Hammerschlag

Intro

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Station 1 – Introduction to the Exhibition Tour

SPIEGEL Panel

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Social Media as a Mirror of Society

Entrance

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Station 2 – The Year 1980, the Second German Gay Rights Movement, and Section 175 of the German Criminal Code

Workshop: MEME THE PAIN AWAY

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

· 4:30 PM – 6:30 PM · Kampnagel P1
· with Anahita Neghabat ·

This workshop explores how memes can be used as creative tools to convey messages in a pointed, humorous, and effective way. Together, we will analyze how memes function in digital communication spaces, develop our own memes, and discuss their potential as a tool for activism and educational work. The workshop is aimed at anyone who wants to do more than just consume memes—who wants to use them strategically. No prior knowledge is required.

HAMMER–Panel

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Art as a Hammer for Society

In the closet

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Station 3 – Tidying Up with Terms

DJ Set

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

· 9:00 PM · Kampnagel K4
· featuring Saeleen Bouvar (Transtronica)
· Free admission ·

Saeleen Bouvar is a musician, DJ, and founder of TRANSTRONICA Festival, the world’s first electronic music festival with an exclusively trans lineup. As the initiator of Salon Queertronique, she has been shaping Hamburg’s queer club culture since 2017. Her sets combine historical depth with sensual intensity and move between disco, Chicago house, acid, and techno, serving as sonic narratives of trans history and the present. @saeleenbouvar

The Main Entrance to the Toilet on Spielbudenplatz

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Station 4 – the public toilet: Enter to Exit, Cruising

From Demo to Demo

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Station 5 – Two Demos, Pink Lists, and the Mirrors Are Smashed

The TucTuc

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Station 6 – Gay bar, art venue, meeting place for social movements

The Toilet Stall of Transparency

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Station 7 – Aesthetic Models, Artistic Replicas, Queer Art, and Activism

The Queer Choir Toilet Stall

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Station 8 – a choir of queers, rewritten songs, photographer Rüdiger Trautsch

Disco Toilet of Queer Joy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Station 9 – Trans-Lesbian-Gay Joy of Life, Toilets, Habitats

Homosexuals as a Victim Group under the Nazis

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The knowledge now widely accepted regarding the persecution of gay men under National Socialism was first addressed in the mid-1970s, initially within the gay rights movement and later among the general public.

The first program of the theater group “Brühwarm” from 1976 included a scene that addressed this persecution. The authors Hans-Georg Stümke and Rudi Finkler, who were also active in the Hamburg gay rights movement, published the monograph Rosa Winkel, Rosa Listen. Homosexuals and “Healthy Public Sentiment” from Auschwitz to the Present.

Interview with Kai Reinecke: After the Demonstration in Schanzenpark

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In this interview, eyewitness Kai Reinecke recounts the confrontation between the police and demonstrators in Schanzenpark following the “Stonewall” demonstration on June 28, 1980.

So, the demonstration ended in Schanzenpark; it was damp and cold. We were all wearing parkas because it was damp and cold, and back then parkas were in style, even in the gay scene, in weather like that. And we didn’t know how we were supposed to have a picnic on that wet grass in Schanzenpark, and we just stood there somehow—I don’t even know if there was anything to eat for a picnic. I have no idea. I never really noticed—it probably got lost in the rain or the chaos, since it wasn’t exactly cozy either. And a lot of people had already left. And then people must have spotted that VW bus again; it was parked less than 40—well, I can’t say exactly—I’d say less than 40 meters from where we were all standing, and [those people] had approached Corny. Who did they approach? Corny. I don’t even know if he was one of the organizers of the demonstration; that could very well be the case. In any case, they asked him if he could get the films handed over. So, to go over to the bus, because he’d been taking photos throughout the demonstration. Then he went over there—as far as I could tell. I think I just caught that in passing at the beginning. Then the two police officers in the bus immediately rolled up the windows. Because of the rain, they didn’t want to take photos through the raindrops on the windows. They kept taking photos, though. And then they rolled up the windows, and in response to Corny’s polite—or not-so-polite, since he isn’t always polite—question about whether he could have the film, they rolled up the windows, didn’t respond, and kept taking photos.

