Gottfried
Helnwein
Memorialising
the Holocaust
by Katy O'Donoghue, May 2008
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Monuments
- The
Warsaw Ghetto Monument
- Holocaust
Memorials
- Nazi
Monuments
Chapter 2: Counter-monuments
- The
Disappearing Monument
Chapter 3: Gottfried Helnwein
- Selektion (Ninth November Night)
- Kilkenny
Arts Festival
Chapter 4: Representing the Holocaust
Conclusion
Illustrations
Illus. 1: Epiphany 1 (The Adoration of the Magi), by Gottfried Helnwein, 756 cm x 2000 cm,
digital print, installation at Kilkenny Castle during the Kilkenny Arts
Festival, 2001.
Illus. 2: Heroes detail, Warsaw Ghetto
Monument, designed by Nathan Rapoport, Warsaw, Poland, 1948.
Illus. 3: Martyrs detail, Warsaw Ghetto
Monument, designed by Nathan Rapoport, Warsaw, Poland, 1948.
Illus. 4: Warsaw Ghetto Monument, designed
by Nathan Rapoport, Warsaw, Poland, 1948.
Illus. 5: Arno
Brecker, (1988) by Gottfried Helnwein, 99 x 66 cm, silver print.
Illus. 6: HarburgÕs Monument Against Fascism, designed by Jochen Gerz and Esther
Shalev-Gerz, shortly after its unveiling in 1986, before its first sinking.
Illus. 7: Memorial graffiti on the Harburg Monument
against Fascism, designed by Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, 1986.
Illus. 8: HarburgÕs Monument Against Fascism, designed by Jochen Gerz and Esther
Shalev-Gerz, unveiled in 1986, almost gone.
Illus. 9: Lebensunwertes Leben, (1979) by Gottfried Helnwein, watercolour on
cardboard.
Illus. 10: Selektion (Ninth November Night), by Gottfried Helnwein,
scanachrome on vinyl, installation, Cologne, Germany, 1988.
Illus. 11:
Selektion (Ninth November Night), by
Gottfried Helnwein, scanachrome on vinyl, installation, Cologne, Germany, 1988,
after vandalization.
Illus. 12: Epiphany I (Adoration of the Magi), (1996) by Gottfried Helnwein, oil
and acrylic on canvas, 210 x 333 cm, Denver Art Museum, Kent Logan Collection.
Illus. 13: Epiphany II (Adoration of the Shepherds), (1998) by Gottfried Helnwein, oil and acrylic
on canvas, 210 x 310 cm, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.
Illus. 14: Epiphany
III (Presentation at the Temple), (1998) by Gottfried Helnwein, oil and
acrylic on canvas, 210 x 310 cm, Jason Lee Collection, Los Angeles.
Illus. 15: Mary-Sheila
Walsh, Aoife Connelly and Eimear Connelly, by Gottfried Helnwein, digital
print, installation at Kilkenny Castle during the Kilkenny Arts Festival, 2001.
Illus. 16: Epiphany
III (Presentation at the Temple) by Gottfried Helnwein, 800 cm x 600 cm,
digital print, installation in Kilkenny city during the Kilkenny Arts Festival,
2001.
Introduction
Gottfried Helnwein has been described as an artist that has committed
himself to reminding the world of the Holocaust.[1]
Children are a recurring theme in his work; the strong/weak hierarchy makes
them a ready metaphor for the victims of evil. Stripped one by one of their
privileges, rights, sustenance, and finally their bodily integrity, the NaziÕs
victims were subjected to what Christopher Bollas has called Ôa radical and
catastrophic infantilization.Õ[2]
I first became aware of HelnweinÕs work in 2001 when he exhibited at the
Kilkenny Arts Festival in Ireland. Large scale portraits of local children and
photographs of his paintings conflating Nazi and religious imagery were hung on
buildings around the city. I was particularly interested in the intense debate
that arose around the installation of the pictures. City Council members
objected to the hanging of work on City Hall, the public sent letters of
complaint to local newspapers and called in to the local radio station in
protest.[3]
During the exhibition two of the works were vandalised. Helnwein has maintained
that it is important to see a reaction to his work. In February I travelled to Bonn, Germany
and met with Helnwein to discuss how, through placing his work in the public realm, he attempts to keep
Holocaust memory alive by instigating a dialogue. His subject matter is
the repression of the greatest trauma of our century - National Socialism,
peopleÕs complicity in it, and its consequences.[4]
Epiphany 1 (The Adoration of the
Magi) part of Gottfried HelnweinÕs installation at Kilkenny
Castle
during
the Kilkenny Arts Festival, 2001.
Illus.
1
The Western tradition of memorial making has been founded upon an
assumption that material objects can act as analogues of human memory.[5]
It has been generally taken for granted that memories can be transferred to
solid material objects, which can come to stand for the memories, and by virtue
of their durability, preserve them beyond their purely mental and thus,
ephemeral existence.[6] I will
discuss the problems inherent in this conception of objects, and more
specifically monuments, as sites of memory using Nathan RapoportÕs Warsaw
Ghetto Monument as an example of a monument that has shifting meanings.[7]
In discussing the problems inherent in monuments I will highlight the
particular difficulties in constructing a monument to commemorate the Holocaust
and how this has resulted in new attempts to memorialise. I will discuss the
concept of the counter-monument with particular reference to Jochen and Esther GerzÕs
disappearing Monument Against Fascism,
War and Violence – and for Peace and Human Rights.[8]
HelnweinÕs work has no illusions of monumental permanence but is often
monumental in scale and is very much sited in the public sphere. I will explore
how HelnweinÕs work relates to the concept of the counter-monument and highlight
the similarities in the aims and objectives of his public memorials and Jochen and
Esther GerzÕs Monument Against Fascism.
