Meet the Germans | Rory's Berlin Blog | Goethe-Institut

    Who pays for talent?  Today’s digital revolution threatens the survival of professional musicians, writers, photographers and film-makers. Back in 1976 the influential Scottish television and music producer Donald MacLean (no relation) wrote, ‘new media can enrich us ... but if we exploit new technology without regard for the creative consequences they’ll impoverish us -- we shall wake up one morning to find we have only amateur music and movies.’



    That impoverished morning has now dawned.  Thanks to the ease with which ‘content’ can be copied from the internet, and shared with friends, the world’s creative economy is being undermined.  Nowadays twenty music tracks are downloaded illegally for every one that is bought on line.  It’s a similar story for films and books.  Pirated versions of new movies are often available for download before their official release date, alongside stolen copies of last week’s New York Times bestsellers.  Journalists who once resold their articles to overseas periodicals now see their words instantly replicated around the globe without permission or a penny of further payment.

    As MacLean points out, if no one pays a copyright fee then an author or musician cannot afford to create another work with the inevitable consequence -- the demise of professional creativity.  So how can professional artists continue to work?  One way is to raise the money themselves.

    In this month’s artist interview I speak to the young and talented Berlin two-man-band Berge.  Marianne Neumann – beautiful in both voice and presentation – and her steady, guitar-strumming partner Rocco Horn have big plans to produce their second album, and are aspiring to finance it through Sellaband, a music website that enables artists to raise the money from their fans.

    Their target is €10,000, a figure that will cover the cost of the technicians, studio rental, mixing, mastering and the pressing of the CD.  What do fans get for helping to make Berge’s vision a reality?  €10 earns them a free download of the album next summer (which simply means they’re buying the album in advance).  €20 brings a signed copy of the CD.  €100 receives thanks in the shape of a complete ‘test merchandise package’.  If a fan invests €500, Marianne and Rocco will perform a private, ‘unplugged’ concert in their home, office, local kneipe or even sauna (you need to watch the video).  For €1000 Berge and its full backup band will give a party ‘which you’ll never forget’.
    ‘We want to use our music to spread constructive and positive feelings,’ Rocco told me when we met.  ‘I always see things in terms of physics.  With our music we try to move people, move emotions, move ourselves.  We want to bring things to movement, to life.’



    Who pays for talent?  In the new e-age, we do – by clicking and committing ourselves to help dynamic, innovative, sincere, young musicians like Berge to write and sing songs ‘that move people’s minds, that search for the sense of life, for happiness and the nature of human beings’.
    Rocco adds, ‘If you want this album as much as we do, please help it to become a reality.’

Begeistern.  It’s one of my favourite German words.  It means to inspire, to fill with enthusiasm but I find its etymology to be particularly stirring.  Geist means spirit but it also connotes both breath and wind, so the word can be conceived as a moving force and as the essence of life.  Hence begeistern literally translates as to have ones spirit moved – and that’s what happened to me last Saturday.



    I went to Leipzig for a short meeting, then could hardly wrench myself away.  In the sunshine strolling musicians busked outside the stunning 16th century Altes Rathaus.  Students cycled past Saturday shoppers queuing for ice cream.  Couples held hands outside Auerbachs Keller, a wine bar-cum-restaurant founded in 1525 and mentioned in Goethe’s Faust.  At the Nikolaikirche speakers recalled the 1989 democratic revolution when East Germans protested against the communist regime, speeding the downfall of the Wall, re-making Leipzig as the Stadt der Helden (the city of heroes).

    Leipzig – an hour south of Berlin on sleek, 190 kph ICE trains -- has always been of an independent frame of mind.  It was long a rich trading capital, situated at the intersection of the Via Regia and Via Imperii during the days of the Holy Roman Empire.  Its wealth (enhanced by the discover of silver in the Erzgebirge hills) enabled it to grow into an important centre of learning and culture.  Bach lived in the city for almost thirty years. Wagner was born and Mendelssohn died here.  Schumann and Grieg were frequent visitors.  Johann Wolfgang Goethe studied at its university between 1765 and 1768.

    On Saturday I stumbled in awe between the great men’s statues, from memorials to museums, through the Art Nouveau Mädlerpassage shopping arcade to the Apelshaus, where Peter the Great and Napoleon once stayed (not on the same night).  At St. Thomas Church – where Bach had been choirmaster and director ‘musices lipsiensis’ – I happened upon a rehearsal of the St. Thomas' Boys Choir, their voices filling the building with a Bach cantata.  As I listened I glanced at a plaque which noted that Martin Luther had preached in the church.



