At the end of the summer on August 18, 2015, a boat capsized in the Aegean carrying migrants from Turkey to Greece. It was not the only boat that had sunk in that turbulent summer. Already five months earlier on April 18, 2015, between 700 and 1,100 people had lost their lives in one of the worst shipwrecks in the Mediterranean when the ship they were on sank in the waters between Libya and Lampedusa. In 2014, over 5,000 and in 2015 almost 7,000 people perished making the crossing. But on August 18, something important for our understanding of the dangerous crossing happened; the filmmaker Amel Alzakout wore a waterproof Contour camera on her wrist that recorded the journey and the tragic shipwreck. Luckily, she survived the ordeal and made it eventually to Berlin, where she was able to settle and begin to work. The visual material she captured chronicled the experience of a wreck, lost lives, and a rescue at sea operation. Alzakout’s material has come to serve as key incitement to two recent film projects: Purple Sea (Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed, 2019) and Shipwreck at the Threshold of Europe, Lesvos, Aegean Sea (Forensic Architecture, 2020). This chapter considers these films closely; it also draws from them in its general reflections on the work of the moving image in representing migrant experience and on the work of the border as an abjecting apparatus.

On a certain level, this work joins a series of films about the 2015 migrant wave that includes Fuocoammare (Gianfranco Rosi, 2016), Human Flow (Ai Weiwei, 2016), Sea Sorrow (Vanessa Redgrave, 2017), and It will be Chaos (Lorena Luciano and Filippo Piscopo, 2018). These films have a broader focus and contain images of masses drawn from the twenty-four-hour news reporting cycle. As Karen Remmler noted of these films, “images of overcrowded boats have become iconic for the plight of refugees.” We can add that the stories of these films typically begin precisely at the shore; in effect the stories begin with the people framed as a mass of refugees headed to Europe. The so-called refugee crisis presents the migrants as a crisis for their point of destination. Their backstory, where they are from, the rationales that brought them to the journey, and what transpired before they reached the shore typically play little part in the films.

Introduction: The “Missing People” in the New German Discourse Comedy

In Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze famously observed that “the people are missing” in postwar Western cinema. This is in contrast to “classical cinema”: in the earlier twentieth century, the modern medium of film had been closely associated with the modern phenomenon of the crowd on more than one level. Film and cultural theory circled around the moral dangers and political potentials of collective reception, and on-screen crowds featured prominently in the political aesthetics of socialism as well as fascism and nation-building Hollywood. In the aftermath of Hitler and Stalin, however, these crowds all but disappeared in Western political cinema: visually imagining the masses as a collective actor became exceedingly difficult. As indicated by several contributions across this volume, the rupture diagnosed by Deleuze continues to reverberate until today. In the 2010s, to be sure, the crowd had a major comeback in cultural theory, sparked by circulating media images of emerging forms of transnational collective activism: Tahrir square, Gezi Park, Occupy. But even as scholars ranging from Judith Butler to Brian Massumi, Jodi Dean, Joshua Clover, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri newly set out to theorize the “political potential” of collective assembly, this resurgence of interest in a progressive crowd aesthetics has remained overshadowed by the parallel rise of right-wing claims to embody the people. With an eye to the German anti-immigrant organization Pegida, Butler repeatedly reminds us that a “surging multitude” of publicly assembled bodies would “include lynch mobs, anti-Semitic or racist or fascist congregations.” Now in the 2020s, we may think of a new generation of activist movements, prominently including Black Lives Matter, while events such as the Capitol Riot in the U.S. seem to have further cemented the spectral superimposition of the activist people with the fascist mob.

Julian Radlmaier’s Selbstkritik eines bürgerlichen Hundes (Self-criticism of a Bourgeois Dog, 2017) tackles the question of how to cinematically reimagine activist, potentially revolutionary assembly against the backdrop of these concerns. On the plot level, Selbstkritik probes the possibilities of worker organization on the “apple plantation OKLAHOMA,” located somewhere between contemporary East Germany and Franz Kafka’s and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s ambiguously heterotopic America. Radlmaier’s film quotes these two intertexts with a poster on a street corner as well as an extradiegetic intertitle culminating in the promise that fascinated Kafka’s protagonist: “Jeder ist willkommen!” (All are welcome!).

