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Cake day: August 10th, 2025

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  • I live in Germany for over 6 years, and come from Russia. I don’t appreciate generalisation, but some things he mentioned just ring the bell. Some Germans I met definitely fit the description, but not the others.

    I don’t think art here is complacent, but I also see how artists from outside of Germany (and generally, foreigners), often tune down their criticism towards Germany.

    At work, my German colleagues are very sensitive if a foreigner criticizes late trains or long bureaucratic procedures. There’s a notion we should be grateful, and if we don’t like something, we should go back to places we like…

    Germans themselves seem to be critical of their society though, so I wonder how it works from the inside.

    Perhaps Ai Weiwei’s point is a perspective of an outsider who’s expected to express gratefulness and complacency.











  • I believe the results mainly reflect the anti-immigration sentiment.

    I’m a naturalized immigrant in Germany myself and don’t understand the trend at all. I imagine that supporting certain immigration groups might stretch the social support system in the country, but it’s the faulty of the system itself, no? I get the vibe that it’s the immigrants who are the problem, and that we are somehow worse humans than the natives and set our minds on causing problems just for the fuck of it.

    Can someone explain why immigration is a problem for Europe? It seem to be the good old xenophobia… Or maybe I’m biased.






  • Not really. To be open, I don’t live in Russia for over a decade. There were minor incidents even before the big war, like people abruptly stopping speaking to me upon hearing my nationality, or asking why I support (I don’t) Putin or why I don’t stop him. One guy explained to me very matter-of-factly that all Russians are intrinsically evil and deserve supervision because of it… Didn’t know how to answer that one. Very rarely I was thrown insults in the streets. But other than a very few incidents, all people I know outside of Russia were always welcoming and supportive. Recently, I received more threats and hate speech from my pro-putin compatriots than I ever received anywhere else in the world.