Montages of Exile. Photographic Techniques and Spatial Dimensions in the Artwork of Grete Stern

Jewish Culture and History

ISSN: 1462-169X (Print) 2167-9428 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjch20

Montages of exile. Photographic techniques and spatial dimensions in the artwork of Grete Stern

Christina Wieder

To cite this article: Christina Wieder (2020) Montages of exile. Photographic techniques and spatial dimensions in the artwork of Grete Stern, Jewish Culture and History, 21:1, 42-65, DOI: 10.1080/1462169X.2020.1701846 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1462169X.2020.1701846

Published online: 09 Dec 2019.

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjch20 JEWISH CULTURE AND HISTORY 2020, VOL. 21, NO. 1, 42–65 https://doi.org/10.1080/1462169X.2020.1701846

Montages of exile. Photographic techniques and spatial dimensions in the artwork of Grete Stern Christina Wieder

Institute of Contemporary History, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY This article examines the significance of contact zones and hetero- Received 14 February 2018 topias in the artwork of the German-born photographer Grete Stern, Accepted 13 November 2019 fl who was forced to ee Germany during National Socialism and went KEYWORDS into exile to Argentina. After leaving Germany Grete Stern not only Photography; exile; contact played an essential role in the modernization of photography in zones; heterotopia; Argentina but also became a central figure in the migrant community intervisuality in Buenos Aires. I will argue that Stern’s portraits and photomontages themselves can be understood as contact zones that practiced a form of visual multilingualism and operated as cultural translations but also hold a heterotopic potential inside them.

It was in 1951, when Grete Stern took her famous portrait of Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most prestigious Argentinian writers to date. Just the same year she ﬁnished her almost four-year long photographic work for the popular women’s magazine Idilio and it was one year later, in 1952, when Borges published his essay collection Otras Inqusiciones. This essay collection contains a short text called ‘The Analytic Language of John Wilkins’,in which the author cites a paragraph from a Chinese encyclopedia and, in so doing, presents a rather perplexing taxonomy of animals.1 It was this short paragraph, which, while reading it, made Michel Foucault laugh and became later probably the most famous example of a Foucauldian heterotopia, as it appears in the introduction of his remarkable The Order of the Things. It is also there where Foucault writes:

Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax whichcauseswordsandthings(nexttoandalso opposite one another) to ‘hold together’.Thisiswhyutopiaspermitfablesanddiscourses:they run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental dimension of the fabula; heterotopias (such as those to be found so often in Borges) desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences.2 Following Foucault’s concept of heterotopias as real but disturbing counter spaces that hold the potential to reﬂect, transform or even deconstruct social norms inside them3, I will argue in this article that such spaces can often be found in the artistic work of the German-

CONTACT Christina Wieder [email protected] Institute of Contemporary History, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. JEWISH CULTURE AND HISTORY 43 born photographer Grete Stern. When Stern arrived in Buenos Aires in 1935 she became close friends with Jorge Luis Borges, who not only joined the same artistic circles as Stern, but probably shared as well her understanding of how certain artistic techniques, e.g. the juxtaposing of things that apparently do not belong together, are able to create spaces of resistance. But where exactly can the rebellious and heterotopic potential in Stern’s pictures be found, what audiences did she address, which political developments did she criticize and what strategies of visualization did she use to reflect or deconstruct social norms? Before answering these questions and examining the heterotopic power of Stern’s photography by focusing on her photomontage series Sueños (Dreams), which she produced for Idilio between 1948 and 1951, I will provide in the following an insight to her former work and education in Germany, her surroundings in Argentina and especially her workspace – her house in Ramos Mejía. As I will argue, both her house and the actual art production taking place there became important contact zones4 where cultural encounters between the different migrant communities and the local art scene in Buenos Aires could take place. This means that these were spaces where power relations were negotiated, but at the same time visual relations between an Argentinian, Jewish, and exilic visual culture were established.5 These cultural encounters will serve then as a starting point to discuss Foucault’s concept of heterotopia and its importance for Grete Stern’s artwork in exile. As Foucault writes in his central text on heterotopias, ‘Of other spaces’, ‘[w]e are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposing, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.’6 Therefore, in my following analysis, I will too pursue an approach that highlights networks and intersections in exile, visual relations between different migrant communities and cultural experiences. This approach also follows the claim of the art historian Burcu Dogramaci, who has already called for a rethink of the current research of exile studies and who proposed focusing on network theories to reveal new aspects of exile experiences.7 Also Ofer Ashkenazi, by discussing photographic strategies of exiles in Palestine, pointed out that traditional interpretations of exile that focus more on a nostalgia about the past ‘situate the exile and her works outside the cultural discourse of both “home” and “aboard”’ and thus ignore many intersections and the possibility of a vis-á-vis of the past and the present.8 Following Ashkenazi and in order to underline Dogramaci’srequest,Iwillaim todemonstrateinthistextthatculturalencountersasmuchasvisualnetworksareessentialto understand Stern’s oeuvre and her use of heterotopic techniques as visual techniques of emancipation. To elaborate this argument and to answer my research questions, I want to suggest intervisuality9 as a method that considers network theories not only in the sense of personal relations, organizations, or institutions, but also in the form of a visual network: a network of pictures shaped by an exile experience, that establishes relations between different visual culture traditions and creates processes of communication inside the whole visual corpus. The theoretical approach of intervisuality originated from the field of Visual Studies and offers innovative ways to operate with visual sources. Due to intervisuality’s understanding of the visual as a whole, constantly connected, and interacting complex, it allows the visual corpus to be structured and systematized without being tied to limiting categorizations, such as moving or static images, film or photography, etc. Rather, it suggests an understanding of images that crosses genre borders and goes back to visual culture 44 C. WIEDER theories such as those of W.J.T. Mitchell or Gottfried Boehm, who, in the early 1990s, pro- claimed the iconic and the pictorial turn.10