    Leipzig begeistert me, nowhere more so than in the Zeitgeschichtliches Forum, a bold and moving museum which chronicles the history of communist East Germany.  As the exhibition’s introductory text states, in the DDR ‘pretension and reality were far removed from each other’.  To create a museum about the aspirations and collapse of a country was a task which required great courage and honesty.  The Zeitgeschichtliches Forum Leipzig does not disappoint.  Its exhibits include ubiquitous Trabants, uniforms and East German foodstuffs, as well as ex-president Wilhelm Pieck’s office furniture.  Much more chilling – and revealing -- are the Stasi’s tools of espionage, the models of Iron Curtain border fortifications, the footage of Soviet tanks putting down the June 1953 general strike and original Leipzig 1989 protest placards.  The exhibition impresses visitors not to forget the reality of the East Germany.  

    Too soon I had to catch the train back to Berlin.  As the Stadt der Helden fell away behind me, I found myself scheming how soon I could return.  If nothing else, I still had to visit Auerbach’s Cellar – out of which Faust had ridden on a flying wine barrel – to taste the spirit, the essence of Leipzig as Goethe once did.

    Karl Marx’s contemplative, bronze statue at Berlin’s Marx-Engels-Forum – once a spot of political veneration – is a now popular tourist attraction.  In Chemnitz, the philosopher’s 40 ton head – the largest portrait statue in the world – is being renovated with the help of furniture giant Ikea, to encourage visitors to come to the city (which was known as Karl-Marx-Stadt during the Communist years).  Thousands of other busts of the great German thinker, economic historian and revolutionary socialist – which once graced plinths in peoples’ palaces and civic parks -- rot away in countless leaky warehouses from Helmstedt to Vladivostok.  Marx has been consigned to history, right?  His theories have been disgraced, yes?  His relevance today is only as an iconic portrait on counter-culture t-shirts, OK?



    Well, maybe not.  ‘Was Marx Right?’ is a question that is being asked in – of all unexpected places – the Harvard Business Review.  In the year when ten of thousands of protesters have occupied Wall Street, marched through Berlin and joined the anti-corruption movement in India, some economic thinkers are asking if it’s time to ‘reconceive capitalism’.

    In the Harvard Business Review, Umair Haque – one such economist and consultant -- notes that over the last twelve months trillions of dollars of financial assets have been destroyed, trillions in shareholder value has vanished and worldwide GDP has stalled.  Yet, despite the crises and protests, bankers and company directors don’t seem to be getting the message.  Over the same period, UK executive pay has risen by 50%, taking the average earnings for a director of an FTSE 100 company to just short of £2.7m. (while the average pay settlement for private sector workers was only 2.6%).

    ‘This isn’t a financial crisis, or even an economic one.  It’s a crisis of institutions-ideals inherited from the industrial age,’ writes Haque.  So maybe it’s time to look back to the thinkers of that age and ask if ‘there might have been something to Marx's critiques of capitalism after all.’

    Haque is not suggesting that Marx’s prescriptions and Communist manifesto be resurrected; history proved them to be tragically, fatally flawed (viz. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kulak genocide, gulags, the Great Leap Forward and ‘Cultural Revolution’, the Stasi etc.).  But he is suggesting that we look again at Marx’s analysis of capitalism. 

    After all, Marx spent decades at Berlin’s Humboldt University and in the British Library, studying economic reports, trying to understand the basic underlying mechanisms of the capitalist system, learning how it moves through boom and bust, how value is created by labour and how unemployment is used to control the price of that labour.

    In his article Haque asks us to reconsider Marx’s analysis of alienation, where workers’ are divorced from the output of their labour, thereby undermining their sense of purpose and fulfillment, as well as his theory of ‘commodity fetishism’ where objects became ‘revered talismans ... imbued with ... powers that give them inherent value -- and obscuring the value of and in the very people who’ve worked laboured over them in the first place’ (think America’s mega-malls, and London rioters stealing, not bread, but video games).  Haque also looks at ‘immiseration’, meaning the exploitation of labour, and ‘false consciousness’ in which workers do not even know that they are being exploited.  Marx considered this to be one of the most pernicious aspects of industrial age capitalism.  As Haque points out, America’s largest private employer is Walmart; its second largest employer is McDonalds. 

