The responsibility of Claudia Roth
“I clearly demand that at least the managing director Schormann be fired”
A heavily criticized installation at the Documenta in Kassel is being dismantled. Now the calls for a reappraisal of the scandal are getting louder. Michel Friedman speaks plain language: He calls for the dismissal of General Director Sabine Schormann.
For weeks, the discussion about the Documenta has been getting more and more intense. But anyone who thought that anti-Semitic tendencies in the art scene began in Kassel was wrong. A newly founded network has now issued a clean bill of health – and normal operations are running. How please is that possible?
Sabine Schormann got in touch. The general director of the documenta did not speak in the Bundestag culture committee – she did not appear there. She also did not call a press conference to answer journalists’ questions. No, she left a 14,000-character statement on the art show’s website. Those who had expected her resignation were disappointed. Sabine Schormann “explains herself”, it says there.
Now that everyone has had their turn: from outraged parliamentarians to the artist Hito Steyerl, who has withdrawn her works from Kassel, to the curator Ade Darmawan from Ruangrupa. The low point was reached when the director of the Anne Frank educational institution, Meron Mendel, announced his resignation as mediator last week.
And now the main person responsible, Sabine Schormann, is in touch. A lot is known: your dismay and simultaneous emphasis on the “role allocation”. She is only responsible for the “organization” and “finances”. She points out that she “acted immediately”. But when you read it, it becomes clear: the measures were immediately distributed collectively again “in the sense of the overall composition of documenta fifteen” – and petered out.
A network of experts has been formed that is based at the Documenta archive, she writes, so no advisory board, as many have called for: “The curators are called upon to draw on expertise from this advisory network if they cannot make a final assessment themselves. whether a work intended for the exhibition uses imagery that is anti-Semitic,” Schormann writes. Again one reacts instead of acting.
Normal operation at the Documenta
The new network also sees no need for action at all, so the normal operation of the documenta has long been running smoothly again, while everyone outside of Kassel is very worried: “Further measures” that “go beyond accompanying mediation” are not necessary. Who is speaking here? What are the criteria of the networkers? In any case, this is not what a lasting confrontation with anti-Semitism looks like.
And so you want to call for Claudia Roth. But is she really the great enlightener? Because one point in the Schormann text is puzzling: In the spring, the Ministry of Culture assigned the curator Emily Dische-Becker the task of processing the anti-Semitism allegations and protecting the Documenta from the GAU. According to Schormann, she apparently took over the entire “coordination” – “on the recommendation of the (sic) BKM, among others”, i.e. the commissioner for culture and media. Schormann seems to have assumed that she would take care of that.
Miscast by Claudia Roth
As is well known, Roth boasts that he was the first to take action in the spring. But now she has to ask herself why Emily Dische-Becker was the right mediator for her in that situation – also in cooperation with the Central Council of Jews. After all, she is one of the co-organizers of the controversial conference “Hijacking memory” in Berlin’s House of World Cultures (HKW).
There, “a progressive milieu emerged as the victim of particular Jewish memory,” as the Israeli sociologist Natan Sznaider sharply criticized in the Jewish General. We can only imagine how Roth herself feels about the theses of the HKW, of which she is the top sponsor. At some point she will have to speak to explain what she thought about the cast in the spring.