Glossen

by Frederick A. Lubich

“Zeitgeist” was the theme proposed a year ago for this edition of Glossen. Throughout the year 2017, nothing seemed to crystallize that would qualify as a real zeitgeist phenomenon until the ball got rolling with the fall of Harvey Einstein. In this context and in retrospect, the exhibition “Facing Our Fear” at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia gains increasingly sharper contours which shall be traced in the following reflections.

The exhibition opened on Jan 20, 2017 and was organized to coincide with the inauguration of the 45^th president of the United States of America. In paintings and installations as well as in  poetry readings, artists, students and professors of the university and its local communities expressed their current apprehensions about the new president, covering in their works of art topics that ranged from sexual harassment to climate change and the politics of immigration. It was quite an intense and emotional event and one of the young poets could not hold back her tears after she had read her very moving poem. Her personal experience and poetic expression struck me and resonated with deeper chords in me.

Manuela Mourão, a visual artist and professor of English at Old Dominion University, was another participant in the exhibition. Born and raised in Portugal, she also brought an Old World sensibility to her vision that in hindsight turned out to be quite a perspicuous premonition of the Brave New World of contemporary America, adding an additional dimension to the fear that the American Dream could morph after all into a veritable American Nightmare.

Mourão’s installation displayed a bouquet of red roses, but they were not put into a vase with water but rather laid on the bottom of a cage, where they soon would wilt and waste. So what was the message in this mixed media work of art? “A rose is a rose by any other name“, Gertrude Stein suggested famously, in other words, things are what they are. But at the risk of being a romantic bore, one can also argue, that roses can mean so much more.

Since antiquity, the rose has symbolized like no other plant the magic of love and the beauty of womanhood, ranging from innocence to experience, connoting both innocuous flirtation and ultimate defloration, whereby the sounds of the last two nouns already clearly betray their etymological derivation from the Latin word “Flora”, the name of the goddess of flowers and fertility in ancient Roman mythology.

During the time of the crusades, the order of the Rosicrucians adored the white rose as a symbol of renewal, which in turn inspired many centuries later the young martyrs of the White Rose to their code name under which they fought and died in their resistance against their country’s brutal fascist regime. And the rose not only symbolizes the sweet beginning of love but also its bitter end such as in the expressions like “War of the Roses”. The latter translates into the German expression “Rosenkrieg” and as such it refers much less to the English civil war between the Houses of York and Lancaster in the late Middle Ages and much more to the modern battle of the sexes and their final law suit in a civil court of divorce.

The German-Bohemian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, probably best known for his early Art-Nouveau poetry with all its flowery imagery, was also a modern master of multiply-coded metaphors, especially when it came to the rose and its manifold symbolism. Literary scholars have counted close to two dozen symbolic variations in Rilke’s rose poetry. Mourão’s dark roses can evoke all those old-world memories and much more.

In her assemblage “To Grab and to Hold” she also included a stylized chastity belt adorned by a dark red heart. In light of the numerous erotic and sexual connotations of the rose, this installation begins to reveal itself along with its telling title as an intricate mis en scene that in turn also alludes to the recently much discussed topic of our “culture of rape”. The latter has always been the dark subculture of patriarchy’s gender hierarchy. From this perspective of sexual politics, the medieval chastity belt reinforces this deeply duplicitous cultural tradition, in which serenading female beauty has been going hand in hand with brutally subjugating it.

At a closer look, this mis en scene turns into a mis en abyme, literally a gaze into the abyss, or, as this technical term has been redefined in art history, as a visual technique in which an image contains a smaller copy of itself. Either way, this installation reflects and represents both perspectives, since the look into the cage also opens up the view of the medieval chastity belt right from the depth of the Dark Ages. This miniature torture chamber for female sexuality is certainly the most painful and shameful form of incarceration a male-oriented society has inflicted upon women in its perennial and at times desperate quest of maintaining absolute control over the opposite sex.

