How to Do Things with Words or: The Name of the Rose

Artistic freedom is not freedom from the social sphere, but freedom exercised within it. Art may claim a certain autonomy, a heightened mode of attention set apart from the everyday—one we would not ordinarily grant to a purely functional object. Yet art never exists outside lived conditions; it is overdetermined by them, even as artists attempt to transcend them.

This tension—the notion of art as a utopian exception within a fundamentally unjust world—has shaped the Berlinale since its founding in 1951, amid Cold War cultural politics. It once again became sharply visible this year. Only in her second year as festival director, Tricia Tuttle came under intense scrutiny for her handling of the festival’s recent political controversies. Following the close of the seventy-sixth iteration of the festival in February, Germany’s Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media Wolfram Weimer convened an extraordinary meeting of the Berlinale’s supervisory board, reportedly aimed at pushing for Tuttle’s resignation. A follow-up session concluded that Tuttle will remain Berlinale director, but, according to Weimer, the festival will henceforth be accompanied by a Berlinale-specific consultative forum and subject to a new code of conduct governing political statements at all federally funded cultural events in Germany.

The proximate cause was a photo published by the Bild tabloid and widely circulated in what appeared to be a targeted campaign by the right-wing Axel Springer media group, showing Tuttle on the red carpet during the photocall before the premiere of Chronicles from the Siege (2026). The film, an Algerian-French-Palestinian production about a geographically unspecified occupation or siege as a normal condition, won Best Debut at this year’s Berlinale. In the photo, members of the film’s team—including its director Abdallah Al‑Khatib—hold a Palestinian flag and wear keffiyehs. In his acceptance speech at the award ceremony, Al‑Khatib declared: “We will remember everyone who stood with us, and we will remember everyone who was against us. A free Palestine from now until the end of the world.” He also accused the German federal government of being complicit “in the genocide in Gaza,” an allegation the German government rejects. Weimer characterized Al-Khatib’s statement as anti-Israel and antisemitic, but offered no evidence for that claim, nor did he explain how this justified his intervention in the festival’s affairs as federal culture minister.1

Weimer’s actions sparked swift backlash. A group of filmmakers issued an open letter and within hours it collected nearly 700 signatories from the international film and cultural sector—including the recent Golden Bear winner İlker Çatak, Karim Aïnouz, Ruth Beckermann, Shahrbanoo Sadat, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Ada Solomon, and Nadav Lapid—and has since grown to 2,500 signatures.2 German film organizations, including the Bundesverband Kommunale Filmarbeit, AG Kurzfilm, and AG Filmfestival, warned that pressuring festival leaders over political expectations creates structural strain and weakens both the Berlinale and Germany’s cultural landscape. Tuttle’s own team likewise publicly expressed their support for her in an open letter on the festival’s website.3

The controversy unfolded against an already tense backdrop. When asked at the jury’s opening press conference about the festival’s responsibility with regard to the war in Gaza, jury president Wim Wenders emphasized that art should serve as a counterweight to politics rather than intervene directly in current issues, arguing that artists should “do the work of the people, not the work of politicians.” Writer Arundhati Roy withdrew from the festival in protest, joining a group of prominent actors and directors who accused the Berlinale of sidelining voices critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza. The festival was widely condemned, in other words, for showing too little solidarity with Palestinians—yet even the slightest acknowledgment of such solidarity was treated by the German government as a serious offense.

These tensions reflect a broader pattern in Germany, as a growing list of such cases—recently catalogued by Diedrich Diederichsen in Artforum—makes clear: exhibitions, performances, and academic programs have been canceled or altered in response to pro-Palestinian statements or criticism of Israel’s military actions.4 Weimer has intervened in several such situations. Most recently, Weimer’s office informed three left-wing bookstores in Germany that an independent jury had not selected them for the German Booksellers’ Prize, even though the jury had in fact nominated them; his office removed their names following an inquiry by Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz. Weimer argued that a state-funded prize should not go to institutions he deems “extremist.”5 In another case, when comedian Jan Böhmermann invited rapper Chefket to participate in a show at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, Weimer objected after seeing an Instagram post showing the rapper wearing a T-shirt depicting a map of Palestine encompassing present-day Israel; the invitation was subsequently withdrawn. Such controversies are hardly new even for the Berlinale. Two years ago, the Best Documentary award for No Other Land—directed by a collective of Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers—sparked a tense reaction from several German politicians working under Weimer’s predecessor, Claudia Roth. If Weimer succeeds in implementing his proposed restrictions on cultural funding, the independence of cultural institutions, including Germany’s largest federally funded film festival, will be severely compromised—and with it the credibility of Germany’s claim to democratic values of freedom of expression and artistic autonomy.

