The unmastered past: Activist & filmmakers bring German colonialism into the present with Café Togo

Interview with Abdel Amine Mohammed, Musquiqui Chihying & Gregor Kasper

November 2019

The film shows Amine taking groups around the so-called Afrikanisches Viertel (African Quarter) of Berlin and telling them stories of the colonialists behind the street names. Was this done purely for the film or is this part of his activism?

Musquiqui Chihying & Gregor Kasper: Although some people thought these scenes are performed just for the film, because Café Togo uses different layers of reality and questions the boundaries between fact and fiction, these situations are not staged. They're documenting the daily work of Amine, showing his personal perspective, but also taking these activities as an example in a broader process of disputing the colonial traces and continuities in the public sphere.

Abdel Amine Mohammed: The tour is an integrative part of an overall discourse strategy designed to destabilize the way the German colonial narrative in the multicultural metropolis of Berlin is being told and thought about in schools, universities and in the civil society over time. This is on the one hand, an attempt to deconstruct the established narratives about and around the German colonial past. On the other hand the communities (a group of NGOs from both Black and PoC communities and their allies) around this aim to reclaim and launch their own narrative to produce a different canon of knowledge, in an almost old-fashioned style: knowledge creation with a touch of epistemic disobedience, by loading the everyday life with colonial references that undermine what one believes to know, that is, the master narratives. And of course this is particularly good in the city, with regard to street names with colonial connotations. Once you've heard that, you will not forget it.

"The tour is an integrative part of an overall discourse strategy designed to destabilize the way the German colonial narrative in the multicultural metropolis of Berlin is being told."

What motivated the making of this film and what did you hope it would achieve?

Musquiqui Chihying: After the lifting of martial law in 1987, "transitional justice" and "decolonisation" have been important tasks for constructing a new democratic society and improving social inequalities in Taiwan. However, until today, the importance of reconsidering the problematic street names still hasn't attracted comprehensive attention from the whole society. Therefore, the renaming streets movement in Berlin's Wedding district is especially meaningful for me, not only as a learning process, but also a chance to develop an artistic practice that can be used to rethink the circumstances in Taiwan.

Gregor Kasper: For me - as a white socialized person - one main intention was to create a setting where a white audience cannot only connect at intellectual levels to these issues but especially at emotional ones too. Without this part the (self-)reflections won't go deep enough to change still ongoing colonial narratives and structural racism in the society.

Also, by asking Amine to contribute with a fictional story and changing his "medium of action", we intended to explore what possibilities, views and visions can be extended through this added method. What can be put across, when both fields come together, when you combine art and activism?

Did Amine approach Gregor and Chih, or did you all collaborate together from the start?

Musquiqui Chihying: At the very beginning, back in 2014, it was a seminar given by my teacher Kristina Leko from the Berlin University of the Arts that led me to explore the colonial history in the Wedding district in Berlin. The seminar was aiming to help students to realise their artistic practice in public spaces, with all kind of possibilities and mediums. It didn't take long for me to decide to engage in the renaming streets movement in Wedding, since I can easily link this topic to my own interest. To understand the historical background more, I joined the street lecture organised by Berlin Postkolonial e.V., an NGO that concentrates on de-colonial dialogue, and this was where I met Amine. Amine's presentation was very clear and straight to the point, and simultaneously, I could also grasp his humour. I think this is important for constructing filmic language.

Our research project "Violence Elsewhere" explores Germany’s unique relationship to violence after 1945. What does that mean to you and do you see it manifesting in your film?

Abdel Amine Mohammed: During the tours in Berlin my experience with participants is that, I realize how this is heavily charged with identity politics for many Germans born and bred here. In this sense, to be a good German requires a reflective stance in regard to Germany’s history up from the 1930s to 1940s and often in a highly ritualized way, which is not a value judgment. This has nowadays become en vogue. But once I elaborate on the details and “lecture” them about the “hidden stories” behind German colonial past, there remains not just an intellectual curiosity in mind, like to say, ‘wow, that is interesting', but often an identitarian reflex. The preoccupation/engagement with the Nazi past is often provided with a moral imperative: to be a good German means to have undergone this and in the long run cultivate a constant engagement with this. But when I bring up the argument that, you cannot understand the Nazi regime while disconnecting it from its colonial roots, the whole thing is no more just an intellectual challenge, but a moral accusation.

In the '90s as I just migrated to Germany, I once met a woman on the S-Bahn in Berlin. From the book title she was holding, I could tell she speaks French. We got in a casual conversation. Immediately after she asked me about my “origins”. She used colonial metrics (are you from one of our former colonies?) as a “tool” to geographically locate me. When I disagreed by arguing that this is a silly way of reading a person, her answer was even more baffling: she brandished the French way of remembering colonialism: the French colonial past is understood in its full scope as a “mission civilisatrice en outr-mer” – an attempt to bring civilization to the non civilized. She emphasized even more by arguing that colonialism is not only negative, as many people tend to put it: it has its own positive sides, which need emphasis. Today I understand better how deep this is ingrained in social mindset, when French former head of state Nicolas Sarkozy on a state visit in Dakar (Senegal) holds the same narrative, by characterizing Africans being outside of history and progress.

