Walking Through Two Germanys

A guided tour with curator Stephanie Barron

Comments (0) By Tom Christie Wednesday, Mar 18 2009

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There were victims of that bombing.

If one thinks about the end of the war from a German point of view, it was one of death, destruction, famine and loss because fathers, brothers, uncles were all lost in the war. It was, shall we say, a shared tragedy and humiliation that was in a way unspoken. Because, given the extent of the Holocaust, it was never something the Germans could own in a public way. They couldn’t claim victim-ness.

Hermann Glîckner, View of Installation

Heinz Loffler, Stalinallee

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No, because they were the bad guys.

They were the bad guys, but they were also, at the end, victims. It’s a very skittish line and it’s why only recently has there been more of an influx of literature dealing with the end of the war from the Germans’ point of view. You think about those Victor Klemperer diaries. If you think about W.G. Sebald writing about the destruction, that’s only come out in the last 15 years in Germany (and then it takes time to get translated). So it’s still a kind of murky area.

They’re still dealing with it now. In Berlin, there are the bullet-scarred buildings, the little museum kiosks everywhere, the Mauer (wall) museum, the streetside exhibition “The Topography of Terror” ...

The later generations of Germans have looked squarely at the war, but that’s a post-’68 dealing with it. If you speak to people in their 20s and their 30s, they have visited the camps, they really know a tremendous amount, yet [with] their parents or their grandparents, there was a silence about it. I find it very interesting as an American and as a Jew. It’s not been an area that, at least in visual culture, has been addressed much. It’s addressed much more in literature and in film.

Anyway, so this [Hans Grudig, Den Opfern des Faschismus (zweite Fass) (To the Victims of Fascism {Second Version}) (1946/9)] is a rare example then of a work right at the end of the war of an artist, who was not Jewish, addressing a work about the victims of the camps. He was in a labor camp, Sachsenhausen, as a political prisoner. His wife was Jewish. So this was his number and then he references the Jewish star. He did two versions of the painting, one with the star and one without. It’s one of the rare examples that actually directly confronts it.

It’s a beautiful piece. Where did you get it?

It’s from [the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden], and they never lend it. I have to say I got spectacular loans. That’s really the result of working in this field for 25 years and having people trust you. Otherwise it’s like, why are they going to send these things to L.A.?

How did you find all of these pieces?

You start, you travel, you look at books, you look at old catalogs. There were, for instance, starting right at the end of the war, a series of exhibitions that were done, all German exhibitions. They were done in Dresden. They were done in small towns in Germany. You begin to look at what was even put on show at the time. Then you travel, and you look, and you talk to people, and then you start begging for loans.

You have a German co-curator.

I have a German co-curator, Eckhard Gillen, which was terrific because he lives in Berlin. He knows a tremendous amount. He’s done exhibitions. He’s friends with lots of artists, and it was really helpful for me in terms of making me aware of a lot of artists whom I didn’t know, and then we would sift through it together. He was fascinated to see what worked for my sensibility, for what I thought would be for a U.S. sensibility and what I was interested in and what I wasn’t interested in.

This is interesting. [Werner Heldt, Tür (Door) (1946)] This guy Heldt was in Berlin. This is a piece he did on a door, which he just found, and the red is lipstick. Then you have artists who stayed in East Germany. Of course there is no East and West Germany in this room. It hasn’t happened yet. It’s an occupied country, occupied by the allies from ’45 to ’49. So it’s basically a country that has been divided by England, France, Russia, the Soviet Union and the United States. Berlin, of course, is divided into four sectors.

This artist, Gerhard Altenbourg, ended up staying in the East, and he did this amazing drawing on recycled paper, with children’s drawings [Ecce Homo 1 (Sterbender Krieger) (Ecce Homo 1 {Dying Warrior}) (1949)].

Were you familiar with any of the artists in this room?

I knew Altenbourg, actually, because I had been to that museum for a previous exhibition I had done in the East. I knew Heldt’s work. I did not know Rudolph, and obviously I knew Hanna Höch. I knew [Ernst Wilhelm] Nay’s work. I had seen a lot of it, but I had to look closely to tell a good work from a not-so-interesting work. I knew [Willi] Baumeister. But here’s a guy, no knowledge of this guy, [Juro] Kubicek [Berlin 1947]. So there’s this revisiting of a Dada sensibility. They’re searching around in the ’40s and what are they going to connect back to? The previous 12 years is nothing anybody wanted to connect to, the Nazi era, so do you go back to expressionism, do you go to Dada, do you go to new objectivity, do you go to abstraction? They’re searching. Here is a very interesting work by Fritz Winter [Triebkräfte der Erde (Sprouting Powers of the Earth) (1944)]. It’s at the end of the war. Now, the way most people talk about it, at the end of the war in the West you had abstraction, which is synonymous with freedom and democracy, and in the East you had realism, which was socialist realism and it was communism. Well, here’s Fritz Winter doing these kind of abstract works, but it’s called Sprouting Powers of the Earth, which has an uncomfortable ring of blood and soil. So they’re dodging around in and amongst what’s German in German art and they’re dodging in and around stuff that had also been percolating during the Nazi era. It’s fascinating.