Latest news with #polarisation
The Guardian
5 hours ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Women born in East Germany have lived between two worlds. That's why we're shaking up art and politics
In February 1990, the German news magazine Der Spiegel ran the headline 'Why are they still coming?', adding: 'In West Germany, hatred for immigrants from the GDR could soon reach boiling point.' That year, resentment towards so-called newcomers from the east erupted without restraint. East Germans were insulted in the streets, shelters were attacked and children from the former GDR were bullied at school. There was a widespread fear that the weekly influx of thousands of people would overwhelm the welfare system and crash the housing and job markets. The public consensus? It needed to stop. That same year, Kathleen Reinhardt and her parents moved from Thuringia in the former GDR to Bavaria. She was in primary school, and her new classmates greeted her with lines such as: 'You people come here and take our jobs. You don't even know how to work properly.' It was a formative shock. Reinhardt, who was recently appointed curator of the German pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale, has an eye for imbalance, for what is missing, for who is not being considered. That she will represent Germany at one of the art world's most prestigious exhibitions is – against this backdrop – not just remarkable, it's historic. Thirty-five years after reunification, a different kind of German story is being heard. At a time of polarisation, when supposedly stable institutions and even the global order itself are faltering, figures such as Reinhardt – someone who understands 'otherness' and has lived between two worlds – are exactly what is needed. In her career, Reinhardt is known for going where things are uncomfortable, for entering terrain that is politically fraught or typically avoided by curators. She thrives in the difficult – and confronts it. Perhaps this is because she was born in a small GDR town in the early 1980s and was raised under socialism, but then grew up in Bavaria – the very embodiment of West German order. Reinhardt studied American literature (with a focus on Black writing), art history and international management in Bayreuth, Amsterdam, Los Angeles and Santa Cruz. She speaks four languages and holds a PhD on the American conceptual artist Theaster Gates. She has managed the studios of the South African artist Candice Breitz and the Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj, and has curated high-profile exhibitions at the Dresden state art collections. In 2022, she became director of the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin. Located on a quiet, tree-lined street in what still smells like old West Berlin, the museum was once sleepy and conformist. But it now attracts curators, artists and critics with its radical reprogramming. Reinhardt's exhibitions there aim to reveal ambivalences, focusing on fracture rather than polish. But it's not just her CV that points to something worth noting about millennial Germans shaped by the GDR. I interviewed Reinhardt a few weeks ago, and I came away realising that women like her play in a league of their own. She wants to understand how it all connects – who we are today and the past we emerge from – while keeping a healthy scepticism towards grand narratives. That in itself feels almost avant garde in a time when stories from then and now are being instrumentalised, appropriated, bent or simply glossed over. On one of her first walks through the museum's garden, Reinhardt encountered The Dancer's Fountain by Georg Kolbe – a 1922 commission from the Jewish art collector Heinrich Stahl, who was later deported to Theresienstadt and murdered. The fountain had vanished during the Nazi era, resurfaced in the 1970s and was reinstalled with no explanation. At the top: a graceful, dancing female figure. At the base: stylised Black male bodies supporting the basin. Reinhardt's reaction? She started to dig. Working with art historians and provenance researchers, she traced the fountain's journey, uncovered records and identified a likely model whom Kolbe had used. She brought to light the complex and violent histories of the 20th century inherent in this object, becoming the first director in the museum's 75-year history to refuse to look away. Earlier this summer, she invited Lynn Rother to the museum to take part in a panel discussion on provenance research, its current status and future potential. Like Reinhardt, Rother has an East German background. Born in 1981 in Annaberg-Buchholz, she now lives between Berlin, Lüneburg and New York. She is the Lichtenberg-professor of provenance studies at Leuphana University and the founding director of its Provenance Lab. Last year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York created a new position just for her: its first curator for provenance. Rother's work is also about the stories behind objects. Who owned them? Who lost them – and why? Her research lays bare the darker infrastructures behind museum collections: looting, coercion, legal grey zones. She exposed the largest art deal of the Nazi era and now leads two major digital research projects backed by €1.8m in funding, exploring how machine-readable data can help trace – and eventually close – gaps in provenance. Sign up to This is Europe The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion Art, as Rother told me, has always been a mobile asset in times of war and crisis. Museums and the art market have benefited, directly and indirectly, from the tragedies of the 20th century. Some works in today's collections were acquired through murky channels in moments of extreme horror. The great challenge of Rother's work is to recognise and document those entanglements. You could say it's a dirty job. Provenance researchers are seen as troublemakers. Their work sometimes leads to restitution, and with it, uncomfortable questions about national narratives and institutional pride. Rother's team recently ran a computational analysis of provenance records and found a striking pattern: married women were systematically erased. Even when a work had belonged to a woman, her husband was listed as the owner. 