In sports, the Black athlete is often mythologised: supernatural speed, exceptional strength, genetics as magic. And yet, in public spaces, a Black person running is met with suspicion, fear or anger. The choreographer Joana Tischkau’s new piece Runnin’which premiered at Berlin’s prestigious performance stage HAU, last week, opens that tension and holds it for us to see.
The work builds itself in the everyday: four performers move in circles across an empty stage. It brings the so-called “pedestrian movement” of postmodern dance – walking, standing, sitting – the sort of movement considered neutral, almost invisible, into collision with the Black body. When a racialised person simply moves, simply breathes in our shared streets, the piece seems to ask, is that ever neutral?
The audience was thrilled. We were lucky enough to have witnessed a dance performance turning into a subtle metaphor, a playful mirror for what is happening around us right now in Berlin’s cultural landscape. Questions of participation and unconscious bias with respect to race and gender seem no longer at the centre of discourse. Not because they have been successfully answered already, but because they have been silently pushed aside, in favour of a hollow neutrality, a return to the status quo.
For a few years, it looked as though something was shifting in Germany’s cultural institutions. In the wake of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, suddenly there were panels everywhere on structural racism, gender quotas and commitments to diversify programming. Berlin, ever proud of its progressive image, rushed to be the ultimate role model for diversity. And it was, for a while. But now the mood is changingdramatically.
Across the city, the appetite for “diversity” seems to have passed. The energy and resources that were once put into anti-racist and inclusive work have faded, and diversity programmes are the first to be sacrificed when austerity measures are taken. At a Berlin arts conference earlier this year, Tischkau said: “As a Black German, able-bodied and cisgender woman, I managed to slide through the extremely short window of so-called ‘diversity-sensitive opening’. A window that is now completely closing … This is not participation. This is anti-democratic … My biography should not be an exception, but the norm.”
The closing window is not just a Berlin story. It is a global one. In the US, the backlash is far louder and more radical. Under Donald Trump’s presidency, critical race theory is declared a threat. Diversity training in federal institutions has been banned. Universities and school districts are being targeted for teaching histories that acknowledge systemic racism. The message is clear: diversity is dangerous.
That same rhetoric is making its way across the Atlantic. In Germany, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has framed diversity and gender politics as “ideological indoctrination”. It attacks cultural institutions that platform marginalised voices, framing them as anti-German and extremist. And increasingly it is being heard.
But it is not only the far right’s success in recent elections or the extreme budget cuts that feed into regressive cultural politics. The backlash was there from day one, and as I have sadly realised over the years in various confidential settings, it came from inside the house. It came from many of the people we work with day to day, who would identify themselves as progressive, leftist even, and who would claim to just look at the “quality” of a piece of work, rather than its author’s identity, towards which they think they are, of course, totally neutral.
State-funded diversity programmes looked good on paper but were always a hassle to implement in reality. Many people who have worked within German cultural institutions in recent years will tell you how hard they had to fight to persuade their own colleagues that white, heteronormative or Eurocentric positions are not per se the “better” art. As though it’s not a question of references and knowledge when considering which artworks we find more valuable and which ones we simply don’t understand. To broaden our perspectives, we have to acknowledge which communities and subjects are underrepresented in cultural and artistic spaces, so we can find ways to balance it out, with specific calls and invitations and funding.
But, of course, limited resources in arts and culture lead to competition, which sometimes turns into a ruthless defence of privileges. Everything that deals with marginalisation is instantly labelled “woke”. Artists of colour have to justify their success, which is suspected to be a result of preferential treatment rather than an outcome of their craft and effort. Usually these mechanisms play out behind the closed doors of committees and juries whose work is strictly confidential. But once a disagreement over diversity becomes public, it is immediately instrumentalised by the political right.
When the House of the World Cultures (HKW) Awarded ITS international literary prize to the Senegalese author Mohamed Mbougar Sarr in 2023, two members of the jury subsequently publicly criticised the judging process saying that, in their view, questions of identity and race had outweighed literary criteria. They didn’t explicitly say that Sarr didn’t deserve the prize, because this would have been ridiculous. The 35-year-old author has won prizes around the world for his outstanding novel, The Most Secret Memory of Men.
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But they alleged that white jury members had been silenced during discussions, and that white candidates had been disadvantaged. The allegations were immediately rejected by HKW, a multidisciplinary arts space in Berlin known for its decolonial approach. But, of course, the statement by the ex-jury members was of great use to the AfD. The far-right party’s leaders quoted it in a parliamentary question this summer, questioning public funding for the HKW’s “pro-migration” programming and the suitability of its director.
The danger here is not only political, it’s cultural. When institutions end their diversity missions preemptively, when funding bodies shy away from “controversial” topics, when artists are told their work is “too specific”, we don’t just lose representation. We lose truth, we lose complexity. Because art should be free to reflect the world as it is, not just as the powerful would like to see it.
The anti-diversity backlash is not just fatigue – it is a strategy. Like all reactionary movements, it masquerades as a return to “neutrality”. But this neutrality was never real, as Tischkau’s Runnin’ powerfully reflects, without spelling it out. It doesn’t have to, we can sense it. That is actually what makes an artwork brilliant.
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Fatma Aydemir is a Berlin-based author, novelist, playwright and Guardian Europe columnist
