Heinrich Böll Foundation Opens Office in Beirut

The Heinrich Böll Foundation, an organisation which is close to the German Green party, has opened a regional ofifce in Beirut. It hopes to intensify its work in cultural affairs and in the encouragement of civil society. By Bernhard Hillenkamp

Some 60 representatives of Lebanese and German civil society gathered in the Gefinor Rotana Hotel in West Beirut in November for a discussion on "Europe and the Middle East: old structures, new challenges." It was the first event in the celebrations marking the opening of the new office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

Following the discussion, an exhibition of photographs was opened, a visual impression of contemporary Lebanese society by Gilbert Hages entitled "Here and Now". And the third and final event was the dedication of the office itself in the Gemmayzeh district of East Beirut.

Following Tel Aviv and Ramallah, Beirut is the third city in the Middle East with a Heinrich Böll Foundation office. Its director, Kirsten Maas, was also the first director of the Ramallah office in 1999. The office in Tel Aviv was opened a year earlier.

The Heinrich Böll Foundation is one of five political foundations attached to the five main German parties. They use public money to promote development, and one of their goals is the encouragement of democracy.

Promoting the exchange of democratic activists

The Heinrich Böll Foundation seeks above all to support organisations of the civil society which are working towards democracy, cultural development, environmental protection and the peaceful solution of conflicts.

"Beirut is a bridge between east and west," Kirsten Maas told Qantara.de, "and it's a city of many languages. We work throughout the region and we want to promote dialogue between the Arab world, Iran and Europe."

The Foundation's offices put on conferences in the region and bring European and Arab intellectuals together, as they did at the round table discussion featured in the opening events. On the podium were the Minister of State in the German Foreign Ministry, Kerstin Müller, the lawyer, Prof. Chibli Mallat, and the chairwoman of the Foundation's board, Barbara Unmüßig.

The Foundation carries out projects with local partners in which it tries to initiate ideas through discussions which can then be taken to Europe.

"That's why we set up an internet portal with texts from the region and from Europe," says Kristen Maas. "That way texts which are not so well known in Arabic or in European languages can be made available in translation." Using three languages, information can be made available from different perspectives.

Local culture and art in focus

Another kind of dialogue was represented by the second of the opening events. It's another priority of the Beirut office: to reflect local cultural and artistic reactions to globalisation.

At the opening, Gilbert Hage, professor of fine art at the Academie des Beaux Arts, showed large-format portrait photographs of Lebanese young people in the art gallery Espace SD. It was a small part of his current project on post-war youth in Lebanon.

H&M-styled teenagers from the generation following the Lebanese civil war look at the audience out of two-metre-tall black-and-white photos. The poses are uniform, but they possess a great intensity of expression. Gilbert Hage hopes to record the faces of 2,000 Lebanese young people in his exhibition "Here and Now" and to get the public to observe them precisely.

The Foundation wants to bring the exhibition to Berlin, as it did with an exhibition organised by its regional office in Thailand entitled "Identity versus globalisation?", which it showed at the city's ethnological museum.

Contemporary cultural expression dealing with globalisation from the point of view of the region will be shown in Germany—it's an art which contradicts current clichés. As Barbara Unmüßig, chairwoman of the Foundation board, put it in the opening discussion: "My Foundation attempts to deconstruct false awareness."

Günther Kniess, Germany's ambassador in Beirut, welcomed guests to the reception in the five rooms of the building which dates from the turn of the 20th century. He pointed to the work of the political foundations as a special form of German foreign policy.

With conferences, art exhibitions, interactive forums, as well as with targetted studies and projects with local partners on subjects like civil society, cultural globalisation and sustainable development, the five staff—two German, two Lebanese—are trying to strike out a new line in the dialogue with the Middle East.

Bernhard Hillenkamp

Translation from German: Michael Lawton

To visit the website of the Middle East Office of the Böll Foundation in Beirut, click here.