This is one of the most discussed cultural reports in recent months: A concert in an alternatively managed brasserie in Bern was canceled because of complaints from the audience. A Swiss band called Lauwarm was on stage. The five musicians played reggae, two of them wore their hair in the form of dreadlocks. That’s why some viewers felt “uncomfortable” with what was being offered, the organizers later justified their decision. Because reggae is the music of indigenous Jamaicans, and when white people use reggae, it is a case of “cultural appropriation” – that is, members of a dominant culture appropriating creative achievements of the oppressed, formerly enslaved or otherwise marginalized cultures without the right to do so.
As early as March, a musician in Hanover was invited to a concert by the Fridays for Future movement – she didn’t even play reggae, but had styled her hair into dreadlocks like her lukewarm colleagues. After all, the climate activists offered her beforehand that she could perform if she went to the hairdresser first. And in late August, the debate about cultural appropriation exploded
in Germany once again, when a film entitled “The Young Chief Winnetou” was released in the cinemas and the Ravensburger publishing house took a corresponding children’s book out of the program after protests by activists. This almost grew into a state affair, the “Bild” newspaper dealt with the debate on its front page, the Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU) personally took care of the matter: “Winnetou and Old Shatterhand were idols for entire generations. “It is wrong that book publishers and broadcasters ban Winnetou out of fear of criticism,” he wrote on Twitter.
Cultural appropriation was one of the most popular hot topics of the year – because it polarizes so beautifully and because it shows the essential cultural-political debates of the present as if under a magnifying glass. On one side is a hypersensitive left that believes it must protect marginalized cultures from exploitation by mainstream society. On the other hand, there is an equally hypersensitive conservatism that believes that any criticism of existing cultural conditions and social behavior ultimately only amounts to an ominous “cancel culture” in which everything is to be forbidden that people who consider moral
consider keeping, just does not fit.
If you approach the subject with a little more composure, you can see that both sides are right and wrong. Of course, there is a long history of cultural appropriation, particularly in the United States, where African American culture has been exploited by white people who afterwards came out as the real pioneers. Was Benny Goodman really the inventor of swing and Elvis Presley the king of rock ‘n’ roll? Black artists and theorists have rightly insisted that corrupt historiography needs to be corrected.
On the other hand, going back to the Swiss example: is reggae really an “indigenous” culture? Or is it not itself the product of many appropriations from a wide variety of cultures? In general, a culture without appropriations is inconceivable at all – this is the blind spot that weighs on the left position in the debates, as well as the undeniable tendency to call for bans all too quickly. Instead of condemning appropriations in general, it would be more fruitful to consider what distinguishes good appropriations from bad appropriations and how this topic can be dealt with more sensitively in the future. At the end of the year, after the smoke from most of the shitstorms has cleared, one can at least get the impression that the topic is now being dealt with in a more thoughtful and productive manner.
Our author Jens Balzer has published the book “Ethics of Appropriation” (Matthes & Seitz, 10 euros) on the subject.