'That's not a clerical error,' she said. It shows that structural discrimination and patriarchal mechanisms are just as present in the art market as anywhere else. Like Reinhardt, Rother has spent years inside global institutions. I haven't shared their stories just to chart the rise of two exceptional women, but because it's been a hard-fought road since German reunification in 1990. We, the women from the East, have come a long way. For years, we were ridiculed, overlooked and reduced to stereotypes. Even Angela Merkel was first seen as a quiet little girl, then branded a Mutti, a motherly figure, a term simultaneously condescending and comforting and used to downplay her authority. But we're no longer a punchline. Today, women from the East – not just in politics and culture, but now also in the global art world – hold some of the most influential positions. To me, the stories of Reinhardt and Rother show how exclusion and institutional rigidity can – slowly, painfully – become insight. How memory, for those shaped by the GDR, is rarely linear. And how power, when approached from the margins, can be exercised more critically, and with greater care. In Bavaria, Reinhardt often felt she wasn't in – but not completely out either. 'What I had was school. Education. That was my little step up.' Her parents, a factory worker and a utility clerk, provided support but no privilege. It was similar for Rother, who was driven from early on. After studying art history, business and law, she earned a traineeship at Berlin's state museums in 2008. There, she came to see that it wasn't only about hard work – her origins suddenly mattered. She was constantly asked: 'Are you from East or West?' The hierarchy was obvious. Westerners ran the institutions. Eastern directors were deputies – at best. Even the art mirrored this: East German works were written off as second-rate. Both women have long rejected the patronising West German gaze. The 'east', Reinhardt argues, is not a special case, but a prism – a way to look at broader geopolitical lines and ask bigger questions about how we approach history and transformations in societies. Or in Rother's words: 'With artworks, labels matter. But we as people shouldn't be bound by them.' What these women offer isn't nostalgia. It's clarity. A resistance to simplification. A belief that history is not a finished room. In Reinhardt's office, there's a poster that reads: 'You don't have to tear down the statues – just the pedestals.' Both of these millennials are doing just that – carefully, insistently, telling it all again. We need more like them. Carolin Würfel is a writer, screenwriter and journalist who lives in Berlin and Istanbul. She is the author of Three Women Dreamed of Socialism
The Guardian
21 hours ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
UK a ‘powder keg' of social tensions a year on from summer riots, report warns
The UK is a 'powder keg' of social tensions, with a third of people rarely meeting anyone from different backgrounds, research has found. A report from the thinktank British Future and the social cohesion group Belong Network found that a year on from last summer's riots, there was a risk of unrest being reignited unless urgent action was taken to address issues of polarisation and division. The research found 31% of adults said they rarely or never had opportunities to meet people from different backgrounds, and a third say they did not frequently get a chance to meet other people at all in their local community. In a foreword to the report, the former Conservative chancellor Sajid Javid and the Labour politician Jon Cruddas said: 'The bonds that hold society together – civic participation and a shared sense of belonging – are under growing pressure. 'This is leaving our society more fragmented, fragile and less resilient to internal and external threats. At the same time, forces driving division are intensifying, political polarisation is deepening and trust in institutions is declining. Unless we address these forces, the very basis of our democracy is at risk.' They said last summer's riots after the Southport knife attack, the more recent racially motivated rioting in Northern Ireland and the findings of the grooming gangs inquiry had 'laid bare the fragility of social cohesion in the UK' and were part of pressures that have been 'building for decades'. The new report, The State of Us, will be a 'foundational input' to the new Independent Commission on Community and Cohesion, chaired by Javid and Cruddas. It was based on the views of 177 UK organisations working on social cohesion and community development, as well as 113 written submissions of evidence, a nationally representative survey and eight focus groups in towns and cities across the UK, including in areas affected by last year's riots. Anti-hate campaigners, meanwhile, say X is amplifying and monetising dangerous content and failing to enforce its own prohibitions against violent incitement. Research by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate found more than 4,300 posts in the past year that promoted violence against Muslims and immigrants, sent in reply to tweets by half a dozen high-profile account holders including Tommy Robinson, Andrew Tate and Laurence Fox. The CCDH chief executive, Imran Ahmed, said: 'One year on from the Southport riots, X remains the crucial hub for hate-filled lies and incitement of violence targeting migrants and Muslims.' If social media firms do not enforce their own rules, governments must confront the 'profit-driven amplification of violent and hateful content', he said, or the 'harm to targeted communities will grow and metastasise, with devastating consequences for British society'. The research follows a warning from MPs that current online safety laws contain 'major