Germany’s Green culture chief is Roth
NewsGermany’s new Minister of State for Culture will be Claudia Roth of the Green Party.
Roth, 61, has been vice president of the Bundestag since 2013.
Originally from Ulm, she worked at the state theatre in Dortmund before managing a rock band. She is committed ‘to the rights of women and homosexuals, against discrimination and hate speech.’
She might be quite good. And don’t forget that she is not backed up by an actual staffed Ministry of Culture. Cultural affairs are literally the affair of the autonomous Federal States. Roth, once she takes office, will provide guidance only.
WHo needs HER guidance?!?
All the people who got tired of classical music and want some ‘life’ entering the field and modernity, which is so much better than all of that old stuff.
This is an unparalleled indictment for the German cultural landscape. She is one of the most incompetent politicians in Germany, an incomparable air pump contaminated by woke ideology.
Really? I knew her in Brussels when she was an MEP. Always seemed to me to be on the ball, very intelligent, very committed to her work on the Civil Liberties Committee. But maybe it’s the Civil Liberties bit you object to?
Typical Mott and Bailey argument. No, she’s there to protect the arts, not to pursue a political agenda.
No, Zelda, we do NOT object to LIBERTY, we object to total incompetence and stupidity!
You are not obliged to vote for her party (neither did I) or to like her, but this is pure nonsense. Care to back up your verdict by some facts?
Hello cliff, meet the people!! We’re going over together.
1000% True Achim Mentzel. INCOMPETENCE is her trademark!!
Really???
So more concerned with rights, discrimination and hate crime than culture or the arts. Sounds a bit like our arts secretary.
Is it one or the other? You can believe in the arts OR in human rights? What a wonderful worldview…
It need not be a zero-sum commitment. She could well be committed to both.
Shouldn’t we all be???
But does they/them have any views on actual culture? Does it really matter nowadays?
I think she has. She has a (modest) background in theater and (Rock-) music management. And she goes to Bayreuth. Certainly not ideal as an advocate for classical music, but probably better than someone without any culture background.
By the way, great article in today’s FAZ about Merkel and music, written by Franz Welser-Möst.
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/mensch-merkel/angela-merkel-und-klassische-musik-die-schutzherrin-der-kunst-17650472.html
Increasingly, culture is seen not as a value in itself but as an instrument of social engineering. This instrumentalization is comparable with the instrumentalization that totalitarian regimes applied in the past.
Roth has recently published a kind of manifesto:
https://www.zeit.de/kultur/2021-09/kulturpolitik-gruene-corona-kuenstler-sozialpolitik-diversitaet-gleichberechtigung
This lady is obviously the wrong person for such a position – her ‘manifesto’ reveals her true colours:
“Das bedeutet für Kulturpolitik aber auch, in anderen Kategorien zu denken und die Trennung von Kultursparten ebenso zu überwinden wie die Trennung von innerer und auswärtiger Kulturpolitik. In Bezug auf Kulturorte gilt es, sich vom verengten Blick auf wenige renommierte Häuser zu verabschieden, Kunst und Kultur in ihrer ganzen Vielfalt und Diversität wertzuschätzen und die in der Förderung noch immer gängige Unterscheidung von E- und U-Kultur endlich hinter sich zu lassen.”
In other words: leave differences in genre; existing institutions like opera houses and orchestras where only classical music is performed, are narrow-minded – they should embrace everything that people think is music – it’s all the same. There is no diversity in classical music, so: away with it, and especially let’s cancel the idea that there is a difference between serious music and entertainment. So, everything is serious, highbrow music, or everything is entertainment. We can trust that the latter will be the wished result because the idea is to reflect what people think in society in a broader sense: it’s the numbers that count, not content. Follow the herd, that is.
Conclusion: Mrs Roth is a populist, disguised as leftwing social justice warrior. This in the nation that sees itself as a ‘Kulturnation’ and was one of the most important breeding grounds of classical music alltogether.
Reality check: what would composers like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, Mahler have thought of this manifesto? Had they always thought that their music should NOT be accessible to as many people as possible, or that their work is mere entertainment?
I couldn’t sum it up any better than you just did!
No. Pronouns are more important.
An example of this sick ideology that has also been discussed here on this blog: The Berlin State Ballet has taken Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker off the programme this year because, according to the commissioning director, it is a racist work because there is a Chinese and Oriental dance in it, which were so directly designated by the composer. One could no longer present such a work to the public in good conscience.
Hope I don’t meet her on a dark night!
In 2018 someone met her on a dark night in a deserted dead-end street in Eastern Berlin and was converted from hate speech into support of the green cause.
Secretary to Groucho Marx: “The Dean is furious. He’s waxing wroth.”
Groucho: “Is Roth out there too ? Tell him to wax the Dean for a while.”
Claudia Roth voted in 2019 against the Bundestag’s decision to classify the Israeli boycott movement BDS as anti-Semitic. While most members of het Green Party agreed with the motion, Claudia Roth refused to call BDS anti-Semitic in general.
She has also shown uncritical admiration for other, anti-Israel cultures, particularly Iran’s Mullah regime. She clapped high-five with mass murderer Alireza Sheikh Attar and met Holocaust denier Ali Larijani again and again, laughing cheerfully. When she visits Iran, she obediently puts on a headscarf. She then abandons her feminist beliefs, even though she is criticized for this by Iranian feminists, who accuse her of betrayal and lack of solidarity.
Claudia Roth is very close to the part of the German cultural sector in which hostility towards Israel is a good commonplace and even popular.
God help us.
Even God is powerless against human stupidity…
Hello,
in Germany the individual Laender ( States) hold cultural sovereignty, not the Federal government.Busybody Merkel has (had) the tendency to ignore constitutional rules and laws and had created that office to get ever more influence where it is not hers.
The Lord of the Flies can ever only destroy and she has indicated today that that was her intention :Macht kaputt, was Euch kaputt macht!
boomers have too much radiation in their system.