Police Decoys in Quentin Crisp's The Naked Civil Servant (1968)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The British gay eccentric Quentin Crisp writes the following about police decoys in public restrooms in his 1968 book The Naked Civil Servant (translated into German in 1988 as Crisperanto):

CW: racist stereotypes, the N-word

The main area of operation for this particular strategy was the dimly lit public restrooms in the less densely populated areas of London. While a plainclothes detective paced back and forth across the street with watchful indifference, his accomplice—selected by superiors for his natural, job-appropriate physique—stood there at the urinal and “showed off”—he displayed his DIY apparatus to anyone who happened to walk in. (One cannot imagine what an equipment inspection—which would, after all, have to take place before every shift—would look like.) The trap worked well, and many of the most unbelievable people were lured to their doom in this manner. More recently, now that everyone is familiar with these maneuvers, they have fallen out of fashion. Common knowledge robs them of their effect. They also offend the sporting instinct of the British people. They are seen as a trick, like placing a diamond bracelet on the sidewalk and pouncing from ambush on anyone who bends down to pick it up. Almost exclusively, it was borderline cases that were caught. Those whose idea of a pleasant evening consisted of wandering from one “gentleman” to another quickly learned to recognize a cop even by touch. People who had never heard of homosexuality but whose natural curiosity was aroused by any manifestation of strange human behavior were put in such danger by these police techniques. Even if you had a good night, asking the officer what on earth he was doing there would certainly lead to arrest; if it was a bad night, a brief glance in his direction was enough. The worst consequence of the decoy system , however, was that for a police officer assigned to such a post who happened to have no sympathy for gay men, aversion quickly turned into the most savage hatred. Conversely, gay men who originally feared the police—which some might consider a good thing—now developed contempt for them.

Rüdiger Trautsch »Hardly Anyone Did It Out of Love!«

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Rüdiger Trautsch, who was closely associated with the Café TucTuc from 1979 to 1981, studied photography at the Academy of Fine Arts during that time. For his thesis project, “Hardly Anyone Did It Out of Love!”, he staged scenes from the everyday life of an ordinary gay man (Martin Dannecker and Reimut Reiche).

The large-format booklet feels substantial in the hand; with ample white space and a deliberately balanced placement of text and images, Trautsch gives his protagonist Reinhold—a middle-aged window dresser—the space he needs to stroll through the IGA wearing makeup, receive a visit from his aunt, cruise through parks and cruising spots, and dance through the nightlife in a grand evening gown. A touching portrait.

The Mirror

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Corny Littmann smashes the Spiegel in a relatively unspectacular manner. He recounts it here.

The Observation Room – Visible

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Station 10 – Surveillance of Gay Venues by the Hamburg Police from 1960 to 1980

Voyeurism in Harun Farocki's 'Prison Pictures'

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In the 2001 film »Gefängnisbilder« Harun Farocki shows excerpts from Jean Genet’s film “Un Chant d’Amour” (1950), in which a prison guard develops a voyeuristic fascination with the prisoners’ masturbation, “their love life.”

The prison is a place of prohibitions, and thus of secrets and transgressions, at least those hoped for and fantasized about.
– Harun Farocki, »Prison Images«, DE 2000, Min. 08:05

Filmmaker Farocki juxtaposes these excerpts with documentary footage from U.S. prisons, in which prisoners attempt to cover the transparent barred doors of their cells with their mattresses in order to create some semblance of privacy. These attempts are regularly and violently quashed with tear gas and physical force.

William E. Jones »Tearoom«

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The title of the film “Tearoom” by filmmaker William E. Jones plays on the term tearoom —which in slang refers to a place for quick sex.

In 1962, the police department of Mansfield, Ohio, shot an instructional video documenting their methods of prosecuting gay men. The door of a janitor’s closet in the public men’s restroom was fitted with a one-way mirror, allowing an officer to use a 16mm film camera to secretly monitor and film the men who met there for sex. The footage was subsequently used as evidence in court, resulting in all the accused men being found guilty and serving at least one year in prison. What is striking about the surviving recordings is that some faces have been burned out of the footage, rendering them unrecognizable. The artist suspects that these individuals may have been police officers who were covered by their colleagues. In 2008, William E. Jones released this educational film in its unedited form—as a radical example of using a film “as found”—thereby, on the one hand, making visible the police surveillance practices of the 1960s, while on the other hand highlighting the shift and, consequently, the mutability of the discourse over the past 50 years.

