Front matter

Nationalism reloaded

The “Timeline” deals with nationalism in Germany and the process of its modernization in the years from the reunification 1990 until the „Remembrance Year“ 2005. With nationalism we do not in any case mean just an extreme right-wing ideology; but rather one which includes the entire society. Nationalists are all those people who, when they say „we“ and don't just mean their friends; but willingly admit they „feel like a German“ and believe, even if they wouldn't say it, they belong to a “people” that's different from the others and naturally try to form a nation-state. This definition makes it clear that 1990 was not the starting gun for a German re-nationalization; rather that nationalism represents an ideology belonging to a nation-state, which continuously reproduces itself. Just the same as dealing with National Socialism, and the continuously recurring attempts to relativize the Shoa after 1990, are not new. This can clearly be seen on hand from the Historian Dispute in the 1980's. But after regaining full sovereignty in 1990 the stance, that the sentence for the crimes committed has been served, really started to set in. Without this historical turning point the development which the “Timeline” shows would be hard to imagine. The work was completed in the winter of 2005/2006 so that newer developments could not be included, like the world cup football(soccer) tournament which was a catalyst making it possible to live out the new German consciousness, which had until this point only been postulated in public debates. Usually the later developments affirmed the processes shown in the “Timeline”.
The liberation from an imagined anti-nationalist consensus and from the “Auschwitz coil” (Walser) is central in this process and comes to it's clearest expression; in Walser's conferment speech in Frankfurt's Paul's church for the peace prize of the German Book Publishers, in the Kosovo war, in the debate about the exhibition “Crimes of the Defense Army”, in the anti-Semitic campaigns of Möllemann, the forced labor debates, and culminated in 2005 in context with the 60th year remembrance of the allied victory over Germany. The starting point of the development was the reunification and the regained full sovereignty of the German state. The early 1990's showed at first a nationalism determined more by practical  and racist interests, which caused the people in Germany to consider either setting asylum applicant homes on fire, or on the opposite side to pursue the politics of making Germany seem an attractive location to do business, and with chains of candle holders generate an image of Germany for the rest of the world which is liberal, peace-loving, and sympathetic, or through asylum laws to determine once and for all who is German and who not, and how persons who aren't should reside. Symptomatic for the modernization of nationalism in Germany is significantly not the subject matter, but the treatment of the Shoa; and the replacement of the German guilt with responsibility based on its history. While in the 1960's  the politician Franz-Josef Strauß still demanded “a people that have achieved this economic performance have a right not to have to hear anything more about Auschwitz” and drew the the classic end point, the connection of the Germans with their history became ever more clearly emphasized up until 2005. This gradual change is shown in a series of portraits which play out a sort of Chinese whispers game, which ends with Roland Koch formulating the doctrine:„Whoever denies Auschwitz, denies just the same being German“. The portraits display individuals as busts in classic ruler poses, but the cold needle etching technique allows them to be reproduced as often as wished, which is a reference that the persons shown are not singularly responsible, but rather represent a process of the society as a whole. Koch's statement seems at first to be a critique of denying the Holocaust; in reality though it's a further development of the instrumentalization, and with that a further relativization of the Shoa. While in 1998, Joshka Fischer still uses Auschwitz as an argument for the first German war of aggression since 1945 by demanding stopping the “Serbian SS” in Kosovo, now the history of the Shoa is completely part of German consciousness. Through the declaration to the history of National Socialism and the elimination of the European Jews the Germans liberate themselves from the alleged dictation from abroad and from the imagined anti-nationalist lobby. Only in this way can Roland Koch's “being German” work. In fact it works better than any other nationalism. The emphasis that no end point will be set and that one(as German) is, based on one's own history, very aware of the responsibility to the rest of the world, creates a great immunization against all criticism.
And – the greater the guilt, the more the responsibility.

The works in the “Timeline” are not limited to public debates; they include developments in culture, especially film, and fine arts. This allows the viewer to understand and associate the process of the modernization of nationalism on various levels.
The “Timeline” does not attempt to show a linear development, but rather display a process of public debates and developments in the cultural field(especially film and exhibition practices), and how historical turning points from 1990 to 2005 build upon each other. This necessitates a certain subjective selection of “facts” but doesn’t affect the objectivity of the process moving toward its completion. The resulting complexity allows the observer to understand the process of the modernization of nationalism, and combine and associate the elements. Inside the various threads this was done through the means of etching, collage, and spatial installation. Here the relation of image to text role relates to each other in a completely equal dialog: each valid in and of itself, but also complementing the other, without becoming an hierarchical picture, subtitle or a picture-ified text.
Due to the fact that the “Timeline” was created for the exhibition “La Normalidad” in Buenos Aires in the winter of 2006, the goal of the group was also to convey the contents to a public which is not confronted with the developments in Germany on a daily basis, but have a special interest in German commemoration politics. In the installation in Buenos Aires the text that is integrated in abbreviated form here was in glossaries, which were attached to the images with wires, and thus a mobile part.In addition, there was a collage by Alice Creischer (see website) integrated into the timeline, which dealt with German nationalism in art and the practices of its exhibition.
On the Informationdisplay of the exhibition ,,German Angst” the timeline is presented as a Zine for take away.