre.

In Alexandria, Hatem Hassan Salama, brought intimate performances to neighbourhood cafes in working class parts of the city. Working with a storyteller, a photographer, a dancer and a musician, he created impromptu events in places whose traditional and masculine culture was unused to such modern art. But the result was to open such rich conversations art, politics and morality that they went on for two or three hours after the show itself.

In Stoke on Trent, Anna Francis has been using her visual art practice to talk with her neighbours in the run down area where she lives. Last summer, she created a temporary community centre in a derelict pub and about 600 people came to fifty different activities in the month: plans are now under way to make this a permanent facility. It will signal new possibilities in a very disadvantaged place that is not much heard.

These projects,  and hundreds of others in and beyond Europe, all see art as a place to begin conversations about where we are and what we might do about it. But they are art activities, not political or even social interventions. They nurture trust, skills, knowledge, confidence and networks because they do not try to produce those things. They happen without effort when people are engaged in and by a shared artistic project that speaks to their lives.

Art is a space where we can still meet, especially when the other platforms for dialogue, such as politics, the media and the online world, have become so polarised that we can no longer hear – or tolerate – each other there. Art can be safe because it does not check our identity papers on entry. It does not separate us from them. Indeed, as these examples show, art welcomes difference, complexity, even conflict – within the protective licence of character, symbol, metaphor and non-reality. Art allows us to enact our unspoken, even unconscious feelings and encounter other people, including the feared foreigner or despised neighbour. It encourages and enables reflection. Art has room for us all, and it can put up with all that we feel, think and want to say – not because it’s all good or even acceptable, but because it’s there and art knows that denying our feelings is more dangerous than doing something creative with them.

But this is just one vision of art. I know that.  It is neither inevitable nor uncontested. I respect but I do not share the fears artists sometimes express about instrumentalisation. Art is not self-sufficient. I believe in art for people’s sake because without people art has no meaning. It ceases to exist. But the trap of propaganda – especially well-meaning propaganda – is dangerous. It attracts those who strip art of precisely the complex ambiguities I value and enslave it to their vision. The risk is real and best avoided by listening, really listening, to those whose voices we find most uncomfortable.

If art is to reach across the divisions in our fragmenting world, it will do so only by being democratic, diverse and tolerant – a culture that lives up to Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: ‘Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.’ That would be a truly universal culture.

Europe is not a place. It is not a government or an administration. It is a culture, whose greatest values have been forged in response to its greatest traumas. We needed it in 1945; we need it today.

Courtroom 600 of the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg was the venue for the post-war trials of Nazi leaders, so it is strange to learn that it is still used for the administration of justice. Strange but completely appropriate. Those trials established new principles of international law and the competing concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity. They also showed that what had happened under the Nazi regime was not above the law. The scale or horror of a crime cannot be allowed to take its perpetrator beyond justice, even if it takes them beyond comprehension and perhaps beyond mercy. At the same time, Courtroom 600 is a historic site under the care of the Nuremberg Trials Memorial which works to increase understanding of what happened here.

On 21 November 1945, the American Prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson, began his opening speech by saying

‘That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.’

On 21 November 2015, in the presence of four people who had been there 70 years earlier, those words rang again in Courtroom 600. The occasion was not a reenactment but a remarkable performance given at the invitation of the Nuremberg Trials Memorial by the lawyer and academic, Philippe Sands, with actor Katja Riemann, singer Laurent Naouri and pianist Guillaume de Chassy.

‘A Song of Good and Evil’ is based on Sands’ 2016 book about the extraordinary and entangled fates of three lawyers who sat in Courtroom 600 as Jackson spoke. Two – Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht – were Jews who had studied law at the University of Lviv (now in Ukraine). Both had gone on to develop new legal concepts that would be tested in this court: Lemkin that of group destruction or ‘genocide‘ as he termed it, and Lauterpacht that of international protection of individual rights from ‘crimes against humanity‘.

The third lawyer was in the dock. Hans Frank had studied law in Kiel and represented the Nazi Party in thousands of court cases. He had been Governor-General of the occupied Polish territories between 1939 and 1945 and was now on trial for the unprecedented crimes committed under his command. Among the millions who died directly or indirectly on Frank’s orders were almost every member of Lemkin’s and Lauterpacht’s extended families.

The performance in Courtroom 600 was recorded and the film premiered on 14 March 2017, after a talk by Philippe Sands organised by Nottingham University School of Law. ‘A Song of Good and Evil’ combined elements of drama, recital, lecture and trial to create an experience unlike anything I’ve seen. As do trials, it walked the frontier between reason and emotion. Dispassionate exposition, court transcripts and documentary photographs rubbed shoulders with personal narrative, letters and – overwhelmingly – music. Although it was mediated by video, it was impossible not to be conscious that this was happening in the same place as the events it was describing, at a lifetime’s distance. It was also impossible not to respond to it except through the filter of my family history and identity, ensnared as they are in the crimes of that war and their consequences.