The Observation Room – The Invisible

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Station 11 – Missing Pieces, Gaps, Perpetrator's Perspectives

‘Out of the Restrooms, Into the Streets’

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Station 12 – Back to the Present, Back into Public Life

Felix Rexhausen's »Dienstlich Unterwegs«; (Männerschwarm)

Fri, 01 Jan 1982 00:00:00 +0000

In his anthology Die Märchenklappe, author Felix Rexhausen publishes the text “On Official Business,” in which he captures the thoughts of a fictional police officer assigned to observe homosexuals from the police box at Spielbudenplatz. In contrast to his disinterested colleague, he seems to have a voyeuristic curiosity about the “view of Pissburg” (p. 64): “It’s crazy boring here today. Sure, still better than running around outside in this weather or sitting in the patrol car. But otherwise, I kind of liked it better; I always enjoy coming here.” (p. 65)

Ulrich Waller »The Accidental Death of Christian K« (Malersaal)

Mon, 01 Dec 1980 00:00:00 +0000

queer.de writes about it:

The “Peep Show for Cops” as a play at the Hamburg Schauspielhaus

The scandal not only influenced socio-political consciousness but also stimulated creativity. As early as December 1980, the events were taken up in a play. In “The Accidental Death of Christian K.,” director Ulrich Waller critically examined the power of police officers in 20 short scenes. Here, they are “confronted with their stupidity and criminality; their perversions are exposed to ridicule” (“Du & Ich,” March 1981, p. 48). In all the scenes, Waller drew on real events, which he portrayed in a satirically exaggerated manner.

Deregulation of §175

Mon, 01 Sep 1969 00:00:00 +0000

Section 175 of the German Criminal Code had criminalized sexual acts between men* since 1871 and was used to persecute homosexuals, particularly after it was tightened by the Nazis in 1935. After years of lobbying by the homophile movement, it was relaxed in the Federal Republic of Germany on September 1, 1969. A second reform followed in 1973. Since then, sexual acts with male minors under the age of 18 were punishable, whereas the age of consent for lesbian and heterosexual acts was 14. It was not until June 10, 1994, that §175 was completely removed from the German Criminal Code (StGB); the convictions handed down under this provision were not largely overturned until 2017.

Chemical Mace – CN Gas

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Chemical Mace was developed in the 1960s as a defensive spray for private use and was quickly adopted by the police as a supposedly non-lethal weapon for controlling demonstrations. During the incident in Schanzenpark as part of the first Stonewall demonstration in Hamburg on June 28, 1980, the police used CN gas against unarmed and peaceful demonstrators.

In English, the brand name mace is now used as a generic term for tear gas in general, while the name chemical mace in German media refers to sprays containing the active ingredient ω-chloroacetophenone (CN) . Due to its highly hazardous effects (possible consequences include blindness, skin cancer, and death from lung damage), CN gas may only be discharged from a sufficient safety distance and has gradually been replaced by 2-chlorobenzylidene malonic acid dinitrile (CS) (tear gas) and pepper spray. The effects of CN were widely discussed in the 1970s in the German media as part of coverage of the militarization of the police and the increasingly violent crackdown on demonstrators.

Credits

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Who made this project possible

Hammerschlag

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

– a performative installation

Impressum

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Impressum dof this website

Links

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Similar and dissimilar projects by other artists and activists

Operation »Hyacint« – Poland 1985–87

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ewa Majewska – »Public against their will. The production of subjects in the archives of “Hiacynt Action”«

Hammerschlag

Intro

SPIEGEL Panel

Entrance

Workshop: MEME THE PAIN AWAY

HAMMER–Panel

In the closet

DJ Set

The Main Entrance to the Toilet on Spielbudenplatz

From Demo to Demo

The TucTuc

The Toilet Stall of Transparency

The Queer Choir Toilet Stall

Disco Toilet of Queer Joy

Homosexuals as a Victim Group under the Nazis

Interview with Kai Reinecke: After the Demonstration in Schanzenpark

Police Decoys in Quentin Crisp's *The Naked Civil Servant* (1968)

Rüdiger Trautsch »Hardly Anyone Did It Out of Love!«

The Mirror

The Observation Room – Visible

Voyeurism in Harun Farocki's 'Prison Pictures'

William E. Jones »Tearoom«

The Observation Room – The Invisible

‘Out of the Restrooms, Into the Streets’

Felix Rexhausen's »Dienstlich Unterwegs«; (Männerschwarm)

Ulrich Waller »The Accidental Death of Christian K« (Malersaal)

The “Peep Show for Cops” as a play at the Hamburg Schauspielhaus

Deregulation of §175

Chemical Mace – CN Gas

Credits

Hammerschlag

Impressum

Links

Operation »Hyacint« – Poland 1985–87

Police Decoys in Quentin Crisp's The Naked Civil Servant (1968)