When the actor Veit Schubert reads the passage on the stage of the Berliner Ensemble in which Ai Weiwei and his father burn their own books – Baudelaire, Majakowski, Lorca – Ai Weiwei makes a cell phone video of him. “I tore out the pages one by one and threw them into the fire,” read Schubert: “They writhed in the heat like sinking ghosts.” The scene is a key moment in Ai Weiwei’s autobiography “1000 Years of Joy and Sorrow”. The son helps the father Ai Qing destroy his beloved library because the destruction is supposed to protect the “deviator” Ai Qing from the wrath of the Red Guards, and from this disaster grows a lifelong task, almost an oath: The moment As the books turned to ashes, “a strange force seizes me,” wrote Ai Weiwei: “A commitment to reason, to a sense of beauty – these things are inflexible.” The artist Ai Weiwei was born in the flames of the burning library, an artist in the tradition of his father. Culture can be destroyed, he understood that. But what followed after that?
“1000 Years of Freud and Sorrow” (Penguin Verlag) is the autobiography of the artist Ai Weiwei, but it is just as much the biography of his father. An “honest man”, he was, was a justice-loving, patriotic: “And he was lucky that he never had to leave his country,” said Ai Weiwei in Berlin. In Europe it is his only appearance at the presentation of his book, and after Ai Weiwei’s abusive departure from Berlin in 2019, it is noteworthy. After Schubert has read another passage, Ai Weiwei jokes that if he had known that his text sounded so good in German, he might have stayed longer in Berlin. It is therefore clear: this will not be settled with Germany.
Germans tend to take criticism “a little personally”
Although his interlocutor would also be open to that. Daniel Kehlmann encourages the artist to speak calmly about his unpleasant encounters in Germany, you can only learn from them. But Ai Weiwei doesn’t like. What he said was just an individual opinion, he just had a “big mouth” and was not always right, he said, not without irony. And then at least adds that the Germans tended to take criticism “a little personally”.
Ai Weiwei was born in 1957, the year of the Cultural Revolution. When the horror entered its next, even darker phase ten years later, his father was banished and took the son with him. Ai Qing, who knew Mao, yes, with whom Mao even pretended to consult in one of the most cryptic scenes in the book, had fallen out of favor as the author of “bourgeois” works and was banished to “Little Siberia” in Xinjiang. It was an inhospitable area, a basin for the “five black categories: landowners, rich farmers, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements and deviants from the right,” writes Ai Weiwei.
It’s a gulag childhood. The two lived in a hole in the ground, pasted newspapers on the walls, behind which rats were hiding, and boiled the clothes to get rid of the lice. Sometimes a pig falls into the hole. The father has to clean the latrines, thirteen communal toilets, which essentially consisted of beams over a cesspool. Before starting work, he smoked a cigarette and examined the frozen piles of feces, “as if he were admiring a sculpture by Rodin”.
Ai Weiwei: 1000 years of joy and sorrow. Memories. Translated from the Chinese by Norbert Juraschitz and Elke Link. Penguin, Munich 2021. 416 pages, 38 euros.
Ai Weiwei will be drawn to caves all his life, stuck these years in his bones. He draws strength from the certainty of an outsider who knows about his position as an outsider. Today, at the height of his fame, he is sometimes asked if he doesn’t flirt with this attitude, after all, he has achieved everything that an artist could achieve. But this question assumes that exhibitions, attention and appreciation could obliterate or rewrite such a cruel childhood. As if one had something to do with the other.
The banishment part is the most impressive part of the book, a journey into hell into tyranny, which is all the more oppressive because people – like Ai Qing – believed in tyrants. The old world had to be wiped out so that a new one could arise, and its victims believed in this ideology. Every day, Ai Weiwei saw his father hit a bowl in the dining room and accuse himself that the rituals of countless humiliations were as natural a part of the child’s everyday life as endless nature.
Ai Weiwei describes the suffering and deformations of millions of people dryly, almost laconically. That this is less of a literary trick than more of a survival strategy, one suspects when Kehlmann asks how he endured this time at all, why he was not broken because of it. “I was a stupid child and not very sensitive,” claims Ai Weiwei: “Otherwise I would have gone crazy.” You don’t have to believe it, but the sentence still has its meaning.
On this evening, Kehlmann is enthusiastic, awesome and sometimes offensively naive, an air spirit, a kind of sunny version of Kevin Kühnert, but also unmistakably: a man from the West. In contrast, Ai Weiwei appears heavier, beefy, powerful, and wide awake at the same time. A revealing misunderstanding arises when Ai Weiwei outlines the relationship between the West and China. Both are competitors who not only play according to different rules of the game, but also completely different games: “The West plays chess, China plays Go,” said Ai Weiwei. Kehlmann made it: “The West plays chess, China plays golf”.
“1000 years of joy and sorrow” spans entire universes in terms of time, space and ideology. When Ai Weiwei came to New York in the 1980s after 30 years of isolation in communist China, to the city of Ginsbergs and Warhols, he felt like a chunk of ice in boiling water. Ai Weiwei describes the bizarre, sometimes brutal, sometimes bumbling repression of the Chinese authorities with exhibitionistic attention to detail.
Some traits can actually be better understood, some criticism suddenly seems clueless. When Ai Weiwei drove to Lesbos to see the refugees, when he even posed as the dead refugee boy Alan Kurdi, he was interpreted as political free-riding, as obsessive and frivolous. But when he describes in Berlin now how the tents, the dirt, the fear brought back memories of his childhood, how all certainties about European values shattered, some allegations should be reconsidered.