Investigation of German
Identity after the Second World
War by Contemporary Artists
Christian Boltanski,
Shimon Attie, and Susan Hiller
Transart Institute/ Plymouth
University
Course: Master of Fine Arts
Name: Ira Susann Hoffecker-Sattler
Student Number: 16053163
Submission: May 1st, 2017
Word Count: 5418 (including captions of images)
Contents
Page
Student Declaration 3
1. Introduction 4
2. Christian Boltanski 6
3. Shimon Attie 9
4. Susan Hiller 12
5. Conclusion 16
Bibliography 23
Student
Declaration
In
submitting this paper for assessment, I confirm that it is my own work.
Signed:
_____________________________________
Name: Ira
Susann Hoffecker-Sattler
Date:
_______________________________________
1.
Introduction
Germany and its capital Berlin have experienced many
different governments and regimes during the past 150 years. There is no other
city that has seen so many different identities within this short timeframe.
The evolution of this city is inextricably linked with the history of the
German people.
The capitulation of Germany in
May 1945 marked the end of the Second World War (WWII) in Europe. Germans had
to accept responsibility for the actions of the Hitler regime which had brought
devastation and death across Europe. Horrendous crimes had been committed and
the guilt of the Holocaust needed to be accepted as a collective guilt that
would never go away. Germans were in shock. Their country had been destroyed as
a consequence of people following Hitler’s dictatorship. Also, Germany was now
divided into two parts for the foreseeable future: West Germany, influenced by
the free-market US American ideology, and East Germany, dominated by the
communist Soviet Union.
After the war Berlin
became divided into East Berlin, the
capital of East Germany, and West Berlin, a West German exclave
surrounded by the Berlin Wall from
1961–89. The dividing wall
fell on November 9th, 1989 and Germany and the two city halves were
reunified in 1990. Berlin was rebuilt as one city that belongs together, yet
undergoes a constant transformation.
Over the years, I
became extremely interested in investigating the different identities of Germany
and Berlin. Childhood memories of the years of the ‘leaden blanket’[1] over Germany’s
recent past had a pivotal impact on me. The question about what makes our
German identity through history and heritage is a vital part of my life and has
brought this theme into my work.
I have investigated those different historic
layers of Berlin in my art practice. I have studied Berlin’s history, the
social and political contexts, and the Zeitgeist of those relevant times and
Berlin’s changing architecture. By looking at historic and current maps of the
city, can one see how dramatically Berlin has been transformed several times
over the past 150 years.
In preparation for
this MFA paper, I have studied a selection of contemporary artists who have
investigated Germany’s Post-Nazi and Post-WWII identity after the fall of the
wall in November 1989. I am especially interested in how non-German
contemporary artists discuss Germany’s collective memory. I will examine how
these artists have explored Germany’s past and how they have responded to the
urban landscape. How do these artists work to keep Germany’s collective memory
alive? How do they address the absence and the loss and how do they work
against forgetting but towards remembering?
For this paper, I
have chosen to write about the following contemporary artists and these
specific pieces:
-
Christian Boltanski’s site-specific and
permanent installation The Missing House
in Berlin from 1990,
-
Shimon Attie’s site specific photo
installation The Writing on the Wall
also in Berlin’s Scheunenviertel, from 1991,
-
Susan Hiller’s J-Street Project, a film and a photo series from all over Germany
from 2002 to 2005.
2. The Missing House by Christian Boltanski
The memorial Das fehlende Haus,
(‘The Missing House’) was installed by French artist Christian Boltanski (born 1944)
in 1990 in Berlin’s Scheunenviertel, the former Jewish quarter of Berlin.
Before the Nazis came to power, mainly Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe
lived in this area. Close by there is also the memorial Der verlassene Raum, (‘The Room that was left’) by Karl Biedermann
and the former Jewish Cemetery which was destroyed by the Gestapo in 1943.
The Missing House is a site-specific installation which was
produced for the city of Berlin following an exhibition Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit (‘The Finiteness of Liberty’,
September and October 1990), which brought together various artists who were invited
to work on the site of their choice, to the east or the west of the dismantled
wall. A gap in a line of houses on the Grosse Hamburger Strasse, in the former
eastern part of the city, was the ideal site for Boltanski’s project. On
February 3rd, 1945, a bombardment damaged the building and it burnt
down. Its central part, 15B, was never rebuilt.[2] Still today there is a
free space, a gap between houses no. 15a and 15c, which were spared from the
bombardment.
Christian Boltanski, at that time guest professor at the
Hochschule der Kuenste in Berlin, began his research in city archives with his
students in 1990, shortly after the wall had come down in November 1989.[3] This led to interviews
with witnesses to unearth traces of those who had lived in this place, an enigmatic
void in the urban fabric. Deportation and emigration had forced the former
Jewish inhabitants to leave their flats. Documents relating to the pre-war
tenants cited there were approximately twenty-five Jewish inhabitants who were
later killed by the Nazis.[4] The intervention of the
artist consisted in installing a series of twelfe black and white plaques, 120
x 60 cm. Boltanski placed them on the blind walls of the adjacent houses A and
C, in the exact height of actual floors where those people had lived. Information,
stating the name, profession and the years of residency, was printed on the
white metal plaques, reminiscent of obituaries in German newspapers.
