Watching monkeys at a zoo, one can never be quite sure who is observing whom. During one of my few visits to Berlin’s Zoologischer Garten, a smart little caged creature held its hands to its face as if holding an imaginary camera. It looked at me through the thus formed frame, and I was almost sure I glimpsed an ironic smile. Even if it was but a clever imitation of the gesture the observant creature is surely often faced with, and even if I project too much of an anthropomorphic interpretation, it still made me realize how arbitrary that role division was—the fact that I am on this side of the cage, having paid to look inward.

Filmstill, Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin

Observation is both the main topic as well as the main formal characteristic of Bestiaire directed by Denis Côté. We observe the concentrated faces of young people during a drawing session—their eyes move back and forth between the animal on the paper and the object, which is disclosed as a stuffed animal at the moment of the last shot; a safari park during a snowy winter with animals walking outside, while others from warmer climates are locked indoors; taxidermists going about their work, creating frozen counterparts of what we just saw alive; and, finally, the summer crowds of visitors apparently so busy taking photos of the animals that they actually fail to see them.

The observational character of the film is further enhanced by its form. The camerawork is carefully pre-composed and static from the very first scene. Even the focus plane remains at the same depth while subjects move in and out of it. As an introduction to the film screening, Côté recalled a remark made by a viewer at the Sundance Film Festival: “This film is about an audience watching a film.”

Indeed, Bestiare’s technique reminds me of another, unfortunately quite unknown film entitled Five Dedicated to Ozu (2003) by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Therein too, during the long, static scenes in which almost nothing happens, a reflective process is initiated in the viewer, who thus becomes aware of and preoccupied with the process of watching itself. In Bestiaire, this effect is even stronger. The animals we observe do not hide their awareness of the camera’s presence and often look directly at it. Sometimes, it becomes so unsettling to sit in the dark while a melancholic bull is staring at you from the screen for minutes, that the film inevitably tries to relieve the tension by cutting to a comical intermezzo—an ostrich, with its long neck and big eyes, which expresses nothing, really nothing else, but curiosity.

Filmstill, Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin

This film obviously does not pretend to be ordinary entertainment. It is also full of ethical connotations. It is the pity we feel for the animals that have to spend long, cold winters in bleak cramped spaces made of concrete and metal; anxious, nervous or just looking desperate. It is the taxidermic techniques of separating skin from flesh and flesh from bone that provoke disgust, a feeling closely connected with our sense of morality. The title itself refers us to the illustrated compendiums of animals that have placed such creatures in a religiously moralizing textual context; for example, the presentation of pelicans that pull out their chest feathers in order to feed their young ones on their own blood, thus saving them from starvation, as an allegory to Jesus’ sacrifice in order to save the sinners from eternal death.

February 12 2012, Sylvain Corbeil, Denis Côté, Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin

Having said that, the director’s vehement denial that this beautiful and unusual film’s ethical component is something arbitrary, and only something the viewer may or may not “project into it”, was somewhat irritating. Of course, no artistic work can be reduced to its moral message, but when the latter is as powerful and as well-aligned with the aesthetic form as in Bestiaire, such a dismissal seems suspect. The silent producer, who stood by the director’s side during the Q&A session that followed the screening, could not introduce any more clarity regarding the question: Why deny?

(Bestiare’s last screening is on Thursday, February 16 at 22:45 in Kino Arsenal.)

Berlin will not miss Schönefeld as much as it will miss Tempelhof, or even Tegel. This parting will be nowhere near as emotional because the Schönefeld airport will not disappear, nor even change its purpose. The site will still function as an airport, receiving a bigger, more lucid terminal with an integrated train station, other facilities and a new identity—SXF will become BER.

Yes, BER and not BBI as we previously thought. The latter IATA abbreviation is already taken and will be put on your checked-in luggage only if your destination is Biju Patnaik International Airport in Bhubaneswar, India. But maybe this is even better; at least the three letters are part of the word ’Berlin’, as if to make it up for the fact that the airport is actually not a part of Berlin geographically, but rather located in Brandenburg.



Günter Wicker (Photur) // Berliner Flughäfen

Anyhow, the current runway will still be used, probably the same runway from which by the end of WWII around fourteen thousand airplanes had taken off, planes newly built by the Henschel aircraft plant. Berlin–Schönefeld started its career as a factory airfield. After the war, the Soviets stripped Henschel of its equipment—which was then transported to the USSR to fix soviet trains and kolkhoz machinery—and ordered the building of a civil airport on the demilitarized site. Aeroflot, at that time the largest airline in the world, was thus the first to operate from Schönefeld. So the first civil flight to take off from there surely headed eastward, as probably did the last Henschel aerial weapon. The new outlooks have an eastward orientation too, as it is anticipated that Berlin Brandenburg International Airport will become the main European hub for flights to Eastern Europe, Asia and the Far East.

