60 Hans Haacke. DER BEVÖLKERUNG (To the Population

Home , Hans Haacke, Reichstag (Nazi Germany)

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.

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 during 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 history 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.

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.

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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 collectivity 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 statistics, 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

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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 statement 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 important not to lose sight of the very specific political and historical context for which this work was conceived and not to get sidetracked by unrelated issues, however important they may be in another context. Different from the common and more casual reference to “the American people,” who are all of immigrant stock (with the exception of Native American Indians), even today there is still a certain hesitancy in Germany to use the locu- tion “das deutsche Volk” instead of simply speaking of “die Deutschen.” Those who do so in other than solemn declarations of legal significance— like the preamble of the constitution—more often than not are on the conservative end of the political spectrum or on the radical right. The invocation of das deutsche Volk can or is meant to have ethnic and exclusionary overtones. It is on the lips of every neo-Nazi skinhead who beats up on people who do not look sufficiently German to him. An antiracist nongovernmental organization in Berlin calls itself Amadeu Antonio Stiftung. In its name it commemorates an Angolan who was murdered because he was not white and certainly not German in the killers’ view. He is not the only one who paid with his life. Shortly after the first salvo in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung against my project, written by a journalist who is close to the conservative wing of the CDU, the cover headline of Die Junge Freiheit, a notorious rightist weekly, alerted the troops with a preposterous cover headline that I was planning to get rid of the German people (“Das Deutsche Volk abschaffen”). It is important to recognize that Germany is well on the way to being an immigration country. By now, 9 percent of the permanent residents are not natives. A large portion of them come

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041887448 by guest on 28 September 2021 from Turkey. Ironically, their numbers must increase if the famed German social security system is to survive and the country is to have a chance in today’s global competition. You voice concern about the cold rationalism of statistics, demographics, and economic calculations. It is true, they can turn us into mere ciphers and can be used for global economic and political domination. But it would be stupid, I believe, and utterly irresponsible to forgo these tools in making the future more livable by those who resist hegemony, fend for equal rights, and do away with age-old hatreds between nations, religions, and ethnicities. The entire population, irrespective of an individual’s citizenship status, pays taxes, social security dues, and is subject to the law. I would also argue that the mixing and cross-fertilization of cultures and the incorporation of formerly alien histories is not synony- mous with cultural homogenization and the abandonment of a “home- grown” culture. Germany has seen many migrations. Without them the country would not only be culturally but also in many other respects poorer. Let me cite a folksy example: Grimms’ fairy tales. One generally believes they are deeply rooted in German culture. They are in fact, for the most part, French, imported by Protestant Huguenots, who had been driven out of France and settled not far from Kassel, where the Grimm brothers had collected them. Beginning in 1791, Goethe, Mr. German Culture if there ever was one, produced Shakespeare in the theater he directed in Weimar. The bard has been a mainstay of the German theater ever since. The cultural tradition of German-speaking countries is unthinkable without the contribution Jews have made. Now, young, German-born Turkish writers and filmmakers are beginning to be recognized. In Britain, in France, and in other European countries with a sordid colonial past, some of the most creative cultural figures today trace their heritage to the former colonies. Cultural amalgamation also has a long history in the United States. To mention only one obvious example, a significant part of its “population” are African Americans. Since their arrival as slaves, far from being culturally “neutralized,” they have had and continue to have a profound influence on “American culture.” And we are all richer for it.

RD: Earlier, when I called DER BEVÖLKERUNG a counter-monument, I meant that it engages in a dialogue

Top: Norman Foster. Glass cupola atop Reichstag, 1993–99. Public viewing platform. Photo: Dennis Gilbert. Opposite and bottom: Portico, Reichstag (German Parliament Building), Berlin. Photo: Stefan Müller.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041887448 by guest on 28 September 2021 or contest with an existing monument, the Reichstag building, with its imperialist sculptures, as well as with the other monuments and the broader spatial organization of the city as it is seen from the Norman Foster dome. By “talking with” the Reichstag,3 DER BEVÖLKERUNG re-signifies it, disrupting the authoritarian messages and seeming solidity of what you call, referring to the architecture, “an imperial palace,” an appearance that belies the Reichstag’s democratic history.4 DER BEVÖLKERUNG uses the building’s architectural language to make the building speak differ- ently and I would say more democratically, because the building itself now becomes the site of a democratic questioning of power and a contest over the meaning of the social order. But the questioning takes place architecturally. It occurs to me that works like DER BEVÖLKERUNG offer a democratic model for what is sometimes called “art in the public sphere.” Critics often use this phrase to describe art that engages in political struggles that are extra-aesthetic. They thus shore up the idea that art and politics are essentially separate. By producing debates among and within buildings, statues, and art, a work like DER BEVÖLKERUNG reveals that aesthetic structures and traditions are already part of the political public sphere.

