An ostensibly “inclusive” multi-culti mural was commissioned for a beer pavilion at this year’s Oktoberfest in Munich. The following essay by a writer for Politically Incorrect analyzes the painting’s underlying antagonism to Islam, which is not at all apparent after a superficial glance. Rembrandt Clancy has translated the analysis, and includes an introduction with additional background.

Introduction
by Rembrandt Clancy

Recently a free health magazine distributed in German pharmacies and intended for families provided instruction to parents on how to keep an ‘eye to the Right’ in kindergartens (Gates of Vienna reported). Now another trusted institution having direct contact with the people, the two-centuries-old Munich Oktoberfest and the largest folk festival in the world, expresses this same principle of double function, this time with an eye to Islamisation.

Andreas Steinfatt, the head of Hacker-Pschorr, a century-old brewery in Munich, commissioned the local artist Rudi Reinstadler to execute a 2,000 square metre mural to decorate the Hacker-Pschorr tent which was completely rebuilt for this year’s weeks-long festivities.

The setting for one of the motifs on the wall painting is a market square in Munich showing three Mohammedan women striding together toward the viewer, thus providing Islamic visual enrichment in a venue which serves beer and crispy pork hock.

Unzensuriert.at writes that those who have inquired of the brewery regarding the Islam motif, or otherwise complained and announced their non-attendance at the festival, are handed a standard form letter which threatens critics with prosecution:

Please note, e-mails with contents of an offensive and inciting character will be handed over for prosecution.

In the same letter, the Hacker-Pschorr brewery represents the wall composition as a “typical Munich street scene … a painting with no political statement”.

While Hacker is updating from dirndl to niqab, tz.de reports that many tourists and local people are staying away because of the recent series of “Islamistic” violent acts in Bavaria. Reservations for tables at the festival have been cancelled and hotel bookings are down compared with past years: according to the second-in-command of the Hotel and Catering Association, there are 10 to 15 percent fewer bookings. Even two societies for traditional costumes have cancelled their participation in the procession on the Theresienwiese (official open space at the Oktoberfest). And VIPs are cancelling invitations because they are unwilling to take responsibility for their guests. Also security measures are onerous compared with past years and have even become controversial. And the security costs have also made attendance at the festival expensive.

All of the foregoing notwithstanding, D. Weber, the author of the following essay, explains that the Islam painting is not what it appears to be.

Note: The Islam motif in the photo is only a small part of the much larger mural; it is found at one end of a giant balcony in the Hacker tent. To the extreme left in the photo, the scene showing clientele in front of a blue, Hacker-Pschorr tent belongs to a different motif and is therefore is not part of D. Weber’s analysis. Also, across the bottom foreground of the Islam painting is a brown X-backed ale-bench which can be mistaken for part of the painting.

The setting for the motif is St.-Anna-Platz in Lehel, Munich. Perhaps it is significant that the 19 century Parish Church of St. Anna (Catholic) clearly looms in the background of the Islam motif (cf. video tz.de at 1.08 min), although this has been clipped out in the photo used here. The three Mohammedan women in the foreground line up precisely with the church in the background. The perspective of St. Anna-Platz corresponding almost exactly to the one in the photo can be viewed in the main image available at muenchen.de.

Anti-Islam Painting in the Hacker Festival Tent

by D. Weber

Original German language source: Politically Incorrect
Translation: Rembrandt Clancy

September 10, 2016

The new Islam painting at the Oktoberfest has already been discussed several times [at Politically Incorrect]; however, it is worth taking a closer look at this painting. At first glance it appears to be exactly what the host at Hacker who commissioned it wanted: a tribute to Angela Merkel’s settlement policy and the “Multicoloured Republic” as it really exists. If one looks at the detail of the painting, however, one quickly recognises, as is so often the case in art history, how the artist often fulfills the commission of the contracting authority only superficially, while adroitly designing his own critical interpretation into the painting. The pictorial structure and metaphorical language reveal quite clearly that the Islam painting in the Hacker tent is unambiguously a warning against Islamic colonisation — without any doubt it is an outstanding anti-Islam painting.

Structure of the Painting

The pictorial structure is very simple. In the middle are the central figures dominating the image narrative, the three Mohammedan women veiled in black. Easily recognisable from their clothing, from left to right there is an Iranian, an Arab and a Turk. These three figures are surrounded by a circle made up of Germans — predominantly women: it begins at bottom left with the woman with the ponytail, followed by the sitting woman in the orange jacket, then the women in the blue skirt with the blue purse, the youth in the green T-shirt, the pair of lovers, the old woman in rather rustic garb, the strange man with the brown face and white arms; and finally, at the bottom right foreground it includes the two women with their backs turned to the viewer. This primary grouping of three Mohammedan women with the Germans who encircle them are complemented in the left half of the painting by a smaller subsidiary grouping: three young Germans sitting at a white table together with five young girls standing up, among whom are three veiled Mohammedan women and two blond Germans. One of these young Mohammedan women gazes, just like the sitting German woman in the yellow top, in the direction of the three main figures in the foreground and establishes thereby an axis of reference between the secondary group and the main group.