    The global economy seems to be in ‘historic, generational trouble, plagued by problems the orthodoxy didn’t expect, didn’t see coming, and doesn’t quite know what to do with’, according to Haque.  Or as novelist Robert Harris puts it – while talking about his new book The Fear Index, ‘One feels a great smash coming closer, almost in slow motion, and we can’t avoid it.  How have we got ourselves into this mess?’



    The ‘future of plenitude’ will not be Marxian — but it sure won’t look like the present.  ‘And if we're going to trace the beginnings of better, more enduring, more authentic, more meaningful, fundamentally more humane paradigm for prosperity, perhaps it’s worthwhile exploring — even when we don’t agree with them — the critiques and prophecies of those who already challenged yesterday’s.’

    These are provocative thoughts, not least because guess who EU leaders hope will bankroll the Eurozone’s bailout fund (as it has done with the US deficit)?  Say hello to China, a single-party state with its founding ideology based on Marxism-Leninism.  Before long it’s not just Ikea which may be polishing up the old thinker’s statues.

    Berlin boasts some of the finest museums and galleries in the world.  This week I complete the list of my personal top ten:




6.  Jewish Museum

  
 At the start of the twentieth century Berlin was one of the world’s
largest Jewish cities.  One third of the hundred richest Prussians were
Jews.  By 1945 Hitler had destroyed most of Germany’s rich diversity,
making it both poorer and more homogeneous. Berlin’s Jewish Museum –
with its Libeskind’s extension -- explores two millennia of German
Jewish history.  But far from being locked in the past, the museum looks
forward with child-friendly tours, weekend workshops and special shows
including (at the moment) histories of Jewish football and radical
Jewish music in New York.

Jewish Museum Berlin, Lindenstraße 9-14, 10969 Berlin,  +49 (0)30 259 93 300

7.  Allied Museum

  
 At the end of the Second World War the victorious Allies divided
Berlin into four sectors.  Stalin’s secret intention was to draw Berlin –
and then the whole of Germany -- into the Communist orbit.  In 1948 he
blockaded the city as a means of driving the Americans out of Europe,
but the Allies retaliated by launching the Berlin Airlift to sustain its
freedom.  The Cold War turned hot and in 1961 the Soviets built the
Wall to completely encircle the Western sectors.  The Allied Museum
tells the story of those years.  Displays include the guardhouse from
Checkpoint Charlie, an RAF Hastings as well as a section of the Berlin
spy tunnel, the largest ever SIS/CIA operation.

Allied Museum, Clayallee 135, 14195 Berlin,  +49 (0)30 81 81 990





8. Berlin Wall Memorial
-- Bernauer Strasse witnessed some of the most tragic scenes when the
city was divided in 1961: East Berliners jumped from apartment windows,
vaulted over barbed wire, tunnelled beneath the street in an attempt to
reach freedom.  The Berlin Wall Memorial – which includes the city’s
only unadorned stretch of border fortifications as well as a superb
museum -- marks the iniquity, compliance and heroism of both East and
West Berliners during those tragic years.

Berlin Wall Memorial, Bernauer Straße 119, 13355 Berlin, +49 (0)30 467 98 66 66

9.  DDR Museum

    Trabants, hidden microphones, beach volleyball nudists and Spreewald pickles: Ostalgie
(or nostalgia for life in former East) may worry parts of country,
where a recent survey found half of 16-year-olds believed that East
Germany was never a dictatorship, but at the DDR Museum visitors can
safely experience life in under communism (at least for their 90 minute
visit).  Watch TV in the authentic East Berlin living room, spy on your
neighbours, join the FDJ Pioneers or march in the May Day parade.  The
museum is located on the Spree opposite the Berlin cathedral.

DDR Museum, Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 1, 10178 Berlin, +49 (0) 30 847 123 73 11

10.  Currywurst Museum

  
 The currywurst is as much a part of Berlin as the Brandenburg Gate,
with over 70,000,000 curried sausages scoffed in the city every year. 
No surprise then that Berliners should celebrate their civic dish with a
feel-good museum.  Uncover the story of fast food through the ages,
learn about the ‘currywurst war’, lie back on the Sausage Sofa and
discover why Volkswagen is one of Germany’s largest sausage makers. 
Entrance is far from cheap but the souvenirs are among the best in
Berlin (for non-vegetarians) and the complimentary ‘Currywurst in a Cup’
has the tastiest, fruitiest sauce which I’ve found anywhere in town.

Deutsches Currywurst Museum, Schützenstraße 70, 10117 Berlin, +49 (0) 30 8871 8647