HH: Yes. It is naive if not pernicious to claim that art and politics are totally separate, that there is an art without political implications. To make such separations and ghettoize so-called political art is, in itself, a political act. In the context of GERMANIA, my work at the 1993 Venice Biennale, I was asked whether I thought the German pavilion, which had been given a martial makeover under Hitler, should be torn down and replaced by a new structure. I said no. That’s not how we grapple effec- tively with the history inscribed in this building. I also don’t promote taking the letters from the Loevy foundry off the façade of the Reichstag. In both instances juxtaposing two statements that are at odds with each other causes produc- tive friction. Let me add, in passing, a note about Sir Norman Foster’s rehab of the Reichstag. His original winning design called for a thin flat slab on stilts over the entire building, similar to the roof of a gas station. The Bundestag insisted that the building again have a dome, as it did when it was built by Wallot in the late nine- teenth century. Grudgingly Foster complied. The result is absolutely magniﬁcent. Even though

Hans Haacke. GERMANIA, 1993. Installation in German pavilion of Venice Biennale.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041887448 by guest on 28 September 2021 the imperial imagery is still crowding the architrave, his dome has made the building lose its pompous weight and its attendant political implications. As you know, the roof is open to the public. Inside the glass dome one can walk up to the very top and enjoy an unobstructed view over Berlin. One sees the Brandenburg Gate, the synagogue, the new corpo- rate towers and consumer palaces of Potsdamer Platz, the Siegessäule [Victory Column], the new chancellery, and, behind the Akademie der Künste, which is being rebuilt next to the Brandenburg Gate, another construction site, Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust memorial. By far the tallest structure around is an elegant TV tower, built decades ago by the East German Government on Alexanderplatz. I could add a long list of other telling sites that are visible from the roof of the Reichstag. Looking straight down into one of the two open-air interior courtyards of the building on the bottom one can also see DER BEVÖLKERUNG.

RD: One of the most important achievements of DER BEVÖLKERUNG has been to inspire a democratic contest over the meaning of democracy, both in the seat of representative democracy, where MPs look at the courtyard from the assembly hall, and among the public, which sees the work from the roof, thereby encouraging a public sphere of direct democracy. With respect to this debate about democracy, I’m having some difficulty reconciling the necessity of respecting the work’s specificity to the German context with my desire to relate the debate to broader questions about democracy. My difficulty centers on the term Volk. Early in the parliamentary debate, Gert Weisskirchen of the SPD asked, “What is the basis of democracy?” Speakers responded in various ways, both explicit and implicit. Weisskirchen, for instance, argued that the fundamental democratic principle is the inviolability of human dignity and equality before the law, an argument echoed by others. He also argued against the notion of democracy as simply a majoritarian discourse. At least, that’s how I understand his statement that “Before any elections and ballots, democracy is based on acknowledging that some things cannot be voted on.” By contrast, Volker Kauder of the CDU/CSU refers positively to the “normalcy” of what he sees as the French and British idea that democracy is “based on liberty for the sovereign people of their states” and “dignity” for noncitizen residents. (Does this mean unfree- dom for noncitizens, and, if so, can there be dignity without liberty?) Certain theorists of radical democracy, however—such as Claude Lefort, for whom democracy is not only a form of government but a whole new form of society—argue that the basis of democracy is the disappearance of certainty about the meaning of “the people,” a disappearance that legit- imates debate about who constitutes the people and makes it possible to

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041887448 by guest on 28 September 2021 question democratic power, whose source resides in the people. This is what Lefort calls “the question of democracy,” which, he says, emerges with the disappearance of authoritarian references to an extra-social, unim- peachable ground of the people. Two years ago, in an interview with Chantal Mouffe, I used Lefort’s ideas to interpret DER BEVÖLKERUNG as a performance of the democratic contestation of what “the people”—the political community—is, what constitutes its unity.5 The work still seems consistent with radical democratic theory in its expansion and deepening of democracy through a kind of declaration of rights for noncitizen permanent residents and non-German citizens. But now, given the stress you place on the difference between the German Volk and the English the people or the French le peuple, I’m no longer sure about the correctness of my earlier reading. As you stress, Germans have historically deﬁned themselves in terms of ethnic rather than political identity, a tendency intensiﬁed by the Nazis, when, as you say in the project proposal, “Whether a person was consid- ered German or not became a matter of life and death.” The racial connotations of Volk, especially when the adjective deutsch is attached, would seem to preclude interpreting DER BEVÖLKERUNG’s challenge to “Dem Deutschen Volke” as part of a perpetual democratic questioning of who constitutes the people, understood in the sense of the political community and the source of democratic power. Yet German history, especially twentieth-century history, certainly necessitates keeping the identity of the people open to question (which, indeed, your work seems, to me, to do). How can this problem be resolved, linguistically or otherwise? “Population,” a forceful challenge to the people in its ethnic, nationalistic sense, doesn’t really challenge the constitution of the people, in its political sense. Indeed, the German specificity of Volk would seem to preclude this challenge. Could one say that in challenging the term Volk, and, in particular, deutschen Volke, DER BEVÖLKERUNG supports transforming Volk into the people in the political sense?

