“You know, Diana, we are in Germany. We can’t use words like genocide or apartheid. We don’t know who will be in the audience, and I want to protect you. If an extreme right person interrupts, I’ll have to interfere and control the conversation. I am totally with you, I understand you, but you know the history here, the culture of memory. Someone might be offended, or not understand you.”

With these words, a German scholar, well established and working in a reputable institute, tried to convince me to choose my words.

It was October 2024, one year into Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Lebanon was also under attack.

And I had just realized that the panel I was invited to, addressing Beirut’s history, would talk about the city without addressing the war Israel was waging against it. So I told him it made no sense for me to speak only about history or music while ignoring the ongoing destruction, erasure, and genocide in Palestine and Lebanon.

He then invited me for a coffee to “discuss” my intervention.

The panel was meant to celebrate Beirut as a city always on the edge, a city that loses itself year after year. The city of intellectuals and culture, the city of cafés and books. A city worth mourning, but only in its metaphors.

Not the suburbs. Not the South. Not the Bekaa. Not that Lebanon.

Not the people whose histories disturb. Their ways of mourning, their rituals of grief, their resistance, are not worthy of their attention, nor part of this story. Maybe they are too mournful, too religious, not refined enough for their taste, for this imagined Beirut, cleaned, curated and made to fit a certain language.

So of course, better to leave aside the ongoing destruction by Israel, the ethnic cleansing, the dehumanization of an entire community. The stories of entire villages in the south being erased. The noise of the histories and memories I would bring into the conversation.

On that same day, a rocket hit Ras el-Nabaa, less than 200 meters from my parents’ home, where my aunts and their families were staying. Just meters away, seconds away… yet a million lifetimes away from me. Bombs, erasure, families gone, memories shattered.

The silence goes on, relentless.

And yet, here I was, sitting there, safe in Berlin, listening to him asking me to watch my words. To be careful with my language, not to disturb the fragility of German history.

He kept reassuring me that he would “protect” me, in case some “extreme right wing” guy, the usual monster everyone fears, would interrupt the panel. Because my words would offend him. Would offend them.

Our words scare them. Our history still unsettles them.

But for him, there was no problem using this fear. No problem disciplining me through his own imagined violence. His history, his memory, was something I was expected to accept. To carry.

***

Since October 7, I have heard so many European scholars, people who built their careers on our region, tell me quietly, in private, that they are “with Palestine”, or that they are ashamed of their government.

Quietly. Always so quietly.

But when it comes to speaking publicly, to standing against what is happening in their own institutions, their silence is so loud. They speak about freedom of expression. They love that phrase. But when it comes to Israel, or to questioning German memory and the structural racism it created in their institutions, suddenly it disappears.

Since I became German, some even laugh about it. They come to me, joking, almost hysterically, creepily: “Now you are part of it. Our German guilt. Our memory.”

They laugh and laugh. And my world turns upside down. They laugh while my memories shatter, piece by piece. They laugh while everything around me loses meaning. They laugh while I live this constant dissonance. Here, in Berlin, everything is calm, yet so disturbing. There, everything is collapsing, yet it makes so much sense.

They laugh and laugh, in silence, living their everyday lives, convinced they are safe in their own small, individual worlds. As if safety was natural. As if it was not built on distance. On silence. On what is not said.

***

It is 9am. A peaceful, sunny day in Berlin. March 2026.

I am sitting in the office. I hear a sound.

Drones.

I feel it in my body. I move in my chair, and I look around. Does anyone else hear it? No one reacts. I look again. I am in Berlin.

I have told myself, with a lot of guilt, that the sound of drones is something new to me. That I wasn’t used to it, nor internalized it. Not yet. Not like my family and friends there. They had become hunted by that sound. I kept telling myself this was not my trauma.

But my body tells me otherwise.

It reminds me that it has already absorbed this fear, the fear of something hunting us from above. It didn’t forget the shiver it creates. Fear travels with us. It does not stay there, nor respect borders. It sits in the body, quiet sometimes, then suddenly very loud.

My body has carried this for years. The fear of planes haunting the sky. We used to call it umm kāmel. It watched us. Today they call it zanāni. Now it hunts, speaks, erases you like a bug.

My heart starts beating fast. I look outside. I am still in Berlin. It’s just the neighbor cutting the grass in this nice, fancy and quiet neighborhood. But in my body, it is a drone. Following me here. Into this calm, safe life.

I ask my colleague: do you feel something?

She says yes.

For a second, I think maybe she feels it too. Maybe she understands something of this. Maybe I am not that hunted.

Then she says: yes, this weather… this long winter in Berlin. It’s so depressing.

Yes, I say. The winter.

***

It always comes back to the same moment. The same questions. The same hunted memories.

February 2024. Sitting at a table with German scholars. More than 20,000 people already killed in Gaza.

One of them, a specialist of the region, was speaking loudly, almost proudly. He was talking about the Israeli war on Gaza, its repercussions in Europe, and the pro-Israel stance of universities. He criticized those who expected more from German scholars.

Then I said: “But German scholars are not really fighting back, nor willing to take a clear stand. Maybe this is the moment to give something back to the places you build your carriers on. Even a little.”

Something changed.

His eyes turned red, his face tightened. He looked straight at me and asked me:

“But do you condemn Hamas?”

The post “Now You Are Part of It. Our German Guilt. Our Memory” appeared first on Untold.

***

It is a cold, rainy day, and I am hurrying over to a bus station next to the university campus where I teach to reach Berlin’s Central Train Station on time. Luckily, the bus station is close by, and after two minutes of walking, I arrive. Suddenly, a vehicle stops abruptly in front of the station.

It appears as if the van is out of fuel; it is not the city bus, but a private cleaning company service van. A man steps out in a hurry. It is unusual for a vehicle to park at a bus stop. Its unusualness and unexpectedness caught those waiting for the bus off guard, including me. The driver sharply diagnoses the station’s glass panes, turns his head up towards the time screen, and then adjusts his neck and head posture to check the ceiling as if he is looking for someone or something specific dangling from it.

It turns out that he is looking for pro-Palestinian stickers and posters. The unexpected action made me wonder why someone would want to make sure to remove Palestinian posters and erase their traces.

Graffiti writing and stickering as a game of (in)visibility

Authorities’ removing graffiti, stickers and other related forms of self- and collective expression is no exception in street art politics. It is a game, as graffiti writers and muralists describe it, where what is written, pasted or stencilled on the wall is ephemeral. If not the authorities, then ‘ordinary people’ would tear their opponents’ stickers off or cover their graffiti writings by spraying or splashing paint or stickering over them, crossing them out, adding a word or a symbol to alter the meaning to their favour.

For instance, many Israel supporters add “from Hamas” to “Free Palestine” [Fig. 3], or draw a ‘triangle’ on top of an already painted ‘flipped triangle’ to form the Star of David instead of Hamas’ inverted red triangle (IRT) icon.

Palestine supporters might also put a stickered watermelon over the word “Fuck”, leaving only “Hamas,” or merging the Star of David into the Swastika to create a parallel between Zionism and Nazism – a design of the Lebanese typographer Pascal Zoghbi.

Zoghbi’s design is widely seen in Germany through the murals of Musa La Rage . This process of removal, covering, editing, and commenting on each other—especially on the Palestinian side, whose voice is contested in Germany—reflects broader issues of visibility and grievability. These scriptural and visual acts serve as crucial diaries for understanding resistance and solidarity at a time when pro-Palestinian voices are not only underrepresented in German and Western European media and art galleries, but also suppressed on social media by pro-Israel actors. This includes Instagram “civil watch” accounts dedicated to pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian graffiti in Berlin, whose users even tag Interpol in the comment sections of Palestinian posts.

These practices take particularity in Germany, especially in Berlin, where we see that street forms of solidarity with Palestine are not only removed by pro-Israel supporters but also by the German police, whose brutality goes beyond the dimensions of legality.

How can we understand this act of contracting a worker to “clean the station”? How does this “cleaning process” relate to Germany’s stance on Palestinian solidarity against the Israeli occupation?

Since 2008, Germany has declared unconditional support for Israel as part of its Staatsräson (the Reason of State). This political philosophy is based on the promise of “Nie Wieder” (Never Again) to address and honour the cultural memory of the six million European Jews who were killed during the Holocaust by the Nazis.

Accordingly, any debate about Jewish people, Israel and Zionism must go through this canon.

Resisting the guilt and extending griveability

Nevertheless, Palestinian street solidarity resists this reasoning. Aesthetically, the place chosen for stickers, graffiti writing, and painting is not solely a matter of visibility – a spot visible to people as they stand (bus station), enter (public toilet) or walk from one point to another, and preferably higher so that Israel supporters and the police do not remove it– but also of meaningfulness [Fig. 4].

For instance, many posters were hung on the East Side Gallery Wall from the river’s side (home to a few graffiti pieces and white canvases), while the names (and stickers) of Gaza and Palestine are displayed on the other side of the wall, facing the street (home to commissioned murals exhibited for tourists). Graffiti of “Free Gaza” can also be seen on the Berliner Mauer at Bernauer Straße, where parts of the separating wall are still standing with memorials, notices, looped short videos of patrolling soldiers, and pictures of the people who were killed by GDR guards while escaping from East to West Germany.

These official walls are for ‘learning’ about a dark part of German history as well as grieving the bodies and souls of those who passed away by seeing their pictures, reading their names and watching videos of East German Wall guards patrolling [Fig. 5].

Spraying Palestine or Gaza on the Berlin Wall challenges the scholarship that (Western) history has ended with the fall of the German wall, and it places Palestine alongside Germany’s own history of separation, remembrance and guilt.

History continues in Palestine. The graffiti of Palestine on the Wall memorial shows a parallel present-day Palestinian reality, which tourists would neither find informative signs on nor see in the various museums dedicated to human suffering and wall separation. Similar writing can also be found on parts of the Berlin Wall at Potsdamerplatz, where someone wrote “Palästina” twice below the metal sign of information, entitled “Dennkmal Mauer – The Wall as a Monument,” making the wall not solely a historical landmark of the past, but also a symbol of the actual wall of apartheid built by Israel in Palestine [Fig. 6].

These graffiti on the Wall of Berlin, and memorial sites extend “grievability” to Palestinians at a time when Israel has made trauma a weapon of war and while coverage of the Palestinian genocide in mainstream Western media coverage has been tightly policed and increasingly racialised.

The police as the new church

Pro-Palestinian expressions are often interpreted as antisemitic, pro-Hamas and terrorist, or at least aggressive. Germany’s practice of accusing Palestine supporters of antisemitism is a political move. Germany has long tried to de-Nazify its image to the world by organising the World Cup of 2006 and introducing the Erinnerungskultur (Culture of Remembrance) to address the Holocaust and the inhumane and unjustifiable killing of the Jewish population.

This culture of remembrance and political policy to acknowledge what the Nazis did to the Jews translates into the state’s reason as a guarantor of Jewish safety in Occupied Palestine (and elsewhere). This policy of guilt and remembrance has implicitly made the Palestinian statehood and right to return for refugees against the guilty German project of self-cleansing.

This double standard does not solely appear in the brutal police intervention, defamatory anti-Muslim and anti-Arab speech in newspapers (labelling pro-Palestinian students “Jewish haters” (Juden-Hasser), cancelling artists and the removal of solidarity aesthetics, but also shows in the reinterpretation of solidarity expressions in order to whitewash their Nazi legacy.

As an example, the debate on the use of the inverted red triangle by Palestinian supporters was triggered by local media and politicians, referring to the symbol as a “Nazi reference.” Also, a doctoral student who was holding a poster reading “NEVER AGAIN” was arrested by thirteen police officers and had their poster confiscated, accusing the student of another “Again,” a reference to Nazi-camps and the “extermination” of Jewish people [Fig. 7].

Another colleague had notified the student that the police might have a Nazi-focused interpretation based on reading the Palestinian Question through anti-Semitic German history. To avoid that, the student added “never again for everyone” in the margin of the poster. However, the police refused to accept any interpretation other than their own.

Policing aesthetics and criminalising symbols

What role do aesthetics play in a German context characterised by official support to Israel, its Staatsräson and Nie Wieder? How do the aesthetic forms of solidarity with Palestine interplay with Germany’s history and denounce its complicity with genocide? In other words, how does ‘wall washing’ relate to ‘self-cleansing’ and ‘whitewashing’?

Most police “interpretation” of pro-Palestinian signs do not happen on site, for it is already based on a textbook against anti-Semitic symbols and signs, titled “Leitfaden Zum Erkennen Antisemitischer Straftaten” (Guide to recognising antisemitic crimes) [1]. Among the many Palestinian signs, the textbook considers anti-Semitic, the BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions), Handhala (signifier of Palestinian personhood, displacement and exiled childhood), the key (the right to return), and Palestinian visual symbols of solidarity and resistance are put in a booklet next to fascist and Nazi signs.

Each symbol has a small text ideologically changing its meaning to make it “anti-Jew.” For instance, for Handhala, the textbook reads that this icon is “a comic book character meant to symbolise the supposedly defenceless Palestinians. [Instead,] The comics advocate violent action against Israel.”

