There are more women in cultural criticism now in Germany and Britain, but we also face more aggression. Is this progress?
R
emember the international outrage over a lurid incident involving a female dance critic, a male choreographer and a deposit of his pet dachshund’s excrement? In February 2023 the German choreographer Marco Goecke cornered Wiebke Hüster in the foyer of the Hanover State Opera during the interval of a show. Goecke, who was then artistic director of the venue, brought out a bag of dog poo from his pocket and pushed it into the journalist’s face. The reason? Hüster had written a negative review of his Netherlands-based show, In the Dutch Mountains, which had appeared in the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Faz) on the night of his hundekot attack.
The incident sparked column inches of conversation in Germany on critical culture, with a ripple effect further afield: in the Netherlands, theatre critics condemned it as an act of violence against freedom of expression; in the US, the American Theatre Critics Association did the same, with a blaze of accompanying newspaper headlines across Europe.
Goecke lost his job and became a professional persona non grata. Good, I thought, as a critic who has been approached by some angry men myself in theatre auditoriums, though never with this level of repellently visceral aggression. The reaction was indubitable proof of the culture industry’s zero tolerance towards assault in Germany, right? Especially in a case involving a man attacking a woman in this publicly shaming way.