I will discuss in detail HelnweinÕs photo mural installations in the cities of
Cologne and Kilkenny and explore the supposed problems inherent in any
aesthetic representation of the Holocaust. I will consider the (later qualified
and amended ) quote by Theodor Adorno that Ôto write poetry after Auschwitz in
barbaricÕ and the subsequent debate among critics as to how an event such as
the Holocaust can or should be represented and what forms its images can or
ought to take.[9] In
conclusion, I will challenge the notion of there being any ÔlimitsÕ to
representation with regard to Holocaust art.
Chapter 1
Monuments
Warsaw Ghetto Monument
Traditionally, the monument has been used as a site of memory; by its
seemingly land-anchored permanence, it might also guarantee the permanence of a
particular memory or idea attached to it.[10]
In this conception the monument would have to remain essentially impervious to
time and change. However, in his article ÔThe Biography of a Memorial IconÕ
James E. Young argues that monuments can, over time, accrue new meanings and
significance. Young discusses Nathan RapoportÕs Warsaw Ghetto Monument as an
example of a monument that has undergone many ÔpersonalityÕ changes.[11]
It was the first memorial to mark both the heroism of Jewish resistance to the
Nazis and the complete annihilation of the Jews in Warsaw and was unveiled on
19th April 1948 to mark the 5th anniversary of the Warsaw
Ghetto uprising.[12] The Warsaw
Ghetto was established in 1940 as a city based concentration camp and a transit
centre for Jews on their way to their death at Treblinka.[13]
Ten-foot-high walls topped with broken glass and barbed wire were erected
around what had been largely a Jewish slum section of Warsaw. On top of the
original 50,000 inhabitants, 500,000 Polish Jews were brought to the ghetto.[14]
Many died from starvation or disease before the Germans began rounding up the
remaining Jews for deportation to Treblinka. The Jewish Fighting Organisation was
set up to resist deportation; they forced the Nazis to withdraw from the ghetto
in a series of hit and run attacks that turned into full blown street battles
which raged for six weeks. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the first civilian armed
resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II and although it was
unsuccessful, both the Jews and the non Jewish Poles of Warsaw celebrated the
significance of this event.[15]
Unlike other more abstract memorial forms such as the obelisk or the pantheon,
this free standing wall resembles a great tombstone, with wreaths of flowers
adorning its base. The seven heroically sculpted figures of men and women on
the monumentÕs western wall facing the open square are transformed to legendary
proportions.
Frontal
view of the Warsaw Ghetto Monument designed by Nathan Rapoport
Illus.
2
Except for one fallen youth at the lower right, the figures are rising
to resist and protect themselves. Each grasps a weapon of the sort found in the
ghetto: a muscular prophet figure on one knee picks up a rock; a young boy at
the left clutches a dagger; a young woman at the right holds a rifle; the
leader of the revolt, Mordechai Anielewicz holds a home-made grenade in his hand.
With his bare chest, tattered clothes and rolled up sleeves, clutching his
grenade almost like a hammer, RapoportÕs Anielewicz is unmistakably
proletarian.[16] On the
other side, in numerical reference to the tribes of Israel, twelve stooped and
huddled figures on the reverse embody archaic, archetypal Jews in exile. Eyes
to the ground, all trudge resignedly to their fate, except for the rabbi
holding a Torah scroll in one arm, who looks up and reaches to heaven as if to
beseech God. The monumentÕs dedication is inscribed in Hebrew, Yiddish and
Polish ÔTo the Jewish People – Its Heroes and Its MartyrsÕ.[17]
Reverse
side of the Warsaw Ghetto Monument designed
by Nathan Rapoport
Illus.
3
As a Polish Jew in German occupied Poland, Rapoport fled to Russia. [18]
Although Russia was technically
allied with Nazi Germany at this point, her borders with Poland were open to
Jewish refugees who could either pay for sanctuary or provide skills and labour
deemed valuable by Stalin at the time. Rapoport spent several years working as
a state sculptor where he would set in bronze and stone all the forms and faces
designated worth remembering.[19]
His time working in Stalinist Russia no doubt resulted in the ultimate mixing
of Jewish and proletarian figures in the Warsaw Ghetto Monument.
The
Warsaw Ghetto Monument, designed by Nathan Rapoport
Illus.
4
Nathan Rapoport set out to make Ôa clearly national monument for the
Jews, not a Polish monumentÕ.[20]
However, the monument has been revitalised by ceremonies conducted at its base
and with the stateÕs blessing it is now as much a gathering place for Polish
war veterans as for Jews. To the former Communist governmentÕs consternation,
the Ghetto MonumentÕs square became a gathering place for Solidarity and other dissident
groups in the 1980s, who turned it into a performance space for protests.[21]
The government launched its own campaign to nationalise the monument after 1983
and square surrounding the Warsaw Ghetto Monument became both a dangerous and
necessary memorial space for the state, whose best interest ironically was to
preserve its literal reference to the Jewish uprising while assiduously
avoiding its symbolic reference to the current resistance.[22]
The American philanthropist and Warsaw survivor Leon Jolson commissioned
a reproduction of the monument from its original forms, with slight aesthetic
modifications, to be installed at Yad Vashem on Har Hazikaron (Remembrance
Hill) in Jerusalem.[23] The
decision to recast the Warsaw Ghetto Monument in Israel after 1967 came about partly
amid fears that its Jewish life in Poland could not be guaranteed. In being
left to stand in an environment both hostile to and bereft of Jews, the monumentÕs
Jewish significance and character now seemed threatened as never before. American
Jews and Israelis worried that, as Jews were being expelled from the party and
unions in Poland, Jewish meaning would be elided from the Warsaw Ghetto
Monument.[24]
Unlike its back to back setting in
Warsaw, at Yad Vashem the heroes and martyrs are placed side by side so they
may be viewed simultaneously. A handful of those involved in the Ghetto
uprising lived to fight in IsraelÕs own War of Independence. Israeli
independence followed the liberation of the camps by three years and was regarded
as an extension of the JewÕs struggle for survival in Europe.[25]
By uniting past heroism and resistance with present, the recasting of the
monument invites Israelis to remember parts of their own war experiences in the
images of the Ghetto Uprising.[26]
In Israel, therefore, this cannot be a memorial to victims so much as it is to
victory; it recalls the JewsÕ ultimate triumph over the Nazis in their survival
and, in having risen at all, the JewsÕ victory over their own past responses to
persecution.