The next phase in the life of the Schönefeld airport was one of decline, brought on by the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. In the 1990s everything was moving westward, and everything western was given preference. The airlines too favoured the cooler, more central and symbolically more meaningful airports of West Berlin, and the number of passengers using what used to be the main airport of the German Democratic Republic, rapidly decreased.



Günter Wicker (Photur) // Berliner Flughäfen

However, as the low-budget airlines gradually become the modern air ‘superpowers’, the somewhat distant and not-that-cool airport gained significance once again. RyanAir, EasyJet and Germanwings stirred it from its post-communist lethargy and divided it into new sectors of influence, each coloured according to the specific, non-ideological corporate design: blue with a yellow outline, mighty orange, purple on metal, and so on. Berlin, as a cheap-but-sexy destination, attracts more and more tourists and SXF has gradually developed into what it is today EasyJet’s largest base in continental Europe.

The third metamorphosis is about to happen this summer. Although not everybody stands unanimously united behind this idea, Berlin’s air traffic will be united—it will be centralised at the new airport. This major step could stand in the tradition of the Berlin’s unification pathos, but surprisingly it does not, at least not from the architectural point of view. After closing such significant an airport as Tempelhof, one would expect an internationally-renowned architect to be commissioned for this potentially symbolic replacement. But it won’t be a star like Foster, who referred to Tempelhof as ‘the mother of all airports’, and whose office has excelled with such previous airport projects as Beijing, Hong Kong, Kuwait, Amman and Stansted. Instead, the project was awarded to two local but quite nameless architectural firms, GMP and JSK. More acronyms—that’s right.



Björn Roller // Berliner Flughäfen

Another discrepancy is a visual one. Namely, the disharmonious interplay between the airport’s coiled control tower (which does impress) and the main terminal building, which brings to mind a cheaper-but-bigger version of the minimalism of Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gallery.

Berlin is slowly leaving its divided past behind and the new airport is another step in that same direction. However, this project will not become a symbol of unity, but rather one of pragmatism. It seems that in Schönefeld things never quite come to a completion; usually, they just take a new form. The opening of a new airport thus follows the trend of previous reorganisation. Schönefeld has always been there for those in need of a quick, cost-efficient and practical solution. Flying used to be a romantic endeavour, but nowadays it’s all about pragmatism. The new romantics take a train or a ship, if they can afford it.

Eurobonds, common debts to be guaranteed by all European countries but spent nationally, are anathema to the German public and German politicians. So it was kind of a surprise hearing Werner Hoyer, Minister of State at the German Federal Foreign Office, declaring “project bonds”, common debts to be guaranteed by all European countries, but spent on a European level, instead of a national one, to be a possible future development.

Mr. Hoyer, who is a possible candidate for the President of the European Investment Bank, what might explain the shift, was answering calls from Italy’s former Prime Minister Giuliano Amato. Both were attending a roundtable on “Changing the debate on Europe” at the Dahrendorf Symposium, held at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin last week. Mr. Amato said: “Let us issue Eurobonds for common projects. Let us give our citizens the feeling of getting more from Europe, nor less! Otherwise: Where should growth come from?”

Yet on what kind of projects the new debts should be spent for, both remained silent. In fact, it seemed, Mr. Amato and Mr. Hoyer intended primarily to make people feel better about the European Union. “We have to make the EU appealing, not a source of constraints”, Mr. Amato said. Citing concerns in Italy and Greece, he added: “Maybe some citizens say: ‘Well, without the pressure from Germany, we would get through our problems much better.’”

Whether or not intended, new, and probably expensive projects, seem to be seen as a possible way out of current euro-skepticism. “When it became nasty, language was not very peaceful anymore”, Mr. Hoyer reminded the audience. The usual legitimization of the EU might not be enough anymore, he fears. “We do need a new narrative on Europe”, Mr. Hoyer said. “We shouldn’t forget the old ones, but we should give people also a new one.”

If project bonds will mark a shift towards higher acceptance of the EU by the public or towards calmer markets remains difficult to judge in advance. To calm markets, which are in panic about a possible default of Greece, that could possibly then lead to further defaults, project bonds seem to be too small, no matter what size they are going to have exactly. To change attitudes towards Europe, project bonds might simply be the wrong answer, as they wouldn’t mean less austerity on a national level and, especially, painful but necessary reforms, to get rid of, for example, the traditional two-tier labor-markets that privilege those who already have got jobs, especially in the state-sector, and the elderly at the expense of those who have not yet found a permanent job and have to live with precarious part-time employments.

Maybe the problems could at least partially be solved by a different, more respectful way of communication. Wolfgang Ischinger, ex-ambassador and Chairman of the Munich Security Conference, and participant at the roundtable, called for more intervention by Europeans into each other’s internal affairs, but also for more emotion. “I believe we are not courageous enough. We have to intervene in each other’s internal affairs more often than we do, but not only negatively”, he said. “I am waiting for the moment when Merkel and Sarkozy will travel to Greece and tell the Greeks that we also love them. Emotional elements matter in Europe, and we need to tell each other that we love each other”.

