The long now (1924 - 2124)

Talya Lubinsky

In her autobiography, A Path Through Hard Grass: A Journalist’s Memories of Exile and Apartheid (Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien 2014, p. 30), Ruth Weiss writes: 

South West Africa – South Africa! We were actually on our way. The Tanganyika on which we sailed, owned by the Woermann shipping line, was later sunk by the British navy during World War II. The name Woermann was inextricably linked with Africa. Adolf Woermann had established a thriving business selling alcoholic spirits in the Congo and had been one of the businessmen who urged Bismarck to adopt colonisation. He later acted as an advisor at the Berlin conference of 1884, which created the rules for the “scramble for Africa”. Woermann’s ships delivered everything that colonies needed: arms, equipment, alcohol – and even ropes used for whipping “cheeky k****rs”.

The ship that saved Weiss and her family from probable death in Nazi concentration camps, was also tied to the oppression and colonisation of Black people in Africa. Weiss and my grandfather were born in Germany in the same year, 1925, and both arrived in South Africa escaping National Socialism in 1936 and 37. When they arrived on the shores of Cape Town, they were no longer just Jews, they were categorised as white under British colonial rule and later Apartheid.

In listening to interviews of Ruth talking about her life, I found a template for telling a story that complicates the hegemonic German narrative that holds certain identity groups as perpetual victims and others as perpetual perpetrators, in a way that is forcefully separated from historical and contemporary continuations and ostensible contradictions of cycles of violence. During this time of genocide against Palestinians, these essentialised identity categories are being weaponsied by Germany against racialised people, especially those who align themselves in solidarity with Palestine.

The soundtrack playing throughout the mixtape is a meditation on these cycles of violence, taken from the traditional liturgy of the Passover Seder. This version was recorded by the band Dali Muru & The Polyphonic Swarm. The song follows an accumulative structure, where each verse is repeated and then the next one added, speaking to the nature of violence not only as cyclical but also as compounding over time. Reflecting on the past 100 years since Ruth Weiss’ birth, which create the conditions for the next 100 years, I listen to her life, her work and the archive as a kind of resistance to that violence as well as a testimony to it.

Archival reference no: BAB TPA.43 116, 117, 174, 175, 176.