Thomas Rogers

The request came from the far-right party Alternative for Germany, which has a history of anti-immigrant agitation, and it made Hines, a U.S. citizen who was educated at Juilliard, feel nervous, he said. He said the request was a way of whipping up resentment against foreigners working in the arts — an assessment shared by other opera company employees.

“You have to ask why they are asking this question,” Hines said. “Their goal is to make artists uncomfortable, and to tell us: ‘Why do you need to come here and take our jobs?’”

Alternative for Germany — widely known by its German initials, AfD — was formed in 2013 as a euroskeptic party, but it has drifted to the populist right in recent years. Its central issue is limiting immigration, and it has few concrete references to culture in its federal policy program, but party representatives have criticized what they see as an overly left-wing and multicultural government-funded arts scene.

Many German cultural institutions have been high-profile supporters of the so-called welcome culture encouraged by the government since 2015, when Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the door to allow 1.2 million refugees to enter Germany. Some have included works about migration in their programs, and run workshops to help integrate newcomers into German society.

Marc Jongen, a leading AfD ideologue, wrote on his website in January that “it would be an honor and a pleasure” to “tackle the removal of filth from the culture industry.” The party’s 2016 platform for the state of Saxony-Anhalt called for “museums, orchestras and theaters” to “promote a positive relationship to their own homeland.”

Many cultural leaders in the state Baden-Württemberg, of which Stuttgart is the capital, saw the inquiry about artists’ nationalities as an ominous sign of the party’s increasing interest in the arts — and a possible clue of what the party might focus on if it were to gain greater power over arts institutions.

In Germany’s decentralized political structure, most arts organizations are funded and managed at the state and local levels. Although the AfD is particularly popular in states in the former East Germany, it is represented in all 16 state legislatures and has a strong presence in many municipal governments.

After the director of the Friedrichstadt-Palast, a performance venue in Berlin, criticized AfD voters in 2017, a state lawmaker from the party called for the theater’s budget to be cut. In May, an AfD official described independent theaters in the city of Leipzig as “extremist” and pushed to eliminate their funding.

Three states in eastern Germany are to hold elections in the fall, and recent polls have placed AfD in first or second place in Saxony and Brandenburg, and in second or third place in Thuringia. Other parties have so far said they will not include the right-wing populists in any governing coalitions, but the AfD’s leaders in Saxony have said that, were they to become part of the government, a priority would be to control the ministry that oversees culture.

Petra Olschowski, the deputy minister responsible for the arts in Baden-Württemberg, said that “if a member of the AfD was to become a minister for culture in a German state, they could immediately intervene massively in the cultural sphere, for example, by closing venues.”

She said she was “shocked” when she saw the request to reveal artists’ nationalities, adding that she has noticed a “sharper tone” and greater “self-confidence” on the part of the AfD as the elections approach.

The AfD is currently the third-largest party in the Baden-Württemberg legislature, which is not enough to meaningfully affect the state’s cultural policy. The Ministry for Science, Research and Art was legally obliged to answer the request about artists’ information.

The ministry responded with a statement that broke down the performers by nationality, without identifying individuals. It said that the Stuttgart Ballet, for example, employed “63 dancers from 24 nations.”

Rainer Balzer, one of the AfD lawmakers who made the inquiry, said in an interview that he was motivated not by xenophobia, but by a desire to improve arts education.

“If you compare our graduates to those in Asia, it is a grim comparison,” he said. “It is sad that the media and the directors twisted my request into something xenophobic.”

Frank Brettschneider, a professor of political science at the University of Hohenheim, said that AfD politicians have become skilled at pushing boundaries, and then playing the victim when their actions cause pushback.

“They try to do things they know will provoke people, and bring the AfD into conversation, then claim to be naïve and not mean it that way,” he said.

State-funded institutions in Baden-Württemberg are required by law to include representatives from parties in the state legislature on their boards. Among them is the Akademie Schloss Solitude, an international artist residency program in Stuttgart that has an AfD member on its board of trustees. Its director, Elke aus dem Moore, said she respected that the rule was intended to reflect voters’ democratic choices, but that she was “concerned” about the AfD presence at board meetings.

The directors of several state cultural institutions in Baden-Württemberg said in interviews that they were torn over how to respond to the AfD’s request to know about artists’ nationalities, for fear of feeding what they see as a provocation. The Ulm Theater posted a satirical counterinquiry on its Facebook page, asking the AfD to reveal how many of its lawmakers in Baden-Württemberg have a criminal record.

Peter Spuhler, the general director of the Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe, said that the inquiry had encouraged him hire more foreigners. “I am proud we have 46 nations, and if we make it to 50 or more, I will be more proud,” he said by phone.

Marc-Oliver Hendriks, the executive director of the Staatstheater Stuttgart, an umbrella institution that includes the city’s main theater, opera and ballet stages, said the AfD request had raised concerns about potential efforts by the party to disrupt German cultural institutions. “The inquiry itself is effective, because it makes artists nervous,” he said.

Hines, the opera singer who was born in Texas, said that he intended to remain in Germany.

He said that the AfD request seemed to overlook how opera companies function. “Opera is a very specific job,” he said. “A casting director wants someone who can do that job, regardless where they come from.”

He added that he hoped his contract in Stuttgart would be extended when it comes up for renewal next year. “I feel at home here,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/arts/afd-germany-culture.html" id="ac9fad1a-d0b5-3440-afd5-c1f5b6dbac64">The New York Times</a>.

Demands of Far-Right Party Unsettle Artists in Germany

STUTTGART, Germany — Elliot Carlton Hines, a baritone who sings with the Stuttgart State Opera, received a text message in June that unnerved him. A friend was telling him that the state culture ministry had been asked for the nationalities of artists employed in the state-funded opera, orchestra and ballet companies, as well as where they had been educated.

