What Are We Actually Defending?

The threat to art and culture—particularly the performing arts—in North Rhine-Westphalia and elsewhere is real. The protest against this threat is both necessary and justified. But the danger extends far beyond mere budget cuts.

An essay by Klaus Dilger

150 people gathered in front of the state parliament in Düsseldorf. They are demonstrating against the proposed cuts to cultural funding in NRW. Almost all of them are directly affected: artists, cultural workers, independent organisations. The rest of society? Absent. As so often.

This scene is symptomatic of a dangerous diagnosis: art—and the arts scene—no longer seems to reach the public consciousness.
This marginalisation does not come from the outside alone. The art world itself bears responsibility. For too long, it has settled into the logic of funding mechanisms, institutional self-optimisation, and the administration of its own relevance.

This kind of „art“ has, in many places, become a language that functions only within its own milieu—self-referential, obscure, assertive, insulated. Many citizens no longer know what this “art” is supposed to be for. They do not encounter it in their everyday lives—not as participation, not as friction, not as reflection. They do not experience it as art, but as something abstract, elitist—or at best, charming.

The result: a dangerous loss of significance. The pandemic made this all too clear. Care workers, cashiers, delivery drivers were declared “systemically relevant”. Artists were not.
Not because they are less important, but because they too rarely appear as socially essential—because they fail to intervene, circulate within their own bubble, and orient themselves too often towards grant applications rather than inner necessity.

What can art do when it touches us?

The question arises anew—more urgently than ever—for individuals and for society.

The answer is tangible.
A teenager who feels his body for the first time in a dance project.
A refugee processing his story through documentary film.
An elderly woman laughing at the theatre for the first time in years.
A schoolchild in a museum discovering that their imagination matters.

A teenage boy gaining self-confidence in a street dance workshop.
A Year 9 girl who overcomes her stutter through a theatre project.
A retired steelworker writing poems about his childhood in a literary circle.
A woman with PTSD painting again for the first time in art therapy.

A class discussing racism in a hip-hop project—and writing lyrics together.
A trans youth expressing their identity through drag performance.
A young father attending a participatory opera with his child—and crying for the first time.
A carer feeling freedom again in an acting course.

A prison inmate developing a play about guilt and responsibility with others.
An older man visualising memories in a photography project for his dementia group.
A blind woman experiencing space through other senses in a dance piece.
A school refuser re-engaging with learning through a comic workshop.
A young activist transforming her rage into political language through documentary film.

A Roma family telling their village’s life through a mobile stage.
A Muslim teenager speaking uninterrupted for the first time at a poetry slam.
A lonely pensioner exhibiting his collages in a neighbourhood gallery—and being seen.
A grandchild of war, finally able to ask questions about his grandfather through writing.
A shared house of people with intellectual disabilities discovering agency through inclusive circus.

A queer teenager confronting fear through performance art.
A refugee boy building a paper theatre to explain his homeland.
A nurse dancing her exhaustion in a community workshop.
A single mother finding strength in a feminist theatre project.
A Ukrainian reflecting on loss through a wordless video installation.
An Israeli and a Palestinian connecting through a dance duet.

A Million more such sentences could follow…

Art is experience. Encounter. Opening.
It creates meaning where systems fail.
And it carries a promise:
That we, as a society, can be more than what we currently are.

Why Art Must Not Be a Footnote in the Security Debate

In the summer of 2025, new truths are being asserted.
Defence is everything. Culture, almost nothing.
The German federal government is following NATO’s new trajectory, planning to raise its military expenditure from just under 2% to 5% of GDP—roughly €215 billion annually. Germany would then become the world’s fourth largest military spender, after the USA, China, and Russia. Almost unquestioned by the public, the Ministry of Defence is quietly becoming the republic’s financial power centre.

Though the budgets may not be directly linked, this debt-financed rearmament permeates every other area. Each year, €130 billion in additional funds must be found.
Local governments are overwhelmed, and so-called “voluntary” expenditures—like arts and culture—are the first to be cut.
The investment backlog of recent decades collides with the long tail of the pandemic and the multiple crises of our age. In this climate, culture is the first casualty—not because it is especially costly, but because it can be cut most easily and with the least public resistance.
Cultural funding is frozen, slashed, outsourced. Theatres, dance houses, community centres, youth projects, and freelance artists come under pressure.
While the military gears up, cultural infrastructure is being quietly dismantled—silently, routinely, almost bureaucratically.

But this is more than just a matter of fiscal policy.
It is a signal. A shift in priorities.
A dangerous one.