Julian Radlmaier’s 2021 political comedy, Blutsauger (Bloodsuckers), is set in the late summer of 1928 in an unnamed Baltic Sea coastal village in Germany. Communism, capitalism, and fascism are in the sultry sea air, and vampires occupy the upper echelons of society. Indeed, entry into capitalism, specifically through the purchasing of stocks, is predicated on sucking the blood of an unsuspecting proletarian. In this freighted historical setting, we already know how the tale of political parody will end. In the diegetic world of Radlmaier’s film, a local Chinese man, known simply as “der Algensammler” (algae collector), becomes a scapegoat for hate against the capitalists: the proletarian crowd turns into a fascist lynch mob. The capitalists perceive the communists as a much greater threat than the fascists because, as Corinna Harfouch’s character Tante Erkentrud unapologetically declares, “Mit denen kann man wenigstens reden” (One can at least talk to them).

We evoke Radlmaier’s most recent feature to open our discussion about contemporary transnational German film and the futures it points to, because Blutsauger’s portrayal of capitalists not only as vampires but as facilitators of fascism in a historical setting also appears to speak to our era of neoliberal crises and the sweeping embrace of authoritarianism across the globe. Through the diegetic employment of an array of old and new objects and styles, the film’s anachronistic portrait of the Weimar period indirectly locates it in contemporary Germany and foregrounds the link between past and present. Despite its comedic mode and playfulness, Radlmaier’s potentially historical projection of neoliberalism’s trajectory is unmistakably bleak: the film dramatically concludes with murder by a fascist lynch mob. Beginning with a reading circle of volume one of Marx’s Capital, however, the film also reminds us of the collective possibilities that open up at any moment of political instability, including the present late neoliberal moment.

Already in the early 2000s, Lisa Duggan declared that “if the triumph of neoliberalism brings us into the twilight of equality, this is not an irreversible fate. This new world order was invented during the 1970s and 1980s, and dominated the 1990s, but it may now be unraveling—if we are prepared to seize the moment of its faltering, to promote and ensure its downfall.”

Introduction: Some Notes on Postfascism

Christian Petzold’s Transit (2018) is an adaptation of Anna Seghers’s homonymous antifascist novel that engages with the history of forced migration of European refugees in Marseille trying to flee fascism in the hope of getting asylum in North and South America. In Petzold’s adaptation, Seghers’s novel has been reworked to address contemporary political contradictions. The film’s central anachronism is that although it is set in the past, it is filmed in the contemporary spaces of Marseille, thus foregrounding a dialectical tension between the history of fascism and the present reality of forced displacements, exile, and militarized border controls in Europe. Petzold justified this choice, explaining that the film seeks to identify the parallels between the past, rising neo-fascism, and the refugee crisis in Europe. As he states, “my aim was not Brechtian disruption, but to emphasize correspondences between then and now.” Indeed, scholars have been quick enough to recognize the film’s references to the current refugee crisis, but nobody has paid attention to the issue of the rising fascism mentioned by the filmmaker. In this chapter, I suggest that the film’s anachronism points to the contemporary reality of postfascism, a term predominantly associated with the Hungarian philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás and secondarily with the Italian historian Enzo Traverso, both of whom argue that reactionary practices of exclusion that we identify with the history of European fascism have been embedded in mainstream politics. Postfascism, for these scholars, therefore refers to a historical period in which policies and ideas associated with the extreme right have become part of mainstream liberal politics. This leads also to the rise of neo-fascist movements precisely because their political narrative seems to have been vindicated by the (neo)liberal mainstream. Before analyzing the film, some further comments on postfascism are in order.

Introduced by Tamás in 2000, the term postfascism describes the present historical experience when contemporary fascism does not operate as a form of counter-revolution against international Socialism as it was the case with its twentieth-century precursor. Tamás suggests that contemporary liberal democracies are postfascist because they have undermined “the Enlightenment idea of universal citizenship,” according to which every individual irrespective of race, class, origin, gender, and nationality should be part of the civic community. Socialist internationalism embodied this desire to complete the Enlightenment project that could not be realized in bourgeois societies.

In this re-politicized age, the collective and its representation has moved to the forefront of our interest. How can the collective be figured in documentary films with aesthetic ambitions? Is there a way for the body politic to emerge without using obvious historical footage of protest movements, parades, processions, or a panoply of talking heads? How might these kinds of films, which tend to wear their politics on their sleeve, represent the group without falling prey to propaganda? Are there new ways of representing the agon of collectives in the public sphere, and, if so, what stylistic means are used?1 How do the films negotiate the consent of their subjects, that is, what a director chooses to show about the implied community? And, finally, what are the possibilities for new polities— perhaps a kind of rejuvenated chorus of antiquity—to emerge from particular modalities of such documentary filmmaking?