To add insult to injury, medieval husbands could even claim to protect their wives with this iron underwear from all those errant knights who were out there to conquer not only the lands of other lords but also their fair ladies as additional trophies. In that fashion, the chastity belt doubled as an anti-rape shield and thereby as an utterly sexist symbol for the double standard of a patriarchal society. Throughout the centuries this morbid contraption morphed into the fashionable garment of the crinoline, which in Spain was also not so coincidentally called Verdugado, the “guardian of virtue”. This sartorial monstrosity reached in the middle of the nineteenth century its most excessive dimension, ranging from eighteen to twenty-four feet at the bottom, before it began to change its shape again and turned into the corset of the Victorian Age. This time around, it forced the female body mercilessly into the hour glass shape, thereby perfectly ready made for the male gaze around the turn of the century which became also known for its cultural decadence.

In other words, the habitual “damsel in the distress”, supposedly waiting to be rescued by some knight in shining armor, was in reality the ultimate and multiple victim of a thoroughly  misogynistic society, in which male passion and sexual aggression could parade and masquerade as heroic gallantry and virtuous chivalry. Of course, not all men were like this. Even then, there must have been more than a few good men guided by common sense and enlightened by human decency, but unfortunately they were by far not enough, as we know from our cruel history all the way into high modernity. The hidden agenda of medieval knighthood continues to inform our modern vocabulary in which so-called “cavaliers” are still known as “lady killers”. From the feuds of the medieval aristocracy to the sexual power games in today’s high society and its nouveau riche … nothing is new … “noblesse oblige”!

“Les extrêmes se touchent”: Sigmund Freud famously identified the two central human drives opposing each other as the “Lustprinzip” and the “Todesprinzip”, the pleasure principle and the death principle. Students of medieval epics or romantic opera know, that Tristan and Isolde can only experience the ecstasy of love by uniting it with the agony of death, a moribund agony which became known amongst cultural cognoscenti around the world as a melodramatic “Liebestod”.

During the Roaring Twenties of the Weimar Republic, this romantic mix-up of love and death transmogrified into the gruesome reality of a series of sex crimes known as “Lustmord”. Just like the romantic notion of “Wanderlust” gained popular traction during the nineteenth century in the English language, the German word “Lustmord” became vice versa a term of lurid attraction in the English speaking world in the first part of the twentieth century. Maria Tatar’s study Lustmord. Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany remains to date the definite study on this ghastly case history.

Between the tragic trajectory of consenting lovers in the world of romantic art and the victims of sexual predators in the world of brutal reality emerges the “Heideröslein” (Little Rose on the Heath) as one of the most well-known poems by a young Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s most celebrated poet of 18^th century Weimar Classicism. It has been set to music by numerous composers, most notably by Franz Schubert and is a center piece of Germany’s romantic Lieder canon and folksong tradition which in turn continued to inspire following generations of musicians from opera composers to rebellious rock bands like Rammstein, whose song “Rosenrot” clearly pays tribute to Goethe’s little red rose.

“Sah ein Knab ein Röslein stehen”, saw a boy a little rose …, thus begins Goethe’s poem that describes in the first stanza a young boy, who stumbles upon a beautiful red rose in the meadow. In the second stanza, the rose begins to speak, thereby sounding like  a blooming maiden, who tells the young boy that she does not want to be plucked. In the third and last stanza, the “wilde Knabe”, the “wild boy” tells the rosy maiden, that he will pluck her anyway and although she tries to fight him off with her thorns, he prevails in the end and she has to succumb: “Half ihm doch kein Weh und Ach, musst es eben leiden”, in other words, as one translator put it: “She cried and sighed in vain and had to let it happen”.