holes', as the Online Safety Act does not currently identify misinformation or disinformation as harms that need to be addressed by firms. The government said it did include an offence of false communications 'to target the spread of disinformation online when there is intent to cause harm'. The British Future report stated that successive governments had failed to take sustained, proactive measures to address social cohesion, and that 'a 'doom loop' of inaction, crisis and piecemeal response had failed to strengthen the foundations of communities across the country.' One reason behind the lack of social contact was money, the report found. Half of respondents said they did not always have enough money to go to places where they would meet other people. Jake Puddle, a senior researcher at British Future who led the report, said: 'We are facing a long, hot summer, with a powder keg of tensions left largely unaddressed from last year that could easily ignite once again. People are unhappy about their standard of living and the state of their local area, and don't trust politicians to sort it out. 'Public concerns about immigration and asylum can also be a flashpoint. That's only made worse when people have little contact with new arrivals, where public voices exacerbate division, and where governments fail to support or consult communities in their plans for asylum accommodation.' Kelly Fowler, chief executive of the Belong Network, said: 'Good work is happening across the UK on cohesion and community strength, but it is patchy and often confined to areas of high diversity or where tensions have spilled over into unrest. 'A lack of sustained funding limits its impact. It's time this issue was treated with the urgency it merits, in every part of Britain. We must not wait for more riots to happen.' The research found there was widespread concern about declining public services, inequality, the cost of living and the impact of social media, along with a lack of trust in politicians and institutions to help put things right. It also identified immigration and asylum as key issues raised by research participants, who were often focused on integration and pressures on housing and public services. But it found cause for optimism, with 69% of people feeling their local area was a place where people from different backgrounds got on well together, and many participants recalled moments of togetherness and community strength in adversity during the Covid-19 lockdowns.
The Guardian
21-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on social cohesion: too many of us are still ‘bowling alone'
Thirty years after writing Bowling Alone, the famous essay in which he diagnosed a dangerous crisis of social cohesion in the United States, Robert Putnam has a right to feel vindicated. In a lecture this spring, Prof Putnam, now 84, warned his audience that, amid levels of polarisation and distrust higher than at any time since the civil war, the US was 'in danger of going to hell in a handcart'. Britain is still, thankfully, a long way from the poisonous toxicity of Trump-era America, notwithstanding the ominous rise of Reform and Nigel Farage. But research published this week by the More in Common polling group paints a worrying portrait of communities in which there is a widespread sense of social disconnection, high levels of distrust among the young and a felt loss of shared spaces and rituals. Alarmed by the progress of Reform in 'red wall' seats that it won back in the last election, Labour has chosen primarily to view the problem of social cohesion through the narrow lens of immigration. But the report's authors suggest a far wider set of factors is at play, from the remote-working legacy of the pandemic to the paradoxically isolating effects of social media, which leave us too often alone with a phone. Significantly, given Reform's success in the most deprived parts of England and Wales, they also identify a class dimension to the weakening of communal ties and diminishing levels of social trust. According to More in Common's director, Luke Tryl, 'a pernicious graduate gap appears to be opening up, with those who have degrees generally feeling more connected and optimistic than those who don't.' The decline in associational life has been decades in the making. Far fewer of us now go to church, are members of a union or join social clubs. Political parties, once embedded in the life of communities, have become more detached from them and less representative of their varied social makeup. Deindustrialisation, and the cultural shifts of the Thatcher/Reagan era in the 1980s, inaugurated a more individualist age. The savage austerity inflicted by George Osborne in the 2010s degraded the public realm, closing leisure centres, libraries, youth clubs and arts centres. Inevitably, the loss of free or cheap social spaces hit the less well off hardest. According to Prof Putnam, this was the kind of context that helped deliver Donald Trump in the United States, as a swath of the population lost faith in the social contract and became 'vulnerable to authoritarian populist appeals'. There have been warning signals in Britain too. The riots and disorder last summer, in the aftermath of the appalling murder of three young girls in Southport, took place in some of the most deprived areas of the country. Together with Citizens UK and UCL academics led by Ed Miliband's former speechwriter, Marc Stears, More in Common is launching a joint research project dedicated to finding ways to strengthen our fraying social bonds. Labour should pay close attention to its work. Thus far, the government's programme of national renewal has focused overwhelmingly on the need to stimulate economic growth, within the unnecessarily constricting confines of its fiscal rules. But fostering the connections that bind people together in our towns and cities should be an equal priority. That will take social imagination and some hard thinking about the way we live now. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
