I am dissatisfied with the overall situation

33 C-Prints, 40x40 cm, 2006-2007

"These policies will strike down the firefighters of Hamburg!", the speaker shouts into his microphone. I am not prepared for what happens next. To the wailing of a siren, around 600 uniformed firefighters drop to the floor as if they were dead. For several minutes, nothing moves, there's just the sound of the sirens, lifeless uniforms and among them a few press photographers that scurry about, taking pictures. Only one of them does not photograph. He is sitting on the sidewalk changing his film: That's me. When I have finally fiddled the film into the back of my new medium-format camera, the spectacle has passed. The firefighters are upright again, they regroup behind a banner carried in front and slowly start moving. Just about all of them are wearing their uniform, just about all of them have a whistle supplied by the union ver.di in their mouths, some of them are carrying placards. I catch a glimpse of the t-shirt that one of them is wearing beneath his uniform jacket. The print is a quote from a german movie: "I am dissatisfied with the overall situation". We slowly walk up Willy Brandt street, one of the firefighters keeps turning the crank of an age-old siren. I am lucky: As the parade arrives in front of the department of human resources of the Hamburg firefighters, the whole play is repeated. Again the signal "these policies will strike down the firefighters of Hamburg!", and again the uniformed men drop to the floor. This time, there is a fresh roll of film in my camera.

I had decided to photograph public demonstrations, and the experiences of this first demonstration that I visited destroyed every concept that I had prepared for the work. No encompassing shots from far away, no portraits of protesters at home or on the street. The photograph of the firefighter feigning death on the floor for me was a far better expression of what I had felt myself when I had been on a protest. The feeling of community, of working together towards a goal, at the same time the bitter aftertaste of being reduced to simple slogans. The insecurity of whether the stated goals might be acchieved. The question whether the action might be futile, even ridiculous, whether all those who stayed at home aren't right: that it's all of no use anyway. The doubts whether - even as a group - one is not powerless in the face of a state who has long channeled the once insurgent potential of a demonstration into ordered tracks, who creates corridors where protest is permitted or not, who sometimes suffocates any public perception of protest with a huge number of policemen. In the face of media who only seem to be interested in violent protest - and then ignore the concerns of any peaceful protesters. In the face of a society that has become numb from the everyday occurence of demonstrating masses and barely notices them.
But still: protesting seems to be in fashion, despite all disenchantment with politics, all assurances that "the people in charge" will "do as they please". One look into the newspaper will suffice to convince oneself that there can be no talk of a crisis of this form of political participation. Every week, there are three or four smaller or bigger protests, manifestations or vigils in Hamburg, Berlin has as much in a day. Something has changed since despite all resistance the Achtundsechziger entered history books, since the environmental activists of the eighties entered the german parliament - knitting and in sneakers - and in 2002 turned one of their constitutive claims into law: the abandonment of atomic energy. The Berlin Wall collapsed under the pressure of hundreds of thousands of peaceful protesters, the Soviet Union vanished and with it went an accusation that during the first 45 years of federal Germany had made it easy to push aside any criticism of German politics: That the women and men on the street were all revolutionists, who not only wanted to voice their criticism of politics but question the whole political system (which of course some did and still do) and lead the German people into a totalitarian communism.
Relieved of the burden of the cold war, the capitalist order now seems to expand without boundaries. The processes collected under the catchword "globalisation" bring us new fellow citizens and with them new themes of protest from the far reaches of earth. They link together the scattered members of different protest groups to new, larger movements, and it has long become common to travel to larger protest events such as the G8 summit. The war in Iraq 2003, the job market reforms known as "Hartz-Laws" since 2005 and the G8 summit in Heiligendamm 2007 have mobilised masses not seen in Germany since the "Monday-demonstrations" in 1989.
Or are demonstrations in a crisis after all? The opinion that no matter how long one keeps on protesting, "the people in charge" would do as they please, is not especially new among protesters. But while this (self-evident) realisation used to lead to higher aggression and stronger resistance, today it seems to lead to resignation and - aside from a few popular topics - to a weak mobilisation among the populace.

"Reih dich ein in die Arbeiter-Einheitsfront, weil auch du ein Arbeiter bist." (Get in line with the united front of the workers, as you too are a worker) The first thing I notice on getting out of Berlin's Frankfurter Tor subway station is an unusually high density of red flags, of hammers and sickles and stars, of portraits of grey men, long dead: Karl Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong. Then the music. Behind a big red banner at the front of the annual Liebknecht-Luxemburg-demonstration people are densely packed, singing old songs from the worker's movement. Songs I never thought I'd hear again outside of a history book. On the edge of the street there are street vendors selling red carnations for two Euros apiece. We start moving. Our trip takes us along Frankfurter Allee to the cemetary in Berlin-Friedrichsfelde. Some of the participators carry wreaths with big ribbons attached. There are flower vendors on the side of the street at all times. Eventually I realize that they are always the same people: Once the end of the protest group nears, they pack their things, run to the front and set their shop up again. Our trip is uneventful. We only stop once, when a remote-controlled firecracker bursts a few meters in front of us. After three or four hours we finally arrive at the socialist's memorial on the Friedrichsfelde cemetary. Buried in a circle around the central memorial stone lie Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Ernst Thälmann, Walter Ulbricht and others. A throng of people has formed around them. Most of those attendent have brought red carnations or bought them on the way. One after the other, they lay the flowers down on the tombstones. Some of the graves - especially those of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht - are barely visible beneath the masses of flowers. Others - that of Walter Ulbricht, for example - have been lavished with less attention. Only a few scattered flowers are on their stones. Everything seems a bit like a posthumous popularity contest.