In attempting to answer some of these questions, I take as my case study the films of acclaimed Austrian director Ruth Beckermann. She establishes a documentary mode of choric configurations, one that presses spatial qualities into the service of explicit and implicit collectives. In Die Geträumten (The Dreamed Ones, 2016, 89 min.), Waldheims Walzer (The Waldheim Waltz, 2018, 93 min.), and Mutzenbacher (2022, 100 min.), Beckermann reflects on contemporary socio-sexual, economic, and political mores through the lens of the past. Whether it be the fraught love story between two of the German-speaking world’s postwar literary greats, the election of a former SA member as President of the Second Austrian Republic, or the re-publication of the 1906 pornographic novel, Josephine Mutzenbacher (2021), all three films represent marginalized or oppositional voices. In this regard, Beckermann uses overdetermined sites to profoundly reflect on the possibility and ephemerality of political collectives that arise out of a sense of historical injustice. She sets Die Geträumten in the soon-to-be-defunct inter-war radio broadcast studio Funkhaus Wien, she circles the central St. Stephen’s Square during Waldheim’s election campaign in Waldheims Walzer, and she situates an open casting call for Mutzenbacher in the now partially razed coffin factory- cum-cultural center Kulturzentrum F23 Wien-Liesing. These locales, where readings from the correspondence between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, protests against presidential candidate Kurt Waldheim, and conversations about the pedophilic novel Mutzenbacher occur, become spatially and temporally porous.

Queer German cinema in the aftermath of the 1960s and 70s cultural revolutions espoused what Alice A. Kuzniar describes as a cinematic “counterpolitics,” variously deployed against what today might be called cisheterocapitalist violence burdening queer life. Queer filmmakers of this era practiced a type of political cinema that turned to the documentation of structural violence against queer people and the expression of various forms of queer life in order to challenge dominant narratives about how to be in the world. On the basis of interviews with Stefanie Jordan, Bärbel Neubauer, and Matthias Müller, among others, Kuzniar established how the work of these filmmakers pursued a type of transformative spectatorship. Their queer cinematic practices position viewers to “reframe [their] desires and transform [themselves].” Kuzniar turns to Jörg Fockele to expound this claim. Fockele, expressing a dislike of queer feel-good romances with a low threshold for political transformation, calls for a cinema featuring “outrageously queer characters who do totally abnormal things and make the audience wonder.” Such cinematic techniques of excess would stimulate among viewers reflection about their investment in the status quo and prompt them to consider other ways of being in the world.

Nils Bökamp’s You & I (2014) and Monika Treut’s Von Mädchen und Pferden (Of Girls and Horses, 2014) might at first sight appear to be restrained rearticulations of the earlier counterpolitical queer German cinema. The aesthetic-political principle underpinning their films is indeed less characterized by queer suffering and audience provocation than by rest and repose. The queer characters in these films turn away from their daily lives in the city to embrace the countryside, where they overcome obstacles that burden queer relations. This is not to say, however, that Bökamp’s and Treut’s films are devoid of political transformation. Rather, they turn to a different configuration of political commitment than that familiar to the queer German cinema of the postwar generations. Favoring relational bonds that emerge from an opting out of normative rhythms of daily life, Bökamp and Treut pursue a cinematic mediation tactic that acknowledges queer struggle while also generating new strategies to overcome the burdens endemic to queer life under neoliberalism.

In recent years, themes of racist violence and far-right terrorism have become prominent in German narrative film and television. Fatih Akın’s political drama Aus dem Nichts (In the Fade, 2017) is the most internationally showcased and prize-winning example of such works, which also include Burhan Qurbani’s Wir sind jung. Wir sind stark (We Are Young, We Are Strong, 2014) and Berlin Alexanderplatz (2020), Christian Schwochow’s Je suis Karl (2021), as well as Christian Alvart’s Netflix series Dogs of Berlin (2016), ARD Das Erste’s three-part miniseries Mitten in Deutschland: NSU (NSU: German History X, 2016), and several episodes of ARD’s Tatort (Crime Scene, since 1970). Many of these films and series directly or indirectly reference the murders committed by the neo-Nazi terrorist organization Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (National Socialist Underground) across Germany between 1998 and 2011, and the subsequent investigations and trials of the case, which concluded in July 2018. In so doing, they pose a range of ethical and political questions pertaining to the issue of racist violence in Germany today; and yet because they largely lack resolution, these films and series refuse to offer reconciliation and thereby ultimately convey a sense of political pessimism. However, the politics of pessimism found in many of these works is far from nihilism, and it is distinct from a pessimistic outlook for a future politics. Instead, it promotes withdrawal, negativity, and a refusal of reconciliation as positive political pursuits: not pessimistic prognoses for politics, but pessimism as politics.

