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Die Schrecklichen Kinder: German Artists Confronting the Legacy of Nazism

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Die Schrecklichen Kinder: German Artists Confronting the Legacy of Nazism Die Schrecklichen Kinder: German Artists Confronting the Legacy of Nazism A Division III by A. Elizabeth Berg May 2013 Chair: Sura Levine Members: Jim Wald and Karen Koehler 2 Table of Contents Introduction . 3 Heroic Symbols: Anselm Kiefer and the Nazi Salute . 13 And You Were Victorious After All: Hans Haacke and the Remnants of Nazism . 31 “The Right Thing to the Wrong People”: The Red Army Faction and Gerhard Richter’s 18. Oktober 1977 . 49 Conclusion . 79 Bibliography . 85 3 Introduction After the end of World War II, they were known as the Fatherless Generation. The children of postwar Germany—the children of Nazis—had lost their fathers in the war, though not always as a result of their death. For many members of this generation, even if their fathers did survive the war and perhaps even years in POW camps, they often returned irreparably physically and psychologically damaged. Once these children reached adolescence, many began to question their parents’ involvement with Nazism and their role during the war. Those who had participated in the atrocities of the war and those whose silence betrayed their guilt were problematic role models for their children, unable to fulfill their roles as parents with any moral authority.1 When these children came of age in the 1960s and entered universities, there was a major shift in the conversation about the war and the process of coming to terms with the past. The members of the postwar generation made themselves heard through large-scale protest and, eventually, violence. In this series of essays, I will look at the ways in which artists of this generation created work in response to their troubled history and the generational politics of the 1960s and 70s. I will examine the works of three postwar German artists: Anselm Kiefer, Hans Haacke, and Gerhard Richter. These three artists were born between 1932 and 1945 and reached artistic maturity amidst violent conflict between their generation and that of their parents and government leaders. The works they created in response to this conflict were confrontational, brazen, and controversial but, ultimately, celebrated. In the 1960s, student protest movements and antiwar demonstrations were taking 1 Hans Kundnani, Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany's 1968 Generation and the Holocaust, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 11. 4 place across the Western world in response to the United States’ war with Vietnam. However, students in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), took on a unique perspective and fervor. The participants’ protest of the war in Vietnam was compounded with attacks on their government, parents, and universities for their involvement with Nazism and the perceived continuities between the FRG and Nazi Germany. The student protestors called for the dismissal of professors with Nazi ties and attacked politicians who had been active during the Third Reich, of which there were many. Though after Germany’s defeat in WWII, the Allies began a campaign of ‘denazification’, it was an impossible feat. Their failure was reflected in the government, military, and businesses of the FRG that were replete with former Nazis. Allied denazification aimed to destroy the Nazi Party and associated organizations as well as to punish individuals involved with the Party and perpetrators of crimes against humanity. The most iconic event of this process was the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg where the Allied powers tried 24 Nazi officials representing the major departments and ministries of the Nazi government—of whom half were sentenced to death and few were acquitted—and 6 Nazi organizations for war crimes and crimes against humanity.2 Several trials and tribunals followed Nuremberg as the Allies experimented with how to find and convict the Nazis in the general population. Over 1.6 million Germans filled out the Fragebogen, a questionnaire about their involvement with the Nazi Party and criminal activity during the Third Reich.3 By 1950, the Western Allies had performed over 3.6 million denazification proceedings. However, of those, only 2 Norbert Frei, Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration, Trans. Joel Golb (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 93. 3 Elmer Plischke, "Denazification Law and Procedure." The American Journal of International Law 41, No. 4 (1947): 815. 5 25,000 people were classified as major offenders, militants, or profiteers. 