A column of international perspectives on queer Berlin

Ahmed Awadalla looks at what happens when outsiders get inside the halls of power and start to mirror the very systems they once fought

What happens when the outsider becomes the insider? When those who fought their way into power start to wield it like their bullies did to them? Do they protect the vulnerable, or protect their own position? Do they dismantle the system, or learn to play its game?

The unsettling reality is: not everyone who breaks into the system wants to break it open. Some learn to dominate as skillfully as those who dominated them. Tár – an unsettling character study set in Berlin’s classical music world – understands this. Filmed in 2021, it feels almost prophetic. The film gives us a lesbian who rises to the top of the Berlin Philharmonic, only to wield authority with the same cruelty, entitlement and impunity we’ve long associated with men. Is this a Berlin thing? Or simply how power operates everywhere?

Those who come from the margins have to work twice as hard to prove their brilliance, only to be dismissed or seen as a threat. This is a world that rewards mediocrity and protects those who preserve the status quo. Differ, and you’re difficult; call out problems, and you become the problem. Tár interrogates these dynamics, enough to make some viewers – including conductor Marin Alsop, herself a lesbian – publicly criticize the film. And perhaps that discomfort is exactly the point. This isn’t just about representation. Or maybe it’s the kind we didn’t know we needed. The film reminds us that neither gender nor queerness shields anyone from reproducing harm. The echoes are everywhere.

One may think of Alice Weidel, a lesbian who disavows her queerness while leading the far right. But that’s too easy. For me, AfD is just a scarecrow masking the deeper rot in German politics. Angela Merkel herself can be read as gender-washing: placing a woman at Germany’s top made the country’s image far more benign, and made the CDU appear lighter than its darker roots. Or, closer to home, we have the notorious case of the medical care provider (who shall remain unnamed), convicted of sexual harassment yet still practicing. These patterns repeat: the person of color who rises and throws their lookalikes under the bus; the enlightened academic, sheltered by institutional privilege, who lectures newcomers on how to integrate.

The faces change, but the structure remains. When inclusion becomes the goal, it reshuffles the players but leaves the game intact. What we need now are not just new faces in old rooms, but new rooms entirely. Systems don’t transform through representation alone; they shift when we’re brave enough to ask who gets to hold power, and why. And if you ever hold power – the real question is: what will you do with it?