JUDENMORD Art and the Holocaust in Post-war Germany
Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius with Sigrid Philipps
reaktion books In Memory of my Grandmother Emma Hummel née Reis, Mainz, 27 September 1880 – Krefeld, 3 April 1962 and my great-aunt Barbara Fischer née Reis, Mainz, 9 January 1895 – Auschwitz, 20 October 1943
Published by reaktion books ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44–48 Wharf Road London n1 7ux, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published by Reaktion Books in 2018
English translation by Anthony Mathews Translation © Reaktion Books 2018
Bilder zum Judenmord © 2014 by Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius Originally published by Jonas Verlag, Marburg, 2014
The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting societyvg wort and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association). The author acknowledges additional support by the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Kunstsammlung.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978 1 78023 907 1 Contents
Foreword to the English Edition 7
Introduction 8
1 Prequel Images 22
2 The Human Figure, 1945–9 32
3 Early Series 66
4 Captured in One Picture 140
5 A Confession 168
6 Remembering in the 1950s 170
7 Remembering Again: The Early 1960s 207
8 The Past in the Present: Commenting on the Auschwitz Trial 238
References 319 Bibliography 355 Acknowledgements 381 List of Illustrations 383 Index 393 1 Prequel Images
he Nazi period was not the first time that Jews were subjected to deadly attacks; quite early on pogroms were captured in images and widely T known about. The question is whether this German history of anti- Judaism and anti-Semitism is also reflected in the drawings and paintings that were made after 1945.1 As early as 1493 the same woodcut of Jews being burned alive was shown as many as three times in the Nuremberg chronicle of the world by Hartmann Schedel (illus. 2). The illustration was inserted into the text whenever ‘evil deeds’ are mentioned that were attributed to the Jews and whenever there are reports of their alleged desecrations of the Sacred Host in various German towns.2 This extremely realistic portrayal of the burning alive of Jews has re- mained in the popular mind right up until modern times, and is recalled in the graphic representations of gassing by both Lea Grundig and Ludwig Meidner (see illus. 41 and 42). Whereas, however, the image in the late medieval illustrated book of world history was understood in relation to the torments in Hell as an inevitable punishment, in their 1940s graphics the two exiled Jewish artists expressed sorrow at the terrible suffering of their peo- ple. In this sense they were countering the anti-Semitic imagery of the Nazi propaganda that did not so much portray acts of violence as emphasize the alleged danger that the Jews presented. In the 1950s Lidy von Lüttwitz (see illus. 140) used the ancient woodcut as a model for the memorial at Auschwitz. In Germany the few other representations of pogroms before 1933 referred mainly to the cruel acts of persecution in Tsarist Russia in the 1880s and those carried out during the civil wars there.3 As images of grief and fore- warning, they have been represented principally by Jewish artists. In 1904 in Exile (illus. 3), Samuel Hirszenberg portrayed the mass exodus following the 23 Prequel Images
2 Hartmann Schedel, ‘Burning Alive of Jews’, from Schedelsche Weltchronik (Nuremberg, 1493), woodcut.
pogroms of 1903.4 In a large painting a long procession of male and female figures is moving through a hostile-looking landscape. Their clothing and headgear are varied and indicate a range of social classes, all walking close to- gether, sharing the same fate. The painting has disappeared; in the interim it was widely distributed as a postcard bearing the title Golus and referring to any exile since the destruction of the Second Temple.5 It became a prototype for the representation of Jewish refugees and has clearly influenced the works of art discussed in this book more than Hirszenberg’s Wandering Jew of 1899, portraying a massacre.6 For Jakob Steinhardt in 1913, it may have been both the contemporary ac- cusations of ritual murder current in Russia at the time and those in Zerkow in Poland in his youth that were the motivation behind his two woodcuts7 and the dry-point etching (illus. 4) depicting pogroms. The compositional arrangement of these works, Lea Weik concluded, harked back to the cop- per engraving by Johann Michael Voltz on the bloody acts of violence against Jews in Frankfurt am Main in 1819.8 In this drawing, and in one of the two woodcuts of 1913, gangs approaching from the left are attacking Jews on the right who are already overpowered, while in the right-hand foreground, among those that have been clubbed, there is an old bearded Jew holding up his hands to the heavens, representing the lamenting Jew and prophet, a grieving figure that Steinhardt was particularly preoccupied with at the time.9 With what seem wildly rapid strokes, the whole event is etched into a city street scene, as in the case of Voltz, but significantly Steinhardt added on the horizon a church tower topped by a cross. In a 1914 lithograph Max Liebermann recalled the pogrom in Bessarabia ten years previously. Only in the background did he suggest the attacks by 3 Samuel Hirszenberg, Exile, 1904, postcard.