Given these circumstances, the decision of this year’s jury to award the Golden Bear to an explicitly political film, Yellow Letters by İlker Çatak—and not, for example, to the deeply detached solipsism of a film like My Wife Cries by Angela Schanelec, which ignores everything post-Brecht—stands out all the more. Set in Turkey but shot mainly in Germany, with Berlin standing in for Ankara and Hamburg for Istanbul, Yellow Letters follows a couple—an actress and a screenwriter-scholar—who clash with the authorities after collaborating on a politically charged drama. The film is at its strongest when it juxtaposes political censorship with the middle-class theatre milieu, exploring whether making money from art is illegitimate or reasonable—both an aesthetic and socioeconomic issue. Overall, however, Yellow Letters proves far too didactic in its treatment of the art-politics nexus, placing it within a Berlinale tradition of films foregrounding political contradictions: dialectical on the surface yet laying out its subject all too plainly.

Other films in this year’s competition, by contrast, explored a far more nuanced relationship between art and politics, treating the aesthetic as inherently political and thus offering a compelling alternative to both Yellow Letters’ didacticism and Wenders’s bourgeois notion of artistic autonomy. Dao by Berlinale regular Alain Gomis, for example, is a remarkable tour de force of rhythms and counter-rhythms. Featuring the impressively charismatic Katy Correa, Dao weaves threads of heritage between Paris and Guinea-Bissau and interrogates what it means to communicate with the dead. The audience favorite, Rose, directed by Markus Schleinzer, on the other hand, tells the story of a woman in seventeenth-century Central Europe who disguises herself as a man in order to survive social constraints; Sandra Hüller, in the leading role, won the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance. Although distinct in style, both films address the political as something actively shaped by how people foster a sense of community and the moral, economic, and aesthetic principles on which it rests. Dao is driven by improvisation and the tension-and-relaxation dynamics of social interaction, while Rose is characterized by a minimalist segmentation of the individual versus the collective.

Both films were highlights of this year’s Berlinale, with Rose leaving the most lasting impression, thanks to its acute observational sensibility and masterfully pared-down narrative. The black-and-white film is set during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) in Central Europe, marked by struggles between Protestant and Catholic states, dynastic ambitions, and territorial disputes. The opening sequence pans images of buried human skulls and bones, as well as smoking, burning fields. Siren-like, almost sacred chants—punctuated by the sudden striking of a recurring high-pitched note—break through the ethereal yet somber stillness of the sparse landscape. The black-and-white imagery imposes a peculiar gravity and sincerity. An omniscient, feminine-voiced narrator speaking in German begins to unfold the story of an “eccentric”: Rose. Though not told in Rose’s own voice, the story takes the form of a memoir that is revealed toward the film’s end to be Rose’s. The narrator’s voice lends subtle, almost wry hues to the austere visuals, infusing them with warmth and a touch of wit—as if the black-and-white film were suddenly bathed in color.

The recited text, the spoken manuscript, is written in a distinctly unusual German. It feels archaic, extinct—simultaneously oral and highly artificial. At the same time, the mode of narration resembles a short story shaped by lived experience. Schleinzer explained at the Berlinale press conference that he and cowriter Alexander Brom authored an entire novel about Rose’s life—from childhood to adulthood—in order to better understand the character, though the film focuses only on its later sections. Some elements of Rose’s story draw on the many documented instances in European history of women who lived in disguise as men to endure war, hunger, and patriarchy. The artifice of the spoken text reinforces the sense that the narrative is socially constructed: like a figure from a classical Western, a scarred soldier appears in a remote Protestant village in Germany, presenting himself as the heir to a long-abandoned farm. Gradually gaining the trust of the wary villagers, the soldier—Rose in disguise—relies on deliberate deception, challenging the gendered constraints imposed on her at birth and subtly reshaping the community around her.

