Cologne Western Wall

Western Wall 1994

Western Wall Action against Nuclear Armament 2006

The Cologne Wailing Wall (also "Wailing Wall for Peace", "Palestine Wall" and "Anti Wall") was a permanent rally in Cologne. It was created in the late 1980s on the initiative of Walter Herrmann and was initially devoted to various social issues, but in 1991, under the influence of the Second Gulf War, it focused on peace. After a temporary break, from 2004 the topic narrowed down to the Middle East conflict . The project was increasingly perceived as anti-Semitic , distorting and one-sided. It was the subject of numerous legal disputes until it was discontinued in 2015 due to Herrmann's health problems.

history

The permanent rally started at the beer fountain on Schildergasse . Hanged on clotheslines, the housing shortage and the suffering of the homeless were denounced on small cardboard boards. In 1991 the “Wailing Wall for Peace” was created on the Domplatte at the south tower of Cologne Cathedral , supported by the vigil against the Second Gulf War . The cathedral church and the public order office tried to prevent the project through legal proceedings, confiscations and evictions. Around 50,000 passers-by and supporters used this form of free communication by 1997, including celebrities such as the Dalai Lama , Ernesto Cardenal , Lew Kopelew and Klaus Staeck . They wrote down their handwritten wishes for peace, demands for social justice or anti-war protests on small A4 size cardboard boards. In 1997 the permanent exhibition was removed from the Domplatte at the instigation of the City of Cologne. The Cologne Higher Regional Court found that "the property rights of the City of Cologne" had been illegally encroached upon on someone else's property, and that the right of ownership took precedence over the right to freedom of expression. Since then, the Western Wall has been built up and dismantled in a smaller, mobile form. In 1998 the project received the Aachen Peace Prize .

A new edition of the “Wailing Wall” on the Domplatte was devoted from 2004 to a presentation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict , which was repeatedly rated as anti-Semitic , distorting and one-sided. Representatives of the Cologne synagogue community insisted that the wall be banned from 2005 onwards.

Wailing Wall in 2011. During the night, the mobile black beacon feet were stored on a nearby WDR site .

From then on, it was legally regarded as a permanent demonstration and not as an information stand. In order for the assembly law to be fulfilled, at least two people were always present. The comments of the passers-by, written on cardboard boards, which were attached to one of the three partition walls, were regarded as speeches at a demonstration. This legal opinion was last confirmed to Walter Herrmann in 2007 by the Federal Administrative Court, after the State of Berlin banned an action planned by him in Berlin in 2003, “Against the military intervention in Iraq and elsewhere”.

On April 10, 2015, the Cologne District Court found Herrmann guilty of violating the Youth Protection Act by showing 15 pictures of dead and seriously injured children on the Western Wall . He was given a suspended fine . Herrmann announced his appeal and assessed the verdict as an inadmissible interference with the freedom to demonstrate.

The sponsoring association of the self-administered Alte Feuerwache civic center , in which Herrmann stored the majority of his installations overnight, terminated his use of its rooms in October 2015, among other things because of insulting some of its members and an employee.

From 2016 Herrmann no longer performed his installation in front of Cologne Cathedral. He died on June 26, 2016.

Panel discussion on how to deal with Walter Herrmann's estate in November 2016 at the Karl Rahner Academy

Before his death, Herrmann signed the Wailing Wall archive, consisting of more than 100,000 cardboard signs and maps, the Cologne City Museum and the Cologne City Archive . A dispute arose about the acceptance of this estate by the city museum, in which the accusation of anti-Semitism was discussed again. Demands not to accept the cardboard signs at all, or only those from the years before 2004, were raised. Most recently, it was agreed that the historical archive of the City of Cologne and the Cologne City Museum would take over 150 of the cardboard signs, including those that are supposed to document anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in the Western Wall in recent years.

Criticism of the representation of the Middle East conflict

Two signs from January 2011: on the left the juxtaposition of Adolf Hitler and Israel, on the right a criticism of the Western Wall

Critics, including representatives of the Cologne synagogue community , Henryk M. Broder and Gerd Buurmann , accused those responsible of distorting the Middle East conflict by one-sided portrayal of the suffering of the Palestinians and portraying Israeli politicians as war criminals and thus fueling anti-Semitic resentments. Israel is consistently portrayed as an aggressor , while terrorist attacks by Palestinian organizations are kept silent or portrayed as desperate acts by the hopeless. Nothing is learned from the Western Wall about the goals of the Palestinian Hamas or the Lebanese Hezbollah , and their anti-Semitism is not discussed. The critics accused those responsible for violating their own claims, namely to be against war and violence. So one tolerates anti-Semitically motivated violence, the war against Israel does not fall under one's own opposition to the war. A ban on the wall demanded by the synagogue community in 2005 was rejected by the city, citing the freedom of assembly and demonstration . In a statement, Herrmann describes the accusation of one-sidedness as "a campaign that aims to give the Western Wall on Palestine an anti-Semitic image". He further explains: "In the case of the Middle East conflict, the Western Wall shows solidarity with the Palestinians, who have endured an occupation regime that grossly disregards the norms of international law for more than two generations."

In January 2010, a photo of a caricature held by a woman was posted on the Western Wall . It showed a person with a Star of David who was holding a glass with red liquid in front of him and was preparing to cut up a Palestinian child with a knife and fork and eat it. The Cologne theater maker Gerd Buurmann and other people filed criminal charges against this representation on suspicion of sedition . Buurmann criticized the caricature for using the symbolism of the Nazis and anti-Semites, which exceeded the limit of legitimate criticism of the State of Israel. Reactions from Cologne citizens to the city council, in a critical dispute between the council groups, in the Israeli press and also from the chairman of the Aachen Peace Prize, Karl Heinz Otten , were reactions that were distanced or even negative . However, the public prosecutor did not see sufficient suspicion, among other things because of the lack of imagery typical for anti-Jewish images, and discontinued the proceedings.

After a break from February to September 2010, the "Wailing Wall Palestine" was shown again. In December 2010, the Lord Mayor, Mayor, six parliamentary groups, representatives of the churches and the synagogue community as well as the associations for the maintenance of town twinning with Bethlehem and Tel Aviv passed a resolution against what was perceived as one-sided and anti-Semitic depictions of the Western Wall. At the same time, on December 19, 2010, the Jewish internet magazine haGalil published a thematic focus with articles by prominent Cologne authors in which they condemn the “Wailing Wall” as anti-Semitic.

Volker Beck criticized the erection of part of the Western Wall on the occasion of the funeral service for Herrmann in the Church of St. Theodor in Cologne-Vingst and described it as an "unbearable signal to the Jewish citizens of our city". Pastor Franz Meurer , who had accompanied Herrmann in his last days, replied that only plaques from the early days of the Western Wall were displayed in the church: “If Walter Herrmann had stood in front of my church with his anti-Israel slogans during his lifetime, I would have him chased away there ”.