The devices included a laser cutter, computerized embroidery machines and equipment to digitally sculpt wood. In one glassed-in area on the building’s second floor, Helsinki residents could repair personal electronic items by 3D-printing replacement parts and soldering them together.

Soininvaara’s uncertainty was understandable: The 59-year-old, who has worked in the Finnish library system for three decades, is more of an expert on literature than on high-tech engraving, and Oodi — which means “ode” in Finnish — isn’t exactly a normal library. Given its breadth of services, one might be forgiven for wondering whether Oodi should be considered a library at all.

A swooping three-story construction of wood, steel and glass that looks like a ship topped with a layer of ice, the new building, which cost 98 million euros, or around $110 million, including equipment, is one of the most anticipated public projects in the country in years. It is an ambitious attempt by one of the most literate and digitally savvy nations in the world to reinvent the library for its population’s future needs.

“Books are important, but it’s not the whole library,” Soininvaara said. She pointed to Oodi’s recording studios, kitchen, gaming room with PlayStation consoles, and an “immersive 3D space,” a room whose walls can be illuminated with digital projections, available to artists or for corporate presentations.

The result of two decades of planning and public consultation, each of Oodi’s three floors was built to fulfill a different civic purpose. Its expansive ground floor, which includes a restaurant, movie theater, European Union information center and several areas suited for concerts, is meant for events that encourage Helsinki’s residents to mingle. The second floor, with electronic equipment and workrooms, is for noisy creative activity, and the top floor, an open-plan, brightly lit “book heaven” with rows of white stacks, is a conventional, if inordinately tasteful, reading room.

“We took into account the fact that libraries will always be changing,” said Samuli Woolston, a partner at ALA Architects, the Finnish firm behind the building. “Already, their use is different now from what it was 10 years ago.” New functions, he explained, could easily be accommodated into the building’s design.

Tommi Laitio, the city’s executive director for culture and leisure, explained that the building and its expansive technological offerings were partly intended as a bulwark against populism. In 2015, the right-wing, populist Finns Party joined a coalition government. Jussi Halla-aho, the party’s leader, once argued that solving Greece’s debt crisis would require a military junta, and he has linked Islam to pedophilia.

“This is very much a political project,” Laitio said, arguing that threats to democracy across the globe in recent years could be explained partly by people’s uncertainty about technological advances.

Oodi’s high-tech equipment is intended to counteract those fears. “It allows people to experience the future so it doesn’t feel so intimidating,” he explained.

Finland’s high-profile investment in the public library system runs counter to trends in the United States and Britain, where many libraries have faced drastic budget cuts in recent years. Last year, a column in The Guardian argued that the cuts to the British system, which increasingly relies on volunteers, had been so severe that “the U.K. no longer has a national library system.”

Oodi “fits very well into the Nordic story of how societies work,” Laitio said. “There are so few of us here, so we have to make sure everyone can develop to their fullest potential.”

With their generous publicly funded benefits, Nordic countries place a high premium on social integration and education, and, based on 2014 figures from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Finnish government spends more than 1 1/2 times as much per capita on libraries as the United States.

The Nordic countries are emerging as leaders in library design. Dokk1, a state-of-the-art “hybrid library” with “maker spaces,” a passport office and a playground, opened in Aarhus, Denmark, in 2015. It was named “public library of the year” by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions a year later, and its visitor numbers have grown significantly.

Oslo’s new central library, which is due to open in early 2020 on the Norwegian capital’s waterfront, is expected to include a movie theater, gaming area and workshop for visitors to use digital equipment.

The Nordic countries have been faster to embrace digital technology than most, and Laitio argued that Oodi points to a way forward for library systems across the world that have struggled with digitization and budget cuts. The building, he said, is intended for use as a coworking space and a town square, and tries to appeal to a broad range of demographics.

“We have to make sure that libraries aren’t just relevant for people who can’t afford books or a computer,” he said.

Oodi’s architects noted that the building’s balcony was built to be at the same level as the stairs to the Parliament building across the square, a symbolic gesture to indicate that learning is as important in Finnish society as politics.

“We often think that things like social cohesion or democracy are just words, but in spaces like these they really come to life,” Laitio said. “You need some social infrastructure for communities to work. You can’t build them on friendship, or this abstract idea of living together.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/06/arts/design/helsinki-library-oodi.html" id="b9eb3a62-8cc5-35ea-a11d-93440e0f0032">The New York Times</a>.

Helsinki's New Library Has 3D Printers and Power Tools. (And Some Books, Too.)

HELSINKI, Finland — Two days before the opening on Dec. 5 of Oodi, Helsinki’s new central library, its director, Anna-Maria Soininvaara, stood before some of the high-tech equipment that would soon be available for the public to use. She wasn’t entirely sure what it all did, she said sheepishly.

The menacing display was a theatrical embodiment of the gleefully confrontational role Imam, the lesbian daughter of refugees, has come to play in Swedish pop culture. Imam, whose mother is Lithuanian and father Syrian, is one of the country’s best-known hip-hop artists and a symbol of the counterreaction to the rise of right-wing populism in Scandinavia’s most-populous country.

When the mask came off, Imam, 32, launched into “I Min Zon” (“In My Zone”), a languid, withering song from her first EP, in which she rails against racism and sexism in the country. “Fifteen million people in the world are named Mohamed,” she rapped in Swedish, “but whose name do they want to see on the résumé?”

