Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth will visit the Munich Security Conference this Saturday. It is the first time that a German cultural politician is taking part in the conference. But what makes you sit up and take notice even more is the succinct sentence she used to justify her participation: “Cultural policy is security policy.”
Apart from a number of “bilateral talks”, Roth wants to hold discussions with the Belarusian civil rights activist and former presidential candidate Svetlana Tichanovskaya and the Belarusian writer Sasha Filipenko at the Literature House in Munich – “about the role of free art and culture, of literature, of feminism in and for Belarus”. .
And as if we needed a further indication that Roth doesn’t intend to play the culture lady here among nothing but foreign policy and defense experts, she writes: “The people in Belarus have my full solidarity. I support their desire for new elections, democracy , freedom and the rule of law and I demand the unconditional release of all political prisoners.”
Have you ever heard such words from Roth’s predecessor, Monika Grütters? No. Grütters also never sat on a panel with dissidents. It is fitting that Roth wants to present an “Artists at Risk” program for politically persecuted journalists, writers and artists in the next few weeks.
For Roth, art is political even if the artists don’t go to jail
The first 100 days of Roth’s term of office will be up in three weeks, but the essential characteristics of the new German cultural policy are already clearly emerging. Firstly, the new Minister of State’s concept of political culture. Her predecessor Monika Grütters, although famous for her encroachment and willingness to expand, always avoided getting in the way of other departments. In any case, Grütters understood culture as a reserve of beauty, which should be shielded from politics as much as possible instead of being connected to it. For Roth, on the other hand, who is at the height of the debate, art is always political, even if the artists don’t go to prison.
The second innovation is that the strict separation of German and foreign cultural policy has been abolished. Only at the beginning of the last legislative period did Grütters get an equivalent counterpart in Michelle Müntefering in the Foreign Ministry. But the strengthening of foreign cultural policy that was hoped for did not materialize, and Müntefering was barely visible for four years. Little has been heard of the soft power initiatives that she announced at the beginning of her term of office, which are intended to give Germany and Europe a clearer voice in international discourse vis-à-vis illiberal states such as Turkey, Russia and China. Quite apart from that, the separation of inside and outside turned out to be unrealistic. Apart from the acquisition and distribution of millions in funding for cultural buildings, Grütters’ supreme discipline, there is hardly a cultural-political topic that can still be negotiated “nationally”. The recent flurry over alleged anti-Semitic tendencies among the curators of the forthcoming Documenta Fifteen was an example of this.
Müntefering’s successor Katja Keul is still responsible for foreign cultural policy, for the Goethe Institute and for much more. But now Roth is talking to dissidents from Eastern Europe. And in Andreas Görgen, she brought the man from the Foreign Ministry into her own house as her right hand, who did the actual work there under Müntefering. It might also help that Roth and Foreign Minister Baerbock are party friends.
And finally, Roth introduced a new style of politics: the aforementioned pseudo-scandal surrounding the Documenta could easily have gotten out of hand, and the artists threatened to be harmed. But Roth managed to clear the unfounded allegations from the table with a few conversations. When an internal report by Deutsche Welle recently confirmed the anti-Semitic statements made by employees that the SZ had previously reported on, Roth also took action. The press release that she had sent out resembled a violent public rebuke by the director. Even more unusual was that she expressly expressed her “respect” to “the journalists… who uncovered these abuses”. Grütters was often celebrated as a great political talent. With Roth comes a determination that was previously missing.