From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires11 Grete Stern (born in 1904 in Elberfeld, Germany) grew up in a Jewish middle-class family and studied at the University of Applied Arts in Stuttgart before moving to Berlin in 1927. Arriving in Berlin, Stern aspired to learn more about photography and therefore started to take private lessons with Walter Peterhans, one of the most important Weimar photographers of that time. In 1929, when Stern had been studying with him for two years, Peterhans was appointed Professor of Photography at the Bauhaus University in Dessau. As Stern was already advanced in her photographic education and well-connected in Berlin’s art scene, she decided that it was now time to step out from her student status and start her own project. Together with her close friend Ellen Rosenberg (later Auerbach12) a young photographer and another of Peterhans’ students, she founded a photo studio in Berlin called ringl+pit. The studio`s name was inspired by their nick- names as children because, as the two later commented ironically, ‘Auerbach and Stern’ would have sounded more like the name of a ‘Jewish rose manufactory’.13 This quote perfectly captures ringl+pit’s need to distance themselves from their rather conservative family backgrounds and their desire to be acknowledged as ambitious and unconventional new artists. By adapting new artistic strategies and techniques, Stern and Auerbach also intended to question the existing gender norms and the ideas of femininity of their time. It seems that these two women found in photography a medium to express their interests, to liberate themselves from social and family expectations and to develop their own ideas and ways to deal with these traditions. Through experimenting with the techniques of collage and photomontage they created an emancipative strategy that gave them the liberty to visually define themselves as new, Jewish women.14 The figure of the ‘new woman’ became of particular interest in the artwork of ringl+pit. This ‘new woman’ was, from the start, closely linked to popular culture and widely circulated in the advertisements, magazines, movies, and photography of the 1920s and early 1930s.15 To a certain point, Stern and Auerbach were representatives of this ‘new woman’ due to the fact that, for them, photography was the economic basis on which to live an independent life – an idea of emancipation that the ‘new woman’ was promoting. At the same time, photography was a medium through which ringl+pit were able to shape the image of this figure according to their own taste. Stern and Auerbach began to specialize in advertisement pictures and so aimed their art directly at the field of popular culture. Nevertheless, ringl+pit’s pictures, such as Petról Hahn or Komol, very clearly expressed a critical and ironical commentary on popular culture, e.g. its inherited double moral standards, especially the ideas of beauty, which were still carried forward by the figure of the ‘new woman’. During that time, Grete Stern, in parallel with her work with Auerbach, continued to study photography with Peterhans at the Bauhaus University. This was also where she met her future husband, Horacio Coppola, an already well-known Argentinian photographer, who went to Germany in the early 1930s to study at the Bauhaus. Coppola soon became close friends with Ellen and her future husband, stage designer Walter Auerbach. This group of young artists was not only inspired by Berlin’s left-wing political circles of the early 1930s but also shared the artistic interest in questioning the social, more precisely JEWISH CULTURE AND HISTORY 45 the gender, norms of their time. They actively participated in each other’s artwork. Ellen and Walter Auerbach, e.g., were the protagonists in Horacio Coppola’s 16mm experimental film Der Traum (1933), a visual study inspired by circulating dream interpretation and psychoanalytic theories of that time. Coppola himself, on the other hand, performed together with Stern in Auerbach’s short movie, Gretchen hat Ausgang (1933), a comedy picture on a maid’s brief excursion into the world of the ‘new woman’, that very accurately points out the intersection of class and gender and that the idea of emancipation promoted by this figure is not equally accessible to all women. The year 1933 drastically changed the living and working situations of these young artists. Due to National Socialism’s rise to power, they were forced to leave Germany and, while Ellen and Walter Auerbach managed to flee to Tel Aviv and later settled in New York, Stern and Coppola first went into exile to London and then, in 1935, to Argentina, her husband’scountry of birth. In her two years in London, Stern mainly took portraits of the exile community, amongst them the Marxist philosopher Karl Korsch and psychoanalyst Paula Heimann, as well as Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel, who she met during the journey to London. Even if there are some noticeable changes in Stern’s artwork after she had to flee Germany – the playfulness and cheerfulness, at least temporarily, seem removed from her pictures – these early Berlin years remain an important source of inspiration for her later work in Argentina. Not only did Stern continue examining gender related topics or search for collective ways to participate art, but also, even years later, did she acknowledge the impact of Walter Peterhans’ teaching methods on her photographic work. In an interview in the late 1980s Stern remembered, ‘We didn’t have any books, but he made us see the things. Er lehrte uns das Sehen [He taught us to see].’16 This quotation very clearly points out her own intervisual approach to art – her understanding of the visual as a complex that was not restricted to certain forms, genres or movements but defined by an openness towards the various forms of visual expression that surrounded her everyday life and can be understood as the basis for the cultural encounters taking place in her own artwork.

Peronism, exiles and visual culture in Argentina Argentina’s position as an immigration country goes back to developments in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the Argentinian government introduced a special program to attract foreign workers. Argentinian authorities promoted the country as an economically promising environment and, in so doing, made it attractive to Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese jobseekers.17 At the same time, the first Jewish refugees, mainly those fleeing the pogroms taking place in Russia during the regency of Zar Nicholas I, came to the country and began to settle, in the provinces of Entre Rios, Santa Fe and the suburbs of Buenos Aires.18 These early immigrants and refugees, who lived in Buenos Aires next door to each other, were responsible for the following ensuing developments and the lively exchange of different cultural traditions. Those cultural enrichments, which should be considered an accomplishment of interacting migrant communities, meant early twentieth-century Buenos Aires became increasingly attractive for artists and intellectuals from all over the world. As a result of the growing internationalization of the city and its image as a liberal-minded and cosmopolitan capital, Buenos Aires also became an auspicious destination for Jewish and political exiles in the 1930s and 1940s, who could 46 C. WIEDER participate in already existing migrant networks as well as newly founded, mainly anti- fascist, refugee organizations.19 In 1935, when Stern arrived in Buenos Aires, she quickly bonded not only with these anti- fascist circles but also with the local art community and quite easily found work as a photographer. Nevertheless, the 1930s and 1940s in Argentina were a politically uncertain and challenging period. During her first years in Buenos Aires, Grete Stern lived through the so-called ‘infamous decade’, an era of authoritarianism that began in 1930 with the civic- military coup d’état that overthrew President Hipólito Yrigoyen and lasted until 1943, when it was ended by another military coup. It was followed by a provisory military regime, where Juan Domingo Perón, as Secretary of Labor and Social Security and later as vice-president, already occupied a powerful political position. Although at the beginning of World War II the country was ruled by a pro-Fascist, authoritarian government, and from 1943 by a provisional, still pro-Fascist, military regime, Argentina remained neutral to the very end of the war. Just months before the end of World War II, Argentina entered the war on the side of the Allies – mainly because of the increasing pressure exerted on it by the United States. In 1946, Perón was officially elected president and the emergence of Peronism (1946–1955/1973–1976) initiated a new political era in Argentina.20 Uki Goñi has convincingly demonstrated in his study, The Real Odessa: How Peron Brought The Nazi War Criminals to Argentina, how Juan Domingo Perón not only held collaborative and private relations with National Socialists residing in Argentina during the war, but also, how during the Peronist government war criminals could easily enter Argentina.21 At the same time, due to its century long tradition of immigration, Argentina was the South American country where most Jewish refugees arrived during National Socialism.22 Such contradictory immigration politics where, amongst others, one of the main reasons, why in many anti-fascist circles as well as in the Jewish community Perón’s presidency was perceived as a massive threat.23 Another fundamental reason for criticism articulated by anti-fascist and Jewish organizations in Argentina was, that by the time Perón was elected president, noticeable changes occurred in the field of visual culture. Photography and film, which until then had not had much influence in the field of politics and often were not even understood to be proper art forms, became powerful instruments of political propaganda during Peronism. A new department within the Ministry of the Interior, the Subsecretatía de Informaciones y Prensa, was created to visually document the government’s work and to develop a specific Peronist visual line to legitimatize its political goals in public media. Photography, magazines, and movie screenings no longer had the one and only purpose of entertaining, but gained tremen- dous political weight as propagandistic instruments.24 Peronism’s visual grammar was eclectically composed of several motifs, aesthetics, and strategies of visualization from different visual traditions. The spectrum included Fascist and Soviet, local Socialist, anar- chist, religious and US-American image traditions, all of which merged and adopted in the Peronist image propaganda. Besides the institution of an extensive cult of personality around Juan Domingo and Eva Perón, which was largely inspired by the Italian and German Fascist propaganda, the image of the worker, influenced by a Soviet picture line, took center stage in Peronist indoctrination.25 The monopoly position of the government as producer of pictures as well as the increasing restrictions and censorship of visual culture were the reasons why, especially in alternative art and avant-garde circles, Perón was received as a ‘local Mussolini’.26 JEWISH CULTURE AND HISTORY 47

Grete Stern, due to her visual education in seeing analytically and, of course, because she had already witnessed in Germany how images could be abused for political pur- poses, was soon able to decipher these Peronist propaganda strategies. She therefore chose to let her artwork respond to these developments in the Argentinian visual culture.