Mattias Naxe, 30, a lighting designer in the audience, said he was drawn to Imam’s music primarily because she was a “very good rapper,” but added that her success was also a reflection of Sweden’s polarized political climate. In last fall’s national election, the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats won 18 percent of the vote, making them the country’s third-largest party. “She came at the right time,” he said, adding that she “very much” represents this particular moment.

Although Sweden is known for being one of the world’s premier suppliers of dance-pop, it also has one of Europe’s most vibrant hip-hop scenes. Imam is one of its biggest female stars. In 2014, her breakout single “IMAM,” a political song in which she refers to herself as a “176 centimeter Pussy Riot,” reached No. 1 in the Swedish charts. Since then, she has won numerous awards, including a Swedish Grammi, the country’s equivalent to a Grammy Award, for artist of the year.

Her most recent album, “Helig Moder” (“Holy Mother”), released in February, has been widely praised in the Swedish news media, and she was recently announced as the opening act for the main stage of the renowned Roskilde Music Festival in Denmark.

In an interview in a coffee shop in the Hornstull neighborhood of Stockholm, where she lives, Imam said she had struggled with the pressure of her success and the fallout from her position as a political provocateur. She explained that her new album was an attempt to come to terms with the “superhero everyone wants me to be, or the one that I’ve become in Scandinavia for a lot of people.”

Although Sweden is often seen internationally as a paragon of social liberalism, many of Imam’s songs have highlighted the racism, misogyny and homophobia she believes permeate society here. Her 2015 single “Imam Cobain” included a frequently quoted line instructing the men who “say my love is a crime” to “go and kiss” a “swastika.” Another song called out people offended by the fact that she is a “hybrid,” with Syrian roots.

The rise of the Sweden Democrats, she argued, only goes to prove her point. The party, whose slogans include “Keep Sweden Swedish,” has its roots in the neo-Nazi movement and campaigned on severely limiting immigration. “Sweden is finally revealing itself for what it is,” Imam said.

The rapper was born in 1986 in communist Lithuania, but her family moved to what was then Czechoslovakia when she was a toddler. When her father, a journalist and lawyer, came under pressure there because of his far-left politics, the family fled to Kiruna, Sweden’s northernmost city, which she described as “very cold” and “with no people of color.” After the family relocated to Stockholm, Imam attended a school in the suburbs where she said there were “neo-Nazis and immigrants, and nothing in between.”

A longtime fan of the Fugees and Kanye West, she started performing while completing her degree in English and psychology at the University of Stockholm. Her anger at the far right was galvanized in 2013, when Jimmie Akesson, the leader of the Sweden Democrats, retweeted a photo of her performing at a protest against the far right while wearing a jacket bearing a crossed-out “S.D.,” the party’s initials. The song she performed included the line, “send the pigs to slaughter,” referring to members of the party. Afterward, she received threats from his supporters. “He knew what he was doing. He knew what kinds of followers he had,” she said.

The debate around refugees in Sweden, she argued, has become untethered from reality. “The claim that we can’t afford the refugees isn’t fact-based,” Imam said. Tax avoidance by large companies was a bigger drain on the economy, she added.

In 2015, one of Imam’s cousins was among the many thousands of migrants attempting to make their way across the Mediterranean into Europe after the outbreak of the Syrian civil war. The incident, she recalled, affected her deeply. “She sent me a photo of her boat, with just water and three sandwiches, and I thought this was crazy,” she said. The cousin and her two children ultimately ended up in Denmark.

Ametist Azordegan, a radio host and producer currently writing a book about Swedish hip-hop, described Imam by phone as one of the country’s “top hip-hop artists” and one of the “absolute best” lyricists, and argued that she “has built a space for gay, young women that hasn’t existed in the media in Sweden.”

Christina Tsiobanelis, one of the three co-directors of “Silvana,” a documentary about Imam’s early career that played in movie theaters around Europe, said in a phone interview that the rapper’s success coincided with not only the rise of the far right but also the growth of an increasingly vocal feminist movement in the country. “If she had come up three years earlier, she might not have become that successful,” she said.

The film, which won a Guldbagge Award, the Swedish equivalent of an Oscar, for best documentary, also chronicled the beginnings of Imam’s relationship with Beatrice Eli, a Swedish pop singer. The two remain together, and have recorded several duets. In Imam’s view, they are the country’s first prominent lesbian couple to be “cool and young.” She added, after a pause, “and hot.”

At Annexet, Eli appeared on stage to perform with Imam in “Magi Som Orlando,” a sexually charged duet. They pressed into each other as the crowd cheered. Then, a few minutes later, the stage turned into a raucous celebration reflecting Imam’s cultural and sexual identities. Two belly dancers and a row of women in traditional Arab costume gyrated on the stage, while another dancer balanced on her head. Silvana jumped up and down, laughing.

“Silvana is a symbol for the new Swedish girl,” said Leonora Haag, 20, who watched in the audience. “Swedish people are very much a collective, you don’t stand out. What’s amazing about her is that she just doesn’t care.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/arts/music/silvana-imam.html" id="12fbe282-27bb-34a6-a17e-3552b24b36d6">The New York Times</a>.

STOCKHOLM — On a recent Friday night, Swedish rapper Silvana Imam appeared on stage at Annexet, a concert venue in the south side of Stockholm, dressed like a comic-book villain. Her face hidden by a black mask studded with spikes, she dragged a metal baseball bat across the stage to the loud cheers of her mostly female audience.

She Raps and Sweden Listens

The announcement, in a news release Wednesday, followed an inspection of the building by the head of construction for the project and the president of the Federal Office for Construction and Regional Planning. A new timeline for the opening will be presented to the board of the museum’s foundation June 26.

