A commented version of Ai Weiwei's article

 26/10/2025

“Was ich gern früher über Deutschland gewusst hätte”

What I Wish I Had Known About Germany Earlier

By Ai Weiwei

And some answers in between by a Greek, former Hamburg citizen (myself)

On July 11, Zeit Magazin editor Elisa Pfleger, through our gallery, invited me to contribute 15–20 short reflections on the prompt “What I would have liked to know about Germany earlier” for an upcoming summer issue column. I subsequently wrote and submitted the piece. On July 23, in response to Zeit Magazin’s request for additional reflections in a more personal and light-hearted tone, I provided further contributions. Two days later, we were first shown a shortened and edited version by Pfleger, and then immediately afterward informed that Zeit Magazin’s Executive Editor Johannes Dudziak — Pfleger’s supervising manager — had reviewed the column, canceled its publication, and commissioned new contributions from other writers instead.

Read the original article in full below:

A society governed by regulations, yet lacking individual moral judgment, is more dangerous than one with none at all. 

Sometimes regulations are the result of a collective moral judgment, even if this doesn’t imply, individuals are excused not to display one themselves.

A society that values obedience without questioning authority is destined to become corrupt.

To question authority as a principle, equals to imply, authority is random and in no case representative of the society’s will to governance. To permanently question authority, even if she did not cause, through her exercise of power, a plausible reason for the questioning, resembles to some ‘revolutionary gymnastics’, rather than to adult society ethics. Also, a society can understand the necessity of the law, without praising ‘blind obedience’.

A society that admits to error but refuses to reflect on its origins possesses a mind as stubborn and dull as granite.

To admit to error, is the first necessary step towards a reflection of its origins. Most of the other societies, didn’t even get there, since they still think to never have committed any errors.

Here, at a deserted street, people stop dutifully at a red light. Not a car in sight. This, I once thought, is the mark of a highly evolved society.

It is a mark of a highly evolved society, to understand the meaning of a regulation, even if it does not always applies, 24/7

At the heart of bureaucracy lies a collective endorsement of power’s legitimacy, and therefore, individuals surrender their moral judgment — or perhaps never developed one. They abandon challenge. They relinquish dispute.

This is a typical misunderstanding of the notion of representative governance per se, read as an arbitrary surrendering of power, and of moral judgment obligation of the citizen, to some bureaucratic mechanisms, an automatism of misplaced criticism and a distorted definition, often resulting from a too long confrontation of its user with some authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. 

When conversation becomes avoidance, when topics must not be mentioned, we are already living under the quiet logic of authoritarianism.

Agreed.

When the majority believe they live in a free society, it is often a sign that the society is not free. Freedom is not a gift; it must be wrestled from the hands of banality and the quiet complicity with power.

Power is not per definition negative. Its exercise can be distorted and must therefore be critically controlled in all times. It’s just a societal necessity, since society cannot rely on individual responsibility for its coherence and rule of law. Democracy is difficult, but it still has no better alternative.

When people sense that power is beyond challenge, they redirect their energy into trivial disputes. And those trivialities, collectively, are enough to erode a society’s very foundations of justice.

Agreed. But to sense that “power is beyond challenge” isn’t a sign of realism, it is one of cynical withdrawal from civic responsibility and democratic ethos.

When public events of great consequence — such as the Nord Stream Pipeline bombing — are met with silence from both government and media, the silence itself becomes more terrifying than any atomic bomb.

Germany's investigation into the Nord Stream pipeline bombing identified a Ukrainian group as suspects and issued arrest warrants for individuals involved, leading to the arrest of a Ukrainian man in Italy in 2025. The German government has indicated that trained divers could have attached devices to the pipelines at a depth of 70 to 80 meters. This has created a diplomatically awkward situation, as Ukraine is a key German ally. Where exactly did you identify “silence” in this matter in Germany?

Facts are acknowledged partially, forgotten deliberately, or swallowed by collective silence.

And so we repeat catastrophe — again and again, in cycles.

Facts are even sometimes fabricated. One can never stop crosschecking and investigating them. German journalism, with the exception, of course, of the Springer Media Group, is still at a high level of investigating facts and news.

When the media becomes a servant of public opinion, or avoids conflict to maintain favor with existing powers, it becomes an accomplice to authority.

Yes, definitively, but not all media are the same. Your line of argument could result in the assumption, they are. That’s a generalization that serves the enemies of free journalism and therefore, at the end of the day, serves populism. And here again, authority is marked as something automatic negative.

What we call lies are not always distortions of fact.

True.

Political leaders make decisions steeped in fallacy and failure. This reflects the broader political condition of a society in which most people have surrendered their awareness and even their basic agency — allowing such leaders to enact their mistakes on their behalf. 

Some political leaders definitively do. But again, to put all political leaders in the same pot, is a populist discourse, leading to messiah-type solutions, presented then as an anti-systemic alternative.

When a society uses linguistic difference or cultural misunderstanding as excuses for exclusion, it has crossed into a more insidious form of racism. This is not a political opinion — it is an attitude, a stain in blood, passed down like genes.

The same occurs, when a specific society (e.g. the German) is misunderstood as a coherent whole, because of the same misunderstanding mentioned above.

Bureaucracy is not merely sluggish. It is a cultural scorn. It rejects the possibility of dialogue. It insists that ignorance, codified into policy, no matter how wrong and inhumane it is, remains the best resistance against social mobility, against moral motion. In such a society, hope is not misplaced. It is extinguished.