HH: Our discussion of Volk and Bevölkerung touches on intricacies of national and supranational histories and projects, on lived experiences and political philosophy. The latter sometimes risks being an abstract discourse, divorced from social reality “on the ground” and diverting us from examining how to use that very particular reality’s potential for shaping the future. Of course, these things are all interrelated, laced with untranslatable linguistic nuances and expressed, inevitably, in historically contingent language. In conversations with non-Germans, who are puzzled by what appears to them to be an innocuous word, I point out that, because Germany became a uniﬁed nation very late, the German

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041887448 by guest on 28 September 2021 notion of “the people”—rather than politically—is invested more with references to a common language, culture, and ethnic unity, even though to a degree only imagined. The predominantly cultural and tribal versus political meaning of the Volk is a form of nativism that exists also in other countries. It is a potentially volatile brew that the Nazis exploited with deadly consequences. The nationalist and ethnic, if not outright racist, inflection of the Volk, however, was not the only one with cur- rency in Germany. The French Revolution had given le peuple a decid- edly political connotation that spread across Europe and inspired many subsequent revolutions, including the failed German revolt in 1848. Sixty years later the Kaiser was toppled and the first German republic was promulgated in 1918. The Volk finally proclaimed itself the sovereign—from the Reichstag. The post–World War II constitution of 1949 speaks of the German people in the terms of this republican tradition. In Article 1 it covenants the inviolability of human dignity, and the German people professes its allegiance to “inviolable and inalienable human rights (Menschenrechte) as the foundation of every human community, of peace, and of justice in the world.” In Article 3 it declares that all people (Menschen) are equal before the law. In both instances, please note the choice of the word Menschen [people] rather than Germans. Article 3 continues stipulating the equality of men and women and prohibits discrimination, both positive as well as negative, because of a person’s gender, familial background, race, language, place of origin and heritage, a person’s creed, and religious or political opinions. Probably in view of the great number of people who were maimed in Hitler’s war, it also expressly prohibits discrimination against the handicapped. Seen from this perspective, I have no quarrel with the invocation of the German people. In a letter to the editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, I followed the thinking of Habermas about these matters and declared myself proudly a “patriot of the constitution.” One of the ﬁrst bags of soil around the dedication “To the Population” was collected by the then Minister of Justice, Herta Däubler-Gmelin, from the grave of Carlo Schmid, who was one of the major framers of this constitution.

RD: I’m glad that you mentioned the inﬂuence of the French democratic revolution and its notion of le peuple in Germany. It conﬁrms my feeling that theories of the people as the democratic political community (by contrast with the people as a racial unity), one that remains democratic so long as it questions its basis, far from being abstract in relation to DER BEVÖLKERUNG, are highly relevant to the specificities of the German context. Your work poses the problem of how to articulate the two. Your introduction of another term, Menschen, is also important, since it raises

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041887448 by guest on 28 September 2021 equally urgent questions about the meaning of humanity and of human rights whose source is not citizenship. Can such rights be exercised within the parameters of the nation-state? Or do such rights claims require the agency of transnational institutions? Interestingly, in the German context, Giorgio Agamben writes that it was precisely the Nazis who raised the question of the meaning of humanity when they attempted to separate the nonhuman from the human (in the human) in the concentration camp, which he considers the paradigm of modern power.

MK: I’d like to go back to Weisskirchen’s comment from the parliamentary debate, which I found extraordinary, not least because art was held as exemplary of those things that “cannot be voted on.” This is even more exceptional given the kind of debates about public art in the United States wherein art is described as needing to please “the people,” servic- ing a mythic social will. If I understand Weisskirchen and similarly minded speakers correctly, elected government officials are supposed to facilitate social will, but this will cannot override an individual’s artistic will. Art does not and should not fall under the rules of popular sovereignty, in other words, and the Arts Committee is charged to pro- tect the paradox—the sanctity of artistic will as the very expression of a democratic social will. What are your views on this point that democracy must acknowledge that art is exempt from the necessity of popular con- sensus? Does this mean that social will and artistic will are, and should remain, incommensurate?

