Right on schedule (that is, about 5 years after America) hipster-hating is coming to Germany (g, h/t JCW). But before we assail them, let's celebrate the magic they can work when their obsessions meet with a solid work ethic. I recently dropped by a party held in Generation 13 (g), a combination of cafe, 'museum of pop culture', and shop in Berlin-Mitte.
The museum sprawls through the entire basement of a large building. Everywhere you look, pop culture ephemera from the 1970s and 1980s is displayed with a mixture of Teutonic organization and loving care. I wandered, spellbound. Memories from my misspent youth drifted to the surface: idle afternoons watching Battlestar Galactica, Space: 1999, and the Six Million Dollar Man; my Kiss album collection; the first primitive pong video game; and so much more of the crap that we filled our lives with in the 1970s.
I learned much from this museum as well. For instance, that there were once action figures of the Ramones, Johnny Rotten(!), and John Lennon(!!). That the movie Battlestar Galactica was once released on Super-8 film in German. And that the original Donkey Kong video arcade game, of which there's one in the shop, is as difficult as it is addictive. Here are a few cellphone photos to give you an idea of what's on display.
I am surprised to find out that there is a museum dedicated to Eastern European design in Los Angeles called the Wende Museum:
So why would a museum that examines the histories of Eastern Europe
during the Cold War be located in Los Angeles? According to the museum,
“their location in California provides independence and critical
distance from current political debates in Europe, and also facilitates
the questioning of preconceived ideas about our past and present.
Moreover, the Museum’s physical remoteness from Central and Eastern
Europe has enabled it to attract significant artifacts and collections
that might otherwise have been destroyed as a result of emotional and
political reactions.”
The Wende Museum was founded by Justinian
Jampol in 2002 with a mission to preserve the quickly disappearing
cultural artifacts and personal histories of Cold War-era Eastern Europe
and the Soviet Union.
The Guardian reports on a recent study of gallery-speak, officially christened 'International Art English':
If you've been to see contemporary art in the last three decades, you
will probably be familiar with the feelings of bafflement, exhaustion
or irritation that such gallery prose provokes. You may well have got
used to ignoring it. As Polly Staple, art writer and director of the Chisenhale Gallery
in London, puts it: "There are so many people who come to our shows who
don't even look at the programme sheet. They don't want to look at any writing about art."
With
its pompous paradoxes and its plagues of adverbs, its endless sentences
and its strained rebellious poses, much of this promotional writing
serves mainly, it seems, as ammunition for those who still insist
contemporary art is a fraud. Surely no one sensible takes this jargon
seriously?
David Levine and Alix Rule do. "Art English is
something that everyone in the art world bitches about all the time,"
says Levine, a 42-year-old American artist based in New York and Berlin.
"But we all use it." Three years ago, Levine and his friend Rule, a
29-year-old critic and sociology PhD student at Columbia university in
New York, decided to try to anatomise it. "We wanted to map it out,"
says Levine, "to describe its contours, rather than just complain about
it."
They christened it International Art English, or IAE, and
concluded that its purest form was the gallery press release, which – in
today's increasingly globalised, internet-widened art world – has a
greater audience than ever....
IAE always uses "more rather than fewer words". Sometimes it uses
them with absurd looseness: "Ordinary words take on non-specific alien
functions. 'Reality,' writes artist Tania Bruguera, 'functions as my
field of action.'" And sometimes it deploys words with faddish
precision: "Usage of the word speculative spiked unaccountably in 2009;
2011 saw a sudden rage for rupture; transversal now seems poised to have
its best year ever."
Through Sketch Engine, Rule and Levine found
that "the real" – used as a portentous, would-be philosophical abstract
noun – occurred "179 times more often" in IAE than in standard English.