In this chapter, I examine the politics of pessimism in Aus dem Nichts, situating the film within the context of Fatih Akın’s filmography. I identify a darker turn in his experimentations with the aesthetics of abjection, which Akın has already deployed to various degrees in his earlier films, culminating in his subsequent film, the Fassbinder-inspired, serial-killer biopic Der goldene Handschuh (The Golden Glove, 2019). Aus dem Nichts saturates its cinematic world with negative affect, evoking Germany’s recent political past with nonliteral references to the NSU investigations and the ensuing trial. My focus is on the political potentials of this radical pessimism. Adapting the concept of “futurability” from the Italian autonomist philosopher and media theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi, I argue that Aus dem Nichts posits its vision of negative futurability through its protagonist Katja in her search for justice, ultimately ending in murder- suicide.

When freelance journalist and film dramaturge Lars Meyer coined “New German Discourse Comedy” in his 2019 assessment of emergent sensibilities among young German filmmakers, he clearly found inspiration in another widely embraced German neologism: “discourse theater.” Regarding the “discourse” in “discourse theater,” cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen argued some fifteen years earlier for “a new genre” in German theater, spearheaded above all by Berlin dramaturge René Pollesch, in which the highly “artificial language of academic texts” acquires everyday use value. Tallying the kinds of inscrutable texts in play for Pollesch, Miriam Dreysse went farther by pointing out in detail that it’s not just any theory but rather “sociological theories of neoliberal late-capitalist societies,” in particular “critical urbanism, postcolonial studies, gender and queer theory,” that serve to help Pollesch’s actors scrutinize their lives caught within the matrices of heteronormativity and neoliberal labor relations. Far from wanting to intimidate or indoctrinate audiences with such highfalutin discourse, the grounds for taking recourse to theory, Pollesch himself once explained, has to do with the fact “dass wir Sehhilfen bekommen für die Wirklichkeit” (that we acquire visual aids for reality) otherwise disorienting and impenetrable for actors and audiences alike.

At first glance, Meyer’s nascent catalogue of films exemplary of his new rubric “New German Discourse Comedy” does recall Pollesch’s theater by dint of its films’ explicit inclusion of theory. With its gratuitous recitations from theoretical tracts, Meyer’s corpus makes no secret of the importance it places on academic discourse. Take, for example, Max Linz’s debut Ich will mich nicht künstlich aufregen (Asta Upset, 2014), which has its heroine reading aloud from Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Or consider the nameless heroine suffering from writer’s block in Susanne Heinrich’s debut Das melancholische Mädchen (Aren’t You Happy?, 2016–2018) who reads from the German translation of Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (1999) on an exercise bike. And then there is Irene von Alberti’s Der lange Sommer der Theorie (The Long Summer of Theory, 2017), which not only lifts its title from cultural historian Philipp Felsch’s 2015 history of Berlin theory clearinghouse Merve Verlag but also features characters reading from his book. Most recently, Julian Radlmaier’s Blutsauger (Bloodsuckers, 2021) includes readings and discussions of volume one of Marx’s Capital (1867), from which the film takes its inspiration.

Gerd Kroske is probably best known for his East German documentary about the anti-regime protests in Leipzig in the weeks leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Leipzig im Herbst (Leipzig in the Fall, 1989), co-directed with Andreas Voigt. This historically important film was made on the streets, contemporaneous to the movement. Maintaining a commitment to radical political and social topics in his documentary filmmaking, Kroske has more recently turned to West German activist history and the anti-psychiatric Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK). His film titled SPK Komplex (2018) documents the collective’s emergence in the early 1970s in Heidelberg through the experimental therapeutic practices of Wolfgang Huber, its politicization of the stigmatized perception of illness, and its subsequent dissolution with the imprisonment of Huber and other members.

