Marcello Faletra defends Franco Berardi's Auschwitz reference at Documenta

Marcello Faletra, writing on Artribune, critiques Silvia Truzzi's September 7, 2017 article in Il Fatto Quotidiano dismissing Franco Berardi's planned performance at Documenta 14 in Kassel, which was to use the phrase "Auschwitz on the beach." Faletra argues that Truzzi's empirical assessment of European guilt—denying that Europeans "killed" 30,000 migrants in the Mediterranean—is reductive and ignores the structural violence of EU border policies. He invokes Hannah Arendt's concept of statelessness and Zygmunt Bauman's dehumanization to assert that migrants, stripped of legal status, are rendered "less than nothing," paralleling the condition of Jews before the Holocaust. Faletra cites Theodor Adorno's warning that barbarism persists as long as the conditions that produced Auschwitz remain, and notes Berardi's renunciation of the performance out of respect for Jewish communities. He also references Imre Kertész's critique of the cultural commodification of the Holocaust, particularly in films like Schindler's List and Life Is Beautiful, which he calls kitsch. Faletra concludes that the controversy reflects a broader failure to recognize the moral obligation of rescue and hospitality, as articulated by Jean Améry and the Talmud, and warns against cynical fatalism that normalizes migrant deaths.