Jenny Farrell reviews the new anthology by Jeremy Corbyn and Len McCluskey, OR Books, New York and London, 2023, available here

Poetry for the Many is a truly remarkable publication by two of Britain’s most outstanding socialists, whose public profile does not bring the publication of poetry books immediately to mind.

Jeremy Corbyn and Len McCluskey, former leaders of the Labour Party and Unite the Union respectively, are prominent figures in British politics. They are highly respected not only by the political Left in Britain, but also among working-class communities and all those who support their struggle for genuine democracy around the world.

Both men have a long history of public service, fighting for workers’ rights and social justice. They are proud trade unionists and committed socialists, with a strong internationalist perspective. Their careers have been marked by a steadfast commitment to the values of fairness and justice.

Jeremy Corbyn, the Member of Parliament for Islington North, is known for his tenacity and incorruptibility. As Labour Party leader from 2015 to 2019, he significantly expanded the party’s membership and gave hope to a new generation of politically engaged young people that real change and a better life for all was possible.

Len McCluskey, the former general secretary of Unite, is celebrated for his industrial and political acumen. Under his leadership, Unite became the most influential British union. Growing up in Liverpool, Len was shaped by the city’s vibrant cultural scene and its strong sense of community. His leadership style is known for being both combative and confidence-inspiring, championing workers’ struggles both at home and abroad.

Together, Jeremy and Len represent a powerful force for change, dedicated to the fight for fairness, justice, peace, and a better life for all.

The motto “For the Many” was popularised within the Labour Party during the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. It featured prominently in the party’s 2017 general election manifesto and became closely associated with Corbyn’s tenure as party leader to encapsulate the party’s commitment to social justice and equality.

The phrase is borrowed from Shelley, specifically from his Masque of Anarchy, where the poet calls on the working people of England to become aware of their strength, when he wrote “Ye are Many, they are Few.” Shelley was enthusiastically embraced by the working class, and his convictions live on to this day. They are expressed in the central beliefs enshrined in the work of Jeremy Corbyn and Len McCluskey.

Poetry for the Many is an extension of this core political stance. The title is a challenge to the establishment, which seeks to forever enforce its hegemony of culture and the arts to represent their interests. Working-class people are frequently made to believe that high culture has nothing to do with them and that they cannot understand it even if they tried. Nothing could be further from the truth, and this is what Jeremy and Len have set out to show.

They have collected here a very fine selection of poetry that has been meaningful to them in their lives and in their struggles. Some of the poems are well known, however Len and Jeremy give their particular take on these. Among such famous poems is, for example, William Blake’s hymn Jerusalem about the fight to establish a humane world in the here and now, which is also the motto whoich inspired the creation of this website, Culture Matters. Len writes: “We must remember that Jerusalem was a call to arms, for all nations and working people, and reclaim the poem of a great radical.” Jeremy comments on another poem we all know, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” that it is a reminder of how being in tune with nature’s beauty is a powerful motivation to do what we can to preserve it. Jeremy writes: “by simply describing daffodils in his famous poem [Wordsworth] conveys a strong message advocating for environmental sustainability.” Both Jeremy and Len do something else that we are not taught at school: they highlight the radical potential of the poets who do make it onto the school curriculum.

As a collection, many of the poems presented focus on resistance, class struggles, colonialism, and oppression. To mention some of these: The US-author Langston Hughes’ The Negro Speaks of Rivers connects the Black experience with the long history of human civilisation. Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est and Isaac Rosenberg’s Dead Man's Dump are among those poems that expose the horrors of war and how the working classes are sacrificed for the interests of the ruling elite. “The Peat Bog Soldiers”, a song of resistance, was written by two Germans, Johann Esser and Wolfgang Langhoff, while prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp, as a direct expression of resistance to fascism, and the fight for freedom. Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish’s In Jerusalem addresses the experience of colonised, occupied Palestine. The selection traces a line from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century.

Many of the poems collected here by Len and Jeremy, however, are less well known and often stem from the canon of writings by the oppressed. They describe the experience of poverty, repression, racial, sexual or religious discrimination, displacement, prison, and wars. It is hardly surprising therefore that we are so much less familiar with them, as they challenge directly establishment cultural hegemony. They speak of the experiences of the Many, and for two people who have put all their efforts into furthering the cause of the Many by fighting for the rights of the working people to a fair share of the wealth they produce, it makes complete sense that the authors highlight the expressions of this experience in poetry. These are the voices that need to be heard.

Among Jeremy’s choices is Warsan Shire, born to Somali parents in Kenya, living in Britain. Here is an extract from her chilling poem Home:

No one puts their children in a boat, unless the
water is safer than the land. No one would choose
days and nights in the stomach of a truck, unless
the miles travelled meant something more than journey.

No one would choose to crawl under fences, beaten
until your shadow leaves, raped, forced off the boat
because you are darker, drowned, sold, starved,
shot at the border like a sick animal, pitied. No one
would choose to make a refugee camp home for a
year or two or ten, stripped and searched, finding
prison everywhere. And if you were to survive,
greeted on the other side—Go home Blacks, dirty
refugees, sucking our country dry of milk, dark
with their hands out, smell strange, savage, look
what they’ve done to their own countries, what will
they do to ours?

The insults are easier to swallow than finding your
child’s body in the rubble.

This poetry collection reflects, among many other things, Jeremy and Len’s democratic approach to collaboration in their work. Fellow fighters who have been involved in their struggles were invited to contribute and comment on a poem of their choice. What emerges is more than a book of poetry, it is the embodiment of joint effort in the interest of and collaboration with the Many.

Poetry for the Many is a resource for people looking for solace and encouragement in difficult times, people who need to feel that they are part of a global movement against war, repression and deprivation. The poems come from different epochs and parts of the world. They celebrate internationalism, solidarity, the working people and their lives. They deepen our own humanity and will to change the world.

The anniversary of Seán O’Casey's death falls on 18th September. He was the first English-speaking dramatist of international significance to emerge from the proletariat. His proletarian consciousness made his plays a significant part of Irish and international theatre history, securing their enduring relevance. O’Casey was not only a talented playwright but also a committed political activist. This dimension was not just a backdrop to his works but central to his creative output and is crucial to understanding his work. O’Casey saw his plays not merely as artistic creations but as weapons in the fight to create a new, truly humane society.

In the years before O’Casey turned to writing, he was deeply involved in national and class struggles in Ireland—as a proponent of Irish-speaking culture, a militant trade unionist, and a socialist activist. These experiences shaped his worldview. While politics defined O’Casey’s life, the craft of writing became equally important to him. Alongside influences like the legendary trade union leader Jim Larkin, Shakespeare and Charles Darwin, his fellow Dubliner Bernard Shaw had a lifelong impact on him, shaping his understanding of the connection between drama and politics. Shaw’s blend of sharp wit and creative humour was to become a hallmark of O’Casey’s own writing. Shaw had supported the locked-out Dublin workers in 1913 and spoke out against the executions of the leaders of the Easter Rising in 1916. O’Casey later stated that Shaw and Larkin were the two figures who most influenced his move to the left.

Despite his prolific output, O’Casey is known in Ireland and the English-speaking world almost exclusively for his Dublin Trilogy. These plays, with their portrayal of the working class as politically immature, were met with hostility by revolutionaries, particularly The Plough and the Stars. The later rejection of The Silver Tassie by Yeats in 1928 further contributed to O’Casey leaving Ireland permanently and moving to England, despite the role his plays had played in saving the Abbey Theatre from financial ruin at the beginning of the decade.

The establishment took issue with O’Casey’s thematic choices—his candid and satirical depiction of the church-state relationship in the Irish Free State in Cock-a-Doodle Dandy or The Bishop’s Bonfire, his examination of the 1929 economic crisis in Within the Gates, and his backing of the Spanish Republic in The Star Turns Red, where he highlighted the link between church and fascism—all of which were deeply objectionable to the Irish establishment. They distanced themselves from O’Casey, and although some of his later plays, like the acclaimed 1955 production of The Drums of Father Ned at the Gaiety Theatre, were occasionally performed, these works seldom saw the stage.

This stood in stark contrast to O’Casey’s reception in the socialist countries. The USSR celebrated his work, and his plays were frequently staged. As early as 1925, O’Casey was in contact with the Soviet cultural establishment and also met and admired Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. His support for the Soviet Union grew stronger during and after World War II. His plays were performed not only in major theatres but also by working-class theatre groups across the country. In Germany, O’Casey was already known by 1931. After 1945, O’Casey was performed in both German states. In West Germany, there were disturbances during the performance of The Silver Tassie in 1953 over its anti-war message, and in 1968 the audience disrupted the staging of The Star Turns Red. In East Germany, however, O’Casey found very fertile ground at the Berliner Ensemble and the Deutsches Theater, and numerous other theatres throughout the republic also staged his plays. O’Casey was one of the most performed Western playwrights in the GDR.

The Unity Theatre in 1971

After moving to England, O’Casey remained politically active. In addition to writing plays, he worked closely with the London-based Unity Theatre, associated with the CPGB Daily Worker in the late 1930s. He expressed solidarity with the Spanish Republic and the Soviet Union, and in the early 1950s, he called for support of the Stockholm Appeal of the World Peace Council to ban the nuclear bomb, among other activities.

Like Brecht and other socialist and communist authors, O’Casey did not view theatre as merely a place for entertainment or escapism. His plays were intended to contribute to the emancipation of the Irish and the working population as a whole, to mobilise the necessary forces to create a truly human society. He achieved this without compromising the artistic value of his dramas. In the inseparable unity of his art with his political thought, the political content of O’Casey’s works did not diminish their artistic quality but rather strengthened them and produced a profound aesthetic effect.

Brecht’s epic theatre managed to bring the German playwright’s revolutionary political views and innovative theatre aesthetics to global influence. His practice of using the distancing effect to provoke critical thinking secured him a permanent place in the world of theatre. In contrast, Seán O’Casey’s influence remained relatively limited. Unlike Brecht, O’Casey’s dramas are more tied to the specific social and political struggles of the Irish people. However, O’Casey’s ability to integrate these profound, general themes into his dramas is a key reason for the enduring significance of his works. While his plays are firmly rooted in the social and political realities of Ireland during his time, the underlying ideas—such as the fight against oppression, the quest for social justice, and the pursuit of human dignity—address universal human experiences that remain relevant in other contexts and at other times.

