A letter from New York

Dear Berlin,

Not so long ago you said “Let Them In!” and opened your arms to immigrants seeking refuge.  You stood there like Lady Liberty, the America of Europe! But then the sky darkened with fear. And here in New York we are biting our nails as a fascist future arrives. Berlin, we need your solidarity.

We now know: out of Neoliberalism, Fascism is born. Because during our election, the American Dream turned rotten. Even though it was built on slavery and genocide, debt and war machines and Starbucks coffee and destructive con¬sumption, there was a magic glue holding our whole shit together. When it dissolved, the white triangle-ghosts of the KKK instantly floated back to the center of our national stage. Then the left instantly split into factions. We now experience official racism, rumblings of demagoguery, and the inability to conduct a civil discourse. In short, we are beginning to resem¬ble the failed states of much of the world…but we’re more heavily armed! So it’s a dangerous moment, but there’s also a chance. Now that the dream of Liberal Globalism is being replaced by Ugly Racist Capitalism, we must wake up to discover trans-national solidarity as our only hope. Seventy five years ago we went to war so that our kids would not have to speak German. Now we need your help in re-imaging how to communicate and organize.

Berlin, come in…this is Houston… we have a VERY BIG problem! It turns out that Trump’s advisors, though trafficking mainly in untruths, made one claim on America that isn’t exactly a lie. They worked out a white supremacist ideology that ties into the slave-trading fact of the white founding fathers. It can’t be said to be imported or inauthentically American. They dug something up that was long rotting under the floorboards: an invention of race that split the white working class from people of color in order to lay the economic cornerstone of America. That rot is why we now have an epic car-crash of “identity politics” and economic politics on the Left. The violence of slavery and its social and class effects never healed and reparations never paid. And meanwhile, the monster kept eating. It began to gobble up the white middle class too. It’s roped a nation into un-payable debts. That is why in the last 2 weeks we are choking on language which is now bursting with poisoned “triggers” each word choice certain to stab one demographic or the other while Trump rises. That is why we are royally fucked.

Berlin, you don’t have the language to speak about racial inequities either. You also have a rotting corpse at your core. You are also fucked. But you know about vigilance. You have Adorno. You have Brecht. You have an art that is born already knowing that Fascism is not just a word to overuse on social media. That it can be a reality and deep-scar generations. We need a way to revitalize our political language so that it expands to include the rotting corpse but not to let it awaken as a zombie. We need a richer soil than the 140 characters to work out our thinking and horizons. Art is a beginning.

The last weeks have shown us that above all, Trumpism is threatened by artists. It was no mistake that the last alt-right propaganda meme on the eve of the election accused performance artist Marina Abramovich of Satan worship (#spiritcooking). Then, last week, the cast of Broadway’s “Hamilton” stepped up from their stage and spoke. Brandon Victor Dixon (the actor who plays Aaron Burr who shot the father of Wall Street, Alexander Hamilton) made a statement directed at the vice president elect in the audience.  It was a dramatic challenge. And in response The Predator himself tweeted that “the theater must always be a safe and special space…Apologize!”

This really meant: you will not be safe as long as you are free. The specialness of your industry is predicated on you shutting the fuck up.

Friends, this is a declaration of war!

And though “Hamilton” is a hip hop inspired musical about the white founding fathers with a full cast of black and Latino actors and thus embodies America and American theater, this declaration of war shouldn’t be understood as directed only at us over here. Because “shut the fuck up” is also echoing around the globe from Russia to Poland to India.

And there can only be one answer: preparations to join together and fight. The theater itself will be our boot camp. Because if you watch Victor Dixon in his moment of protest, you will see the generously flowing movements and rich pronunciation of a trained actor-warrior. And if you go on the streets in protest, you will see that the empowered public voice and public body are needed on this stage too.  Even more, it’s by developing a personal relationship to intuitive beauty that one sustains the struggle. It’s by understanding the deeper logic of artistic time that we can speak truth to power even after the play had ended, and the next day too. It’s by committing to artistic experiment that a certain risk becomes possible.

Here in New York it is time to plan. The stakes are high, and soon it will be time to risk.  If we do not, we will lose everything. Or more specifically: We will have much to offer the 1% and nothing to offer our comrades. And our comrade’s survival depends on it.

Berlin, we have come too far to calculate that “probably me and my friends will be fine.” We learned too much about the history of power accumulation and its reliance on the privilege of silence. We have learned too much about the common work of emancipation. We have already exchanged identities: we are both in America. We are both in Germany. Now let’s fight side by side.

In Solidarity,
New York
24/11/2016