In reality, Handhala was originally designed by Palestinian caricaturist Naji al-Ali (1938-1987), whom Israel assassinated in London, which the textbook does not mention. As for “Intifada until victory,” it reads that “the first (1987) and second (2000) Intifada were violent Palestinian uprisings against Israel. The slogan heard at anti-Israel demonstrations implies the annihilation of the State of Israel.”

This booklet was published in December 2021, and its captions are the same as those of the police, showing how ideological interpretations are supported and enacted by law against others.

Colourful rage

The Guide to Recognizing Antisemitic Crimes was published in 2021 and does not include the watermelon or the inverted red triangle, which are also treated as antisemitic by German police. Its symbolism, however, was born out of colonial artistic censorship.

Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour (b. 1947) explains that the idea of watermelon came from Israeli soldiers, who, in 1981, interrogated Mansour and two of his colleagues about why they were doing political art instead of painting ‘nice women,’ ‘nude figures,’ and ‘nice flowers,’ which they would buy from them, the police added.

“The flag was forbidden, and so were the colours, which is why we, as artists, were not allowed to use these colours. One of our friends, Issam, started arguing with the authority person, asking him what he would do if he made a flower but with those colours. The soldier became angry, saying that ‘even if it is a watermelon, we will take it and confiscate it. Do not do anything in these [red, black and green] colours.’”

On the one hand, the watermelon sign offers a new language of solidarity—one charged with joy rather than with the sorrow of the Nakba and other classical symbols that embody affective sadness. This fruit symbol reflects the spirit of resilience that has accompanied solidarity protests, offering, at the same time, new possibilities to express support in places where the icon of Handhala is considered antisemitic [Fig. 8].

This builds on the existing presence of the watermelon as a summer decorative motif—seen on ice creams, umbrellas, earrings, and many other objects—thereby challenging German censorship of solidarity with Palestine and embodying resistance itself.

On the other hand, the adoption of the inverted red triangle in protests and graffiti around the world, including in Germany, can be interpreted in two different ways.

First, the red triangle serves as a symbol of empowerment and a reclaimed emblem for most Palestinian supporters, who use such symbols to express solidarity and to symbolically challenge Israeli genocide and Western complicity.

Second, when a red triangle is painted on the walls of campuses or newspaper buildings, the authorities experience it as if it were written on their own bodies—turning graffiti into a physical act. If the (German) state uses law and policing to inscribe its power onto pro-Palestinians, by prohibiting some protests, banning the use of Arabic language in demonstrations and using violence against protestors, for example, then marking a “place of meaning” (memorial wall) or “place of authority” (police station)—even by simply writing a word (Free Palestine) or symbol (inverted triangle) of defiance on its walls—becomes, in turn, a way of writing back onto the body of that authority [Fig. 9].

In his book The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge, Frank Stern explains how “Germany — striving for sovereignty and integration into the West — was able to instrumentalise philosemitism in its domestic and foreign policy as well as a moral stance against local, deeply rooted antisemitic rightwing extremism.”

On the one hand, Palestinian solidarity bothers Germany because it always makes the state feel guilty twice; Palestinians are paying for what the Germans did to the Jewish people. On the other hand, the visibility of the Palestinian struggle and the existence of the Palestinian people with their claim to land make the post-Holocaust Jewish success incomplete. Therefore, being genocidal and complicit with the extermination of the Palestinians seems to be a ‘moral salvation’ for Israel and Germany.

The elimination of the Palestinian people would make the former’s guilt vanish (or evaporate) and make the Zionist project successful as a story of survival.

In this sense, Sami Khatib reminds us that the pseudo-question “Do you condemn Hamas?” becomes equivalent to “do you support the Western world order, its ruling ideology (Human Rights Discourse), and do you condemn the entire spectrum of Palestinian resistance, from peaceful boycotts to the Hamas attacks of October 7?” In other words, “Palestinians should accept their colonial subjugation, should not resist, and should, ideally, disappear and with them the annoyance of the Palestinian question.”

The aesthetics and writing of remembrance and solidarity of Palestine in Germany demonstrate the limits and double standards of German remembrance culture and solidarity. It shows how condemning genocide and the killing of civilians is manufactured in accordance with ideological motivations to justify one’s own history, where some humans and bodies are seen as not worthy of life because one decides to.

The post Palestine on Berlin’s Walls: Street Art, Censorship, and the Politics of Solidarity in Germany appeared first on Untold.

On February 20, 1914, socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg stood trial for anti-war speeches she had delivered the previous year at two gatherings in the Frankfurt area. She was accused of public incitement to disobedience against the law—a charge broad enough to give prosecutors significant leeway in pursuing critics of the state and thus commonly used against political dissenters in the German Empire. 

The prosecution’s witnesses alleged that Luxemburg called on soldiers to disobey orders, encouraging them not to shoot at the enemy in the event of war. In addition to the defense pleas presented by her attorneys, Paul Levi and Kurt Rosenfeld, Luxemburg—a seasoned orator—offered her own detailed rebuttal, dismissing the prosecution’s account of the events as “nothing but a dull, soulless caricature of my speeches and social-democratic agitation in general.” 

Recognizing the profoundly political nature of the trial, Luxemburg did not speak only in her own name: she spoke on behalf of the movement, referencing its decade-long anti-militarist tradition and citing anti-war resolutions of the International Socialist Congresses. Standing proudly by her belief that speaking up against the impending war was her obligation, she told the court: “We do not carry out our anti-militarist agitation in secret darkness, in hiding; no, we do it in the full blaze of the brightest light of the public eye.” 

Luxemburg spoke in this vein for several more minutes until the judge impatiently interrupted her, saying: “We don’t have time to listen to grand political speeches. We are handling the case legally, not politically.” 

Criminalizing Dissent Then and Now

That intervention is striking not just for its hypocrisy, as there can be little doubt that Luxemburg’s trial was indeed political, but also because it resurfaces almost verbatim in Berlin courts today, in cases concerning solidarity with Palestine, especially those related to protests at universities. 

Students who refuse to stay silent about Israel’s genocide in Gaza have staged interventions at universities to disrupt what they experience as an unbearable status quo: the systematic muzzling of Palestinian voices, the absence of any critical discourse around the ethnic cleansing unfolding live on their phones, and academic complicity in legitimizing the machinery of violence. 

Unlike the 2024 encampments in solidarity with Palestine that went on for weeks or even months in the United States, Britain, Spain, and some German cities, the university occupations in Berlin were short lived. Free University (FU) and Humboldt University (HU) promptly called the police and pressed charges of trespassing, resulting in hundreds of criminal cases. The two dozen student trials I have attended since then further expose how the state insists on depoliticizng students. 

In Germany, politically engaged scholarship and pedagogy are commonly dismissed as activism, not “legitimate” science. The fantasy of academic neutrality persists despite decade-long efforts by feminist, queer, and postcolonial scholars to debunk it as a construct that serves hegemonic interests. This myth is less a naïve belief than a strategically deployed ideological weapon used to keep dissenting voices out of academia and reinforce Germany’s Staatsräson (reason of state). The past two years have made this explicit, with countless cancelled lectures, disinvitations, dismissals, and other acts of academic censorship and repression. 

The Right Side of History

After being forcibly prevented from holding events on Palestine at their universities, students have taken the opportunity to speak out in court. They reiterate the reasons why they protest, making it very clear that it’s not just their right, but, in the face of the genocide, primarily their moral obligation. They speak about the genocide, occupation, apartheid, and settler colonialism, calling out Germany’s involvement in these crimes, including their universities’ ties with Israeli academic institutions and companies that have been proven complicit in human rights violations. 

They demonstrate how the violence over there is connected to the violence over here. They speak uncomfortable truths, making state representatives squirm in their seats. Judges frequently interrupt and dismiss the statements, claiming that such discussions belong in academic settings, not in the courtroom—the irony of how the students end up in court in the first place seems to be conveniently lost on them. 

Explaining why he took part in the occupation of a lecture hall at FU, one student spoke of a desire “to create a place for solidarity and critical exchange” because no such space was available at the university. The judge stopped him half-sentence with a retort: “This is not a political science seminar.” The student asked for permission to continue and went on to explain that students’ demands that FU cut ties with Israeli universities were in line with the International Court of Justice ruling ordering all states, including Germany, not to “render aid or assistance in maintaining” Israel’s illegal presence in the occupied Palestinian territories. 

The judge interrupted again, sarcastically remarking: “You have delivered a great seminar presentation for the audience.” The student was eventually found guilty of trespassing and ordered to pay EUR 450; his appeal was later denied. 

The judge’s closing statement was as damning as it was patronizing. “This is not a Hollywood film,” he sneered at the student. “The whole thing has nothing to do with freedom of science and teaching. You may think you’re standing on the right side of history, but that doesn’t mean you can break the law.”

In a different case pertaining to the same lecture hall occupation, another judge likewise emphasized “the rule of law” and dismissed all other concerns (that is, the defendant’s and her lawyer’s references to the genocide, international law, and the German constitution) as “mere background noise” (nur Hintergrundgeräusche).  

The Repression of the Rule of Law

The trials also attest to university leaderships’ strategic inability to respond constructively and with care to students’ legitimate interventions. Rather than creating space for potentially difficult but urgent conversations, universities choose to criminalize protestors. 

The repeated attempts to summon FU president Günter Ziegler as a witness appear to have been unsuccessful—at least one judge rejected them as having, “legally speaking, nothing to do with the content.” HU president Julia von Blumenthal did appear in court to offer her account of the events of May 23-24, 2024, when students occupied the Institute of Social Sciences and renamed it the Jabaliya Institute after the repeatedly bombed refugee camp in northern Gaza. 

Blumenthal’s testimony lacked clarity, leading the court to conclude there was no sufficient evidence to support the claim of trespassing. In fact, student trials frequently end in acquittal (Freispruch) or are dismissed (Einstellung) due to lacking evidence. Their key function thus seems to be less about punishing alleged offenses and more about repressing and physically intimidating the student movement. 

Student trials are part of the pervasive prosecution of Palestine solidarity in Berlin where, since October 2023, police have opened thousands of Palestine-related criminal investigations (between 7633 and 10,000 according to contradictory media reports), twice the number of cases initiated against climate activists in a comparable period. 

So far, only about 2,100 Palestine-related cases have been processed by courts and only five percent of those have resulted in convictions, mostly fines. Even though the majority of the cases are ultimately dismissed or end in acquittals, their sheer number makes it the most heavily criminalized political movement in Berlin at least since German reunification. 

Shocking as this may be, a recent report demonstrates that criminal prosecution is only one aspect of a vast landscape of repression against Palestinians and those who stand in solidarity with them. Published by Palestinian activists in Berlin, the report painstakingly enumerates the many ways in which “German authorities systematically curtail freedoms of assembly, expression, academia, and art when it comes to anti-genocide protests and advocacy for Palestinian rights.” 

The repression is “widespread, systematic, and deliberate,” and manifests in myriad ways including protest bans, visa cancellations, home raids, racial profiling, arbitrary detentions, surveillance, and censorship. Such crass manifestations of criminalization of Palestine solidarity have prompted comparisons to Nazi-era tactics against regime opponents. Yet, as Luxemburg’s case reveals, such far-reaching state-led repressions under the guise of upholding “the rule of law” have a longer history in Germany. 

Resisting the Reason of State

Luxemburg was found guilty of two offences of resistance against state authority, though resistance against state violence would be a more literal translation of Widerstand gegen die Staatsgewalt, and more on point. 

Article §110 under which Luxemburg was tried was removed from the Criminal Code during West Germany’s sweeping criminal law reform in the late 1960s. However, several other articles listed under that same section and title have, with some modifications, remained in force since 1871 and are now commonly applied in Palestine-related trials. These include: §113, resistance against law enforcement officers; §114, physical attack on law enforcement officers; and §120, freeing of prisoners. 

The latter, despite the spectacular liberatory imagery it evokes, mainly pertains to something much more mundane: at protests and sit-ins, police routinely drag someone from a crowd; those nearby who attempt to prevent the violent arrest (sometimes simply by holding on to that person), often get detained, too, and charged under that article. The former two articles are commonly evoked when it is police officers themselves who physically attack protesters. 

The police, however, are rarely put on trial. As Mohamed Amjahid documents in his evocatively titled book Alles nur Einzelfälle? (All Just A Few Bad Apples?), in Germany, less than one percent of charges against the police end in convictions. Police impunity continues despite well-documented instances of police violence and pro-police bias is prevalent in Berlin courts. 

According to a report published by a court-monitoring group of which I’m part, “the courts legitimize and enforce a political agenda dictated by the Staatsräson, criminalizing dissent through biased proceedings, selective application of the law, and the procedural intimidation of defendants and the public.” Perhaps then, a more honest and accurate way to refer to the Criminal Code section that is applied to Palestine-related trials in Berlin would be Widerstand gegen die Staatsräson (resistance against the reason of state). 

Legal Absurdities

Criminalized expressions of solidarity with Palestine and protest against Israel’s and Germany’s human rights violations are primarily handled by Department 231 of the Berlin Public Prosecutor’s Office, which oversees “offenses related to violence, state security, and public order disturbances, particularly incitement to hatred, the use of symbols of unconstitutional organizations, and breaches of the peace, when there is a political or religious background involved.” 

Some of the most widely publicized cases filed under this category involve “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which prosecutors continue to criminalize as a Hamas slogan despite ample evidence to the contrary. Germany’s unique obsession with the chant has famously birthed myriad absurdities. 