O’Casey attached fundamental importance to the written word in his dramas. He believed that the text, as written by the playwright, is the central element of any theatre production and should not be seen as mere raw material to be altered at the director’s whim. For him, the text was the foundation on which the entire theatrical realization is based, and he saw the task of staging as accurately and effectively implementing the artistic content contained in the text. This position is also underscored by his detailed stage directions, which show that he had clear ideas about how certain scenes, dialogues, and characters should appear, viewing the theatrical performance as an extension and realization of the written word, not as its transformation or reinterpretation.

In his early works, particularly in the Dublin Trilogy (The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars), O’Casey’s realism is distinctly traditional. However, later, O’Casey began to develop his style further and experiment with new forms of artistic modernism. Examples of this can be found in plays like The Silver Tassie, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, or Red Roses for Me, where O’Casey uses complex symbolic imagery and fantastical scenarios to explore reality. This way, O’Casey’s later works expand and deepen his artistic expression without losing their connection to reality. He created a more complex and richer theatrical language, allowing him to convey deep human and social themes in new and powerful ways.

One of the recurring themes in O’Casey’s work is the question of revolution. While in his early Dublin plays, especially after the loss of their leadership in 1916 through execution by the British colonial power, he controversially considered the Irish working class not yet ready for revolutionary change, his later works explore the potential for fundamental change. A look at his second last work, Figuro in the Night (1961), illustrates this.

The thematic focus of O’Casey’s play Figuro in the Night lies on revolution and liberation. The play is set in a new suburb of Dublin, flanked by two monuments — one commemorating the fallen Irish who served in the British Army during World War I, the other honouring those who died for Irish liberation. Both monuments document death.

The arrival of a third sculpture, a “Manneken Pis” statue in the city center (in O’Connell Street), introduces a new note. The cheerful figure causes a stir and celebrates natural human needs. In O’Casey’s play, it becomes a catalyst for a revolutionary uprising, where the people—especially the youth—overthrow the old order in a joyful, almost carnivalesque manner. The playwright uses this figure to portray the joy of human bodily functions and zest for life, highlighting the central importance of vitality and renewal for revolution and liberation.

He focuses on the human dimension of the revolution, emphasizing the liberation and reintegration into the nature of the whole person. This revolutionary vision emerges as a necessary antidote to the despair and life-denial of the contemporary world, offering hope and a strategic perspective for revolutionaries. The play is also a polemic against writers like George Orwell, who portrayed revolution negatively. Instead, O’Casey celebrates it as a carnival of life.

Figuro in the Night uses imagination and the fantastic to depict a moment of complete social upheaval, in which the rules of society are turned upside down, and the creative imagination of the masses is unleashed. The tension in the play lies in the conflict between suppressed human needs and the inhibiting forces of false consciousness, with the former eventually undermining the latter to achieve liberation.

Sexual liberation and political liberation

The uprising of the humanized senses, particularly sensuality, is thus central to O’Casey’s portrayal of human liberation. This sensuality, which has evolved throughout history, forms the core of humanity, deeply rooted in the masses, and cannot be indefinitely suppressed by restrictive moral constraints. O’Casey uses sexuality as a potent symbol for the broader, deeply rooted liberation of humanity, without making it into an absolute, ultimate goal. The sensual relationship between women and men becomes the measure of humanity’s progress, intertwining the natural with the human. This aligns with Marx’s view:

The relation of man to woman is the most genuine relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man’s natural behaviour has become human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become his natural essence. 

- Marx, Private Property and Communism, 1844

The drama explores how internal subversion, even small signs of change, can lead to significant transformations. The young women, particularly the girl in the opening scene, are catalysts for this change, expressing the new spirit through song. This suggests a generational shift, with the younger generation refusing to repeat the mistakes of their elders. The folksong “Oh dear, what can the matter be”, with its image of blue ribbons that a young man is to bring home from the fair for his sweetheart, runs as a leitmotif throughout the play.

The older characters, represented by the Old Man and Old Woman, may outwardly resist but are also influenced by the rising vitality of life. Although their liberation is incomplete, it represents a partial victory of sensuality even in those most attached to the old ways. Their speech, laced with references to popular songs and love ballads, subtly undermines their supposed disdain for sensuality, embodying a resurgence of human expression and rebellion against repression. Through rhythmic and poetic language, O’Casey expresses this upheaval, with the Old Woman particularly challenging traditional roles and presenting a growing, revolutionary perspective on human progress.

Thus, the world depicted in the play, despite its degeneration, is not portrayed as dead but rather as ripe for revolution, with the sensual-emotional uprising serving as a catalyst for broader changes. The drama suggests that life is full of potential for change, needing only the right spark.

By portraying the themes of revolution, transformation, and the power of human nature, O’Casey shows how pent-up energies and suppressed human instincts are unleashed during a spontaneous festival, embodying a broader social upheaval. O’Casey often uses communal festivities as focal points in his plays. However, unlike earlier celebrations, often controlled by oppressive forces such as the church or state, this festivity is secular, rooted in pagan traditions, and represents a genuine carnival of life. The connection to pagan roots is particularly evident in how this fountain of life can be traced back to a tradition of pagan water god worship, associated with ecstatic rituals that were initially suppressed and the wells later appropriated by the Catholic Church. Here, they reclaim their rights, and people seamlessly identify with this source of life.

This upheaval transforms a subdued suburban area into a blooming garden, symbolizing humanity’s return to a new Eden. This Eden, unlike the Christian Garden of Eden, is one that humanity regains after experiencing and overcoming hardships. It is a place full of vitality and joy, where humanity takes its destiny into its own hands.

In contrast to the world depicted in The Plough and the Stars, where insurrection is portrayed as a distant event that brought only destruction and despair to the people, this later work shows a revolution in which the people actively participate. This upheaval, with its emphasis on the joy of life, brings profound and lasting changes to human relationships, a recurrent theme in O’Casey’s work.

The older characters in the play have a distorted perception of reality. They see the vibrant transformation of the world around them as decline and fear change. Yet, despite their resistance, their physical senses betray them, and they involuntarily become participants in the revolution they seem to reject. While the corrupt journalists—the Blind and the Deaf—cannot grasp the transformative power of the revolution, the old men, despite their weaknesses, are ultimately touched by it.

The character of the Birdlike Lad embodies the union of human and nature and serves as a messenger connecting the local events of the play with a broader revolutionary context. He emphasizes that the uprising is not confined to one place but spreads universally, even reaching the highest power structures in the form of the bishops, who now themselves sing love songs. “Oh dear, what can the matter be”, referenced repeatedly in song, speech, and images of blue ribbons, receives a completely new ending at the drama’s conclusion. The song’s story is finished, the young love —both in the song and in ‘reality’—brings the longed-for blue hair ribbons from the market for his beloved, who then invites him into her home. The longing is fulfilled, becomes reality, on stage.

The play ends with the consolidation of the revolution. The ecstatic energy of the initial uprising gives way to a new order, expressed through the characters forming an organized, majestic dance. This transformation from chaos to order reflects the merging of discipline with the poetry of life, suggesting that the rebellion has established a new, harmonious social order.

Thus, Figuro in the Night portrays the revolution in O’Casey’s play as a powerful, transformative force that liberates suppressed human energies, revitalizes society, and reclaims a new Eden. Ultimately, the play offers a hopeful vision of human renewal and the possibility of a life-affirming social order.

On the 250th anniversary of his birthday, Jenny Farrell writes about Caspar David Friedrich, September 5, 1774 - May 7, 1840

The French Revolution sparked great hopes for the rise of the bourgeoisie, the abolition of feudal structures, and the establishment of a capitalist society. Napoleon gained power through military successes against reactionary forces and the restoration of stability after the fall of the Directory.

His leading role in state reforms – including the codification of civil rights in the Code Civil, educational and administrative reforms, and the creation of a stable economy – consolidated his absolute power, supported by the military and the bourgeoisie. He centralised power in his person, established an authoritarian regime, and crowned himself emperor in 1804.

Napoleon's wars of conquest in Europe served both territorial expansion and the spread of capitalist production relations. The occupied territories were often restructured and equipped with bourgeois reforms. Through the Continental Blockade and other economic measures, Napoleon sought to secure France's economic dominance in Europe and weaken competition, especially from Britain.

The events of 1806, including the defeats of the Prussian army at Jena and Auerstedt, the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, and the occupation of German territories by French troops, led to a strong anti-Napoleonic freedom movement in Germany.

Caspar David Friedrich was deeply affected by all these events, and national themes shaped his art. He depicted specifically German landscapes, such as Rügen, the Harz, the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, and the Giant Mountains, interspersed with national symbols like oaks, megalithic tombs, and Gothic ruins. His figures also wore traditional German costumes.

It was these national traits, which made sense in the context of the Napoleonic Wars, that were later instrumentalised in a different historical context for the purposes of German fascism. Friedrich's allegories of death and resurrection often express a patriotic character. Moreover, his work is imbued with poignant melancholy and solitude, reflecting the mood of the time.

For over forty years, Friedrich, born in Greifswald as the son of a soap boiler, lived and worked in Dresden, the center of early Romanticism, with prominent painters, poets, and composers, including E.T.A. Hoffmann, Kleist, and Weber, who express violence and horror in their art.

Art that's rooted in the upheavals of his time

Friedrich insisted that his works would and must always bear the imprint of his time. Growing resistance in the occupied territories culminated in the Wars of Liberation (War of the Sixth Coalition) with Napoleon's defeats in Russia (1812) and at the Battle of Leipzig (1813). The united forces of other European powers, including Britain, Russia, Prussia, and Austria, finally defeated him and restored the old order.

