Nazi Continuities: Kindl Art Center in Berlin: Against the Gap

It is a common attitude to prefer to just enjoy art and aesthetics instead of dealing with disturbing questions of repression and blank spots in the “dark times” of the history of art institutions, private collections and museums. Franz Josef Degenhardt processed this in a line of his song “Father Franz” (1966): “Stop with the story – art is enjoyment!”

This is exactly what the artist, who works under the pseudonym Franz Wanner and was born in Bad Tölz in 1975, does not want to grant the audience at the Berliner Kindl. For Wanner, there is no collective national trauma, “but rather a learned citizen pragmatism in a state that reinvented itself from the rubble of a self-inflicted war as a prodigy of economic liberalism, stripped of all ideologies,” as Stephanie Weber summed it up in an earlier catalog brings the point.

nd.Kompakt – our daily newsletter

Our daily newsletter nd.Compact brings order to the news madness. Every day you will receive an overview of the most exciting stories from the world editorial staff. Get your free subscription here.

Wanner’s art is based on meticulous research, which he forms into narratives using images, videos and texts. Wanner countered the superstition of “innocent” science in the five-channel video installation “DUAL-USE” (2016), which demonstrates the often camouflaged entanglement of civil and military research. In a film and theater project he dealt with the secret service branches of the Federal Intelligence Service, which emerged from the Gehlen organization. Reinhard Gehlen, who had previously headed the “Foreign Armies East Department” in the Wehrmacht, was able to continue his Nazi career without interruption in the Federal Republic of Germany – he was apparently indispensable in the fight against communism.

The preoccupation and unmasking of such invisible connecting lines and continuities runs like a red thread through Wanner’s work, which now in Kindl shifts the focus just a little and focuses on other continuities, namely those of companies that employed forced laborers during National Socialism. The title of the exhibition curated by Kathrin Becker, “Mind the Memory Gap,” sounds very similar to the warning from the Berlin public transport company to pay attention to the gap between the subway and the edge of the platform. Filling the white space of the memory gap and revealing the traces of the past in the present also plays a role here.

In the first room of the rigorously designed exhibition you can see a photo of a pair of plexiglass protective glasses that belonged to a previously unknown prisoner of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and were found there during excavations in 2006. The forced laborer at Röhm & Haas apparently made the glasses for himself. Röhm & Haas, which also had a US branch, applied for the patent for Plexiglas in 1931. The company used forced labor in Nazi Germany to produce plexiglass, which from 1936 was entirely reserved for war production. The forced laborers used the material to produce windows for the cockpits of fighter aircraft from the Heinkel factories, which were absorbed into today’s Airbus company.

Such connections run through Franz Wanner’s exhibition and raise the question of the extent to which other companies that exist today were also directly or indirectly involved in forced labor and benefited from it. And this question is more than justified, since many companies survived the defeat of German fascism relatively unscathed and, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, were back on site in a new guise after the “zero hour”.

Some dimensions only become clear when they are put into perspective. At the end of the 1990s, Thomas Kuczynski calculated compensation claims amounting to 180 billion DM based on the use of 14 to 15 million forced laborers in Germany.

Wanner, currently a scholarship holder of the Harun Farocki Institute and living in Munich and Zurich, presents the results of years of research in his first solo exhibition using documents, objects and video projections. The plexiglass safety glasses shown at the entrance are connected in the third and final room with the work series “Shadows I-III”, in which the various uses of the material are demonstrated, from plexiglass hoods for sculptures to test pieces of the material from space research to police protective shields . But Wanner always keeps the art context in mind. As a former brewery, the Kindl, once owned by the Oetker Group, used forced laborers to brew the beer and were housed in a camp on Hermannstrasse.

Arno Breker, on Hitler’s list of divinely gifted artists, also employed up to 180 forced laborers to produce his megalomaniac sculptures in Wriezen. The architect Hans Freese, in turn, built Breker’s studio in Dahlem, today the headquarters of the Bernhard Heiligen Foundation and the Kunsthaus Dahlem. Freese also designed the “forced labor camp 75/76” in Berlin-Niederschöneweide in the middle of a residential area on behalf of Albert Speer. The Swiss Bührle art collection is also mentioned by Wanner, as the Ikaria subsidiary of the arms company Oerlikon-Bührle exploited forced laborers in Berlin during the Nazi era.

It is obvious to see Wanner as a political artist – but in an interview he rejects this very categorization because it limits the “narrative” he is trying to create. His work also contains fictional elements. This becomes clear in a video at the Kindl art center in Berlin, for example, in which Wanner imagines how companies process their Nazi history in a business-friendly and advertising-effective way.

»Franz Wanner. Mind the Memory Gap”, until July 14th, Kindl – Center for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

Subscribe to the “nd”

Being left is complicated.
We keep track!

With our digital promotional subscription you can read all issues of »nd« digitally (nd.App or nd.Epaper) for little money at home or on the go.
Subscribe now!