Visual contact zones and cultural encounters In the following passage, I examine how far Stern’s artwork pursued the objective of establish- ing intervisual relations with both the Argentinian local residents and exile communities in Buenos Aires, and thus co-designed a rebelling, anti-fascist and anti-Peronist network of pictures. I argue that both the artist’shouseinRamosMejía,aswellastheactualart production taking place there, should be understood as contact zones. Contact zones that not only functioned as spaces where different social groups could interact with each other and where power relations were negotiated during Peronism, but also as spaces that enabled ‘meaningful contact’27 and therefore formed a fruitful ground for cultural translation.28 In her text ‘The Art of the Contact Zone’ Mary Louise Pratt describes contact zones as ‘social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they lived out in many parts of the world today.’29 The concept has been widely explored in post-colonial studies, in the fields of geography and anthropology as well as in artistic research. James Clifford, has adapted the term of the contact zone for the museum as a social space of interaction30 and Burcu Dogramaci has used it to describe exiled artists’ studios as spaces for cultural encounters.31 Both approaches are particularly useful for my analysis, as Grete Stern’s house functioned as both a studio and an exhibition room at the same time. Even though ‘the factory’32, as the house was called in the Buenos Aires art scene, cannot in a narrower sense be understood as a project of participatory art, as it is described by Divya Tolia-Kelly, the art production and exhibition in Stern’s house still created ‘a space for embodied, multilingual, marginalized experiences to be expressed in visual form’33 It was a ‘meeting place to artists, a cultural circle, a space in which to display works of all kinds’34 for local artists as well as for exiled ones. The expression ‘going to Ramos’35 became an expression of participating in the enriching exchange about modern art; in the words of Maria Moreno, Grete Stern’s house by then had become the ‘Bloomsbury porteño [Bloomsbury of Buenos Aires]’.36 An important step in this process was, that in 1945, Grete Stern joined the art collective Madí37, which was based in Buenos Aires and founded by the Jewish-Czechoslovakian painter Gyula Kosice, the Uruguayan plastic artist Carmelo Arden Quin, and the ‘porteño’ sculptor Rhod Rothfuss. Besides such representatives of the Jewish community that came to Buenos Aires before the 1930s, Stern and many other exiles were affiliated with Madí, including dancer Renate Schottelius, sculptor Martin Blaszko, composer Estéban Eitler, and psychoanalyst Marie Langer. This Madí group of Jewish and/or political immigrants and refugees created, by means of their Marxist-inspired art production, an anti-Fascist and anti-Peronist counterpart to the increasingly state-driven propaganda. By 1945, Madí had already organized its first exhibition and just one year later, the second one took place in the Ramos Mejía ‘factory’. Stern was not only the hostess of the event, but had also designed the programs, which, as a gesture of internationality and solidarity with the various immigrant communities, were translated into both English and French.38 48 C. WIEDER

More than that, Grete Stern’s house can also be understood as a testimony to Bauhaus history in Ramos Mejía. It was designed by Stern together with Wladimiro Acosta, a Russian- Jewish architect who had fled from Odessa in 1919 and in 1922 began to study at the Bauhaus University in Berlin.39 Stern and Acosta, in a way, are both representatives of the exiled Bauhaus community that was forced to leave Germany after 1933, when the University was shut down due to National Socialist repression.40 The act of building this house in Ramos Mejía can therefore be understood as an act of solidarity with the Jewish, exiled Bauhaus community, which by that time was already spread all over the world – in Tel Aviv, Chicago, New York and many other cities. Still, it was meeting places like Stern’s ‘factory’ that at this time were essential for the endurance of the artistic Bauhaus ideas. Madí founder Kosice, a frequent visitor to Ramos Mejía, showed great interest in the Bauhaus tradition, especially due to its anti-Fascist and Socialist ideological background, and so had Stern’s study books translated into Spanish.41 Anyhow, as mentioned before, Stern’s education was not primarily based on conventional book-oriented teaching methods, but rather on an investigation through visual perception and creation. This was also the reason why Stern’s own visual translation of Bauhaus ideas through her own art production was probably far more influential than the translation of the books could have ever been. Stern’s pictures, such as the Madí ‘logo’ (Figure 1) or the program for the collective’s second exhibition (Figure 2), operated through their Bauhaus style as (visual) cultural translations and at the same time as intervisual contact zones for the local art scene, the Jewish community in Argentina, the Jewish Bauhaus exiles in Tel Aviv, Chicago, and New York, and other political refugees or locals, who could relate to these images from political, exilic, or Jewish perspectives. In the Madí ‘logo’ photomontage Stern juxtaposes for example various photographic motives that in this way form a multilingual visual composition. In the background we see one of Buenos Aires’ most famous buildings, the Obelisk, which was designed by Alberto Prebisch and gives the picture its local specificity. Prebisch was one of Argentina’s main representatives of modern architecture. The Obelisk not only represents the architect’s understanding of modernity, but also reflects international trends in avant-garde movements. Stern’s photomontage picks up this idea of modernity and elaborates it, first, by introducing a Bauhaus inspired simplicity and a sophisticated play with geometrical forms to the picture, and second, through the close-up of the letter ‘M’, which becomes the initial letter of the collective’s name Madí. Stern took this ‘M’ from an advertisement for the Swiss watch brand ‘Movado’ and, in so doing, creates a reference to modernism’s understanding of time and its belief in progress. More than that, the surrounding vivid city life with cars and street lights enhance this allusion to modernity and modern art, which had fundamentally influenced the work of many Jewish and political refugees who later exiled to Argentina. Even more directly Stern addressed this group in her design for the second Madí exhibition. Not only does she stage Madí founder Gyula Kosice in the center of the photomontage, but also on the edge of the picture Renate Schottelius, two important representatives of the Jewish migrant and refugee community and pioneers of modern dance and art in Buenos Aires. Having in mind Michael Berkowitz’ work on Jewish iconography and self-representation, it seems as if Stern, by staging these personalities in such a prominent way, inscribed her pictures into the tradition of visualizing (symbolical) Jewish leadership.42 More than that, the artist created in these photomontages common spaces to unite different groups, e.g. the old and the new generation of Jews in Argentina, JEWISH CULTURE AND HISTORY 49

Figure 1. Grete Stern, Madí (1946/47). migrants and refugees, Jews and non-Jews. In this sense, Stern’s pictures not only became visual and conceptual marks in the history of the Madí collective, but also negotiated diﬀerent visual culture traditions, practiced a form of visual multilingualism and built a network of pictures that swept even across national borders. As Stern already had in her years of exile in London, she continued her photographic portrait work in Buenos Aires. While her London portrait series appears to be more an exclusive documentation of the German-speaking exile circle, in her Buenos Aires sequel she pursued a more open path, which might represent her sphere of activity and inﬂuence 50 C. WIEDER

