The end of the Goethe Institute in Russia

The end for the Goethe-Institut in Russia was foreseeable. One must hope that the closure of the Russian House in Berlin, which has been long-delayed in consideration of this last cultural bridge between Germany and Russia, will pay off in terms of security policy.

The Goethe Institute, which opened in Moscow and Petersburg after the fall of the Wall and expanded to include a branch in Novosibirsk in 2009, brought German theater stars such as Pina Bausch and Peter Stein as well as composers such as Helmut Lachenmann, Nikolaus Huber and Enno Poppe to Russia, who became cult figures there. These guests always stood for dialogue; the Goethe-Institut always asked about the needs of the Russian side. It supported a concert cycle on 20th century music at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, which showed that the Russian Yefim Golyshev was the first to compose dodecaphonic music in 1914.

In 1999, the Moscow institute had the St. Petersburg performance duo “Ache” celebrate the milestone birthdays of the national poets Goethe and Pushkin, and in 2016, after the annexation of Crimea, the office in Novosibirsk held a brilliant international festival with top-class live debates. The Moscow house, long the regional headquarters and the largest Goethe Institute in the world, employed two hundred people at its peak.

That was a long time ago. Since the beginning of the major Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, there have been no more bilateral cultural projects. Many partners and institute employees have left Russia. The authorities forced the institute to reduce its staff to about a tenth in 2023. Most recently, his activities were limited to the popular German courses, as well as film screenings, including on ecological topics or those of inclusion, as well as poster exhibitions about German literature.

Russian users value the Goethe Libraries, especially since German is popular as a second foreign language, and the institute also maintains diverse, often informal contacts with Russian civil society, which is increasingly under pressure. Such trusting exchanges do not suit the Russian state power at all, especially with representatives of an “unfriendly country”; it wants citizens who fear it and obey it. When the outgoing German ambassador Alexander Graf Lambsdorff met with Russian German teachers, an official from the domestic intelligence service FSB pointedly recorded their conversation on camera and microphone.

These last, precarious connections, which are all the more important for pro-European people in Russia, were cut off with the closure of the Russian House in Berlin. At the same time, the European Court of Human Rights closed almost 900 pending cases by Russian citizens who accused their state of human rights violations.

Many wait years for a decision, such as the liberal politician Lew Schlosberg, who was recently sentenced to eleven years in prison for his opposition to the war. It sends a bad signal when Europe, fighting the Russian war machine, throws overboard Russians who suffer for its values.