Bureaucracy needs to be defined. Not any exercise of power belongs to a bureaucratic mechanism and not all mechanisms are obsolete per se.

In the surrounding atmosphere, one sees not culture, but self-congratulation; not art, but insularity and collective reverence for power. What is missing is sincerity — honesty of emotion and of intention. In such an environment, art that grapples with true human feeling or moral reckoning is nearly impossible to produce.

Art was possible to produce in much worse environments, as the one described here. Also, Art is an expression of emotion and intention, which are not necessarily always honest or sincere. Art is not always a moral response, it is a way of dealing with the human existence and condition.

A place that routinely discards self-awareness and erases individual agency is one that lives under iron walls of authoritianism.

True.

I have no family, no fatherland, never known what it is to belong. I belong only to myself. In the best of circumstances, that self should belong to everyone.

Ok.

I still do not know what art is. I only hope that what I make might touch its edges while it seems unrelated to anything. And in truth, in the best of circumstances it is unrelated to me, for the “I” already melts into everything.

Ok.

Those things found in galleries, museums, and collectors’ living rooms — are they art?

Not automatically.

Who has declared them so? On what basis? Why do I always feel suspicion in their presence?

Is it rather a suspicion you feel against galleries, museums and collectors?

Works that evade reality, that shy away from argument, from controversy, from debate — be they text, painting, or performance — are worthless. And strangely, it is this worthless work that society most readily celebrates.

It is highly dangerous to operate within an acceptance of “a” reality, and then accuse anybody of evading it. Whose reality are we talking about? Art cannot per definition evade debate, it is always written within a dialectic gesture. The rest is not art, it is only mere entertainment.

I understand now: People crave power and tyranny as they crave sunshine and rain, for the burden of self-awareness feels like pain. At times, even like catastrophe.

People do not crave tyranny, they crave only withdrawal from civic responsibility, and the necessary effort to it, and they crave only material wealth, as an answer to a psychological void.

Under most circumstances, society selects the most selfish, least idealistic among us to take on the work we call “art” because that choice makes everyone feel safe.

It’s not about feeling safe, it’s just the ultimate ‘proof’ we don’t need it, that art is not necessary. That’s the biggest lie of capitalism. Art is not a product. It is a way of moving in time and space. But idealism or altruism alone, as an artist’s characteristics, are no guaranties of great Art.

Zusätzlich (Additionally):

In Berlin, I encounter the ever-present Schweinshaxe and Schnitzel, and I can hardly believe that such a highly developed, industrialized country offers such a monotonous selection of ingredients. Even more baffling is the sudden proliferation of Chinese restaurants — most of them noodle-based, and operating at a culinary level that any Chinese person could easily achieve at home. The variety of food and cooking methods is so limited here that people from all over the world feel compelled to open restaurants: Vietnamese, Thai, Turkish — you name it.

Now, this is the typical superficial perception (“Wahrnehmung”) about German food and German cuisine, a complete cliché. Isn’t so in every big city of the world with foreign cuisine and foreign restaurants? Are they all therefore monotonous? The people feel compelled to open restaurants, only because gastronomy isn’t such a big risk, businesswise, and always welcomed, much easier accepted and integrated than any other activity by foreigners, in any country. It also creates bridges of cultural understanding, too often underestimated.

But the truly horrifying part? The sheer number of Chinese restaurants. I can only assume they believe that no matter what ends up on the plate, German customers will come running. In front of some of these establishments, there are even long queues — yet the food they serve bears little resemblance to anything recognizably Chinese.

That, I can believe, although there is also great Chinese food in Berlin, you only have to look carefully and not pick the ones on the tourist mile.

My favorite food in Germany is the bread and sausage — you simply can’t find ones with such distinctive character anywhere else.

Ok. But there are other German gastronomic products, less stereotypical and much more complex in taste and quality. Think of good German sweets, for instance, think of a slice of ‘Quarkkuchen’. Heavenly!

 I’m puzzled by why so many people would willingly cram themselves into a small bar just to have a long conversation. Since I don’t speak the language, I can only imagine that the young people coming to Berlin would talk about clubbing. This sort of thing was all the rage in the US back in the ’70s and ’80s.

Clearly you ignore the “Kneipenkultur”, similar but different from any “pub culture” or “club culture” elsewhere. It clearly also has to do with ‘understanding the language’.

The Germans might be the only people who are truly the furthest from a sense of humor. This could be the result of their deep reverence for rationality. Just look at Berlin Airport or the advertisements for Mercedes-Benz cars — you start to feel that their lack of humor has become a kind of immense humor in itself.

Another cliché, this time, a little worse than before, with the food and the small bars. The German “Kabarett” tradition, still very much alive, very close to the stand-up comedy in the English speaking countries, is one with a very fine sense of humor, also a very political one, so no, you are wrong there. In everyday life, no one can match the British humor, I’ll give you that. But to just take the tendencies and strategies in German advertising as a proof for the presence or absence of a sense of humor in German society as a whole, is very narrow-minded. Germany is far more complex in mentality, than the advertiser of Mercedes, or the designer of the Airport. The reverence for rationality is probably and sadly the only hope Germany still has, in order not to repeat its horrible errors of the past you mentioned, at the beginning of your article.