IT HAS PLAYED OUT – OR: THE TRUMPIZATION OF EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING

Spring 2025 doesn’t make it easy to believe that things will be better this year than in 2024, 2023, 2022 and or  in the coming years. On the contrary, the disastrous cultural policy decisions in Cologne and Berlin, where the budget debates not only resulted in cuts to important institutions and projects, but also in some cases in complete liquidation orders (see the Cologne Academy of the Arts of the World), bode ill for German cultural policy after last weekend’s depressing election.

Current events in the USA are rightly fuelling fears that even more massive cuts to social and cultural projects are looming here too and that regressive policies in general will make a mockery of the important progress made in recent years and decades. These fears are exacerbated by the speed with which many companies (such as Meta, Google, Target, McDonald’s) are prepared to discontinue their diversity and sustainability programmes.

But you don’t have to look that far to feel pessimistic; even in their own environment, more and more people are acting in a selfish, egocentric or even aggressive, careerist manner in the face of tougher economic conditions – probably because they always have been, but didn’t notice it in more relaxed economic times, but perhaps also because they finally feel liberated by the new circumstances and don’t have to hide it. You can definitely say that: Trump has given many – in my world of experience it is significantly always men – a carte blanche, which they gratefully accept.

The signs of this antisocial cultural climate have been apparent to me for some time in various work contexts. Unnecessary displays of power and bossiness, unpleasant hierarchical games, incomprehensible posturing, from which the structure of institutions and the workflow of projects generally suffer. This applies to Kafka-esque complexes such as universities as well as individual artistic personalities.

Which brings me to the specific reason for my column today: the case of the Institute for Pop Music at the Folkwang University of the Arts under the new direction of Jan St. Werner – and the fact that it’s a new institution.

In order to clarify the extent of the fall that this means for me personally due to my own biographical connection to the Mouse-on-Mars biotope, I need to expand a little.

It must have been at Popkomm. 1995, the music fair that always took place in Cologne (then still a world pop city) in August in the 90s, when I met Jan St. Werner for the first time together with his Mouse on Mars partner Andi Thoma for an interview in the backstage room of Cologne’s Gloria. The two had just released their second album “Iaora Tahiti” on the then popular Too Pure label, which, like their debut “Vulvaland”, delighted indie listeners primarily in England and Germany; America still needed something, but later the two ended up there on Thrill Jockey Records, an indie label that still guarantees quality today.

I remember this meeting very well (of which there is also a video recording in an issue of my multimedia fanzine Harakiri at the time), because every meeting with the two “mice” (as they were of course often dubbed) is remembered very well, they were and are non-stop corny spectacles by two very humorous people, virtually everything is taken ad absurdum with them, nothing is taken seriously. In a world in which loud macho artists (deliberately not gendered) often take themselves too seriously, I liked the fact that there were musicians here who ticked differently.

Especially as we all felt – this is the second reason why I’m going so far out on a limb here – that we belonged to a common (sub)culture (at least according to my reading of the encounters and the general socio-cultural contexts of those days). Conversations like this one in 1995 were not (only) about promoting an album, but about a dialogue with like-minded people about the social-artistic biotope and the community in which we had decided to live.

In the case of Mouse on Mars, their own imprint Sonig and a-musik, the epicenter of the experimental-electronic music scene in Cologne (which still operates today as Sonig Vertrieb and whose first home base at Brüsseler Platz 10A was not only a record store, but also housed the musicians’ flat-share of Marcus Schmickler, Jan Werner and a-musik owner Georg Odijk and initiated projects of the same name) still play a central role today.

I told David Bowie about all these personal overlaps and the insanely great releases that came out of them during an interview in a hotel on New York’s Lower East Side in the summer of 2002. At the end, he asked me to make him a list of books and records that he absolutely had to get. Some of the recommended titles were by Jan St. Werner. When Bowie came back to Germany a year or two later, I suggested a joint interview, which all the potential participants thought was great – but Bowie kept us on hold at the hotel for a day (because of a never-ending meeting with his New York record company) before we thankfully declined to spend the night there. Jan and I felt that the form of communication was totally inappropriate; culture per se should be the exchange of people at eye level and not the unculture of hierarchies.

Which brings us to 2024 and my actual column concern. This article has been urging me to publish it for some time – see the introduction. The fact that it’s happening now and is linked to Jan St. Werner is ultimately a (meaningful) coincidence, as it’s the one thing that really tipped the scales.

