Imagine the following situation:
- you are in the 80-ies in
- you are living in Germany
- Terrorism (Baader – Meinhof Group) in Germany reached its peak.
- Cold war was still present.
- With Tschernobyl, young and the elder generations faced new (nuclear) threats, we never experienced before in Europe.
The known artist Joseph Beuys even made a song “Sonne statt Reagan” which is a nice word game in german language. In german language its meaning sounds like “we want sun instead of rain”, but in reality it was a critic to the politics of Ronald Reagan ” we want sun instead of Reagan” . The shout for a better life in our country.
As a small boy at that time, I wanted to have answers to this actual situation I am living in and I reached out to politicians and asked them, what they think about peace and asked them for some comments.
One answer I got, was from Johannes Rau (the later president of Germany) who made interesting statements to the situation in 1986. From today´s point of view interesting and maybe valuable for future generations as they are still generally correct
– today we have more mass destruction weapons than in any other country of the world; these weapons have to be minimized, as they are a danger and threatening our lives
– we need less nuclear and chemical weapons
– we need a stabilization of power at most possible low level in East & West..
– we need to support the exchange of cultures ..
“Art meets politics” Here I put together the LP of Joseph Beuys and my letter from Johannes Rau. In my opinion 2 interesting documents with different approaches to a certain situation.
If you want to listen to the song, here is a link to youtube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ1_ALxGbGk
ArtAutographs 