An July 15, the Documenta supervisory board, chaired by Kassel’s mayor Christian Geselle, will finally meet to discuss the anti-Semitism scandal and to decide on the future of Documenta general director Sabine Schormann. Angela Dorn, Minister of Art in Hesse, will not be able to ignore the clear words of her Green Party colleague Claudia Roth on July 14th. The Minister of State for Culture had counted Schormann, was “astonished” and “astonished” at the recent statements: The descriptions of the processes in the past few months are not accurate.
After Schormann, after a long silence, had announced her view of the processes in a detailed text on the Documenta website, it was immediately clear that this was by no means a liberating act. The result: we have reached the level of the War of the Roses. The parties only talk to each other through the media. And actually it is an ineffective squabbling, was worked up in 28 days: nothing.
Schormann writes in all seriousness on documenta-fifteen.de that everything has long since been clarified. After the scandal on June 18, a newly founded network of experts decided that no questionable works could be found at the Documenta. Need for action: non-existent. “Further measures” that “go beyond an accompanying mediation” are not necessary, Schormann writes, without naming horse and rider who was even authorized here. Meron Mendel, director of the Anne Frank educational institution, certainly wasn’t, although he was said to be on that body before he threw it down. Mendel immediately contradicted Schormann and made it clear on Deutschlandfunk: He didn’t know of any other experts, he hadn’t been shown a single work himself, and access to the Indonesian artists’ collective Ruangrupa had been blocked. This is a “fog candle”. Is it really possible that Schormann is bluffing or even lying here? That would be devastating. Who are the mysterious decision-makers hiding here in the collective?
The absurd theater continues, which began with a liberation by Claudia Roth. On June 27, the “Spiegel” published that immediately after the first allegations of anti-Semitism in January, the Minister of State for Culture had put together a council of experts to advise the Documenta – in order to prevent the catastrophe. However, their suggestion was dismissed in Kassel as censorship and an encroachment on artistic freedom. Steps one and two are correct, we know that for sure. Because Schormann admits it now.
However, Sabine Schormann now claims that there was no “fixed body attached to the supervisory board”, but a “five-strong team of consultants to support the artistic management and the artists as well as the gGmbH”. Author and curator Emily Dische-Becker was responsible for the coordination, on the recommendation of the BKM, among others, and in coordination with the artistic team. Did this body really exist? Or is it a chimera, like the network that now issued the clean bill of health?
In fact, up until the beginning of the Documenta, Dische had a consulting contract with Kassel, put together the program for the debate “We need to talk” that was eagerly awaited by all parties, but whose content and cast then prompted the Central Council of Jews to write to Claudia distance Roth from it. Josef Schuster, President of the Central Council, regretted that his association had not been considered as a participant in the announced talks. As a result, participants of the event canceled out of loyalty – and the entire event failed. At the time, Ruangrupa diagnosed in an open letter: “The preliminary failure of the forum is therefore also a failure of the German discourse on anti-Semitism and racism.” But who really failed?
Emily Dische-Becker, who co-organized the controversial “Hijacking Memory” conference in the House of World Cultures at the beginning of June, confirmed to the “Jewish General” when asked that she advised the Documenta at their request and was involved in the conceptual advice of the forum “We need to talk” to have been involved, “also in the question of putting together a panel of experts”. The commissioner for culture and media made suggestions. But she didn’t pursue the Documenta any further. Her contract for internal advice ended before the opening of the Documenta, she quotes the “Jüdische Allgemeine”. Dische contradicts Schormann, who wants to see all the responsibility with Roth.
In the face of this confusion, one inevitably wonders: Who would have been the strong, integrative figure who could have successfully carried out this crucial mediation work in the spring, could have convinced Ruangrupa that a substantive debate is important – and perhaps even the erection of the anti-Semitic banner could have prevented? Who should Roth have enforced in Kassel? It wasn’t Dische-Becker.
Because this back and forth leads to the crucial question: What goal were Claudia Roth and Sabine Schormann actually pursuing back then? Was there anyone in Kassel who took the allegations seriously and was really interested in an argument? So far, one has only ever heard that the talks with the Indonesian artist collective were extremely tough, and that there was always another artist present in the rounds. The “Süddeutsche Zeitung” now has a recording of a training course for Documenta guides on June 1st.
It seems to be evidence that “Dische-Beckers does not see her own task as providing information about anti-Semitism or “pointing out the difference between ‘legitimate criticism of Israel’ and ‘Israel-related anti-Semitism'”. Rather, it is “to provide guidance on how to dismiss allegations of anti-Semitism.” She is quoted as saying: “And, in general: the entire anti-Semitism debate in Germany is poisoned because it is being instrumentalized by political actors”. In the course of the session, one participant then ranted in “a mixture of question and contribution about an Oedipus complex of the Israelis. This is already evident in what he claims is an accumulation of sexualized terms in Hebrew on the topics of the motherland, weapons and warfare.” Dische-Becker did not react to this.
Sabine Schormann and the curatorial team made it clear back in the spring that the allegations against them were pure defamation, baseless slander. The course of this conversation shows why: antisemitism is not recognized as a problem, only the public reaction. To pretend now that everyone worked so meticulously on an argument back then is unbelievable. The willingness to really mediate has probably never existed.
So how do we have to proceed now? Claudia Roth’s spokesman put it in a nutshell: It is increasingly questionable whether the Documenta Director General can or wants to do this. Sabine Schormann should let her office rest – a really sovereign mediator must take over. Because this debate is having a corrosive effect on the entire German art world – including for the museums and their directors, who have remained silent since the discussion began, although we know that they deal with the topic of the anti-Israel boycott movement BDS and the many supporters in their everyday life.
Those directors who have a clear agenda, who have signed the initiative GG 5.3 Cosmopolitanism, such as the head of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, Hartmut Dorgerloh, or Johannes Ebert from the Goethe-Institut, but also those who worry about the BDS Exhibit supporter Angela Davies in Dresden. BDS has become an everyday topic in German museums. And everyone urgently needs to talk to everyone. The topic did not disappear with the end of the Documenta. It stays and gets bigger the less people talk.