In fact, in its declarative, multi-clause sentences, and in its odd
combination of stiffness and swagger, they argued that IAE "sounds like
inexpertly translated French". This was no coincidence, they claimed,
having traced the origins of IAE back to French post-structuralism and
the introduction of its slippery ideas and prose style into American art
writing via October,
the New York critical journal founded in 1976. Since then, IAE had
spread across the world so thoroughly that there was even, wrote Rule
and Levine, an "IAE of the French press release ... written, we can only
imagine, by French interns imitating American interns imitating
American academics imitating French academics".
The mention of
interns is significant. Rule, who writes about politics for leftwing
journals as well as art for more mainstream ones, believes IAE is partly
about power. "IAE serves interests," she says. However laughable the
language may seem to outsiders, to art-world people, speaking or writing
in IAE can be a potent signal of insider status. As some of the lowest
but also the hungriest in the art food chain, interns have much to gain
from acquiring fluency in it. Levine says the same goes for many
institutions: "You can't speak in simple sentences as a museum and be
taken seriously. You can't say, 'This artist produces funny work.' In
our postmodern world, simple is just bad. You've got to say, 'This
artist is funny and ...'"
From 50 Watt, the Nuremberg ABC of 1912, illustrated by Olga Kopetzky. Over at 50 Watt, they say: "I can't find so much as a blurb about Olga (1868–1928), who published
under "O. Kopetzky." Her work has been in circulation, though, as she
illustrated an oft-reprinted 1915 edition of Paul Carus's Gospel of Buddha."
Vanity Fair has a fascinating piece about the infamous art-forging Beltracchis of Cologne. It's hard to say what's more impressive -- the ingenuity of the forgers or the credulousness of the art establishment:
He
had moved from old masters to early-20th-century French and German
artists, partly because it was easier to find pigments and frames from
that period. The forgeries came in “waves,” he says, depending on his
need for cash. “Sometimes I’d paint 10 works in a month, and then go for
six months without doing any.” Among his specialties were paintings by
the German Expressionist Johannes Molzahn, who had fled the Nazis and
taken refuge in the U.S. in 1938; Fischer sold as many as a dozen
purported Molzahns, which fetched up to $45,000. (One was even bought by
the artist’s widow.) He says he insinuated three fake paintings, by
three different artists, into a single auction held by art dealer
Jean-Louis Picard in Paris in 1991.
In the mid-1980s, Fischer also began painting phony works
supposedly by Heinrich Campendonk, another German Expressionist from the
Lower Rhine. Condemned by the Nazis as a “degenerate artist,” he had
fled into exile in the Netherlands shortly after their rise to power.
During this period, Andrea Firmenich, a young German art scholar in
Bonn, was assembling a comprehensive catalogue of Campendonk’s art with
the assistance of Campendonk’s son; Beltracchi says “five or six” of his
own forgeries ended up in Firmenich’s catalogue raisonné. “This was
really brilliant,” says Ralph Jentsch, a modern-art expert who would
later play a critical role in exposing the Beltracchis’ fraud. “It shows
the criminal potential of this guy. . . . It also shows how careless
[Firmenich] was.” For her part, Firmenich counters that Campendonk’s
output was unusually vast (more than 1,200 works), that two other
authorities consulted on the catalogue, and that “no expert is immune
from mistakes.” She declines to go into further detail. “The damage to
my person is so big that I am not able to say anything ‘official,’” she
wrote to me in an e-mail. “The damage for the experts of art is so
enormous, and the public understanding of Beltracchi as a hero so
absurd, that I hope you can understand my opinion.”
...