Goethe’s “wilder Knabe” is a poetic word for boy and an antiquated version of the Middle High German word “Knappe”, meaning young squire. In its modern variation, it still retains some of the old chivalric splendor of medieval youth and continues to resonate in names like “Wiener Sängerknaben”, the German term for the Viennese Choir Boys. In sharp contrast to the German word “Knabe”, its Anglo-Saxon cognate “knave” experienced a significant deterioration in meaning, describing in modern English not only an old-fashioned boy servant, but also a tricky and deceitful fellow, in short a rogue given to knavery. In other words, the bloodline of this “Knabe” goes from the wantonness of wild whipper snappers all the way to the savagery of Jack the Ripper.

On the war on roses and their bloody metamorphoses: From the roses of the meadow to the Rosenbergs in the Ghetto, from rape to torture and from war to mass murder runs the ghastly gamut of warfare against the proverbial other, or to put it more precisely, from the witch hunts of the Middle Ages to the growing pogroms against Jews in High Modernity, from the burning at the stake to the inferno of the Holocaust, in short, from gynocide to genocide …, that has been man’s deadly force and fury time and again towards all those, who supposedly did not fit or submit to the powers that be. Their various forms of final solutions have left an endless trail of blood and tears throughout world history.

“Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung”, the world as will and representation, that magnum opus of Arthur Schopenhauer, as pessimistic as its late-romantic world view might be, could also be turned upside down for the sake of a happier humanity. Just imagine, Hegel’s “Weltgeist”, his  timeless World Spirit, might after all still have a modern, mind-boggling ball, if one could only refocus the conflicting principles of Freud’s psychology through the lenses of Hegel’s dialectical philosophy, then there might still be hope for a future world history together with a happier humanity. And Germany’s dark modern history, so out of joint with enlightened modernity, might have after all and against all odds a case in point.

Whereas the Third Reich was the last and most disastrous manifestation of man’s will to absolute power and Aryan supremacy, the contemporary Federal Republic of Germany has in turn emerged in central aspects as its essential opposite. Whereas Nazi Germany persecuted and exterminated millions of civilians, the current German government has invited more than a million refugees fleeing from civil war in the Middle East to resettle in Germany. That is an unprecedented number in the annals of oppressed nations and their forced mass migrations into a far-away society that is culturally and ethnically very different from their own.

And whereas Nazi Germany propagated the ideals of “survival of the fittest”, today’s Germany not only practices compassion with the weakest, the survivors of war-torn countries, it also promotes programmatically the ideals of gender equality within its own institutions of democracy. For example, in planning for the fourth term of her government, Angela Merkel declared her intentions to base its political representation completely on the principle of gender parity. And last but not least, whereas fascist ideology preached and practiced the military strategy of the “scorched earth”, modern-day Germany is an international pioneer in environmental policies and recycling technologies.

“Verkehrte Welt” is a German term for a world which has been turned upside down and inside out. There is no linguistic equivalent for it in the English language, probably, because the history of the English speaking world has never gone through such topsy-turvy turmoil, such dialectical contradictions as the world of German speaking countries has. In literary history, the world view of the “verkehrte Welt” emerged out of the literature of German Romanticism, in which the Freudian concept of the “Heimlich-Unheimliche” first manifested itself avant la lettre most conspicuously.

“Heimlich-Unheimlich” is an untranslatable wordplay on the German word “Heim” which means home. Its adjective “heimlich” assumes in German the meaning “secret” or “secretive”, thereby reflecting the understanding that things kept at home will remain unknown to the outside world. The subsequent negation of “heimlich” into ”unheimlich” in turn changes the meaning of “secret” into “uncanny”, or, to be  more precise and linguistically closer to home, into “strangely familiar”. The double bind of “Liebestod” and “Lustmord” can exemplify this uncanny transmutation, in which the bonds of love turn so to speak into the bondage of death.

In his seminal essay “Das Unheimliche” (1919), Freud got a lot of psychoanalytical mileage out of this linguistic contradiction. And down the road, the road of Germany’s modern history, the collective drive of the “Heimlich-Unheimliche” should bring out the worst of its abysmal discrepancy, revealing the beloved homeland as a country of utter terror and bottomless horror, a “verkehrte Welt”, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein could have never ever imagined in all its modern monstrosity.