The museum, one of Europe’s most ambitious and expensive current cultural projects, has been burdened by construction problems and by accusations from academics and activists that it hasn’t done enough to determine the provenance of its objects that were acquired during the colonial era or to address whether it is appropriate to hold onto them. The opening of the permanent exhibition had already been delayed to 2020; the Forum was slated to open in stages, beginning with a temporary exhibition of ivory objects in November.

The exhibition was to include items lent from other museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris. Last week, German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that delays in the activation of the climate control system of the new building had led the other museums to decide not to send their ivory items for the opening exhibition.

Officials confirmed Wednesday that the “central cooling system would not be able to be activated until late July,” leaving little time for it to be certified in time for the fall opening. Representatives of the other museums did not respond to requests for comment.

It is the latest setback for a project that has been dogged by controversy since its conception. The Humboldt Forum is on the site of the Palast der Republik, the former East German Parliament, which was torn down after German reunification, to the outrage of many East Germans. The Forum is to open within a facsimile of the Berliner Schloss, the Berlin Palace, which was built by the Hohenzollern dynasty. The Schloss was badly damaged in the Allied bombing of Berlin in World War II and demolished in 1950 by the government of Communist East Germany. Some see the decision to rebuild the Schloss as an attempt to erase Germany’s turbulent 20th-century history.

The Forum has also been the target of complaints from activists and academics who have said the new museum’s leaders have not done enough to explore the collection’s ties to colonial exploitation. Once complete, the $700 million Forum is to unite the collections of Berlin’s Asian Art Museum and Ethnological Museum, as well as exhibitions from the City Museum of Berlin and a project overseen by Humboldt University.

The debate has also drawn new scrutiny of Germany’s own troubled colonial past, which some scholars say has been largely overshadowed by the country’s postwar reckoning with the Nazis’ crimes.

Among numerous items from outside Germany, the Forum’s collection includes several hundred spectacular sculptures, known as Benin Bronzes, that originated in an area that is now part of Nigeria. The sculptures, which are actually made of brass, were bought on the open market after being looted by British troops. Scholars and activists have described the sculptures as “stolen art” and have called for them to be returned to Nigeria.

In an interview with The New York Times last year, Mnyaka Sururu Mboro, an anti-colonial activist in Berlin, called on the museum to return to Africa the skulls of ancestors who he said were executed by Germans in Tanzania. “The people there are still in sorrow,” he said.

Jürgen Zimmerer, a historian specializing in colonialism at the University of Hamburg, who has been critical of the project, said in a phone interview that the museum “has a problem in that it has yet to figure out how to deal with objects looted during the colonial period.” Zimmerer argued that a “large social debate” was necessary in Germany about what the new building should be used for.

Initiators of the project have countered that the Forum is a positive symbol of Germany’s history of scientific enlightenment and exploration. In an interview with the Berliner Zeitung last year, the head of the Humboldt Forum, Hartmut Dorgerloh, acknowledged that “the discussion about provenance research has shown that social developments are changing the work of the institutions.”

The Forum announced plans for joint projects with Namibia as well as efforts to involve curatorial voices from the countries where these objects originated. Dorgerloh has said that where a claim for restitution has been made, it would be noted along with any object on display. He told the Berliner Zeitung that “while restitution is an option” for objects with colonial histories, “alternative” approaches would also be explored, such as loaning them out.

The Forum is one of several high-profile projects in Germany that have been dogged by delays in recent years, leading to public hand-wringing about whether German officials are capable of successfully carrying out large public construction projects. Berlin’s new airport, which was slated to open in 2011, is now scheduled to open nine years behind schedule, in the fall of 2020.

Some critics have argued that the delay in the Forum’s opening should be seen as a boon. “This is an opportunity,” Zimmerer said. “They should leave the building closed for another two years and invite everyone to participate in a competition about what to do with it.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/arts/design/berlin-humboldt-forum-opening-benin.html" id="d4e348aa-5c6e-32f2-abc6-3854057832aa">The New York Times</a>.

Berlin's Troubled Humboldt Forum Pushes Back Opening

BERLIN — The Humboldt Forum, the problem-plagued museum housed in a reconstructed palace in the center of this city, has pushed back its opening date to 2020 because of technical reasons, officials announced this week. They added that “it was not realistic for the building to be ready for use by the end of 2019 as had been planned.”

Berlin's troubled Humboldt forum pushes back opening

<h1>HAMBURG, Germany — After Swiss actor Bruno Ganz died in February, officials in Vienna opened a safe to reveal a tightly guarded secret. Inside was a slip of paper with Ganz’s signature, and the name of an actor he had chosen. It was the beginning of one of the stranger rituals in European theater.</h1>

Ganz, who is best known internationally for playing an angel in the Wim Wenders film “Wings of Desire” and for portraying Hitler in “Downfall,” was a giant of German-language theater and the most recent holder of the Iffland Ring, a centuries-old piece of jewelry given to the “most worthy” actor who performs in German.

Each ring bearer decides his successor — and it is always a he — and writes it on a slip of paper, which is kept hidden in Vienna until their death.

Ganz chose Jens Harzer, a 47-year-old actor in the ensemble at Hamburg’s Thalia Theater. He is set to receive the ring in a ceremony at the Burgtheater in Vienna on June 16, and the distinction signals Harzer’s rise to the top ranks of the European acting world.

But the prize comes burdened with historical baggage: a supposed curse, accusations of sexism and an association with the Nazis. For Harzer, it has also stirred an acute awareness of his own mortality.

In a recent interview at the Thalia Theater, Harzer was modest about the significance of the news: “Of course, I am not the most worthy actor of my generation or whatever. Never. What’s that about? Absurd,” he said.