Since the pandemic, I’ve been increasingly struck by what we might call a mild insensitivity to the people around us among many others. It’s always primarily about our own sensitivities, decisions are not scrutinized to see whether they might have drastic consequences for others around us, and this often goes hand in hand with different social and economic conditions – yes, let’s be clear: privileged people very often tend to overlook the fact that others lead completely different lives, in which commitment is not just a nice add-on, but often of existential importance. This starts with a poor email response culture and unpunctuality, or often absence on agreed occasions, through to, let’s say, lopsided project constellations. Especially people in management positions (the word alone should make you shudder) and/or people with permanent positions who primarily deal with freelance project contributors often exhibit striking interpersonal deficits, negating the fact that the others are often sitting at the table with them under completely different conditions.

Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative is dissolving into hierarchy games – and not just where you expect it anyway, in the business world, but for a long time and very widely in cultural contexts that always think (and claim) to be different, but ultimately only, let’s say it like it is: displaying the same Trump mentality as the assholes we once competed against.

Jochen Distelmeyer aptly sang about all this in his 1999 song “Kommst du mit in den Alltag” (the lyrics are essentially by Michael Girke):

“(…) Do you remember under / The old bridge / We had sworn so firmly / To be different / From the people in their offices / Everything seemed so simple / But we didn’t know anything about all this / Yet (…) Sometimes when I lay my head / Very tenderly next to yours / And we look deep, very deep / Into each other’s eyes / Then I know what this is all about / And then I know / Where I belong / And I think: Down with the circumstances! (…)”

In the summer of 2014, I met with DJ, producer, music journalist and author Hans Nieswandt at Hallmackenreuther in Cologne to talk about a teaching position at the Institute for Pop Music at the Folkwang University in Bochum (of which he was artistic director from its foundation until 2019). I really appreciate Hans, in terms of content anyway, but also explicitly for the open, emotional way in which he meets everyone. His vision for the institute and the lecturers he selected inspired me – and so I was delighted to have been part of the institute’s colloquium since 2015.
Unfortunately, Hans’ contract ended in 2019 (which was convenient for him, as he had just moved to South Korea anyway), after which a professorship was to be advertised immediately, but the processes within the Folkwang University of the Arts are slow – and the pandemic was not going to speed them up. In the end, only a junior W1 professorship at the Institute for Pop Music was advertised with an application deadline of 31.8.2023, which was then filled from January 2025.

So the institute was “without a CEO” for a whole five years, to deliberately choose a term from the corporate world. Five years without an artistic director, i.e. a person (if not ten) who is at the institute full-time all week to look after the students.
Yes, let’s be clear: WTF!

At some point I’d had enough and initiated on Kaput a Survey of lecturers and professors: “Quo Vadis pop teaching?”, to empirically verify my perceived mood. I was not an isolated case with my gloomy perception of the situation.

Without the passionate work of all the teaching staff at the institute (NUMINOS, Anne Ohlen, Tanja Godlewsky, Richard Ojijo, Steffen Müller, Katharina Hausladen, Philipp Janzen, Henrik von Holtum, Verena Maas) and especially my colleague Gregor Schwellenbach, I think the ship would have run aground massively during this time, but he devoted himself to the students far beyond his actual (a point I don’t want to go into great detail, but most lecturers only have contracts limited to one semester with 2 to 5 hours, which are remunerated with just €41.64 / SWS (per semester hour per week for academic teaching assignments) and €149.74 / SWS per month (for artistic teaching assignments), whereby you have to finance your own travel to and from the Folkwang University of the Arts – you have to really want to do this to be able to work in a structure made up of administrative staff paid according to collective wage agreements: and (still) well-paid professors) to be paid so little.

At some point, there was finally some movement in the slow mills of Folkwang. However, no professorship was advertised but, as already mentioned, a so-called junior professorship.

Despite being overqualified, Gregor Schwellenbach applied for it and I really would have liked him to get it with all my heart. But I was also pleased to hear that Jan St. Werner ultimately got it, simply because a) I was generally very happy that an artistic director was finally coming back to the institute, and b) because of my, I think, very detailed appreciation of his work.

But then something happened that is symptomatic of many cultural structures out there: the new management in the person of Jan St. Werner completely negated the social aspect of such a position. At least that’s how it seemed to everyone involved in Bochum, because there was no dialogue between the end of August, when it was clear that Gregor Schwellenbach was not the first choice, and the beginning of January, when Jan St. Werner took up his new job as junior professor at the Institute for Pop Music at the Folkwang University of the Arts, although the teaching staff and students were not informed of this in an expected email introducing and positioning him as a person and artist, or even through personal contact, as could be done, but in a collective email from the administration.

So you could say that there was a lot to talk about when I met Jan St. Werner in Berlin at the end of January – after two brief meetings at the institute that didn’t really result in a conversation.

