In April 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic spiraled—and before the subsequent string of wildfires, hurricanes, protests, and political violence hit the United States and Europe—there was a minor scandal involving Germany’s Ruhrtriennale, a cultural festival established in 2002 in hopes of revitalizing Germany’s former industrial heartland. The controversy has been largely overshadowed by the pandemic, but it points toward a rapidly growing crisis in the country’s attempts to balance its history and its future.
The festival’s directors had chosen the renowned Cameroonian social and political theorist Achille Mbembe to open the festival of arts and culture. Felix Klein, Germany’s federal government commissioner for Jewish life in Germany and the fight against anti-Semitism, objected to the choice. Mbembe, who—in the process of attempting to situate Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories within the history of colonialism—compared the occupation of the West Bank to apartheid in South Africa, could not, in Klein’s view, be granted a prestigious position in a festival supported by German tax dollars.
