Art from the Nazi era: drawings despite everything

How can the Shoah be represented? And what can documentary images from Auschwitz tell us? The discussion about this has been conducted with some polemics over the past two and a half decades, especially in France, triggered by a catalog article by the art historian Georges Didi-Huberman published in 2000. This is about four photographs, presumably taken by Alberto Errera, a prisoner of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando. They are considered the only authentic visual documentation of the mass murder in the camp.

For Didi-Huberman, they are fragments that can be used to at least get closer to historical reality. He was sharply criticized for this attitude by the psychoanalyst Gérard Wajcman and Claude Lanzmann, who completely omitted historical images in his documentary “Shoah” (1985). Your accusation: By focusing on the four photographs, which amounts to fetishization, Didi-Huberman is denying the unimaginability of what happened in the concentration camps. In his book “Images Despite Everything” (2007), Didi-Huberman deals with this accusation in depth.

In Germany the debate received relatively little response; Nevertheless, there was also a debate in this country about the idea that the Shoah could not be represented, especially in the field of fine art: for his “Birkenau” cycle (2014), Gerhard Richter initially transferred the four photographs from Auschwitz onto large canvases in presumably true detail and then painted them over them but then again, so that now only abstract colored areas can be seen. It is implied here that the Shoah cannot be represented artistically and one should not even try.

Michael Müller sees it differently: Referring to Richter, he also transferred the photographs from Birkenau to large canvases, but left them in their figurative form. He also reproduced Richter’s abstract paintings. A possible idea behind this: Doesn’t it lead to a mythologization and exaggeration of Nazi crimes if the concrete thing is taken away from them? To a certain extent, such an approach also contradicts the will of the prisoners: they risked their lives (which were already hanging by a thread) to inform the world about the Nazi crimes.

Ernst Kaufmann, who was interned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp for several months in 1945 and made numerous drawings there, undoubtedly also pursued this goal of information and documentation. Some of them are currently in the exhibition “Night in Germany. Persecution – Destruction – Resistance” can be seen in Neuhardenberg Castle in Brandenburg. Curated on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Stauffenberg assassination attempt on July 20, the show shows drawings and paintings that were created under Nazi rule. For decades, Schneider has compiled works by artists who were persecuted during the Nazi era and are often forgotten today.

It is surprising that the drawings by Kaufmann, who studied art in Karlsruhe, Munich and Leipzig, have not received more attention. As curator Simon Häuser explains, Kaufmann’s family had tried unsuccessfully to sell them for a long time before they came into Schneider’s possession. According to Houses, they were already shown in Solingen last year, and with the current exhibition they have been published in a catalog for the first time. There are explicit depictions of everyday life in the camp as well as scenes that were presumably described to Kaufmann by fellow prisoners who had been transferred to Theresienstadt from other concentration camps. They show inhumane torture and torment: a normality that is unimaginable for us today (but apparently not unshowable). In their visual, documentary form – the style is reminiscent of court drawings – they come closer to the photographs from Auschwitz than written reports and other artistic evidence.

However, the pictures inevitably also contain the artist’s subjective expression, which is particularly evident in the sometimes sarcastic picture titles. “How long will he live after the poison injection?” says one drawing. Kaufmann thus takes on the perspective of the SS man captured there. Sitting in front of a cot, he observes an emaciated prisoner to whom he has apparently administered a deadly solution as part of a medical experiment.

Another picture is titled “Jewish prisoner doing stretching exercise on the pulley.” However, the “stretching exercise” as shown in the drawing consists of the prisoner pulling a fellow prisoner up a gallows equipped with a pulley system under the supervision of an SS man. Remember the words of the comic artist Art Spiegelman, who depicted the story of his father, an Auschwitz survivor, with cartoon animals. He replied to his critics that it was not his design but the Holocaust that was in bad taste.

Of course, Kaufmann’s drawings are only a small part of the art created in concentration camps – there have already been several exhibitions of them at home and abroad – and their significance must be assessed by historians and art historians. They are also only a small part of the Neuhardenberg exhibition. Works from Schneider’s collection that vary greatly in both style and motif are shown here.

In addition to lesser-known artists such as Kaufmann, there are also those who are now part of the canon – such as the couple Lea and Hans Grundig. Both artists were persecuted under National Socialism and later had notable artistic and cultural-political careers in the GDR. Georg Netzband, whose painting “The Abyss” (1935) can be seen, is not quite as well known. It shows an apocalyptic scene: humanity falls into seemingly bottomless, dark depths. Apolitical? Not at all – shortly after its completion, the picture was presented at the German Academy of Arts for just a few days, then it had to be taken down by order of the Nazis. The reference to their rule and its foreseeable consequences is obviously too clear.

A not insignificant part of the rather small exhibition also includes works that show the destruction of German cities by Allied bombers on paper or canvas. An ambivalent motif, as it is often used today in historical revisionist contexts. So was this actually a question of “resistance,” a catchphrase under which the exhibition subsumes all depictions of the bombed-out cities? In fact, such images in Hitler’s Germany could potentially be seen as “destroying the military’s strength” – and could therefore even be punished with the death penalty.

At least in the case of Eduard Hopf, there can hardly be any question of resistance. Although some of his works were branded “degenerate” and confiscated by the Nazis in 1937, he took part in the Great German Art Exhibition in Munich in 1942, which was intended to propagate the Nazi ideology. The chalk drawings of the destroyed Lübeck, which can currently be seen in Neuhardenberg Castle, were made by Hopf in March 1942 on behalf of the NSDAP. There is nothing about this in the manual.

Hopefully the only carver in this show who has put together works that are really worth seeing.

»Night in Germany. Persecution – Destruction – Resistance”, until August 11th, Neuhardenberg Castle in Neuhardenberg (Brandenburg).