Another thing has changed. The collapse of the Eastern Bloc has also led to the fact that the political system will no longer serve as a scapegoat. One can no longer claim that in socialism, everything is better. There seems to be no arguing the omnipotence of capitalism. Even the last countries labelled as socialist, like the People's Republic of China, succumb to the might of the market. And once there is no alternative to the existing political system, one's own action is required: One has to try to get the best possible outcome out of the existing system. If something goes wrong in Germany, there is no other side to point to where everything is supposedly better - or worse - depending on which side one belongs to.
A growing number of aspects of public life is being put into private hands. Energy supply has been privatised in all of Germany, in some states and municipalities this has also affected water supply, hospitals, thrash removal. The moment the government gives away control of these sectors, however, the country loses its role as a contact person for the people and gets replaced by a company that will not react to protests or other forms of expression of opinion, but only to purchase decisions and their potential alteration. It is unlikely enough that the government will react to a demonstration, a company will only move if pressure from the market forces it to do so.
This change in the political decision-making processes has a good and a bad side. On one side, people have to take more responsibility for the development of their country, and many are doing so - the growing market share of organic food is evidence of this change of mind and of the implementation of political demands not through protest but through changes in one's own way of life.
On the other side, a lot of responsibility is put into the hands of companies that can't be held responsible for their actions as easy as the state. The public relations departments of those companies often have budgets that state-owned offices can only dream about, and they use these funds to take an influence on public opinion. The risk that has to be faced is that important political decisions - such as the use of nuclear power in energy production or of genetical engineering in food production - are in a permanent state of public decision, where the market share is seen as a share of votes, in a poll that gives well-situated citizens more rights than those who are poor.

"This station is closed until the rightist extremist are out of the city". Anyone who wants to leave Dresden using public transport on the evening of 13th February 2007 doesn't stand a chance, all discussions with the policemen positioned at the entrances are pointless. Until the extemists are out of the city, nobody - with the exception of journalists and a single confused Asian tourist - is allowed to enter the deserted Dresden central station. The train to Leipzig that I take on my journey home after photographing the memorial events to the Dresden bombing in the last days of World War II - called "Bomb-Holocaust" by the rightist extremists - is just as empty. I am fine with that, after eight hours of rain, clamour and clashes between police and protesters I can use a little quiet. At Dresden-Neustadt station a young man of about 30 years enters my compartment, and we start talking soon afterwards. He inquires about what led me to Dresden. I tell him that I photographed the right-wing demonstration. He is immediately interested. Was the protest a success? Did a lot of people turn out? He says he wanted to take part himself, but a table-tennis competition kept him from doing so. Discussing the moral aspects of participating in a protest such as this one leads nowhere, the other travellers in the compartment - a female student and a woman of about 40 - soon lead our conversation to an article in "Vanity Fair", with Michel Friedman writing on the National-Democratic Party, my co-travellers say he is "very biassed". Soon, we are no longer discussing the events in Dresden, but the utility or futility of studying. My young conversational partner thinks it's nonsense - after all he is earning his own living aged 20+, while I still depend on my parents.

Examinations of the German educational system (the PISA studies for example) have been criticising the low permeability from bottom to top and the bad educational opportunities for socially disadvantaged people or people of immigrant origin. But instead of correcting this, state after state introduces tuition fees that repel especially these groups of people. While there are financing opportunities for this, nobody likes to begin his working career with a debt of several tens of thousands of Euros. Once one has accumulated such a debt, it needs to be repaid, which leads to less interest in programmes that are financially less attractive but at the same time more important for culture and democracy, namely art and humanistic programmes. School time in the Gymnasium is being reduced from thirteen to twelve years, and the Diplom programmes at the universities are reformed to becom Bachelor and Master programmes. All these changes leave less time for general education, if the vocational education should remain at the same level.
People are surprised that a growing number of people get attached to radical organisations and groups, at the same time the education of young people is hemmed with additional obstacles. Education time is shortened and adjusted to the needs of the job market, at the same time the general education that is so important for a functioning democracy is being neglected. Anyone who wants to have a functional, vital democracy must take thorough care for a sound political and social education of the populace, must see this education as the main goal of education, period. As long as we fail in making citizens aware of their own responsibilities in democracy, as long as we do not give them the necessary tools to do so, the dialogue between democratic leadership and populace will stay at a low level, and we risk the total alienation of the people from their government.