The restoration after the War of the Sixth Coalition, particularly after the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815), had profound effects on the population and freedom of expression in Germany. The restoration forces suppressed any form of liberal or national uprising. Draconian censorship ensured that only government-compliant content was published. Authors who expressed criticism could face publication bans or imprisonment. The authorities employed spies to monitor and persecute political dissidents, and unwanted political associations and assemblies were banned. This repression led to radicalisation and strengthened the opposition movements that culminated in the revolutions of 1848. The suppression of liberal and national ideas fostered national consciousness and the desire for a united and liberal Germany.

Friedrich's work was deeply rooted in the upheavals of his time and must be understood as a reaction to the Restoration after 1815. His support for national freedom movements now turned into an exposure of the reaction in Europe.

Winter gained central symbolic power. In art, winter is often a time of death. One of the most famous manifestations is Franz Schubert's "Winterreise" (1827), where winter and ice symbolise political repression. Furthermore, the ninth and final, innermost and most terrible circle of Dante's Hell is an ice lake, a frozen wasteland. Accompanying the encoded artworks that sought to expose the reaction, the escapism of Biedermeier emerged – the retreat, the flight into the private, domestic, and apolitical. The pressure on artists of the time to conform to this was great. But not everyone bowed to it.

The Sea of Ice

Friedrich's painting The Sea of Ice (1823-24, oil, Hamburger Kunsthalle) was created during this time of Restoration. The initial impression is dominated by a highly dramatic scene: huge, sharp-edged ice floes rising at pyramidal angles dominate the centre of the image, conveying a sense of mortal threat. The horizontal lines of the ice layers and the vertical breaks and peaks of the ice blocks create a dynamic element that heightens the drama of the scene.

The peak of the central ice formation draws the viewer’s eyes to this highest point, increasing the dramatic effect. The ice blocks seem to tilt and break in different directions. The repeating, broken shapes of the ice blocks create a visual rhythm that underscores the chaotic and threatening nature of the scene. Irregular and sharp-edged structures convey a sense of chaos and destruction.

The horizontal planes of the ice masses convey stability and suggest an endless expanse of the icy landscape. The low-set horizon line also emphasises the vastness of the sea of ice and enhances the feeling of isolation and infinity. The sky, dominated by ice blocks, reinforces the sense of oppressive power. The contrast between the calm, horizontal planes and the dynamic, vertical forms creates a visual tension that moves the viewer's eye back and forth, drawing them into the scene and creating an intense emotional experience.

The absence of people reinforces the feeling of loneliness and abandonment. An all but sunk ship, crushed by the masses of ice, symbolises failure and destruction. Weathered wood and the ravages of cold intensify the sense of abandonment and hopelessness. In art, the ship is frequently a metaphor for the world and human life. With its icy demise, all movement freezes, life ends futureless. Bearing Dante in mind, the world is heading for a hell of ice.

The floes in the foreground form a piled-up structure, repeated by similar ice formations in the middle and distant background. These steeply left-leaning slabs resemble deadly high mountain cliffs and suggest further sailing ships frozen into the ice, past victims of the eternal cold. The counter-movement of smaller right-leaning ice peaks enhances the impression of the relentless crushing of all life, supported by the huge, brown horizontal slabs in the foreground. Mentally extending the lines reaching left and right, they converge at the stern of the capsized ship – a dark point amidst the many white shades of the frozen sea.

Viewers observe the scene from the shore – the brown colour of the foreground floes and remnants of earth indicate this. However, the earth shows no signs of life, and thin trunks of dead trees protrude from the ice. There is no escape from this relentless, all-encompassing ice. Artist and observer each face the icy desert alone.

Modern viewers, who understand the artist's time and set parallels to their own, well understand his despair and are themselves emotionally moved.

Longing for a united Germany

With this work of art, Friedrich aligns himself with a tradition of seascapes. The marine and landscape paintings of Turner, Friedrich's English contemporary, also contain clear, albeit different, social commentaries. While Turner's gaze is forward-looking, Friedrich's seems at first glance to look backward. But through his reflection on a specifically German tradition, he expresses a longing for a united Germany, which could only achieve progress by overcoming aristocratic small-state structures.

This includes a return to the revolutionary efforts of those reformers of the 16th century who understood the Reformation not only as a religious but also as a political revolution, aiming for the abolition of princely power. Thus, in 1823, Friedrich painted Hutten's Grave, in which he commemorates not only Ulrich von Hutten but also other patriots whose names can be found on the sarcophagus.

After Friedrich's rapid rise during the Wars of Liberation, where he became known for his works aimed at a liberated German republic, he quickly fell out of favour with the political and cultural scene after 1815. When he turned against the princes, he was ostracised along with others with similar views. These rulers fought vehemently against any efforts towards national unity that could have endangered their power in the years following 1815. Instead of giving in to the pressure and turning to anti-democratic or unpolitical Biedermeier themes, Friedrich resisted the Metternich Restoration by continuing to portray shattered hopes.

Friedrich's critical stance made him so unpopular with the authorities that he did not receive the professorship for landscape painting at the Dresden Academy in 1824 during the new appointment because his influence on the youth was feared. Not only in the academic world but also in public consciousness, the artist was increasingly suppressed and could only survive financially thanks to the support of Russian art connoisseurs. His works, including six significant paintings in the Hermitage, found recognition there.

Friedrich experienced a brief moment of hope during the Dresden uprisings in 1830. But after their defeat, his paintings became even darker. When Friedrich died in Dresden in 1840, he was poor and largely forgotten until the early 20th century.

Friedrich's art not only reflects his progressive stance during a time when the struggle for a unified German nation was radical, challenging the entrenched feudal society, but also serves as a potent reminder of how art can be manipulated to serve different political agendas. While his vision of nationalism was forward-thinking, aimed at liberation and unity, it was tragically co-opted by the Nazis to fuel their fascist ideology.

Today, as extreme right-wing nationalism and white supremacism are once again on the rise, it is crucial to approach Friedrich's work with a nuanced understanding of its historical context. Only by recognising the specific circumstances that inspired his art can we prevent its misappropriation and fully appreciate his commentary on the on the hell-like ice age that was the European Restoration of the 19th century. Far from being a reactionary nationalist, he was aligned with the forces who laid the ground for the unsuccessful bourgeois revolution in 1848/49. 

James Baldwin, the important left-wing, Black author and activist, was born one hundred years ago in Harlem, New York, on 2 August 1924. Baldwin’s stepfather David, a Pentecostal preacher, was a factory worker, earning too little to provide for his family of nine children. His mother Berdis, a migrant from the South, worked in domestic service. The young James’ first encounter with police at the age of ten brought home to him the realities of racism. David’s preaching initially led the teenage Baldwin to become a young minister.

During his time at Public School 124 in Harlem (with its first Black principal, Gertrude Ayers), Baldwin’s potential was recognised by Orilla Miller, a white teacher and communist from the Midwest. Miller introduced him to literature and theatre, including A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and the landmark play Voodoo Macbeth, directed by Orson Welles with an all-Black cast. These experiences deepened Baldwin’s literary passion, broadened his cultural horizons and provided a secular alternative to his religious upbringing. The Harlem Renaissance also played a central role in shaping his artistic and intellectual outlook.

The Millers were supportive of the socialist side in the Spanish Civil War, took Baldwin to a May Day parade organised by the CPUSA, and significantly influenced Baldwin’s political education. Through them, Baldwin learned that racism could be opposed and solidarity could be built across racial lines.

Baldwin’s political consciousness was further shaped by his English teacher Abel Meeropol, a communist and staunch anti-racist, author of the anti-lynching song Strange Fruit. Meeropol’s adoption of the sons of executed communists Ethel and Julius Rosenberg added another layer to Baldwin’s awareness. Additionally, his encounter with artist Beauford Delaney introduced Baldwin to the secular tradition in Black music, which transformed his emotional experiences into artistic expression.

By 1941, Baldwin had lost faith in Christianity and rejected his father’s authority. After leaving school in 1942, he faced economic hardship and was unable to afford college. The wartime labour shortage meant he found work. He joined a writers’ workshop, taught by communist Mary Elting, aligning with the Communist International’s Popular Front strategy, and received a scholarship from the League of American Writers in January 1942, cementing his connection to left-wing politics. The 1943 Harlem riots and Baldwin’s experiences during this tumultuous period further fueled his radicalisation. He joined the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), navigated various left-wing camps and published poetry in the communist Daily Worker.

Seeking an alternative to oppressive US society, Baldwin was drawn to the communist movement, especially with its anti-racist stand and its influence on African Americans, considering the CPUSA a haven for young Black writers. Between 1920 and 1950, many Black intellectuals, including Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright, found a political and artistic home here, though some drifted away from it again.

After various jobs, Baldwin found employment closer to the publishing world, including a stint as messenger in the progressive newspaper PM. In 1944, Baldwin took a theatre class at the New School, sparked by the renaissance in African-American theatre. Baldwin believed literature should create an all-encompassing humanism, elevating individual suffering to a collective level, as reflected in his reading of Shakespeare and Gorky. In 1947, Baldwin published reviews of Gorky’s works, praising his expanded vision.

In 1946, Baldwin’s best friend, Eugene Worth, committed suicide, profoundly impacting Baldwin and later reflected in his novel Another Country (1962).

These formative experiences solidified Baldwin’s commitment to social justice and influenced his decision to move to Paris in November 1948. Seeking a more open environment to continue his radical work, Baldwin left the repressive atmosphere of the United States. In Paris, he found the freedom to explore his identity, including his queerness, and to articulate his revolutionary ideas, which would shape his prolific career as a writer and activist. The move solidified his commitment to writing and led to major works like Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953), Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Giovanni’s Room (1956). By the 1980s, he openly identified as gay and collaborated with Black feminists, critiquing both imperialism and white supremacist thinking, including in this context racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Baldwin’s debut novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain, draws on his upbringing in Harlem. Aged 24, he published an essay titled “The Harlem Ghetto”, criticising the conditions affecting African Americans. In this way, he became part of African-American protest literature, articulating the realities of oppression. The rise of Black Power and revolutionary groups made him more optimistic about the possibilities of revolution in the US.

A drive to change the world

Baldwin’s writing career encompassed bestselling novels, essays, plays, and articles. His major political works, such as The Fire Next Time (1963) and No Name in the Street (1972), were penned abroad, addressing international issues. His revolutionary ideas were fueled by a relentless critique of the present and a drive to change the world.