In one instance, after a judge ruled that the slogan did not constitute a criminal offense, police arrested individuals who chanted it at a rally outside the courthouse immediately after the acquittal. 

The material presented as evidence in such cases can also be incongruous. In one trial, a young person was charged with using a symbol of unconstitutional organizations after briefly holding someone else’s home-made poster that had the words “from the river to the sea, peace is the only luxury” written in black sharpie around the perimeter of a peace sign. 

The poster also featured Palestinian and Lebanese flags, an image of a kneeling child with outstretched arms, and the phrases “children have a right to live in peace” and “everyone has a right to a life in dignity,” in bold colorful letters. Citing court-commissioned expert reports, the defense argued that the phrase “from the river to the sea” cannot plausibly be linked to Hamas as it predates the organization’s founding by decades. 

The trial ended in acquittal, but the judge advised the defendant not to use the slogan again, as no higher court in Germany has yet issued a definitive ruling on this matter. 

For the Record

Luxemburg’s Frankfurt trial was widely reported and the unusually harsh sentence—one year in prison (though she ultimately served longer and was released only after the war ended)—sparked protests across Germany. Her defense statement survives thanks to its publication in the socialist newspaper Vorwärts, based on a verbatim report. As the court did not provide an official transcript, it is likely that a journalist in attendance recorded the proceedings using shorthand. 

Widely taught in schools and specialized courses, shorthand was an indispensable tool for court reporters since, unlike the Reichstag, German courts did not typically employ stenographers to produce transcripts. In fact, German courts still fail to produce detailed records of their hearings in any form, making the country an outlier in the EU, where audio or video recordings, and even live streams, are common practice. 

Attempts to change Germany’s anachronistic stance have been unsuccessful since 1903 when a commission tasked with reforming the criminal process rejected the use of stenography, arguing that “contradictions between the minutes and the reasoning of the judgement might enable unjustified appeals.” More recent interventions, including the 2023 draft law on the digital documentation of criminal court hearings, have also failed and no legislative progress on this issue can be expected during the current term of the right-wing dominated Bundestag. 

In better news for German democracy, criminal court hearings are generally open to the public, based on Öffentlichkeitsgrundsatz (the principle of publicity), envisioned to ensure transparency, fairness, and accountability. In some cases, such as those pertaining to minors or state secrets, judges can restrict access or prohibit it entirely. 

For the most part, however, the principle of publicity means that the hearing’s time and location are timely announced (typically displayed inside the courthouse) and that members of the public can physically enter the courtroom. In practice, at the Berlin Criminal Court in Turmstrasse, the location of Palestine-related hearings is often changed at the last minute to so-called security courtrooms, causing confusion and delays. 

Those who wish to attend the sessions are required to undergo intimidating procedures, including invasive security searches and temporary confiscation of belongings. The measures seem as uncalled-for as they are arbitrary. 

On some days, visitors’ breasts are squeezed, waistbands and bra straps inspected, tissues confiscated; on other days, security staff let people through with just a basic pat down. No one explains who makes the rules and why they’re so inconsistent. Once they get through security, visitors are directed to the waiting area located up a winded staircase, a place with no chairs, no water, no toilet, no clock. There they wait for the hearing to start.

The right to take notes is not explicitly regulated by law, but generally permitted to strengthen the transparency of judicial proceedings. In the security courtrooms, however, visitors are prohibited from bringing their own pens, notebooks, or electronic devices. Court staff half-heartedly hand out blank sheets of paper and pencils to those who ask for them. 

The pencils are often blunt and, occasionally, colored (I have tens of pages of court notes written in baby blue). In an age of sophisticated recording devices and AI-powered transcription software, shorthand may seem like a superfluous skill, but it would be remarkably useful in Berlin courtrooms today. Note-taking is rendered arduous also because the acoustics, to quote a judge, are “scheisse” (shit).  

Bearing Witness

In addition to the prosecution of activists and systematic intimidation of those who attend their hearings, a new alarming development has emerged: the mistreatment of witnesses. But not all witnesses. Police officers called to testify are met with remarkable patience, indulgence, and respect by judges and prosecutors. By contrast, witnesses who are activists involved in the Palestine solidarity movement are not only distrusted, but, at times, treated as if they were on trial themselves. 

As we read in a statement published by grassroots organizations Arrest Press Unit and Palestinians and Allies, 

On the morning of September 22, 2025, at 6:40 a.m., the Berlin police rang the doorbell of a Palestinian family. Three police officers claimed to have an order from the Regional Court requiring them to bring the mother of the family to court as a witness at 11 a.m. The witness was not shown this order. … The witness is a Palestinian human rights defender whose home and workplace had already been raided by the Berlin State Criminal Police Office (LKA) in July. Those searches were also justified on the grounds that she was a witness to a criminal offense. 

The police did not allow the mother to get her three children ready for school. She was promptly taken away and held in a detention cell for two hours, without access to her personal belongings including her phone. When the hearing began, the judge dismissed her complaint about the mistreatment, evaded all responsibility, and refused to recognize the actions as unlawful.  

Neither the court nor the police offered a credible justification for the use of such repressive measures. The systematic harassment campaign against the Palestinian activist, however outrageous, is hardly an exception. Other documented cases of home raids, digital surveillance, and repeated arrests tell a similar story. The lasting emotional distress inflicted on entire families and communities has become part and parcel of the affective landscape of Palestinian life in Berlin. 

Recording the Archive

Even though public discourse on Israel’s genocide in Gaza seems to be shifting even in Germany, albeit appallingly late, the trials of those criminalized for speaking out will continue in the foreseeable future. 

In the meantime, the repression of Palestine solidarity in Berlin needs to be recognized for what it is: a political, not merely a legal matter, as judges still insist. With sparse and selective court reporting and no detailed record of criminal trials, attending hearings in person remains the only way to bear witness and to document the prosecution of the most repressed political movement of our time. 

Unless Germany follows the example of other EU states and finally permits court proceedings to be recorded, we may have to relearn shorthand to keep tabs on Berlin courts. 

In the face of advancing fascisization, judicial transparency and accountability remain a pressing matter and an intrinsically German problem. The student statements heard in court today belong in the archive alongside Luxemburg’s defense speech; future historians will have much to learn from them.

The post Legally Speaking:  Inside Germany’s Trials Against Palestine Solidarity appeared first on Untold.

Editor’s Note: On September 27, 2025, more than 100,000 people took to the streets of Berlin under the slogan ‘Together for Gaza’. This was possibly the largest Palestine solidarity demonstration in Germany’s history. It was organised by a broad coalition of actors: the Left party, Amnesty International, Medico, Palestinian community organisers and Communist groups. 

Despite the contradictions in their political programs, these groups converged on common demands of ending German military cooperation with Israel, restoring humanitarian aid to Gaza, ending the occupation of Palestinian territories, fulfilling Germany’s obligations under international law, supporting Palestinian self-determination and upholding civil freedoms of assembly and expression in Germany. 

An organiser reports that the mass turnout enabled by such a coalition marked a turning point, “pushing the Palestine solidarity movement out of isolation by activating wide sections of the working class for concrete, collective action”. 

In contrast to the unprecedented scale and relatively few arrests of ‘Together for Gaza’, an autonomous demonstration on the same day and other subsequent protests saw smaller turnouts and ever-escalating police repression. This occurred even in large protests that were not backed by a broad coalition. Most recently, at the “United4Gaza” demonstration on October 11, where organizers counted some 50,000 participants, police targeted youth, families, and even children: at least three minors were arrested for trivial reasons, and two separate incidents saw small children caught up in brutal arrests.

Germany has become notorious for its harsh repression of Palestine solidarity — rivaled perhaps only by the United States. The solidarity movements in both these contexts have also been weakened by tactical differences and the lack of a common theory of change. To explore these parallels, we are publishing an analysis piece written by Cameron Jones – a student organiser at Columbia University who has been active both in New York and during a semester abroad in Berlin this year. Cameron’s refrain ‘ugh, agita’ in response to incidents of repression and state violence is also the inspiration for our column’s name.

***

A brick thrown by a Zionist hits a protestor’s face, blood streams down. Animal feces rains from luxury high-rises. University security kneels on the neck of a Palestinian student. A rabbi rams his car into protesters on the streets of New York. These are just a handful of the incidents that have taken place at pro-Palestine demonstrations in New York City. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in Berlin, faceless militarized police in riot gear knock young protesters unconscious, raid cafés in Neukölln, and ban Arabic chants and songs at demonstrations, on top of deporting Palestinians from Gaza who had escaped the ongoing genocide.

This is not a comprehensive list of the violent incidents that protestors have faced, but rather a glimpse into constant and worsening repression imposed by the state and institutions. The Palestine movement in both Berlin and New York reveals what many already know: that the so-called ‘rights’ guaranteeing protest and free speech under Western liberalism are hollow promises—rights that have always excluded marginalized communities, particularly People of Color, immigrants, and Queer people. 

Rather than signaling a universal moral awakening, recent responses to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians have exposed fractures within Western liberal discourse. For example, public resignations from mainstream news organizations, political shifts with the ascension of candidates like Zohran Mamdani, and unprecedented campus mobilizations suggest that segments of the West are beginning to question the narratives that have long justified Zionism. This shift is not uniform nor fully realized, but it marks a discernible break from decades in which Palestinian dispossession was either denied or framed as necessary. 

What Palestinians, Arabs, and their allies have long asserted—that liberal democracy in the West is predicated on the exclusion and dehumanization of certain populations—is now being forced into public consciousness through images of mass death, famine, and systemic repression from Gaza to the West Bank. 

Impunity and repression 

The last few years have laid bare the consequences faced by those who dare to resist the Zionist narrative: the high risk of arrest, the constant threat of assault by police or Zionists, and, for those with precarious immigration status, the life-shattering possibility of deportation. 

Worse than the attacks that we face is the impunity of those who commit them. Reuven Kahane, the rabbi and real estate developer, who drove his car into a crowd of protestors at a picket last May, injuring one person who was hospitalized with leg injuries, faced no legal consequences. He was charged with assault, but the district attorney’s office dismissed the case, citing speedy trial limitations. The victim and community members, however, argued that prosecutors deliberately stalled the proceedings. 

Just a month after the incident, last June, a judge also denied the victims request for a temporary order of protection against Kahane. This kind of violent, blatant disregard for the law—met with silence or dismissal by the very systems meant to safeguard against such violence—reveals exactly who the state deems worthy of protection. 

It is not those who speak out against genocide, and certainly not those who are living through it. In this way, the state does not merely fail to protect dissenting voices, it actively mobilizes legal and political power to structure whose lives are safeguarded and whose resistance is rendered criminal, revealing repression not as a breakdown of liberal democracy, but as its very mechanism of preservation.

 The Berlin police who brutalize demonstrators face no consequences for their actions, because their violence comes directly from the state. And the media, instead of exposing this violence, emboldens it by ignoring or vilifying those of us who speak out against what has become the first live-streamed genocide. 

This lack of accountability is not incidental, but a deliberate strategy enacted through police directives, media narratives, and state policies, each working in concert to demoralize dissent, criminalize solidarity, and ensure that attention is diverted away from the real violence: the ongoing genocide in Palestine.

Climate of fear

This climate of disillusionment is not accidental, it is by design. The repression of the movement in the West is meant to quell resistance, to instill fear, and to lower attendance at demonstrations, teach-ins, and solidarity events. The raid of the Palestine Congress in Berlin in 2024 showed that the state does not only target protests, but any form of Palestinian political expression. 

These raids, lawsuits, and endless court hearings function as tools of repression, meant to overwhelm and exhaust activists until their work feels impossible. To some extent, these tactics have worked. Protest numbers have steadily declined since October 2023. 

In New York, demonstrations I attended that once drew thousands—especially around events like the UN General Assembly—now rarely reach 500 participants. And in Berlin, the weekly protests I attended in summer 2024 often brought out over 400 people, but more recently they struggle to surpass the same 200 or so participants, with larger mobilizations happening only on a monthly basis. At the same time, student movements have faced immense challenges as universities clamp down on organizing through disciplinary sanctions, suspensions, and expulsions, alongside growing threats of deportation in both the U.S. and Germany.

At Columbia University, repression has been especially severe. Last spring, the one-day occupation of Hinds Hall led to multiple expulsions and even the revocation of degrees, despite the peaceful nature of the action. Since then, the university has deepened its cooperation with the Trump administration, going as far as aiding in the detainment of Palestinian student activists like Mahmoud Khalil. 

Following a $200 million deal with the administration, Columbia escalated its crackdown, suspending and expelling over seventy students simply for holding a teach-in at the main library. As one of the most high-profile universities in the world associated with the Palestine solidarity movement, Columbia quickly became a primary target of the Trump administration. And given its deep institutional ties to the Zionist state, including a dual-degree program with Tel Aviv University and a global center in Tel Aviv, the university ultimately chose to protect its financial and political interests over the well-being of its students.

This pattern of repression has produced a climate of fear across campus, where students know that even symbolic or educational forms of protest can result in the loss of their academic future. Organizing has become increasingly difficult as more and more student activists are banned from campus, cutting them off not only from their peers but also from the very institution they are trying to hold accountable. 