Figure 2. Grete Stern, program of the Madí exhibition (1945). more accurately. As already mentioned at the beginning of this text, Jorge Luis Borges was one of Stern’s friends and one of the many faces she photographed in Buenos Aires. Painters, writers and intellectuals like Victoria Ocampo, Pablo Neruda, Maria Elena Walsh, Antonio Berni, Lino Enea Spilimbergo, Gertrudis Chale, Marie Langer, Amparo Alvajar, Clement Moreau, Gyula Kosice, Diyi Laañ and many more were portrayed by Stern and, in this way, represent an astounding gathering of diverse people with different cultural backgrounds who joined those frequent meetings in Ramos Mejía. That these gatherings where partly defined by asymmetrical power relations cannot be negated, given the fact that Jewish and non-Jewish, exiled and local, male and female individuals joined this circle and appear in Stern’s portraits. Nevertheless, Stern, in this portrait series, seems to have created a visual space where those power relations could be negotiated in a productive way. The writer Maria Elena Walsh, another close friend and neighbor of Stern’s, once described these portraits, due to their Bauhaus inspired simplicity and emotional direct- ness, as ‘facial nudes’43. But if we interpret this so-called ‘facial nudity’, in more than an exposing or humiliating way, as a strategy of reduction, a fall to basic human nature, it seems as if Stern created in these pictures a level of equality between these different JEWISH CULTURE AND HISTORY 51 personalities, without removing each individuals unique history, and therefore enabled a mutual ground for respectful cultural encounter. In this way, these portraits represent more than a mere documentation of the cultural encounters taking place in the ‘factory’ contact zone. Instead, I would like to emphasize the argument of Kye Askins and Rachel Pain, that ‘where an activity (in this case art) is the contact zone, objects as conduits may facilitate transformative social relations to seep across spaces of encounter.’44 In order to underline Askins’ and Pain’s argument, I would like to suggest that these pictures not only represent or illustrate contact zones, but become themselves contact zones through the use of certain techniques and motives that manage to cross spatial borders, e.g. the frequent use of mirrors as recurring objects or the play with angles and perspectives. More than that, they even create favorable conditions to reflect or deconstruct social norms and, as I argue, could thus transform into visual spaces of heterotopic potential. As Nadja Elia-Borer has pointed out for the works of Louise Lawler, Martha Rosler, Monica Studer and Christoph van den Berg, photography can function as heterotopia in many different ways, primarily, because it doesn’t focus exclusively on the motives that we can see, or on ‘internal spaces’, but inexorably refers to the ‘external’45.Theyopen up an imaginary arsenal that, in the words of Elia-Borer, permanently irritates our trained modes of perception.46 I will examine this in the following by analyzing Stern’sportraitof the Argentinian painter Antonio Berni (Figure 3), which she took in 1947, and explain how these visual contact zones could become heterotopic spaces through the use of certain photographic techniques or the circulation of motives.

Figure 3. Grete Stern, Antonio Berni (1947). 52 C. WIEDER

The portrait shows the painter Antonio Berni, who was born in Rosario in 1905 as the son of Italian immigrants, located in his studio – as Dogramaci suggested, a space that might be a potential contact zone itself.47 He is in the center of the picture sitting on a chair with his body oriented towards the camera. Behind the artist we can see a working table with papers and brushes, different paintings hanging on the walls and a sculpture standing in the background. It gives the impression that he was caught in the middle of his working process. Berni’s body language is open, he looks directly into the camera and therefore not only seems to be aware of the other person (the photographer, Grete Stern) in the room, but also includes the spectators into the picture space: contact is taking place. Interestingly, this inclusion of the spectators and the photographer into the picture frame is not the only extension of space occurring in this portrait. On the edge of the picture, there is a mirror, which reflects Berni’sprofile and gives an insight on the other side of the room, a part that would not have been accessible neither from the point of view where the picture was taken, nor from Berni`s perspective looking into the camera. It is this mirror that opens up the space and, in so doing, not only ‘seep(s) across spaces of encounter’48 but also refers to ‘external spaces’.49 The mirror does so, primarily, by opening up the, until now, non- accessible space inside the picture’s frame, but secondly through its multiple points of reference as a motive in the history of photography. Besides the mirror’s particular significance as a motive in the history of Bauhaus photography or its tradition in the 1920s and 1930s feminist art as an object for self-definition and empowerment,50 it too appears to be a motive related to expressions of exilic experiences51 or even the object that captures ‘the joint experience’52 of utopia and heterotopia. Including all of these potential interpretations of the mirror in this portrait, Grete Stern, by introducing this motive that appears almost just a trivial accessory, again deals with different traditions of visual culture and the picture becomes an intervisual contact zone of heterotopic potential. I believe that this heterotopic potential of Grete Stern’s photography will become even clearer when we look in the following at further strategies of visualization adapted in her photomontages for Idilio.

Heterotopic dream spaces or an exiled artist’s rebellion In 1948, Grete Stern began to work for the women’s magazine Idilio and articulated trough her Dream series a politically powerful statement that, as I will argue, created visual counter space in opposition to the ones occupied by the Peronist image propaganda. I believe that the power of Stern’s photomontages partly is built on her previous experience of cultural encounters, where she gained knowledge about the Argentinian visual culture, but at the same time could preserve her own artistic approaches. I aim to demonstrate that, in this Dream series, Stern strongly argues from the standpoint of her own experiences as a Jewish woman who was forced into exile, but at the same time speaks to a group that was, other than herself, the target group of the Peronist mobilization attempt. Stern’s political appeal in this picture series is a show of solidarity, it claims for female emancipation and political participation. It is a demand for social change, which, as I will argue, the artist approaches through heterotopic techniques in her photography. Idilio went on the market in 1948 – in the middle of the Peronist heyday – and was apopularwomen’s magazine. In addition to sections on the latest fashion trends, fotonovelas, love counselors, beauty and ﬁtness tips it also entertained the psychoanalytic column ‘El psicoanálisis te ayudará’ (Psychoanalysis will help you). In this column, the sociologist Gino JEWISH CULTURE AND HISTORY 53