Holocaust Memorials
Although the Ghetto Monument was intended by the artist to be Ôa clearly
national monument for the Jews, not a Polish monumentÕ, it has since been
nationalised by Poland and Israel. [27] Monuments are open to appropriation and
can therefore, not always guarantee the permanence of any particular idea or
memory. Commemoration of the dead of the First World War was probably the
largest and most popular movement for the erection of public monuments ever
known to Western society.[28]
After 1918, there had followed a period of political turmoil, Germany had lost
the war and in an attempt to deal with their grief and bitterness there was a
gigantic, though decentralised and uncoordinated, programme of erecting war
memorials.[29]
When War broke out again in 1939, Germany was the country with the highest
number of memorials in the world.[30]
The purpose of nationalist war memorials and memorials such as the Warsaw
Ghetto Monument has traditionally been to commemorate resistance and to
transform traumatic individual deaths into acts of national celebration and
heroic assertions of collective value. [31]
A war memorial is successful when personal human sacrifice is justified for the
greater good. If the traditional aim of war memorials is to encourage the
resolution of suffering, and to validate the personal sacrifice by affirming that
Ôthey did not die in vainÕ such cannot be said of Holocaust memorials, where
nobody can claim the deaths served any purpose whatsoever.[32]
Unlike state sponsored memorials built by victimised nations to themselves;
Holocaust memorials are necessarily those of former persecutors remembering
their victims.[33] The
difficulty in commemorating the Holocaust is that memory work that attempts to
deal with such an event must not be redemptive. The primary aim of Holocaust
memorials is to repudiate and lament, not affirm; both the historical realities
and the archaic values that seemed to have spawned them.
Nazi Monuments
Between the Nazi abhorrence of entartete
kunst or Ôdegenerate artÕ – and the officially sanctioned socialist
realism of the Soviet Union, the traditional figurative monument had enjoyed
something of a revival in totalitarian societies.[34]
Both regimes commissioned, or made possible, works of public art which would
reflect their ideals of pure Aryan race or workers solidarity. In its consort
with this centuryÕs two giant totalitarian regimes, the monumentÕs credibility
as a public site of memory was thus eroded further still.[35]
In the 1980s and 90s Gottfried
Helnwein produced a series photographic portraits entitled Faces. The series was a collection of portraits of icons of
contemporary culture, both high and low, that he was particularly interested in
including: Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, Andy Warhol and William S. Burroughs.[36]
Helnwein also wanted to take photographs of Ôthe last witnesses who were close
to the center of power, which caused the catastropheÕ.[37]
He photographed two leading artists responsible for the dominating aesthetics
of the Third Reich: Leni Riefenstahl, a film maker who had directed the great
propaganda spectacles of the Nazi party, and Arno Brecker, whose sculptures embodied
the Nazi ideals of pure Aryan race. HelnweinÕs photograph of Brecker shows the
ageing sculptor with a suspicious expression. Helnwein reports that both Arno
Brecker and Leni Riefenstahl tried to justify their fascist activities to him
by claiming that they simply worked on commissions for the reigning powers and
had no political agenda of their own.[38]
Arno Brecker, (1988)
Illus.
5
Interestingly, when Nathan Rapoport began constructing his Warsaw Ghetto
Monument, he travelled to Sweden to source granite for the monumentÕs retaining
wall. The Jewish agency in Stockholm directed him to the best quarry in the
area, where he discovered a huge cache of perfectly cut Labradorite granite
blocks, ready to be shipped. He was informed that the blocks had been ordered
during the war by Arno Brecker for a monument in Berlin to commemorate HitlerÕs
victory. Rapoport had the granite sent to Warsaw for the construction of the
Ghetto Monument.[39] In its use
of the giant proletarian figures of the Stalinist era and the typological image
of Jews in exile, the Ghetto Monument has found little critical consensus and
has been subsequently condemned by Post War critics as being too Stalinist and
not Jewish enough.[40]
Chapter 2
Counter-monuments
With the attempts to memorialise the Holocaust in Germany there was a
realisation that conventional memorial practices were inadequate and
inappropriate to the task. Pierre Nora has warned that rather than embodying
memory, the monument may displace it altogether, supplanting a communityÕs
memory-work with its own material form. ÔThe less memory is experienced from
the inside,Õ Nora cautions, Ôthe more it exists only through its exterior
scaffolding and outward signsÕ.[41]
Thus, once we assign monumental form to memory, we may have to some degree
divested ourselves of the obligation to remember. In shouldering the
memory-work, monuments may only serve to relieve the viewers of their memory
burden.[42]
One of the contemporary results of GermanyÕs memorial conundrum is the rise of
its counter-monuments. In his essay The
Counter-Monument: Memory Against Itself in Germany, James E. Young
discusses how this genre of Holocaust anti-memorials has attempted to deal with
the danger that a monument may contribute less to memory than to forgetting.[43]
Counter-monuments are memorials conceived to challenge the very premise of the
monument. They involve the creation of self conscious memorial spaces where the
aim is not to embody the memory but give it back to the community, not to
console but to provoke, not to remain fixed but to change and to demand
interaction from the viewer.[44]
In their abstract form, these counter-monuments claim not to dictate a specific
object of memory. Rather, they more passively accommodate all memory and
response. By inviting viewers to commemorate themselves, the counter-monument
reminds them that to some extent all any monument can do is provide a trace of
its makers, not of the memory itself.[45]
The Disappearing
Monument
Berlin born conceptual artist Jochen Gerz was one of six artists invited
to propose a design for the city of Hamburg for a Monument Against Fascism, War, and Violence – and for Peace and
Human Rights.[46] He worked
together with his wife, Esther Shalev-Gerz, toward finding a form that
challenged the monumentÕs traditional illusions of permanence and its
authoritarian rigidity. The artistsÕ first concern was how to emplace such
memory without alleviating the need for individuals in the community to
remember. Their second concern was how to build an antifascist monument without
resorting to what they regarded as the fascist tendencies in all monuments.