I have to admit that at the time of our meeting, it was already relatively clear to me that I no longer had any ambitions to continue working at this institute. Ultimately, this is less Jan St. Werner’s fault than that of the Kafka-esque Folkwang apparatus, which does not cultivate any feelings for its employees, as one might hope for in an artistic institution, especially since a large part of the staff are artists and take up and passionately carry out their teaching activities for very altruistic reasons.
But Jan St. Werner has played his part in stirring up frustration in me (and many others). Quite banal through his performed lack of interest in taking the task of leadership seriously as a mandate to seek direct contact with teachers and students. But through his completely opposite approach: Instead of first seeking dialog internally (defacto, to this day he has not sent a direct email to the teaching staff, let alone shared his phone number with them, as he should have done, but instead has let all communication go through the institute’s administration), he first gave interviews that were primarily about his vision for an institution that he didn’t even look at before applying. In this respect, you can imagine how great his interest is in treating this institution and the people who have been working and, in a way, temporarily living there fairly. He was like a bulldozer here – in the best Trump style (forgive me for the frequent use of the comparison, but unfortunately that’s how this posturing feels), he beat his “Let’s make Folkwang great again” policy into the world.

He, who willingly accepted the Holger Czukay Prize for Pop Music from the city of Cologne in 2020, coquettishly stated in an interview with WDR 5 (self-censoring his own artistic biography, which until recently had primarily taken place on the terrain of pop music): “My participation in pop music has so far been characterized by evasion, misunderstanding and complete rejection of the term”. Ha, yes.
It’s fine to reinterpret your own CV, it can happen to anyone, because what do I care about my music from yesterday? But this self-absorbed dismissal of the passionate work of his predecessors and the hopes and aspirations of the young people who have chosen this institution as their own does not paint a good human picture: “The moment I am given responsibility in such an institutional context, it is clear that there is a kind of crisis situation there,” he also said on WDR 5.

What I want to say is that I understand and respect when a new artistic director brings their own concept and wants to implement it, and that means that other artists are in demand for this. Teaching assignments are only temporary in nature (even if one would often wish for more consistency and appreciation as well as remuneration), as we all know who do them. But the sound makes the music, to put it in musical terms.

At our meeting, Jan St. Werner remarked that he would have preferred to find an empty institute (without current students and faculty). I really appreciate the honesty of this statement – even though I find it very, very harsh, as it represents a logic that I would not want to live in. You can talk to people as equals and treat them with the respect they deserve – and still make the decisions you have to make. Especially if you’re in an environment where other axioms should apply than, say, in the human resources environment of a DAX company. Not least because there are students who have enrolled at an institute with expectations, which has given them certain promises and guarantees.

The main criticism must therefore definitely be leveled at the Folkwang University of the Arts, which, I learned at my Berlin meeting, took until the beginning of December to send a contract to the new employee. Against this background, of course, many months of silence become just a few weeks of silence. Of course, the manner in which it was done doesn’t make it any better.

Anyway, the child has now fallen into the well, to quote my grandmother, who liked to use such seemingly trivial phrases. Because in this case, students fall into a black hole and have to see where their plans lead them – because in this specific case, they contradict their ambitions to establish a sound institute and deconstruct the Pop Institute.

As I said, I have no problem at all with a new artistic director having their own artistic agenda, but one should expect that intensive dialog is sought in order to offer a certain degree of continuity and not just a quick pass-through of the latest students.

For me, dialog and exchange are fundamental pillars of a world I want to live in.

The solution, I don’t know, but it would be worth a try to fill all decision-making positions with explicitly non-white, non-male (I deliberately don’t use the word “male” here) people under, say, 40. We older people have messed it up. It has to be said so harshly in view of a world that has not only been 50%/50% out of step for a long time, as many elections indicate, but has tipped drastically to the other side.
Or to say it clearly again at the end: the Trump mentality has unfortunately not “only” characterized the Trump side for a long time, it has crept into almost all social and unfortunately often also cultural contexts like a poisonous snake.

For me, subculture and community were and are not just any old terms, but represent places of togetherness and coming together at eye level, but unfortunately in many cases they are also just the playing field of ego ambitions and individual career biographies.

The Folkwang-St-Werner-Pop-Institut drama described here in far too much detail is just one – particularly serious – case of unfortunately too many in my professional environment. In difficult times, true character is revealed, as my grandmother used to say. How right she was, narcissism and egocentrism are far too often encountered where a human dialog at eye level is needed right now if we want to change the situation for the better. It’s not too late yet, but I’m beginning to lack a little faith that we will succeed, because there are many others and they are already starting where we never expected them to.

All photos are by Thomas Venker – taken at the Osorezan Bodaiji Temple on Mount Osore. The temple is located deep in the caldera of an active volcano – a place that is considered one of the gates to the underworld in Japanese mythology.

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This article is brought to you as part of the EM GUIDE project – an initiative dedicated to empowering independent music magazines and strengthen the underground music scene in Europe. Read more about the project at emgui.de

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.

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