Germani and the psychologist Enrique Butelman analyzed, under the pseudonym Dr. Richard Rest, the dreams of Idilio’s female readers who had sent them as letters to the editors. Germani and Butelman were at this time already acknowledged academics and well known for their anti-fascist engagement. Germani was born in Italy and exiled to Argentina in 1934, where he would later become the first director of the Research Center for Comparative Social Structures of the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella and where he met César Civita, another Italian exile, publisher and founder of Idilio. The magazine was published by the Editorial Abril,anewbutinter- nationally recognized publishing house, which in addition to Stern, Germani and Civita employed other exiles, such as the Jewish-Hungarian photographer and cinematographer George Friedman. Cultural historianPaulaBertúaevendescribestheEditorial Abril as a ‘cultural embassy’,53 a platform that supported Jewish and anti-fascist refugees in Argentina, who were facing political and economic difficulties at the time of Peronist’s emergence. As the author argues, it might have been either the impossibility or a conscious decision to not participate in the cultural circles co-opted by the Peronist regime that led Stern, same as Germani and Butelman, to look for alternative work spaces and engage in Idilio.54 Print media in Argentina was already since the beginning of mass migration a central channel of communication for the Jewish community and became later for all kinds of exile organizations the main platform to discuss and distribute their agenda. Yet, these newspapers and magazines generally did not reach other audiences than the ones from their own community. By collaborating in Idilio, and especially through the use of photography,55 Stern, however, found a way ‘to shape mainstream culture’56 as a Jewish woman in exile and reached a broad audience that neither the traditional Jewish press nor exile publications ever accomplished. ‘El psicoanalisis te ayudara’, which in general targeted to a non-academic audience, pursued the common didactic goal of making basic psychoanalytic knowledge and dream interpretation accessible to Idilio’s readers, who were addressed by the column as follows: ‘We want to help you to get to know yourself, to strengthen your soul, to solve your problems, to answer your doubts, to overcome your complexes, and to surpass yourself.’57 The column was divided into different sections. First, there was the ‘case of the week’, which was discussed in more detail. In this analysis the authors (aka Dr. Richard Rest) briefly reviewed the reader’s dream and explained the symbolic implications. Next to this, several letters were answered with brief comments and a small section provided information on psychoanalytic concepts or definitions (e.g. the unconscious, repression, etc.). Grete Stern was in charge of the visualization of the column and her photomontages could thus be seen on page two of the weekly magazine for many years. This picture series, later known under the name Sueños, became central not only in Grete Stern’s oeuvre, but also in the history of Argentinian photography. Today, in particular, it is understood to be the first explicitly feminist photographic work in the country.58 In the context of the political changes occurring during Peronism, Stern’spictureswere highly provocative. In 1947, during the first Peronist period of government, women obtained the right to vote, which was certainly an overdue and very important achievement. Nevertheless, the state-driven visual line propagated an image of femininity that was in contrast to these political improvements for women, defined by strictly conservative ideas and characterizing women through care work, domesticity, and, above all, motherhood.59 In other words, while the introduction of female suffrage allowed women to participate in 54 C. WIEDER political decisions, Peronism simultaneously intended to re-establish conservative ideas of femininity that limited female action spaces to a private sphere. Stern’s critical and subversive response to the ‘peronization’ of culture and the establishment of such restricting ideas of female agency can be well recognized in her photomontages for Idilio. She reacted to this situation with an intervention into the current visual culture, and by abstracting these dreams through the use of Dadaist image strategies and creating a broader political framework that addressed not only the drea- mer, but all those women who were at the center of Peronist mobilization attempts. More precisely, she reached out to Idilio’s readers in general – women of the (lower) middle class, whom the Peronist image propaganda had promised social advancement. This is also why Stern chose to include the topics of propaganda (marriage, motherhood, domesticity) in her artwork. However, through her techniques of photomontage and parody elements, she does not let these topics function in a standard way. Much rather, her photomontages, by introducing such strategies, open up new, visual and emancipa- tory counter spaces – heterotopias, as Foucault would call them – that were able to articulate critical comments on the Peronist regime in a period of increasing restrictions in the field of visual culture. Even though Grete Stern visualizes, beside the already mentioned mirror, many other heterotopic spaces in her photomontages, such as cemeteries, archives and theaters,60 my analysis aims rather to demonstrate how the artist used the Dadaist techniques of photomontage or parody as visual strategies to create heterotopic counter spaces. To emphasize this argument, I will discuss some of Foucault’s heterotopic principles. First, I will examine the principle that allows heterotopias to bring together different spaces in just one space. Second, I want to return to the paragraph cited at the beginning of this text, which says that heterotopias ‘dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences’.61 And third, I will include the factor of time, to which Foucault refers as ‘heterochronies’,62 and that the author argues is a factor that fundamentally influences the functional capacity of heterotopia. All of these characteristics, as I aim to demonstrate, are closely linked to Dadaist strategies of visualization, which Stern used in order to create visual spaces of resistance opposite the Peronist propaganda. Furthermore, these photomontages again practice a form of visual multilingualism that let the artist speak about her own experiences of exile. Generally, it can be stated that photomontages, similar to theaters and cinemas, which Foucault describes as heterotopias, are capable of ‘juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’.63 More than that, the technique of photomontage, through changing the original order of pictorial motives or modifying the initial system of an image, bears the potential of creating something unexpected. This is also what John Hearfield, one of the most important representatives of the Dada movement, pointed out when he spoke in an interview about his experience as a young soldier during World War I and how he created photomontages by cutting elements of photographs out and sticking them together in another order. Through using the technique of photomontage, Heartfield argued, his pictures created a ‘counter point’,64 which changed the content of the original piece and even allowed him to avoid the censors’ eyes. Grete Stern, who while working for Idilio was under the pressure of Peronist restrictions, similar to how Heartfield described it, therefore chose to create visual counter spaces through her experiments with photomontage. JEWISH CULTURE AND HISTORY 55

As Stern already did in earlier works, such as those produced close to the Madí movement, in her Dream series she juxtaposes and intersects different visual culture tradition – an Argentinian, German, Jewish, Exilic tradition – which do not appear as a simple adjacency, but much more as an interacting network of visual relation. As mentioned before, by introducing even elements of the Peronist visual grammar, Stern’s pictures negotiate those ideals of femininity but the artist thwarts them by placing her protagonists, the female dreamers, in situations of crisis. In this process her former experience in Germany, especially her critical work on the ‘new woman’ was of significant advantage for the artist. She once more picks up this figure and makes it face its conservative Peronist antagonist, which leads to a rather bizarre visual confrontation. Foucault argues, even though heterotopias are ‘located on the outside border of cities’,65 they ‘have a function in relation to all the space that remains’.66 Grete Stern’s photomontages, in this sense, should not be understood as pictures that stand outside the Argentinian visual culture of that time, much rather she placed her pictures directly in the center of Peronist mobilization attempts – in Idilio, one of the most popular women’smagazinesof the 1940s and 1950s. Yet, Stern uncovers the topics of the Peronist propaganda, especially the harmonically framed function of the woman as a caring housekeeper and sacrificing mother, as a myth. Citing Foucault, Stern’s photomontages in this sense ‘create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory.’67 The aim to use parody to reveal the Peronist, harmonic idea of femininity as an illusion, which Mary Louise Pratt identified as one of the arts of the contact zone,68 plays an important role in Stern’s work. If we refer to heterotopias as counter spaces, it is also interesting to emphasize that the original Greek noun parodia, as Linda Hutcheon accurately pointed out, can be translated as ‘counter-song’.69 But more than that, Hutcheon defines parody as a ‘repetition with difference’70 that ‘seems to offer a perspective on the present and the past which allows an artist to speak to adiscourseformwithin’.71 Following this argument, Stern’s photomontages are part of the discourse about Peronist femininity constructions, but at the same time they are able to maintain a critical distance and unmask, or even deconstruct, the state-driven propaganda. This means that even though Stern chose not to participate in the circuits co-opted by the Peronist regime, she certainly does not speak from an outsider position. She may speak as an exile, but as she learned through cultural encounters before, experiences of exile and migration have fundamentally influenced Argentinian cultural developments since the mid-nineteenth century. The function of the woman as mother, which during Peronism was raised even beyond the family sphere to a national purpose, appears in several of Stern’s pictures. Yet, comparing the photomontage Los sueños de renacimiento (The Dreams of Rebirth) (Figure 4) with other circulating images of motherhood, which stylized the figure of the mother as sacrificing and caring and as one that only in this way could reach personal fulfillment, Stern’s adaptation can only be interpreted as pure irony. The photomontage shows a smiling woman in rather conservative cloths clapping her hands together while looking at an over-proportionate egg. With her happy smile and the clapping hands as a gesture of excitement, the woman seems as if she was passionate and curious about what the egg has to offer her. Neither Germani and Butleman’s dream interpretation, nor the title or Stern’s picture itself, explicitly speak about the topic of motherhood in this case. However, through the massive presence that Stern gives this absolutely dispropor- tionate egg, and through the exceeding occupancy that motherhood took in the Peronist 56 C. WIEDER