The ultimate other of patriarchal reality is the matriarchal imaginary. And in deed, the research of the Swiss-German school of matriarchal mythography provided the ideal groundwork for the growing cultural critique of patriarchal history. Especially Johann Jakob Bachofen’s magisterial study Das Mutterrecht (The Mother Right), an encyclopedic tour the force through ancient religions and civilizations, as well as Carl Gustav Jung’s archetypal depth psychology helped to lay new conceptual foundations for social and political movements ranging from modern Feminism and Women’s Liberation to present-day Femen-style shock demonstrations. These movements of emancipation were all inspired to varying degrees by the mythic matrix of the Magna Mater and her cultural ideals of peace and liberty and – mutatis mutandis – equality and prosperity for all.

On modern paradigm changes and their sexual politics: If the current American president as the most powerful man in the world is raising fears among several major demographic groups such as liberals and immigrants and last but not least women of all walks of life, then the current German chancellor, considered to be the most powerful woman in today’s world, does exactly the opposite, especially when seen through the perspective of women, liberals and immigrants.

Framing the political portraits of those two most powerful world leaders in Europe and America from an archetypal point of view, one could certainly characterize the American president as a patriarchal pushback, a phallocratic backlash so to speak and – vice versa – the German chancellor as a kind of matriarchal  comeback of Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian Chancellor and political founding father of a united Second German Empire, only now thoroughly transgendered into a magnanimous Lady Liberty who is opening the doors of her re-united Germany to all the huddled masses fleeing their war-torn countries in the Middle East.

In her younger years, Angela Merkel was known in political circles as “das Mädchen”, or “the Girl” and as she rose to power to become her country’s first female chancellor, she became known as “Mutti”, as “Mommy”, so called derisively by her distractors and affectionately by her supporters. But no matter how Germans look at her, today she stands respected by democracies around the world as a role model for a liberal society, a flourishing economy, a welfare system with solid social security and – ultima ratio – a progressive environmental policy designed to preserve and recycle the wealth of Mother Earth. Or to rephrase it more mythographically, she represents a contemporary manifestation of the archetypal avatar of the Magna Mater as Alma Mater, the Great Nurturing Mother who was known for her maternal cornucopia throughout antiquity, symbolizing the material abundance of our world which was to be shared with all of humanity.

“Die Zukunft wird weiblich sein oder gar nicht“, the future will be female or not at all. That vision was a popular slogan in Germany in some of the more imaginative circles of its student movement in the late sixties and early seventies of the last century. That movement does not seem to have lost any of its progressive momentum.  On the contrary, less than a year after the exhibition “Facing our Fear”, the wanted list of sexual predators, the phalanx of falling men is growing by leaps and bounds, challenged by a growing group of rising women who are now courageously  confronting and exposing them. In the process, these women have become known as “The Silence Breakers”, a united female front that Time Magazine has recently chosen and personified as the “Person of Year”.

If Edvard Munch’s iconic image “The Scream” inaugurated the twentieth century as a silent scream that already conjured up all the pain and suffering of its coming miseries and atrocities, then the “Silence Breakers” of Time Magazine represent the latest “Scream” shattering not only the silence about female suffering in the past but also the glass ceilings over their future. Together they are turning the tables, they are re-writing history and every former “Damsel in Distress” comes back – at least figuratively speaking – as a formidable “Belle Dame Sans Merci”.

And that proud and prickly Bella Donna, that late romantic revenante with such a foreboding French name straight out of a Gothic novel is no picnic in the park, no “déjeuner sur l’herbe” as in Edouard Manet’s impressionistic masterpiece – unless his young ladies and gentlemen reverse their roles and exchange their fancy Belle Époque clothes. If there is any poetic justice in this world, then the fair ladies in this travesty, this veritable tableau vivant, certainly would amount to an epic epiphany, because they finally could stand up in all their Victorian mercilessness for all their sisters in their present and past distress. And the brotherhood of all …

those wandering knaves and knights,
who still can’t imagine how it once felt,
can now not only walk in their shoes
but also try out their latest chastity belt!