At times, it seems, politics can be surprisingly romantic. As in every love affair, more romanticism would also mean less independency, though. Are Europeans ready to fall in love with each other with these strings attached?

Is a cold wind blowing in Europe, when it comes to its minorities? Participants agreed at last week’s panel on “Europe as a social space” at the Dahrendorf Symposium in Berlin: “We witness a decline of social space in Europe”, said Hakan Seckinelgin from the London School of Economics. “Europe has become a closed society, there is a racialization of society”, added Eric Fassin from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. “The scapegoat is changing but the logic of exclusion is the same”, said Angela Kocze from the European Roma Rights Center, a lobby group, in Budapest and the Central European University.

And indeed, Mrs. Kocze gave some depressing figures: More than 90 percent of Hungary’s Roma are unemployed. Very low numbers of Roma go to high school. A mere 0.2 percent of Roma attend university, she said. “We are witnessing the gradual empowerment of the extreme right in Hungary, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden”, Mrs. Kocze added. But not only on the political right has the climate got chilly: “Italian authorities expelled European (Roma) citizens. And this decision was not taken by far-right politicians, but by the center-left government led by Romano Prodi”, she bemoaned.

Her conclusion was obvious: “The European project is under threat: From the left, from the far right”, and “from neoliberalism”.

Missing in this discussion were possible solutions to address the issue. Instead, participants largely stopped at concentrating on the problem. However, it became clear again, that missing information is a key. European media coverage on transnational social problems is far too superficial and random. When did you hear the last time about Roma exclusion in the (German) press? What do you know about Roma living in Berlin? When did you read the last interview with migrants coming to live here disclosing their motivations? Media and public, it seems, first have to recognize migrants and minorities, before stereotypes can pass to give way to more profound knowledge.

Let’s face it: The euro-crisis is the dominant topic at the Dahrendorf Symposium, held today (Wednesday) and tomorrow at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin. Eventually, almost all panels revolve around monetary issues. And in fact, many other topics are strongly connected to it – for example European democracy.

Ivan Krastev from the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and the International Institute for Security Studies (IISS) recognized a deep democratic asymmetry between debtor- and creditor-countries. He stated that countries like Germany were still able to make autonomous decisions with regard to the euro-crisis. On the other hand, countries like Greece are merely expected to “accept, what was already designed“. This, he believes, is no sustainable solution and it remains doubtful whether “Northern” countries will in the end carry their point.

The underlying reason was not, however, that Greece was expected to take harder cuts than countries could bear, Mr. Krastev explained. Some Balkan-countries even imposed harsher austerity-measures in the last 20 years or so. Instead he presented four alternative causes, to explain why austerity meets resistance in Greece and elsewhere: First, Europe has become more conservative. Young people in Southern European countries don’t go on the streets to demonstrate for a better future. Instead, they claim the right to live like their parents. Second, Europe has become more pessimistic: In 1989 people in the East-European countries depicted the EU as “heaven”; today polls suggest that people in Europe are more pessimistic than anywhere else in the world. Third, the communist legacy paradoxically helped to strengthen competitiveness post-1989, as trade unions didn’t enjoy much support in Eastern Europe. But they are influential in Southern Europe. Finally: Eastern Europeans had a positive picture of EU-institutions in comparison to their national institutions, while today EU-institutions are often seen as evil and national institutions as benevolent.

Most of these assumptions can be challenged, of course. There are many other differences between Eastern Europe 1989 and Southern Europe 2011. The countries in today’s crisis are not only already part of the European Union (Eastern countries were not), they also introduced a common currency (which most Eastern countries still do not use). Southern European countries are democracies and market economies, so no one expects a systemic transformation. At the same time, people are used to speak up loudly, a tradition more unknown in countries under communist dictatorship.

However, protests show that the current approach towards the debtor-countries might very well fail, if measures are not accepted as legitimate. How could democracy thus be strengthened on the European level? Norbert Röttgen, Germany’s Minister for the Environment, came up with an old and still radical vision: The introduction of a European federation. Only by concentrating more powers on a European level, he claimed, could Europe win back lost power. These powers were needed to decide how we want to live and to reclaim lost ground from the economic and financial sector. They were also needed to make decisions more legitimate and acceptable. People, he said, should elect directly the President of the European Commission, who should also guide European politics. Council and Parliament should become a federal two-chamber parliamentary system. National elections should be coordinated.

In the eyes of many, these ideas might go too far. If they are feasible remains doubtful at best. And many questions are still open: What if, for example, a European parliament would approve by a vast majority measures to be implemented in Greece but rejected by the Greek? Shouldn’t countries concerned enjoy veto-rights? While open questions remain, a debate on legitimacy and democracy on the European level is urgently needed in today’s more complicated European world.