Figure 4. Grete Stern, Los sueños de renacimiento, Idilio n° 29, 7th of June, 1949. construction of femininity, it is impossible to not understand Stern’s photomontage as a critical comment on Peronism’s over gloriﬁcation of motherhood. In this sense, it is speciﬁcally the pictures reference to the ‘exterior space’–circulating motives, elements or aesthetics of the state propaganda – that reveals Stern’s photomontage as a rebelling counter space. Yet, not all of Stern’s pictures pursue a parodic approach that ironizes the harmonic frame of the Peronist visual grammar. The artist also adapted strategies that might seem more frightening, gloomy or disturbing. This bleak atmosphere that Stern created in some of her photomontages – in particular in Los sueños de persecuciones (The Dreams of Persecutions), Los sueño de elecciones ineludibles (The Dreams of Unavoidable Elections) or Los sueño de monstruos (The Dreams of Monsters) – can itself be understood as subversive, due to the fact that it thwarted the happy cohabit and the peaceful sense of community that the government’s visual line portrayed. In contrast to the National Socialist propaganda, Peronism’s visual indoctrination was much less based on the stigmatization of others. Enemies, opponents as much as any feeling of discomfort or crisis were simply ignored and excluded from the visual representation of the regime. Grete Stern, in contrast, created a visual space for such marginalized experiences, which is also one of the reasons that her photomontages had such a powerful impact. JEWISH CULTURE AND HISTORY 57

In some cases, Stern’s photomontages generate a disturbing feeling due to their historical implications not only for women but also for Jewish exiles in Argentina – in a way, a warning. I will further examine this later in my analysis of Los sueños de vestido (The Dreams of the Dress) and El sueño de dinero (The Dream of Money). But first I want to come back to Foucault’s assumption that ‘heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time.’72 I also believe that Stern’s photomontages cause such a temporal rupture partly because they provoke disturbing alienation or shock effects, something that is closely linked to the work and theory of two other very influential exiles, namely Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, who Stern knew personally from her time in London. While Brecht writes with regard to Verfremdung, that ‘[t]he instructional elements [. . .] were, so to speak, installed; they did not result organically from the whole, they stood in opposite to the whole [. . .]’,73 Benjamin in his discussion of Brecht’s works points out that such an approach in theater ‘corresponds to the new technical forms – cinema and radio.’74 This is because both Brecht’s work on Verfremdung (alienation) and Benjamin’s concept of the shock, are closely linked to the artistic technique of montage. Benjamin’s understanding of montage as a mechanism to emancipate meaning in the modern, mass industrial, urban life, was profoundly influenced by Brecht’s theater. More precisely, his use of interruption and juxtaposition. For both of them, the shock or alienation effect was an ‘aesthetic trick’75 in order to free the art from exploitative dynamics of capitalism and, more importantly, to expose the discontinuity of history. Interestingly, Grete Stern makes a reference to modern, industrialized city life not just through the provocation of shock or alienation effects and the introduction of the figure of the ‘new woman’, but also through the use of photographic footage, pictures taken by her (by that time) ex-husband Horacio Coppola. In the 1920s and mid-1930s Horacio Coppola was already one of the pioneers of modern Argentinian city photography. As Jorge Schwartz described it, the photographer, by catching the urban landscape through his visual com- positions that were strongly influenced by geometry and abstraction, captured the intuition of the modern.76 His play with vanishing points, diagonals, lights and shadows is probably best conserved in his iconic series on the enlargement of Calle Corrientes, one of Buenos Aires’ most famous streets. One of these pictures, a photograph of a corner house in Calle Corrientes that highlights the shadow projection of a street light on the house’s façade, was later reused by Stern in her photomontage Los sueños de vestido (Figure 5). Stern’sphoto- montage shows a young woman dressed in a white nightdress, running down the nocturnal street, while a group of well-dressed young people looks and points at her. Around them are pieces of furniture, two chairs and a desk stand disorderly on the street. While in Coppola’s original photograph the streetlamp’s shadow stays sharp and precise, after Stern’s mod- ification it becomes a threatening stain that emphasizes the daunting dynamic of the picture. The young protagonist seems frightened and urgent to escape this humiliating situation, but the dark shadow that now forms the background to the apparently aggressive group appears almost like a hurricane moving towards her. By adapting the technique of photomontage and introducing disruptive elements, in this sense the picture becomes away‘to “shock” people into new recognitions and understandings.’77 Besides that, the girl in the white dress portrays another association. Her dress and posture, as well as her frightened look over the shoulder, which signifies that she is trying to escape the group that appears to almost be a force of nature, reminds the viewer of the nymph Chloris in 58 C. WIEDER

Figure 5. Grete Stern, Los sueños de vestido, Idilio n° 4, 16th of November, 1948.

Botticelli’s Primavera that is being robbed by Zephyrus, the god of the west wind. More than that, I believe that this photomontage also speaks about exile and the shared experience of many Jews who had to flee overnight, leave all their belongings and were chased and humiliated like the girl in the picture. Stern’s photomontage, in this way, juxtaposes various traditions of visual culture, establishes intervisual relations between them and at the same time creates a heterotopic space that through the provocation of shock causes a rupture in time and initiates a process of reflection on ideas of femininity and the powers of group dynamics. In another photomontage, El sueño de dinero (Figure 6), Stern again uses a part of one of Coppola’s pictures – Suipacha, between Alem Avenue and Posadas (1936), which shows astreetfromafrog’s eye perspective and in this way the buildings form a diagonal line crossing the picture. El sueño de dinero provokes a similar shocking and disturbing effect as Lossueñosdevestidoand again addresses, I assume, a community of Jewish spectators. In Stern’s montage the original photograph’s symmetry is enhanced by a line of walking men, all dressed the same way, so that they appear to be in uniform. The female protagonist is sitting on the street, her purse is open and she tries to collect the money that is scattered over the street. Apart from the interpretation that El sueño de dinero represent a critique of the mercantile-capitalist, social order, as Paula Bertúa suggests,78 I would like to add another possible reading. It also brings to mind pictures of the Reibpartie, a series of events after the so-called Anschluss where the supporters of the NSDAP intentionally humiliated Vienna’s Jewish citizens. They were forced to clean the city’s pavements of pro-independence JEWISH CULTURE AND HISTORY 59

Figure 6. Grete Stern, El sueño de dinero, Idilio n° 51, 8th of November, 1949.

slogans and publicly shamed by the pro-Anschluss Viennese population. Thanks to German- language newspapers like Das Argentinische Tageblatt, Das andere Deutschland or Jüdische Wochenschau, which informed their readers about the political developments in Europe, these images were known in Buenos Aires’ Jewish and anti-Fascist exile circles, some may have even experienced this themselves. By using such historical references, adopting the visual strategies of Dadaism and introducing them as heterotopic technique to the Argentinian art world, Stern not only created visual counter spaces, addressed the magazine’s readers and opposed the Peronist propaganda, but also related the political situation of the 1940s and 1950s in Argentina with the period of the interwar years and Dada’svisual rebellion against National Socialism. Both Jewish and non-Jewish exiles who had had to ﬂee 60 C. WIEDER

Germany and went on to Argentina were familiar with the aesthetics and techniques of Dadaism and therefore able to understand these pictures’ implications and decipher Stern’s photomontages as a warning not to carelessly consume the Peronist propaganda.

