Understanding a story does not mean we are finished with it. That sounds like a tall order, especially for a magazine: we are meant to provide context, make connections, offer guidance. I believe that is our remit. But we should not leave readers with the impression that a person, a work or a past has now been definitively explained. A punchline makes a fine ending to a sentence, but it is no adequate model of the world.
In our articles this week, I keep encountering this boundary: between what can be pinned down and what resists definition. For me, this suggests a task for culture: it should expand our knowledge while also curbing our claim that this means we already grasp the whole.
A gap is not always a shortcoming
Our article “Die Bühne bleibt nicht. Ihre Spuren schon.” (The stage does not endure. Its traces do.) takes Sandra Prechtel’s archival film “Einar Schleef – Ich habe kein Deutschland gefunden” (Einar Schleef – I Found No Germany) as its starting point. Recordings make theatre history accessible. But the preserved trace and the past event are not the same thing. This does not imply any disregard for the archive. On the contrary: its significance becomes clearer when we do not also ask it to restore a lost present.
The archive opens up new questions; it does not settle them. For me, that is precisely its promise. A recording can contradict, unsettle, stand in the way of a later interpretation. It need not become evidence for a story that has already been finalised.
In Shida Bazyar’s novel “Die Lücken” (The Gaps), what is missing takes on a different meaning. Our profile describes a village as a site of German history and its suppression. Here, it would be convenient to celebrate every blank as an appealing openness. Some gaps arise because something is being left unsaid. This distinction is crucial: there are limits to what we can know, and limits to what we want to know. An argument against definitive interpretations must not provide cover for the latter.
A person is not a diagnosis
Our preview of Herlinde Koelbl’s exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bonn also leads us to this boundary. Koelbl pairs portraits of people with cancer with conversations. The illness is the reason for portraying them. That does not mean it can serve as their complete explanation.
I would like to see an approach that takes the experience of illness seriously without automatically declaring every face a symbol of vulnerability, hope or courage. Even well-meaning labels can pin people down. To honour someone, we do not have to endow them with an exemplary attitude. People should be allowed to be ill without having a message ready for the healthy.
The strongest objection to such restraint is this: without distillation, nothing becomes comprehensible. A portrait must select, a novel must shape, an editorial must judge. That is true. The alternative to the finished story is not a shapeless collection of every detail. What matters is whether an interpretation recognises its own limited scope — and allows itself to be corrected by something that does not fit within it.
Openness brings obligations
Emilija Škarnulytė’s exhibition “Arrow of Time” in St. Gallen shifts the scale once again: from human memory to planetary timescales, with a decommissioned nuclear power station as its point of reference. Our article asks about responsibility for consequences that extend beyond human memory. For me, this is no invitation to lapse into awestruck silence. It is precisely the limits of our knowledge that demand we scrutinise decisions and their consequences all the more carefully.
Openness, then, is not a licence to avoid commitment. We must establish facts, identify responsibility and justify our judgements. But we should not confuse people with their diagnoses, history with its surviving records, or art with our explanation of it. That would be my assessment of this week: precision also means knowing when our own sentence ends — while the matter itself is far from over.
Original reviewed by the editors · 28 October 2026