150,000 were assigned to the category of lesser offenders and roughly one million were considered ‘fellow travelers’, sympathizers who were never members of the Nazi Party.4 Denazification proved to be a more difficult task than the Military Government had expected. Originally, any person with connections to the Nazi Party or who held anti- democratic views was banned from public office or civil service aside from manual labor. But first, the Allies had to decide how they defined who was a Nazi. In March 1945, the Allies declared that any individual who joined the Party after January 1933 and had not held a leadership position would be exempt from the ban. By June, as the policies went into affect after Germany’s unconditional surrender, the definition changed. Anyone who had joined the Party at any time or had held public office after 1933 would be considered a Nazi. Later that month, the definition shifted back towards leniency, it was understood that those who joined the Party after May 1, 1937 could have done so under pressure to keep their jobs.5 In 1946, amnesty was given to those who were born before January 1, 1919, the disabled, and the poor.6 The tightening of definitions was equally a matter of public opinion—both in Germany and back home—as it was a logistical necessity. By the end of the war there were 8 million members of the Nazi Party in Germany. In many places, a purge of all former Party members would be catastrophic: In Bonn, 102 out of 112 doctors were or had been Party members. In the shattered city of Cologne, of the 21 specialists in the city waterworks office—whose skills were vital for the reconstruction of water and sewage systems and in the prevention of disease—18 had been Nazis.7 4 Frei, 38-9. 5 James F. Tent, Mission on the Rhine: Reeducation and Denazification in American-Occupied Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 50-1. 6 John H. Herz, "The Fiasco of Denazification in Germany," Political Science Quarterly 63, No. 4 (1948): 573. 7 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 56. 6 By the time the Military Government ceded control of denazification to the new German government in 1948, national polls showed that half of Germans thought, "National Socialism had been a good idea badly carried out.”8 Nazi sympathy and lack of remorse increased over the course of the Allied denazification proceedings. By 1948, the percentage of those who viewed National Socialism negatively had declined from 41 to 30 percent.9 In response to public opinion, German government officials called for the virtual end of denazification. In September 1949, less than two weeks after he took office, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer spoke before his cabinet and expressed his desire to change course: "In view of the confused times behind us, a general tabula rasa is called for." 10 This sentiment was institutionalized in the form of the concept of the Stunde Null (zero hour). Many of Adenauer’s own advisors and peers had been involved with the Nazi government. All aspects and levels of the government were affected, even the President of the FRG—and one time prisoner of the Nazis—Heinrich Lübke had been involved in the construction of arms factories for the Nazis and possibly the construction of concentration camp barracks, all using slave labor.11 One of the most notable former Nazis in power in the FRG was Hans Globke, a close advisor to Adenauer and the Director of the Federal Chancellery from 1953-1963. Globke’s role in the Third Reich was revealed to the public at the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Globke wrote the commentary to the 1935 Nuremberg Laws that stripped German Jews of their citizenship and banned marriage and intercourse between Jews and German citizens. 8 Herf, 205. 9 Herf, 205. 10 Frei, 6-7. 11 Kundnani, 12-13. 7 Globke’s commentary was the basis of how the laws were put into action. He had proven his grotesque anti-Semitism a few years prior when he encouraged legislation to make it more difficult for German Jews to change their surnames to avoid being recognized as Jews. In his commentary on the Nuremberg Laws, Globke included a requirement that Jews be required to change their first names: Israel for males and Sarah for females.12 Despite his role in the Nazi government, Globke evaded Allied denazification because of his status as a ‘fellow traveler,’ a status only made possible because his application for membership in the Nazi Party was rejected.13 Under Adenauer’s leadership, the Federal Republic of Germany expanded amnesty, ending all investigations of civil servants and army officers. 14 After the passage of new amnesty laws in 1954, the number of investigations dropped dramatically, the following year only twenty-one people were sentenced for their crimes during the Third Reich.15 Meanwhile, former Nazis held positions of power in both federal and local governments: “In Bavaria in 1951, 94 percent of judges and prosecutors, 77 percents of finance ministry employees and 60 percent of civil servants in the regional Agriculture Ministry were ex-Nazis.”16 In Bonn, one third of the officials of the Foreign Ministry were former members of the Nazi Party.17 After West Germany was allowed to rearm in 1955, it was revealed that 31 of the 38 generals in the newly created Bundeswehr had been members of the Wehrmacht.18 It was only when the postwar generation came of age in the 1960s, that the failure 12 Ibid, 12-13.
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