How to fight the far right? Invite them in – the German museum taking on hate
When museum director
Hilke Wagner went to the opening of a new public artwork in Dresden’s market
square, she anticipated a friendly gathering of culture lovers. Instead, she
and her colleagues found themselves surrounded by far-right protesters with
megaphones, vilifying the sculpture’s organisers and its Syrian-German artist
as “traitors”. “We came back to our offices and cried,” Wagner recalls. “We
didn’t know what we should do.”
Welcome to the fraught
reality of cultural programming in Dresden, a city rocked by far-right
extremism. Wagner arrived here in November 2014 to run the Albertinum museum, one of
Europe’s most prestigious collections of Romantic to contemporary art. A month
before her arrival, an anti-Islam protest movement, Pegida,
appeared on Dresden’s streets, rapidly swelling in size and extremism. Last
November, Dresden city council formally declared a “Nazi emergency”.
In today’s polarised
political climate, cultural producers face a difficult choice. Should they
engage with reactionary voices, and risk normalising them, or boycott them, and
risk alienating them further? Wagner’s path at the Albertinum offers a third possibility:
a case study in how arts organisations can win over a hostile public, while
remaining true to their ideals. On her appointment,
Wagner set out to energise Dresden’s contemporary arts scene and to insist on
the pluralist learnings of the Albertinum’s collections. She wanted, she
told Die Welt soon after starting the job, “to make it clear that our
own culture is the result of a cultural mix”....
