From Berlin to Baghdad
A Testimony to the Revenge Against Civilization
Saad Elqirsh
It is commonly said that the creative artist must allow a temporal distance to arise between themselves and turbulent events—war, revolution, invasion—in order to add vision to mere sight. In doing so, the artist does not remain confined to what the eye records, but penetrates the essence of things, approaching the deeper forces that melt and fuse together until their boiling point ignites the visible summit.
Some people enjoy repeating this comfortable notion—sometimes as an invitation to inertia, and at other times as a means of absolving themselves of responsibility. Even if such a rule holds validity, it is nonetheless accompanied by exceptions that ultimately confirm it. One cannot forbid the poet who participates in battle from being inspired by the flames to compose a verse or a poem, nor can one command him to remain silent in the name of a supposedly more sacred combat duty than poetry itself. The same may be said of a filmmaker who, whether by chance or by conscious risk, finds themselves in the field before the smoke of destruction has cleared, opening their eyes as a camera while their chest still inhales the fumes of bombardment.
The Iraqi documentary From Berlin to Baghdad represents precisely such an exception to the conventional rule with which I began.
The film’s director and producer, the Iraqi poet Amal Al-Jubouri, was destined to find herself at the center of the storm. Perhaps she deliberately chose this position, hastening to travel from Berlin, where she lived, to Baghdad, where her heart remained anchored. Her camera was already active, documenting a moment that would never recur—a moment that does not wait for the hesitant, and that invading forces might later attempt to erase, deny, or cleanse themselves from.
After the film was produced in 2003, it was first screened at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, attended by hundreds of Germans and other viewers. The director described the event as unprecedented in the museum’s history: preparations for the screening required the temporary removal of archaeological objects displayed in the hall near the Ishtar Gate, one of the most significant remnants of Babylonian civilization. Chairs were installed and the glass dome of the gallery was covered so that the film could be projected to the audience—an act intended as a tribute to the civilization of Iraq, an expression of solidarity with its people, and a condemnation of what had befallen Iraq’s antiquities, history, and cultural heritage through looting and plunder in the aftermath of the occupation and under its facilitation.
The film was also fortunate to be screened four times in major Egyptian cultural venues: the Goethe Institute in Cairo, the Egyptian Journalists’ Syndicate in Cairo, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and during “Iraq Night” at the Cairo Opera House.
Filmed over the course of a single week and co-directed by the Iraqi poet Jawad Al-Hattab, the fifty-minute documentary constitutes sufficient evidence indicting the brutality of the American invader—an aggressor fully aware of its objectives.
Those who awakened late to history, having missed its dawn and midday, sought to accomplish something—anything—within the narrow span before sunset. The United States of America, as Oscar Wilde once remarked, is the only country that would pass from barbarism to decadence without ever passing through civilization. The impatient barbarian naturally violates what he lacks. Americans lack history—and for this reason they despise it. It is precisely for this reason that they targeted the cultural and civilizational landmarks of Baghdad immediately after its fall on 9 April 2003.
This film bears witness to crimes committed by American forces: the deliberate burning of the National Library, and the prevention of access to the Iraq Museum in Baghdad for four hours, allowing professional thieves to depart with their plunder. Only afterward were crowds permitted to enter—an act designed to conceal the crime.
At that early moment, immediately following the invasion, Amal Al-Jubouri captured a revealing slogan that I have not seen documented in any other Iraqi film. Someone had written on a wall: “In revenge for Kuwait.” It was a threat unsigned by its author, yet it echoed the cry of the legendary Arab figure al-Zīr Sālim before he began his forty-year war of vengeance for the death of his brother: “For the vengeance of Kulayb!”
This film is the child of its moment—born from an exceptional circumstance in which the Iraqi horizon appeared simultaneously expansive and constricted: expansive because dictatorship had fallen, yet constricted because the future remained opaque. Officials were absent, while eyewitnesses were present—loyal Iraqis who attempted to rescue the heritage of their country armed only with their civilizational conscience and their sense of historical responsibility.
The prominent archaeologist Mu’ayyad Saʿīd stated that in the first days following the fall of Baghdad, American forces prevented anyone from moving within the museum:
“The tanks stood at the entrance while the thieves entered in safety.”
Those permitted to enter the museum knew exactly what they were doing. They knew the easiest routes for systematic looting: stealing museum documents or destroying them, and removing artifacts by “forcing open fortified doors.” In this manner, everything that might have formed the nucleus of an Iraqi memory was destroyed—photographic archives, documentary collections, and more. At the conclusion of the crime, the museum itself nearly fell victim to arson, as had already happened to the Library of Baghdad and the Museum of Modern Art.
It was a miserable and sorrowful fate for a dispersed history. Smoke rose from the windows of the House of Books and Documents, which housed the Saddam Center for Manuscripts on Haifa Street, in a building dating back to the eleventh century. Thousands of manuscripts were burned, according to the manuscript specialist Osama Al-Naqshbandi.
Dr. Ḍamiyā ʿAbbās managed to rescue manuscripts that “represent the memory of humanity.” She stated that the campaign against memory “was not directed at Saddam Hussein,” adding that “the kingdom of America is not equal in value to the treasures of Iraq.”
Meanwhile, the Library of Ancient Languages had become little more than shelves topped with the ashes of burned collections. Jaber Khalil, former head of the Department of Antiquities and Heritage at the Ministry of Culture, stated that this library—once the most important and renowned center in the world for the study of ancient languages—no longer contained a single surviving page. He also expressed fears that these treasures might eventually surface in Israel or elsewhere.
From Berlin to Baghdad was not made by Amal Al-Jubouri as an exercise in nostalgia or a stimulus for funerary sentiment. Rather, the film will regain renewed relevance when Iraq one day produces leaders who understand the meaning of their country—leaders who recognize that floods arrive and sweep everything away: the statues of dictators, collaborators, and thieves alike.
I visited Basra and found no images or statues of officials. The era of the “indispensable leader” had ended. History had instead chosen a more deserving object of honor: the son of Basra and its enduring symbol, the poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab. He greets visitors from the airport screen beside the “Sayyab Hall,” and one also sees his statue—one that withstood the Iran-Iraq War and remained standing with dignity long after the removal of statues that had burdened Iraqi eyes for decades.
The film From Berlin to Baghdad concludes with lines from a poem written by Mahmoud Darwish at the beginning of the Anglo-American bombardment of Iraq, before the fall of Baghdad:
I remember al-Sayyab crying out in the Gulf:
Iraq, Iraq—nothing but Iraq.
And nothing answers but the echo.
I remember al-Sayyab: poetry is born in Iraq.
So be Iraqi, my friend, if you wish to become a poet.