Living in Paris, he became aware of the struggles of North African refugees, leading him to see global struggles as interconnected. Baldwin’s awareness of Black internationalism addressed Western imperial power in the Middle East. He was a vocal supporter of Palestinian self-determination, viewing Israel as a proxy for Western imperialism and Palestinians as oppressed victims. The Black Lives Matter movement has revived Afro-Arab and Afro-Palestinian solidarity, a tradition Baldwin significantly influenced. In 2013, over 1,000 Black intellectuals signed the “Black for Palestine” statement after Michael Brown’s murder by police in Ferguson, Missouri, when Palestinians tweeted solidarity statements and tips for the demonstrators on how to deal with tear gas.

From his early encounter with communists and other progressive political activists, Baldwin knew that his experience was not limited to African Americans but was intrinsic to capitalism and imperialism. Baldwin expressed this understanding on many occasions, related it geopolitically to colonialism in Africa, to South Africa, and Palestine, for example, or here in a later, 1970 letter to the imprisoned Angela Davis:

White lives, for the forces which rule in this country, are no more sacred than Black ones, as many and many a student is discovering, as the white US-American corpses in Vietnam prove.

In September 1956, Baldwin attended the First Conference of Negro-African Writers and Artists at the Sorbonne, sponsored by the Negritude Movement, a literary, cultural, and political movement developed in the 1930s in response to French colonial rule and the dehumanising effects of colonialism. It sought to reclaim the value of Black culture and heritage, promoting a collective Black identity and solidarity across the African diaspora. This movement, led by figures like Frantz Fanon, Senghor, and Césaire, sought to unify the African diaspora’s cultural heritage, akin to the 1955 Bandung Conference.

The years 1957-62 were pivotal for Baldwin as he became an internationalist. His experiences with the civil rights movement and French colonialism’s brutality, especially during the Algerian war, reinforced his understanding of international racism and state terror. This period included significant travel, writing, and a deepened interest in Islam and anti-colonial struggles.

His increasing activism and affiliation with Black internationalist currents in the 1960s culminated in New Yorker editor William Shawn inviting Baldwin to write about Africa, alongside an invitation from Israel, setting Baldwin’s thought in new directions and leading to a book on Africa with Israel as a prologue.

Baldwin’s visit to Israel shifted him further away from a Western perspective towards anti-imperialist internationalism, perceiving this country as a pawn in the Middle East, created to serve Western imperialist interests. International events like the Vietnam War and Israel’s Six-Day War aligned Baldwin with SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and the Black Panthers, seeing these conflicts as expressions of US imperialism and racism.

Baldwin was pioneering in exposing US racism and drawing parallels with international struggles. His essay “What Price Freedom?” in the journal Freedomways, connected US racism to its imperialist actions abroad, critiquing the US idea of ‘freedom’ imposed by violence. Baldwin’s work increasingly highlighted the similarities between the treatment of African-Americans and colonial subjects.

By 1968, Baldwin had become closely affiliated with the Black Panther Party. He endorsed their community programmes and their stance against police violence, viewing them as a challenge to the repressive US state.

No Name in the Street articulates Baldwin’s anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist stance, opposing the Vietnam War, South African apartheid, and Israeli settler-colonialism. It expresses solidarity with liberation movements and projects a socialist future. His relationship with Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party underscored his commitment to long-term anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle.

Between 1968 and 1972, Baldwin spent much of his time outside the United States, initially in Turkey and France after traumatic events like the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. During this period, he ended his relationship with his lover Alain and, coupled with the 1971 Turkish military coup and his declining health, decided to permanently move to St. Paul-de-Vence in France, buying a home there.

In October 1973, following US support for Israel during the “October War” against Egypt and Syria, Baldwin made his strongest public criticism of Zionism and expressed support for Palestinian rights. He highlighted the creation of Israel as a means to control Arabs, condemning the Western powers for using Israel and Vietnam to enforce their interests.

The Reagan administration, with its harsh stance on issues like HIV/AIDS, intensified Baldwin’s despair and rage over the United States.  Baldwin received an honorary doctorate from the University of Massachusetts in 1978 and became a Distinguished Fellow there in 1983. He continued his work as a political journalist and author, producing his only poetry book and his final novel, Just Above My Head.

In his 1979 essay “Open Letter to the Born Again”, Baldwin condemned Western anti-Semitism and expressed solidarity with Palestinian self-determination, criticising the Zionist project and its colonial roots.

Towards the end of his life, Baldwin sought to redefine gender and racial identities. Diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in early 1987, Baldwin spent his remaining lifetime at his home in St. Paul-de-Vence, passing away aged 63 on December 1, 1987.

Spy thrillers about and accounts of East-West spying during the cold war abound, always written from a particular Western political standpoint. Autobiographies relating the stories of former “agents for peace” on the other hand are rare. Beatrice Altman-Schevitz’s The Shadow in the Shadow is the only such memoir to be published in English from a woman’s point of view, giving the perspective of a GDR spy.

The Schevitzes’ arrest on May 3, 1994 was the nightmare that unfolded for many of the courageous people on the ‘invisible front’ following the collapse of socialism in Europe and the Soviet Union. They, along with others, were exposed in the spring of 1994 in the course of the investigation into the “Rosenholz” files. They, who had always been so careful to protect their cover and their sources, were now betrayed.

Beatrice’s newly published autobiography tells the extraordinary story of these two left-wing US-Americans. Jeffrey, a graduate of the elite Princeton University, “had studied in Berkeley, California, between 1962 and 1969. He was an activist in the free speech movement and very active in the anti-Vietnam War movement in Berkeley and later at Washington University in St. Louis”.

Beatrice’s political awakening occurred in Buffalo and with the Attica Prison uprising in 1971 and the court case that followed it. “The injustice was too much for me to remain silent.”

In 1976, Jeffrey was offered a two-year teaching post at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin West and so they moved there from the US.   Soon they decided to find out more about what life looked like beyond the Wall. As Beatrice explained to me during our conversation for this review:

“I was not just curious about the GDR, I saw it as an experiment worthy of support. A socialist experiment, like Cuba was, like Chile had tried for and was destroyed. Sanctions like we see against Russia today are designed to ruin a country. From 1946 to 1990, the CIA was never going to allow this experiment to succeed and did so much to destroy it wherever people attempted to build socialism. Jeffrey and I felt the GDR had attained great accomplishments despite the capitalist system’s continued onslaught. So I was more than just curious in 1977. I wanted to be part of this and support it.”

Following meetings and long conversations with US and British ex-patriot contacts living in East Berlin, they were recruited into the GDR’s Intelligence Agency, trained in espionage and began their work. For just over twelve years, from 1977 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Beatrice and Jeff acquired and passed on sensitive information. With his distinguished academic background, Jeff found prestigious jobs at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Bonn and at the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Centre, where he was able to establish sources who had access to material of interest in Bonn and other industrial locations. These sources believed to the end that they were helping to supply details to the Washington-based consulting firm International Energy Associates Limited (IEAL). In this way, Jeff protected them also from the eventuality that he might be exposed.

The Schevitzes supplied a great deal of data, especially via their source “Caesar” with access to the Federal Chancellery. Of key interest to the GDR were the Western government’s position on nuclear energy, high-tech sanctions against the GDR, rearmament and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Also vital was knowing who were the supporters and opponents of NATO’s 1979 decision to station Cruise and Pershing II nuclear missiles in Germany.

A second source, from the Green Party, provided inside knowledge regarding the influence of the then young opposition party on security and peace policy. In relation to this work, the author told me:

 “Our task was to describe all the different shades of opinion in the Chancellor’s office and various ministries in Bonn, to write up all the diverse positions in the Bonn government between 1980 and 1990: security issues, the non-proliferation of nuclear fuel and weapons. Further puzzle pieces came from other agents. Rainer Rupp was of course in the NATO headquarters. We were just in Bonn.”

Nevertheless, as Der Spiegel reported in an extensive interview with the Schevitzes, Helmut Müller-Enbergs, secret service expert and political scientist at the Danish University of Odense, who worked intensively on the “Rosenholz files”, found a special Stasi file that contained an “eternal list of the best spies” compiled for the GDR’s external intelligence section, officially known as HVA Department I/1. It showed the “Schevitz couple occupied second place there.”

Beatrice herself was not only tasked with photographing documents, decoding radio information and acting as courier – she sought positions in workplaces that would also yield useful insights for the GDR: in the South African embassy in Bonn and later working as a social worker in a Karlsruhe US military base. The author writes informatively about both jobs and reveals the close ties the West German government had with the apartheid regime, as well as giving readers an insight into the daily lives and problems confronting the families of American GIs, including literacy issues and domestic violence.

Beatrice writes this story from her perspective as a woman. She tells readers about her childhood in Buffalo and her Jewish family background, and her parents’ shock that she would be going to Germany: “for my parents, the country was still Nazi Germany … they never wanted to stand on German soil, they would never visit me there. I could understand that.” The focus on her specifically female experience is never far from the heart of the narrative. She writes about pursuing her ambition to complete her academic degree with truly impressive determination. It is humbling to read how many obstacles Beatrice faced, how she put on hold her ambition to earn a degree in the interest of peace. The author also commends without reservations her treatment as a complete equal by the GDR intelligence officers. In the South African embassy, however, other rules applied: the white supremacists were also male supremacists.

Beatrice’s mother’s antipathy to Germany resurfaces when she eventually does visit and Bea takes her to see the former concentration camp site in Dachau, and when she visits to support Beatrice and Jeff during the trial period. We read:

“Then I told Judge Maier that my mother would be coming to Germany on May 10. This visit had been planned, booked and paid for since Christmas. I explained to him how afraid she was of Germany and the Germans because the horrors of the Nazis were still very much in her mind. She would come here anyway and I wanted to have this contact with her, especially now. Judge Maier was speechless.”