That certainly would be la dernier cri of their latter-day hypocrisy that argues that their sexual aggression was nothing but mutual affection. And drag queens who can sing and dance, they all could join the silence breakers, throw up their legs and support them as kinky movers and shakers, forming chorus lines and cabaret songs like “Good Bye Weinstein, Hello Einstein! Zeitgeist, Weltgeist, Poltergeist … Willkommen, Welcome, Bien Venue … whatever the rhymes and rhythms might be for this Exit Hollywood Revue … it is high time, that those once so high and mighty keep rumbling and tumbling down.

Which brings us back to “Facing Our Fear” and the “Harasser in Chief”, as the current president of the United States has become known amongst his most outspoken critics. No matter what his legacy will be, he certainly will also go down in history with his loose locker room talk of “grab and hold”. Speaking of locker room talk, in this context Mourão’s assemblage of cage and chastity belt gains an additional political subtext by becoming a visual double entendre for “Lock Her Up”. That was the infamous battle cry at the former campaign rallies of the present president against his formidable female opponent. Not only was this slug of a slogan meant to hit her below the belt, but where there are locks and keys, one can also easily lose the latter, and then who or whatever remains locked up, can be left to turn rotten and soon forgotten.

Demagogues have always been eloquent masters of sexual innuendo and chauvinistic bravado, tapping and digging into that unsavory swamp of “blood and soil” that the fascist propaganda of the Third Reich extolled as the pure source of Germany’s rebirth and the fertile ground to make the fatherland great again. And such a patriotic uprising is always a male phantasy, a chauvinistic imaginary, as already the word fascism, rooted in the Latin cognates ”fascis” and “fascinus” reveals, as they signify and associate phallic power and empirical prowess.

The only comic relief in this rebirth of national greatness is the president’s public obsession that his hands might not be big enough. For what? To grab and to hold! Not to mention other potential shortcomings for someone with an agenda of not so subtle megalomania. Whatever his deeper issues might be, “bigly” is most likely the correct password into this masculine mystery. And if one last laugh is not enough, one might also reconsider the strange transformation from holding hands to groping paws as a secret evolution in reverse, reminiscent of Nietzsche’s nefarious “Blonde Bestie”, that prowling, predatory “Blond Beast”, that came to symbolize Nordic superiority, predestined for more Lebensraum in the East.

“There is no business like show business”, goes a well-known American maxim, but the current political circus has turned the experience of popular amusement more and more into a nationwide bewilderment. The satirists of the Weimar Republic thought they were funny, when they lampooned the leading loudmouth of the Nazi party as a pathetic performer and sent him up as a high wire acrobat in Munich’s famous “Zirkus Krone”. But all these memories are spooky specters that keep haunting those of us who have deep roots back in the Old World – like Manuela Mourão home in Portugal and mine in Germany – because we have seen and heard this uncanny spectacle in America’s current politics before and it appears strangely familiar.

Zoon politicon as sexual predator: The Greek term zoon politicon literally means political animal and it is an expression characterizing someone who is a natural in playing party politics. Nowadays, this political concept describes not only skillful players in the public arena, it also reveals quite a few of them as sexual animals, latter-day throwbacks to a much more primitive stage in the process of our so-called Western Civilization.

Looking at these sexual predators historically, their downfall seems to mark one of the last stages of the Sexual Revolution that started over one hundred years ago in the western world. Their ongoing exposure appears to make sure, that this sexual and political revolution with its continuing education and emancipation of both sexes will have a happy end. We need to do better than they have done, if we in deed want to strive for the best of all worlds. To put it differently, just as the past of mankind has been literally “his story”, its future has to be just as literally “her story”. And if the pre-patriarchal mythology of the Magna Mater has any real validity, her future will be again a culture of true gender equality, at least according to the scientific conjectures of our modern cultural anthropology.