The community is composed mostly of functional roles rather than individuals: the magistrate, the wealthy farmer, the maid. Only Rose—whose name in her masculine guise remains unknown, as the community addresses her simply as “Herr” (“master”)—and her wife Suzanna, whom her father has forced into marriage, are given proper names. When Rose tells the farmhand how she got the scar that disfigured one side of her face during the war, she remarks, “It’s not just my face—everything has taken on a new shape now.” Schleinzer uses this personal narrative to reveal the historicity—and thus the mutability—of social structures such as war, farming the land both as work and labor, the institution of marriage, binary sex, and social classes. The historical film genre itself likewise appears as artifice, almost as a travesty—or at the very least as a self-conscious citation of its own conventions. This effect stems partly from the narrative’s play with deception, through which the film opens up a queer counter-history that makes visible the mutability of the political as produced through communal life. Furthermore, it is shaped by the restrained visual style and subtle performances (mainly by Hüller as Rose and Godehard Giese as the wealthy farmer and Suzanna’s father), which invert the stark social realism of what is spoken and reveal what remains unsaid, hidden in the habitual workings of social codes.

In a world where everything is functional and physically determined—where posture, dominance, restraint, and rationality govern life, where labor alongside God-fearing piety is held as the highest good, and reproduction is regarded as “the only service to the community,” where hands shape wood, bread, and linen, doors and windows are opened and closed, pigs, chickens, and sheep must be fed, and winters are harsh though summers are no less fraught with danger—the performative power of the word breaks in, bringing with it the possibility of “composing oneself,” as the narrator renders Rose’s attempt to write down her own story: “This is life in deceit and lies. And one can call it freedom, to live this way.” Rose’s ironic distance becomes palpable in the way her sentences unfold, layer upon layer, shaping new meanings. For instance, she undercuts her claim that reproduction is “the only service to the community” by adding, “no matter what others claim,” as if the narrator, speaking Rose’s words, were winking at the absurdity, sharply exposing—and gently mocking—the violence embedded in the norm of reproductivity.

From the start, this peculiar wit suggests that nothing good lies ahead. Yet it counterbalances, with even more cruel and unpredictable force, the bitterness of Rose’s eventual exposure and the severity of the punishment she and Suzanna subsequently face. This tension renders Schleinzer’s film ambiguous in its depiction of social roles, while also making it exceptionally effective in sketching its characters and their psychology. Compared with The White Ribbon by Michael Haneke, on which Schleinzer collaborated closely on casting—as he did on several other Haneke films—Rose takes a more materialistic yet playfully engaged stance toward its subject. While The White Ribbon, set in a northern German village on the eve of World War I and also shot in black-and-white, is similarly told by an unnamed—though masculine-voiced—narrator, its perspective is less contradictory and thus appears more authoritative than that of Schleinzer’s Rose. Haneke’s film takes a heavily psychoanalytical and somewhat abstract view of its characters’ experiences and actions, focusing on what remains unsaid—the rules, norms, and institutions shaping society—without explicitly questioning them. Schleinzer’s earlier film Angelo—inspired by the historical figure of Angelo Soliman, an African man brought to Vienna as an enslaved child in the early eighteenth century and later transformed by the court’s colonial projections into a figure of myth—casts a revealing light on Rose. Like Angelo, Rose presents its protagonist as a mythologized figure, attentive to taboos while actively confronting social contradictions as forms of violence.

It is above all Hüller who allows the viewer to witness how Rose, in a kind of performative mise en abyme, assumes different identities that extend into her gestures, posture, speech, and even the manner in which she wears her hat, drawing on the social and economic privileges embedded in the expectations imposed on a man. Rose reacts with immediate anger when her assumed male identity slips—for instance when she cannot light the fireplace for Suzanna, who, like everyone else, initially believes Rose to be a man—a failure that risks casting doubt on her ability to provide for her wife and thus exposing her biological sex. As noted in one scene, Rose does not merely “step into the trousers,” assuming a male-associated role but also leverages this male guise to possess and accumulate economic (money, property), cultural (literacy), and social (reputation) capital. When Suzanna accidentally discovers Rose’s biological sex, Rose remarks: “This is what gives us freedom. For others, we are that—man and wife.” Fulfilling a social role brings social acceptance, and social acceptance, in turn, brings freedom—and gender is, of course, just one of many dimensions defined by these roles. Crucially, it is the performative assertion endowed with authority—in this case, the claim to be man and wife—that brings the desired reality into existence: words shape the world just as much as the world shapes them.

