Complete Love

It’s 2011, late summer. All over Europe, young people are occupying central public squares to demonstrate for more social justice. In Berlin, their agenda is different. The completists gathered at Alexanderplatz aspire for justice primarily on an intimate level. They believe that only when the redistribution of material wealth includes equal chances of finding sex and love — no matter how elderly, disabled, or ugly you are — communism will become real.

- Ingo Niermann

It had grown dark. The only light came from the lamps in the park and from the street. A bald guy had gotten onto the stage and announced, “Next is Public Movement from Tel Aviv.” He read from his phone, straight from the Internet: “Public Movement is a performative research body that investigates and stages political actions in public spaces. It studies and creates public choreographies, forms of social order, overt and covert rituals. Among Public Movement’s actions in the past and in the future: manifestations of presence, fictional acts of hatred, new folk dances, synchronised procedures of movement, spectacles, marches, inventing and reenacting moments in the life of individuals, communities, social institutions, peoples, states, and of humanity.”

The audience stood up and moved toward the statue of Marx and Engels. It seemed they already knew that the performance would be held there, and stood along the perimeter of the plaza that surrounded the statues. Karl followed.

The monument was located at the opposite end of the plaza and wasn’t illuminated. It seemed the city wanted to lend the already modestly proportioned figures (only two times larger than life, with a seated Marx) as little aura as possible. But at least they hadn’t dismantled Marx and Engels the way they did with Lenin.

It was a crude, ungainly sculpture that actually looked best in the dark. With their diagrammatic beards and cylinder legs, Marx and Engels recalled characters from Japanese animation. A typical friendship motif from the 19th century depicted one figure sitting and the other standing, maybe with a hand on the other’s shoulder. But Engels had been set back here a bit, to emphasise Marx’s greater significance.