This Is How Peace Works

I want to be a pacifist. And I know I will never be one completely – in the sense that, for as long as I can remember, I have known: Auschwitz could not have liberated itself.

I have also often sung the – originally French – partisan song „The Partisan“, made famous by Leonard Cohen’s version. Unlike Joan Baez, who these days paints Selenskyj with sunflowers, I did not, however, swap out one crucial line. She turned „I took my gun and vanished“ into „Into the hills I’ve vanished“. Without a gun, which makes no sense for a partisan.

I too live without a gun and yet honor the partisans of the Second World War. And after the unspeakable slaughter in the south of Israel – of young international party dancers, of socialist kibbutz families and really of anyone who happened to be in the wrong place at that terrible time – I too want the remaining hostages to be freed. Of course I very soon saw the destruction in Gaza, the death tolls printed everywhere, reported by Hamas politicians. My kindred spirit, Eric Angerer, could no longer place his background pieces on the subject even with alternative media, but then finally managed to after all with the „Achse des Guten“, because the greater part of the world seems to have made up its mind: Israel is the child murderer. So many see parallels to the war in Ukraine, it is suspected the Deep State needs the firestarting, and anyway Hamas of course originates from the Mossad.

I too see parallels, and from a pacifist point of view: when people live, work, produce something and cooperate with one another, peace sets in. But when a region like the Donbas is shelled for eight years, at some point there is a reaction. Rockets had been flying out of Gaza since 2006 and we have seen terrible blows and counter-blows over the years. And yet, in quieter times, workers from Gaza could work in the nearby kibbutzim in Israel, and there were human relationships. That is over now, but it must and will become that way again – when peace prevails.

Where does propaganda begin, what is the difference between enemies who constantly say and write that they wish you dead, and propagandistically constructed enemy images that are claimed to want to bring you death?

How do I support the idea of peace in the world, and at what point do I let everything be done to me „for the sake of dear peace“? I don’t really know, it has to be looked at anew from day to day.

I must apologize for wandering off so much right at the start, because really we’ve been asked here to present a peace song of our own. And I’ve had mine in my head the whole time anyway:

Today this seems so simple to me, such a minimal demand, but when it turned out in 2020 that literally every activity mentioned here could be suspended from one moment to the next by a single (health) ordinance, I was, to put it mildly, astonished and then, week by week, more and more shocked. I had loved the 1990s, for the fact that Berlin eventually became a cosmopolitan city after all, that every kind of getting together, every kind of party, theater, literature and journalism was possible – or seemed to be possible. I also believed Wolf Biermann – with slight doubt – when he once said something to the effect that: democracy, that is, the democratic states, bring peace along quite incidentally, because free trade with one another and the separation of powers ensure that they never fight against each other. In any case, I asked myself, delighted: Can that be true? That’s just great.

It occurred to me, of course, that there had after all been proxy wars, and slowly, actually quite late, I realized that Arab societies certainly did not slide into chaos or Islamism purely of their own accord. The 2000s brought ever more threatening news, with 9/11, SARS 1, the war on terror and so on. But as long as I could sing what and when and – almost – where I wanted, I was mostly content as a former East German in the lovely West. I also thought:

And I thought: That’s how it is after all – until 2020. Then I wrote it down as a song, and in 2022 I started singing it at demonstrations. Because by then I thought: That’s precisely how it is not! The lyrics then went on like this:

Especially at the Gethsemane Church in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg and at the peace festivals in the Mauerpark, I felt, together with the many other colleagues and the atmosphere, a strength that gave courage in that strange microbe time – which is not really over, after all.

Even within the so varied peace and freedom movement there were various accusations: All you do is party, that’s no resistance! I always found it good and right that „Captain Future“ knew how to counter the hybrid war against the people with the motto and the song by Henning Wehland „Tanz um dein Leben“. The devil doesn’t like happy people. And my live appearances were meant to bring this feeling too. After a „Free Assange concert“ near Rostock, the actually friendly „Radio Marabu“ broadcast the next morning a scathing pan of the songs and ideas of my colleague Lui Koray from the Momo movement, and especially of me too. The song presented here was supposedly cheap, in 4/4 time – a march, then, as if to spur on the Wehrmacht – appealing to base instincts because it invites clapping along and so on. The idea „Everyone should live as he pleases“ was supposedly fundamentally wrong and would rightly have been rejected in the GDR – where allegedly only high quality standards existed. Well then, cheers!

The things people think in the scene and in the world… I find it interesting, as long as no one has too much power. Merely appearing on an announcement for a peace festival or an Easter march has, on the official side, cost me many a gig, which wasn’t so bad, because a lot of it has been too much for me over the last four years. But there you can see what effects such a little song has. The refrain really is very simple, without words, for singing together. My fellow singer El Alemán said about it: In the verses you sing something against police and politics, and then you thumb your nose with the la-la refrain… But of course, gladly!