The result is a university that publicly claims to value free speech and debate while, in practice, punishing dissent with extraordinary severity. The protests on Columbia’s campus after October 7 drew nearly a thousand attendees, and student mobilization only grew during the encampments. Today, it would be a surprise if 200 students turned out for a Palestine action.

A history of protest 

Looking at the trajectory of the movement in both cities, a similar story emerges. Unlike places where Palestine solidarity was almost nonexistent before October 2023, both New York and Berlin had long-standing, robust movements with recognizable figures and protests that regularly drew hundreds. 

New York is home to one of the largest Arab and Muslim communities in the U.S., with more than 20% of the country’s Muslims living in the city. I attended many protests there before October 2023, demonstrations sparked by Israeli bombings of Gaza, visits by high-ranking Israeli officials, or escalations in East Jerusalem. Similar protests took place in Berlin as well, often sparked by the same cycles of violence in Palestine that brought people into the streets in New York. 

What makes Berlin particularly significant is that it is home to the largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe. Germany’s Palestinian population is estimated at up to 200,000, many of them from Gaza. Their personal ties to the ongoing violence give the movement a personal sense of urgency. This long-standing presence, combined with already active networks of solidarity organizations, meant that Berlin, like New York, had the infrastructure and community base to rapidly mobilize after October 2023. 

The rapid mobilization in both cities, and the subsequent repression it provoked, reveals how the state perceives its Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim populations not as constituents to be protected, but as internal threats whose political visibility must be contained.

Both cities saw dramatic increases in protest turnout and influence, with thousands flooding the streets. Unlike earlier demonstrations, which were primarily Arab and Muslim communities, the protests after October 2023 brought together students, workers, Black and brown coalitions, as well as anti-Zionist Jewish allies, reflecting the diversity of the cities themselves. 

This surge was fueled by a broader shift in public opinion: the genocide in Gaza shocked a generation of young people, who responded with outrage and solidarity, attending protests, organizing teach-ins, and engaging online. Social media amplified the violence and brought these stories into public view, making support for Palestine more visible and widespread than ever before. 

It was precisely this expansion of support and participation, cross-generational, cross-racial, and highly mobilized, that threatened those in power, provoking the harsh crackdowns we witnessed.

A threat to power

In Berlin, chanting “From the river to the sea” became grounds for violent arrest. Arabic chants and songs were banned outright at some demonstrations, and even symbols like the upside-down red triangle were criminalized—I myself was arrested for wearing one. In New York, authorities banned sound amplification at many demonstrations, wiped Palestine groups off social media, and targeted movement leaders with arrests and harassment.

These tactics were designed to break us down, and to an extent, they did: organizing became more difficult, more dangerous, and more draining. The protests shrank—not simply out of apathy—but because the risks kept multiplying. 

We know that as the conditions for organizing grow more difficult, leftist movements inevitably begin to fracture. As our efforts stalled both on the streets and across university campuses, I began to witness growing fractures within the movement. In both New York and Berlin, I participated in discussions among solidarity groups, where organizers clashed over whether to cooperate with police, how to navigate media narratives, and even what political direction the movement should take. 

These differences often spill into the streets: instead of unified mass actions, separate groups call for separate protests for the same cause. The result is smaller turnouts, a diluted presence, and, crucially, greater risk. Organizing is always safer and more powerful in numbers; fragmentation does not silence the movement, but it does make it easier to suppress and far more dangerous to sustain.

This is not to say that we should give up or that the movement is weak: rather the opposite. States do not repress people and movements at random. They target those who threaten their power, those they fear, and those with the capacity to shift public opinion. The repression we face is thus a testament to the strength and resilience of the Palestine movement. Even as protests dwindle in New York and Berlin, the spirit of resistance persists, captured in chants like “disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest,” created at Columbia and reminding us that solidarity endures even under pressure. 

The dwindling numbers are not evidence of apathy, but of how effectively states have made solidarity dangerous. Yet silence is precisely what they want from us. As I continue to march in both cities, even in smaller crowds, I am reminded that each voice still matters and that the greatest victory of repression would be to convince us otherwise.

***

*Academic Opposition is an activist group of students and researchers active across German universities. We organize internationally to expose and end German academic complicity in the Israeli occupation and genocide of Palestinians. Our activism comprises militant research, political analysis and focused campaigns. Locating an urgent need to build long-term power and train student activists, we bridge gaps between cycles of activism and inter-generational handovers of political work. With Agita we are getting the word out on Germany’s turn towards militarism, domestic authoritarianism and a foreign policy that operates outside of international law. Linking these shifts to imperial violence elsewhere, Agita brings you reports and analyses about the global Palestine solidarity movement based on our learnings on the ground as organisers in Germany.

The post We Will Not Stop, We Will Not Rest: Repression and Resistance from Berlin to New York appeared first on Untold.

Today, we opened our archives too.

In full honesty to you, our dear reader, this opening has its origin in a time when this over-consumed cloth was impossible to rip – the only reality we knew and inhabited. In this spirit of acceptance and defeat, however, we believed there was still something meaningful to say about a past, a revolutionary time, that felt closed and sealed forever as a political project.

You can retrace this origin of this collection in the acts of documenting and archiving that, since the revolution, had been powerful tools for recording the realities of war. They also became a form of resistance against oppression and the foundation for demands of justice and accountability in Syria and its diaspora. The preservation of stolen, smuggled, salvaged materials – be it videos, memoirs, images, testimonies, or stories – has been a powerful medium to keep the revolutionary ethos alive, proving to the world that this ‘event’ existed.

A living tapestry 

We envisioned the introduction of this collection on the act of archiving as both a continuation of this trajectory and a departure from it. Our endeavour sought to capture how archiving infiltrates the way we think, speak, and attempt to write about the revolution – what came before and after – as our own thoughts penetrate facts. The constitution of these archives waives the personal and the collective, the lived and the imagined, the past and the present. 

They are fragments that unfold as a living tapestry – a clock, a song, the sea’s infinite waves, a broken TV, the green buses and a bureaucratic site. Each fragment of our archive vibrates with its own resonance, defying the constraints of order and resisting unified narratives. Each word becomes a gesture of defiance, a refusal to let fleeting moments of hope and despair fade unread. 

Before December 8th, 2024, these fragments were all we had to comprehend a history shaped by loss and exile – to make a claim on time through what was archived and written. But when the unimaginable turns into reality, time returns to the present, carrying the possibility of hope and restoration which also infiltrated our own words. The clock of history ticks once more and time starts to flow again. It reminds us that history – and these archives – are not static repository of “what was”, but a living, creative force that shifts and breathes, bearing the weight of what was and the promise of what could be. New light illuminates spaces of grief and melancholia, fear and humiliation we thought we understood, but never fully grasped. What we once treated as eternal had to be reimagined as the cloth and its threads are now ripped apart.

Writing, archiving

This has been true prior to December 8th, 2024 and, even more, in its aftermath. As we wrote down these archival fragments, we noticed their becoming a conduit through which history is continually reimagined and reshaped. These fragmented archives weave together the disconnected threads of history and breathe life into memory. Time collapses and reforms, no longer linear, but circular, offering moments where endings become beginnings, where loss unfolds into the possibility of renewal. Our act of writing became a transformative vessel, a time machine that navigates the fragile boundaries between memory and the present, contributing to the formation of these archives and their constant reconfiguration.

Writing and archiving are not merely intellectual exercises but emotional and political acts – a refusal to surrender memory to silence. Even objects shed their passivity and become subjects—autonomous, breathing entities. The Citadel of Aleppo evokes childhood – a labyrinth of the past, reshaped by the revolution. A bridge is formed between these sites of memory, embodying both shelter and loss. The loss is palpable in the devastation of Aleppo, but also in the silence of the sea, which carries countless untold stories, dreams of survival, and death. A clock, once silent, begins to tick defiantly, reclaiming lost time from the abyss of forgetting. On the dance floor in Berlin, the echoes of Abdul Baset al-Sarout’s voice merge into a new rhythm, intertwining Syria 2011 with the neon-lit nights of 2019, where past revolutions dissolve into pulsating beats and scattered fragments of hope. 

In our attempt to write down our own archive and archiving our own fragments, we pursued meanings in the chaotic and fragmented expanses of memory. In a world where ruptures and losses shape the surface of history, we search for fragments whose stretching towards each other offer insights into the “how” and “why” amidst the “what.” This search for meanings becomes a vibrant and fluid, at times even fugacious, confrontation with the past. Rather than dwelling in simple explanations, we sought meanings in the ambiguity of experience.

In what follows, dear reader, we share the meanings carried by the echoes of lost voices, pieces of revolution, the bitterness of missed opportunities, the taste of unexpected renewals. Yet, meanings, like archives, remain ever elusive – a fleeting shimmer, a thought we believed we’ve grasped, only to see it slip away. In this pursuit, these archives become spaces of metamorphosis – an ongoing process that confronts us with questions we may never fully answer,  propelling us forward today, as they did yesterday.

This text was written prior to February 2025 and is part of the dossier “Eternity Unwoven,” curated by Veronica Ferreri and Inana Othman.

The dossier is a collaboration of Archivwar with Untoldmag and Arabpop. Its Italian version is available in Arabpop Vol. 8 “Cose” (Arabpop logo)

Graphic project: Greg Olla

The publisher remains available to rights holders regarding any images for which it was not possible to identify or contact the owners.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Resarch and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101064513 “ARCHIVWAR – Archives in Times of War: Scattered Families and Vanishing Past in Contemporary Syria.” 

Funded by the European Union. Views and options expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Execute Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

The post Eternity Unwoven: Echoes of the Unwritten and Poetics of the Archive appeared first on Untold.

Frau Hoffmann was a tall woman. Short grey curls, bags puffy under her eyes – the nights grew shorter with age. She had a long, lined face and a slightly stooped back, though not because of the pressures of school routine or the attendant stress. Most of the students were small, arrayed before her on their chairs. It was not her habit to talk down to them. Aras must have thanked her a hundred times, and she had asked him to call her by her first name. But it was too soon, and in Aras’s head she was still his German teacher, someone owed respect. ‘Of course, I’m happy to!’ Frau Hoffmann said.

His mother stood next to them, clutching a folder stuffed with papers. Frau Hoffmann turned to Nadia: ‘I don’t know if Aras mentioned this to you, but I’ve actually been to Aleppo. I went on holiday there with my family. A remarkably beautiful city, a gorgeous city.’ Nadia inclined her head and asked, ‘Did you visit the castle?’
‘Citadel,’ corrected Aras.
‘Yes, of course. I heard it was destroyed.’
‘Just the back of it,’ Aras said.
‘Just the back of it,’ Nadia nodded.

As a boy, Aras used to go in and get lost there, the citadel, always on the hunt for a new stage. Once, with one of his cousins, he had gone looking for the hill where Abraham was said to have milked a cow – the reason why the city where they lived was called Halab: white, like the milk. Getting lost in the citadel was a kind of ritual. Inside, time was blurred. There was always something new to find. Once, with another cousin, he discovered the tomb of Salah al-Din’s third son. Another time they clambered down into the dungeons, where people had once poured acid. Their search led them eventually to the throne room, one of two spaces preserved in their original condition, although nobody really believed the interiors were original. Still, the patterns, the geometry – Aras had sat down and tried to count the squares, the triangles, the sequences, but they seemed to never end. The citadel was a vast labyrinth, an adventure playground. In it he would never go astray. Other visitors, used to seeing children without parents, would drop him off at the main entrance, where he would wait with the guards, picturing the battles in which the citadel had never been taken – the moat was simply too deep – until at last his family emerged and he re-joined them. Back then they didn’t know the citadel’s afflictions would persist, or that the increasing damage to the city would come to seem like an inverse prediction of the past, when Aleppo’s nickname al-Shaba’ – the white mingled with the black – had once referred to marble. Now, it meant ash and rubble.

The ground offered its solid, uneven foundation to other people who stood nearby, their eyes glued to wristwatches, to phones. Nervous glances. Cigarettes appeared in the corners of several mouths, while other people chatted with their companions. Only a very few had come alone, and those were the ones who looked around. It would take nerves of steel to be here by yourself, thought Aras, smiling at them. They hadn’t rolled out the appointments system yet, when phones would put each person in a queue, sorted alphabetically.

The doors opened. Anybody standing directly in front of them, the metal doors, was swallowed up. If you wanted to be first through the mill you were first to arrive, because the mill ground slowly. Frau Hoffmann, Aras and Nadia passed through the entryway. Their pace was slow, a pace not rushed, not hasty, not reluctant, not without purpose, but with confidence low. The floor reflected back their steps, tiled; a reception desk was directly opposite the entrance. A corridor on the right led to the Citizens’ Registration Office. Their path took them left, up the stairs. The silicone on the banister was red, worn. The door now facing them was mint green, silver-handled, ring-scuffed. Five people were gathered around it. No obvious order. Aras memorised the faces, hoping that they – and perhaps the door as well – would memorise his own, so that when the sixth face came they’d know whose turn it was.