By the early 2000s, Beltracchi’s fakes were selling at auction to
collectors for the high six figures, sometimes more. Steve Martin paid
$860,000 in 2004 for a counterfeit Campendonk called Landscape with Horses,
then sold it through Christie’s 18 months later at a $240,000 loss,
still unaware that he’d been in possession of a fake. In 2007, a French
gallery sold Portrait of a Woman with Hat, a semi-nude allegedly
by the Dutch Fauvist painter Kees van Dongen, to a wealthy Dutch
collector, Willem Cordia, for $3.8 million. Other forgeries wound up in
the hands of galleries, museums, and private collectors in places as far
flung as Tokyo and Montevideo, Uruguay. In addition to imitating the
works of second-tier Expressionists and Cubists such as Louis
Marcoussis, Oskar Moll, and Moïse Kisling, Beltracchi embarked on a more
dangerous business: forging the works of great artists such as Fernand
Léger, Georges Braque, and Max Ernst. While they would command higher
prices, these paintings also ran the risk of inviting closer scrutiny.
Beltracchi says he was especially drawn to Ernst, because “physically,
he resembled my father.”
Despite the higher stakes, or perhaps
because of them, art experts eagerly jumped on the bandwagon. Indeed,
the Beltracchis often prophylactically secured statements of
authenticity from leading authorities to quell potential doubts before
offering the paintings to auction houses and galleries. Werner Spies,
now 75, the former director of the modern-art museum at the Pompidou
Center in Paris and the world’s leading Max Ernst authority, made a
pilgrimage to Domaine des Rivettes in early 2004 to inspect The Forest (2).
The large canvas depicted a sun of concentric circles of red, blue,
white, and yellow, rising over a coppice of cypress trees. Beltracchi
had painted the large work in two days, employing the same method that
Ernst often used: rubbing a spatula over blocks of rough wood,
seashells, and other found objects that he had placed beneath the
painted canvas. With Wolfgang making himself scarce—he never revealed
himself to potential buyers or experts, he says—Helene escorted Spies
into the couple’s bedroom. The phony Ernst hung on the wall behind the
bed. “Spies came in, took one look, and was overcome with excitement,”
Helene says. He declared that there was no doubt The Forest (2) was authentic.
Spies—who did not return e-mails or phone calls asking for
comment—quickly put Helene in touch with a Swiss art dealer, who
triumphantly sold Max Ernst’s long-lost The Forest (2) to a
company called Salomon Trading, for about €1.8 million, or $2.3 million.
The painting passed to a Paris gallery, Cazeau-Béraudière, which sold
it in 2006 to Daniel Filipacchi for $7 million. “The widow of Max Ernst
[Dorothea Tanning, who died this past January] saw the painting and said
that it was the most beautiful picture that Max Ernst had ever
painted,” Helene gloats today. She and Wolfgang were amazed by the
gullibility of those they had duped, says Helene. “We’re still laughing
about it.”
Also playing a bit part are the relentless, utterly dedicated German police, who discovered a fake Beltracchi in the mid-1990s and started an investigation, and then let everything slide while Beltracchi fled the country for a few years and then resumed his forgery career.
Someone has finally found an use for hapless Hans-Peter, interior minister of Germany. Martin Backes, artist, has created a high-tech balaclava based on a "pixel-style print of German Secretary of the Interior Hans-Peter Friedrich."
No visit to Berlin is complete without a trip to the Gemäldegalerie, one of my favorite museums. On previous visits, I'd never stayed until closing time. This time, I saw what they do there at closing time, and it wasn't pretty. Hence the letter:
Dear Berlin Museums Visitors’ Service,
Recently, I visited the Gemäldegalerie
(Painting Gallery) in Berlin. The museum advertised that it was open until
18:00, and I decided to stay until that time to enjoy the collection.
I have always enjoyed my previous visits to this elegant museum,
but this time was different. 15 – perhaps even 20 -- minutes before 18:00, my
ears were suddenly assaulted by an audio message from blown speakers in the
museum’s ceiling. Amid crackles of distortion, the announcement played the
melody of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ and announced to visitors that the gallery
would be closing shortly. The first announcement, in German, was then followed
by an equally distorted and almost unrecognizable message in English, then, if I
recall correctly, in French.