Conclusion In summary, Grete Stern’s artwork in Argentina can be interpreted as a visual contact zone for migrants and locals in the 1940s and 1950s. Her house in Ramos Mejía served as a space for cultural encounters and due to their inherent intersection of various visual culture traditions so did her pictures. In this way, the artist as much as the actual art production played an essential role in the establishment of an intervisual network in exile. This network even reached beyond national borders, as examined before, through references to exiled artistic movements like the Bauhaus or Dada. More than that, even under the pressure of censorship Stern managed to visually formulate a rough critique of the Peronist government’s goals, especially its gender norms, and through her art addressed an audience that could relate to the contents or visual techniques of her images from many diﬀerent perspectives. These pictures not only rebelled against the restriction of female agency and through the use of photomontage, parody and the provocation of shocks created visual, heterotopic counter spaces, but also implicitly spoke about Stern’s own experience of exile. Through various forms of artistic expression and on diﬀerent levels of image communication, Stern visually translated her experiences of exile to the Argentinian visual culture and even managed to let them become an integral part of it.

Notes

1. Jorge Luis Borges, “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins,” in Inquiciciones/Otras inquisiciones, 2nd ed., ed. Jorge Luis Borges (Buenos Aires: Debolsillo, 2014), 276. 2. Michel Foucault, The Order of the Things (New York: Random House, Inc.), xviii. 3. As Foucault already refers to cultural and artistic spaces or practices elaborating his spatial theory, the concept of heterotopia allows me to think these spaces as well as ones that are visually constituted. While the works of other theoreticians, e.g. Henri Lefebvre or Edward W. Soja, are to a greater extent oriented towards sociological examinations of space or situated in the field of urban studies, Foucault’s proximity to cultural studies facilitates the adaption of the concept for an analysis of visual sources. As I will argue later in this text, contact zones (Pratt), or as well in-between-spaces and third spaces (Bhabha), do not necessarily have to be understood as competing space concepts to heterotopias. Much rather, I will emphasize, that in the case of Grete Stern’s artwork they build the foundation to create heterotopic counter- spaces. See: Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004); Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27; Henri Lefebvre, The Producion of Space (Oxford/Cambridge: Wiley-Backwell, 1991); Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 33–40; Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real- and-Imagined Places (Cambridge/Oxford: Backwell, 1996). 4. In this article, I refer to the term of the concept zone as it was used by Mary Louise Pratt in 1991 and further developed in more recent works, like those of John Clifford or Kye Askin and Rachel Pain. See: Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone”, Profession (1991): 33–40; James Clifford, Routes: travel and translation in the late twentieth century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 188–219; Kye Askin and Rachel Pain, “Contact Zones: Participation, Materiality, and the Messiness of Interaction,” in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 29(5), (October 2011): 803–21. JEWISH CULTURE AND HISTORY 61

5. As Stern’s work accurately illustrates, Jewish and exile experiences today build an integral part of the Argentine visual culture, yet, in this text I refer primarily to the Peronist visual culture that hardly represented such minorities in its image production. Even though Jewish and exile cultures in Argentina are closely connected to each other, and, as I argue, both part of Stern’s work, there is some further clarification necessary: Jewish cultural production started already with the beginning of mass immigration at the end of the 19th century and provided a broad offer of newspapers, magazines, theaters, cultural clubs, associations etc. Many Jews who had to flee during National Socialism later affiliated with these organizations or at least took advantage of their cultural offers. Following Robert Edwards, I refer to exile as the conse- quence of politically enforced migration that leads to the experience of a break ‘with the cultural and social continuities of place and with collective memory.‘ This of course does not apply to all exiles in Argentina, Jewish or non-Jewish, yet to most of the leading figures in ongoing political debates and to important representatives in the arts. Contradictorily, Jewish and political, mainly anti-fascist exile organizations in Argentina did not always get along that well as they represented different interests and followed other strategies to realize them. However, many Jews such as Grete Stern, who would rather identify as anti-Fascist and therefore stand ideologically closer to anti-fascist organizations like Das andere Deutschland than e.g. to the Asociación Filantrópica Israelita, played an important role as mediators between the two groups. Even though ideological conflicts between Jewish and anti-fascist organizations in some cases led to a separation of these two groups, e.g. both had their newspapers, clubs, events, there were too moments of solidarity or common spaces that both shared. E.g. Paul Walter Jacob, a Jewish refugee, member of Das andere Deutschland and director of the exile stage Freie Deutsche Bühne frequently organized together with his ensemble solidarity events for Jewish and political organizations or Ernesto Alemann, des- cendent to a Swiss family and publisher of Das Argentinische Tageblatt, continuously wrote about the danger of National Socialism, the devastating consequences for Jews in Europe and published in his newspaper advertisements for Jewish and political organizations and events just next to each other. For the definition of exile, see: Robert Edwards, “Exiles, Self and Society,” in: Exile in Literature, ed. María Inés Lagos-Pope (Lewisburg: Buckmall University Press, 1988), 15–31, here 16. For further information on the relation between Jewish and anti- fascist organizations in Argentina, see: Gernán Friedmann, Alemanes antinazis en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores, 2010) . 6. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22. 7. Burcu Dogramaci, “Netzwerke des künstlerischen Exils als Forschungsgegenstand – zur Einführung,“ in Netzwerke des Exils. Künstlerische Verflechtungen, Austausch und Patronage nach 1933, ed. Burcu Dogramaci, Karin Wimmer (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann Verlag, 2011), 13–30. 8. Ofer Ashkenazi, “Strategies of Exile Photography: Helmar Lerski and Hans Casparius in Palestine,” in Marc Silberman (ed.), Back to the Future: Traditions and Innovations in German Studies (Bern: Peter Lang, 2018), 93. 9. See, for example: Guido Isekenmeier (ed.), Interpiktorialität. Theorie und Geschichte der Bild- Bild Bezüge (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2013); Ingeborg Reichle and others (ed.): Image match. Visueller Transfer, “Imagescapes“ und Intervisualität in globalen Bildkulturen (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2012); Valeska von Rosen: “Interpikturalität,“ in Metzler Lexikon Kunstgwissenschaft. Ideen, Methoden, Begriffe, ed. Ulrich Pfisterer (Stuttgart/Weimar: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 2003), 208b–211a; For further examination on the iconic and pictorial turn, see: Gottfried Boehm, “Jenseits der Sprache? Anmerkungen zur Logik der Bilder“,in Bildwissenschaft und Visual Culture, ed. Marius Rimmel (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2014); W. J.T. Mitchell, Image Theory (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press 1994). 10. Following Michael Berkowitz “‘The pictorial turn’ actually happened in politics generally, and Jewish politics specifically, well before the current scholarly fascination with images and image-making.” As the author argues, this also explains the rediscovery of theoreticians like Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg or Erwin Panofsky during that process. See: Michael Berkowitz, The Jewish Self-Image. American and British Perspectives, 1881–1939 (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 23–26. 62 C. WIEDER