“But,” he added, “who am I to criticize?”

Harzer has long held the esteem of German theater fans. The spindly, soft-spoken native of Wiesbaden, Germany, is known for his subtle command of language and intense onstage presence.

He spent a large part of his career at the Munich Kammerspiele, and has performed on high-profile stages around the country. But because he has mostly eschewed film and television — except most recently in a supporting role, Dr. Schmidt, in “Babylon Berlin” — he remains largely unknown internationally.

Harzer said he was an admirer of Ganz long before the two men met in Munich in 1996, to perform as father and son in a play. One day, Harzer said, it became clear during rehearsals that Ganz, a recovering alcoholic, was drunk.

After the irritated director called for a break, Ganz retreated to his dressing room. To show he wasn’t bothered by Ganz’s drunkenness, Harzer implored him to come back, an act of tenderness that cemented a bond between the two men. (Ganz again quit drinking until his death.)

“The nice thing about this ring is that it’s a subjective choice, by a great actor,” Harzer said. “That makes this strange ring almost likable.”

Although the Iffland Ring’s origins remain murky, one legend traces it to the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who supposedly gave it to the German actor and dramatist August Wilhelm Iffland around the start of the 19th century. In its lengthy history, only nine men have apparently been awarded the ring, which bears Iffland’s likeness along with 28 small diamonds.

One recipient, Albert Bassermann, considered the object cursed after three of his anointed successors died before they could receive it. He threw it on one of the men’s caskets as it was about to be cremated, but it was rescued by the director of the Burgtheater, Austria’s premier playhouse.

The Austrian government now oversees the prize. Performers must name their successor within three months of receiving the ring, and the slip of paper with their choice is locked away until their death.

In 1954, the ring passed to Werner Krauss, a German with ties to the Nazi regime. He appeared in “Jud Süss,” a notorious anti-Semitic propaganda film produced at the behest of Joseph Goebbels.

Asked about the ring’s association with Krauss, Harzer said, “I don’t care.” The ring’s politics, he added, were “for other people to worry about.”

Since the ring has only ever been given to men, political questions have now turned to gender, and whether it is past time for an actress to be honored.

There has been confusion about whether the ring’s rules allow it to be given to a woman. (A less prominent female equivalent, the Alma Seidler Ring, was started in 1978.) In an email, a spokeswoman for the Austrian Culture Ministry explained that the rules for the Iffland Ring “have no specifications on the man/woman question.”

Esther Slevogt, a founder of the online theater magazine Nachtkritik, said in a phone interview that even if the Iffland Ring is technically open to women, it is predicated on the notion that “only a genius can recognize another genius,” and that “the concept of the ‘genius’ is a very male idea.”

She compared it to a ring worn by a bishop or a cardinal that is kissed by worshippers. “If you know a bit about it,” she said, “you might think it’s a bit stupid, but also funny.”

“Of course a woman should get it,” Harzer said, adding: “I will be provocative and say it is unimportant whether the name on my paper is a man or a woman.”

Harzer argued that most accomplished German actresses had expressed little interest in the award. “I swear to you, they will not hang around and think, ‘Hopefully, when Harzer dies, I will get this ring.’”

The product of what he described as a “very middle-class” family “with no interest in literature, no theater,” Harzer studied acting at the Otto Falckenberg School in Munich. But he said he learned much of his craft as part of Germany’s publicly subsidized ensemble-theater system, which allows theaters to hire actors as salaried employees and use them in multiple plays per season.

Harzer said he was the “best proof” of the system’s value, arguing that it provides an important public service and fosters talent. “I think it’s absolutely worth defending,” he said. “It’s as important has having a swimming pool or a library.”

He also noted that the Iffland Ring comes with its own macabre associations. “With this ring, you are essentially told, ‘Hey, when are you going to die?’” he said. “My advantage is that in the last few years, I was confronted with death.”

Harzer said he discovered two years ago that he had a life-threatening illness, which he declined to name. The diagnosis required him to stop working and undergo several serious operations, he said. He has now recovered.

“We as a family, with my two children, have a very difficult time behind us,” he said. “Now I have grappled so much with death, it doesn’t scare me.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/12/theater/iffland-ring-jens-harzer.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Each ring bearer decides his successor — and it is always a he — and writes it on a slip of paper, which is kept hidden in Vienna until their death.

Is this ring an honor, or a curse?

<h1>The Humboldt Forum, a new museum housed in a replica of a long-destroyed castle, is set to open this fall.</h1>

The project has been plagued by strife, and its leaders have come under fire from activists and academics who say little has been done to research the provenance of colonial-era objects in the museum’s collections.

But many longtime Berliners are disdainful of the project for another reason: The Forum occupies the former site of the Palast der Republik, a hulking building that once housed the East German parliament and that was demolished to make way for the new museum.

For many former East Germans, the decision to tear down one of the architectural showpieces of the German Democratic Republic, or GDR, was a form of historical vandalism.

The Kunsthalle Rostock, an art museum in the northeast of Germany, is presenting a new exhibition called “Palast der Republik: Utopia, Inspiration, Politics,” dedicated to the building’s artistic, social and political legacy. The show, running through Oct. 13, features design elements and furniture from the demolished building, as well as art by prominent East German painters that once decorated its walls and artworks it inspired.

The communist GDR was a one-party state where many citizens were systematically monitored by intelligence services and people faced severe consequences if they spoke out against the regime.

But it still arouses nostalgia among some former citizens who fondly remember its gender egalitarianism and social safety net or admire its utopian aspirations.

Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the former East remains poorer than the rest of Germany, and many residents feel that the promises of reunification were never fulfilled. The region has become a bastion of support for the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany party.