HH: I believe in the background of Weisskirchen’s position is the memory of the shameful Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich the Nazis organized in 1937. They attached a tag to each of the works they had pulled from public museums. It reminded the viewer that taxpayers’ money had been wasted on it (language we have more recently heard in the culture wars of this country). The Nazis claimed to follow the Gesundes Volksemﬁnden (good/healthy sense of the people)! Indeed, it is probably true that the majority of the Germans, like the majority of Americans today, are skeptical if not hostile to art they don’t understand, that they ﬁnd offensive or suspect of being a fraud. Since the late 1980s, populist demagogues have succeeded in having Congress pass legislation that has crippled the NEA and led to self-censorship in many institutions. Just a few years ago Rudolph Giuliani appealed to these sentiments when he threatened the Brooklyn Museum. It probably was such apprehensions about leaving decisions on art open to populist exploitation that moti- vated Weisskirchen. When I spoke to the parliamentary caucus of the Green Party just before the Bundestag debate, several Green MPs emphat-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041887448 by guest on 28 September 2021 ically declared they would abstain from voting on the project because they object to voting on art. As principled as this position is, it almost doomed the project. Let me add this: Rita Süssmuth, the former CDU speaker of the Bundestag, is rightfully credited for establishing the Kunstbeirat as a buffer and a forum where decisions on art in Bundestag buildings are shielded from populist drives in the Parliament. It is com- posed of twelve MPs, representing all parties in proportion to their numbers in the Bundestag. The committee is aided in its deliberations by a group of experts (museum directors, curators, a former Documenta head). Volker Kauder is a member of that Committee, as is Antje Vollmer. It voted twice overwhelmingly in favor of my project. Had the Bundestag, in fact, overridden this vote, the Kunstbeirat would have found itself in a very difﬁcult spot. Also, this concern is behind the speeches of Süssmuth, Weisskirchen, Thierse (present Speaker) and others, who supported the project. In many countries mechanisms have been put into place to pro- tect the dispersal of public money for cultural projects from becoming a political football. There appears to be a contradiction between this sort of protection and an unfettered exercise of decision making by majority vote. Whether it amounts to an undemocratic practice when it is, in fact, based on a wise decision arrived at by a democratic vote is debatable. I happen to belong to the constituency that benefits from this arrange- ment; and there are many others (for example, universities, libraries, medical facilities, to name only a few). The freedom of speech guaran- teed in the Bill of Rights and in the German Constitution’s stipulation “Art and science, research and teaching are free” further compound the complexity of these issues.

MK: Antje Vollmer, a Green Party member and an opponent of your project, was the only speaker to make mention of the art market during the hearings. She makes a point of underlining the fact that the art that has been commissioned or bought by the German state thus far are the same works found in major contemporary art museums. Vollmer’s conclusion is that certain “exclusive clubs and groups that mutually advise and promote each other” (implicating the members of the Arts Committee here) are monopolizing not only the marketplace but the state’s national art program as well. Her basic complaint is that the state’s exclusive patron- age of a narrow roster of already established, internationally recognized artists leaves little chance for unknown artists or artists of future genera- tions to find state support. What is your sense of the current relationship between the art market and official state culture in Germany? If it is true that there is a confluence or continuity between the international art market and the state’s official nation-building cultural policy,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041887448 by guest on 28 September 2021 then could Vollmer have missed a bigger point? Does the situation not indicate that the very premise of nation-building now avoids overt cham- pioning of “German” artists (the weight of past nationalist endeavors persist) in order to secure the nation’s position as a Euro-international cultural leader? Simply and crassly put, patronizing the “winners” of the international art market is a means to become a “winner” nation (we see this logic at play in international biennials, triennials, and other mega- exhibitions also). In the new Reichstag renovated by a British architect (Foster), artists from Germany (Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Ulrich Rückreim) are put in company with artists of “international recognition” from the United States (Jenny Holzer), France (Christian Boltanski), and Russia (Grischa Bruskin; Ilya Kabakov’s proposals were rejected). You have a more ambiguous national affiliation within this collection of artists from elite Western nations; you are both German (by blood) and not German (by soil). Could you speak a bit about your sense of both your work’s function and the function of your ambiguous national identity in the context of the German state’s nation-building effort?

