There Is Only Love And Fear

A dispatch from Berlin's new music scene during a dark election weekend

I was thinking about Birkenau on the tram.

It was a sunny late summer morning, with autumn lurking beneath the corner. The sun clearly wouldn’t be strong enough to keep the mornings warm and cozy for much longer.

There would be elections held in two German states on that day, and everyone suspected what would become reality a few hours later: That more than 30 percent of voters in these states condone and support a nationalist, racist, misogynist, homo-, queer- and transphobic, climate-change-denying, right-wing extremist party, effectively making it one of the strongest political forces in Thuringia and Saxony.

Another ten to 15 percent decided to vote for a relatively new “conservative socialist” party that based their election campaign on pro-Putin sentiment and hostility towards migrants and refugees.

I’ve found myself in a dark mental state since yesterday.

I kept coming back to this sentence, There Is Only Love And Fear, the title of Bex Burch’s debut solo album.

Fear can take other shapes, like rage, hate and self-pity, and often leads to aggression, blaming and fingerpointing. Fear is a breeding ground for fascism. To reach love, we need to overcome fear.

Right now, I am in fear myself – for all my queer and migrant friends, for the spaces we inhabit, for art and freedom and tolerance and all these concepts we live and care for, for the future of this country, and for people who came here looking for shelter but find only cold-hearted rejection.

On the tram I kept thinking about Birkenau, a cycle of paintings by Gerhard Richter, which I’d seen at Neue Nationalgalerie the day before.

I had come to see the Warhol exhibition, but having a few more minutes to spare until meeting a friend for lunch, I spent another visit to Richter’s 100 Werke für Berlin.

Standing in front of Birkenau, a group of large paintings based on actual photographs from the biggest Nazi concentration camp, the historical absurdity of the situation dawned on me.

There are mirrors on the walls opposing the Birkenau paintings. They turn us, the observers, and our reaction into parts of the piece. We’re just standing there, watching silently, like we’d be following the news on election night, refusing to acknowledge what had happened right in front of our eyes. In fact, that very refusal let it happen in the first place.

I couldn’t take my eyes off Richter’s painting Besetztes Haus (Squatter’s House) from 1989, the year that the Berlin Wall came down. The visual felt familiar; like a still from a recurring dream I’ve had since my childhood.

Gerhard Richter, Besetztes Haus (1989)

I tried to think about what makes art good or bad. An aspect I returned to was that art should need no explanation. Its mere existence will emit a radiation that is impossible to ignore. It calls upon us, as sociologist Hartmut Rosa might say.

Leaving the small village where I grew up behind, I imagined the big city as an anonymous place where you would be able to shape your own identity instead of being assigned to one. To me, Richter’s painting invoked that hopeful feeling, specifically about Berlin – a mythical city for us growing up in West Germany in the 1980s and 1990s.

While that feeling does wear off after a while and I enjoy living in a calm, quiet natural environment these days, I still look forward to my frequent city trips. Berlin’s rich cultural landscape just keeps me sane, especially on that dark election weekend when I spent 48 hours in town. Despite the tabloids constantly trying to frame daily life in the multicultural metropolis as a permanent threat, I feel weirdly safe in my urban cocoon.