The cancellation of Mozart's Idomeneo in Berlin has provoked fierce criticism across Germany. Should art censor itself for fear of offending religion? Katharina Goetze reads the German press It was a production not unlike many presented every evening on stages across Germany. Hardly a producer in Germany nowadays lets the evening go by without at least one controversial scene, the possibilities encompassing a whole spectrum from actors being drowned in fake blood to naked performances. In that respect the staging of Mozart's opera Idomeneo was not unusually shocking. Yet director Hans Neuenfels managed to touch on one of the last taboos when in the final scene he let Idomeneo carry the decapitated heads of Jesus Christ, Buddha, Poseidon and, well, the Prophet Mohamed. The production had already been staged in 2003, receiving mixed reactions from audiences. Nevertheless, the Berlin Opera House had scheduled the Neuenfels production to be shown again later this year. It was only after Kirsten Harms, head of the Opera House, received a warning from German security services saying that Idomeneo presented an "incalculable security risk" that plans to stage the show were shelved. Security officials feared it would offend Muslim sensibilities, and so did the Opera House. When Harms's decision came to light last week it provoked a storm of criticism among politicians and commentators worldwide. This latest episode in a seemingly never ending series of conflicts revolving around freedom of expression versus religious tolerance has painfully re-ignited the debate about how secular societies deal with the threat of religious fanaticism. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in an interview that self-censorship out of fear was unbearable: "We have to take care that we do not retreat more and more out of fear for violent radicals. Self-limitation is only legitimate if it happens out of responsibility, on the basis of a completely nonviolent dialogue between cultures." Aiman Mazyek, secretary-general of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, took sides with the chancellor, saying that the Opera House's move was regretable. Yet he understood the cancellation "less as surrender to religious zealots than to security officials." Eleonore Buning in the conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called the decision to cancel the opera "an act of rushed hysteria", mocking that there was not even an explicit bomb threat in the Opera House's letterbox. With reference to 9/11, she asked, "but did the planes disappear from the sky? They are only a bit stricter controlled." Controls do not avert danger, Buning admits, but it illustrates how a democracy can steel itself against the threat of terrorism. "Protected should be an achievement for which time and again since the French Revolution until the recent past blood has flown: the freedom of thought, speech and art." Stefan Kornelius wrote in the left-leaning Suddeutsche Zeitung that the lesson to be learned from 9/11 should have been that it is not really the terrorist attack itself but the anxiety it causes that destroys freedom, values and order. In the case of the opera, Kornelius reminded readers, the freedom of art had not been limited out of respect, but out of fear. Fanaticism and terror win where argument has failed, Kornelius wrote. "This is not the work of terrorists. This is what enlightened, but over-anxious people do to themselves." Not only did the opera scandal highlight unresolved issues, its timing also coincided with Germany's first Islam Summit. The event, hosted by Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble, was intended to resume the dialogue between Germany's Christians and the country's 3.2 million-strong Muslim community. Schauble, who called the cancellation of the opera "crazy and unacceptable", wrote in a newspaper article preceding the summit that, "Muslims in Germany should be able to feel like German Muslims." Although the three-hour long meeting was promising, the spirit of reconciliation suffered when conference members' well publicised and apparently unanimous decision to go to watch Idomeneo together was blocked. Ali Kizilkaya, chairman of the Islamic Council for Germany, said in an interview that he would not under any circumstances watch an opera in which the Prophet Mohamed is beheaded. Yet director Hans Neuenfels was adamant that he had been completely misinterpreted. In an interview with the daily Frankfurter Rundschau he argued that the opera was about the subjective view of Idomeneo, who in the end tears itself away from the fanaticism of all religion. "The production is neither directed against Islam nor any other faith, but a discourse about the origins of religion," Neuenfels said. It is a reasonable question whether the scene with decapitated heads was really suitable or if its "trite message was not rooted in the provocation arsenal of the 1970s", Daniel Bax wrote in the left-wing Tageszeitung. "But that is not what this is all about." Bax reminded readers that so far there had not been protests against the opera and that German Muslims, as before the cartoon controversy, had remained peaceful. "Rather we seem to be confronted with a new type of the proverbial 'German Angst'. This was once the description for a specifically German, exaggerated fear of environmental disasters and nuclear wars. Nowadays it seems to be replaced by a growing anxiety about Islamic terror which bears no relation to the actual threat."