Other, more personal aspects of life naturally feed into the story – some stressful, at times traumatic incidences, as well as children, happiness, support, friendship and love. These complete the roundedness of the autobiography, and a sense of real people living real lives emerges. On a few occasions, Jeffrey contributes his experience of aspects of their shared life. This happens in particular towards the end of the memoir, following the couple’s exposure and his time in prison, as well as regarding his defence strategy for their trial – a strategy that saved them from long prison sentences.

Why did Beatrice decide to publish her memoirs? Her first motivation was that when she reached retirement age during the Covid-19 pandemic, she wanted to impart her life experience, which had been a complete secret to her family until 2020. She wished to explain on her own terms the reasons behind her and Jeffrey’s decision to work for the secret service of a socialist state. Above all, the couple strove to do everything in their power to help stop a third World War. As the book shows, they risked and sacrificed a great deal in pursuit of this goal.

A second important reason for writing her autobiography was that Beatrice hoped to show by example that everybody who wishes to live in peace and to help prevent war, must examine their own possibilities. What once meant espionage in her case, is now campaigning for peace by exposing the machinations of NATO and the US-led war machine. She and Jeff remain active in this cause and by telling their story, Beatrice hopes to inspire and encourage others to continue the struggle in whatever way is open to them.

The Shadow in the Shadow is available for purchase online.

Germany’s minister of state for culture, the senior Green politician Claudia Roth, one of the almost exclusively West German-born government officials, voiced her surprise at a recent literary event upon discovering that there were other books on East German (GDR) bookshelves than the ones she knew. This was a rare admission of sheer ignorance of the cultural background of one fifth of the German population – well over thirty years after ‘unification’.

The sum total of Roth’s knowledge of the arts in the socialist part of Germany is the Western knee-jerk response: ‘repression’. This view reveals fathomless ignorance, both of a highly cultured and educated public with thousands of outstanding, world-class writers, artists and musicians, and of the German and international humanist tradition from which they arose.

Instead, everything is done to extinguish any memory of this: literary prizes are awarded to writers who reinforce the Western hegemony of ideas, its sole claim to the interpretation of history.  Not only in Germany, but internationally too, novels about the ‘horrors of socialism’ tend to get more traction than books that present a more differentiated picture. The International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film, has not had a local, East German management for 20 years, with Ms. Roth controlling the coffers. Any attempt to grapple with the radical denial of achievements and well-lived lives is suppressed or ridiculed.

And so it is with Jenny Erpenbeck: including the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, which preceded the International Booker Prize, it is the sixth time this author has been nominated for the award. No other German writer has achieved this. While Erpenbeck is very well-known abroad, Der Spiegel has ignored her. She has never won the German Book Prize or the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. Indeed, Kairos did not even make it onto the longlist for the German Book Prize.

So the appreciation on the international stage of East German literature, written from an informed perspective, must be warmly welcomed. Not only did Katja Oskamp’s Marzahn Mon Amour win the 2023 Dublin Literary Award, Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos is now on the shortlist for the 2024 International Booker Prize. Indeed, Katja Hoyer’s Beyond the Wall has been received far more favourably internationally than in Germany.

To read Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel is an eye-opener for those who wish to find out more about life in East Germany (GDR) in the final years of its existence and beyond. Unprejudiced readers will discover a highly cultured society, a place where everybody has free access to education, training and a job. For readers who remember the GDR, the book includes deeper levels of meaning – a wealth of references to a dizzying array of fine artists who lived there or those who were  part of the antifascist tradition.

The novel spans the years 1986 to 1992, with the final section depicting the dissolution of the state, mass redundancies, plunges into unemployment, unaffordable rents and cultural hollowness. Erpenbeck knows what she is writing about: She was a young adult during the years the novel is set. Her paternal grandparents had been persecuted in Nazi Germany and lived in exile in the USSR, where her father was born. Both her grandparents were well-known authors in the GDR – her grandfather, Fritz Erpenbeck, was a publisher and wrote crime novels, and her grandmother Hedda Zinna addressed many themes, including the situation of women in the GDR. Erpenbeck’s father, John Erpenbeck, is a physicist and a writer. Her mother was an Arabist who lost her academic post with unification.

Jenny Erpenbeck builds her story of the final years of the GDR around the narrative of a relationship between a 19-year-old woman, Katharina, and a 53-year-old writer and radio broadcaster, Hans. The relationship soon develops into one of psychological control and masochistic overtones, making the young woman feel unworthy and dependent. Erpenbeck portrays her male protagonist Hans as a very well-read author who has had frequent affairs. In several respects, his childhood in Nazi Germany has cast shadows on his adulthood. This includes Hans’ need to blame and punish others for perceived ‘betrayal’, his latent violence, his need to feel superior and be controlling.

Katharina, on the other hand, only realizes late on that the relationship is destroying her, because she considers herself emancipated. Hans’ trajectory from a Hitler Youth to one who now unquestioningly follows a different flag is representative for his generation, while Katharina is more characteristic of her own age group, born into the GDR and naive to Hans’ manipulation.

Why does the author connect the story of this affair with the collapse of socialism? Erpenbeck herself explains in an interview that “Betrayal and lying are at the center of my work, as are the layers of truth”. When Hans in a fit of jealousy emotionally torments Katharina for having a fling with someone her own age while on work practice, she learns that if “I tell the truth, I get punished.” Erpenbeck explains:

Kairos is a slow process of how something meant as a kind of truth actually transforms into a relationship with lying at its centre. As it was in the political history of the GDR. Ideas were received enthusiastically in the beginning, a new start after fascist times. Slowly, a certain vocabulary was forbidden, a certain exchange of opinions not allowed. People started to deliver ready-made sentences.

However, she adds, “we are coming to a similar time now, because there are certain sentences that you are supposed to deliver and others sentences that you are not supposed to deliver anymore.” Erpenbeck does not turn a blind eye to the new reality of post-socialist Germany.

Aside from the relationship at the heart of the novel, Erpenbeck strives to capture not the spectacular or dramatic, but the everyday lives of people. Hans’ knowledge of early post-war cold-war history certainly adds to the deeper dimensions of history, reflecting times before Katharina was born. This includes, for example, the efforts made by the Soviet Union for a unified neutral Germany after the war:

“Adenauer sold the East for NATO membership.

What do you mean by “sold”?

The Russians, he tells her, were willing to allow free secret elections throughout Germany — there was only one condition: a unified Germany was not to join a military pact directed against the Soviet Union.

Aha, she says.

Which makes sense in view of twenty-seven million Soviet dead in the War. They even applied to join NATO.

Who did? The USSR?

The USSR. But of course that wasn’t approved. Anti-Communism was the name of the project all along — from Hitler to the Western Alliance to the Federal Republic.”

As the story progresses to the dissolution of the GDR and its annexation by West Germany, Erpenbeck incorporates detailed references and documents regarding the aspirations of many for socialism. These desires are integral to the intricate historical backdrop of the book:

“Socialism must find its own democratic form, but not lose itself. That’s what it says in a paper that Katharina’s mother and Ralph put their names to and showed her over their drinks. In its quest for a durable form of social organization, humanity needs alternatives to Western consumer society. Welfare must not be at the expense of poor countries.”

However, the swift emergence of capitalist, semi-colonialist reality soon dashes any hopes for a more democratic socialist system:

“Already the eastern districts have started to smell different, clean and nicely scented West Berliners are inspecting streets that are named for the working-class president Wilhelm Pieck, the Bulgarian Communist leader Dimitrov, the socialist prime minister Otto Grotewohl — all names that mean nothing to them. They will use the word “grey” to describe the section of the city that has no neon advertisements.”

(NB It is regrettable that the people mentioned here mean as little to the West German translator Michael Hofmann as they do to the West Berliners mentioned in this passage, resulting in incorrect translation. A cursory check in Wikipedia would have enlightened him, and even electronic translation software gets it right. I have therefore retranslated the excerpt above). 

In contrast to the flood of so-called memoirs of the East, often written by people who have no knowledge or memory of this epoch, Erpenbeck's narrative diverges from the prevalent Western discourse. Through her portrayal of ordinary lives, she poignantly illustrates the losses endured after 1990. There are no signs of dissatisfaction or social unhappiness on the part of the characters and their wider circles. When Katharina travels to Cologne for her aunt's 70th birthday, it is not a trip to paradise. Her aunt is no better off than before; she lives quite poorly in a basement flat. Money is very central, as are other Western values. Similarly, the characters' excursion to Moscow is depicted with depth and insight, reflecting Erpenbeck's nuanced approach.

In the book's concluding section, the atmosphere during the fall of the Berlin Wall is vividly recreated. In an interview with an East Berlin newspaper, Erpenbeck discusses her research into the momentous social upheaval of 1989/90 for the novel, highlighting discrepancies between historical facts and her own memories:

And it was only then that I realized how short the gap was between the fall of the Wall and the moment when it became clear that reunification was imminent. It was just eight weeks! From November to January. In my memory, the euphoria, the feeling of self-empowerment and the new beginning took up a huge amount of space. In reality, from January onwards, everyone had to make sure that they understood how the Federal Republic worked as quickly as possible. By then, the brief period of coming of age was already over.

About the wholesale redundancy of GDR employees she writes in Kairos, recreating the exact circumstances:

“Early in December 1991, Hans is dismissed, along with all the other 13,000 employees of the broadcasting services of a state that no longer exists. And because the waiting rooms and corridors of the Berlin labor exchange are too small to take the 3,000 who are suddenly out of work in the capital alone, the labour exchange sets up for three days in the great broadcasting hall of the East Berlin Broadcasting Service and gives a guest performance there.”

On the full-scale destruction of a literature, reminiscent of the Nazi book burning, she comments:

“Books Worth 240,000 Marks in the Trash: The Karl Marx bookstore on Wednesday cleared out its unsold stock. The manager says he needs warehouse space for new titles. Even quality literature had proved unsalable. For many tons of books, the trash heap is the final destination.”

Erpenbeck provides an insider’s perspective. Her characters are believable and lead fulfilling lives. East German readers appreciate Erpenbeck's portrayal of their lives and achievements, which resonates with their own experiences and preserves their dignity. Whether or not Kairos receives the International Booker Prize on 21 May, it is a book well worth reading.

Editor's Note: The judges clearly agreed with Jenny Farrell, as the book has won the 2024 International Booker Prize.