“Coincidentia oppositorum”, the collapse of opposites, that’s what scholars of the Magna Mater are calling her maternal law and material order. It is the mythic matrix of the eternal dying and becoming which Goethe had famously conjured up word for word for the first time in European literary history in his classical poem “Selige Sehnsucht” (Soulful Longing). There, he invokes the timeless cycle of dying and becoming as the “Stirb und Werde”, which has become a well-known proverb out of the master works of German literature. After all, it evokes the arch principle of death and rebirth, of creation and destruction, which is of course the bottom line in the chthonic realm of the pagan Great Mother Earth, who in turn is the archetypal opposite of the celestial kingdom of the Christian God Father in Heaven. In a final reversal of our earthly fate and heavenly fortune, Goethe’s Faust conjures up at the very end of its epic drama the poetic epiphany of the “Eternal Feminine” and elevates her into a cosmic panorama, where she rules supreme again like Babylon’s Ishtar and Astarte way back when.

Back to the future: From heaven to hell, from womb to tomb and back again, in the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece, this magic cycle of life and death and rebirth has been celebrated in the sacred trinity of Demeter, Persephone and Hermes. They provide the original matriarchal role model for patriarchy’s coming takeover, and its physical and metaphysical ascendency. Whereas Demeter represented the Great Mother, Persephone personified her divine daughter, who disappeared every fall into the underworld only to come back again in spring. This annual rebirth and return to earth was accompanied by Hermes, the messenger God, who opened the hermetically sealed border between this world and the other world. In Greek mythology, Persephone was also known as Kore whose name simply means “The Maiden” and her symbolic ttributes were all the flowers of spring. Great painters of the Mediterranean Renaissance like Sandro Botticelli and others loved to paint her in all her floral glory. Or, to update her ancient résumé, Kore, the ancient Greek Maiden, is the original “Flower Girl”.

Which brings us back to Manuela Mourão’s installation “To Grab and to Hold”.  Its telling title turned out to be quite an uncanny prophecy. In addition, it finds a perfect counterpart in the snapshot of Al Franken, posing as a make-belief sexual predator over a sleeping Leeann Tweeden. His assault arrested in midair – a mentally arrested schoolboy prank par excellence – is a revealing tableau vivant, graphically illustrating man’s relentless impulse to “grab und to hold”. As such it sure will become an emblematic image – if not anthropological pastiche – of man’s timeless knight errantry, ranging from more or less harmless tomfoolery all the way to brutal violence and horrible depravity. In any case, Goethe’s “wilder Knabe” is back again, but his puerile knavery comes back now as a timely caveat.

“Pueri sunt pueri et pueri puerilia tractant”, goes an old Latin adage, meaning, that boys will always be boys and boys will always do boyish things. Al Franken, who had made himself a name in his younger years as a popular comedian in Saturday Night Life might wish that this old Roman proverb still holds true and somehow excuse his adolescent stupidity. But men will be men no more, if they continue to act like wild boys, schoolyard bullies and so much worse.

Harvey Weinstein, the once almighty director of Miramax, has become the ultimate poster boy of that rogues’ gallery, especially since Time Magazine put him on the cover of its Oct. 23 edition. With his glowering look, staring out of a dark background he has become in deed the face to fear, if you are a woman out and alone at night. The illustrious magazine comments the famous and now so infamous director’s fast fall from grace in three telling, alliterative words: “Producer, Predator, Pariah”.

“O tempora, o mores”, that’s how the Romans since Cicero’s times commented and lamented the passing of time and the decay and perdition of its customs and morals. This year, Time Magazine followed in their age-old footsteps twice by turning not only the arch perpetrator of sexual assault into a cover story but also by honoring the countless victims of sexual assault into their annual “Person of the Year”. In other words, in this year’s Time Magazine, the Zeitgeist has indeed found its most telling reflection and representation, in short its voice and face.