A second component of the work was installed in the former
West Berlin. On the grounds of the destroyed former Berliner Gewerbe Museum,
were placed several vitrines with various forms of archival documentation,
researched by Boltanski’s art students.[5] These artifacts related to the two waves of
inhabitants of the building 15b in Grosse Hamburger Strasse. At the time of the
1945 bombardment, there were no more Jewish inhabitants in the building. They
had been evicted, displaced, deported and most likely killed. During allied
bombings, the inhabitants were mostly Germans, who had replaced the
now-vanished Jewish tenants.
The Missing House, image of a part of the installation in
Grosse Hamburger Strasse
Critics and celebrants of Boltanski have often
‘characterized his work as one of contradiction.’[6] In an interview with art
historian Tamar Garb, Boltanski states: ‘A good work of art can never be read
in one way. My work is full of contradictions. An artwork is open – it is the
spectators looking at the work who make the piece, using their own background.’[7]
Boltanski explained, when politicians talk about the war
they talk about numbers, for example, 3000 have died. ‘It is not a number, it
is rather 1+1+1+1+1 etc, everyone with their own individual circumstances of
life and their own wishes and needs. Deaths must be counted in ones.’[8] This crowd of people
consisted of individuals. Only when one looks at the personal life and story of
each individual victim of the war, the incredible magnitude of what happened
seems to be more understandable.
Boltanski, whose father was Jewish, is noted for his installations associated
with the Shoah, composed of cropped photographs of anonymous people.
In many of his works, Boltanski refers to his own personage. Using various
media, he often tells his life stories, both actual and reinvented. What is
unusual in his work is that he freely takes on new roles and discards of old
identities, constantly changing the stories of his own life, creating an individual
mythology. Not surprisingly Boltanski mentions German artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986)
as one of his major influences.[9] Beuys also created a mythological
story around his own life. He, however, followed through with the same story
throughout his life. For their propaganda, the Nazis had appropriated Germanic
mythology. Beuys, with his story, was drawing a strong parallel to this
appropriation.
Photo of the second part of the installation, the
vitrines
Christian Boltanski’s public and permanent memorial draws the attention
of the viewer to the fact that something is missing. Unlike other memorials in
Berlin, such as Gunter Demnig’s Stolpersteine,
Karl Biedermann’s Der verlassene Raum,
or the Holocaust Memorial, where the
memorial consists of one or various artefacts that remind of the past,
Boltanski draws our attention to the void.
From millions of victims of the war Christian Boltanski selects those people
who lived in this house and gives them back their names and identity. He takes
them out of the anonymity of a statistic and leaves it to the viewer to
reactivate the stories of the former inhabitants.
3. The Writing on the Wall by
Shimon Attie
As
well as The Missing House, Shimon
Attie’s site specific project Die Schrift
an der Wand (‘The Writing on the Wall’) was also installed in Berlin’s
former Jewish quarter, the Scheunenviertel in 1991. Jewish American artist
Attie (born 1957) used photos of the 1920s and 1930s of the former Jewish
inhabitants of this area and slide projected portions of those images onto the
same buildings where the photos were originally taken 60-70 years earlier. The
projections were a part of a collection of six moving photography and public
art projects from different European cities called Sites Unseen.
Sites Unseen was a series of art projects done
in Europe between 1991 and 1996. Attie used a variety of media, besides the
on-location slide projecting Writing on
the Wall installation. Projects included underwater light boxes in a Copenhagen
canal, Trains I and Trains II, where he projected
photographs of Hamburg’s and Dresden’s former Jewish citizens onto the city’s
central railway station, a series of site-specific public installations in
Krakow and Cologne and The Neighbors Next
Door installation in Amsterdam from 1995.
‘The Writing on the Wall’, Berlin, 1991-1992, source Shimonattie.net
With
his The Writing on the Wall, Attie created
a visible layering of images of the past onto the present by projecting slides
of old photographs of life before the Holocaust on the sites where those Jews
had actually lived and from where they had been removed by the Nazis. This
installation consisted only of traces of light, showing a ghostly appearance of
people who once lived there. There was no other physicality to the piece but
‘transient shadows projected on architecture’ [10] and exist now only as
photographs.
This
installation of 26 different images at different locations in the
Scheunenviertel, in former East Berlin, happened shortly after the wall had
come down in November 1989. During the German Democratic Republic (GDR)
government, East Berlin was subject to minimal economic growth and development
and many of the houses still looked like they were left after WWII. Also, due
to the extensive bombing of Berlin at the end of the war, very few of the
buildings that were built before the war were still intact[11]. To realize the project, Attie sometimes needed to respond to the
Scheunenviertel as it existed in 1990. ‘The
Writing on the Wall is a simulation of Jewish life as it once existed in the
Scheunenviertel, but not a literal reconstruction’[12].
