Political Art: Why does Theodor Herzl’s clock tick?

Eckhart Gillen: Let’s talk about your three new large-format pictures from the last four months, which were created after the Hamas attack on Israeli kibbutzim on October 7, 2023. In the 1970s, Jean Amery drew attention to the combat term “unjust state of Israel” in his book “The New Anti-Semitism”: “Kill the Zionists dead, make the Zionists red.” The Nazis’ “Juda perish” resonates in this battle cry. What are you trying to get at in this picture when Jean Amery’s portrait is hung with an Auschwitz-like gate header bearing the all-too-familiar slogan: “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free?”

Yury Kharchenko: What this could be about is the connection between the Holocaust, the old and the new anti-Semitism. Anti-Zionism today often turns into pure hatred of Jews. The State of Israel and the Jewish people are rejected and should be dissolved. It was of course clear to me after Israel’s army invaded Gaza that Israel would lose the war of images. Nevertheless, I did not expect that the hatred of Jews that we have to experience today would be as similar as it was in Germany in the early 1930s. This is why we clearly see the swastika on the red Soviet flag, as the supposed fight against Zionism in the USSR was used for political persecution and intrigue.

Conversation

Gerd Wallhorn

Yury Kharchenko is a painter from Berlin. Born in Moscow in 1986, he came to Germany in the 1990s as a Jewish quota refugee along with his parents and grandparents, who were Holocaust survivors. He currently has the exhibition “Welcome to Jewish Museum” in Schwäbisch-Hall. He presented the catalog, which was published by Hirmer Verlag, in the Berlin bookstore Der Zauberberg, in conversation with the curator and art historian Eckhart Gillenfrom which we print an excerpt.

But we don’t just see historical flags and symbols that no longer exist today, but also current signs and flags.

Yes, on the blood-red Nazi flag, which shares the blood-soaked surface with the Soviet flag, we see the Palestinian flag, which is connected to the flag of the Federal Republic of Germany, from which an Israeli flag emerges, still worm-like. And next to it is an Israeli flag with a blood-red Star of David.

I also see a British and an American flag in the background of the Auschwitz-like headline “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.” The whole thing looks like a kind of fireworks display made of flags and different stars.

It is a galaxy of stars and flags – here past and present are brought into one unity, but with different metaphors and associations. Some people think that in this way I want to confuse and even provoke.

Aren’t you being provocative when you write this Palestine slogan in concentration camp script?

I provoke you to think. At first glance, I incorporate certain confusions that are not familiar from the visual world. This is about similar patterns of thinking and behavior among people. Therefore, this picture, or story, takes place in today. It is a universe from which Jean Amery’s face emerges in black and white, perhaps as if in a hologram. Jean Amery was always a leftist, but in the 1970s he criticized the left and its anti-Zionism. He believed that counter-violence could only be considered positive if it ultimately led to a more humane situation. Let’s take Judith Butler, for example, who recently described Hamas as “counter-violence” and still counts it as part of the global left. Certain forms of Zionism are of course to be criticized, even if one considers that Israel, as the national state of the Jews, became an almost binational state as a result of the Six-Day War in 1967. So have Netanyahu’s national policies, particularly over the last decade, which have made the situation worse. And it is precisely this policy that contradicts Theodor Herzl’s basic idea of ​​a Jewish nation state. As a former Soviet-Russian Jew, I am all too familiar with the fact that the USSR incited Arab countries against Israel for decades because it counted Israel as part of the global West, i.e. the empire of capitalism, while the USSR defined itself as a left-wing opponent. The stereotype of the Jew as capitalist comes into play here.

I see melting, dissolving clocks in the style of Dalí in the picture. These show 6:29 a.m.

Yes, it is the time on the 7th. In October 2023, Hamas attacked Israel and spread its genocidal message to all Jews worldwide. For all Jews, time has stood still, and Israel’s security concept has collapsed like a house of cards. Nobody knows where this war can lead.

Let’s move on to the next picture “From Auschwitz to Israel Gaza War”. I see a baby pterodactyl flying out of the Auschwitz gate and a Palestinian flag tied to the Israeli one. What do you want to express with that? Are today’s Gaza war and the Holocaust connected?

I want to see today’s events in the context of history. Our German culture of remembrance only considers the victory over the Nazis up to May 8, 1945. Unfortunately, I often had to experience that I was not perceived as an individual with my own background, but was instead associated with the Holocaust or National Socialism, i.e. only with the past. On the 8th The Second World War ended in May 1945, while the bloody history of the Jews continued in the Middle East after 1945. The Arabs refer to the Nakba – the expulsion of the Palestinians after the establishment of the State of Israel. This is a state that has never been accepted by the Arab states and has always had to fight for its existence, until now. The fact that the war continued for the Jews is hardly highlighted in the German culture of remembrance.

This suggests that many citizens do not want to confront reality. The Canadian sociologist Michal Bodemann speaks of a memory theater in this regard. Would you agree to that?

Yes, partially. I have personally experienced how strangely many Germans react to questions about memory. You only meet a few people who really remember things with a lot of heart and soul, who want to know how their families behaved under the Nazis.

I would like to come to the picture with Theodor Herzl. In the foreground are two cartoon characters: Beavis and Butthead. However, these are shown as zombies. Both stand in front of Palestinian flags and Theodor Herzl stands in front of them.

It’s about the crisis of postcolonial theory in relation to Israel. The narrative of calling Israel fascist is a parrot of the old Soviet propaganda of denouncing Israel as a “fascist state” – without thinking about it. Added to this is woke thinking. Why? – Wokeness is after colors and flags, identity politics and particularism instead of universalism. It’s often not about Zionism and Israel or the Jews in Israel. That’s why I show a jumble of Palestinian and Israeli flags around Herzl. Because society is about victim status. Wokeness is like a rally or an Olympics, as if someone wrapping themselves in a flag would run faster across the finish line of a marathon. According to the motto: “My suffering is the greatest suffering and therefore I have the moral right to discriminate against others.”

In the picture we see that Theodor Herzl is wearing a watch like in a comic. They also painted another series of pictures where you can see the logo of the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), the Israeli Defense Forces, and desperate hands around it and the melting clocks again.

It’s about the military’s relationship to peace, questions of self-protection, but also death and grief. It breaks my heart that most of the hostages have still not been freed. Hence hands in the darkness, longing for light from the darkness, hands turned toward one another, Kohanim hands, the hands of Jewish priests. Herzl is shown with the clock because his idea of ​​a Jewish state is in danger. Israel’s security concept has fluctuated significantly since October 7th. The image conveys the desperate situation of Israel, which on the one hand is under constant genocidal threat from Islamist fundamentalism and terrorism, and on the other hand is being abandoned from within by self-centered politicians. Theodor Herzl appears in the middle of the picture with a ticking clock that seems to warn of a catastrophe: the threat to Israel and the open outcome of this war.

»Welcome to Jewish Museum«, bis 20. October in the Hällisch-Fränkisches Museum in Schwäbisch-Hall.