Duke Ellington, a prominent figure in music and cultural history, especially in jazz, died fifty years ago on May 24, 1974.

Edward Kennedy Ellington was born into a lower middle-class family in Washington on April 29, 1899. His mother was the daughter of a former slave. Both parents played the piano, so Ellington grew up in a musical household and began playing this instrument at the age of seven. Additionally, his parents instilled in their children the conviction that all people are equal, emphasizing that achievement and decency are the keys to progress and dignity.

Ellington's childhood was marked by pervasive racism, including the unrest of the ‘Red Summer’ of 1919, three months of bloody violence. As a Black man, Ellington also had to assert himself in a hostile and discriminatory industry. These early experiences of racism and discrimination naturally impacted on his music.

'Red Summer', 1919

The 1920s were a time of artistic and cultural flourishing for Black Americans, particularly in Harlem. This Harlem Renaissance emerged in an era of intense racist oppression and social inequality, as a response to the ongoing Jim Crow era and the Ku Klux Klan. The artists of the Harlem Renaissance addressed the issues facing the African American community through their work and promoted awareness of the need for social and economic justice. The movement was an attempt to break through systemic racism and promote alternative forms of identity and solidarity.

In 1923, Duke Ellington founded an ensemble with his childhood friend, drummer Sonny Greer, which would later become the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Over the years, the ensemble grew into a fully-fledged jazz orchestra, gaining high fame. Originally emerging as a form of African American folk music (blues, work songs, and spirituals), the term ‘jazz’ first appeared in the early years of the 20th century and was initially used in connection with music originating in the southern United States. Thus, Ellington made a relatively new, specifically Black musical genre his form of expression.

The jazz musicians who joined Ellington's orchestra under his leadership included some of the most talented musicians of the time, including saxophonist Johnny Hodges, trumpeter Bubber Miley, and clarinetist Barney Bigard. They performed in Harlem clubs and later in the legendary Cotton Club, when it only allowed Black artists and staff, but no Black audience.

The music was often orchestrated to evoke a jungle atmosphere, projecting this idea onto African American employees as exotic savages or plantation dwellers. Ellington's contribution to music during the Harlem Renaissance went far beyond mere ‘entertainment’ and undermined these stereotypes. His ability to merge various musical influences and create a unique sound paved the way for future generations of jazz musicians and solidified his legacy as one of the most important figures in American music history, showing the potential of this artistic expression to contribute to broader movements for social change and equality.

An early success was “Black and Tan Fantasy” (1927), which referred to the name of the clubs where a mixed audience of Black and White patrons was admitted. The content of this composition was socially critical: a Black dancer dances herself to death due to love and financial hardship. The music included elements of blues, jazz, sacred, and classical European music (Chopin's Funeral March). This remarkable composition was a direct challenge to the derogatory stereotypes associated with the then-called ‘jungle music.’ Its syncopated rhythms, improvisations, and the use of brass instruments played on this, elevating this sound to a very sophisticated level.

Ellington’s class consciousness, particularly regarding the Black working class, was often subtly woven into his compositions. Compositions such as “Harlem Air Shaft” (1940) are excellent examples of his ability to depict life in urban Black communities. In “Harlem Air Shaft” Ellington musically portrays the cramped living conditions and lively atmosphere of a Harlem apartment building. The title refers to the airshafts in Harlem apartment buildings, capturing the atmosphere of bustling streets, crowded tenements, and pulsating energy. Ellington uses music to paint a sound portrait of everyday life in this neighbourhood, incorporating elements of swing, blues, and improvisation to evoke the landmarks and sounds of Harlem.

As the civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1950s and advocated for racial equality through direct action, such as mass protests, boycotts, and sit-ins, Ellington was sometimes criticized for his more restrained approach. While Ellington’s earlier stand primarily consisted of using a specifically Black genre and imbuing this with artistry and dignity, as well as organizing benefit concerts, his approach evolved over time. By 1961, Ellington had included non-segregation clauses in his contracts and refused to perform before segregated audiences.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Ellington acted as a ‘jazz ambassador’ on behalf of the U.S. Department of State. During those years, he also traveled to socialist countries, including a five-week tour of the USSR in 1971. He reports about this in his autobiography Music is My Mistress (1973):

“Here no one ever moves from his or her seat until the entire concert and all the encores have been played. That impresses me very much. The enthusiasm is such, and the demand for encores so insistent, that some concerts run over four hours. Yet no one complains—not the audience, not the stagehands, and not even the cats in the band! The Russians come to hear our music, and for no other reason. Some are satisfied, and some are surprised how much they are satisfied.

They come prepared for our version of “Caravan,” which has long been a favorite in Russia, but not, I think, for our extended composition Harlem. After we have gone through the regular program, and are into the encores, and they are thinking they have heard all the band's stars, then I feature two of its new members, Johnny Coles on flügelhorn and Harold Minerve on alto saxophone, who never fail to excite them. I finish every performance by playing Billy Strayhorn’s “Lotus Blossom,” and that also is always graciously received. It seems to leave the audience suspended in euphoria, or beyond.”

Black, Brown and Beige

During the 1930s, the idea of a large-scale composition about the experience of racism in the United States emerged. The premiere of Black, Brown, and Beige: A Tone Parallel to the History of the American Negro took place in 1943 at Carnegie Hall as part of a benefit event for Russian War Relief. The three-movement composition addressed three specific epochs of Africans after their enslavement in North America: slavery, their involvement in wars, and the contemporary period, with a focus on “Harlem and all the little Harlems in the U.S.”

Ellington provided explanations for each movement, referring indirectly to the ongoing oppression. As Ellington writes in Music is My Mistress, the first section, "Black," addresses the connection between work songs and spirituals. A devout person, Ellington made this connection between sacred music and field music, with spirituals referring to a church that slaves had no access to.

“Black” begins with dramatic drums, suggesting the African roots of the slaves. Through alternating motifs, saxophone solos, and innovative instrumentation, Ellington gives voice to the workers of the past. The second half, “Come Sunday”, describes the movement inside and outside the church, with a shift from melancholy to exuberant joy.

In the second section, “Brown”, Ellington honours the contribution of Blacks in various liberation wars. The first of three dances, the “West Indian Dance”, celebrates the heroic deeds of the seven hundred free Haitians who came to the aid of the Americans during the Siege of Savannah (1779). It then moves on to the Civil War and finally to a lighter mood in “Emancipation Celebration”, referring to the Emancipation Proclamation issued by Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, during the American Civil War, which declared that all slaves in Confederate-controlled territory should be freed. The horns play a clave-like rhythm representing the West Indian influences in American music. Ellington creates a driving rhythmic ground for the saxophones, reminiscent of a train. A trumpet and trombone duet represents the hopeful mood of young people after emancipation, while lonely saxophones capture the melancholy of older generations uncertain of their future.

Thirdly, it deals with the Spanish-American War, with the return of decorated heroes who continued to be denied basic rights. This section naturally resonated with the contemporary audience regarding World War II. The “Double V” campaign expressed African American hopes that the Black soldiers’ fight against fascism would mean an end to discrimination in their own country.

The final “Beige” movement criticizes contemporary racism. As Ellington writes, the movement expresses a new dignity for African Americans. It begins with lively music that reflects a certain stereotypical view of Blacks and is interrupted by a waltz that shows that there were “more churches than cabarets” in Harlem and that Blacks were educated and cultivated.

Each movement of Black, Brown, and Beige uses Ellington's jazz idiom in characteristic ways to depict the harsh lives of Blacks who contributed significantly to building American society.

Works such as “Jump for Joy”, “Deep South Suite” and “Beggar's Holiday” are further examples of Ellington’s political engagement and efforts for social change through art. “Jump for Joy” was a Broadway-like show that spoke out against racism and advocated for an end to discrimination in the United States. “Deep South Suite” and “Beggar's Holiday” addressed the discrimination and suffering of African Americans, particularly in the Southern states. Ellington's music denounced social injustices and sought to bring about change even before the civil rights movement gained momentum.

His commitment to liberation was primarily evident in his music. Through his diverse musical repertoire, he demanded the same level of recognition and respect that was accorded to white composers. Ellington’s influence is immeasurable, not only on US music and culture but also on the global stage. He undoubtedly ranks among the great musicians of the twentieth century.

George Gordon Lord Byron was born in London on 22nd January 1788, and died 100 years ago, on 19th April, 1824. His father, an officer, died when the boy was three years old. His mother, of Scottish descent, then moved with him to Aberdeen. In 1794, he inherited the title Baron Byron on the death of his great uncle and was titled Lord Byron in 1798.

He attended Harrow and went on to study at Cambridge in 1805. Here he published his first volume of poetry, Hours of Idleness (1807) and his first satirical parody, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). After completing his studies, he travelled to Spain, Portugal, Greece and Turkey, a journey which he describes in the first two cantos of his early great verse epic Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) and which brought him overnight success.

Up until then, Walter Scott had been the most successful author of ‘exotic’ verse narratives. Now Byron shifted the setting of this type of tale from the Scottish past to the contemporary foreign East, and adopted a more subjective perspective than Scott. Scott had developed the historical novel through his experience of great historical upheaval, writing novels that were based on real historical conflicts and class interests – in contrast to costume dramas. Byron extended this to the to the ‘Orient’.

Following several scandalous affairs, Byron married a rich heiress in 1815. However, the marriage was unhappy, and Lady Byron obtained a separation, accusing Byron of cruelty, madness and an incestuous relationship with his half-sister. The scandal ruined his social and financial standing. He left England in April 1816, never to return.

The radicalism of the labourers

However, Byron did not only leave for private reasons. Despite personal arrogance and prejudices, the increasing misery and radicalism of the labourers in the countryside had not escaped his notice and had aroused his anger at the ruling classes, including the church and the urban bourgeoisie.