The last time Aras had taken leave of the place was four years earlier, and he’d believed it really was the last time. A fond farewell. Not that he was a credulous person. But when, verdict by verdict, more dead were added to the chants each Friday; when cities were cut off from electricity, water and all forms of communication, when there followed more and more arrests, more and more disappearances; when the dictator, who described his own people as too ill-educated for reforms, decided to smother the revolution beneath a sky thick with hails of bullets – Assad or we’ll burn the country to the ground, said the walls, Assad for all eternity, they said and said again; when soldiers who didn’t want to fire on their brothers and sisters, on their girlfriends, neighbours and relatives, joined the Free Syrian Army; while Nadia alternately sat in front of the computer screen or stood out on the street, outside embassies, local government buildings or the Reichstag, hoping to hear the one piece of news that would end it all; Aras had realised then that it wouldn’t be long before he saw this building once again, and now, after two years, he had. Goodbyes aren’t forever.

So while the European Union debated on that very day, a day like today, whether to supply the Syrian rebels with weapons – Germany didn’t think it was a good idea, because it would just mean the opposing side would arm themselves still further – the banister opposite the mint-coloured door provided Aras with some small support. The tiles at his feet worried him. They captured his attention. Black, cracked in certain places, split. Somebody had fought against their power, perhaps, tried furiously to bring the place down with their feet, over and over, others following, a pathetic attempt. Were the cracks evidence that the police had made a pact with the floor, offering it different faces, and the floor, in return, had exercised the harshness of state power? Aras’s vision went red.

Nadia and Frau Hoffmann were chatting beside him.
‘Can you translate?’ his mother asked.
‘A man was on trial, and the three judges sentenced him to death,’ Aras translated. ‘He was offered a last wish, as is often the case. Normally, most people ask to see their mother again, or they ask for food, that sort of thing. But this man thought he was clever, so he asked to learn German.’ Nadia was building up towards the punchline. ‘The first judge said, “No, we can’t grant that wish.” The second judge agreed: “It would take far too long. We’ll never get round to carrying out the sentence.”’ Realising he knew the joke already, Aras braced himself for Frau Hoffmann’s reaction. ‘The third judge said, “We should grant him his wish. He’ll carry out the sentence himself.”’ The others by the door, whom Aras had almost forgotten were there, joined in with Frau Hoffmann’s laughter. ‘I’ll have to tell my students that one,’ she chuckled. ‘Priceless.’

[…]

There Were Days (original German title, “Da waren Tage”) is Luna Ali’s debut novel, written and published in German by S. Fischer in 2024. 

Aras, the protagonist, observes the Syrian revolution from a distance. Born in Aleppo but raised in Germany, he was in his first semester of law school in 2011 when the revolution began. As violence in Syria escalates, the conflict increasingly permeates his life in Germany. From lecture halls to immigration offices, during an internship in Jordan, or as a guest on a political talk show, Aras relives the anniversary of the revolution each year as a merging of reality and imagination. Thus, the novel There Were Days asks how the desire for freedom—and the repression of that desire—shapes the life, actions, and language of the protagonist in the diaspora. 

The excerpt is from the third chapter. It addresses the most direct impact of the Syrian revolution’s repression on Aras: his family’s desire to escape the war. The chapter is set in March 15th, 2013, at the Foreigners’ Office (Ausländerbehörde), where Aras, his mother Nadia, and his former German teacher attempt to submit a Verpflichtungserklärung (declaration of commitment) to secure family reunification—the only safe passage between Syria and Germany at the time. To achieve this, they depend on Frau Hoffmann, whose income qualifies her to provide a guarantee (Bürgschaft). The chapter explores the dehumanizing bureaucracy of the Foreigners’ Office, which reduces individuals to subordinates, while also unravelling the intricate web of politics, (post-)colonialism, and kinship, ultimately fostering solidarity.

This text was written prior to February 2025 and is part of the dossier “Eternity Unwoven,” curated by Veronica Ferreri and Inana Othman.

The dossier is a collaboration of Archivwar with Untoldmag and Arabpop. Its Italian version is available in Arabpop Vol. 8 “Cose” (Arabpop logo)

Graphic project: Greg Olla

The publisher remains available to rights holders regarding any images for which it was not possible to identify or contact the owners.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Resarch and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101064513 “ARCHIVWAR – Archives in Times of War: Scattered Families and Vanishing Past in Contemporary Syria.” 

Funded by the European Union. Views and options expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Execute Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

The post 2013 – Getting the process going appeared first on Untold.

جنة جنة جنة يا وطنا [Paradise, Paradise, Our Country is Paradise] 

Words and the relentless music penetrate my body, inebriated and exhausted as it rests on a sofa of a semi-stranger, with the only bond we share being Syria. Night eventually descends in summery Berlin, while I am listening countless times to the song Janna Janna remixed by the Syrian-German band Shkoon.

Its beginning and end dissolve into a flow of sounds, words and beats. Darkness reaches the palm frond framing the window, its slow motion devouring every single object of that unfamiliar living room. The night is untamed, almost ruthless, in its carnivorous mission, ingesting my own body and mind, too, until now occupied by the crescendo of the synths and the pounding of the beat. The entire space and myself, the past and the present, dissipate profanely and profoundly.  

***

May 2021, Berlin, a desk

It was not the first time I listened to this song, even to this specific remixed version. As happened to a lot of the traditional musical repertoire, the piece was reinvented with new meanings in March 2011 and became the soundtrack of this historical period, the revolution, after protests sparked in Syria. The song, also, became tied to one of its uncontested icons, Abdul Baset al-Sarout, a young prominent football goalkeeper who had embraced the revolution and led the protests in Homs with his words and presence. He later turned into a Free Syrian Army fighter in the wake of the brutal repression and siege laid down by the al-Assad regime in his hometown, a transformation captured by the documentary Return to Homs by filmmaker Talal Derki. The song and its infinite re-interpretations also became the sonic landmark of my nightlife in the German capital, since my arrival in May 2018. I witnessed its innumerable metamorphosis–that did not scratch its sacred power–in the many Arab parties populating pre-pandemic Berlin. 

***

February 2019, Berlin, a nightclub

An unremarkable winter night. An electro dabke version of the song instigates a powerful energy reverberating on the dancefloor. Squeezed next to each other, partygoers are greeting each other, some others dancing and drinking, others simply chatting. The moment this song starts, this heterogeneous group becomes a single entity. My friend Azad, standing next to me, is also infected by the song and the atmosphere. He starts to shout, singing along. Holding my hand, he initiates a spontaneous dabke line where I follow his voice and body. We ignore the heat, the lack of space and oxygen; we dance, sneaking around single dancers, trying to find an empty spot for our next steps amongst the other chains of people whose hands clasp together. The song is replayed immediately, the energy still inhabiting the room with force as sweating bodies and loud voices continue to move and sing in unison. 

I did not reflect much in that moment about what was happening –as similar to other such moments punctuating my nocturnal life. I just danced, I let myself be carried away by the sound and the vibe. There was no time, space and, even, willingness to dissect the power of the song as it was all about living in the moment, savouring its addictive and hedonistic flavour like an animal starving in the middle of a dying forest. Maybe those moments on the dancefloor were just so cathartic because they were about holding onto something beautiful that was about to end or it had already ended but we were not ready to let go. 

Revolutions never last for an eternity, nor should they. Yet, those moments of pure magic can survive, or we want (we need) them to survive, not to fall down, collapse forever–and us–with them. They always remind me of Eugenio Montale’s poem, I Limoni [The Lemon Trees], his wandering in a noisy city made of cement punctuated by a moment of pure beauty as he suddenly glimpses a lemon tree hidden in the courtyard of a building. Maybe the revolution had the smell of the lemons Montale was desperately seeking, that ultimate treasure that life, the world, and nature can offer to ordinary people. Maybe the paradise–Janna Janna–was Montale’s lemon trees. 

***

October 2022, Berlin, an old kneipe

For Azad, –the friend who held my hand in captivity dancing dabke that night– the song is an allegory of his revolutionary past. Three years after that night; a lifetime after the revolution, we talk about my ideas behind this text. He smiles at me and his partner, with a hint of bitterness, saying that he forgot about that night, but he remembers the song as part of his young self reaching the square to protest, dance, listen to Janna Janna and to fulfill the promise of a different future for Syria. His enduring attempts always failed as the regime’s snipers and their bullets were always faster in dropping the curtains at these rebellious gatherings and claiming some people’s lives in the process. 

***

August 2015, Lebanon, a school courtyard

For me, that dabke reminds me of those evenings spent in the courtyard of the school in the midst of agricultural fields. Created by the Syrian community displaced from rural Homs, the school and its courtyard–situated not far from its informal settlement – became the stage for any sort of event that required a sahra [party]: celebration of an engagement, a wedding or just ordinary life. The singer with his voice and the musician with his electric piano animate those dark nights and their summer breeze amusing the usual crowd while guests arrive from far and not so far away. 

Sometimes, we just listen to his singing, making up impromptu celebratory or ironic lyrics about one of us. Other times, the electro dabke pushes us in the middle of the courtyard/dancefloor as circles of men and women, sometimes mixed, dance not far from children playing around. The atmosphere is not always joyful, nostalgia and melancholia arise amongst a tensed silent audience as his voice recalls the past and what has been lost. 

There was no revolutionary fervor in those summer evenings. Janna Janna and all the other revolutionary songs never made it to the courtyard –to be honest, the revolution seemed to have become a chimera by the time of my arrival in August 2014. Sarout was never mentioned there either. Yet, those moments also were revolutionary in their own essence: they were celebrating the ‘minor struggles’ to be alive and continue to live despite displacement and the devastation of the war. 

***

Berlin, October 2024, a bed

The dancefloor was neither the street nor the courtyard. Yet, Berlin 2019 managed to bring Syria 2011 and Lebanon 2015 back as if we were inside a half-broken TV from the nineties, in which, from time to time, one channel blended with another one –as if time and space collapse making it impossible to distinguish what we were doing, with whom, where and when. The dancefloor, after all, was just a vacuum that helped everyone postpone a sense of an ending and a future repeating an eternal past. After all, this was Berlin, it was not Sarout singing, it was only a remix. Like my friend, I also danced the night away. But that waning dusk on the sofa was different. It was not a time of reckoning the end, but a time of remembering its beginning.  

***

August 2012, London, a crowd, the Syrian embassy

Another Saturday afternoon in front of the Syrian embassy in the most imperial looking parts of Central London. ‘Janna Janna’ is filling the air of those revolutionary protests: we are not Syria, but Syria and the revolution are here. For the young and older generations of Syrians protesting from a distance, this is a moment of hope, euphoria, togetherness until then unimaginable, as fear and silence brought from Syria were carefully cultivated and generationally transmitted even in the diaspora.

I was happy to touch again those moments that were, so far, buried by the passing of time. Yet, they felt more distant than ever, belonging to a parallel universe that crashed in front of the violent reality. 

***

June 2019, Berlin, a computer screen

A week after me lying on that sofa,Sarout died after being wounded in battle between Hama and Idlib. My Facebook newsfeed becomes a reel of mourning for this man and his legacy: the video of him singing during the protests, his interviews and pictures of the funeral attended by thousands of people in Idlib. In Lebanon, members of the Syrian community I lived with commemorated his death, abandoning their usual carefulness in posting anything political and revolutionary at their own very real risk. In Berlin too, the news feels devastating––he was a symbol of the revolution, but almost an embodiment of the Syrian predicament and its contradictions. His death feels like a kitchen knife cutting deeply through the skin and flesh of a finger.

***

November 2024, Berlin

We are no longer on a dancefloor, its darkness and the darkness of the night did not protect us from the reckoning of this bitter end; there weren’t any lemon trees to uncover in any hidden corner. Like the TV of my childhood where white, black and grey lines dominated the screen, eating up one channel and the intrusive other, the feelings, people, years and places belonging to the revolution became mixed up with neither beginning nor end. A dream I did not live but watched in front of a broken TV showcasing fragments of my diaries, fieldnotes and memories. Maybe I can only archive these fragments, making some order and clarity in between these monochromatic lines as a final act of mourning, or as a way to deal with the lingering melancholia. I put a date, a place, I unpack and deconstruct the secret beauty of a lemon tree, the captivating lyrics of Janna Janna, reminding myself that even revolutionary icons like Sarout are human.

***

 7th December 2024, Berlin, Sonneallee/Arab Street,

I am walking towards Sonneallee to catch the bus to go home and watch the speech of Bashar al-Assad that never happened. My friend Nawal and I are stopped by a young boy standing in front of one of the many Syrian patisseries that found their homes in this long avenue. Wearing the Syrian revolutionary flag like the mantle of a superhero, he stands next to an old stereo singing Janna Janna, offering sweets to people passing by to celebrate the imminent fall of Bashar al-Assad. The revolutionary flag reappears in a blink of an eye, worn like an accessory by men walking in the street or attached to the Keffiyeh and the Palestinian flag at the entrance of many shops. 

The day after, even Sarout reappears in flags and posters brought by the jubilant crowd celebrating the collapse of the regime and its eternal aura. I smell again the lemon tree as Janna Janna is blasted in the middle of Kreuzberg, almost symbolizing this surreal moment of touching paradise with the point of that finger, effortlessly, at least for the here and now.

I do not know what to do with this text now that it tells a different ending written only in November from the one we witnessed more recently. I want to delete that part, but I can’t. I am tempted to rewind the tape, letting the interferences in the screen just be what they have been, without any order or logic, to preserve that revolutionary momentum as it was, as it is now, and with it, those who are not here with us, celebrating the many ways in which they also contributed to make the unimaginable and unforeseeable become history. 