But that was not all. At the same time, the museum’s docents
positioned themselves in all the doorways to the individual rooms, as if they
were nightclub bouncers. To actually get into a room at 17:50 and see a
painting, you had to convince a docent to let you in. Many of the docents were
unfriendly and suspicious, treating visitors who wanted to enjoy a
painting at 17:54 as if they were potential criminals. Finally, all the
museum’s visitors were herded out of the museum at exactly 18:00, after being
pressured to leave.
As I could tell by the visitors’ comments, this
unprofessional treatment left a terrible impression that the museum’s visitors
will take back to their home countries. When guests pay to enjoy a museum which
closes at 18:00, then they should be able to actually enjoy the museum until 18:00.
To improve the visitors’ experience, I suggest that the Gemäldegalerie (1) repair the speakers
in the museum ceiling; (2) broadcast only
one closing message (everyone will know what it means, even if they don’t
understand the language) and do so at, say, 17:57; and (3) give guests 10-15
minutes after the official closing time to leave the museum.
As paying guests in one of the world’s finest collections of
Old Masters, they deserve no less.
Instead of giving you a panorama of Kassel to start this post, here's an old 'watch for pickpockets' poster from Kassel's disused former main train station. Wait, that's unfair. Here's a picture of Kassel looking its best:
By day, Kassel's not much to look at. There's a somewhat grand central square, the Friedrichplatz, lined by a giant 18th-century classical pile on one side (the Friedericianum, on the left in the photo above) and a row of shops on the other. Just south of that, there is a massive Baroque park, the Karlsaue, divided into a huge central field ringed by artificial meadows in the English style. Outside the city center, things quickly get very grim indeed: Kassel was flattened during World War II, and the monotonous 4- and 5-story housing oblongs thrown up in haste in the 1950s quickly numb the eye.
But wait, there's more! Every five years, Kassel is taken over by Documenta, one of the largest contemporary-art shows in the world. The working-class locals generally tolerate the quinquennial onslaught of bestubbled men in black turtlenecks and women in flowing raiment, since they spend lots of money and put Kassel on the map. The art is all over town, so to speak, with exhibitions in the Friedericanum (the main venue) the grounds of a disused central train station, a natural history museum, the classical Orangerie, a special modern hall called the Documenta-Halle, and all over the grounds of the sprawling Karlsaue. The atmosphere is of a sedate, bildungsbürgerlich outdoor festival. Inevitably, the Occupy folks have come to Kassel and set up a tent city just outside the main venue.
The international art scene, we are told, is now split between two camps. First, the major galleries, museums and auction houses, who extract profits from those at the top of the winner-take-all contemporary-art pyramid. Then there are curators of the international bienniales, who often critique the unholy commercialism of the mainstream market by inviting outsiders, non-artists, scientists, and activists to display at the major international exhibitions. The works they commission and display often have a social agenda and cannot easily be commodified.
Carolyn Christov-Bagarkiev, curator of this year's thirteenth Documenta (or dOCUMENTA (13), in the official spelling) stands proudly in the second camp -- her welcoming remarks even promise a 'non-logocentric' exhibition, whatever that might be. This has its good and not-so-good sides. On the positive side, she has invited a spectacularly international cast of participants, with entries from all continents. Anyone coming to Kassel looking for room after room of 'big names' will go away disappointed. She has also invited several scientists to explain their work, including Anton Zeilinger, the Austrian physicist who has invented deceptively simple experiments to illuminate seeming paradoxes of quantum mechanics such as quantum teleportation.