‘The Writing on the Wall’, Berlin, 1991-1992, source Shimonattie.net
In 1925,
173,000 Jewish inhabitants were registered in Berlin, 4 percent of the city’s
population, and one third of all Jews of Germany. 55,000 of them became victims
of the Shoah.[13]
On February 27th, 1943, 10,000 Jewish inhabitants of Berlin were
arrested and on June 16th, 1943, Berlin was declared ‘Judenrein’
(‘clean of Jews’). Approximately 1,500 Jews managed to survive in Berlin,
either in hiding or through a marriage with a non-Jewish person.[14]
‘All
the while I continued to make forays through the city, seeking out traces of a
former Jewish presence.’[15] The storefronts in the
Scheunenviertel bore signs in Hebrew and Yiddish. The Jewish culture was highly
visible, reflected in the pre-war photographs taken in this quarter. These
images became the basis for Attie’s project.[16]
‘The Writing on the Wall’, Berlin, 1991-1992, source Shimonattie.net
In
his book The Holocaust and Problems of
Historical Representation author Robert Brown writes that these sites,
those places of memory, serve to ‘preserve the liveliness, ever presentness,
and socially bound uniqueness of personal memories while at the same time
allowing them to become, in a special way, part of history.’[17]
Attie’s
research for The Writing on the Wall created
a contemporary historical record of the district. As Andreas Huyssen wrote: ‘After
all, the act of remembering is always in and of the present, while its referent
is of the past and thus absent. Inevitably, every act of memory carries with it
a dimension of betrayal, forgetting and absence.’[18] Not only were millions of
people killed during this war, many millions were bereft of their dreams and
hopes for the future. While after the war Germans tried to forget and suppress
the painful memory of terrible atrocities that had happened during the time of
the Nazi regime, Germans are now discussing how collective memory can be
preserved and created. Current generations have no first-hand memory. They must
create a collective memory through historic documentation.
4. J-Street-Project by Susan Hiller
J-Street Project (2002-2005) by
Susan Hiller (born 1940) consists of a photographic installation, photos compiled
in a 644-page book, and a 67-minute video that refers to the former existence
of Jewish life in Germany, shot in over 300 locations throughout Germany.
The photos of J-Street
Project were shown in an ‘Index’ installation of all 303 streets in Germany
that are still named indicating Jewish residency. The video contains a
multitude of Holocaust references, despite the ordinariness of the streets and everyday
life. Hiller photographed and filmed these 303 signs found in ‘tiny hamlets,
famous cities, and boring suburbs’.[19]
Exhibition installation ‘J-Street-Project’ at the Model,
Sligo in Ireland, 2014
Like her project Dedicated
to the Unknown Artists (from 1972-76), Susan Hiller is interested in
conceptually accumulating a mass. She creates projects that moves between the
heaviness of the subject matter and the emptiness of something that does not
exist anymore. The American, London-based artist was an anthropologist before
she became an artist. Her penchant for cataloguing is apparent in her work.
Hiller’s father’s family were German Jews who immigrated
to the United States in 1848. She explained that the J-Street-Project ‘did not start as an idea, but with an
experience’.[20]
Hiller travelled to Berlin in 2002 on fellowship as a guest of the DAAD (German
Academic Exchange service). She wandered around the city centre when she saw a
sign that said ‘Judenstrasse’ – Jew Street. It evoked strong memories and
histories. ‘The sign was ambiguous and my reaction was ambivalent. Looking at
the street sign, it seemed to me there was a strange ambiguity in retaining or
restoring the name of a street commemorating people who had been exterminated within
living memory.’[21]
The street signage might have been retained as a commemoration, but it implied
both in its language and its existence a history of racism, segregation and
violence.
Image from J-Street-Project
The artist said that when she began research on all
streets in Germany with the name Jude (Jew), she was not intending to do
historical work to locate where the Jewish community had lived before WWII or
locate former ghettos. She wanted to see what existed in the present day, unintentional
memorials which exist through anonymous bureaucratic decisions.[22]
With the help of
maps of every single town and region, Hiller found 303 street signs all over
Germany that incorporate the word ‘Jude’ (Jew). She approached the Jewish
Museum in Berlin to confirm that these street signs were not installed as a
respectful commemoration after the war. If tribute was intended, streets would
be given names like Anne-Frank-Strasse or Chaim Weitzmanstrasse, but not
Judenstrasse (Jew Street), which is racist. The ‘perfunctory formulation of the
titles renders them unavoidably dismissive.’[23] Even in
death the former namesakes of the signs remain segregated and dishonoured by an
impersonal generic label.
J-Street Project, which took three years to complete, refers
to the Jewish presence in Germany. The Jewish community was part of Germany before
the Nazis came to power and before Germans saw themselves as a superior race
that segregated and exterminated the Jewish members of their society. Hiller
talks about that palpable absence that still exists today. ‘The Germans tore
their own heart out when they tried to exterminate their Jewish population,
because Jews were everywhere and the Germans killed an important part of
themselves’.[24]
Hiller juxtaposes current everyday life in Germany to the
horror of the Holocaust. The 67-minute film is a collection of static camera shots recording daily life around the
signs in city centres, villages, suburban and rural settings. They are shot in
different seasons and different times of the day.