ÔWhat we did not want,Õ Jochen Gerz declared, Ôwas an enormous pedestal with
something on it presuming to tell people what they ought to think.Õ[47]
They decided that their monument against fascism was to be a self-abnegating
monument. It was a twelve-meter-high, one-meter-square pillar, made of hollow
aluminium and plated with a thin layer of soft, dark lead. They chose to place
it in the commercial centre of Harburg, a suburb of Hamburg and in their words
a Ônormal, uglyish placeÕ. The monument stood in a busy thoroughfare outside a
shopping mall and was unveiled in 1986 with a temporary inscription at the base
that read in German, French, English, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic and Turkish:
We invite the citizens of
Harburg, and visitors to the town, to add their names here to ours. In doing
so, we commit ourselves to remain vigilant. As more and more names cover this
12 meter tall lead column, it will gradually be lowered into the ground. One
day it will have disappeared completely, and the site of the Harburg monument against
fascism will be empty. In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up
against injustice. [48]
A steel-pointed stylus, with which to score the soft lead, was attached
at each corner by a length of cable.[49]
The names were intended to be a visual echo of the war memorials of another
age, the black column of self-inscribed names might thus remind all visitors of
their own mortality. However, even the artists were taken aback by what they
found after a couple of months: an illegible scrawl of names scratched over
names, stars of David, funny faces and swastikas. People had come at night to
scrape over all the names, even to pry the lead plating off the base.[50]
However, when authorities had spoke to the artists about the possibility of
vandalism, Jochen and Esther Gerz had replied, ÔWhy not give that phenomenon
free rein and allow the monument to document the social temperament in that way?Õ[51]
HarburgÕs
Monument Against Fascism, designed by
Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, shortly after its unveiling in 1986, before
its first sinking.
Illus.
6
Memorial
graffiti on HarburgÕs Monument Against
Fascism
Illus.
7
As one and a half meter sections were covered with memorial graffiti,
the monument was lowered into the ground, into a chamber beneath that is as
deep as the column is tall. The faster visitors covered each section, the
faster it was lowered into the ground. After the final lowering in November
1993, nothing was left except the
top surface of the monument which was then covered with a burial stone
inscribed ÔHarburgÕs Monument Against FascismÕ[52] The intended effect was to have
returned the burden of memory to the public who had visited and signed the
monument. From the beginning, the artists have intended this monument to
torment, not reassure or redeem. They have likened it to a great black knife in
the back of Germany, slowly being plunged in, each thrust solemnly commemorated
by the community.[53]
HarburgÕs
Monument Against Fascism, almost gone
Illus.
8
Jochen Gerz would like every memorial to return memory to those who came
looking for it but Young reminds us that these monuments are dependent on
public knowledge and when the monument disappears, there is a risk of
forgetting:
If we want [the next
generation] to look at the landscape, a landscape of invisible monuments will
also be one that demands people who know something. The question is if we will
always know enough to bring our memory and history back to these sites. [54]
While the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial has been accused of being too
proletarian, Rapoport has contested this view with a defence that highlights
one criticism of conceptual monuments:
Could I have made a stone with
a hole in it, and said, ÒVoila! The Greatness of the Jewish People?Ó No, I
needed to show the heroism, to illustrate it literally in figures everyone, not
just artists would respond to. This was to be a public monument after all. And
what do human beings respond to? Faces, figures, the human form. I did not want
to represent resistance in the abstract: it was not an abstract uprising. It
was real.[55]
The minimalist architecture of counter-memorials such as Jochen GerzÕs
disappearing monument have also aroused considerable controversy and
condemnation. Young explains popular resistance to these modernist memorials as
due to the inadequacy of these sites to gather together personal memories into
a collective space.[56]
Abstraction may frustrate the
memorialÕs capacity as a locus for shared self-image and commonly held ideals.
In itÕs hermetic and personal vision, abstraction encourages private visions in
viewers, which would defeat the communal and collective aims of public
memorials.[57]
Young argues that though it would seem the specificity of realistic
figuration would thwart multiple messages whilst abstract sculpture could
accommodate as many meanings as could be projected onto it. In fact, it is
almost always the figurative monument like the Warsaw Ghetto Monument that
serves as a point of departure for political performances. He says:
It is as if figurative
sculpture like this were needed to engage viewers with likenesses of people, to
evoke an empathic link between viewer and monument that might then be
marshalled into particular meaning.[58]
Chapter 3
Gottfried Helnwein
Austrian born Gottfried Helnwein has produced a number of large scale photo mural installations that invite comparisons with GerzÕs counter-monument. Helnwein, though, is dismissive of counter-monuments:
There is a big effort now with
holocaust memorials and holocaust museums and there are so many of them in
Germany now and I look at them and how they do it and I think many of them are
meant to also bury the past under all this stone and documentation. They are
also very similar and often they are so symbolic, just stones. They are too
conceptual, there is no emotion there. Just intellectual concepts, too minimalistic.
