German minister: We will not stop listening to Tchaikovsky and reading Chekhov

Germany’s culture minister Claudia Roth spoke at last night’s Ukraine fundraising concert in Berlin.

Among other things the Green politician said: ‘Music is the most effective, the most radical contradiction to war…

‘We must contradict this deadly, this unbounded madness, as loudly and as audibly as humanly possible. Precisely because we cannot stop the aggressor, because we cannot stop Putin, because we have no means of ending this criminal war in Ukraine right now, we need these widely audible signs of solidarity with the Ukrainians…

But: ‘We will not stop listening to Tchaikovsky and reading Chekhov. I don’t want to imagine a world without Russian culture, without Ukrainian culture, without our culture and therefore I oppose anyone who tries to instrumentalize or boycott culture. It’s the culture that makes us human.’