Influenced by both the historically parallel student and anti-psychiatry movements of the 1960s, the SPK challenged the practice and philosophy of psychiatric determination of mental illness as an individual problem. Such a diagnosis not only stigmatized and institutionalized patients but also criminalized them. In the West German context, the SPK also confronted the practices of the Nazis and their T4 Aktion, which prompted the euthanasia of tens of thousands of people deemed intellectually and physically unfit for life. But the anti-psychiatry movement stretched well beyond national borders. From the publication of Michel Foucault’s groundbreaking critique of psychiatry, Madness and Civilization, in 1961 to the wide-spread theories and practices of the likes of psychiatrists Franco Basaglia and David Cooper, the SPK contributed to a broad international discourse. Taking a Marxist approach, the collective understood mental illness as the consequence of capitalist society and its unequal power relations of production. Brief but significant, the history of this collective has long been overshadowed by that of the Red Army Faction (RAF). Even the film’s title evokes this connection. We are immediately reminded of Uli Edel’s 2008 fiction film Der Baader Meinhof Komplex.

What does it mean in our neoliberal present to bring such a radical history at long last to the screen through documentary? First, the politics of the SPK clash with the reality of our ever-diminishing public sphere, the increased relegation of feelings and affective life to the confines of the private realm and the family, and the cultural attack on nurture, human dependency, and care.

Introduction

When Alfred Döblin wrote Berlin Alexanderplatz in 1929, by creating a protagonist (Franz Biberkopf) who was both a war veteran and a former convict, he intentionally focused on a subject on the margins of society: someone whom society had failed. Furthermore, by making gendered violence such an important part of the narrative, Döblin demonstrated that, due to the misogynist nature of ethnonationalism, even those men on the margins could still justify exploiting others to improve their status in society, rather than fighting for real equality. Rather than transferring this ethnonationalism to his recent adaptation of Döblin’s novel, the German director of Iranian descent, Burhan Qurbani, interrogates the entitlement attached to white, male, German identity by placing Franz B. even further on the margins of society. Qurbani updates the narrative to better situate it in a late-capitalist, neoliberal and multicultural Germany: Franz B. is now Francis, a Black, undocumented refugee from Bissau.

By choosing to make Francis both Black and undocumented, Qurbani continues a trend he has established in his previous films of centering narratives on vulnerable people existing on the margins of white, mainstream German society, such as the queer Muslim protagonists in his film Schahada (Faith, 2010) and the Vietnamese immigrants experiencing the violence of reunification in Rostock in Wir sind jung, wir sind stark (We are Young, We are Strong, 2014). Qurbani, himself the child of Iranian immigrants, was born in 1980 in North-Rhine Westphalia, then in West Germany. Arguably, Qurbani’s films demonstrate his interest in allyship that unites different groups of racialized people in Germany. Berlin Alexanderplatz draws viewers’ attention not only to the problem of anti-Black racism in Germany, but also to the unique experience of Black noncitizens. While Black people in Germany experience differing degrees of anti-Black racism, Black German citizens and Black people with legal residency have certain protections under the law ranging from the right to vote (in the case of citizens) to the right to education, legal employment, and housing. For the undocumented, however, there are no such protections or possibilities to legally participate in society. While Francis’s biography in Qurbani’s adaptation allows the director to make a poignant critique of Germany’s current migration politics, critics were not always convinced by his execution. In fact, some argued that the film itself is guilty of exploiting Black bodies and reducing African men to their physicality and sexuality.

In the opening scene of Susanne Heinrich’s 2019 film Das melancholische Mädchen (The melancholy girl; released in the Anglosphere as Aren’t You Happy?), a young woman is framed in profile against a patently artificial backdrop, a tropical scene of palm trees, sandy beach, and turquoise-blue ocean. Naked under a fluffy white coat, she stands in a rigid pose, smoking a cigarette, as she begins to recite a monologue. A cut frames the woman in medium close-up, and she rotates to look directly into the camera as her metacommentary turns to questions of cinematic representation:

As her monologue concludes, the woman suddenly asks, “Schläfst du?” (Are you asleep?), and a reverse shot reveals the diegetic audience of her speech in the form of a naked man. Filmed from a high angle, he lies in repose on a futon, occupying a position typically reserved for women in western visual culture. Underscoring the sequence’s exaggerated attention to gendered cinematic conventions, he proceeds to pick up a Polaroid camera, train its lens directly on the eye of the film camera, and snap a picture, creating a relay of images and looks between the diegetic characters and the audience of the film.