The downsides of CCB's approach are also evident. It's always a bad sign when curators have to resort to fluff-words such as 'foreground', 'practice', 'intervention' or 'technique' to describe what the artist is doing, and there's a lot of charlatanry on display. Thai artist -- I hesitate to use the word -- Pratchaya Phinthong displays two dead tsetse flies in a glass box. Ryan Gardner has hogged the entire sprawling ground floor of the Friedericianum for an installation that features hidden fans which create a breeze. Yup, that's all there is to “I need some meaning I can memorise (The Invisible Pull)” -- two giant, empty rooms with a mild breeze running through them. I couldn't be bothered to find out what this was supposed to teach us, although perhaps it's a commentary on Germans' paranoid terror of moving indoor air. American Susan Hiller features a jukebox playing songs she likes, which 'foregrounds' the exquisite taste and social awareness of her iPod shuffle list. Lara Favaretto has stacked a couple of giant piles of junk in the open area behind the former main train station, an embarassingly unoriginal foray. Goldberg and Faivovich, a hirsute pair of twentysomethings who look like (and may be) heirs of wealthy Argentine families, have filmed themselves crawling over the El Chaco meteorite. They originally wanted to transport this giant rock from Argentina to Kassel, but were very rightly stopped by the authorities and -- the irony! -- indigenous tribes from the area.
Just as uninspired, though perhaps more edifying, are the didactic exhibits by social activists. One room in the natural-history museum, the Ottoneum, is given over to Maria Tereza Alves' massive model volcano, part of a documentation of the struggle of a group of indigenous people to prevent the sale of their land to an international conglomerate. If this were a high-school science fair, this earnest diorama would certainly snap up first prize. Turning to the social studies fair, we have an outdoor exhibit by Robin Kahn on the oppression of certain Western Saharan tribes by Morocco. The display is pasted onto hastily-erected wooden boards in what is supposed to remind you of a refugee camp, and there is a tent in which you may nosh in solidarity on Western Saharan food, if you wish. The explanatory placards, consisting of simple collages, were bettered by many of the impromptu exhibits in the Occupy Kassel tent city in the Friedrichplatz. And then there was the nice Thai lady showing movies about the animal shelter she runs in Thailand, and soliciting contributions for 'DOGumenta' outside her outdoor '"'installation'"'. Then there were the hairy young things from the art collective AND AND AND, whose intervention consisted of the strategy of selling 'anti-capitalist' organic tea from a hastily-nailed-together wooden stand. Or maybe they were giving it away, so as to interrogate the logocentric matrix of late capita-blah blah blah. Anyone who sees revolutionary potential in organic tea obviously hasn't been to a corporate boardroom lately.
But enough of the silliness. They can't all be zingers, in the words of Primus, and there was much fascinating stuff on display. The Cypriot-German team of Haris Epaminonda and Daniel Gustav Cramer took over three stories of a dilapidated former train command center to create a hypnotic installation composed of bare rooms with enigmatic pictures and symbols, books containing star measurements or simple diagrams, oddly evocative unsent letters, and framed, faded photographs clippings of everything from Neanderthal busts to Russian waterfalls. The top floor of the building, a creaky loft, has been subtly claimed for art by the placement of black spheres. The installation worked by suggestion and intimation, and left the visitor with an oddly abstract sense of melancholy:
Julie Mehretu displayed four massive canvases whose background consisted of a thick mass of overlapping CAD line drawings with different perspective points, overlaid by a complex system of handmade marks and color fields. Looking upon these canvases brought on vertigo, and the contrast between the clinical precision of the computerized drafting and the hand-drawn marks was eerie and evocative. Thomas Bayrle's dissected vehicle engines and stand-alone windshield wipers evoked the hypnotic potential latent in the calm repetition of machines. Also on display were some of his short films, one of which shows anonymous crowds of miniature human figures wandering on the reflective leaves of a rotating rubber plant:
His massive 'Airplane' from 1983, a drawing of a plane made of recursive drawings of ever-smaller planes, evoked the almost hermetic obsessiveness of Hanna Darboven.
A roomful of intricately abstract paintings and textiles by Aboriginal artists from Australia mesmerized everyone who entered it, including yours truly.