In a strange anticipation of all these scandalous mass revelations in America, Germany witnessed a similarly shocking experience in the numerous sexual assaults which altogether left over a thousand women violated during the 2015/2016 New Year’s Eve celebration in Cologne and other German cities. What further complicated matters politically, was the fact that the perpetrators were all young Arab men, who were either part of the recent immigration wave to Germany or who resided in the country illegally. Clearly, from the barbarity of civil war to the brutality of sexual assault, mankind has always found ways to bring the worst out of itself. When on the other hand, we have also known so much better along the way.

Ars Amatoria was the title of the poetic manual for lovers by Ovid, Rome’s most famous writer in exile, teaching respect for each other and mutual fulfilment way back in the times of Roman antiquity. And the Moorish troubadours and Christian minstrels, roaming the Holy Roman Empire of the High Middle Ages, further fine-tuned in their courtly love songs the medieval perceptions of what is right and what is wrong when a man is courting a woman. All of its advice is still valid today as it was way back then. Even if love can get out of hand!

“Amantes, amentes”, lovers are crazy, that was the Latin title of a comedy by the German Baroque dramatist Gabriel Rollenhagen. And the French of course know about this craziness too with their notion of l’amour fou. And if the folly of love remains unrequited, it will drive the one left behind even crazier. Then, the only road to take is the high road, the way of the “Hohe Minne”. That’s what Walther von der Vogelweide, Germany’s most renowned wandering minstrel of courtly love had called the fine art of sexual sublimation. If need be, that will always be the Freudian way to go. Anytime and anywhere, and along the road true love can always be found right then and there! In any case, Plato’s world view still holds true, at least it is a longing lover’s best bet: “At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.”

“Dichter und Denker”, poets and thinkers – that was the well-known characterization of the Germans before they plunged with their celebrated high culture into the depth of unimaginable barbarity. And as they returned from the abyss and looked into the mirror, the nation of “Dichter und Denker” emerged as “Richter und Henker”, as “judges and henchmen” who had sentenced the innocent and executed them. This contradictory self-description has become in Germany a well-known definition of its own split identity. Probably only the famous nation of poets and thinkers could forge more rhymes even out of their most infamous crimes. In other words, the best …and the worst … and back again …

“Die beste aller Welten”, the best of all worlds! That was the utopian horizon of the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the last true continental polymath and one of the first philosophical trailblazer of the Age of Enlightenment, whose neo-platonic theodicy envisioned the world as part of a divine universe in pre-stabilized harmony. During the times of the Old Testament, that heavenly vision of earth was called Paradise and ever since that legendary Fall of Man we have lost it and long to find it again and again After all, in the Garden of Eden even that  dubious l’amour fou, somewhere between devilish and divine seemed to have worked out perfectly fine.

“Paradise Now”, that phantom was not surprisingly also a favorite phantasy of the so-called Woodstock Generation that had hoped, that this legendary land of yore would be just around the corner as history was turning the next page and we would all enter the promised “New Age”. And the best way to get there was the popular parole “Make Love Not War”. On top of it, that magic mantra also promised to be the most enjoyable mode of subversion of that bad old war-mongering patriarchy. But on the other hand, it also could be badly misunderstood as a battle cry to always pursue whatever you want no matter what. However, Woodstock’s much celebrated “Free Love” was never that cheap. It was never just a matter of “grab and hold”. Already the wild boys of the Rolling Stones knew much better when they kept reminding us in those days that “you can’t always get what you want”.

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”, that was the quintessence of John Keats’ “Ode on Grecian Urn”. His romantic equation could not be more timely than in our troubled times of “fake news” and “alternative facts”. According to Keats and in tune with his beauty of truth, we need in deed another romantic revolution and Germany, the motherland of European Romanticism, might have already come up with a practical solution, or at least with a like-minded organization.