It is also a way of getting rid of guilt.É[My work] is a different type of
trying to force people not to forget or to look at something. To raise the
stuff thatÕs buried and meant to be forgotten. It is very different to making
now, decades later, some minamilistic stone monument. That is only to show that
the community is really doing something..[59]
He echoes the wishes of Jochen Gerz when he claims he wants his work to be not an answer but a question. [60] As Esther and Jochen Gerz intended their monument to be a knife in the back of Germany, Helnwein wants to employ his art Ôlike a weapon, like a scalpel so that it touches the viewer.Õ[61]
Unlike GermanyÕs near obsession with its Nazi past, AustriaÕs post war
persona was constructed around the self-serving myth that they were HitlerÕs
first victims.[62] Austrian
cooperation with Nazi Germany was swept under the carpet. In 1943, a carefully
worded statement was issued by American, Soviet and British foreign ministers,
in which Austria was openly declared Ôthe first free country to fall victim to
Hitlerite aggressionÕ.[63]
After the war ended, Austria quietly accepted the mantle of martyrdom and was
proclaimed ÔliberatedÕ. A full scale de-Nazification program began which left
behind few tell-tale signs of the Nazi era. GermanyÕs painfully self-conscious
memorial culture contrasts with AustriaÕs general ambivalence towards the
recent past. Young points out that partly because of the confusion generated in
Austria by official memory, and partly because of a reluctance to face their
past, Austrians have generally been content to let the Germans do the memorial
Òdirty workÓ.[64]
Helnwein was born in Vienna in 1948. He described post-war Austria as:
A really strange placeÉ
everybody was serious and depressedÉand the people were unable to say or talk
about what happened. Not because they were not willing but because of the
amnesia. In school we heard nothing about what happened, total denial, no
memory. The
only thing I heard was that we were the victim number one, we were the victims,
we were conquered; we had nothing to do with it.[65]
From 1965 to 1969 he studied at the Experimental Institute for Higher Graphic Education in Vienna.[66] During this time he decided, in protest against the conformist methods of teaching, to make a portrait of Adolf Hitler.[67] When his tutor saw it, he stormed from the classroom and returned with the schoolÕs entire professional staff, including the director of the institute. The director gave a long winded exculpatory speech where he warned that ÔWhosoever recalls the accursed times of National Socialism is ruining the reputation of the Experimental Institute for Higher Graphic EducationÕ, and the picture was confiscated. Helnwein describes this as:
The moment when I sensed for the first time: you can change
something with aesthetics, you can get things moving in a very subtle way, you
can get even the powerful and strong to slide and totter, anything actually, if
you know the weak points and tap at them ever so gently by aesthetic means. [68]
Having graduated from the Institute he refined his artistic strategy at the Vienna Academy of Arts, the same institute that Adolf Hitler was rejected from.[69]
For a class exhibition at the
KŸnstlerhaus in Vienna in 1971, Helnwin displayed the pastels of disfigured
children he had been working on alongside a new version of the notorious Hitler
picture. This time it was enclosed in a frame from the thirties which he had
acquired from an antique dealer. Reactions to the ÒFuhrer pictureÓ were mixed
– some viewers were appalled, while one man fell on his knees before the
painting revealing himself to be as fervent a Nazi as ever.[70]
In 1972 Helnwein held an exhibition
in the gallery of the House of the Press in Vienna, which was forced to close
after three days following massive protests by the employees and strike threats
by the workers council.[71]
During my interview with
Helnwein he recalled an encounter shortly after this exhibition closed with a
journalist from a conservative newspaper. The journalist told him he was
disturbed by the pictures he had seen and couldnÕt sleep because he dreamt of
them. When Helnwein asked the journalist if he had been to war, seen real dead
bodies, or killed anyone, the journalist answered Òyes of course, it was war.Ó
Helnwein then asked him Òbut as a news reporter donÕt you get pictures of all
these horrible things, so bad that you canÕt even print them?Ó and the reporter
said he did. Helnwein recalls that he found it really interesting that:
To see people dying, to see
pictures of actual dead and wounded was no problem and here we have a piece of
paper, with tiny little pieces of pigment on it, and thatÕs all it is really,
and that stopped him from sleeping, I donÕt understand. I realised at that
moment that it is not my pictures, itÕs the pictures that they have in the back
of their head thatÕs the problem. Usually they are dormant and asleep but with
art you can really break it out and thatÕs what they really hate.[72]
In 1979, spurred into action by an interview in an Austrian tabloid
in which the country's top court psychiatrist, Dr. Heinrich Gross, admitted
killing children at Vienna's Am
Spiegelgrund Paediatric Unit during the war by poisoning their food,
Helnwein painted Lebensunwertes Leben or Life is not Worth Living - a watercolour
of a little girl "asleep" on the table, her head in her plate.[73]
Lebensunwertes Leben,
1979, by Gottfried Helnwein
Illus.