This text was written prior to February 2025 and is part of the dossier “Eternity Unwoven,” curated by Veronica Ferreri and Inana Othman.

The dossier is a collaboration of Archivwar with Untoldmag and Arabpop. Its Italian version is available in Arabpop Vol. 8 “Cose” (Arabpop logo)

Graphic project: Greg Olla

The publisher remains available to rights holders regarding any images for which it was not possible to identify or contact the owners.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Resarch and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101064513 “ARCHIVWAR – Archives in Times of War: Scattered Families and Vanishing Past in Contemporary Syria.” 

Funded by the European Union. Views and options expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Execute Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

The post Paradise, interrupted. The archive may not end appeared first on Untold.

As preparations unfolded according to plan, a trace of (perhaps healthy!) concern appeared on the face of Elaf Badr al-Din, assistant professor of Arabic studies at Davidson University and a Syrian researcher. He had embarked years ago on a journey to unearth a supposed prison song in Syria and wrote a related study that is expected to come to light soon.

Around the hall, makeshift musical instruments lay scattered, faithfully reconstructed in the style of Sednaya Prison: here, the bowl oud; there, the dried bread oud.

“Resistance with Soft Power”

“Recovering the music you played in prison is beautiful, but doesn’t your preoccupation with it somehow bring you back to prison?”

My question momentarily pulled teacher Asaad away from crafting the flute. “I studied at the Institute of Music before my arrest, and I was detained just a month after graduating,” he explained. “The abundant time in prison became an opportunity to strengthen my abilities, though there were no references. I believe that music, in general, and singing, help maintain balance. After my release, my relationship with music remained strong, as a member of my family.”

He paused before adding, “But it does, of course, evoke memories—memories filled with pain but also with beauty… even pleasure. It reminds you that the pain didn’t destroy you; instead, you were able to transform it into something beautiful. I’ve always called it resistance with soft power.”

Kasra, who spent eight years in prison and learned to play with Asaad’s guidance, reflects on how detention reshaped his relationship with music. He describes the stages a prisoner undergoes in the search for balance—finding ways to fill the void of free time imposed by detention. Each prisoner explores different fields of art, knowledge, formation, languages, and music. Dozens began learning music, but only six continued.

“You find your balance and create your own world in prison, through which you discover yourself,” Kasra reflects, referencing the term “detention” coined by writer Yassin al-Haj Saleh, which emphasizes adapting to and relying on the prison environment. Despite the many opportunities for other pursuits after his release, Kasra remained deeply connected to music. Whenever he played, he would recall the prison—where and how he learned music.

Haitham Al-Qatrib, a singing teacher from Salamiyah, who was detained in 1982 for ten years, offers a contrasting perspective. He says he never remembers the prison after his release, nor does he dream about it, describing it as “the place I despised the most (…). There is something burned inside us there that cannot be replaced.”

He recounts learning music before his arrest but forgetting everything during his imprisonment, as he was placed in a different wing from the musicians. Yet, he rediscovered music using a radio he had, through which he followed music programs and relearned the basics of solfège. “After seven months, I organized a party for them, performing songs I had composed,” he recalls. “After my release, I stayed away from music for a year, but then I returned to teaching.I became the first professor in Salamiyah to help students gain acceptance into the Higher Institute of Music.”

“Elaf narrates in his research how Badr Zakaria would transform critical situations into humorous ones, such as laughing out loud when a torturer banged his head and the heads of other detainees against the wall in the interrogation room. Different groans emanated from them, and he imagined someone playing the piano with their heads, which led to him being beaten again.”

“Elaf narrates in his research how Badr Zakaria would transform critical situations into humorous ones, such as laughing out loud when a torturer banged his head and the heads of other detainees against the wall in the interrogation room. Different groans emanated from them, and he imagined someone playing the piano with their heads, which led to him being beaten again.”

As we continue our conversation, Asaad Shalash steps into the next room. From there, we can hear him testing the flute (Ney), ensuring its sound is just right.

The challenge of squeezing memory and recalling the musical aspects of their prison lives becomes apparent when we ask about their experience during a pivotal moment: the death of the dictator’s son, Basil al-Assad, in a car accident in 1994. Did they stop playing music during those days when the regime imposed national mourning on the population? Kasra recalls how terror permeated the prison at the time, leaving no space for music. They feared potential retaliatory measures from the prison administration for reasons that often defied logic. Ibrahim Bayrakdar recalls the punishment inflicted on Adnan Qassar, a horseman and fellow prisoner, although he was detained like them and certainly did not cause Basil’s death, nor had he ever committed a fault by surpassing him in horsemanship, he ended up spending 21 years behind bars.

“Symphony of Howling”

When asked about the Symphony of Howling mentioned in Elaf’s research, their memories seemed insufficient to fully reconstruct the details of what their theater friend, Badr Zakaria, once did. It is said that he vented his anguish by howling under the prison door, and gradually, others joined in. The collective howling reportedly frightened the jailers.

Discussing music as a form of soul practice and resistance, Elaf narrates in his research how Badr Zakaria would transform critical situations into humorous ones, such as laughing out loud when a torturer banged his head and the heads of other detainees against the wall in the interrogation room. Different groans emanated from them, and he imagined someone playing the piano with their heads, which led to him being beaten again.

Regarding their most cherished musical memories in prison, Kasra recalls how irritating his music training was for the other detainees, prompting him to practice at the end of the wing to avoid disturbing them. One day, however, remains etched in his memory—when their friend Badr Zakaria expressed admiration for his playing, a moment that has stayed with him to this day. Ibrahim also remembers how annoying his training sessions were to the others and how, after a year of practice, he was selected among the beginners to perform in a concert. He says, “We sang songs like Laylat Yabareh and Sho Qoulak. That was the first time I felt a true sense of my own presence.”

Ibrahim also recalls a group memorial concert in which he, Asaad, and others participated on the day the “Prince of the Bouzouki,” Mohammed Abdel Karim, passed away. During this tribute, they sang Raqqat Hasanak Wa Samarak (The Softness of your Beauty and Brown Skin).

Elaf categorizes this event under the heading “eulogies” in his research, a copy of which I had the opportunity to review. This research began with a grant from the Ettijahat Foundation and continued at the University of Marburg in Germany, later receiving support from other institutions, such as the Umam Foundation.

Melodies Drenched in Fear

But not all memories tied to music were rosy; they were melodies drenched in fear, deeply intertwined with deprivation and punishment. Ibrahim Bayrakdar, from Homs, who spent nearly nine years in detention, recalls a celebration they held for a friend’s daughter’s birthday. Their friend Al-Raqawi, whose voice was beautifully resonant, was singing to the tune of his oud when “the most despicable disciplinary assistant suddenly burst into the room. We fell silent, and he spotted the oud in my lap. He asked, ‘Are you the one singing?’ I said yes—I thought it was better for only one of us to be punished rather than both.

He took me down to the cell, located four floors below ground. I stayed there for a month and five days. My smell became unbearable, indescribable. The fur I was wearing had completely disintegrated from the high humidity—it was as if a hyena had devoured it. No matter how much you knocked on the door, they wouldn’t answer. Hassan Azzou, one of our friends, kept knocking repeatedly, but no one came. He died in that cell.” Ibrahim adds, “The jailers were infuriated whenever they heard us play music. They would think, ‘These are prisoners, and they’re happy? How? They don’t want us to be normal human beings.’”

The jailers were infuriated whenever they heard us play music. They would think, ‘These are prisoners, and they’re happy? How? They don’t want us to be normal human beings.’

However, family visits and the rampant corruption inside and outside the prison played a role in improving their musical conditions, as Ibrahim points out that corruption allowed for the smuggling of many “contrabands”, including real oud strings that they bought from the prison guards, while the families brought some strings with them during visits.

The development of the musical instrument craftsmanship… and a “historic ceremony”

Ibrahim recalls how the musical instrument industry developed in prison, “The first to make instruments was Asaad, he made Oud al-Qas’a (The Bowl Oud) in the Palestine Branch (…) When we moved to Sednaya, we used to take advantage of the eggplant and tomato boxes, and use glass to cut them, and we suffered a lot in that, and we used sock threads to make strings, until real strings arrived through visits and were purchased from the censors. There were experiments in other wings, ouds made from cardboard, then techniques developed, and elaborate ouds were made, they cut the wood and soak it in water and curved it, there were engineers who were experts in manufacturing.” He remembers that when he came out of the underground cell and returned to the wing, with a broken oud and soul, one of them promised them, “Don’t worry about Barhoum, today there will be an oud ready for you,” Ibrahim says with a smile.

At the highly anticipated detainees’ concert, we heard them perform nine prison songs, one of which they had composed themselves. The lyrics to some of these songs were written in prison by the poet Faraj Bayrakdar.

The event was part of a program titled “Towards a Deeper Understanding of Prisons” organized by HAU Theater in collaboration with several human rights organizations. It also included a dialogue session moderated by Bente Schiller from the German Heinrich Böll Foundation, featuring writer Yassin al-Haj Saleh, Lynn Maalouf from the Office of the UN Envoy to Syria, and human rights activist Jumana Seif.

The audience at the concert felt a remarkable harmony in the band members’ playing and singing, despite their decades-long separation after their release and having only spent a few days rehearsing together before the event. A representative of the German Theater described the concert as historic—not only because it marked the first-ever performance by these musicians post-release, but also because it was their debut in Berlin.

Hassan Abdul Rahman, a musician from Damascus now residing in France, who had begun learning music before his arrest and continued his studies while detained, held up a musical instrument during the performance to introduce the audience to a unique oud design. It mimicked the ones they used to craft in prison using cardboard and fruit boxes, reinforced with a mixture of soaked bread, sugar, and jam.

Later, during a seminar organized by the Tafakur Forum for Dialogue and Culture, Hassan recalled how someone from the audience at one of his concerts told him, after many years, that they had “eaten” his oud in Sednaya prison after Hassan and his companions were released. He explained that when a standoff occurred in the prison after several years, at the beginning of the third millennium, food supplies were cut off, and they were forced to break the stale bread into pieces, soak it in water, and eat it.

When a standoff occurred in the prison after several years, at the beginning of the third millennium, food supplies were cut off, and they were forced to break the stale bread into pieces, soak it in water, and eat it.

The musicians were joined on stage by Adnan Hassan, a doctor with a degree in English literature now living in France. Adnan, who spent 12 years and 16 days in the regime’s detention centers, had further developed his oud-playing skills during his imprisonment.

Asaad Shalash also introduced the audience to primitive instruments he made, the ney he made during his conversation with us, the bowl oud, to which he attached strings made from threads taken from socks, and a rectangular oud that imitated one they made in Sednaya from fruit boxes, which he played and sang with his companions the traditional song “Ammi Ya Baya’ al-Ward” (My Uncle, the Rose Seller).

He also introduced the audience to the so-called “morning” ritual, which are songs, most of which are from “Fayrouz classics”, that he played for the detainees, so that they could start their day in the nicest way possible, and to the ritual of “eulogies”, talking about a song they sang in detention about a detained officer who was released by the regime so that he could die outside of it.

Meanwhile, Kasra Kurdi sang with Hassan and the band’s guest, the former detainee, artist Khuder Abdul Karim, the traditional Kurdish song “Yek Momek” which was also sung in the prison. The detainees also sang the song “Atab” which they composed collectively and whose lyrics were written by the poet Faraj Bayrakdar, who the research indicates participated in writing “Eight Prisoners”. Researcher Elaf explains that this song is the only one of those restored that has been documented and reproduced.

During the concert, Asaad Shalash announced the formation of a group they called “Strings Behind Bars” to be a destination for everyone who resisted the harshness of detention through art and music, and to try to revive those experiences, according to his description. “Strings Behind Bars” is also the title of a novel written by Asaad about their musical experience in the prison.

After the event concluded, the former detainees left the HAU Theater, walking under a light rain toward a nearby hotel where they were staying. Their shared moment together felt like a scene from the many years they had spent bound by fate, sharing food, drink, and experiences.

Prison Song or Political Song?

The following evening, the Tafakur Forum symposium (which can be viewed here) became a public space for discussing the existence of a Syrian “prison song” in the first place. Researcher Elaf engaged in an open discussion not only with some participants from his study who were present on the panel but also with many of the former detainees in the audience about whether there could even be such a thing as a “prison song.”

Concerning the classification of the series songs as prison songs, Elaf explained that he referred to Ibrahim Berqdar’s rendition of the song “Yamo,” originally performed by Duraid Lahham in the series. This, he noted, illustrated the extent to which detainees were impacted by cultural products they encountered prior to their arrests. While acknowledging that detainees experience fatigue from their past trauma, he emphasized that he always ensured a female psychiatrist was present to help mitigate these effects as much as possible. The emotional fatigue felt by the detainees ultimately prevented them from performing any prison songs during the second evening.

One contributor suggested that the more accurate term might be “political song.” He argued, “If we call every song sung by a criminal detainee a ‘prison song,’ would it be correct?” He also warned against labeling songs from the Duraid Lahham and Nihad Qala’i duo series as prison songs, pointing out that these songs were professionally created and filmed solely to serve the series.

