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60 Hans Haacke. DER BEVÖLKERUNG (To the Population

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60 Hans Haacke. DER BEVÖLKERUNG (To the Population Hans Haacke. DER BEVÖLKERUNG (To the Population), 2000. Reichstag (German Parliament Building), Berlin. Detail, June 2001. All works by Haacke © Hans Haacke/VG Bild- Kunst/Artists Rights Society. 60 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041887448 by guest on 28 September 2021 DER BEVÖLKERUNG: A Conversation ROSALYN DEUTSCHE, HANS HAACKE, AND MIWON KWON Rosalyn Deutsche: Participants in today’s widespread debates about memorials, in Germany and elsewhere, often assume that memorials, simply by their presence, will help prevent the recurrence of past disasters. Others are asking exactly how memorials to historical traumas might take respon- sibility not only for remembering but for transforming past injustices. What kind of memory might offer such hope? Since DER BEVÖLKERUNG is a mnemonic representation, would you call it a Holocaust memorial, if a nontraditional, countermonumental one? How do you think of DER BEVÖLKERUNG in relation to Germany’s current “memorial culture” and, especially, the tendency of the state and other institutions to treat artists (and architects) as “memory experts”? Hans Haacke: As you suggest, DER BEVÖLKERUNG commemorates those who were deprived of their civil rights, persecuted, and murdered dur- ing the Nazi regime “im Namen des deutschen Volkes” [in the name of the German people]. It is not generally known that the bronze letters of the Reichstag inscription were cast in the S.A. Loevy foundry in Berlin. Last year the Jewish Museum in Berlin devoted an exhibition to the his- tory and the fate of the Loevy family. Five members of the family per- ished in concentration camps. Three were executed, accused of having participated in the plot to assassinate Hitler. About two years ago, in the presence of one survivor of the family, who is now living in New York, the speaker of the Bundestag, Wolfgang Thierse, unveiled a commemo- rative plaque at the public entrance of the Reichstag. The model for DER BEVÖLKERUNG and images of the work in situ were included in the show; I participated on a panel with the title “How German should the population be?” Franziska Eichstädt-Bohlig, the Green Party member of the Bundestag who—in contrast to her party colleague Antje Vollmer—spoke and voted in favor of my proposal, called it a Denkanstoss (impetus to think). She also referred to it with the untranslatable neologism Denkwerk. Its mul- tiple allusions include that it is a work of art, the result of a deliberative process, and that it not only commemorates but makes us think about the present—and the future. By profession she happens to be an architect. Grey Room 16, Summer 2004, pp. 60–81. © 2004 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 61 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041887448 by guest on 28 September 2021 Memorials risk eventually blending into the landscape like street fur- niture. One gets used to them. We have seen that they can be co-opted for purposes which were foreign to their creators. Memorials tend to direct our thoughts primarily to the past. Rarely do they cause us to consider the present and how we want to shape what’s to come. RD: One way in which DER BEVÖLKERUNG avoids fulfilling the demands of the official memorial culture, which often aims at closure and nor- malization and results in familiarization and other kinds of forgetting, is through its overt challenge to nationalist sentiments. It thus avoids the danger, first identified by Adorno, of producing a work about the Holocaust that, in becoming part of the cultural heritage, feeds the very nationalism that caused the disaster. (This is similar to the question of whether and how any memorial at Ground Zero can escape assimilation to triumphalist sentiments.) DER BEVÖLKERUNG rejects the demand placed on artists to provide a cultural basis for a new German nationalism. I view it as a kind of Benjaminian memorial, one that “seizes hold of an image as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” The danger in this case is authoritarian democracy, in which the image—and language—of democracy become tools of oppressive, in this case, anti-immigrant, forces. It also, like so much of your work, brings the past into a constellation with the present, revealing the continuity underlying apparent discontinuity. I’m referring in particular to the connection it draws between the Nazis’ treatment of Jews and other “foreigners,” on the one hand, and the current neo-Nazi treatment of Turkish people and other immigrants, on the other. In making this connection, the work challenges Volker Kauder’s contention, made in the parliamentary debate, that the problem of fascism is confined to “the terrible twelve years of National Socialism.”1 HH: Kauder, who started the campaign against my project, rhetorically asked in his address to the Parliament, “When . will we Germans learn to behave normally, as normally as the French and the British,” and urged no longer to reduce das deutsche Volk to “a short time in its history.” Such sentiments are common among those who want to forget that this shameful period has left an indeli- ble mark on German history. The Bundestag record mentions catcalls from the SPD [Social Democratic Party] and the Greens in response. It is not surprising that Kauder was also a fervent opponent of the lib- eralization of the German immigration laws, which had been passed in 2002 by the governing coalition of the SPD and the Greens in the Bundestag. Their Hans Haacke. Project model for DER BEVÖLKERUNG, 1999. 