Musquiqui Chihying: The academic training in Germany was the main reason that German history became an important element of my artistic practice. Before that, the political situation in East Asia occupied most of my attention since it's where I grew up. Now, as a person who lives in the third space, and keeps traveling between different areas, I found it very interesting to compare, analyse and relink diverse perspectives, which also helps me to construct my own understanding towards art and creativity.

Gregor Kasper: Recently I heard a song from the German band "Die Goldenen Zitronen" ("The Golden Lemons") about the protests around the G20 summit in Hamburg 2017 - in "Die alte Kaufmannsstadt Juli 2017" ("The Old Tradesman Town July 2017") they got to the point: “While the resident of the better neighbourhood/Who in complete despair informed the television cameras/That she didn’t know and couldn’t understand/Where all this hatred came from/Doesn’t her bewilderment show/To what extent her everyday life/Appears to have been spared from any kind of violence?/And does the bewilderment not show/That this state of idyll is perhaps only possible/Because the present violence has been outsourced elsewhere?”

So for the majority society, a lot of violence is made invisible by outsourcing it to the areas and people of the Global South. Regarding our film, the question is: how can you now reconnect to this violence in order to create an awareness, to see a reason for a need of change. In deconstructing the colonial histories behind the problematic street names, and thus making this still active violence in front of you visible and tangible, we see a productive way of tackling this challenge.

"You cannot understand the Nazi regime while disconnecting it from its colonial roots."

The film is usually shown as an installation, with 3 screens showing the 3 strands of the story. Why was this choice made and what effect does it have on viewers?

Musquiqui Chihying & Gregor Kasper: We are interested in exploring moving images with different formats, therefore we had already decided this film will not be a one-channel black box cinema setting from the beginning. However, actually most of the time we were thinking about a two-channel installation, which can display the interview with Amine in one screen, and a fictional story in another. The three-channel proposal came out while we were editing and post producing the film. We realised it would be much more potent if we mix the documentary and fictional parts in the two channels to catch up the interweaved times and histories better, and put a third one in the centre with the spoken and written words of Amine. So that they become not only subtitles, but gaining more significance. Particularly in Germany it is not common, and not often recognized, that a Black perspective is the one that matters, especially when it's about "German" history and politics.

Some of the descriptions of the film (online) refer to Amine working towards "a multidimensional politics of memory" - what would this look like and do you think it is particularly difficult in the German context?

Abdel Amine Mohammed: The concept is borrowed from Michael Rothberg, who holds Multidirectional Memory to be an attempt to bring together the very much-elaborated field of Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies in a comparative and interdisciplinary approach. He demonstrates how the Holocaust has, in the Post-War era, enabled the articulation of other histories of victimization at the same time it has been declared "unique" amongst many other crimes against humanity over time. His thesis holds the argument that, because nations are no longer conceptualized as ethnic unities, the existence of only one collective memory of a society seems difficult. His thesis addresses the question “why does a Holocaust Memorial Museum exist on the National Mall of Washington, but none which reminds of slavery?” By formulating the question in this way and consequently dominating the discourse with it, Rothberg starts his critique by stating that such a debate follows a zero-sum-logic. He sees the public space – in which collective memories meet – as a rare resource, in which it has to be fought for pre-eminence.

Dealing with alternative narratives as an activist I am aware that this means the publication of excluded memories from mainstream media audience and state-owned epistemic spheres. The experience I have so far is that politicians and state institutions publicize claims for apology and repair in official public commemorations created for reconciliation, which demands scrutiny as how social movements construct and use memory, and how the politics of memory shape cultural meaning-making in movements in a multicultural society.

I see the anti-colonial tours we engage in as a juxtaposition of singularity versus continuity and a diversity of commemoration. They are a blunt answer to the belief, that holds true, that to be a good German forcibly means to nourish an unequivocal devotion to the singularity thesis, which holds that one has understood the depth of the violations and atrocities of German Holocaust against the Jewish population during Hitler’s rise. Berlin in particular offers in that respect an invitation to re-read everyday encounters with many of its “hidden aspects” and things that surround us, which offers a unique opportunity to discover how multi-layered history is here.

I will conclude with the recent case of Gerson Liebl, the grandchild of Dr. Friedrich Karl Georg Liebl (1880 – 1947; Regierungsarzt – Government doctor), who keeps reminding the German state how effective and present the colonial past that still accompanies us is.

As Aimé Césaire best puts it in Discourse on Colonialism: “A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.” It is about time that the Western World, especially Germany, should seriously start thinking about dealing with their colonial past in a respectful and decent manner.

All photos and illustrations in this article were kindly provided by Musquiqui Chihying & Gregor Kasper.