Claudia Roth took office as Minister of State for Culture only a few months before the start of this documenta. And so one could come to the conclusion that she personally was not to blame for the anti-Semitic disaster in Kassel. However, she bears the responsibility for how things should go on. However, your five-point plan does not help to lead the documenta out of the crisis – on the contrary. There is only one possibility: the federal government urgently needs to stop all support for the Documenta. Or become an active shareholder. Anything else is irresponsible.
From the outside, one always imagines the Documenta as a large, heavy tanker that can hardly be turned around – a prestige project of great national importance, about which the Ministry of Culture is regularly informed. The opposite is the case, as became clear in 2017, when seven million euros in debt remained after Adam Szymczyk’s megalomaniac Documenta, suitcases of money were carried to Athens – and now it can no longer be overlooked. Documenta 14 was already an organizational disaster – and fundamental changes were promised. Then what happened? Nothing.
The shareholders, the city of Kassel and the state of Hesse are responsible for all of this. You decide – and have done everything to ensure that it stays that way. The federal government is allowed to give money, but that’s all they want to see and hear from Berlin in Kassel. But you are not up to the task. This is now the second time in a row. And at the center of this scandal is: Lord Mayor and Chairman of the Supervisory Board Christian Geselle.
Two places on the supervisory board were previously reserved for representatives of the German Federal Cultural Foundation. But why were the board members Hortensia Völckers and Alexander Fahrenholz sitting? not there since March 2018? You can say it so clearly: They no longer wanted to take responsibility, no longer wanted to serve as a fig leaf, without power and influence. The Kulturstiftung did not – as Kassel is now suggesting – secretly withdraw from the affair: it threw down 2018 with drums and trumpets. Simple: She was fed up. On March 15, 2018, she put her reasoning in writing.
Those were the months after the disastrous end of the Documenta 2017. Geselle replied by pointing out that there was no need for the shareholders to be dismissed and that, according to the partnership agreement, two supervisory board seats were now vacant, which the Federal Cultural Foundation could fill. Völckers replied on April 26, 2018 that she did not intend to take on this task – and asked Geselle to adjust the articles of association. This is possible without any problems – yes, that was his job. On May 31, 2019, the German Federal Cultural Foundation reaffirmed its decision in writing. She only found out about the immediate dismissal of the then managing director, Annette Kulenkampff, from the newspaper. The last letter went unanswered.
This decision by the German Federal Cultural Foundation can be viewed as unsupervised or as an admission that the federal government no longer wanted to support the development of the documenta, which – one has to put it so harshly – ended in an event showing anti-Semitic pictures. Why the financial support was maintained at that time is a question that needs to be clarified now. But how is it possible that the federal government acts so impotently, is powerless?
Claudia Roth also experienced this with Geselle in the spring, when her head of office, Andreas Görgen, made a suggestion as to how the accusations of anti-Semitism against the Documenta could be dealt with self-critically: an expert advisory board for the supervisory board in Kassel. It’s called something like: get help, deal with it. But Christian Geselle immediately freaked out, according to several sources, and barked that artistic freedom was in danger. He continued this theater until the memorable June 18, when the anti-Semitic drawings were found in Kassel.
And now Geselle is acting as if the federal government could have intervened at any time, “attend meetings of the company’s supervisory board and exercise corresponding information and control functions”. It looks like Geselle never bothered how to organize the board after the departures, but simply left it vacant. That alone is a scandal.
It is all the more important that Claudia Roth now takes a clear position. But there is no point in reviving old, failed structures, such as sending someone from the federal government to the supervisory board. It’s even worse now to think about content controls. First, consequences must be drawn in Kassel. Christian Geselle, as the main person responsible, must bear the responsibility. Sabine Schormann should offer to vacate her chair at the end of the Documenta in September. It was she who was brought into office by Mayor Christian Geselle in 2018 with the words that she would reorganize the Documenta, that she would completely rethink the organizational structures and equipment of the world art exhibition.
The next step must be a fundamental structural reform of the Documenta. It should always and exclusively be about structural reform. In terms of content, politics must stay out of it. The Documenta needs a responsibility structure that you can rely on, like a good museum director.
How do you achieve that? Either the federal government and thus the successor to Hortensia Völckers, who will be appointed in July, will really have influence and power, which means she will become a shareholder – or the federal government should withdraw from Kassel completely. And 100 percent: no money, no support, no mandates. There is no other possibility, otherwise there will be another scandal in five years. And that would simply be fatal.