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LISI NIESNER / REUTERS
If you go to the Documenta in Kassel in the next hundred days, you can get to know artists from all over the world there, action film directors from Uganda, queer screen printers from Argentina, Spaniards who invented a cheese currency.
However, the exhibition organizers seem to have forgotten one country, an Indonesian collective called Ruangrupa.
Shortly before the opening, it was not possible to find out which artists from Israel were present at the Documenta.
Perhaps there are no artists in Israel.
Or is the reason something else?
Israel is "the apartheid regime of our time."
"We are calling on governments to end trade, business and cultural relations." This is what it says in a pamphlet from last year that was signed by at least two members of the Documenta's artistic directors.
A call for a boycott that sounds familiar: Do not buy from Jews.
Unfortunately, you have to say it so clearly: Germany's most important art show, funded by the federal government, opened by the Federal President and the Minister of State for Culture, paid for with taxpayers' money, is helped to shape by people who are hostile to the only democracy in the Middle East.
They openly sympathize with the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement, some of which questions Israel's right to exist.
Three years ago, the Bundestag passed a resolution by a large majority that classified the methods of the BDS scene as anti-Semitic.
For example, Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters, who claimed that Israeli experts teach US police techniques to kill black people.
However, key figures in German cultural policy are apparently of the opinion that the BDS movement is not that bad.
Green politician Claudia Roth, who is now the federal government's representative for Documenta, did not agree to the decision in the Bundestag at the time.
Hortensia Völckers, artistic director of the Federal Cultural Foundation, clearly criticized the decision.
Roth and Völckers argue that artistic freedom should also apply to enemies of Israel.
As if it's not the BDS people who want to censor away an entire people.
The Federal Court of Justice ruled this week on a sandstone relief from the 13th century, the »Judensau« at the town church in Wittenberg, a pig that two people with pointed hats are suckling.
I had to think of Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, who at concerts would raise a rubber pig with a Star of David, a modern-day Jew pig.
How similar are the pictures?
According to the verdict, the Judensau von Wittenberg can stay because the municipality has put up a sign that turns the shame into a memorial.
I'm curious to see whether explanatory panels will have to be discussed in Kassel in the near future.