Elke Neumann, the exhibition’s curator, said that many Germans have an overly simplistic understanding of East Germany, and that she hoped the exhibition would help people form a more nuanced view of the GDR.

“Many people still think everything was black and white,” she said in an interview. “It makes sense for people to see what was actually there.”

The Palast was opened in 1976 on the site of the original Berlin Schloss, the centuries-old castle of the Hohenzollern dynasty, which was heavily damaged during World War II. The East German government demolished the building’s remains in 1950.

The Palast, meant to embody the ambitions of the new regime, was a Soviet-style rectangular colossus with two large blocks sandwiching a smaller middle section, clad in distinctive bronze-mirrored windows.

A unique mixture of government building and leisure destination, it housed the (largely symbolic) parliament of the GDR, as well as nearly a dozen venues for eating and drinking, a theater, a bowling alley, a post office and a youth club. It also boasted two auditoriums, including a hexagonal space with unique, diagonally retractable seating that allowed it to accommodate events ranging from state dinners to rock concerts.

“The building gave East Germans an identity, in a positive sense,” Moritz Holfelder, a journalist who has written a book about the building, said in a phone interview. Although the Palast symbolized a repressive regime, he argued, it was primarily seen as a place for everyday activities: eating, dancing and celebrating family occasions.

“Eighty percent of the people I spoke with from the former GDR told me they loved this building,” Holfelder said.

Many depictions at the Kunsthalle Rostock exhibition show East Germans’ ordinary uses of the Palast, like the gatherings and parties that were captured by photographer Thomas Sandberg.

Elsewhere in the show, artists Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani have reconstructed a portion of the dance floor from the Palast’s youth club. The original surface could rise up several inches and rotate while people danced.

After the Berlin Wall came down, the Palast remained in a state of limbo as authorities debated its future. The building was gutted to remove asbestos, and its empty shell became a utopian space for the city’s art community.

One project filled the building with 58,000 gallons of water and allowed visitors to travel around it in inflatable boats. In 2005, Norwegian artist Lars O. Ramberg installed 20-foot letters on the building’s roof that spelled out “zweifel,” the German word for “doubt,” to reflect the sense of uncertainty that followed reunification.

For many, the public debate about what to do about the building was as much about architecture as it was about grappling with the GDR’s legacy. Some in Germany viewed the decision to tear down the Palast as an attempt to erase decades of complex history without fully reckoning with it.

“After reunification, GDR history wasn’t worked through in the way the Nazi past was in West Germany,” Holfelder said.

Gertraude Pohl, a designer and artist who was part of the Palast’s original interior design team and who has several pieces in the exhibition, said that the 2003 decision by the German parliament to demolish the building was a “national idiocy.” In a telephone interview, she said it was “unique” that, in the case of the GDR, “as a country went under, so did its culture and architecture.”

The Kunsthalle Rostock exhibition also features wallpaper created by artist Stefanie Bürkle that replicates the facade of the Palast, to represent her belief that the building had become a two-dimensional surface onto which questions about German identity and history were being projected.

In an interview, Bürkle said the exhibition came at “exactly the right time” to take stock of both the regime’s utopian intentions and its grimmer realities.

“I’m against cutsefying it, and against nostalgia for the GDR, which was a brutal dictatorship that destroyed people,” she said. “The identity of the GDR is not contained in this building alone. It came from all kinds of other things.”

Holfelder believes that if the Palast’s fate were to be decided today, it’s unlikely that the building would be demolished in favor of the new Schloss, which he described as a “squalid box.”

Germans now have more emotional distance from the GDR, he argued, pointing to the fact that the country has been led for nearly a decade and a half by Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany.

“At some point, maybe we will tear down the Schloss again, and rebuild the Palast der Republik,” he said. “From a historical perspective, that would make sense.”

Symbol of a brutal regime Or a fun place to party

BERLIN — In the center of Berlin, across from the city’s cathedral, one of Germany’s most controversial construction projects is nearing completion.

Symbol of a brutal regime? Or a fun place to party?

The piece, titled “ParaPivot,” consists of two large sculptures made of steel, rectangular frames and several enormous spherical rocks. Kwade hopes that visitors will be able to walk under the spheres, some of which weigh more than a ton, if the museum is able to secure the necessary city approvals.

The experience, in a sense, is to be a test of faith.

As Kwade adjusted the model, one of the miniature spheres detached and rolled past a small cutout meant to represent a museum visitor. “Oops, that’s not supposed to happen,” she said, then burst into laughter. She pointed out that the real rocks, gathered from different continents, would remain securely fastened to the structure, even in high winds.

Kwade, 40, has become known in recent years for her sculptures that seem to test or bend the laws of physics and that explore broader questions about the nature of reality and our position within the universe. The installation, which will open to the public April 16, is her first solo museum show in New York.

“Ultimately,” she said, sitting in the kitchen of her studio, in a former industrial space in the city’s Oberschöneweide district, “I want to put into perspective our own relative scale, and the relative scale of what we are doing.” The work, she said, was meant to encourage visitors to think about Earth itself and the “irrational fact that you are on a sphere, turning at high speed in the void.”

Kwade, who was born in Poland but has lived in Germany since childhood, has the focused intensity and upright posture one might expect of someone who builds mathematically precise large-scale sculptures. She speaks in rat-a-tat German, and peppers her conversations with references to the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (sometimes referred to as the “French Freud”) and Danish physicist Niels Bohr.

Kelly Baum, curator at the Met who oversaw the project, said that the artist was selected largely because of the ways her works “play with and exploit illusionism, while referring to scientific principles, to astrophysics.”

Kwade’s focus on abstraction, she added, marked a departure from the past two commissions.

