Dictatorship and Democracy @ Goethe-Institut

What is art? It is leaving beauty and pleasure behind and recognising the entity as part of everyday life. The analysis is Leo Tolstoy’s and one wonders whether Russia’s exile could imagine anything creative about the treachery engulfing Europe.

Dictatorship and Democracy in the Age of Extremes: Spotlights on the History of Europe in the Twentieth Century at Glasgow’s Goethe-Institut offers one hundred and ninety photographs depicting a dramatic story of tyranny.

Three academics lead the exhibition with Professor Dr Ulrich Mahlert curating the content beneath twenty-six perspex frames: from photography and propaganda posters to handwritten letters from Stalin, all the images used are copies of the originals yet their seamless, grey design subtly reflects the first industrial war, the barbaric, silent purges surrounding 1939 and the suppressed prologues to more than twenty-six million deaths.

The frightening thing about this otherwise straight show is that persecution of ethnic minorities manages to survive. That’s why it’s difficult to rationalise whether humanity’s self-serving violence can be portrayed as art. However, perhaps in its capacity to invoke the emotion of the content’s creator at the moment the image is captured, it can indeed be thought of as art.

And from murder to extortion and backdoor deals with the enemy, the Goethe-Institut’s historical account of dictators hiding behind democracy is not only mentally stimulating but includes sharp, well informed commentaries chronologically portraying the formation and demise of different locations throughout the continent.

Along with partners Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute of Contemporary History) et al, and notably Professor Andrew  I. Port of Wayne State University who translated the exhibition from German to English, this modest exhibition is an intelligent reminder of the atrocities felt by Slavs, Jews, Poles, French and many more before the creation of the European Union. With text beneath the pictures citing “demilitarization, decentralisation, denazification and democratization” it sends chills down spines to realise all of the above continue to exist.