HH: I am German by “blood” (that is, my parents were German), and having been born in Cologne, I am also German by “soil.” According to this logic, I am a full- blooded German and “soiled.” I have had reason to be amused by the ambiguity of my current “status,” having now lived outside of Germany for forty years. I was invited to the Whitney Museum’s centennial exhibition “The American Century: Art and Culture 1900–2000” (a triumphalist title) and, in the same year, under the auspices of the National Gallery in Berlin, to “Das XX. Jahrhundert: Ein Jahrhundert Kunst in Deutschland.” After dispensing with this biographical aside, let me tell you about Antje Vollmer. And then I will try to address the core of your question. From day one she ridiculed the project as “Biokitsch,” a catchy word the press eagerly picked up. And she announced for everyone to hear she would not make a fool of herself by bringing soil from her election district to Berlin.6 In her address to the Bundestag she conﬁdently declared she could not imagine that certain MPs

Top: Gerhard Richter. Installation at Reichstag. Photo: Dennis Gilbert. Bottom: Sigmar Polke. Installation at Reichstag. Photo: Richard Bryant.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041887448 by guest on 28 September 2021 whose names she picked as examples, would stoop to such a silly exercise. Two of those named did just that in the week of the project’s inau- guration. By now some 220 MPs have participated, and, according to Vollmer’s sense of decorum, they all behaved like “fools.” Before the project was approved with the slimmest of margins, she tried to derail it through a backroom maneuver. German television reported that she toured the site with the collector Egidio Marzona and ﬂoated the idea that Marzona sponsor a work by Bruce Nauman instead of the Bundestag commissioning me with public funds. Her fellow MPs were not amused. Given the Nauman episode, in which the artist most probably had no hand, Antje Vollmer’s worry about neglect of artists who are not stars in the art market may be a bit overdrawn. Earlier she had been in the news for qualifying Gerhard Richter’s work in the Reichstag entrance as “char- latanerie.” The Art Committee’s publicly announced reasoning behind commissioning Jenny Holzer, Christian Boltanski, Foster as the architect of the Reichstag, and Grisha Bruskin was that each of the former occu- pation powers were to be represented in the Reichstag by a prominent artist and that the German artists have national if not international recognition. It also devised a policy for three other large new buildings that house the ofﬁces of the MPs, committee meeting rooms, the staff of the Bundestag, and other support facilities. Works for these buildings, with a few notable exceptions, were chosen on the basis of competitions among invited and mostly German artists. Many are not well known and represented by hot galleries. I don’t believe their market share will increase on the basis of these commissions. Representation in government buildings does not rank high among the art mongers. I have not seen collectors beating down my door, and it’s hard for me to believe that the auction prices of say Polke or Richter have been affected. Germany, like other countries, has institutions and public agencies that are charged to project German culture abroad. The most visible of these are the Goethe Institutes and the Institut für Auslandsbezie- hungen in Stuttgart. But I am not aware of a nationally coordinated policy to push the fortunes of German artists in

Top: Jenny Holzer. Installation at Reichstag. Photo: Rudi Meisel. Bottom: Christian Boltanski. Installation at Reichstag. Photo: Richard Bryant.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041887448 by guest on 28 September 2021 the national or international art market. If there were such an attempt, I don’t think it could rival in any way the existing transnational network of art dealers, curators, collectors, and writers.

RD: Volker Kauder’s comment that reversing the decision to install DER BEVÖLKERUNG doesn’t threaten the “freedom of art” because the work could be installed anywhere in Berlin not only reveals his lack of under- standing of the principle of site-specificity but, at a time when site- specificity has been neutralized and academicized, reminds us of the subversive possibilities of disruptive site-specific practice. Your previous site-specific interventions have largely been temporary works, which are subsequently kept alive by the controversies they spawn and by your continual updating of the documentation of your projects. Does your decision to do a permanent site-specific work bespeak a commitment to remember permanently the Nazi past? I realize of course that permanence was one of the terms of the commission, but what do you foresee as the consequences of the work’s permanence? Permanence would of course be a positive feature if the work can be seen as performing the question that must be permanently kept alive if democracy is to survive: What is the people?

HH: The work is “permanent” in the sense that it remains in the same place until, as I stipulated, a democratic Parliament no longer meets in the Reichstag building. But it changes constantly. It is a process. The legislative term during which it was approved and inaugurated ended in 2003. Federal elections brought a number of new MPs to Berlin. As I stipulated in my proposal, they were also invited to contribute soil, as the next generation of MPs will be. Among the newly elected was a forest ranger from the Bavarian CSU, which had solidly opposed the project like its sister party, the CDU. (The only notable exception was the Art Committee member Renate Blank from Nürnberg.) One of the ﬁrst symbolic acts of this freshman CSU MP was to break ranks and plant a young apple tree in the courtyard. Apple orchards apparently are common in his election district. But his choice also reminded me and others of a remark by Martin Luther: “Even if the world were to end tomorrow, I would still plant an apple tree today.”

RD: Kauder (whose parliamentary speech represents the extreme conservative argument against the work) calls you “our self-declared patriot of the constitution,” who doesn’t understand that “all power derives . . . from the German people”—which seems to me to be a real case of begging the question! To support his assertion he cites a press report

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041887448 by guest on 28 September 2021 of February 13, 2000. Which report is he referring to and what did you say there?

