Łukasz Surowiec’s project Berlin-Birkenau transplants baby birches from around the former death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau into private gardens in Berlin. The KW top floor is thus filled with vast swaths of the sprouts, and an ancillary video that is vaguely reminiscent of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985). Now, a ritual is a set of stylized actions, performed mainly for their symbolic value. Ritual is defined by a mode of symbolic structuring that removes the human from the clashes of antagonist history (political history) and places him on an altogether different type of temporality (the temporality of life, death, and natural cycles). That is, ritual re-inscribes human history back onto mythical history. The community structured by ritual is thus not a political community but an ethical community. Since ritual voids the political edge constituting one’s identity, one is no longer a Jew, German, nor Palestinian, just a man appearing as Man. The political difference that exists at the core and as the cause of any traumatic political event is evacuated by an all-encompassing piety, which can only maintain itself for as long as that same political difference remains suspended. All ritual is an appeasement, and is thus fully inadequate to express the sense of urgency present in political demands. The act of planting a tree to commemorate war victims speaks the language of Protocol. Planting trees is what first ladies do. To revert art back to ritual is thus to lose sight of the modern tradition of critique. The political is not synonymous with politics. Critique is the acknowledgment of this split, or, as Bertolt Brecht put it, an awakening of a sense of strangeness that forces one to reshuffle the “order of things.”