The soundtrack in the film records traffic noise, church bells and other
incidental sounds and music that
occurred on location. Among others, one hears a musical box playing a popular
old song Das ist die Berliner Luft
(‘That’s the air of Berlin’) from 1890. Several consecutive shots of different
places are accompanied by a carillon. The melody played is that of an old
revolutionary song called Die Gedanken
sind frei (‘The thinking is free’) from 1780 which later had been forbidden
by the Nazis.[25]
Hiller employs the sound in a further attempt to evoke the absent communities.
One of the streets that Hiller encountered first is
Berlin’s ‘Juedenstrasse’, renamed ‘Kinkelstrasse’ by the Nazis after the racial
theorist Gottfried Kinkel in 1938. This street was eventually given back its
original name in 2002, after decades of discussion. The two names are mounted
above one another, with ‘Kinkelstrasse’ struck through in red.
Hiller’s J-Street
Project aspires ‘to provide a space to reflect not only on one unique,
incurable, traumatic absence, but also on more recent attempts to destroy
minority cultures and erase their presence.’[26]
Because of Hiller’s neutral seriality approach, the
viewer is reminded of the many other commemorative projects similarly afflicted
by archive fever. Photo installations of Christian Boltanski come to mind.
The abbreviation of Jew or Jewish to J is ambivalent. It
could be a working title, an abbreviation for a project. Hiller’s title
J-Street-Project creates an immediate connotation of the Nazis use of J as an
abbreviation of Jewish. The Nazis stamped the letter J in red ink on the
identity cards of all Jewish citizens.[27]
‘Juedenstrasse’, former ‘Kinkelstrasse’ in Berlin,
source: Jewish Museum Berlin
Hiller has often described her work as ‘talking about
ghosts’.[28]
The J-Street Project visits streets
and places which have become ghosts that haunt the present. The Jewish communities
were destroyed, many Jewish people all over Europe were killed but the names
and other traces, memories remain.
5. Conclusion
Various
contemporary artists have investigated Germany’s post-Holocaust identity. I
chose to discuss the work of Boltanski, Hiller, and Attie because they all use
diverse ways to think about this aspect of the German past and leave me with
very different aesthetic experiences.
All three projects
by these artists instill unique perceptions and feelings. I chose Boltanski,
Attie and Hiller because they have commonality with my work regarding the
context and subject matter.
Their works
represent important elements in the ongoing German
question of how to come to terms with our Holocaust impacted heritage. Their
works and mine are all discourses about memory. Our work reflects and deliberates
ways to keep German collective memory alive.
One can download
and see Hiller’s film (https://youtu.be/OCXMI5vROys) and study the photos in both Hiller’s and Attie’s books. Boltanski’s The Missing House is the only project that was installed permanently in Berlin.
I read Hiller’s J-Street Project as a memory of the
guilt of the German people and I interpret Attie’s Writing on the Wall as a reactivation of the memory of Jewish life
before the Nazi’s came to power. Boltanski’s project has often been described
as controversial by critics, since there were Germans killed when this house
was destroyed at the end of WWII. I, however, embrace the The Missing House as a place of mourning, an installation that stands
for the unspeakable pain caused through war and destruction.
Ira Hoffecker, Scheunenviertel,
16 x 20 inches, Acrylic and plexiglass on birch panel, 2016
Boltanski discusses
the void in The Missing House. The
void has been a fascination of many in art history and in critical theory
analyses. Scientists and philosophers have discussed nothingness and its
meaning over the centuries. When the emptiness, the void and the nothing are
being discussed in art, sublime experiences are often evoked.
Since the Shoah
happened, however, the void has taken on an additional potential meaning.
Boltanski’s installation is structured around absence, vacancy, loss. The gap
in the building is an analogy to what has been absent in the national life of
Germany for more than 70 years. The artist draws an extremely powerful parallel to the missing Jewry of Berlin,
Germany and Europe. The void stands for six million Jewish people torn out
of society and killed, as well as the destruction of war and the loss of 60 million
lives lost altogether in WWII.
Ira Hoffecker, Forgetting,
24 x 30 inches, Acrylic, resin, cotton on birch wood panel, 2015
The Missing House is a place where I went several times to
commemorate the loss of the erased Jewish community of Germany and Europe, the
killing of the many other minority groups and where I can simultaneously mourn
the loss that occurred on all sides of the war.
Shimon Attie,
contrarily, visually simulates images of the real people who actually lived in those very places and houses
in the Jewish quarter of Berlin before they were torn out of their lives in the
most terrible, mass produced genocide of all times. Even though the
piece conveys the artist’s impressions of the Holocaust and the missing Jewry, for
me, Attie approaches the viewer in a positive and
informative way, raising consciousness of how Jewish life looked like before
the war, by projecting the past onto the present.
I think his images
can become part of a collective memory my and following generations can create.
He reminds me of the peaceful time, when the community was still intact. His
project is positioned before the Nazis came to power in the 1920s and the
beginning of the 1930s.
Attie’s projections
momentarily recreate the once flourishing Jewish community overlaid onto
present sites. With his Writing on the
Wall, Attie brings the actual people to life again.