Pictorial Statement

The host of Hacker wished to commission a “painting with no political statement”, one simply showing a “typical Munich street scene”. Had the artist wished to paint such an apolitical picture, he certainly could have done so. But one must already be quite intent on overlooking the pictorial conception to categorise this painting as “apolitical”. As so often happens in the history of art, the artist appears in fact to have decided in favour of a balancing act between the wish of the patron and his own intentions; in this way, superficially fulfilling the wish of the patron so as not to risk his salary, yet shaping the pictorial statement by way of detail in such a way that the critical message intended by the artist still discloses itself to the attentive and schooled observer without all that much effort.

1. The Mohammedan Women in Black

The painting is clearly dominated by the three Mohammedan women in black occupying the foreground. Related to each other by the common characteristics of their garb and nearly symmetrical posture, this trio of persons from Iran, Arabia and Turkey do not in this case symbolically embody their respective ethnic groups; rather, it is the full spectrum of Islam which mutually binds these three nations: the Shia of Iran, the austere Sunna of Arabia and the typically Turkish, nationalistically Kemalist variant, which, as is well known, rejects the full-veil as inferiorly “Arabian” and therefore un-Turkish. Hence the Hacker painting is in fact an “Islam painting” which consciously selects Islam as its theme and not the ethnic togetherness of various nations which we encounter in the usual pictorial propaganda of the Multicoloured Republic. Also the painting otherwise lacks all the typical propaganda elements which we are accustomed to seeing in contemporary art which is closely related to the state; above all, propaganda photography showing the multicultural, happily laughing faces and the merry hand-in-hand of the “cultures”. Nothing of this is in the Hacker painting: in this painting no one laughs, all the figures look with austerity or impassivity. The only person who looks directly at the three main figures in black is the woman with the ponytail in the left foreground — this eye contact is, however, not reciprocated. The Arabian woman in the middle looks through her eye-slit into a distant nothingness; the two other women in black are wearing jet-black sunglasses. Propaganda for the Multicoloured Republic looks quite different.

Mutuality and togetherness, therefore, are not present in this painting from either party, except among the young girls in the secondary grouping in the left background whose conversation very much effects a sense of distancing, rather reminiscent of a dispute. The Mohammedan women, by the eye-slit and sunglasses, block trust-building eye contact; the Germans maintain the “arm’s length distance” recommended by the politicians: through their circular positioning they literally form an arc around the group in black to the woman with the white top and the hippie-like jute tote bag in the right half of the painting, who emphatically clears a way to the rear with her upper body. All Germans in the painting noticeably make room for the three space-consuming Mohammedan women who tread forward in almost military lockstep.

2. The German Women in the Foreground

The largest German figure in the painting, which by its size likewise quickly draws the attention of the observer, is the women with the floppy hat and red handbag at the right margin of the painting. She is wearing a miniskirt and has her back turned to the viewer. Her head posture suggests she is looking fixedly straight past the three women in black occupying the centre of the painting. Her mirror image is to be found in the woman with the blue handbag in the left half of the painting, likewise in a skirt, and likewise looking fixedly — with almost obsessive fixation — straight past the main characters in black. Both figures, by virtue of their forced ‘looking-past’ stand symbolically for the typical German pattern of behaviour of “conscious ignoring”: the conscious decision not to “look fear in the eye”, because one would not wish to have one’s spirit dampened. We know this behaviour well enough from everyday life; from a human standpoint it is thoroughly understandable because it is comfortable. That specifically these women, the ones in short skirts, show this posture in the painting is likewise presumably no accident. The artist’s criticism is directed precisely at this dangerous act of conscious unknowing [bewussten Ignorierens] on the part of the group of persons most endangered by the Islamic colonisation; namely, German women who run afoul of Islamic dress constraints by wearing short skirts, but with deliberate intent wish not to be aware of this threatening conflict, hence out of their spiritual superficiality they seek to avoid having to confront this uncomfortable theme. Also the third bag-carrying female in the painting, the woman with the jute bag thrown over her shoulder who is grotesquely evading backwards, is certainly to be seen in this context given that her hat is pulled low over her face.

The artist places the consciously unaware women in contrasting relationship with the female duo in the left half of the painting; namely, the woman with the ponytail in the extreme left foreground, who actively turns her head toward the trio veiled in black but at the same time contemplatively holds her neck, and the woman above her on the stool, who contrariwise rather actively turns away and assumes a constricted, almost cowering posture. This seated woman quite clearly feels fear, while the woman with the ponytail rather appears to radiate scepticism. Both fear and scepticism are results of an active coming to terms with the three primary figures in black; these women therefore stand in immediate substantive opposition to the conscious looking-away characteristic of the handbag carriers.

