Scrounge of the State

Welcome to Mint for another opportunity to see the performance lecture Scrounge of the State (2020) by Hanni Kamaly, part of the ongoing exhibition A Careful Strike*! Scrounge of the State is based on a series of articles known as the Pass-Skandalerna, (The Passport Scandals) written in 1921 by the Swedish communist politician Otto Grimlund. The lecture traces and retells the stories of communists Willi Münzenberg and Nathan Chabrow, among others – both arrested and expelled from Sweden during the interwar years of the 1920s. After his return to the USA, Chabrow was interrogated as a consequence of the Red Scare by J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI. Münzenberg was a key figure in the League Against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression, a transnational organisation of political activists. At the same time, major figures in German National Socialism such as Wolfgang Kapp and Erich Ludendorff, who had been and would be involved in the failed coup d’état in collaboration with Adolf Hitler, also sought asylum in Sweden. Kapp and Ludendorff received much better treatment from the Swedish authorities than Chabrow and Münzenberg.