In 1812, when the Frame-Work Bill was being debated in the House of Lords, which provided for the death penalty for the destruction of power looms, Byron made his famous maiden speech in defence of the Luddites. He argued to the Lords:

These machines were to them an advantage, inasmuch as they superseded the necessity of employing a number of workmen, who were left in consequence to starve. By the adoption of one species of frame in particular, one man performed the work of many, and the superfluous labourers were thrown out of employment. Yet it is to be observed, that the work thus executed was inferior in quality, not marketable at home, and merely hurried over with a view to exportation.(…) In the foolishness of their hearts, they imagined that the maintenance and well doing of the industrious poor, were objects of greater consequence than the enrichment of a few individuals by any improvement in the implements of trade which threw the workmen out of employment, and rendered the labourer unworthy of his hire.

He warned:

I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey; but never, under the most despotic of infidel governments, did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return, in the very heart of a Christian country.

Byron, like Shelley and Keats, became the victim of an aggressive smear campaign by state and church, which exercised enormous power over public opinion. Yet it was only after he had left Britain that Byron became increasingly politicized in the fight against oppression in England as well as on the European mainland. In this respect he was also influenced by Shelley, with whom he remained in close contact for the rest of both their lives.

The impression made on Byron by Italian and Greek revolutionaries and his personal experiences in the wars of the suffering and fighting by the people led to a new, socially critical awareness. This was increasingly reflected in his poetry and motivated him to become personally involved in the Greek freedom struggle. 

The reception of Byron’s work by the establishment tends to focus on personal aspects, often reducing his life and poetry to women, sex, “unnaturalness” and money, disregarding his political ideas. So how are his political convictions expressed in his work?

The Enlightenment poet Alexander Pope was much admired by Byron. Pope’s work reflects the rise of capitalism in Britain. He portrays the reality of eighteenth-century England as the best of all possible worlds. However, the revolutions of the late eighteenth century, the industrial revolution and its impact on the lives of working people had heralded a new time. This brought with it, in the eyes of the English bourgeoisie, the danger that their own people might model themselves on those of France.

The alienation of the capitalist world

So Pope’s projection of a seemingly eternal, unchanging ground was torn from under their feet. Suddenly change was possible and was feared by the ruling class. It joined forces with the state church and together they began an unprecedented witch-hunt of those pushing for change. This campaign against all who were considered radical unleashed religious rhetoric, which is why the poet laureate Robert Southey accused Byron and Shelley of forming an “incest league” and a “Satanic school”. These intimidatory campaigns targeted the publishers to such an extent that they feared for their livelihood and freedom. So, Byron could no longer write like Pope. Society had changed fundamentally.

Byron’s first great success, the first two cantos of Childe Harold, initially reflected the prevailing European mood of world-weariness, a feeling of powerlessness in a hostile world, linked to motifs of loneliness and isolation. Other poems published in 1812 express a clearer political stance, for example An Ode to the Framers of the Frame Bill (published 2nd March 1812), in which Byron’s sympathy for the weavers is expressed, although he still believes that the parliamentary system can eliminate the grievances caused by individuals.

However, in the later cantos this loneliness turns into a growing awareness of the alienation of the capitalist world. Melancholy and world-weariness can have their roots in historical and social ills. In addition, the aristocratic outlaw, Byron’s lonely, proud hero, takes a stand against oppression in countries struggling for national independence.

This changed with Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo (1815). After that, Byron advocated radical political change more clearly. It was now that the establishment turned vociferously against him, and in 1816, Byron separated from his wife and young daughter, and went into exile.

Some of the poetry written at this time still contains moments of gloom and escapism, but it also increasingly calls for resistance against the reactionary regimes in Europe. In the third canto of Childe Harold, the speaker searches more intensely for ways out of alienation, out of an oppressive existence. An escape into poetry or nature is ultimately rejected. In his poem Prometheus (1816), Byron emphasises the need to resist tyranny and in the fourth canto, stanza 98, of Childe Harold he writes:

Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying,
Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind;
Thy trumpet voice, though broken now and dying,
The loudest still the Tempest leaves behind;
Thy tree hath lost its blossoms, and the rind,
Chopped by the axe, looks rough and little worth,
But the sap lasts,—and still the seed we find
Sown deep, even in the bosom of the North;
So shall a better spring less bitter fruit bring forth.

Byron’s close collaboration with Shelley in exile in Italy and his personal experience of the liberation movement in Italy and Greece led to a better understanding of society and the revolutionary struggle of the people. In these countries struggling for national independence, including Poland, the Byronic hero was often seen as representing their quest for freedom and Byron became very well-known and celebrated.

Between 1816 and his death in 1824, he composed a large number of great satirical dramatic poems, including Manfred (1817), the unfinished Don Juan, Cantos III and IV of Childe Harold, Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice (1821), The Age of Bronze (1823) and The Deformed Transformed (1824).

The final victory of the allied powers in 1815 led to a Holy Alliance under the rule of Catholic Austria, Orthodox Russia and Protestant Prussia, whose declaration of principles was explicitly written in the name of the holy and indivisible Trinity and the divine Saviour. Dissent, non-Christian religions and natural religion were equally condemned, and the reactionary forces persecuted anything that smelled of French thought. In the context of English Romanticism, Coleridge's turning away from his earlier radical positions logically also included turning away from pantheism.

In Don Juan, Byron postulates that poetry can replace Christianity with new ways of understanding the world; John Keats did at the same time in Ode to Psyche, for example. Such a challenge was be understood as blasphemy of colossal proportions. A parallel to this is Goethe's Walpurgisnacht in his verse drama Faust, part I. Christianity is eliminated, and art is given central importance.

Postulating paganism as an alternative to the Christian religion was also deemed subversive. An inseparable part of this radical questioning of the existing Holy Alliance is the sensuality and this-worldliness inherent in ancient mythology. Sensuality is neither suppressed, spurned nor relegated to an afterlife.

Arising from his own experience of the national liberation movement in Italy, Byron’s point of view has clearly matured in Marino Faliero (1820). While the isolated, brooding hero was still at the centre of Manfred, now a repressive power opposes the people. As the Doge Marino Faliero joins the people in their struggle, Byron plays out his own conflict here with regard to alliances. The fact that he considers alliances at all and moves away from an individual struggle is a significant change. From the outsider position of Manfred, Byron now moves in a direction in which the alliance is conceived as a struggle against his own class; the strength of the movement lies in the alliance:

Should one survive,
He would be dangerous as the whole; it is not
Their number, be it tens or thousands, but
The spirit of this Aristocracy
Which must be rooted out; and if there were
A single shoot of the old tree in life,
'Twould fasten in the soil, and spring again
To gloomy verdure and to bitter fruit.
Bertram, we must be firm!

The character of Israel Bertuccio has the most developed political awareness. He involves Marino Faliero in the conspiracy, plans and leads its course. The rebel Bertuccio comes from the people and embodies their strengths. He fights selflessly for the freedom of Venice and its people. Byron has come to recognise that the leaders of such a liberation movement can, perhaps even must, come from the people. It is Faliero who joins the people, recognises their leadership role, and not the other way round.

In his new cantos of Don Juan Byron’s stories gain social significance, the dialectical relationship between the individual hero and the historical process emerge, and growing trust in the actions of the masses is felt:

50
But never mind;—‘God save the king and kings!
For if he don’t, I doubt if men will longer—
I think I hear a little bird, who sings
The people by and by will be the stronger:
(…)f,—and the mob
At last fall sick of imitating Job.

51
At first it grumbles, then it swears, and then,
Like David, flings smooth pebbles ’gainst a giant;
At last it takes to weapons such as men
Snatch when despair makes human hearts less pliant.
Then comes ‘the tug of war;’—’twill come again,
I rather doubt; and I would fain say ‘fie on ’t,’
If I had not perceived that revolution
Alone can save the earth from hell’s pollution.

The religion of rent, rent and more rent

For all that, Byron ultimately leaves private property – the basis of capital – untouched. He sees liberal state reform as the way to improve society and create more humane living conditions for the population. However, in one of his last poems, The Age of Bronze (1823), it is expressed that the greed for profit of the large landowners played a devastating role in politics and especially in the Napoleonic Wars:

Behold these inglorious Cincinnati swarm,
Peasants of war, dictators of the court;
Their ploughshare was the sword in the hands of hirelings,
Their fields fertilized with the blood of other lands;
Safe in their barns, these Sabine farmers sent
Their brothers to battle - why, for rent!
Year after year they voted for cent. after cent.
Blood, sweat and tears devoured millions - why? - For the rent!
They roared, they dined, they drank, they swore
To die for England - then why live? - For the rent!
Peace has made a general malcontent
Of these honoured patriots; the war was torn!
Their love of country, millions, all misspent,
How to reconcile? By reconciling rent!
And will they not repay the borrowed treasures?
No: down with everything, and up with the rent!
Their happiness, their unhappiness, their health, their wealth, their joy or dissatisfaction,
Being, purpose, goal, religion - rent - rent - rent!

In January 1824, Byron travelled to Greece, where he planned to take part in the struggle for liberation from the Ottoman Empire. He died of a “fever” in Missolonghi on 19th April before this could happen. Nevertheless, he became a national hero in Greece, which he still is to this day. His name – pronounced Veeron in Greek – is a popular name for boys; even an entire district of Athens (Vyronas, Βύρωνας, older: Vyron Βύρων) is named after him.

Since the Second World War, authors have regularly conceived of plots set around a cataclysmic event that cuts off people or places from the rest of the world. Some examples include Marlen Haushofer’s 1963 novel The Wall, José Saramago’s 1995 Blindness, and The Road, 2006, by Cormac McCarthy.

For many of us, the pandemic was the first time we seriously considered global disaster – the possible collapse of existing society – as a real possibility. It is hardly surprising that authors too continued to imagine where such sudden catastrophes might lead to. First published in Portuguese in 2020, but finished on 30 November 2019, Agualusa’s novel The Living and the Rest not only opens with a disquieting calamity, but uncannily anticipates the almost apocalyptic developments that have occurred since then.

A catastrophic weather event has hit not the mainland of Mozambique, possibly as a reaction to a cataclysmic bomb attack on Jerusalem by anti-Zionist Jews:

The prospect of a nuclear war, however, had given people a wake-up call. Huge spontaneous demonstrations happened in all the big cities of the world, from New York to Moscow, via Delhi and Beijing, demanding the complete dismantling of the different nuclear arsenals.