HH: He refers to a letter I wrote to the editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in response to a front-page editorial by Karl Feldmeyer, in which the Arts Committee and I were accused of plotting against the Volk. He compliments Kauder for alerting the republic of this danger. Aside from his claim that I am a sympathizer of Stalinism, Feldmeyer refers to an unsolicited expert opinion rendered by Dietrich Murswiek, a Freiburg University professor of constitutional law, in which he warned that the project violated the German Constitution. The professor did not reveal who commissioned him to offer his opinion. It was probably ini- tiated by Kauder, whose election district is near Freiburg and who dumped copies of the tract into the mailboxes of his colleagues in Berlin. Another professor of constitutional law, Hans Meyer, who was for many years president of the Berlin Humboldt University, later expertly ripped it apart. He deliciously titled his critique “How a professor of constitutional law shoots with cannons at sparrows—and misses.” In my letter to the editor I call myself a “fervent patriot of the constitution.” To my knowledge, so far no complaint has been ﬁled with the German Supreme Court against me or any of the Members of the Bundestag who presum- ably condoned or even participated in violating the constitution.

MK: Another point of objection to DER BEVÖLKERUNG was your stipulation that the 669 legislators become participants in the artwork, that they each provide fifty kilograms of soil from their home districts. Clearly, the garden is meant to be a perpetually transforming “picture” of Germany, emphasizing a provisional unity that is to be made and remade over and over again by the collectivity of heterogeneous component parts. According to your plan, this heterogeneity, in turn, supports the growth of new and unexpected life that can only be sustained through continued vigilance and commitment. But I am curious. Why was it so important that the garden’s soil composition mirror the Bundestag membership? If the project is a new kind of symbolic representation of the country, as you have written, why afﬁrm the existing structure of the legislative state apparatus as its blueprint? Was this a matter of site speci- ﬁcity for you?

HH: Your use of the word garden could make one believe that the plants around the neon letters are taken care of by a gardener. I expressly stated that no watering, weeding, or other sort of tending should occur.7 My project is not to be understood as a critique of “the existing structure of the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041887448 by guest on 28 September 2021 legislative state apparatus.” Your choice of words seems to have a negative ring. If that is so, I don’t share your opinion. No matter how much I disagree with certain decisions and laws it passes, a democratically elected parliament is one of the most important constitutional pillars of a democracy. Also in this respect, I am a “fervent patriot of the constitution.”

RD: The question of DER BEVÖLKERUNG’s relationship to debates about posttraditional identity extends to the earth component of the work. The soil refers, both literally and ﬁguratively, to democracy. It literally embeds “the population”—which you propose as the democratic constituency of the German parliament—in the material basis of territory, supporting the idea of democratic representation based on geography rather than German ancestry or lineage. Figuratively, the inevitable mixing of the soil is, as you’ve written, an “anti-particularist” gesture pointing toward the desir- ability of a hybrid, heterogeneous—which is to say, “impure”—German identity.8 In this light it’s really peculiar that Kauder accuses you of offer- ing “a purifying solution.” In the interview with Chantal Mouffe that I referred to earlier, Mouffe argued against Habermas’s universalizing antiparticularism. “I believe,” she said, “that a political community is always a community which is ordered symbolically according to a certain set of values, which I call the ethico-political principles of a regime.” Does the antiparticularism of both the earth and linguistic components of DER BEVÖLKERUNG indicate that for you the political community is not uni- ﬁed by adherence to particular values? Or are you only opposing racial and not other kinds of particularism?

HH: There may be a misunderstanding, which demonstrates how diffi- cult it sometimes is to translate texts from one language to another without explaining how history and context can affect the meaning of common words. After the establishment of Germany as a politically con- stituted nation in 1871, there have been and still exist to some degree today tendencies of regions to take a particularist course which can go so far as an outright or de facto separation. As is known in other countries, also in Germany there is a north- south divide. There are the well-known tensions between the former East Germany and the West. There are religious divisions: traditionally Protestant versus Catholic, but in the background also Christian and non-Christian (that is, Jewish—and now also Muslim). We are all familiar with the reciprocal suspicions of urban and rural populations. Some of the political parties exist only in one part or even only in a single state

Hans Haacke. Grass Cube, 1967, ﬁrst exhibited in solo show at Howard Wise Gallery, New York, 1967.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041887448 by guest on 28 September 2021 of the Federal Republic. The most remarkable example is the Freistaat Bayern, the former Bavarian kingdom, where the CSU is the unchallenged governing party. In some respects, Bavaria is a state that considers itself almost as a nation unto itself. I wonder whether this has anything to do with what Chantal Mouffe and Jürgen Habermas are quarreling about.