9
Helnwein recalls:
He was the most celebrated
forensic psychiatrist and a member of the Social Democrats and he had all the
medals of honour that you could get and then they found out that he killed 800
children. So the reporter asked Òdid you poison them?Ó and [Dr.Gross] said they
were looking for a humane way [of killing them] so they came up with putting
poison in the food; so when the kids were eating they were not aware that they
would die. When I read [the article] I was in shock because somebody had just
admitted he had killed 800 children and everybody couldnÕt be more relaxed. I
thought this should have raised a storm of protest or something but not one
voice, not one guy would write to this fucking newspaper, there was nothing. At
the same time on National Television for the first time, it was not an anchor
man but some guy in television was appearing with out a tie, like with a white
shirt but no tie. They got 3,500 letters of protest, they freaked out, people
were freaked, this is the end of everything, you know? They were completely
upset and I thought something is wrong. Here is a guy with no fucking tie and
people think it is the end. Here a guy killed 800 and it was nothing. And I
thought OK, maybe it is a reading problem, so I called the guys from the news
magazine and I said ÒGive me a page, I need a page, I will paint an open letter
to the guy.Ó And they said ÒOk you can have it in two daysÓ and so I had to
paint, day and night. I painted exactly what he said - the girl with the food
and her head in the plate. I painted it realistically with watercolours and then
I wrote this small thing thanking him and that actually caused a storm of
protest and so now suddenly people wrote to this magazine upset about the
painting, not about the guy. This tiny little picture started a huge
discussion.Õ[74]
Helnwein has always attempted to
make works that extend beyond the art scene into the social and political realm
and has embraced all the possibilities of technological processes to bring art
to the widest possible public. From 1966 he began to take his art out onto the
streets in a series of ÔaktionsÕ or
performances which were recorded and documented.[75]
In 1973 one of his pictures was used for the cover for Austrian news magazine ÔProfilÕ and his earlier stated wish Òto
be on all the magazine covers of the worldÓ started to become a reality. The
German news magazines ÔDer SpiegelÕ
and ÔSternÕ, the American ÔTime MagazineÕ, ÔLÕEspressoÕ from Italy, ÔRolling StoneÕ magazine and the German ÔZeit MagazinÕ all used work by Helnwein
on their covers.[76] In 2007 the
Virtual Museum of Art in the internet based world Second Life opened with a Helnwein retrospective.[77]
I hated the gallery system
anyway and I was always looking for a demographic form of mass
communicationÉ I wanted to find
out how can you force people to look at something that they would rather not be
made to look at. I found that images can reach much deeper than words. [78]
The two installations I will
discuss continue this extension of HelnweinÕs works into the public realm. Helnwein
produced large scale photo murals which were displayed in Cologne, Germany and
Kilkenny, Ireland. He confronts the passer by with images and thus attempts to begin
a dialogue, with a possible healing effect.
Selektion (Ninth November
Night)
In 1988 Helnwein planned a large installation to commemorate the fifty year anniversary of Kristallnacht entitled ÔSelektion (Ninth November Night)Õ. The installation consisted of a four-meter-high, hundred-meter-long picture wall with seventeen pictures of local children, running along the railway in a line between the Ludwig museum and the main train station in Cologne. [79]
When I did this memorial in
1988, it was the fifty year anniversary of Kristallnacht
and I thought Kristallnacht was
really a crucial point in time because it was the moment when suddenly the
Germans openly went against the Jews. Thousands of synagogues burnt down in one
night, all the businesses and stores were destroyed, they were chased in the
streets, the people were dead and that was open killing. There could be no
doubt for anybody, until then people said it was not that bad. For me, that was
the actual beginning of the Holocaust reallyÉI shot all the faces of the
children then I put [them next to] this magic word Selektion which means selection; because that was what they were
doing. Selecting who should live and who should go to the gas chamberÉI always
thought that when you look for the essence of this horrible nightmare then I
think its really the idea that a small group of people can decide and play God
and decide who has the right to live and who does not.[80]
However, he had difficulties finding a sponsor, as his planned installation of haunted childrenÕs faces was unlike the muted, conceptualist Holocaust memorials usually commissioned by City Councils in Germany. The city of Cologne refused Helnwein permission to exhibit on city property.[81] In the end, he managed to get permission to use a site privately owned by the railway and had to realize the project at his own expense. Despite initial difficulties Helnwein was pleased with the result.
ÔI thought, this is great
because now having them along the railway it makes even more sense. It was the
railways that deported them to the concentration camps.Õ[82]
Selektion (Ninth November Night)
installation in Cologne, Germany, 1988.
Illus.
10
The wall stretched from the Ludwig museum in Cologne to its main train station. It was in the city centre and a place through which thousands of people pass every day. [83] Each passer-by was confronted with larger-than-life childrenÕs faces; painted white, they appear almost death like, lined up in a seemingly endless row as if for concentration camp selection. There was much media coverage of the installation and public debate ensued. After two days the installation was vandalised when someone slashed the throats of all the children on the panels.[84] HelnweinÕs reaction to the vandalism of his work echoes GerzÕs wish to Ôdocument the social temperamentÕ with his disappearing monument:
Two days after they were hung
somebody cut all the throats and when I saw, I didnÕt know what to do, it never
shocked me because I think if you show art in public places then the reaction
will be a part of whatever it will be, you cant control that. So then I decided
to just patch it up roughly and leave it and actually it makes the piece so
much more powerful. For me it was always an important part to see a reaction.[85]
Selektion (Ninth November Night) after
the installation was vandalized, Cologne, Germany, 1988.
Illus.
11
Like the concept of the
counter-monument discussed earlier, HelnweinÕs murals create memorial spaces where the aim is not to
embody the memory but give it back to the community, not to console but to
provoke, not to remain fixed but to change and to demand interaction from the
viewer.
