You can listen to the panel discussion here (in English)

Red is the colour of love. But it is also the colour of the blood being shed today in wars across Europe and around the world. Where bombs explode. Where people die every day—in trenches and in tanks. In German tanks too. Since the end of the Cold War, Germany has consistently ranked among the world’s five largest arms exporters. But exporting is no longer enough. In light of a military allegedly hollowed out by years of austerity—according to the prevailing narrative—we are now told it is necessary to arm ourselves against an omnipotent enemy.

Until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the automobile lay at the heart of Germany’s economic power, and thus at the heart of its soul. Today, tanks, weapons systems, and debt-financed arms purchases have taken its place. War is constantly in our ears and before our eyes—around the clock. On talk shows and live broadcasts, through social media algorithms and video platforms, we are being trained in weapons technology and defence capabilities. Social spending is cut, a special fund of €100 billion is created, and military expenditure rises to five per cent of GDP. This has become the new normal.

But weapons demand to speak. History teaches us that accumulated military potential seeks release—in war. “The opposite of war,” media historian Friedrich Kittler said twenty years ago during a lecture in Crimea, “is not peace, but love.”

Is the German and European soul, now rapidly transforming itself into a military machine, still capable of love? Or are we heading inexorably towards catastrophe? Legitimated by the claim that the others started it—a justification the others, whether rightly or wrongly, also adopt as their own narrative. The relentlessness on both sides is part of the problem.

In the discussion series Die Erde ist rot, so oder so, five international authors and thinkers adopt a perspective from after the catastrophe. They ask what we can still change about our future and examine a present moment that could tip into war, barbarism, and fascism. They explore how the power of love—invoked in the spirit of Rosa Luxemburg, the patron saint of the Volksbühne—might help to create a political alternative: international, and red.

With:

• Boris Buden, philosopher from Berlin, author of Zone des Übergangs. Vom Ende des Postkommunismus
• Şeyda Kurt, author of von Radikale Zärtlichkeit and Hass
• Morana Miljanović, sailboat captain, human rights lawyer, researcher
• Srećko Horvat, author of The Radicality of Love
• Oxana Timofeeva, philosopher, member of the artist group Chto Delat
• Sebastian Kaiser, dramaturg, connected online

A series by Srećko Horvat and Sebastian Kaiser