62 Grey Room 16 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041887448 by guest on 28 September 2021 enactment was blocked in the Bundesrat [German Upper House] where the CDU- and CSU- [Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian-Social Union] governed states command a majority.2 Last fall Martin Hohmann, one of Kauder’s fellow CDU members of the Bundestag, called Jews a Tätervolk (people of perpetrators). It took enor- mous public pressure to get the CDU Bundestag faction to expel him. However, he still has a considerable following in his party. Let me also mention that the CDU in the state of Hesse, where Hohmann comes from, had adroitly used racist innuendo in its election campaigns. It’s an old and ugly technique, not only in Germany—and, as we know, not only directed against Jews. Miwon Kwon: In the shift—Volk to Bevölkerung—you’re obviously call- ing into question what the project’s opponents are comfortable accept- ing: that the German Constitution already guarantees equal treatment before the law for all human beings [der Mensch] and that the concept of “Volk” has by now been purged of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi regime in its name (hence, several speakers pointed out that the call “To the Population” is redundant). In this last regard especially, and given Germany’s particular historical trauma and burden, I think Rosalyn’s suggestion that we think about DER BEVÖLKERUNG as a Holocaust (counter)memorial a very appropriate provocation. But I am also concerned to think about the implications of your project—particularly the call to the population instead of the German people—in relation to the current reorganization of national identity, transformation of the function of nation-states, and issues of sovereignty within the context of a pan-capitalist internationalism that is being forged by, among others, the German state. While I understand that your inten- tion is to displace an exclusionary call of national unity based on purity of blood with an inclusive call of a more heterogeneous human collec- tivity based on place/soil, I am a little disturbed by the ways in which the term population, defined in English at least as simply the number of people within a country or region (devoid of considerations of language, cultural heritage, history, etc.), conjures the systemic rationalism of sta- tistics, the world of computation (of bodies) and demographics, the very tools of economic prediction and reorganization. “To the Population,” in other words, in dropping the nation-identifying adjective “German,” opens onto a more pluralistic conception of humanity while at the same time neutralizing the specificities of cultures and histories that constitute it. What your project highlights for me is the difficulty of distinguishing the liberatory from the authoritarian effects of the democratic discourse in the processes of consolidation of global power alignments and economic Deutsche, Haacke, and Kwon | DER BEVÖLKERUNG: A Conservation 63 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041887448 by guest on 28 September 2021 networks today. Let me try to compose a question out of these concerns. In the project proposal you mentioned the importance of Bertolt Brecht’s 1937 state- ment in conceiving your project: “In these times, the one who says Bevölkerung instead of Volk . already does not support many lies.” How do you think this statement speaks to the year 2004? That is, even as old lies persist, are there not new lies for us to identify and resist? HH: Both in English and in German the word population has a dry, soci- ological, and somewhat bureaucratic ring. It does not make our heart beat faster and rally behind the flag. This is why Brecht preferred it to the mythic and tribally inflected Volk, and that is also why I introduced it at the Reichstag. It puts the notion of the “Volk” into historical perspective, particularly when it is linked to the qualifier deutsch. I believe it is impor- tant not to lose sight of the very specific political and historical context for which this work was conceived and not to get sidetracked by unre- lated issues, however important they may be in another context.
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