MK: I might say here that I feel a little cautious about embracing this anti- particularist move in a political sense because even as it might facilitate, as you state, “communality and equality” (in opposing nativism and exorcising the ghosts of the Nazi era), it can also have the effect of homogenizing and collapsing difference (in support of globalism). This is a problem that I tried to articulate earlier in relation to the dedication “To the Population.”

HH: There will probably always be tension between regional identities and adherence to common structures and attitudes. I don’t believe they need to be in mutually exclusive opposition to each other, as long as precepts that are codified in the constitution, particularly in regard to human rights, are observed. A shared respect for these rights, I think, does not have a detrimental, homogenizing effect, nor does it promote so-called free trade for what often amounts to the exclusive beneﬁt of the econom- ically and politically powerful.

RD: You’ve suggested that there is a relationship between the earth component of the work and the earth art you made in the 1960s. Could you elaborate on the nature of the relationship?

HH: Not counting my sand castles, Grass Cube of 1967 is the first example of a work with plants and earth. A year later I collaborated on a proposal by a young New York architecture firm (Ricardo Scofidio was a partner of the ﬁrm) for Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn. I pro- posed to leave an area ten feet deep between two topographical contour lines unculti- vated for the lifetime of the hilly park. Perhaps the closest precedent for the kind of plant growth that plays an important part of the Berlin project is a piece that developed in 1970 on the roof of the East Houston Street building where I had a studio: Airborne seeds sprouted in a small heap of soil. Three years

Top: Hans Haacke. Proposal for Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn, 1968 (collaboration with Berman, Roberts & Scoﬁdio, Architects, New York). Bottom: Hans Haacke. Bowery Seeds, 1970. Roof of 95 East Houston Street, New York.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041887448 by guest on 28 September 2021 later I introduced something similar in a proposal for a complex of new ministries in Bonn—with a politically provocative addition: a mountain of soil that was to have been left there untended—and it was to have the status of a no-man’s land; that is, no nation was to have had any jurisdic- tion in this enclave. Needless to say, the proposal was not realized. Also, the Brooklyn proposal was not accepted.

MK: I’m also intrigued by the extent to which the soil/earth of the project functions literally as a micro-ecosystem of Germany, yet exceeds specificities of national territory to serve as a more abstract or cosmic symbol of “home.” In your project proposal you make reference to many instances of how we, as human beings, maintain deeply ingrained emotional ties to the earth as part of knowing ourselves in an existential sense. You wrote: “In many cultures the earth is referred to as ‘mother earth,’ giving life and periodic renewal. But she also opens herself up as the grave that takes us in, and we become one with the earth. She does not know of power and property. The earth is classless.” Initially, I was a bit irked by this passage because it was not clear how this all-too-familiar gendering of nature/earth—Mother Nature vs. Fatherland, earth/soil vs. nation/territory—as well as the mysticism associated with such thinking, ﬁgured in DER BEVÖLKERUNG. And if earth is indeed outside the social—does not know power (politics or history?), property or class (economics?)—how else do we need to think about the soil in the project? But the passage also reminded me of my grandmother who refused to travel to the United States, not even to spend time with her children or grandchildren, not even when she was healthy, not even for a short while, because she was afraid she might die in a foreign country. She said she wanted to be buried in Korean soil (and she was). I doubt that this wish was inspired by a nationalistic impulse, a love of country. She simply wanted to stay where she felt she belonged ultimately (which, interestingly, was not with her family). I don’t know quite what to make of this personal story in light of all that we’re discussing, but the sense of attachment, maybe even call it allegiance, that my grandmother had to soil over blood seems a significant expression of a desire for belonging that should not be forgotten.

RD: In its entirety DER BEVÖLKERUNG does evoke the National Socialist “blood and soil”—that is, the uniﬁcation of race and territory—but at the same time disarticulates the two terms. It seems to me that the earth component counteracts the Nazi myth of the unity of blood and soil by advo- cating soil, as opposed to blood, as the criterion of German citizenship. Is the fact that participants in the parliamentary debate didn’t seem to rec-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041887448 by guest on 28 September 2021 ognize this disarticulation of blood and soil partially responsible for objections to the earth component of the work, even by some supporters?