However, this news is not immediately revealed. Readers follow the lives and concerns of the protagonists on Ilha de Moçambique, who are mainly African writers, gathered there for a literary festival. Bar an ominous power outage and loss of the internet, the island does not seem too badly affected. There are, however, signs in nature, that the locals perceive: the depletion of fish in the Indian Ocean and the absence of stars in the night sky. All is not well, and this realization slowly trickles through to the assembled authors.

What makes this book an interesting read, in addition to the disaster that happens, is that we have precious few novels from Africa. Its author, José Eduardo Agualusa, is an Angolan journalist and writer of Portuguese and Brazilian descent, who resides on the Ilha de Moçambique. Agualusa, a prolific writer, was also the 2017 winner of the prestigious Dublin Literary Award for his novel A General Theory of Oblivion. Agualusa sets his novels in Angola and other places in Africa, writing from an informed perspective on Africa and African literature.

In one of the many discussions around literature at the literary event central to The Living and the Rest, we read:

While it’s typical colonial literature, with a view of the continent that’s full of prejudices, the truth is that the author does make an effort to give the Africans a voice.

For non-African readers, the exposure Agualusa gives to African voices is an enrichment. His cast hails mainly from Angola, Nigeria, Mozambique, with several of them from multinational backgrounds. They discuss literature, imagination, and the relationship between fiction and reality. Mixed into all of this are the local legends of Ilha de Moçambique.

The novel’s construction is intriguing. Fiction and reality, protagonists and authors begin to merge, and trying to work it all out is a challenge with which Agualusa playfully presents the reader. In this regard, some readers may well find that the characters in the novel are less fully developed and convincing, less “real” than expected.

Increasingly, it becomes clear that this novel is not to be taken at face value. Events occur that seem incredible. Thus, for example, the baby born to Moira and David is born in the hospital that despite earlier assertions, is suddenly no longer derelict – it is quickly and inexplicably transformed. The present and past become fused through dead people coming alive. Other uncanny figures appear in the action, who turn out to be characters from the gathered authors’ books. Close to the end, David burns the notebook in which he has been composing a new novel: it ends exactly as the novel we are reading. And yet, there is also the unsettling anticipation, in a work of fiction, of both natural and political catastrophes that are about to happen. This once more underlines the ability of art to imagine a reality that is not yet an actual fact, but is a strong possibility in the outside world.

Agualusa has thus written fiction about the writing of fiction, creating an imagined reality, while subtly taking away the “fourth wall”. At the end of the day, he is asking readers to consider the power of the imagination, to question their expectations of novels, their perhaps over-readiness to suspend disbelief.

His technique is loosely based on Brecht’s “distancing”, the attempt to encourage the audience to think about what is being presented, by making them aware that they are being presented with something, rather than fully and without distance, identifying with the characters. But it is unlike Brecht in that the people and events readers are presented with have no strong political grounding in terms of the plot.

The Living and the Rest differs from some of Agualusa’s other work. The cataclysmic events in the outside world only touch on the novel’s figures and events in a mild, peripheral way. But of course, it is perfectly legitimate to explore different themes. Here, the author is mainly concerned with the nature of fiction and he makes clear that the book, its protagonists and its incidents, are fiction, and all the that this implies. However, what may have seemed excessive in 2019, and only touches on the novel from the outside, has certainly come closer to reality than may have seemed ‘reasonable’ at the time of composition.

From its outset, International Women's Day was characterized by the fight for peace, against militarism and war. At the Second International Conference of Socialist Women at Copenhagen in 1910, resolutions concerning the “maintenance of peace” and “to combat internationally militarism and secure peace” were tabled in response to the growing threat of war.

Artists also addressed the issue of war – among them the outstanding German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945), celebrated for her versatility as a sculptor, graphic artist, and her remarkable woodcuts. Her work reflects a profound social and political awareness, capturing human emotions and suffering, particularly in the context of war and social injustices, with poignant resonance.

Kollwitz, who lived through both world wars and lost her son in the first days of the first world war and her grandson in the second, created the woodcut cycle War in 1921-1922. Seven plates focus on central aspects of war: The Victim, The Volunteers, The Parents, The Widow, The Widow II, The Mothers, and The People. Here we will look at the plate The Parents.

Lacking the strength to stand, two kneeling, inseparable figures are leaning into and over each other in their darkest hour, grieving over the death of their child. The woman burrows deep into the crook of her husband’s arm, seeking support in him. Her face is not visible. He leans protectively over her and holds her sideways with his arm and hand. With his own head pulled between his shoulders, he simultaneously leans on her and covers his own face in desperation with his large right hand.

Together, the devastated couple form a cone shape, an extreme shrinking into the most condensed form. The black colour emphasizes their inexpressible pain, while the treatment of the wood creates contrasts – such as the horizontal lines of the man providing support with the more bent lines of the mother's garments, whose back is the most heavily pounded part of the work. The dramatic contrast between the dark, solid shape and the light-coloured background also heightens the effect.

A key aspect of the composition is that the viewer does not see the faces. The strong emotional impact emerges from the body language of the couple, which have all but merged into one. Their despair is deepened by the fact that it is not directed outwards, but very privately inwards. Viewers witness it, but from the outside. Our humanity is challenged in the face of such pain, and looking at this work we are moved to the core.

There is a certain similarity in composition in the painting by the young Palestinian artist Malak Mattar, born in Gaza in 1999. In this painting We Have in This Earth What Makes Life Worth Living, a mother wraps her arms protectively around her daughter, completely framing her face and upper body, creating a sense of profound security. She keeps her eyes closed and seems to be dreaming of peace: the sleeves of her blouse are decorated with white doves and colourful flowers.

The child’s serious brown eyes are open and form a contrast to the mother, as does her dress, which differs slightly in colour and shows motifs of olive branches with their elongated green leaves and small fruit. In addition to the fact that olive trees are strongly associated with Palestine, the olive branch has been a symbol of peace since ancient Greece. Picasso's dove also carries an olive branch in its beak. This picture contains both symbols, united in the longing for peace, and the composition is framed by a wonderfully peaceful, Mediterranean blue sky. The work expresses hope rather than despair, speaks of the deepest love between mother and child and thus affects the viewer emotionally.

Mattar processes her experience of war and counteracts it by using strong colours and conveying confidence. She has already experienced five wars in her life and says about the trauma of war: 

It’s not something that can be let go of, shaken off; it seeps into you and becomes a part of you. How can you process something that has not ended? People don’t survive war, it affects your mental health.

The power emanating from the painting conveys the sense that the artist will continue to advocate for peace and justice in her homeland.

It is important to distinguish between wars of oppression and liberation wars, between imperialist invasion and resistance to it. Anti-imperialist wars create a different consciousness among the population.

In early 1942, the artist Sofia Sergeyevna Uranova (1910-1988) was drafted and remained in her division until the end of the war, advancing with it to Germany. For her military valour, Uranova was awarded the Order of the Red Star as well as several other war medals.

She experienced shelling, bombing, suffering and the death of friends. This everyday experience for her became the leitmotif of her art. Uranowa left behind a unique artistic legacy: her paintings involve people who are certain of their humanity in the face of an inhuman enemy, and confident of their ultimate triumph.

In this 1944 pencil drawing of a field hospital Nurse on Duty  the nurse, in the midst of the wounded, turns her tired gaze towards the viewer. For the moment, the patients are cared for. But all those depicted here will continue to fight, they are by no means discouraged, but are gathering new strength.

The memory of the Great Patriotic War is still alive in Russia and the former Soviet republics, and people still identify with their victory over German fascism.

The depictions by Vietnamese artists of their heroic army of liberation radiate a similar pride. Here, too, women fought alongside men for their liberation, as Trịnh Kim Vinh (b.1932), depicted in her lithograph Operation through the Jungle (1973). Trịnh received awards for her role in the resistance and for her contribution to the art of Vietnam. From 1964 to 1969, she studied art in Hanoi, focusing on women involved in the war effort. She completed postgraduate studies in lithography at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, and played a leading role at the Hanoi Art Academy for decades.

In her lithograph Operation through the Jungle, Trịnh shows six fighters at night in the dense jungle, with others following from the thicket. The men carry heavy weapons, a woman in the foreground is characterized by her medical bag, another walks behind her. Viewers sense friendship and confidence.

Wars often manifest themselves as sanctions and famine caused by the aggressor. The Irish people suffered such a holocaust in the mid-nineteenth century, when over a million people in Ireland starved to death while food was being exported from Ireland to England. This genocide was, and remains, a national trauma.

One hundred years later, in 1946, the Irish artist Lilian Lucy Davidson painted Gorta – the Irish word for 'hunger', today An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger) is the term for the famine. It was a colonial-style 'ethnic cleansing' that continued to Leningrad in the mid-twentieth century, and to Gaza today.

Davidson paints the burial of an infant in a style reminiscent of Kollwitz (e.g. the sheet Need from the cycle A Weavers’ Revolt, 1893/94). The ragged, skeletal figures appear ghostly, close to starvation. Two women and a man are depicted. The woman holding the wrapped-up baby, probably the mother or grandmother, looks down. The diagonal of her gaze goes over the child towards the spade which the father is using to dig the tiny grave. Only the little feet emerge from the cloth.

The woman on the other side of the man faces the viewer with her eyes closed – as if she were blind. It is possible that she is the mother, perhaps out of her senses from hunger and despair. It is difficult to tell the age of the three adults, they have suffered so much. The composition is triangular, with the man's head at the highest point in the centre.

He looks directly and unforgivingly at the viewer. Despite his great emaciation, he radiates strength, which runs diagonally from his raised elbow to the tip of his spade. The spade can quickly become a weapon. He will bury his child, but he will not forget anything, and he will take revenge. As in Kollwitz’s sheet Need (1893/94) or in van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters (1885), the wretched are in darkness. Davidson mainly uses brown earth tones and dark blue. However, the sky directly behind the figures remains bright and conveys a certain glimmer of hope.

What can art do? By engaging with these works of art, we as viewers relate what is depicted to our own experience. We feel a sense of common humanity, of compassion and solidarity, fused with anger and the will to change the world.