Drawing the Line

Beschreibung

Using the example of the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, the Bucerius Lecture by Martin Köttering, delivered on 27 October 2025 at the University of Haifa as part of a DAAD-funded delegation visit to Israel, goes right to the heart of one of the central questions of our time: the tension between academic independence on the one hand, and societal expectations and political demands on the other. The starting point is the controversy surrounding documenta fifteen, which has profoundly shaken the German art and university landscape. The discourse on antisemitism, the culture of remembrance, and postcolonial perspectives revealed how strongly the demand for “red lines” in art and academia affects our understanding of democracy, plurality, and social cohesion. The lecture advocates for a stance that withstands ambiguity, opens up spaces for dialogue, and understands freedom not as an arbitrary commodity, but as a responsible practice. In a time of increasing polarization, it becomes clear that universities and arts institutions can only fulfill their mission through critical reflection, trust, and openness: to take responsibility for the present while simultaneously being places of unconditional freedom. In his afterword, written in March 2026, Natan Sznaider commends the Bucerius Lecture as a gesture of friendship as well as an appeal to uphold exchange and dialogue “in dark times,” and underscores the demand it articulates for a “conditional unconditionality” of academic teaching as a sine qua non—not only for the German university system.

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