In both her photos of 303 signposts documenting the past
Jewish presence in Berlin and her 67-minute film of these street signs, Susan
Hiller creates an overpowering association to the Holocaust. Hiller’s stockpile
of images are reminders of piles of personal possessions accumulated in the death camps. The street signs
she recorded are loaded with the memory of the former Jewish existence in those
303 sites.
Ira Hoffecker, Palast der
Repuplik, 36x48 inches, Acrylic and resin on birch wood panel, 2015
There is a strong tension between the everyday life in today’s Germany
and the continued presence and meaning of these street signs. The ambiguity of
possible readings of those signs engages
the viewer to actively think about the different possible interpretations. The signs could be read to
remember the abysmal exterminations committed by the Nazis, or as a sign of the
ignorance of the Germans, who erased their Jewish neighbors but neglected to
exchange the street signs, since there are no memorial plaques that commemorate
the loss.
I see Hiller’s
project as a very important work about guilt and how Germans deal with that
legacy today. It addresses the ongoing German problem of how to remember, commemorate
adequately.
In
my work, I am interested in how Germans deal with collective memory, with
forgetting and suppressing the past as opposed to remembering and comprehending.
I have grown up in an environment where forgetting was, and still is, strongly
promoted.
In my paintings, I
overlay maps from today onto maps of the Third Reich to examine the divergent
identities of those places over time. In some areas of my paintings the
underlying map is covered with new layers of paint, whereas in other areas I
sand the surface down to the previous layers. Many of my paintings respond to
Berlin’s former Scheunenviertel.
I
see my process of covering as a metaphor to articulate how one can willfully
forget and suppress the past. The process of revealing and sanding the surface
down alludes to a process of remembering and acknowledging, reconciling
historic events.
Ira Hoffecker, Camp Moschendorf,
30 by 40 inches, Acrylic and resin on birch panel
With his projection of images of the past onto the present sites, Shimon
Attie inspired me to project my collection of sounds of the past that represent
experiences of the Holocaust onto images of the present. For the sounds in my
video, I utilized sound bites of an interview I conducted with Dr. Peter Gary, who was a
survivor of the Holocaust, (1923-2016), and my own voice, reading poems
by Holocaust Survivors and poets and writers Primo Levi and Paul Celan.
In the video, I
project those sounds onto images of burning refugee homes
in Germany today, onto right wing populists’ and extremists’ marches occurring
weekly in Dresden which are demonstrations against the acceptance of war
refugees from Syria. Also, I have included images of refugees on their odyssey
to and through Europe. The video shows images of the destroyed city of Homs in
Syria from 2016 and propounds a new genocide with the killing of minority groups
during the Syrian civil war.
To correspond with Syrian conflicts,
I wanted to give agency to an artist, Fareed Abd
Albaki, a refugee artist from Syria. The video includes parts of our
interview recorded in Berlin in 2016.
I included excerpts
of Hitler’s voice from his famous ‘prophecy’
speech. Hitler openly announced that the Jewry of Europe would be
destroyed in this January 1939 oration. This is important to know since
most Germans after the war denied they knew what happened to Jews, where Jewish
people were taken and their extermination in concentration camps.
Ira
Hoffecker, Image of burning refugee home in the video Black Milk of Daybreak,
15 min, 2016
After WWII, political
theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) and many other writers researched the
phenomenon of Germans’ denial of guilt. Acceptance of their culpability was
thwarted when most Germans saw themselves as victims after the war. Many
Germans had lost their houses and their belongings due to bombings or
deportation from former German territories, their ‘Heimat’, their home land. Many
women were raped by soldiers. Millions of innocent civilians had been killed, etc.
According to Arendt, responsibility in its juridical sense, ‘guilt of specific crimes
correlated responsibility, was assignable only to a relatively small number of
people.’[29] Instead
of discussing guilt in Germany after the war, the country needed to be rebuilt
and a leaden blanket was put over the past. ‘Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung’, the
coming to terms of Germans with their past and the discussion regarding the
acceptance of guilt only started in the late 1960s.
With the video I
intend to juxtapose newly arisen hate against foreigners, currently against
Muslims to experiences of the Holocaust. I want to suggest how things can escalate
if the people of a country do not stand up and protect each other.
In my first year
proposal I had suggested that the video will be played in a room where the text
of the protocol of the Wannsee Conference would be projected onto a wall and
would flow down that wall with persistent continuity, over the ground, so that
it flows over viewers in the room. At the Wannsee Conference, which took place
on January 20th, 1942, the systematic mass produced death of the
European Jewry was decided upon.
This
video is a further development of my previous photo series (presented in the
fall semester 2016) pertaining to 12 different genocides. I created a
series of images that are set against the Facebook imagery which I then
juxtaposed with the different genocides by mentioning the year and the place
where they occurred.
I have experienced and studied the work of Jaroslav
Koslovski. In one of his works that I saw in Krakow, he represented the place
of a genocide with a pigment. I was also inspired by Hiller’s juxtaposition of
normal daily life in today’s Germany to the Holocaust.