The crowning achievements of this Documenta were, in my view, two multimedia installations. One, housed in a room of the Documenta-Halle, is 'In Search of Vanished Blood' by Pakistani-Indian artist Nalini Malani:
She has suspended five large transparent plastic cylinders from the ceiling painted with silhouettes reminiscent of traditional shadow plays. As they rotate, film is projected both beside and through them, creating a coruscating, mind-breaking riot of silhouette, shape, and sound. Interweaved are images of women veiled, undressed, and in ritual costume. It's difficult to tell which juxtapositions are planned and which are randomly-generated, which makes them all the more fascinating. At one point, for instance, the image of a woman putting on a dress is shown repeatedly, accompanied by the sound of glass breaking. Of course, neither description nor videos can do it justice, you simply have to immerse yourself in the maelstrom.*
The second is called 'The Refusal of Time' and was masterminded by William Kentridge, the South African artist whose career shows a combination of superb draftsmanship, an unerring sense of symbolism, and a streak of unabashed showmanship.
'The Refusal of Time' is a 25-minute meditation on time and space, projected on six separate non-synchronized screens and accompanied by a soundtrack that is by turns boisterously African, raucously Dixieland, grindingly industrial, and spaciously contemplative. And not just by turns -- sometimes completely different stuff gets stacked on top of itself, just as it does in life. Kentridge takes a broad palette of time-related symbolism -- metronomes, space signals, mindless task-repetition, the life cycle of a family, the slow progress toward extinction -- and subjects them to an spectacularly fertile and inventive series of cross-linked variations that is comical, frightening, and moving. Unlike almost every other installation, everyone who entered the Kentridge room stayed, mesmerized, until the end of the show, and there was often spontaneous applause. As someone once said of John Ashbery, Kentridge truly lives in a Versailles of the imagination.
Such are my thoughts on Documenta. I stopped by a few more museums during the trip, and will post about those in the coming days, as my schedule permits. And below, just for fun, some more images from Documenta (details in hover text):
On Friday, I debated American law professor and death-penalty proponent Robert Blecker in the 'New Auditorium' of Heidelberg University, which was freshly renovated in 2011 to celebrate the 625th birthday of that institution. The room was pretty crowded, and the audience -- almost exclusively students -- asked interesting questions. The Heidelberg Symposium (g) is organized exclusively by a small group of idealistic, hard-working students, and they did a fine job, presenting dozens of interesting speakers (I went to several other presentations myself and was never disappointed) and making guests feel more than welcome. If you want to support this entirely voluntary, student-run, interdisciplinary conference, go here (g). They also welcome Sachspenden (in-kind contributions).
Given all the charming people I was meeting, I did rather a bit more drinking and socializing than I normally do -- in fact, on Friday night, I stayed up until 6 AM, and walked home to the Hotel Tannhäuser.* Many thanks to my readers for the suggestions. Unfortunately, the weather was cool and rainy, so all the Biergärten were closed and no space was left inside, so there was no white asparagus with braised pork knuckles (or whatever they eat in Heidelberg) for me. My drinking companions and I always seemed to end up in the Weinloch ('Winehole'!) in the Untere Straße, which stays open until 3 AM and lives up to its name.
I finally got a chance to see the Prinzhorn Collection of art by patients in a clinic for the mentally ill, collected in the early 20th century by an idealistic psychologist and art historian named Hans Prinzhorn. The classic book he published in 1922, Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (g) (Artistry of the Mentally Ill), influenced a generation of modern artists. And I didn't just buy if for the pictures; Prinzhorn's innovation was to treat artworks by mentally ill patients not as curiosities or signs of disease, but rather as serious expressions of the primal human need to understand the world, bring order to sense impressions, decorate one's surroundings, and express states of the soul.
The project was perverted a generation later, when the chairman of the Heidelberg psychiatric clinic, Carl Schneider, permitted works from the collection to be used by the Nazis to 'prove' that modern art was no different from the 'scribblings of mental degenerates'. Prinzhorn himself was prevented from further developing his own fascination with racial ideology (g) by his early death in 1933. Many of the artists whose works appear in the book were later murdered in Grafeneck (g) as part of the T4 program. Prinzhorn's masterpiece has been translated into English and has consistently remained in print in Germany, with the last edition appearing in 2011. The Prinzhorn collection is now housed in a thoroughly-renovated old lecture hall, and is the perfect size.