One manifestation of that is the crack it has left in the value systems that could be thought to guide human beings before the Nazi ascendancy. The need to invent the new legal concepts of ‘genocide’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ in 1945 is one sign of how inadequate the events of the war had shown those values to be. Because my profession is art, not law, that crack has been most obvious to me in the failure of Enlightenment ideas about art. This is a huge question, rooted in the totalitarian challenge to the humanistic ideal of the individual, which those ideas depend on and defend. In the words of Theodor Adorno:

‘Auschwitz has demonstrated irrefutably that culture has failed. That it could happen in the midst of the philosophical traditions, the arts and the enlightening sciences says more than just that these failed to take hold of and change the people. All culture after Auschwitz, including its urgent critique, is rubbish.’ (Negative Dialectic 360, emphasis added)

Adorno’s anguish came back to me as I listened to Laurent Naouri sing ‘Erbarme dich‘ from Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Here’s the problem. In Nuremberg, in July 1946, Hersch Lauterpacht drafted the closing argument for the British prosecutor, Hartley Shawcross. He had recently learned that his niece alone had survived the passage of Hans Frank, whom he had observed for months in the dock of Courtroom 600. As he worked, he sought solace in a recording of the St Matthew Passion. In his prison cell Hans Frank had the same piece of music in mind. As Sands writes in East West Street:

‘I listened to … the Bach Oratorio, “The Passion of St Matthew,”’ Frank told the American. ‘When I heard the voice of Christ, something seemed to say to me: “What? Face the enemy with a false face? You cannot hide the truth from God!” No, the truth must come out, once and for all.’ Bach’s monumental work was quite frequently evoked by Frank, offering solace with its message of mercy and forgiveness. (Chapter 125)

How can this be? How can two men standing on opposites sides of a mass grave find comfort in the same piece of music?

Erbarme dich,
Mein Gott, um meiner Zähren willen! Schaue hier,
Herz und Auge weint vor dir
Bitterlich

Have mercy,
My God, for my tears’ sake; Look hither,
Heart and eyes weep before thee
Bitterly

In this performance, in the voice of Hans Frank, I heard only self-pity. The beauty of Bach’s music fell apart like ashes.

How can this be? As Adorno implies, we believe that the arts take hold of and change us, make us better, raise us to a higher, nobler spiritual plane. Even people who never listen to classical music often accept its claimed distinction and explain their lack of interest in it as some kind of failing on their part. Elite culture has a way of making those who challenge its authority feel small. No one believes in the transcendental power of art more than those who have felt it. They know how it has changed their life and they want to convince others that it can do as much for them. Their mistake – as is evident by Lauterpacht’s and Frank’s shared appreciation of Bach – is to think that what they found was in the art when it was really in them.

The beleaguered arts and humanities are often defended nowadays on the basis that they inspire empathy in us. Empathy is the capacity to put yourself in someone else’s situation – to imagine how it must feel to be them. It goes further than sympathy, which arises from a common bond with another because it makes the imaginative leap to see things from a very different perspective to your own. The case was made by Peter Bazalgette, the retiring chair of Arts Council England in a lecture at the British Library in January 2017. But this is an old argument, as John Carey discussed in his 2005 book, What Good Are the Arts?, in which he questioned many common assumptions about art:

John Dewey, in Art as Experience, declares that art is ‘a means of entering sympathetically into the deepest elements in the experience of remote and foreign civilizations’, and that consequently it fosters global understanding. ‘Barriers are dissolved, limiting prejudices melt away, when we enter into the spirit of Negro or Polynesian art.’ Dewey does not explain how he knows when he has entered into the deepest elements of a Negro or Polynesian, and the most remarkable thing about his theory is that it could ever have been seriously entertained even for a moment. But it testifies to a deep wish among art-lovers to believe that art makes them better and more understanding of other people. (p. 108)

Hans Frank loved music and collected art. He counted the composer Richard Strauss and the novelist Gerhart Hauptmann as friends. None of these things made him interested in seeing the world through any man’s eyes but his own.

The simplistic idea that the arts strengthen our better selves does not survive the Shoah. It does not survive genocide or crimes against humanity. It does not survive the reality that a great jurist and a mass murderer can, in suffering, take comfort from the same piece of music.

It’s not that art has no truth or deeper value. It does. But you have to want to find it. I think it’s true that art can help us empathise with others: I’ve made that case myself in the past. I also think that art offers endless resources for personal growth and fulfilment. But we only find these things if we look for them. Every artistic experience is a meeting of minds – the artists’s and the audience, creator and re-creator. To imagine that we are passive receptors of some spiritual nourishment is absurd. We wrestle with what we encounter in an artistic experience, sometimes submitting, sometimes bending it to our own desires. We receive it through the filter of our character, experience and situation and we imagine it differently every time. Art is an extraordinary, limitless resource for human development. But it is we who must do the developing.

Adorno didn’t give up on culture after Auschwitz: he gave up on an outdated idea of what it was and what it could mean. As Elaine Martin concludes:

A letter to my friends in the European Union

(including, for now, the British)

After last Thursday’s vote, I wanted to write to friends in other European countries, to share my feelings and just to be in touch with people I care for. I soon realised that there were far too many of them and that I’d be writing emails for days. I also saw that I’d be repeating myself in expressing my dismay and asking them not to lose faith in me, in us, in Europe. So this is a personal letter, a letter of friendship and affection, posted here just as a way to reach all my friends – and, who knows, make new ones. I’d write it in more languages if I could, but I can only manage English and French (below). Thank you for reading.

Une lettre à mes amis de l’Union européenne

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