The 2018 exhibition “We Come in Peace” by Pakistani-born artist Huma Bhabha consisted of two monumental, loosely figurative sculptures, one standing and one prostrate on the ground, which Bhabha described as an “anti-war narrative.” In 2017, Argentine artist Adrián Villar Rojas arranged a Bacchanalian tableau of sculptures largely replicated from the Met collection.

“What I love is that Alicja is trying to use steel and stone and abstraction to make us feel the mystery and absurdity of the human condition, but not in a manner that is outright or explicit,” Baum said. “She lets us pick up the ball.”

Kwade said that the idea for “ParaPivot” had emerged from a series of works she had been doing since 2017 involving large rocks suspended on steel bars, often in a solar-system formation. The rocks, she said, were mainly meant to evoke planets, including our own.

“It is like a portrait of Earth, like a strange mirror image,” she said, “as if you’re looking at yourself as a giant.” Lines within the stones, she explained, represented “compressed time,” while the rectangular frames for the new piece, which are arranged in a kind of self-invented clockwork formation, were meant to suggest the many systems — physical, economic, political — that govern our daily lives.

By placing visitors in a position of self-contemplation, she hoped to encourage them to question their beliefs in those systems. She is, admittedly, a skeptic.

“I don’t believe in any firm truths,” she said. Looking around her studio kitchen, she pointed out a lesson in molecular physics: What we observe to be hard surfaces, such as a wooden table top, are in fact made primarily of empty atoms. She asserted that her art “is an attempt to find out what that which we call reality actually is.”

Kwade was born in 1979 in Katowice, an industrial city in what was then communist Poland, to a father who worked as an art historian and restorer, and a mother who was a cultural scholar and specialist in Slavic linguistics. She was a skilled artist from a young age; her father would hold drawing competitions among her, her brother and her cousins, in which the prize was a piece of chewing gum from the other side of the Iron Curtain.

Her family escaped to West Germany when Alicja was 8, under the pretense of attending a relative’s wedding in France. Because hard currency would have aroused the suspicions of the border guards, her father melted gold and hid it in the car’s headlights and doors, and her mother stuffed Alicja’s clothes and her brother’s with dollar bills. “She told us to pretend we were sleeping,” the artist recalled.

Her experiences on both sides of the Berlin Wall, she explained, may have subconsciously inspired the mirrored or doubled objects that frequently pop up in her work. In 2000, while studying at the University of the Arts in Berlin, she saw an image from a fashion magazine of a woman who looked just like her. “I photographed the photo and sent it to my mom as a test, and she thought it was me,” she said. She then photographed herself in the same position, and arranged the images so the two figures were looking at each other.

The piece, and its exploration of divergent, but overlapping realities, set the thematic groundwork for most of what followed.

Several works involve placing rocks or trees on either side of mirrors, so they appear to transform themselves — from metallic to wooden, from gray to brown — in their reflections. For “Perception is Reality,” a 2017 exhibition at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, she used a 3-D scanner to create a partial reproduction of a rock. “My intention isn’t so much to copy something as it is to show different possibilities, like matter and antimatter,” she said.

Other works have tweaked the rules of physics and the values underpinning economic and political systems. As part of a 2013 outdoor group exhibition at City Hall Park in New York, she exhibited a Raleigh bike that had been bent into a perfect — and impossible — circle so that the front and back tires met. Ken Johnson, writing in The New York Times, noted that “Journey without arrival (Raleigh)” had “a nice, counterintuitive simplicity, like a three-dimensional koan.” In an older conceptual piece commenting on luxury and capitalism, she once had nearly 5,000 pounds worth of Champagne bottles ground into grain-sized sand and poured in a conical pile.

Lisa Spellman, whose 303 Gallery represents Kwade in New York, described her in an email as “one of the most important artists of our time” and noted that “her work has become increasingly ambitious and elaborate over the years, in both scale and content.”

The artist said the biggest challenges in creating “ParaPivot” were logistical. Because lifting the sculptures to the roof by crane would have been prohibitively expensive, they had to be painstakingly moved through the building’s hallways and brought up by elevator.

Bernd Euler, a Berlin art-producer whose team built the piece, said over the phone that they had to use a system of chains and a forklift to maneuver the spherical stones, some of which measured more than 3 feet in diameter. Euler, who has worked with Kwade for years, described her as very “exact” and “whatever the positive word is for ‘pedantic.’”

Despite the sculptures’ abstract qualities, Baum said that the work offers a salient commentary on our current moment. “She wants us to engender distrust for the systems and rules which we rely on too passively.”

Her lesson may be taken to heart on the roof of the Met. “ParaPivot’s” visual interactions with the Manhattan skyline, Kwade said, were partly inspired by the fact that the city’s skyscrapers were symbols of a capitalist system she views with mistrust. From certain angles, she explained, the sculpture’s spherical rocks will look as if they are perched on the surrounding buildings, so that “capitalism becomes a pedestal for the globe.”

She noted that capitalism is seen by many as a “pillar” holding up our society. “Money, economics, capitalism, they have nothing to do with reality,” she said, arguing that they are based entirely on people’s faith. “I don’t believe in any authorities. But that doesn’t necessarily make things easier for me.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="9ce9aeea-99a4-43f7-936a-24692b3db905" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/arts/design/met-roof-alicja-kwade.html">The New York Times</a>.

BERLIN — On a recent afternoon in her Berlin studio, Polish-German artist Alicja Kwade was inspecting a model for the work she designed for this spring’s Roof Garden Commission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

On the Met roof, a test of faith

<h1>It was one of 16 films in competition at the festival, seven of which were directed by women. In his acceptance speech, Nadav Lapid, the film’s Israeli director, dedicated the award to his mother, who had edited much of the film but died during production. </h1>

The selection committee was headed by French actress Juliette Binoche.