This performative power, moreover, extends beyond the protective cover of deception, as the film illustrates. When Rose confides in Suzanna, she experiences relief and fosters a solidarity between them “as only the spoken word can,” as the narrator emphasizes. Fearing that Suzanna might inadvertently reveal it, Rose waits to disclose her birth name until their fates are already sealed. Schleinzer deliberately denies his characters a conventional happy ending, explaining at the press conference that films offering such resolutions leave him passive, as if the world were inherently beautiful. “If, however, I see something that unsettles me,” he said, “I feel more compelled to engage actively and responsibly with my own life.” Yet Schleinzer does not simply reproduce patriarchal violence. By contrast, the practice of assuming roles—of rehearsing actions through repetition and variation, as in Judith Butler’s concept of “doing gender”—reaches so far that Rose ultimately rehearses her own execution. Even shortly before her death, she still claims the freedom to live this way: “For impossibility is only a word, and words can be changed,” adding: “Once spoken, words exist in the world and carry real consequences.”

Schleinzer is neither an idealist who believes that social inequalities can be changed merely through attitude or language, nor a cynic who thinks they cannot be changed at all. Rose actively critiques the epistemic violence embedded in strategies of normalization and pathologization imposed by institutions such as the church, the courts, or male authority. In imagining and inventing—central to acting and to artistic production more broadly—lies the possibility of destabilizing identity and transcending the present: through storytelling, interpretation, and rehearsal, art cultivates a representative power capable of reshaping reality. The film denies societal norms—whether heterosexuality or patriarchal authority—any claim to naturalness or inevitability, loosening the seemingly tight grip of words and things. The title itself hints at this: “Rose” not only rhymes with the German word “Hose” (“trousers”), highlighting the film’s cross-dressing aspect, but it is also an anagram of “Eros,” evoking a desire that exceeds a private bond between two lovers and opens onto a political “eroticism,” a profound love of freedom. In this sense, the film echoes Shakespeare’s timeless observation in Romeo and Juliet—“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet”—underscoring the socially constructed nature of identity and how thoroughly social mediation can naturalize what exists, obscuring traces of contingency and possibility.

What allows history to change is its transience, and transience is a central motif in Rose: the skulls, the scarf, the seasons, and the sexes—all are subject to decay and impermanence. Rather than proposing an escapist vision of the past, the film reads the present through a history that proves transient: recognizing the becoming within what seems settled, and the passing of all that exists. As the film concludes, Rose “writes herself beyond the point of the present,” as the narrator notes, remaining alive as a character even where she is already dead as a human being. Her failure as a swindler ultimately becomes a victory in singular expression: she shapes her story to the very end, asserting agency amid impermanence. As Schleinzer demonstrates, within the frame of art alone, the political world can reveal itself as open to change.

1 Wolfram Weimer, “‘Die Stimmung auf der Berlinale wurde regelrecht vergiftet,’” interview by Hagen Strauß, Rheinische Post, March 1, 2026, https://rp-online.de/politik/deutschland/wolfram-weimer-tuttle-hat-ihre-zukunft-von-sich-aus-infrage-gestellt_aid-144557741.

2 “Open Letter on the Future of the Berlinale,” February 25, 2026, https://openletter.earth/offener-brief-zur-zukunft-der-berlinale-3e6cfe08.

3 Berlinale Team, “Open Letter in Support of Tricia Tuttle,” February 26, 2026, https://www.berlinale.de/en/news-topics/berlinale-notes.html.

4 Diedrich Diederichsen, “The War on Bohemia,” Artforum (December 2025), https://www.artforum.com/features/year-in-review-2025-diedrich-diederichsen-war-on-bohemia-1234738079/. See also the instances compiled at https://archiveofsilence.org/.

5 Importantly, the grounds for such assessments are not always made public, leaving the criteria by which institutions are deemed suspicious difficult to scrutinize. See "Deutscher Buchhandlungspreis: Kritik am Ausschluss dreier Buchläden von Preisvergabe," Tagesspiegel, March 5, 2026, https://www.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/deutscher-buchhandlungspreis-kritik-am-ausschluss-dreier-buchladen-von-preisvergabe-15317996.html.

Katharina Hausladen is an art and cultural studies scholar and a writer based in Berlin. She currently teaches at Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen.

Still from Chronicles of the Siege (2026): © Issaad Film Productions.

Still from Yellow Letters: © Ella Knorz_ifProductions_Alamode Film.

Stills from Rose: © 2026 Schubert, ROW Pictures, Walker+Worm Film, Gerald Kerkletz.