4 Jakob Steinhardt, Pogrom, 1913, dry-point etching. 25 Prequel Images
5 Max Liebermann, the military on horseback, whereas he placed a monumental female figure in Kischinew: To my Beloved the centre of the picture following a pictorial arrangement that he often used Jews (The Czar), from (see illus. 218). Fleeing from her assailants out for plunder and carrying her Kriegszeit Künstlerflugblätter, child and all her belongings in her arms, she can be viewed as an allegory of iii/16 (September 1916), 10 lithograph. the persecuted Jews. The print with the titleKischinew (illus. 5) appeared in the magazine Kriegszeit in 1914 published by Paul Cassirer and justified 6 Willy Jaeckel, Massacre the German attack on Tsarist Russia. In the same series of Künstlerflugblätter of the Jews, from Kriegszeit (artists’ flyers) the non-Jewish Willy Jaeckel also published the drawing Massacre Künstlerflugblätter, xxxii/24 (March 1915), lithograph. of the Jews of 1915 (illus. 6). He emphasized the rape of Jewish women by men with fur caps, here presumably indicating Russians; at the time Russia was at war with the German Reich. The artist was harking back to a popular image in war propaganda, using the defilement of women in war as a means of blackening the enemy.11 Lea Grundig, after her first arrest and under the influence of the Nuremberg Race Laws in Germany around 1935 or perhaps during her stay in Switzerland, etched Pogrom (illus. 7) as part of the series The Jew is Guilty about the perse- cution at the time in Poland.12 The same gesture by a boy terrified to death is documented in the well-known photograph from the Stroop Report on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, with which the ss demonstrated their victory over the Jews in 1943 (see illus. 153). Grundig placed the viewer in the same pos ition as the firing squad and so presented him with the threat of murder of the extended family before his very eyes. 26 Judenmord
Even though many artists witnessed the start of assaults by the Nazis after 7 Lea Grundig, Pogrom, 1933, apart from Grundig there are not many other commentaries on them. drawing 5 from the series The The painter Ludwig Meidner, libelled and driven into exile by the Nazis, and Jew is Guilty, 1935, etching. who in Cologne had experienced the pogrom against Jews and their prop- erty on Reichskristallnacht in 1938, devoted an impressive drawing13 (illus. 8) as a memorial to these aggressive acts by the Nazis. Two religious Jews, pre- sumably rabbis, lamenting in the midst of destroyed and burning synagogues and the remains of their contents, are juxtaposed by Meidner with an angel- like vision in a bright robe and with curly hair. This figure is pointing its right forefinger at Hebrew letters14 resembling the Writing on the Wall at Belshazzar’s Feast, but indicating on a white scroll – not on the wall as in Daniel 5:5 – the date equivalent to 10 November 1938 in the Jewish calen- dar. By inscribing this on a scroll, Meidner was writing the date into the long history of persecution of the Jewish people. He was linking Jewish history to contemporary politics in Germany by making reference back to the text of 8 Ludwig Meidner, In the prophet Daniel and the subsequent tradition of Christian iconography. Memory of our Destroyed Its message is that the figure pointing to the scripture is intended to be the Synagogues in Germany, prophet Daniel, who is interpreting the writing as a prophecy of the coming 1939, chalk and charcoal end of Belshazzar’s rule. Opposite him, in the way the scene is normally on paper.
28 Judenmord represented, is the terrified king, the only one to see the message. But in this position Meidner placed the despairing rabbis bewailing the burning of the synagogues, heedless of the written signs. The viewer is left to interpret the reference to Daniel’s prophecy of the coming fall of the brutal tyranny as words of consolation for the Jews. The signs and the burning synagogues can, however, be read as a forewarning from 1939 of destruction still to come in the course of what was at the time the unpredictable end of the German policy of conquest. In Germany Otto Pankok was the only non-Jewish artist to give the title Pogrom (see illus. 16 and 23) to works, though this was a picture portraying only the recently committed atrocities.15 In the charcoal drawing of 1940, he indicated the place of the assaults and, by the way the picture was con- structed, he put the viewer in the position of bystanders. Even though it bears the title Massacre ii, Sitte’s memorial image for Lidice (see illus. 134) must also be mentioned here. Despite the incomparable extent of the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis, historical representations of pogroms were also referred to after the end of the Nazi tyranny. But it is not the history of German anti-Semitism and the recently experienced terror that is reflected in a poster appealing for the col- lecting of memories of Nazi tyranny. Instead it places these within the history of the people of Israel, thus taking up a position that was highly controversial among the surviving Jews.16 P. Shuldenreyn, presumed to be a Jew living in a camp for displaced persons (dps) in occupied Germany, designed a poster in 1947 that won the second prize17 in the competition ‘Collect and Record!’ (illus. 9), organized by the Central Historical Commission of Liberated Jews in the American Zone of Occupation in Germany for all the dps in the Western zones.18 In this, Shuldenreyn referred to the history of his people and emphasized what was for them the ‘religious imperative’19: ‘Remember what Amalek did to you!’ The lines from Deuteronomy 25:17 that can also be taken as a call for self-defence are shown as a two-row heading in large red Hebrew letters at the top of the poster. The course of the Jewish diaspora is represent- ed by four scenes on the face of a clock. In each case, together with a written document, they indicate the appeal for Zameln, the collecting of images and accounts, the written word. In front of the pyramids at the top left-hand side, a group of building workers in line with the book of Haggadah recount the slavery in exile and the exodus out of Egypt. Opposite on the side there appears the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem and the people be- wailing the event; here Shuldenreyn has the Menora tumbling onto the scroll of the Lamentations of Jeremiah. At the bottom left, there is a reminder of the pogrom of Jews in 1648 during the Khmelnytsky Uprising, recorded in the book Yawen Mezulah by Nathan Nata Hannover. At the same level as this on the right, there is an equally large book with the title The Vale of Lamentation, with the words above commenting on the representation of the procession of wandering Jews through the Valley of Tears.20 This does not, however, refer 29 Prequel Images