“Zentrum für politische Schönheit”, Center for Political Beauty, that is the name of a loose alliance of several dozen action artists, founded in Berlin in 2009, who have been drawing attention to social and political controversies like the refuge crisis in Germany, the rise of rightwing parties and their attempts to redefine Holocaust memories. Inspired by the agitprop strategies of artists in the Weimar Republic, these guerilla artists stage sensational events or build provocative public monuments in order to create nationwide media attention and national if not international discussion.

Following this model, one could consider to re-install Mourão’s installation in a public space and turn it into an interactive work of art, where people could participate by complementing for example the bouquet of wilted roses by adding fresh flowers, thereby reminding all of us of all those flowers and all those hearts that have been broken and continue to be broken so wantonly by men who keep wanting them so recklessly. After all the memorials that commemorate the casualties of war, it is high time that we begin to remember all those who were disgraced in the name of love.

“Paradise Now”- Revisited: After everything is said and done, this is Woodstock’s lasting legacy, this is the ultimate truth and beauty of its much touted “Flower Power”. Before grab comes to hold and push comes to shove and things get out of hand, this has to be the law of love, this has to be the lay of the land …

Only when

all the powers belong to the flowers,
when this will be our future folklore,
only then can they all truly blossom
and will not break and fade any more.

Yes, you might say I am a dreamer, to recall John Lennon’s song “Imagine”, that new age ode to a better world, but I am quite happy to agree with him, because I know I am not the only one and we “hope someday you’ll join us and the world will be as one.”

***

Since the beginning of this year, and the exhibition “Facing our Fear”, we have made against all odds surprising progress in make this world a better place by breaking the silence and speaking more and more with one voice. In conclusion, I want the two following female voices speak out for themselves and ultimately for all of us.

The first one is the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, whose life and art is a perfect evocation and personification of the fate of a broken rose. Not only was she already in her youthful years  physically broken by a horrible accident, in addition, she was subsequently also professionally crippled by a culture that would not let her flourish as an artist as she deserved simply because she was a woman in a culture defined by male dictates and desires.

Speaking of flower power: Kahlo painted and photographed herself time and again wearing flowers in her hair and her favorite ones were red roses. In memory of her life and art, today’s world of floriculture commemorates and celebrates her by having named a red rose after her “Frida Kahlo Floribunda Rose”. In other words, wherever a Floribunda blooms, Frida Kahlo, the lifelong artista moribunda becomes alive again in a blossoming flower. And on a deeper, much deeper symbolical level, she also figures as a modern reincarnation of Demeter’s beautiful daughter Persephone.

The second voice is that of Salma Hayek, the Mexican-born actress, who recently told her excruciating experience of playing Frida Kahlo in the Academy Award winning film Frida produced by no other than the once so mighty mogul of Miramax himself. In her long, one-page essay called “Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too” published in The New York Times on December 17, Salma Hayek writes: “When so many women came forward to describe what Harvey had done to them, I had to confront my cowardice and humbly accept that my story, as important as it was to me, was nothing but a drop in an ocean of sorrow and confusion.”

“My story”: Hayek writes that it was her “greatest ambition” to play Frida Kahlo and tell “her story”. However, in the long process of telling it, Harvey Weinstein made it again “his story”, not least by forcing Hayek to play a nude scene just to please him to which she finally gave in so that she could save “her story”. She writes about her dire dilemma: “He said yes to Frida. Then it was my turn to say no to him at all hours of the night.“ She could not have put the nightmare of her collaboration with her “Monster”, the grotesque consequences of its twisted contradictions more succinctly. And as if to remind her of his morbid prerogative as a latter-day cavalier he warns her most ominously: “I will kill you, don’t think I can’t.”

Toward the end of her grim and truly gothic story, Hayek turns her harrowing experience into the larger political perspective by demanding the creation of true gender equality in our future film industry and she concludes: “I am grateful for everyone who is listening to our experiences. I hope that adding my voice to the chorus of those who are finally speaking out will shed light on why it is so difficult, and why so many of us have waited so long. Men sexually harassed because they could. Woman are talking today, because, in this new era, we finally can.”