The Holocaust Within the Artistic Postwar German Society

Holocaust survivor and esteemed writer, Primo Levi, defines “Memory of Offense” as the memory of a wound that can never heal, and which permanently cements the perpetrator and the victim in their roles as such. Levi believes that in the case of the Holocaust, it is imperative that both the perpetrator and the victim preserve the memory; however, during the first twenty years of the Federal Republic, West Germans were not encouraged to confront the events of their recent past.

Postwar German society, stripped and dismantled, was powerless and afflicted with what Theodor Adorno describes as a “damaged collective narcissism.” (Biro) In West Berlin, artists studied with tachistes and informel painters to create an international, neutral mode of abstraction. (Foster) George Baselitz and other German painters rejected this international neutrality and instead attempted to continue the pre-Weimar painterly practices and establish an unbroken link through the German cultural tradition. (Foster) However, this continuity belied the historical destruction of the Nazi era, which led artists like Gerhard Richter to champion post-traditional formations of national identity in painting.

Both Gerhard Richter, during the immediate postwar period, and Anselm Kiefer, during the second-generation postwar period, attempted the project of renationalizing cultural production. Richter's work probes the question of when and whether the Holocaust can be subject of visual culture. Kiefer's work confronts his country's history, inherited through visual representations and verbal and written accounts, and its tense relationship with his generation.

Richter and Kiefer recognized the need to confront Germany's past, and their art reflects this through formal content and conceptual and stylistic reflections. Richter's use of photography and his photo-painting technique present his ambiguous sense of perception and memory, whereas Kiefer expresses an ambiguously bipartisan confrontation with traditional German and Nazi imagery. The two artists attack the Holocaust legacy in Germany from disparate angles, with distinct generational concerns motivating their works, yet both confront the themes of visual culture and historical memory, and express the prevailing ambiguity and uncertainty in German postwar society and identity.

Richter was born in Dresden in 1932 and he studied at the Dresden Art Academy in Communist East Germany. Just prior to the erection of the Berlin Wall, Richter and his wife fled to Dusseldorf in West Germany. Poised in the 1960s, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol strongly impacted Richter, and several critics compare Richter's work to Warhol's. Though the two do share some artistic concerns, unlike the Pop artists, Richter was not interested in critiquing consumerism; his interests were in the “everyday.” (Storr)

Richter employs various techniques to express his perception of reality, but tempers that project by declaring: “I am suspicious regarding the image of reality, which our senses convey to us and which is incomplete, and limited.” (Danoff) This ambiguity is central to his photo-paintings, which was the medium through which he felt he could most truthfully address the postwar reality due to the role of photographs and media in the construction and conception of historical memory. (Foster) However, Richter never claims any cathartic function, rather, it is the tension between repression and memory, shame and nostalgia that energizes his work.

Such conflicts typify German postwar mentality; Richter describes his own “relation to reality” as having “always to do with haziness, insecurity, inconsistency, fragmentary performance.” (Danoff) This ambiguity of perception and his total rejection of ideology are central to his meditations on the holocaust and postwar Germany, as exemplified in his pieces Uncle Rudi and Atlas.

Richter executed Uncle Rudi [Figure 1], an oil photo-painting done in 1965, in his signature monochrome gray palette and blur technique. These were his two tools to systematically distance the viewer from the subject, a telling reflection of German historical repression. Uncle Rudi crystallizes postwar tensions, representing a familiar, though silenced, memory that was very recognizable and common to Germans: the “Nazi in the family.” (Storr) Uncle Rudi is a small portrait based on a picture of Richter's uncle smiling for the camera in his Nazi uniform. Here, the Nazi soldier is not a cruel brute, but rather a family member, an ordinary, upright, happy soldier.

Richter describes his uncle as “handsome, charming, tough, elegant, a playboy,” and Richter notes that his uncle was “so proud of his uniform.” (Storr) Uncle Rudi represents the many Germans that willingly participated in the war, a very frightening reality that is rendered, here, very poignantly and expertly. Richter's blur technique is to feather the paint or smear it with a spatula or hard edge while it is still wet, which obscures the image without involving any editorial judgments or decisions. Furthermore, in choosing to work in gray and relinquish color, Richter lessens emotional perception and thus further distances the relationship to the figure.

Here, Richter renders Uncle Rudi as a faded, aged memory, no longer a striking presence, or even a fully grasped reality. Rudi appears to be merely a “construct of memory” and not a memory of valor or heroism, rather just another soldier, part of what was once the everyday.