Ira Hoffecker, Photo
1/12 of photo series pertaining to genocides, 16x20 inches, 2016
In my photo series I used the shadow of my own body in
different places. In my video, I used my own voice. I wanted to use my own body
as a tool for introspection: I investigate my role in relation
to the history of my ancestral culture and my own family and to my presence in
this world today. By using my body, I ask myself what I would have
done if I had lived under the Nazi regime. Would I have stood up and defended
others or would I have been a coward and shut up?
My work reflects on our role as
people today, asking, how we may be paralyzed, when we should stand up and try
to prevent bad things from happening. I want to inspire
the viewer to think about his or her own role.
When one walks
through the first three rooms of the Permanent Collection in the House of the
Wannsee Conference memorial and museum in Berlin, one can see how the Nazi
regime unfolded. Hitler was elected democratically. Even though he lost the
presidential election in 1932, he was appointed chancellor on January 30th,
1933. Within a very short time he became the unanimous ruler of Germany. During
the first years, propaganda of hate against intellectuals, communists, the
media and journalists, the LGBT community and the Jewish communities was built
up. Hitler’s supporters and members of the National Socialist German Workers’
Party NSDAP came together in huge rallies where hate was preached, lies were
told and all the atrocities were announced. More and more people were arrested
until no one could question their dogma and protest, without the fear of arrest
and death. At the end of the third room in this exhibition, the viewer realizes
that there are unbelievably strong parallels between the Nazis initial policies
to the politics in many countries today.
It
is hard to compare my work to the work of artists like Hiller, Boltanski and
Attie. I know I still need to work hard to continue to find additional and
different ways how I can discuss German identity. Because of my
heritage, I want to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive. I am convinced that
if my and subsequent generations learn from our German past, they become
responsible citizens, and will try everything to prevent hatred and exclusion
from ever happening again.
Bibliography
Assmann, Aleida: Erinnerungsräume:
Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (C. H. Beck
Kulturwissenschaft), pocketbook, 2011
Not only individuals but also cultural circles create a memory in order
to establish an identity, to win legitimization and to define aims. The author
Aleida Assmann asks for the different duties of cultural memory, its media
(writings, imagery and memorials) in the course of history and technology as
well as how to deal with saved knowledge. Besides politics and science, art is
taking on an increasing responsibility in this area.
Attie, Shimon: The Writings on the Wall: Projections in
Berlin’s Jewish Quarter. Shimon Attie – Photographs and Installations
(Heidelberg: Edition Braus) 1994, ISBN: 9783894660956
Bar on, Bat-Ami: The Subject of Violence: Arendtean Exercises in
Understanding (Feminist
Constructions), Published May 1st 2002 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, ISBN 0847697703
The author explores and
discusses the work of Hannah Arendt. The book is a critical investigation of violence. At its background
are feminist concerns, but also concerns with violence that press against the
feminist problematic and push its boundaries. Weaving biographical fragments
with theory, the book addresses the very thinking of violence, the possibility
and implications of its comprehension, genocide (the Shoah in particular) and
nationalism.
Buschbeck,
Lysann: Christian Boltanski. The Missing
House (Grosse Hamburger Strasse, Berlin – Mitte), Mahnmale in Berlin,
online guide to Berlin’s Memorials, https://www.hgb-leipzig.de/mahnmal/bolti.html
Deines, Stefan; Liptow,
Jasper; Seel, Martin: Kunst und
Erfahrung, Beitraege zu einer philosophishen Kontroverse, Suhrkamp Verlag
Berlin, 2013, ISBN 978-3-518-29645-5
The authors investigate
which role sense and experience play when it comes to the perception of art.
They investigate if there is a specific aesthetic experience and how it can be
defined precisely. Several other authors like Georg W. Bertram, Noel Carroll,
Jarrold Levinson, Eva Schuermann and James Shelley enlighten the context of art
and experience from a systematic perspective. The most important essay in
preparation for my thesis was Stefan Deines essay Kunstphilosophie und Kunsterfahrung, Eine Pluralistische Perspektive, page
218 to 250.
Dierl, Dr.
Florian, Botsch, Dr. Gideon: The Wannsee
Conference and Genocide of the European Jews. Published by House of the
Wannsee Conference, Memorial and Educational Site, 2006. ISBN
978-3-9808517-8-7. This is the detailed catalogue of the permanent exhibition
at the House of the Wannsee Conference. In 15 exhibition rooms the viewer is
slowly lead through the history of National Socialism in Germany. From the
beginning of the Third Reich to the room where the Genocide of the European
Jewry was decided on January 20th, 1942. The book provides a
historical background of anti-Semitism and racism and provides an analysis of
the propagandist concept of the Nazis.
Danilo Eccher,
Daniel Soutif and Paolo Fabbri: Christian
Boltanski, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna, ISBN 88-8158-117-5, Catalogue
of an exhibition held at the Galleria d'arte moderna, Villa delle Rose,
Bologna, May 30-Sept. 7, 1997.
In this catalogue,
with essays also by Daniel Soutif and Paolo Fabbri, Eccher analyses Boltanski’s
early works and discusses his exhibition Christian Boltanski - Pentimenti in
Bologna in 1997, during the time while Eccher was artistic director of the
Galleria. The text in this book, which was published also in 1997, is written
in both Italian and English.