3. The Lovers

Forming a conspicuous counterpoint to these persons who are directly related to one another in the painting’s foreground — the Mohammedan women in black and the Germans who surround them — are the lovers, who likewise are emphasised by being in the centre of the painting; indeed, it almost appears as if the lovers arise out of the three women veiled in black by virtue of their placement immediately above them. Even by way of pictorial execution, the two lovers, being entwined with each other and considering the tender softness of the lines, effect a striking counterpoint to the rather ungracious Mohammedan women who step up in the scene with an almost military bearing. These two lovers unmistakably represent an antithesis, the European, German counter-blueprint to the gender segregation in Islam: lovers do not have to conceal themselves; it is beautiful to behold lovers enriching the street scene. Arranged at the painting’s centre point and therefore higher than the women in black, the two lovers radiate, by pictorial concept as well as formal structuring, hope: the hope, that the beautiful and the non-violent will finally, in the end, triumph over the ugly and violent; the hope that the power of love, the power of the Good is stronger than the power of black evil. We can only hope with the artist, that such will really come to pass.

4. The Figures on the Periphery in the Circle of Persons

A quick glance may also be cast at those figures, which, as part of the circle of persons around the black-veiled trio, appear to convey rather individual statements of a symbolic nature, the most conspicuous among them, standing somewhat to one side on the sidewalk, is the old German woman in 19th century garb. This woman, who by her apparel is very definitely not part of a “typical Munich street scene” of today, forms — along with the women in skirts — the second fashion counterpole to the three Mohammedan women in black — albeit a counterpole out of the past. For this woman signifies precisely this past, Munich’s German past, which in view of the Islamic colonisation, is receding more and more into the background. Both in her fashion and also by way of colour the old German woman conveys the effect of a yellowed family photo; she appears like a spirit from the past to admonish the observer: German Munich is disappearing; it is already for the most part history, and if you do not make a correction, German Munich will once and for all soon be remembered only in photographs.

Also belonging to the circle of Germans are two male figures out of a total of only three men in the painting. These are the strange man with the brown head and the white arms and the young man with the green T-shirt. This youngster is the only figure in the entire painting acting nonchalantly; his hands placed loosely in his trouser pockets, his free leg raised lightly from the ground, he is a kind of Johnny Look-in-the-Air [Hansguckindieluft]; it’s all the same to him, the main thing being that the sun is shining. This youth completes the spectrum of the typical German pattern of behaviour in the face of Islamisation: he stands for the beatific indifference of the broad mass of Germans, who think at all times only of their private happiness, and — as the ever-contented connoisseurs of the art of living — they know all the while how to get along in every dictatorship.

The man with the white arms and brown face remains alone in being somewhat enigmatic. Does the artist conceal behind this unnatural figure his criticism of the forced political correctness of contemporary art which requires a “brown” person to also be depicted always and everywhere (we recognise this obligation well enough from the current Hollywood films)? Was the artist intent on suggesting, that only belatedly was he required to paint the head brown in order to fulfil the “brown quota” which is politically demanded of him, thereby deliberately leaving the arms white? Did this belated “browning in” perhaps occur even at the instigation of the one who commissioned the painting? Even if that were the case, the artist would certainly never declare this publicly, for in our beautiful new world of the Multicoloured Republic, artistic freedom already belongs to the German past.

5. The Judgement of the Painting from an Islamic Perspective

Finally, just a few words from the Islamic perspective, for with its innumerable instances of political incorrectness the painting will not only evoke the protest of the German political class, but also the criticism of Islamic, self-appointed custodians of the law.

To begin with, from an Islamic point of view, the pictorial representation of Mohammedan women by an artist — and a non-Mohammedan artist at that! — is in itself already reprehensible. What is yet more serious, however, is the depiction of Mohammedan women as part of a beer-tent decoration. Alcohol, a predominantly male-Christian clientele, fatty pork — all this garnished with Mohammedan ladies — are from Islamic standpoint a very disquieting mixture, which the numerous sympathisers and admirers of the “Islamic State”, even in Munich, will presumably not regard with the greatest enthusiasm. Extremely unattractive from a particular Turkish standpoint, moreover, is also the black headscarf which the artist has placed on the Turkish woman with the green gown in the foreground of the painting. From a colour perspective, the blackness of the headscarves is absolutely understandable, for it emphasises what is common to the group of figures and the ugliness associated with them; in terms of substance, this choice of colour is, however, problematic, and is for many Turks certainly offensive, because Turkish women in general do not wear black head scarves, because they are felt as ugly and “Arabic”. What we can learn is this: if one knows only a little about foreign cultures, it is best not to commission paintings about them for his beer tent. Therefore we wish the host at Hacker much luck with his painting in the coming days; and above all, well-trained security personnel!