Kilkenny Arts Festival
For an exhibition of his works at the 2001 Kilkenny Arts festival in Ireland, Helnwein hung large photomurals of his paintings on buildings around the city. He included reproductions of his three Epiphanies that were created between 1996 and 1998. These works blend Nazi and religious imagery in a conflation of photography and painting.[86] In 1996, using a computer painting and ink jet method, Helnwein painted a series of Madonnas in which he adopted images of the Virgin and Child taken from well known paintings by Leonardo or Caravaggio and documentary photographs from the Nazi era and transferred them onto canvas. He then over-painted the image with oil and acrylic allowing the paint to subsume and become coexistent with the photograph. HelnweinÕs Epiphany I (Adoration of the Magi) is a large (210 x 333 cm) painting in blue monochrome depicting the Adoration of the Magi. But the Madonna is a young Aryan maiden, and she presents a Christ Child who looks like a young Adolf Hitler. The wise men all wear SS and Reichswehr uniforms. They stand attentively, with approving respect, next to the Virgin. The most prominent Nazi holds a document in his hands, while the soldier on the right seems to examine the child, perhaps to see whether he is circumcised.[87]
Epiphany I (Adoration of the Magi) by Gottfried Helnwein, original painting, 1996.
Illus. 12
Epiphany II (Adoration of the Shepherds) again seamlessly melds a version of the Adoration of the Magi with a scenario from the Third Reich. The painting depicts a bare breasted Madonna-like mother with a child on her lap. The child points with closed eyes at the surrounding crowd of onlookers – some of them in Nazi uniforms. Once again the Madonna and Child take the place of Hitler in an old propaganda photograph.[88] Robert Flynn Johnson observes:
The apparent blasphemy of this scene of Nazi evil
encountering the Madonna and Child in a stadium setting is not so clear cut for
Helnwein. Rather it is a more symbolic case of unconditional evil, the Third
Reich, meeting "conditional evil", the Catholic Church, particularly
in light of Pope Pius XIIÕs alleged moral complicity during World War II.[89]
ÔEpiphany II (Adoration of the
Shepherds)Õ by Gottfried Helnwein, original painting, 1998.
Illus. 13
ÔEpiphany III (Presentation in the Temple)Õ is also based on a documentary photograph, this time featuring World War I British prisoners of war, disfigured by shell splinters. They are standing around a table on which a girl is lying, with the soldier on the far right paradoxically bearing Adolf HitlerÕs features. Here the Presentation suggests a sacrifice; the iconography refers to the Òanatomy lessonÓ which was a popular theme in 17th Century Dutch painting: a group portrait depicting scientists standing around a corpse or a skeleton.[90]
Epiphany III (Presentation in the Temple) by Gottfried Helnwein, original
painting, 1998.
Illus. 14
Helnwein supplemented the
reproductions of these existing paintings with a new set of works created specifically
for his installation at the Kilkenny Arts Festival. He made a series of portraits
of local children which echoes his earlier Selektion
(Ninth November Night)
installation in Cologne. Ninety children were photographed by the artist and
nine were displayed in central locations around the city, enlarged up to nine
meters high.[91]
Mary-Sheila Walsh, Aoife Connelly and Eimear Connelly by Gottfried Helnwein, 2001.
Illus. 15
Epiphany III (Presentation at the Temple) by Gottfried Helnwein, Installation
in Kilkenny City.
Illus. 16
I thought, a medieval city, it
would be great to make it a gallery and put the art on the streets. So people
that donÕt even know about it will look at art and just walk through the
streets and be surprised. I also photographed children from Kilkenny and blew
them up and I wanted people to be involved in it. To be a part of the life, to
put it right in to the beautiful little city and I thought this is a Roman
Catholic country, Ireland. I expected there would be some reaction because of
the religious content.[92]
The installation in Kilkenny was also vandalized; Epiphany I (The Adoration of the Magi) was splashed with red paint and a photograph of a child was set alight.[93] A local newspaper The Kilkenny People reported that:
The images have been a major
talking point since before the festival began. A former mayor of the city, Mr
Paul Cuddihy, initially objected to a painting being hung on the City Hall for
fear it might be misinterpreted as lending support to Nazism.[94]
Members of the City Council were shown an image of Epiphany II and told an enlarged copy was to be displayed on the City Hall, although Helnwein had already decided to use another location. The debate over whether the images should be displayed caused the Kilkenny Arts Festival to issue a statement to the press explaining:
The subject matter of Helnwein's work are the often-difficult
subjects of prejudice, hatred and violence. Despite their difficult nature it
is important that these subjects are addressed and debate takes place regarding
issues like Nazi-ism, fascism and feelings of hatred towards immigrants and
minority groups. This is the subject matter of the work of Gottfried Helnwein
and the purpose is to promote public debateÉIn the Ireland of today where we
are faced with increasing incidents of hostility towards immigrant and minority
groups this is a legitimate subject for exploration through artistic work. It
is our belief that it is appropriate and reasonable to use public buildings to
exhibit art for general public display in a festival which is staged for the
enjoyment and stimulation of the people of Kilkenny and visitors to the city.[95]
Chapter 4
Representing the Holocaust
HelnweinÕs work, and the controversy its hanging has caused, highlights
the problems inherent in Holocaust imagery. Ever since the Second World War
intellectuals have debated whether the Holocaust is at all representable. The
question is how an event such as the Holocaust can or should be represented and
what forms its images can or ought to take. This question raises two different
issues, how the Holocaust can be represented and how it should.[96] ÔTo write poetry after Auschwitz is
barbaricÕ wrote Theodor Adorno in 1949, in Cultural
Criticism and Society. [97]
This dictum has certainly played a powerful role in the ethical and aesthetic
debates surrounding aesthetic representations of the Holocaust. Adorno
subsequently qualified and amended this statement in his book Negative Dialectics;
ÔPerennial suffering has as
much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have
been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.Õ[98]
AdornoÕs statement has nevertheless come to function as a moral and
aesthetic dictate for the post-war era.[99]
The moral imperatives for ÔrespectableÕ Holocaust education and studies, as
dictated by Terrence Des Pres are:
1)
The Holocaust shall be represented,
in its totality, as a unique event, as a special case and a kingdom of its own,
above or below or apart from history.