Gumpert, Lynn: Christian Boltanski, Flammarion
Publishing House, 1994, ISBN 2080135597, pp145-146.
One of
Boltanski's favorite themes is his own life story, both actual and reinvented,
which he evokes through startling collections of photographs and objects. In
other pieces, he assembles seemingly mundane elements to address some of the
most fundamental and disturbing contradictions of twentieth-century life. In her essay, art historian Lynn
Gumpert analyzes and provides a context for Christian Boltanski’s haunting
works that have the unsettling ability to be merry and morbid at the same time.
The detailed book spans the entire range of Boltanski's production, materials,
and influences, focusing on those of Boltanski’s works in which he discusses
his own life story.
Haverkamp,
Alfred ‘Europas Juden im Mittelalter –
Streifzuege’ in the exhibition
catalogue
Europas Juden im Mittelalter, Palatinate Historical Museum Speyer, and
German
Historical Museum Berlin, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2005, p.34.
ISBN-13:978-3775791908.
Haverkamp is exploring
the existence of Jewish life in Europe since the year 70 (CE)
from the destruction of the Second Temple
and the beginning of the exile. The author
describes
the persecution of Jewish people over the centuries and examines their role
as
victims in Europe.
Hiller, Susan,
Heiser, Joerg J-Street Project, ISBN
0-9546545-8-7, Published by Compton Verney and Berlin Artists-in-Residence
program, DAAD, 2005. In addition to essays by Susan Hiller and Joerg Heiser,
this book contains a photo of every single street sign in Germany containing
the word Jude (Jew) in the years 2002 – 2004. This book enriches the discussion
of how to remember the Holocaust in Germany.
Hiller, Susan: The Provisional Texture of Reality,
Selected talks and texts from 1977 to 2007, JRP/Ringier, Zurich, Les Presses du
reel, Dijon, 2008, ISBN 978-3-905829-56-3
In the text 3.512 words, we find excerpts from an
interview of Joerg Heiser and Jan Verwoert with Susan Hiller which was
conducted on March 15th, 2007. In the interview, Hiller discusses,
among others, her work Dedicated to the Unknown
Artists in detail. In the book Hiller publishes a selection of many
different texts and ideas relating to her own work, and to other artists.
Hodes, Laura: “Shimon Attie: Projects Past into present”,
November 16th, 2012, Forward website, Forward.com, Education
grounded on Jewish values
Ladd, Brian: The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German
History in the Urban Landscape. The University of Chicago Press, 1998. ISBN
978-0-226-46762-7.
The author
tells the story and provides historic context of many different Berlin
landmarks. He writes about what happened to the urban landscape during the
times of the Prussian Kingdom, The German Empire, The Third Reich and the
Divided City and its new contemporary identity. This is an important book when
one explores the history of Berlin.
Lauterwein,
Andrea: 2007. Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan:
Myth, Mourning and Memory, London: Thames & Hudson, 2007. ISBN
9780500238363
Paul Celan was one of the most important poets to emerge
after post-World War II. The use of Paul Celan’s name and writings in his
paintings must have helped Anselm Kiefer to discuss and understand the Jewish
side of the disaster caused by the Germans. Kiefer’s dialogue with this poet
has been interpreted as a ‘leitmotif’ throughout his work. This
book traces Anselm Kiefer's use of themes from 20th century German history, and
shows how the poet Paul Celan's writings have influenced his work for over 25
years.
Leventis,
Andreas, Susan Hiller: The J-Street
Project: Timothy Taylor Gallery, Modern Painters 106 JI/August 2005, ISSN
505136434.
This article
contains a review of the J-Street Project installation at Timothy Taylor
Gallery in London in April 2005 and a description of Hiller’s career. She spent
the last 40 years looking for ghosts, demonstrating an unremitting commitment
to protecting the memory of the dead through her sound installations and
assemblages of artefacts.
Little, Carl, Susan Hiller: The J-Street Project, Art
New England, May/June 2011, Vol.32 Issue 3, ISSN 02747073. This is a review of
the J-Street Project, the installation on display at Colby College Museum of
Art in Waterville, Maine. Hiller’s installation documents her efforts to record
every place in Germany with a reference to Jewish life.
Muir, Peter: Shimon Attie’s Writing on the Wall, History,
Memory, Aesthetics, Ashgate Publishing Limited, England, 2010, ISBN
978-0-7546-6963-0.
In his book,
author Peter Muir theorizes the images both as a memorial activity and an index
or habitation of history. He refers to and responds to a series of propositions
arising from the text ‘On the Concept of History’ by Walter Benjamin.
Ruchel-Stockmans,
Kataryzna: Impossible Self representation, Image & Narrative, Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative,
Journal, ISSN 1780 678X, 2006
Through his
exaggerated attempts at self-mythologizing, where forgeries are intermingled
with confessions of his trespasses, Boltanski develops a strategy of intently
maintaining contradictory aims and principles, which allows him to expose the
covert mechanisms of self-writing, reconstructing the past and creating
artist’s myths.
Rürup, Reinhard (Hrsg.): Jüdische Geschichte in Berlin.
