The Kunsthalle Osnabrück hosted the theme day Peace in Quotation Marks organised by Forum for Democratic Culture and Contemporary Art.
It wants to examine the call for peace more closely. What does it mean?
In politics. In culture. And in history. And where is the call for
peace instrumentalised? [Instrumentalised here means: The call for peace
is used for other purposes to achieve something].
In his book LTI - Language of the Third Reich Victor
Klemperer wrote: “The National Socialists did not invent new words for
their language. Rather, they twisted the meaning of words. They spoke of
peace. But actually they wanted to justify their war with it. [Justify
means here: They want to declare war. Even if the actual reasons for the
war are different].
Right now we are experiencing something similar again. Russia is waging a
war of aggression on Ukraine. And Vladimir Putin is justifying the war
with denazification. That, too, is an instrumentalisation. Comparable
examples can also be found in other historical and social contexts.
But: When are such lies believed by a particularly large number of
people? In which societies does this happen particularly easily? And
what can we learn from this? For our coexistence. For current politics.
And for dealing with our own history.
Together with the invited experts, we looked at various examples of
instrumentalisation. In different places and at different times. When is
the call for peace only a pretext? When is it used to justify war,
violence and discrimination? [Discrimination is another word for
exclusion and disadvantage.] And for what reasons does this happen?
With Ferda Berse (social scientist and union representative in
Hannover), Dr. Iryna Solonenko (Ukraine Programme Director for the
Centre for Liberal Modernity (LibMOd)), Anna Staroselski (Vice President
of the German-Israeli Society (DIG) in Berlin), Vasyl Cherepanyn
(director of the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) in Kiev), Dr.
Simon Teune (sociologist at the Institute for Protest and Movement
Research and in the field of Intervening Arts at the Free University of
Berlin).
The timetable for Peace in Quotation Marks can be found here: timetable.pdf
The event is funded by the Federal Agency for Civic Education.
You can find video documentation of the individual contributions here.
