German theatre leader urges louder defence of democracy

Carsten Brosda, president of the German Stage Association, has called for stronger solidarity with theatres facing political pressure and urged the cultural sector to defend democracy more forcefully, BR reported.

Brosda said the latest election result in Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD won almost 44 percent, had added to his concerns at the start of the new theatre season. He quoted Kurt Tucholsky, who warned in 1931: “Germans never become so beside themselves as when they want to come to their senses.”

He said people were trapped in a conflict-filled and persistently stressful present, burdened by the belief that nobody knew how to make things better. The question, he said, was increasingly only how quickly or slowly conditions would worsen.

In such a situation, Brosda said, destructive political offers could appear attractive because they claimed to demonstrate effectiveness through destruction. Democrats, he argued, had to show that they could be effective through “good, friendly, peaceful and diverse stories” and through policies and visions of society based on them.

Democracy could not be saved permanently without a social and cultural majority, Brosda said. He referred to philosopher Hannah Arendt, who wrote that one of the most striking and frightening aspects of Germany’s escape from reality was treating facts as if they were merely opinions.

“I don’t believe that anything is lost, but we have to make an effort,” Brosda said. “Democracy has never existed simply because other people took care of it. We are all on the field.”

Theatres are facing growing pressure, particularly from the right, he said. Extremists have objected to advertising posters showing naked performers and questioned programmes that allegedly include too few German classics such as Goethe’s “Faust”.

Brosda said attempts to set “the German” against something supposedly different had to be rejected. The culture of the future, he said, should reflect the diversity of society through an aesthetic of difference and the beauty of that difference, rather than through conflict imposed on it.

As Hamburg’s culture senator, Brosda also advised theatre directors to take disputes to court when necessary to defend freedom of expression and artistic freedom. Arguments that publicly funded theatres had to remain neutral and represent whatever the population wanted misunderstood the meaning of artistic freedom, he said.

“We are still living in a democracy in which people can simply say ‘no’ out loud and reject this,” Brosda said.

He urged the theatre sector to “stamp out the snowball” before it became an avalanche as extremist forces gained ground. The entire German theatre landscape, he said, had to become louder and make clearer what alternative ideas and models for society were available. It also had to ensure that people facing political pressure were not left alone.