PINA-BAUSCH-AUF-DEM-GEBIRGE HAT MAN EIN GESCHREI GEHÖRT©-TANZweb.org

Militarisation + Shift to the Right = Toxic Alliance

Historically, military might has often served as the foundation of national greatness—particularly in authoritarian and far-right ideologies.
Today, as military budgets in Europe skyrocket and far-right parties such as AfD (Germany), RN (France), FdI (Italy), PVV (Netherlands), PiS (Poland), and Fidesz (Hungary) gain ground—while national sovereignty is placed above European cooperation—we are witnessing no accident, but a perilous feedback loop.

What unites these far-right movements is their rejection of liberal democracy—and their deep hostility toward critical art.

This can be observed globally. Since his re-election in January 2025, Donald Trump governs the United States with an even more aggressive anti-cultural agenda.
Even in his first term, he sought to eliminate federal arts funding, denouncing critical art as “woke propaganda” and attempting to ideologically police cultural institutions.
Now, his administration is deliberately using public funds to defund, penalise, or silence unwelcome artistic voices. Institutions that promote diversity, memory culture, or queer perspectives face immense political pressure.

The pattern is clear:
Where the arts fall silent, others fill the void—with simpler, identity-driven, exclusionary imagery.
Culture is no longer understood as a pluralistic space of possibility, but as a backdrop to national myth-making.
“Leading culture” replaces multiplicity.
“Homeland art” displaces ambiguity.

In this context, the weakening of the free arts is not collateral damage.
It is a political aim.
Because where art remains open, authoritarian answers are harder to sell.

This is precisely why culture must now organise dissent—not as party politics, but as the democratic background noise: sensitive, contentious, incorruptible.

Democracy Without Resonant Spaces

Culture is not decoration.
Not the icing on the welfare-state cake.
It is a cornerstone of democracy.

In art, society engages with itself—in contradictions, questions, memories, utopias.
It creates spaces for ambiguity in a political language prone to simplification.
It allows for dissent without violence.
It generates meaning long before statistics can capture it.

What remains of democracy when its stages fall silent?
When there is no place left to reflect, to confront, to unsettle—beyond approval or rejection?

Art is not the solution to every problem.
But it is the space in which problems become visible, tangible, negotiable.

Yet it is precisely now that art is being pushed to the margins.
Because it does not “help quickly”.
Because it does not “mediate”.
Because it does not “deter”.
Instead, it questions, hesitates, disturbs.
Sometimes it offers no answers.
And therein lies its power.

JEWROPE_bodytalk_Yoshiko Waki©TANZweb.org

The Glaring Absence: Rearmament Without Resistance

That the arts remain largely silent on rearmament is symptomatic of their self-disempowerment.

Across Germany, artists are protesting—against cuts, closures, erasure.
But few are protesting against the trillion-euro rearmament plans.
Against the dismantling of cultural public space in favour of military strength.
Against the reduction of cultural policy to a location-marketing tool.

Where is the artistic outcry against this transformation into a security society?
Against the illusion that freedom can be secured by weapons—rather than through trust, education, participation, and culture?
Where is the utopian counter-image to defence through force?

Instead: resignation.
Fighting for budgets, not for meaning.
For pay scales, not for open space.
For applications, not for visibility.

Yet this is precisely where resistance is needed.
Public discourse is increasingly shaped by a new consensus: rearmament is inevitable.
Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine is presented as the final and indisputable justification—for a new military reality, for gargantuan defence budgets, for a “war-readiness” that seeps even into everyday language.

But where is the questioning?
The critical distance?
The artistic counter-voice to the logic of weaponry?

Instead: silence.
Out of fear of seeming naïve?
Out of fear of being mistaken for the wrong side?
Out of fear of being misunderstood—in a time when differentiation is harder to communicate than slogans?

But those who do not ask, lose.
And art that no longer dares to dissent—even against dominant narratives—loses its relevance, or has already lost it.

A Radical Return to Cultural Responsibility

What, exactly, are we defending—if we abolish the very conditions under which democracy remains alive?
If we sacrifice the spaces where difference, critique, and utopia can be explored?
If we believe a country can survive without questioning itself?

Culture must not only speak when its own funding is at stake.
It must grow louder.
Bolder.
More uncomfortable.

Because the greatest threat to democracy does not come from the outside alone.
It comes from within:
Through indifference.
Through oversimplification.
Through the loss of cultural imagination.

If art does not contradict, does not intervene, does not envision other realities—
then the theatres may still stand.
But no one will be listening anymore.

JEWROPE_bodytalk_Yoshiko Waki©TANZweb.org