HH: In my “Thoughts about the Project” that accompanied the proposal when I submitted it to the Bundestag Art Committee, I referred to the sometimes deeply emotional attachment to the soil of the place where one is born, for which Miwon’s grandmother is an example. I would not suspect that of nationalism. I also referred to various myths, including the Old Testament, shared by Jews and Christians. I did not imply that I am a partisan of these myths nor of the gendering associated with locutions like mother nature/fatherland, etc. I hope the slight sarcasm that pervades the text is sufficient proof for such a disassociation. The word metropolis, by the way, and all its derivations (as, for example, in Metropolitan Transportation Authority for the New York Subway Agency or Métro in Paris) is also gendered. Metropolis in its Latin/Greek origin means “mother city.” We are straphangers in mom’s trains. I thought it was necessary to give a brief cultural history in my text because, as so much else, Hitler had contaminated the symbolism of soil. It was important to point out that before the Nazis and in other countries, earth had and still has a symbolic signiﬁcance that is totally unrelated to the use to which it was put during their twelve-year dictatorship. Nevertheless, the art historian Martin Warnke warned the Bundestag not to fall into the Nazi trap and argued strenuously for the rejection of the project. Other well-known German art historians, Willibald Sauerländer and Klaus Herding to name two, passionately supported it in articles and letters to the editor. A colleague of Warnke at the Hamburg University, Monika Wagner, published an article in the Berliner Zeitung in which she described examples of the symbolic use of earth well preceding the Nazis. She also informed the readers about earth works of contemporary artists. I responded to Warnke in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, where his polemic had appeared. I reminded him that symbols are to be read in the context in which they are used—a good old historicist practice. I mentioned that ashes and soil from concentration camps are part of a memorial on a Hamburg cemetery

Hans Haacke. DER BEVÖLKERUNG (To the Population), 2000. Reichstag (German Parliament Building), Berlin. Detail, June 2001.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041887448 by guest on 28 September 2021 and that soil from the East German city of Cottbus was joined, after the reunification of Germany, with soil from a West German site—all this without any Nazi connotations. I made a number of other points and closed by saying that Hitler could celebrate a late victory, if he were, in fact, given the final authority over what earth signifies. I did not mention, as I should have, that the National Socialist ideology promoted das Ausmerzen unwerten Lebens, the eradication of life that’s unworthy. That is a terminology associated with eradicating weeds. I anticipated that weeds would sprout in the Reichstag. They were not to be ausgemerzt. No gardening! I also emphasized in my reply to Warnke that all residents of Germany, irrespective of citizenship and blood lineage have in common the ground on which they walk and the laws of the territory the bor- ders of which are demarcated by posts driven into the earth. If ever there had been a danger in associating the project with Nazi ideology, the loca- tions from which the participating Members of the Bundestag brought their bags of earth has made it moot. There is earth from concentration camps, from Jewish cemeteries, from places where immigrants had been murdered, and from constitutionally (or in other respects for the project) significant places.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041887448 by guest on 28 September 2021 Notes 1. See “DER BEVÖLKERUNG: The German Parliamentary Debate,” in this issue, 82–115. The original German transcript of the debate is available at www.derbevoelkerung.de. 2. In July 2004, after long and bitter negotiations in the conference committee of the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, a compromise version of the immigration law was ﬁnally passed by both houses. It will be in force as of 1 January 2005. 3. The terminology talking with is knowingly borrowed by Deutsche from Kenneth Gross, “Talking with Statues,” in Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 139–66. 4. Hans Haacke referred to the Reichstag as “an imperial palace” in a lecture at a Tate Modern conference on “Installations,” London, 5 November 2000. 5. Chantal Mouffe, “‘Every Form of Art Has a Political Dimension’: Interview by Rosalyn Deutsche, Branden W. Joseph, and Thomas Keenan,” Grey Room 2 (Winter 2001): 98–125. 6. As detailed in Haacke’s proposal for DER BEVÖLKERUNG, members of the German parliament are invited to contribute “50 kilos (approx. 100 pounds) of soil to the courtyard, collected from their election districts or the states where they were elected.” Hans Haacke’s project proposal, as well as a transcript of the German debate and relevant press has been collected in Michael Diers and Kaspar König, eds., DER BEVÖLKERUNG: Aufsätze und Dokumente zur Debatte um das Reichstagsprogekt von Hans Haacke (Frankfurt am Main: Portikus and Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2000). 7. Haacke writes in the project proposal, “Seeds and roots from the places of origin are naturally embedded in the soil brought to Berlin. They will sprout, as will airborne seeds from Berlin. They are to develop freely—without any tending. When a legislator leaves Parliament, a commensurate portion of soil is removed. Newly elected Members of Parliament are invited to contribute to the soil in the courtyard and, in so doing, also to the vegetation.” 8. Haacke writes in the project proposal, “The gathering and mixing of soil from all regions of the Federal Republic in the courtyard of the Reichstag building is an anti- particularist symbolic action. It afﬁrms communality and equality. A quiet gesture, without accompanying fanfare, flag-waving and torchlight, it is matched by the unspectacular sprouting of the seeds and roots in the soil.”

Hans Haacke. Drawing accompanying proposal for DER BEVÖLKERUNG, 1999.

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