Gemalte Zukunft (4)

Today I read a personal report in the Guardian by Bim Adewunmi reflecting on her current Berlin-experiences. She describes how people here grabbed and insulted her for the fact that she’s black. Bims expectations of the city boiled down to the point where she cannot wait for her flight back home: “Everyone had said Berlin was really hipsterish, really international and multicultural. It is all of those things, but I think what everyone who said this neglected to mention is that its internationalism is starkly monochrome – there are lots of Europeans and Americans here and they are almost always white.” What Bim describes is sad and yet not surprising. I hear those stories a lot. A black friend of mine from London once told me how she used to stand in front of the mirror and tell herself “You’re beautiful!” every morning after she woke up. She had suffered gazes, insults and other stuff right here in Neukölln, in a time where the district was already promoted as “the next cool thing” in Zitty magazine. All this reminded me of a theatre play I saw some months ago by the andcompany collective. The play – “Black Bismarck” – was basically a reenactment of what was called the Congo-Conference, a huge mingling in 1884/85, where the forces of Old Europe, the Osman Empire and the Unites States accepted Bismarck’s invitation to meet in Berlin and divide Africa. The arbitrary lines of demarcation agreed upon in that time mostly persist until today. The play revealed the glorification of Bismarck’s legacy in Germany – today there are exactly 146 Bismarck-towers, all over the place, partly up to 45 meters high, not to speak of various streets, places or schools named after this infamous godfather of colonialism. In the end of the play one of the (white) actors climbed on a chair and presented himself naked in front of a (white) wall. He must have been a little clumsy, what happened was that he dislocated his shoulder while standing on the chair. What in the first place seemed like a planned effect, proved to be quite serious – the actor had to skip acting and was taken to hospital. I’m not sure if one can empathize with the impression I had back then, which is that the incident actually had some sort of symbolic surplus: The legacy and the actuality of racism is painful. And we should face it already. So another – maybe my last – recommendation for the future: Lets demolish the white wall, whatever that means. There’s enough motives to do so.