An apt prologue to the episodic narrative that follows, this scene introduces the film’s remediation of feminist film theory and women’s cinema as well as its engagement with the ideologies and effects of neoliberal culture. Das melancholische Mädchen self-reflexively attends to the perennial questions taken up by cinefeminism, including the disruption of viewer identification; the subversion of classical narrative; and the critique of woman’s status as image and object of the male gaze.

As a genre, the education documentary has gained mainstream status at film festivals and on streaming platforms over the past twenty years. Disparate in style and aesthetics, and lacking a common set of formal and narrative conventions, feature-length films such as To Be and To Have (France, 2002), Boys of Baraka (US, 2005), Please Vote for Me (China, 2007), Girl Rising (US, 2013), Our People Will Be Healed (Canada, 2017), and docu-series such as Harrow: A Very British School (UK, 2013) are instead thematically bound by their common object of study: primary school education and its relationship to the production of social and political subjectivity. Institutions around the world are struggling to determine what core skills and values will best equip their pupils to keep pace with the massive socio-economic and political changes afoot in the twenty-first century. Education documentaries have focalized these transformations in the context of specific settings, attending to the ways in which localized human agents who inhabit the roles of student, educator, or administrator define possibilities for social relation.

In settler nations such as Canada, the United States, and Australia, as well as in European nations undergoing multicultural transformations, one of the central stakes in curriculum and pedagogy derives from what Charles Taylor has called “the politics of recognition.” The demand for recognition is predicated upon, in his words, “the supposed links between recognition and identity, where this latter term designates something like a person’s understanding of who they are, of their fundamental defining characteristics as a human being.” Identity, in turn, is presupposed to be partially shaped by (mis)recognition, such that individuals and groups may alternately thrive or suffer damage through the enabling or distorting images projected back upon them. Indeed, “Nonrecognition or misrecognition,” Taylor maintains, “can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.” Within a liberal democracy, the political recognition of cultural particularity of all members of the society is also congruent with a certain form of universalism that regards respect for diverse cultures as ultimately also serving the basic interest of society at large. Whether referencing groups or individuals, the politics of recognition have navigated between legitimizing differences of identity through the latter’s claim to something close to ontological status, and alternately, advancing claims to performativity and elective choice.

Contemporary debates about the politics of migration, asylum, and exile witness a wide range of conspiracy theories, evidence-free arguments, and post-truth distortions. Social media are quick to present refugees as agents of sexual assault, even serious media outlets can’t help to wonder whether migrants are terrorists in disguise, and massproduced television shows cast immigrant communities in Germany and elsewhere as hotbeds of international drug trafficking and crime. The reasons for installing the immigrant’s body as a screen of often paranoid and unfounded projections are manifold; the rise of populist agitation is as much at its roots as the withering of nuanced perspectives—right and often left—amid the bubbles of post-neoliberal, internet-based communication. What might matter more, however, is that in the end free-floating claims about the figure of the migrant tend to untether the very possibility of public discourse and political debate in general: if evidence- free conjecture and blatant lies reign triumphant, then we lose— as Hannah Arendt already argued in the postwar period—the very base of political dialogue and of pluralistic conceptions of democratic life. In representing a feared loss or lack of spatial groundedness, of moored identity, the figure of the migrant thus increasingly turns into what the champions of populist and mostly right-wing identity politics demonize so as to pursue their anti-pluralistic attack on the foundations of democratic institutions altogether.

The same period that has produced the figure of the migrant as a screen of free-floating anxieties and post-truth speculation has also unmoored contemporary art from whatever it still could take for granted after the demise of dominant traditions and normative concepts of art in the twentieth century. As evidenced in recent art events such as Kassel’s Documenta 15 (2022), in its timely embrace of discourses of inclusivity, diversity, and decolonization, contemporary art has shed whatever previously remained of the normative frameworks of autonomous art: it prioritizes collaborative practices over the myth of the individual artist, open-ended process over self-contained work, social engagement over aesthetic self-referentiality, gestures of sharing over the reifying power of the market. Amid this, as critics such as Wolfgang Ulrich and Hanno Rauterberg argue, efforts to delimit the concept, domains, and borders of art no longer prove adequate.