I have a few other observations about Heidelberg:
In the early morning, the streets of Heidelberg are full not only of drunken students, but also lots of drunken random citizens speaking a neurologically-impaired version of whatever their native language is. Or their 'school English'. You'll also see a lot of swarthy men showing each other rather intense levels of public affection. There are almost-nightly fights, which the police actually don't do much to prevent: they watch over things and make sure nobody gets seriously hurt. It's all loads of fun until somebody loses an eye, but it's not exactly the academic idyll it is often portrayed as.
The university's world-famous Egyptian collection is closed, apparently indefinitely, while it's being moved to a new location. Naturally, you won't find this clearly stated anywhere on the University's website or at any signs at the former location of the exhibition.
The traditional German style of holding a 'Vorlesung' lives on among many of the crusty old professors at Heidelberg (but not only there, of course). The professor stands behind the lectern, reading a prepared text (or simply reading a slightly revised version of their most recent book or commentary) in a monotone. The text is read word-for-word, page for page. Deviation from the text is a cardinal sin, as is the idea of integrating contemporary examples or empirical verification. After having droned on for the required amount of time, the professor gathers his or her papers and leaves the room. Interruptions and questions are not permitted, and the professor simply doesn't care if half the students leave mid-lecture out of sheer boredom. The fact that this 'lecture' style could also be performed by an Amazon Kindle doesn't seem to have inspired thesed professors to change their ways. Fortunately, this style of lecturing is slowly dying out even in German universities, but it's always gob-smacking to see one of these 'old-school' profs displaying such open contempt for the audience.
Heidelberg 'Student kisses' are the most delicious candies in the world.
UPDATE: The indefatigable Christian Boulanger asks how the debate was. You'll be able to judge soon enough, since it will be posted on YouTube. Until then, my impressions. My job was to defend the 'European model' of criminal punishment, which could be summed up as (1) avoid prison confinement wherever possible; (2) integrate retributivism (as the basis for the length of the sentence) without going overboard; (3) make sure prison does as good a job as possible resocializing inmates; and (4) keep criminal justice out of the hands of the people and in the hands of politically insulated civil servants. Blecker, for his part, is an 'emotive retributivist' who favors capital punishment for the 'worst of the worst' and supports making prison life gradually more restrictive depending on the level of moral culpability of the offender, meaning those who displayed serious depravity of mind would be subject to punitive segregation. His views are more nuanced than some of the video clips circulating on the Internet may make it seem: he believes the death penalty is used too frequently in the United States, agrees that America has a serious over-incarceration problem, and that too little is done to try to rehabilitate prisoners. His focus is on severe punishments for the 'worst of the worst', but on correspondingly less severe punishments for those whose crimes don't demonstrate utter viciousness.
I was preaching to the choir, since I was defending a system that most of the middle-class to upper-class university students tend to see as natural and normal and humane. (This complacency is aggravated by the 'respectable' German media's disinterest in highlighting the many problems plaguing German criminal justice, with the intermittent exception of Der Spiegel (g)). I don't normally like preaching to the choir, so I tried to leaven my endorsement of European mildness with some criticisms. Nevertheless, the students listened to Blecker's point of view respectfully, and Becker earned applause for his frankly, honestly retributive opinions -- such as that he has little use for the abstract notion of 'human dignity', and that he considers the 'human dignity' of people like Magnus Gäfgen as much less worthy of protection than that of the young boy he callously murdered.
Anyway, that's my two cents. The debate was captured on video by a pretty professional camera team, and I've been promised it will be posted on YouTube in the next few weeks. As soon as it shows up, I'll post it here, and you can draw your own conclusions...
And now for a few random pictures from my photostream:
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