Strong pro-Israel consensus among political leaders has led to conflict with Berlin’s diverse cultural sector and a fraught debate over antisemitism
The Oyoun cultural centre in Berlin-Neukölln is losing its €1m a year funding after it made statements on Gaza. Photograph: Steffen Roth/The Guardian
Yet when it came, the report commissioned by the Berlin senate – the authority responsible for cultural policy in the German capital – was clear: “No antisemitic activity on behalf of Oyoun is identifiable,” it concluded. It was a finding that made the senate’s next move particularly surprising: despite the report’s conclusion, it announced it would be withdrawing the centre’s funding of roughly €1m a year.
“We are in Germany, the country that practically annihilated Judaism in Europe,” said Karin Prien, a politician for the centre-right Christian Democratic Union . “Eighty years on from the liberation of Auschwitz, we still bear a special responsibility to stand up against antisemitism.”That historic duty also obliged her country to confront antisemitic attitudes in supposedly progressive circles, said Prien.
Asked about the row at the Berlinale, Prien said that some of the comments made during the festival’s awards ceremony were “definitely antisemitic”, singling out the use of the term “apartheid”: “Anyone who defames the entire state of Israel, which is a democratic state, as an apartheid state is making an antisemitic statement,” she said.
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