Defending the blue: show your colors

My graphics professor Fons Hickmann always said that you should never let colors be taken away from you. Back then, at the end of the 2010s, it was mostly about black, white and red in combination, but today, at least for a week now, it's probably about blue. The AfD is said to have created an entire world of emojis to express sympathies and affiliations, including the blue heart.

While the CDU's Cadenabbia turquoise, the CSU blue and the ÖVP's so-called Sebastian Kurz turquoise are known with color codes on the Internet, the AfD does not seem to be able to decide. No HEX code and no Pantone number can be found for what is called AfD light blue. So it's hardly surprising how much color varies in party marketing when you look at printed matter, digital material or Ulrich Siegmund's painted swallow. The mere ignorance of the subtleties of the design could be interpreted as evidence of the party's forgetfulness of culture.

Only a few pigments produced pure blue in pre-digital times. It is not without a certain irony that most of them came from far away, like the first synthetic pigment ever, Egyptian blue, which was produced as early as 3,000 BC. It was made from sand, lime, copper minerals and baking soda, and its recipe was thought to be lost for more than a thousand years. The indigo obtained from the indigo plant comes from India, the ultramarine from lapis lazuli from Afghanistan.

The European woad, a plant that was grown in Thuringia of all places, also made it possible to produce an indigo color. However, the concentration of the dye indigotin in woad is up to twenty times lower than in the East Asian legume Indigofera tinctoria. By the way, to get the color you need long, smelly fermentation processes and a lot of urine. It was only in the 18th century that another synthetic dye was discovered by chance: Prussian or Berlin blue.

Many have already fallen for the blue, and very few of them would allow themselves to be comfortably captured by the AfD's narrow definition of culture. The American author and heroine of the auto-theoretical queer feminist Maggie Nelson dedicated an entire book to color in 2009 with her “Bluets”, in which she reflects on love and pain and (survival). The French painter and performance artist Yves Klein must have been obsessed with the contradictory erotic potential of color. For his anthropometrics in the 1960s, he had naked women with bodies soaked in blue painted on the canvas.

An entire post-war art history could be spun around blue. In 1993, the artist and director Derek Jarman, who was almost blind as a result of his AIDS illness, spoke a dense, poetic text about a blue statue for over an hour in “Blue” in 1993. “Blue” is more of a radio play than a film; Jarman reflects on his life, love and death. “Blue of my heart / Blue of my dreams / slow blue love / of delphinium days,” his voice sounds from the off.

Jarman, whose impressive, eccentric garden in southern England remains to this day, must have loved larkspur days, this buttercup plant whose all-pervading blue cools the eyes in late summer. The Potsdam gardener Karl Förster couldn't let go of the delphinium either: he ran one of the few perennial nurseries in the GDR; it was only after his death in 1970 that it was transferred to public ownership. By then he had bred or selected over 72 varieties of delphinium.

At least the AfD will probably have nothing against Karl Förster: his role in National Socialism is still controversial today. And yet none of its flower colors are as flat as the AfD's pale blue color. Whatever tone it is supposed to be, it is certain that it is mixed with white. The deep, raging pigment has its teeth pulled out. The party itself probably describes the color as sky blue.

Regarding the sky, Maggie Nelson writes in “Bluets”: “What I remember, however, is that the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of the empty space beyond.” That's not entirely true physically, but in the context of an imagined AfD heaven it actually sounds quite logical. It must be a very dark room.