Angela Schanelec of Germany took home the directing award for “I Was at Home, But,” an elliptical film about a widowed mother whose teenage son runs away from home.

In one of the most dramatic moments of this year’s festival, “One Second,” a drama by acclaimed Chinese director Zhang Yimou that is set during the Cultural Revolution, was removed from competition days before its planned premiere for “technical reasons,” a term frequently used in China as a euphemism for government censorship.

The Silver Bear, the runner-up prize, was awarded to François Ozon’s “By the Grace of God,” a drama based on a real-life sexual abuse case within the Roman Catholic Church in France. The film, a solemn work by Ozon, a veteran French director, had been one of the most critically lauded in the festival. The French priest the film is based on, who is accused of abusing dozens of boys, has filed a lawsuit trying to delay the film’s release in France.

Yong Mei took home the award for best actress and Wang Jingchun won best actor, both for their roles in the Chinese film “So Long, My Son” by Wang Xiaoshuai. In understated performances, Yong and Wang play a couple who lose their only son in an accident and are forced to cope with tumultuous events over several decades in China’s history.

The Alfred Bauer Prize for a feature that “opens new perspectives” was awarded to Nora Fingscheidt’s “System Crasher,” about a violent 9-year-old girl caught within the German social system. “Piranhas,” an Italian crime drama whose screenwriters included Roberto Saviano, the Italian writer and author of “Gomorrah,” took home the prize for best screenplay. The Teddy Award for best LGBT-themed feature film was given to “Brief Story From the Green Planet,” an Argentine film about friends who encounter an alien creature.

This year’s festival was the last Berlinale, as it is known in Germany, to be overseen by Dieter Kosslick, who has served as its director since 2001. In recent years, Kosslick has drawn criticism for what some observers have seen as an overly broad curatorial approach to the festival, which has grown significantly during his tenure. In November 2017, 79 members of the German film industry signed an open letter arguing that the festival required a “new start.”

Kosslick will be replaced by two co-chiefs. Carlo Chatrian, who was until recently artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival, will take over the Berlinale’s artistic direction, while Mariette Rissenbeek, who has previously been managing director of German Films, a center for the promotion of German filmmaking, will lead the business side of the festival.

'Synonyms,' drama by Israeli director, takes top prize at Berlin film festival

BERLIN — This year’s Golden Bear for best feature film at the Berlin International Film Festival was awarded Saturday to “Synonyms,” a dryly comic, largely autobiographical drama about a young Israeli trying to reinvent himself in modern-day Paris.

<h1>BERLIN — One afternoon in November, Hans-Jürgen Topf walked through the backstage area of the Mercedes-Benz Arena, where dozens of crew members were unloading the equipment for the final stop of U2’s “Experience + Innocence” tour. </h1>

After enthusiastically greeting and hugging several of the workers, Topf, 62, came to a sweltering room filled with humming washing machines and dryers. “This is my life,” he said. “The artists live their life, and I live my laundry life.”

The world’s top specialist for tour laundry, Topf has traveled with many of the world’s biggest music acts, including Madonna, Pink and Beyoncé. As tours have become bigger and more professionalized, their logistics have become increasingly daunting. The U2 tour, which lasted about seven months and spanned two continents, included roughly 150 people, all of whom needed food, housing and clean clothes.

That’s where “der Topf,” as he likes to call himself, comes in. His company, Rock ‘n’ Roll Laundry, provides equipment and laundry staff for touring productions. Although Topf didn’t join the U2 tour because of a back injury, he was in Berlin to pick up machines he had rented to the crew. (He mostly stays within Germany these days, because of his back, but previous tours have taken him as far as South America and Australia.)

“My reputation precedes me,” Topf said, adding that, in the music world, “nobody tackled the subject of laundry, nobody wanted to learn it, until I developed a system for it.”

“He is a pioneer,” Jake Berry, the tour’s production director, said by phone. Twenty years ago, Berry said, most tour laundry had to be done quickly during tour stops at a local laundromat. He said the clothes would come back wet, or, “you’d find a girl’s thong in there.”

In the early 2000s, Berry said, a “little man” — Topf — began appearing outside German venues with a van, offering to pick up, wash and return the production’s clothes. Berry said that the items were returned “pristine and folded.” Soon after that, he invited Topf to join him on tour.

“It’s very hard to find someone who is passionate about laundry,” Berry added. “He is passionate.”

A few weeks after the U2 concert, Topf, who has a gray beard and wears metal-rimmed glasses, was in the basement at the Max-Schmeling-Halle, another venue in Berlin, helping his son Achim, 31, do laundry for Die Fantastischen Vier, a popular German rap act.

The biggest challenge of doing tour laundry, Topf explained, was the volume, which can vary unpredictably, and the need to work without fixed facilities. He often had to work outside or wherever he could find running water, he said, including, at one point, in empty holding cells intended for disorderly fans in a South African stadium. “I know every disabled bathroom in every German football stadium,” he said.

When he is on tour, Topf begins almost every day by washing the performers’ clothes, which usually have to be air-dried with a small fan. The most soiled garments he ever handled, he said, were coveralls worn by the metal band Slipknot that had been sprayed with beer, cream and fake blood, and left in garbage bags for three days.

The most common stains on performers’ clothes, he said, were sweat and aluminum dust from truck ramps carried onstage by equipment-case wheels. The dust gets on the clothes when performers throw themselves on their knees or roll around onstage. The best solution, he said, was for crew members to put down mats: “It’s better for the pants.”