When the bubble burst last year in Dubai, an endlessly reported detail was the number of cars abandoned -- some supposedly with apology notes stuck to the windshields -- by debt-burdened foreigners fleeing an economy in free fall. Now the German impresario hired to oversee the emirate's ambitious cultural plans has also quit his post, leaving behind not a missive on the Volkswagen Touareg SUV he drove in the desert boomtown, but Dubai Speed, a unique insider's memoir of the grandiose -- and all too fleeting -- attempt to use state power to reinvent a culture.
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Michael Schindhelm's impressionistic account of Dubai's failed bid to buy an artistic identity by importing talent from around the world joins books in German and English about Dubai as the instantaneous city, with its made-to-order architectural majesty and astonishing new acts of consumerism, on the brink of cracking up even as it was being built. This emerging literature of the collapsed Dubai experiment gives a more detailed picture of the backstage bluster and indecisiveness that led to such unparalleled overreach than one finds in the news coverage. The portrait revealed is depressing, from the fortune-seeking Western consultants jockeying for position to the money-mad al-Maktoum dynasty with its thwarted pretensions to international grandeur.
Schindhelm was already a master of reinvention by the time he arrived in Dubai in 2007, after resigning from his job as director-general of Berlin's venerable trio of opera houses. Born in communist East Germany, Schindhelm worked briefly as a chemistry professor with future chancellor Angela Merkel, then started directing regional theaters in Germany and Switzerland before moving on to Berlin, where he quit in protest after the financially strapped city was forced to cut opera funding. Schindhelm subsequently traded Berlin for a postmodern city-state that, at least at the start of his sojourn, lured him with promises of unimaginable riches and boundless excitement.
"One doesn't really know whether the man is to be pitied or envied," the German newspaper Die Welt commented when Schindhelm departed for Dubai. After all, weren't the Gulf states a "refuge for those who had substantially failed and now far away use gold to build fake artistic dreams and castles in the air?" From the start, Schindhelm found in Dubai a land of superlatives and excess in stark contrast to the sober constraints of home. "This city is in total mobilization," he writes in his book, currently available only in German, "not only in competition with time; it is a protest against time.… Everything is in a process of transformation, marching forward."
His pressing task was to create swiftly what Dubai's leaders proclaimed would be "the most comprehensive cultural destination in the world." This included, first and foremost, an opera housed within an undulating structure designed by starchitect Zaha Hadid to resemble sand dunes and meant to accommodate an audience of 3,000 in a society with no tradition of theater or music. Schindhelm tried in vain to point out the acoustic drawbacks of such a mammoth auditorium, pushing instead for a never-to-be-built opera house that would reflect Dubai's aspirations as a laboratory for globalized culture. "On today's program is Così Fan Tutte," he imagined, "and tomorrow a Lebanese dance theater group; then follows an appearance by Cirque du Soleil, a modern Beijing opera, and a Bollywood musical. And the auditorium is actually a melting pot."
Soon state museums in Berlin, Dresden, and Munich were working with Schindhelm to build a Museum of World Cultures, and there were plans to create dozens more museums, libraries, theaters, and galleries. The cultural authority was also in talks to include the Hermitage, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the National Museum of China in building "the world's largest consolidated museum."
But Schindhelm was hampered from the outset by the profound disarray and highly opaque decision-making of Dubai's madcap dash to globalize. He was assigned to work in the same skyscraper where Dubai's top government authorities sat on the 52nd floor, while his own office was located on the 28th with two phone lines, only one of which could make international calls. The fax machine was on the 36th floor, and the photocopier was on the fourth.
KARIM SAHIB/AFP/Getty Images
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