Dear Friends of the Arts,

You are reading the first issue of the new Akademie-Brief (Academy Letter), which will appear every two months. It replaces both the Journal der Künste, previously published twice a year, and the Leporello, which announced the Akademie’s programme six times a year. Merging discourse and calendar is a response to the current financial constraints. But this step is about more than just saving resources.

With this new format – both a letter and a briefing – we aim to regain room to manoeuvre. Coupled with the relaunch of our website and a new newsletter, it will give the Akademie der Künste a voice that can intervene regularly and pointedly in current debates. Each issue will be devoted to a theme that is artistically, socially and culturally pressing.

The first issue asks about the so-called culture war. The question mark in the title signals our intention not to repeat slogans but to examine what is at stake when the term is invoked. The historical Kulturkampf of the 19th century revolved around the struggle for power between state and church. Today, the term denotes something else: the polarisation of modern societies around identities, ways of life and forms of belonging. Disagreement is no longer understood as a search for better arguments but as a battle for cultural hegemony. This has always been the case: “Whoever controls language, controls the conflict.” Terms such as “cancel culture”, “speech ban” and “gender diktat” shift perceptions the moment they are uttered. They divide members of the public into camps that no longer seek to persuade one another but only to defeat.

In Germany, we are witnessing political actors attempting to impose language bans – prohibiting gender-inclusive language in their own ministries and exerting pressure on dependent cultural institutions to follow suit. In the United States, under the Trump administration, the measures go further, with the circulation of lists of “banned words”, whose use can trigger the withdrawal of public funding. Language itself is becoming a battlefield. The danger to democracy is obvious: where words are forbidden and speech stigmatised, the space for public discourse contracts. The existence of a diversity of voices and experiences is no longer perceived as enrichment but as a threat.

Even more starkly, the culture war reveals itself in the realm of images. In his contribution to this issue, Wolfgang Ullrich analyses the “culture war of images”, showing how memes under Trump and the MAGA movement have become the dominant medium of politics. He recalls a line frequently quoted by Elon Musk: “Who controls the memes, controls the universe.” For Ullrich, this epitomises a new logic: political decisions today often look like memes come to life – garish, aggressive and punchline-driven. The diagnosis is unambiguous: “The images seem to call forth the violence they depict.” When a detention camp for migrants in Florida is cynically named “Alligator Alcatraz” and promoted through memes, dehumanising policy is transformed into entertainment spectacle. Alligator-induced laughter masks the reality of human disenfranchisement.

Faced with this situation, the following questions arise: Should one engage in the culture war or refuse its terms altogether? Should the battle be fought with the same weapons – or should one resist the very logic of slogans and memes? What can art achieve in such a context?

The arts possess a unique resource: they can sustain ambivalence, cultivate ambiguity and allow for multiplicity. In her conversation with us, Akademie member Monika Rinck shows how poetry can resist the reductive force of culture-war rhetoric: through linguistic precision, the unmasking of hidden motives and an insistence on sustaining difference where others know only polarisation. This, perhaps, is the true counter-power to the logic of the culture war: the ability to make other voices audible and other images visible.

That the Akademie der Künste must take a stand in this climate goes without saying. But taking a stand does not mean adopting the combative metaphors of the other side. It means defending the freedom of the arts – and, with it, their capacity to propose an alternative: difference instead of uniformity, complexity instead of coarsening, ambiguity instead of slogans. This freedom, as art historian Heinrich Klotz once put it, is rooted in the very difference between art and life: “For life does not simply submit to art, nor is art suited to be mere life; it is a difference from life. It is fiction, invention, poetry.”

The question “Culture Wars?” is therefore more than a title. It is an invitation to ask how, through language, images and the arts, we might create spaces in which society can renew itself through imagination.

Kind regards,
Manos Tsangaris
President of the Akademie der Künste

Anh-Linh Ngo
Vice-President

#1 Re: Culture Wars?