At midday on 19 June, a crowd of journalists, photographers and well-wishers gathered at the Zwölf-Apostel Cemetery in a sedate corner of Berlin. We had been invited by the Centre for Political Beauty, an artist-activist collective, to witness the burial of a 60-year-old Syrian man who died while making the journey across the Mediterranean from Libya.
In the graveyard a narrow path opened out into a small clearing, where we were welcomed by Joschka Fleckenstein, one of the group’s leading researchers. Fleckenstein’s face, like that of each his colleagues, was partly obscured by a thick, grimy paste. He looked like a trainee commando off to rummage his way through the jungle. This paste, I was told, symbolised “the burned hopes of Germany and Europe”.
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