Bilder und Dokumente. Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-89468-181-0.
Semin, Dedier,
Garb, Tamar, Kuspit, Donald: Christian
Boltanski, Phaidon Press Limited, 1997, ISBN 9780 7148 36584.
This book
consists of essays by the authors and an interview by Tamar Garb with Christian
Boltanski. Also, there is a passage with writings by Christian Boltanski
‘Research and Presentation of all that Remains of my Childhood’ and a section
about the artist’s work at the Venice Biennale.
Solomon-Godeau,
Abigail: Mourning and Melancholia,
Christian Boltanski’s Missing House, Oxford University Press, Oxford Art
Journal, Vol 21, No2, (1998), pp 3-20. In her text the author Abigail Solomon–Godeau
argues that Boltanski’s Missing House is not a memorial and a site of mourning.
According to Freud this would require acknowledgment of the irrevocable loss of
the object precisely in its specific and singular identity. The work of mourning
can never be generic, but only accomplished through the conscious recognition
of the singularity and irreplaceability of what has been lost.
Stonard,
John-Paul: Germany Divided: Baselitz and
his Generation. British Museum Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0-7141-2690-6. This is
the book that was published to accompany the exhibition of the same name at the
British Museum from February 6th to August 31st, 2014. In
this book, Stonard looks in detail at artists who grew up in Germany’s former
Eastern Germany: Georg Baselitz, Markus Luepertz, Blinky Palermo, A.R. Penck,
Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter. The author discusses their work and how they
investigated identity in Eastern Germany after WWII.
Young, James
E.: At Memory’s Edge, After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary
Art and Architecture New
Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2002, ISBN: 9780300094138
James E. Young
was the only Jew to be invited to join a German commission appointed to find an
appropriate design for a national memorial in Berlin to the all the Jews killed
in Europe during WWII. In his book he discusses how Germany should commemorate
the mass murder of Jews. Young gained a unique perspective on Germany’ s
fraught efforts to memorialize the Holocaust and discusses his role in this
commission.
Weiner, Julia, Bearing Witness, Julia Weiner explores
the background to Susan Hiller’s J-Street Project, Interview with Susan Hiller,
Jewish Quarterly, A Magazine of Contemporary Writing, Politics and &
Culture, Autumn 2005. This is a very detailed, 10-page interview by Julia
Weiner with Susan Hiller from 2005. Besides discussing her J-Street Project the
artist also talks about other works like Dedicated
to the Unknown Artist, Witness and
Psychic Archaeology.
[3] Buschbeck, Lysann: Mahnmale in Berlin, Das fehlende Haus,
Page 1
[4] Danilo Eccher: Christian Boltanski, Page 89
[5] Abigail Solomon-Godeau: Mourning and Melancholia, Oxford
University Press, Page 3
[6] Abigail Soloman-Godeau: Mourning and Melancholia, Oxford
University Press, Page 4
[7] Dedier Semin, Tamar
Garb, Donald Kuspit: Christian Boltanski,
Page 24
[8] Buschbeck, Lysann: Mahnmale in Berlin, Das fehlende Haus,
Page 2 and
Dedier Semin, Tamar Garb, Donald Kuspit: Christian Boltanski, Page 24
[9] Dedier Semin, Tamar
Garb, Donald Kuspit: Christian Boltanski,
Page 46
[10] Peter Muir: Shimon Attie’s Writing on the Wall, Page
2
[11] James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2000) p.71
[12] Shimon Attie: The Writings on the Wall: Projections in
Berlin’s Jewish Quarter. Shimon Attie – Photographs and Installations
(Heidelberg: Edition Braus) 1994. Page 11
[13] Reinhard Rürup (Hrsg.): Jüdische Geschichte in Berlin. Bilder und
Dokumente. Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-89468-181-0.
[14] Peter Muir: Shimon Attie’s The Writing on the Wall,
page 34
[15] Shimon Attie: The
Writing on the Wall: Projections in Berlin’s Jewish Quarter. Shimon Attie –
Photographs and Installations (Heidelberg: Edition Braus) 1994. Page 10 and
Peter Muir Page 12
[16] Shimon Attie et al. The Writing on the Wall: Projections in
Berlin’s Jewish Quarter. Shimon Attie – Photographs and Installations
(Heidelberg: Edition Braus) 1994. Page 10
[17] Robert Brown: The Holocaust and Problems of Historical
Representation, in History and Theory, (May 1994), 172-197 (page 176)
[18] Andreas Huyssen: Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the
Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003) pp.3-4
[20] Weiner, Julia, Bearing Witness, Interview with Susan
Hiller, Jewish Quarterly, page 3
[22] Weiner, Julia, Bearing Witness, Interview with Susan
Hiller, Jewish Quarterly, page 8
[23] Leventis,
Andreas, Susan Hiller: The J-Street
Project: Timothy Taylor Gallery, Modern Painters, p.106
[24] Weiner, Julia, Bearing Witness, Interview with Susan
Hiller, Jewish Quarterly, page 6
[28] Weiner, Julia, Bearing Witness, Interview with Susan
Hiller, Jewish Quarterly, page 2