2)
Representations of the Holocaust
shall be as accurate and faithful as possible to the facts and conditions of
the event, without change or manipulation for any reason – artistic
reasons included.
3)
The Holocaust shall be approached as
a solemn or even sacred event, with a seriousness admitting no response that
might obscure its enormity or dishonour its dead.[100]
Helnwein sets up an aesthetic
distance to the horror in his work by technically and electronically heavily
treating the images. With the aid of computer technology and multiple
reproductions he has endowed the documentary photographs of horribly maimed
faces in Epiphany III with an
alluring aesthetic gloss.[101]
One could argue that the
extermination of the Jews of Europe is as accessible to both representation and
interpretation as any other historical event. However, we are dealing with an
event which tests our traditional conceptual and representational categories
and HelnweinÕs aestheticizing of the horror of
the Holocaust is morally contentious. Saul Friedlander in his book Probing
the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution, describes the
Holocaust as an Òevent at the limits.Ó [102]
He explains that what turns the ÔFinal SolutionÕ to an event at the limits is:
The very fact that it is the
most radical form of genocide encountered in history: the wilful, systematic,
industrially organised, largely successful attempt to exterminate an entire
human group within twentieth-century Western society. [103]
Berel Lang uses a similar notion of the limits of Holocaust
representation in the title of her book Holocaust
Representation: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics, she
acknowledges that the phrase Ôart within the limitsÕ would be a provocation
even if the limits were left unspecified. Lang writes that AdornoÕs assertion
of barbarism – not the impossibility, but the barbarism of writing lyric
poetry after Auschwitz – is one formulation of this perceived
representational limit. Although, she argues a justification might be argued
for barbarism against still greater barbarism – against denial for
example, or against forgetfulness. On this basis, Lang concedes that
representations may be warranted as within the limits, to serve a purpose in
calling attention to the historical occurrence itself.[104]
For a generation of artists and critics born after the Holocaust, the
experience of Nazi genocide is necessarily vicarious and hyper-mediated. They
havenÕt experienced the Holocaust itself but only the event of its being passed
down to them. [105] The mass
appeal of National Socialism in Germany after 1933 was in a number of ways
obviously linked to aesthetic and artistic phenomena. Fascism could even be
defined as a form of government which depended on aestheticized politics,
featuring, for example, the marshalling of masses in geometrical formations and
the expression of party-political and governmental functions through uniforms,
insignia and ranking symbols.[106]
The aesthetics of political symbolism play a part in all systems of mass
politics, the difference in fascism is the frequency, intensity and
omnipresence of such practices. [107] Do works of art about the Holocaust tell
us more about the human experience under fascism or our potential to be drawn
to it? While most art work about the Holocaust carries an anti-war message,
some critics argue that it can implicate the viewer in a fascination with the
inevitably aestheticized representations of violence. Historian Omer Bartov,
for example, has expressed his sense of ÔuneaseÕ with what he describes as the
Ôcool aesthetic pleasureÕ that derives from the more Ôhighly stylizedÕ of
contemporary Holocaust representations.[108]
What troubles Bartov is the ways in which such art may draw on the very power
of Nazi imagery it seeks to expose. Susan Sontag inquired into this dilemma in
her essay Fascinating Fascism first
published in 1974. [109] She
expressed grave moral concern about the meanings inherent in, and audiences
served by, a spate of fascist aesthetics and Nazi imagery in contemporary
photography and film. Saul Friedlander raised the question again several years
ago in his own profound meditations on Ôfascinating fascismÕ, in which the
historian wonders whether a brazen new generation of artists bent on examining
their own obsession with Nazism adds to our understanding of the Third Reich or
only recapitulates a fatal attraction to it.[110]
While HelnweinÕs use of Nazi imagery may seem offensive on the surface,
James E. Young suggests that the artist using Nazi imagery might ask:
Is it the Nazi imagery itself
that offends, or the artists aesthetic manipulations of such imagery? Does art
become a victim of the imagery it depicts? Or does it actually tap into and
thereby exploit the repugnant power of Nazi imagery as a way merely to shock
and move its viewers? Or is it both, and if so, can these artists have it both
ways? Where is the line between historical exhibition and sensationalist
exhibitionism? [111]
Although Helnwein argues that his intention is never to shock:
What is shocking?...Shock is
always the reaction of a society based on their belief system and their rules;
so the only thing a piece of art can do is touch or challenge some of the
arbitrary stupid rules. ThatÕs why I
always like to quote Marcel DuchampÕs concept of art, art is the bipolar product,
it is 50% the artist and 50% the public, the onlooker, he said. And what
happens between these
two poles, something like electricity, that is art. That comes the closest to what I
think art should be, so what rules can you have? [112]
Conclusion
I asked how an event such as the Holocaust can or should be represented
and what forms its images can or ought to take. Holocaust art tends to be
unreflectively reduced by critics to how it can promote Holocaust education and
remembrance. In the context of Holocaust education and remembrance, historical
genres and discourses, such as the documentary, memoir or testimony might be
viewed as more effective and morally responsible in teaching the historical
events than more imaginative discourses. I have discussed the problems inherent
in monuments as sites of memory, both figurative and abstract, due to their
vulnerability to appropriation and multiple interpretations. Accordingly, HelnweinÕs
work is also intrinsically problematic because it is imaginative not
documentary.[113] However, the
prospect of constraining freedom of expression would actually mirror fascist
politics. Critics agree that knowledge of the Holocaust is an important and a
desirable goal of public education (whether formal or informal). Thus, given
the diverse tastes and capacities of groups and individuals and the variety of
possible representations or images, there is really nothing more to be said, certainly
nothing to be criticised, no limits to be set or even hoped for in Holocaust
representation.
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