9 P. Shuldenreyn, Remember What Amalek Did to You, for the competition ‘Collect and Record!’, Munich, 1947, poster.
to the biblical exodus through the desert but to the results of the ‘Alhambra Edict’, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. The bearded man lead- ing with the tallith and Torah scroll on his arm reminds the viewer of one of the attempts to save the Holy Scriptures that Samuel Hirszenberg also refers to in the famous painting Exile of 1904 (see illus. 3). The book on the pogroms in the Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova, from where many of those addressed by the poster had fled, and the writing on the journey of the Jews across the desert are to be found on a large stack of papers standing in an upright position. On the first one, written in printed Hebrew letters, are the Yiddish words ‘Zamelt un farzjjchnet!’ (Collect and Record!) 30 Judenmord
The red letters are written, as in blood, above the stark figure of 6,000,000. They and the quill-pen at bottom right appeal to the viewer of the poster to record, within the continuity of the scriptures, their suffering, their Valley of Lamentation and their ‘journey through the desert’ and thus to preserve for ‘eternity’ their recent history, just as stated in the appeal by the Central Historical Commission in Munich.21 The skeleton on the left copied from Vesalius,22 whose stance also reminds us of ‘the living dead’, one of the then widespread terms applied to concentration camp inmates, as an embodiment of the Six Million signifies both them and also the appeal for documenta- tion. The small hand of the clock points towards the appeal, and the big hand points towards the sunrise, with the imprinted letters for ‘Zion’. In front of the red semi-circle, a farmer can be made out, working the land with his horses and plough. This reference to the widely circulated memorial draw- ing From the Ghetto to Zion by Ephraim Moses Lilien23 from the 1901 Zionist Congress in Basel with the prophecy ‘and will gather them on every side, and bring them into their own land’ (Ezekiel 37:21) was for the dps in the oc- cupied Germany of 1947 the promise of a shining future in Palestine. This promise is emphasized by the fifth hour, the moment of sunrise. By using a further reference, Shuldenreyn continued the association with the history of the pogroms and the tradition of representing them, since the darkened sun appears in a drawing by Ephraim Moses Lilien as a memorial for the martyrs of Kishinev,24 like a halo above the Jew who is bound onto a stake with a tal- lith. The disc of the sun, already semi-visible in Shuldenreyn’s poster on the other hand, could be taken as a confident answer to Lilien’s drawing. After all, the memory of the catastrophe of the history of the Jews from their en- slavement in Egypt up to the recent past was linked to the prophecy that the sun would rise for the Jews in Zion. There is no representation of a ‘timeless cycles of atrocities’25 but a religiously motivated remembrance of Jewish his- tory from the beginnings in slavery up to the imminent prospect of being able and free to migrate to the Promised Land. ‘Khurbn’,26 the catastrophe that all displaced persons had been through, and the murder of six million Jews were not shown, only the appeal to write everything down. These representations of pogroms could also have served after 1945 as models for artists of Christian origin in order to contextualize the new and horrendous events they saw themselves confronted with and enable them to gain some distance from them. However, the earlier murders were not tak- en as subject-matter. Most of the artists referred to the contemporary media, photographs and films of the liberated camps. Apart from some scenes of vi- olence that had already served as a basis for photography in the construction of the imagery, older representations were not referred to. The photographs from the liberated camps that promised an overwhelming degree of authen- ticity and uniqueness led to people forgetting images of the earlier pogroms. This was not the case for Jewish survivors. After the Second World War and the murder of millions, they were left in no doubt that they were seen as Jews. 31 Prequel Images
Having barely come out of it alive, deprived of their rights and homeless, they found that the memory of the history of the people of Israel held out to them the prospect of a common identity. This tendency to think in terms of the tradition of expulsion has also been identified by Mirjam Rajner in the im- ages of flight and deportation ranging from Hirszenberg’s Exile (see illus. 3) to the relief on the rear face of the 1948 monument to the Warsaw Ghetto by Nathan Rapoport.27 The procession of fleeing people on Leo Haas’s Death March (see illus. 85) and Lea Grundig’s The Way into the Gas (see illus. 58) contain echoes of this. Arie Goral transferred Chagall’s paintings of the pog rom at Vitebsk to Hamburg (see illus. 148 and 149). Particularly artists of Jewish origin reminded people of the long history of hostility to the Jews. Otto Pankok was the only non-Jewish artist who, in the 1957 sculpture Jew Walking (see illus. 133), made a connection with earlier pogroms and persecutions.