In his research, Elaf classified the songs sung by the detainees during that period into three categories: complete prison songs, which were composed and arranged in prison; modified prison songs, which were songs performed outside before entering prison; and musical prison songs, which do not contain lyrics. During his research, Elaf was able to identify 34 songs and recover 14 of them. He hopes that at least the fourteen songs will be recorded today.

Elaf covers the prison song in Sednaya between 1987 (the year it was opened) and 1996, a different, certainly horrific period, but one that is distinct from the time in 2017 when Amnesty International described the prison as a “human slaughterhouse.” He says that he conducted nearly 100 hours of interviews with detainees who were members of the Communist Workers’ Party, active in the 1970s and 1980s. His reading of an article by the writer and former detainee Malik Daghistani on the Al-Jumhuriyah website motivated him to research further into this field, which had been absent from the research radar.

In his research, he mentions three teachers in Sednaya: Asaad Shalash, Samir Abdo (Abu al-Nada), and Haitham Qatrib, along with amusing competitive cases between Asaad and Abu al-Nada, who was nicknamed Sheikh Al Kar (The Master of the profession).

Elaf traces the stages of the spread of prison music, starting with the early days when teacher Asaad Shalash would run his hands over a piece of wood in the Palestine Branch to maintain the flexibility of his fingers. Then comes the fermentation and maturation phase in the late 1980s, in Sednaya prison, which witnessed the crafting and development of instruments, as well as other branches like the Palestine Branch. This is followed by a phase of decline and halting, though not entirely, in the early 1990s, due to various circumstances, including the release of musicians, their transfer, the destruction of their instruments, and the separation from their personal belongings.

Elaf’s study also explores prison music experiences in both European and Arab countries. He examines the reasons behind the absence and concealment of prison songs and the creation of prison musical instruments in the Syrian context. He notes that this research would not have come to fruition without the contributions of the detainees in exile, as it was impossible to carry out such work within Syria.

During both events in Berlin, a key point of discussion was how to address this musical phenomenon and its potential negative effects on detainees. Speakers and presenters questioned whether celebrating this phenomenon and the happy moments associated with it might inadvertently diminish the suffering that detainees experienced at the time.

Elaf hopes that this research will serve as a starting point for future studies on the subject of prison songs. Personally, he plans to embark on related research focusing on women’s prison songs. In addition, he envisions an “American tour,” where prisoners will hold a concert similar to the one held in Berlin. Furthermore, Elaf is working on a prison music museum project, which will feature instruments made in prison.

The post Syrian detainees play their forgotten music in Berlin appeared first on Untold.

“It becomes a vigorous and prearranged promulgation of the status quo. The culture industry tends to make itself the embodiment of authoritative pronouncements, and thus the irrefutable prophet of the prevailing order. It skillfully steers a winding course between the cliffs of demonstrable misinformation and manifest truth, faithfully reproducing the phenomenon whose opaqueness blocks any insight and installs the ubiquitous and intact phenomenon ideal.” [1]

Labor and capital are crucial for all industries. This includes the cultural and artistic industry. In the case of Berlin, having been marketed as a globally diverse and artistic city, artists became crucial to maintain such an image to keep its central position in the “art world” as well as uphold its economic proliferation through the music and cultural industry[2]. 

Labeling and categorization as well as commodification processes are key for prolonging this constructed image of a “cultural center”. But how did it reach this point? Why has it become attractive to this high number of artists from all over the world?

After the Berlin wall fell, Germany entered a new phase that fostered new challenges. During the 1990’s Berlin policies adopted were meant to achieve rapid economic growth in a short period of time. However, this was based on a groundless optimistic boom scenario, and many real economic and social problems were ignored. Unemployment was at 20%, while the unemployment rate of the second generation of most immigrant groups, who had come mostly as “low-skilled” industrial workers, reached 40%[3]. Moreover, the rapid unification, led to a top-down strategy to integrate German refugees and expellees, which was a one-way process based on West German terms[4]. Germany and more specifically Berlin, was in desperate need for economic revival, to be able to integrate expellees, refugees, as well as immigrants from other countries. This crisis had turned Berlin into a fertile ground for dynamic urban cultures and a rise of subcultures took place which attracted international attention. Lanz (2010) plainly explains the situation and what followed,

“In the space of a decade, they ((sub)cultures) had developed into one of the few instances of economic potential in the city. In addition to the media and music industry, tourism was regarded as another hope for economic growth. By the end of the 1990s, crisis-ridden Berlin and its establishment began to lay claim to urban (sub)cultures as one of the few marketing opportunities for the city. Multicultural facets of the urban landscape of cultures were an important part of this strategy. Efforts to style Berlin as a cosmopolitan metropolis and the growing ‘festivalization’ of urban policy began to incorporate specific elements of immigrant cultures. Public discourse henceforth increasingly distinguished ‘good’ (utilizable) from ‘bad’ (potentially disturbing) cultures. In particular, the ‘Carnival of Cultures’ evolved into a symbol for the economic and social potential of the multicultural metropolis: for the first time, in May 1996, this street parade took place in Berlin–Kreuzberg”[5].

It was cultural diversity that was about to save the reunified German capital; the entry point to economic revival, where for the first time “outsiders” were the ones who would save the city. The carnival was a “workshop of cultures”, a “metaphor for a peaceful display of multiculturalism”[6]. However, the multicultural essence of the carnival was still under the German notion of clear cultural distinction. Opposing views are easily delegitimized, where those who did not participate were perceived as inferior in some way or another. There is selectivity in participation and representation of different cultures. For example, “rather limited participation of ‘Turks’ or ‘Arabs’ – that is, Muslims – receives critical attention. These are perceived not as musicians but rather as representatives of their religion or their nation, being too traditionalistic and lacking in the happy-go-lucky required of a carnival”[7].  This approach to “diversity” creates a hierarchy of cultures, depending on how significant it is for German society, if given a status or position. Here, the significance is economic.

To further clarify, the “Carnival of Cultures” that was held in 1996 (and the cultural policies that followed) adopts a policy of “culturalization,” which leads to the classification of cultural diversity. This favors certain practices, while others remain invisible. This success that we see stems from its ability to serve two dominant principles of ethnic and cultural representation in Berlin, the first is the principle of “consumption of ethnic cultures” and the other is the “integrating space” that transforms ethnic culture into a social culture (socio-cultural) to cover up social problems. The first law concerns the exoticism of immigrants, while the other leads to the use of culture as an instrument for social and political goals. Culture, on the one hand, is politically charged with somewhat utopian expectations in this case, and on the other hand, it is symbolically relegated to a secondary or worldly status by virtue of its use as a means of integration into social and cultural action[8]. This cultural view is based on the interest of the German economy and is a romantic and unrealistic idea. It is not sufficient to include the differences that exist within German society[9]. The cultural diversity present in the city becomes a tool for decision makers and those who dominate the cultural field to use as needed, politically, socially, or economically. This is currently being put into use within the field culture and art given the genocide in Gaza. The stronger the position of the “culture industry” in a certain society, the more it can control and tame the needs of consumers. It turns into a tool of control and domination, while embodying the statements and trends of the prevailing political regime[10].

This is where selectivity, and the role of labeling and categorization is important.  Giving the ability to choose who is part of this culture/carnival, or who is supported and highlighted to be part of the global and multicultural image of Berlin and who is not. Who is part of the brand image that is to be marketed to keep the economy of Berlin running after it has been revitalized as we mentioned. The musicians who are “accepted” and given spaces, venues, support, opportunities and considered part of Berlin’s musical space, are selectively chosen based on what is considered “suitable” or what fits the German “model.” This was evident with the arrival of Syrian artists and musicians to Berlin (2015-2016). There were always attempts to classify them on a legal or ethnic basis, labels such as “refugee music” or “oriental music”, changing band names on flyers into “refugee rockers” or “refugee musicians”. In this way, new markets are created, and certain aspects of cultures can be commodified (disassociated from their social, political, and historical significance) and marketed for consumption by Berliners becoming profitable for the city. This is a relation of coloniality, that is the “patterns of power in the sphere of knowledge production and culture” rather than politics[11], these power dynamics create monopolies and relations of dependency that guarantee capital flow towards a city such as Berlin (in this case musicians or artists).

For example, when talking about the Asian diaspora in London, Banerjea (2000) explains how one of the functions of the capitalist system is to transform different cultures and works of art into commodities as neoliberal consumer markets need to be constantly fed with new “products” through marketing and advertising in order to benefit from specific productions while disassociating them from any political, cultural or social contexts or significance, which were the circumstances that led to these productions. This is usually done through labelling and categorization processes, which depend on identities or legal status. In this way, new subcultures or genres can emerge in the context of music leading to new consumer markets, where related ‘products’ can be advertised and thus profited from[12]. This also occurred with Rai music in France, where it was transformed from music for the populus in Algeria and other countries into an entertainment commodity that reproduces societal and class hierarchies against Algerians and Moroccans in Paris[13]. This exploitive relation can also be seen in western club culture and specifically Paris, as stated in an important article entitled “Negrophilia in Club Culture”[14], highlighting how “modern-day clubs in the West are venues in which white people get to interact for a night with Black performers, and develop parasocial relationships with the very same Black patrons and entertainers who are denied housing, jobs, and so on, outside of the dancefloor”.

Going back to Berlin and the arrival of Syrian artists[15], which was after the borders were opened in 2015 while Angela Merkel was the head of the German government. It is important to stress that this decision was not humanitarian or caused by “refugees” stranded on the borders of Europe. Rather, it was an economic decision due to the need for labor. According to German figures, by the year 2050 there will be no German labor force due to low birth rates and an aging population. It was a strategic political-economic move; the German society needed labor. Here lies the importance of processes of classification and commodification of cultures, as well as artistic productions, and artists themselves, in the field of culture and art. Typically, border and immigration authorities control who enters the country, through issuing visas, skilled migration initiatives etc. However, the adoption of an open-door policy hampered this process, people arriving to Germany could not be “filtered” by immigration agents and authorities. This leads dominant actors who hold dominant positions within the field of culture and arts to feel insecure about their social positions (and markets) because they might be at stake. This is due to the presence of newcomers to the musical space, who may be able to “transcend the dominant mode of thought and expression” or change the dominant narrative of the cultural field or even alter the or expand the opportunities available[16]. In that way newcomers (Syrian musicians in this example) are labelled and limited to specific categories that restricts them to specific types of music, specific venues, and specific concerts, consequently specific markets related to the classification in which they are placed.

These labelling processes provide a way to limit access to different markets and consumers, and those who hold dominant positions in Berlin in this field can maintain and strengthen their positions by confining newcomers within a specific label that is unrelated to their own and thus keeping them out of their own markets and creating new ones. This is also an attempt to relegate such cultural productions to a certain level (high/low art, underground, alternative) limiting its influence or participation in the “dominant” culture, maintaining the cultural hierarchy as mentioned above. Certainly, this is not a fixed process, there are exceptions and, to some extent this could be countered through collective efforts. This could be seen as a process of “negotiation”, in this case, Syrian musicians did not submit to the classification process, rather resisted it in multiple ways. Boycotting events that place them under a specific label such as refugees or Easterners was one way. Building independent platforms through which they can produce and release music, in addition to artistic collectives and platforms that address and oppose identitarian and racial classifications. We are also currently witnessing this, with the genocide in Gaza, even though challenging, platforms and collectives emerging through artist organizations have an impact through collective organizational efforts. If not on the short, on the long run.

Upon arrival to Berlin, labelling and categorization processes have another role other than limiting newcomers to specific markets, commodification, and profit. Standardization and conformity are another function. Many musicians who arrive in Berlin are pushed towards becoming DJs despite their ability to produce and compose (the same happens with non-artist immigrants who are pushed into manual labor by not recognizing their degrees or not creating a talent or skill pool, like they did for Ukrainians for instance). This is an understandable path for musicians because the market is massive and those arriving need financial stability and to make ends meet, not forgetting the heaviness of the migration process itself. In the context of Berlin’s current cultural structure, this is a way to keep this market and the nightlife economy alive and running in the city. This is how capital and labor are provided for this industry, and even if the musicians while DJing can include inspiration from their own culture or identities which they want to represent, they will end up combining it with local sounds that are mostly Western sounds, samples, and notes. In this way, the structure (if not directly) within the music industry creates standardization and conformity of artists to keep the market going and the cultural economy well-fed.

Once an artist or group of artists begin to differentiate themselves through their music and based on their own culture, identity, or even begin a process of constructing/creating a new musical/cultural identity, given their experiences, creating a new narrative that challenges the “dominant,” “national,” or “Berliner” narrative, is going to be seen as disruptive due to influencing the current environment, and with time might transcend the dominant pattern of artistic or cultural production, changing the power dynamics within the cultural field. There are certain types of cultural capital that are seen as valuable and legitimate, that are used to reproduce and reinvent the existing culture as well as structure, while another is seen as disruptive.

In other words, within a capitalistic system and neoliberal consumer markets, along with western monopolies over cultural resources and means of production as well as the post-colonial and inferior outlook towards the rest of the world, not forgetting oppressive post-colonial regimes established in many countries around the globe, artistic and cultural production is dealt with either as a political tool or an industry made up of capital, labor, and profit. The current structure devastated (not all of course but to a certain extent) cultural and artistic productions that are genuine, critical, or constructive which could influence or critique. At any instance that a certain production could break or change the dominant narrative or deal with political, social, and cultural issues, it is not supported and relegated to underground music, or limited to a certain market or space within the cultural field. It is contained.

We see this in core European cities, which does not only apply to the arts but all types of capital. In the end, they see us as nothing more than capital that can be exploited to consolidate their positions and reproduce the hegemony stemming from colonial and economic history. Funding opportunities, artistic residencies, performances, support programs, and different spaces that are attractive for artists and most people, are available, but we must speak their language, and stay within their narrative. We have freedom here, but with a ceiling. If we break this ceiling, we become an obstacle to them, or more accurately, enemies. Because we appeared as we are, not as they see us. This is what we see very clearly with the Palestinian issue given the genocide in Gaza (and certainly the rest of Palestine). From the state and cultural organizations to concert venues and artistic platforms that claimed justice and openness, have attacked, criminalized, banned, and canceled artists who support this cause.

Similar to dealing with the Palestinians in Germany, where it is possible to live in Berlin, if we conform to the German perspective, their narrative, and outlook. If Palestinians appear in Berlin with their own narrative, perspective, and outlook, they will be suppressed. If they are invisible and produce for the German economy and do not disturb the regime, it is acceptable (and the Palestinians are truly hidden, even in the state numbers it says “unknown” or “stateless”), otherwise you are not welcome. This applies to art and artists. If art can be commodified and promoted in the cultural market and does not disturb the mainstream approach, it is accepted and highlighted. This is the distinction between “good” (usable) cultures and “bad” (unusable) cultures, which contradict the narrative and consequently becomes an obstacle to this society, its policies, and institutions.

[1] Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Dialectics of Enlightenment (Verso, 1997), p. 147.

[2] Berlin’s cultural budget for 2024 is 947m Euros. Berlin’s new culture budget more than double England’s arts funding | Euronews

[3] Stephan Lanz, “The German Sonderweg: multiculturalism as racism in distance,” in: Sili Alessando, European Multiculturalism revisited (UK: Zed Books, 2010), p. 128.

[4] Douglas Klusmeyer, “A ‘guiding culture’ for immigrants? Integration and diversity in Germany,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 27, no. 3 (2001), p. 528.

[5] Lanz, p. 129.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., p. 130.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Klusmeyer, “A ‘guiding culture’ for immigrants.”

[10] Adorno & Horkheimer, pp. 144, 147.

[11] Kevin Ochieng Okoth, Red Africa (Verso, 2023), p. 12.

[12] Koushik Banerjea (2000), “Sound of Whose Underground? The Fine Tuning of Diaspora in the Age of Mechanical Production,” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 64-79.

[13] Joan Gross, David McMurray & Ted Swedenburg, “Arab Noise and Ramadan Nights: Rai, Rap, and Franco-Maghrebi Identity,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, vol. 3, no 1 (Spring 1994), pp. 3-39.

[14] Negrophilia in club culture – Technomaterialism.

[15] Perhaps it is beneficial to highlight the cultural importance of Syria and the region. The region’s (Levant) history is culturally and musically wealthy across centuries. Syria is considered a cultural container holding more than 38 civilizations that have either originated or passed through the region leaving some kind of cultural impact. For example, the “first” musical piece found was in Syria in Ugarit (Latakia presently), as well as the first singer in written history, Ornina, found in kingdom of Mari (close to Deir El Zour presently). Germans are fully aware of this cultural richness this is why there are always excavation teams sent to the region (as well as Egypt and other regions for example), this is also why German museums are packed with artifacts originating from the Levant, Africa, and many other previously colonized regions.

[16] Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Columbia University Press, 1994), p.  31.

*The article was originally published in Arabic in Fus7a Magazine. 

The post On Berlin’s cultural industry: Exploitation and selective inclusion appeared first on Untold.

This conversation was initially held as part of MECAM workshop Cities in the Arab Imagination: Fiction, Reality, and Futurescapes, that took place in May 2024 at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. It is simultaneously published on Trafo blog. 

Diana Abbani: Rasha, reflecting back to your 2019 short story, The Intruders and the City, translated and published in 2022 in The Markaz Review, you explored the complexities Arab writers face in articulating how exile impacts their work, amidst the challenges of personal change and adapting to new environments while reflecting on their past. Starting from that perspective, could you take us back to your initial experiences upon arriving in Berlin? How did these experiences shape your view of the city as a potential “cultural hub” for Arab artists and writers?

Rasha Abbas: When I arrived in Berlin in 2014, the city was different—I was different, and the city was welcoming amidst the influx of Syrian refugees. It truly felt like a free and safe haven, and it was where my work was first translated. That recognition was something big for me; I was genuinely happy about it.

However, as time passed, my perspective changed. Initially, I might have been a bit naive, happily accepting all invitations. However, I soon became more critical, particularly of how I was being represented. Despite there being no shame in being labeled a refugee, I noticed at literary events that our presence was sometimes treated like a charity case, which was unsettling.

 Additionally, I observed that the host community’s well-intentioned initiatives did not always align with our literary concerns. At many events, the focus was predominantly on the impact of the refugee wave in Europe—questioning whether we were a risk or a benefit to the community. While these questions are valid, they often overlook the unique issues and narratives that we, as Arab intellectuals in the diaspora, bring to the table.

DA: Muhammad, since you first arrived in Berlin and co-founded the cultural collective of Al.Berlin, you’ve been an active part of the city’s cultural scene. How do you see your place in the city back then and now? How do you see the current political and cultural repressions in Berlin affecting you, your work, Berlin’s cultural scene and the Arab community and its artistic expressions?

Muhammad Jabali: I originally decided not to live in Berlin in 2012, feeling it was not the right place for a Palestinian. That was my stance until fate brought me back. From 2006 to 2012, I engaged in numerous activities in Germany, such as activist exchanges, poetry readings, DJing, and political conferences. By the end of 2012, I was living in Neukölln, after being invited to a municipal festival and a parallel political conference. I left Berlin with two starkly contrasting impressions: the vibrant atmosphere of the Arab street, Sonnenallee, which was strangely more authentic than Jaffa, where I lived, and the stifling experiences at a conference in Mitte, which, as a Palestinian, felt exclusive and impenetrable unless accompanied by an Israeli friend.

These contrasting experiences gave me a sense of schizophrenia, compelling me to decide that I did not want to live in a place that made me feel this way. However, when I returned in 2018, Berlin felt different, largely due to the influx of Syrian refugees which had fostered a welcoming culture. The city seemed to be evolving, with debates on German ethno-nationalism and a noticeable increase in the Arab population contributing to a changed atmosphere.

Nevertheless, conflict reemerged quickly. By 2019, while planning the first Al.Berlin music festival, the anti-BDS resolution passed in parliament. I was in Austria for an exhibition when I heard that the venue we were supposed to use for our festival had canceled one of our performers due to his BDS support. I was outraged—I had not left Tel Aviv for this.

My aim here is to frame these experiences within a broader historical context. The cycles of hope and disillusionment in Berlin have been ongoing for over a decade. This ongoing fluctuation in what Berlin represents isn’t new to me. Thus, it’s essential to view our situations and the city through a long-term lens, acknowledging that while current events influence us, they are not confined to a single moment; they are part of a continuous flow of time, affecting both our past and our future. 

DA: Rasha, following your withdrawal from the Frankfurt Book Fair in solidarity with the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli, and considering the broader themes of silence and language in catastrophic times, could you share your thoughts on the absence of words and the role of literature in such periods? Do you see language capable of capturing the tragedy, and what drives the narratives we create in these times? 

RA: I have come to understand, and perhaps embrace, the solution of silence, especially after the Frankfurt Book Fair incident. We published a statement, written by Mohammad al-Attar, about our withdrawal. In that context, silence seemed almost a literal necessity. However, I don’t always believe it’s the best solution, but sometimes it feels like the only one we have.

At the Fair, despite suggestions to voice our concerns, I reconsidered our withdrawal after seeing Slavoj Žižek’s speech, even though I don’t share his views on Palestine. This made me wonder about more confrontational approaches. But, at that moment, I didn’t see myself there. Language was a barrier. I don’t fully command German, and I didn’t find the power in me to engage in a heated debate, in English or German, on such a significant platform. 

After 10–12 years of being forced to be an activist for the Syrian cause—because even if you don’t want to, it’s not a choice—I’ve learned the challenges of such a role. If you can’t engage, don’t force it; sometimes writing and reflecting from a distance suits better. Circumstances sometimes dictate a slower pace, and not everyone is cut out for public debate.

Though I’m not fully convinced that silence is always the best approach, I see value in all forms of expression. Some thrive in public discussions, while others, including myself, contribute best through quiet reflection, documenting, and creating works that might only be recognized years later.

DA: Muhammad, in your book published last year, The Entrapment of the Place: A Critical Study of Fine Arts in Israel, you critically examine whether art created in a colonial setting like Israel can represent beauty without reinforcing colonial narratives. Is it possible for art to exist within a colonial framework without being complicit in these dynamics? Further, how does Western art influence and reshape societal standards of what is aesthetically considered as “beautiful” and “ugly”, and how might it reflect and perpetuate colonial narratives and power dynamics?

MJ: This is a complex issue without a straightforward answer. Yes, beautiful art can emerge in a colonial context, but beauty does not dictate moral value. Israeli art, for example, includes truly remarkable pieces, yet beauty can also serve darker purposes. The Arabic term رائع، روعة، مريع, akin to the English ‘terrific,’ embodies the dual nature of beauty and fear, illustrating how closely they are intertwined in language.

However, good art isn’t necessarily peaceful. Recent Western art, particularly from the latter half of the 20th century, sometimes misaligns with our experiences and distorts our perceptions.

In moments of catastrophe, victims don’t think about creating beautiful art, victims scream. That’s not art—you need distance from the moment, art is about creating a metaphor, and if you’re not distanced from it, it can barely be art.

This creates a crucial problem with the poetics of tragedy. At the heat of the tragedy, it is hard to be poetic; there is an inherent contradiction in trying to represent tragedies beautifully. Like Adorno said, writing poetry after the Holocaust is barbaric. Sometimes, going back to silence or being silenced is the solution. It is expected that artists lead the way in times of crisis, but actually, most of the time, poetry after catastrophes is “barbarism”. 

There is a time for silence, and that makes cultural work really difficult to always be at the front line of confrontation. Either it produces bad art, or needing this distance makes it complex. 

DA: Reflecting on your experiences in Berlin and the dual roles imposed on refugee and exiled writers and artists—where on one hand there’s a desire to translate and understand their works better, and on the other, they are categorized into roles that demand testimonial or sociological narratives—how do you both navigate these expectations? Additionally, within the Arab community, do you feel a responsibility to represent them, or do you prioritize individual expression?

RA: Navigating these expectations starts with personal reflection. Often, it seems that my public profile overshadows my actual writing. While part of me resists being pigeonholed as just a ‘Syrian writer,’ wanting instead to explore universal themes like love or science fiction, I inevitably gravitate back to the issues that have shaped me: my Syrian upbringing and the experiences of oppression, war, and displacement. These elements deeply influence what I write, regardless of how I wish to be perceived. In Berlin, despite its challenges, I find it one of the best places for Arab writers and activists to congregate. However, the expectation to represent the Arab community complicates things. The cultural scene can feel imposing, and there are times when you simply want your space. This need isn’t about isolation, but about managing the trauma and complexities that come with diaspora experiences.

MJ: Indeed, Rasha captures the struggle well. The main issue for refugee and exiled artists is exclusion from the collective due to institutional dynamics that do not recognize our experiences as universally human. We often find ourselves fighting for a voice within these structures. A few years back, I was optimistic about our role in shaping a new Berlin collective, but the reality is more complex. Despite this, the Arab community in Berlin is smaller and more fragmented than many realize, with varying desires on how they wish to engage with the city. Events like concerts or art shows play a crucial role, allowing individuals to connect over shared interests without the pressure of collective identity, enriching the cultural landscape of the city.

DA: To conclude and reflect on the future, how can we make the cities we inhabit more livable? What role does imagination play in shaping our perception of these cities? And how can we use it to envision new possibilities for the future?

RA: I believe imagination is crucial to envision what comes tomorrow. What we prepare for today lays the groundwork for tomorrow. But then, there’s the question of making Berlin a more livable city. How crucial is our imagination in this process? Is it really what we need? I believe that while imagination is essential, but alone, it may not be sufficient.

Especially considering recent events and the cruelty witnessed, our challenges are not solely due to a lack of imagination. In fact, I have begun to think that what we really need to address in today’s world is more awareness, a more realistic approach, and fact-gathering—exactly the kind of things we often avoid, like forced activism.

MJ: I’m currently working and studying German intensely because I blame myself for everyday I’ve lived here without mastering the language. There is definitely a communication problem in Germany, which relates to a broader issue in the cultural sector and the lack of communication with Germans. I think part of the blame lies with Arab artists and cultural activists, but it’s not solely their responsibility. The cultural sector often grapples with competing for resources and dealing with issues that clash with German societal norms, such as the sensitive topics of Palestine and Israel.

However, the question remains: should we make Berlin bloom? This ties back to our relationship with our community back home. There is a role here, not just to debate with Germans as fixed entities, but also to revitalize Berlin, leveraging this space to foster a new Arab or Mediterranean influence.

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