11. This sub-title refers to the exhibition “From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola” that took place in 2015 at the MoMA in New York. 12. In 1937, Ellen Rosenberg married the stage designer Walter Auerbach and took her husband’s name. As most of her photographic work was published under the name Auerbach, in the following I will too use this name, even though they were not yet married at that time. 13. Ringl and Pit, DVD, directed by Juan Mandelbaum (New York: New Day Films, 1995). 14. Even though Stern and Auerbach, at least from the outside, seem to distance themselves from their Jewish heritage, ringl+pit pursued many projects related to Jewish culture, e.g. they collaborated with the editor Paul Cassirer on the designs of book covers that were translations of Jewish authors. See: Roxana Marcoci, “Photographer Against the Grain: Through the Lens of Grete Stern”,inFrom Bauhaus to Buenos Aires. Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola, ed. Roxana Marcoci and Sarah Hermanson (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2015), 25; More than that, Stern and Auerbach share their own experiences and their family heritage, e.g., by frequently staging themselves or at least parts of their body in their artwork. This form of self-staging can also be understood as an artistic strategy that allows them to approach the ‘new woman’ not only from a female but also from a Jewish perspective. 15. Gerda Breuer and Elina Knorpp (ed.), Gespiegeltes Ich. Fotografische Selbstbildnisse von Künstlerinnen und Fotografinnen in den 1920er Jahren (Berlin: Nicolai, 2014), Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 44–62; Gabriele Jatho and Rainer Rother (ed.), City Girls. Frauenbilder im Stummfilm (Berlin: Bertz+Fischer, 2007). 16. Ringl and Pit, DVD, directed by Juan Mandelbaum (New York: New Day Films, 1995). 17. Hilda Sabato, Historia de la Argentina (1852–1890) (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2012), 193–95. 18. The first Jews who came to Argentina, arriving with the ship Weser in 1889, were refugees fleeing the pogroms in Russia, which benefited at that moment from a program founded by Baron Maurice de Hirsch and the Jewish Colonization Association that wanted to bring Jews from Russia and Poland to Argentina and supported them to settle in agricultural colonies. This program expanded over time and led to an increasing migration of Jews to Argentina, most of which sought for job stability and economic prosperity. Haim Avni, Argentina and the Jews: A History of Jewish Immigration (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991), 1–20. 19. The German speaking community in Buenos Aires already had a broad cultural scene with its own newspapers, theaters, clubs etc. In the 1930s and 1940s many new organizations were founded, which mainly pursued the goal to oppose the political developments in Germany and Austria and support refugees arriving in Argentina (e.g. Das andere Deutschland, Austria Libre, Das Argentinische Tageblatt, Freie Deutsche Bühne); See for example: Liliana Ruth Feierstein, “Im Land von Vitzliputzli. Aspekte der Geschichte deutschsprachiver Juden in Lateinamerika,“ in Das Kulturleben Deutschsprachiger Juden: Eine Spurensuche In den Ursprung-, Transit- und Emigrationsländern, ed. Elke-Vera Kotowski (Oldenburg: De Gruyter, 2014), 359–73; Germán Friedmann, Alemanes antinazis en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2010); Germán Friedmann, “La cultura en el exilio alemán antinazi. El Freie deutsche Bühne de Buenos Aires, 1940–1948,“ in Anuario IEHS 2 (2009), 69–87; Frithjof Trapp, “Exiltheater in Frankreich und Lateinamerika. Paul Walter Jacob und die Freie Deutsche Bühne in Argentinien,“ in Zweimal Verjagt: die deutschsprachige Emigration und der Fluchtweg Frankreich-Lateinamerika; 1933–1945, ed. Anne Saint Sauveru-Henn (Berlin: Metropol, 1998), 168–75. 20. Alejandro Cattaruzza, Historia de la Argentina (1916–1955) (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2012), 115–80. 21. Uki Goñi, Real Odessa: How Perón brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina (London: Granta Books, 2003). 22. Anne Saint Sauveur-Henn, “Exotische Zuflucht? Buenos Aires, eine unbekannte und vielsei- tige Exilmetropole (1933–1945)”,inExilforschung: Metropolen des Exils. Ein internationales Jahrbuch. Band 20, ed. Claus-Dieter Krohn (München: edition text + kritik, 2002), 243. 23. Yet, it has to be mentioned too, that Peronism supported Zionist organizations in Argentina and was one of the first governments to recognize the state of Israel in 1948. See: Raanan JEWISH CULTURE AND HISTORY 63

Rein, Los muchachos peronistas judíos. Los argentines judíos y el apoyo al Justicialismo (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2015). 24. Luis Primaro, “Fotografia y Estado en 1951. Archivo de la Subsecretaria de Informaciones de la Presidencia de la Nacion en el Archivo de la Nacion,” in 7. Congreso de Historia de la Fotografia 1839–1960 (2001): 173. 25. Marcela M. Gené, Un mundo feliz. Imágenes de los trabajadores en el primer peronismo 1946–1955 (Buenos Aires: FCE-Universidad San Andrés, 2005). 26. Flavia Fiorucci: “El antiperonismo intelectual: de la guerra ideológica a la guerra spiritual,” in Fascismo y antifascismo. Peronismo y antiperonismo. Conflictos políticos e ideológicos en la Argentina (1930–1955), ed. Marcela García Sebastiani (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2006), 161. 27. Kye Askin and Rachel Pain, “Contact Zones: Participation, Materiality, and the Messiness of Interaction,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, no. 5, (October 2011): 804. 28. For the concept of cultural translation see Doris Bachmann-Bedick, Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften (Hamburg: Rothwohl Taschenbuch Verlag, 2014), 144–83. 29. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 34. 30. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 188–219. 31. Burcu Dogramaci, “Migrants, Nomad, Traveler – Towards a Transnational Art History,” in The Humanities between Global Integration and Cultural Diversity. Concepts for the Study of Culture (CSC), Vol. 6., ed. Hans G. Kippenberg and Birgit Mersmann (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 55. 32. Paula Bertúa, “Devenirse de una artista migrante: el destino argentine de Grete Stern,” Revista de Historia Bonaerense, no. 46, (2017): 7. 33. Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, “Participatory Art: Capturing Spatial Vocabularies in a Collaborative Visual Methodology with Melanie Carvalho and South Asian women in London, UK,” Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods: Connecting People, Participation and Place, ed. Sara Kindon and others (London: Routledge Studies in Human Geography), 133. 34. Sara Facio, “Grete Stern. Fotografía en la Argentina, 1937–1981” (Buenos Aires: Editorial La Azotea, 1988), 10. 35. Idem. 36. María Morena, “A cámera despera,” in Os sonhos de Grete Stern: Fotomontagens, ed. Jorge Schwartz (Sao Paulo: Museo Lasar Segal, 2009), 9–10. 37. Madí was a movement of concrete artists, including Gyula Kosice, Carmelo Arden Quin, Rhod Rothfuss, that was formed from the dissolution of the group around Arturo magazine. The meaning of the name is uncertain, it may have originated from the first syllables of the words ‘materialismo dialectico’ (dialectical materialism), although it is also possible that it is a simple play with sounds. See: Andrea Giunta, “Todas partes del mundo,” in Catálogo Verbomérica, ed. MALBA (Buenos Aires: Museo de Arte Latinoamericano, 2016), 74–82. 38. Paula Bertúa, La cámara en el umbral de lo sensible. Grete Stern y la revista Idilio, 1941–1951 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblios, 2012), 82. 39. Roxana Marcoci, ‘Photographer Against the Grain: Through the Lens of Grete Stern,’ in From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires. Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola, ed. Roxana Marcoci and Sarah Hermanson (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2015), 30. 40. Magdalena Droste, Bauhaus (Köln: Taschen, 2006), 92–3. 41. Gyula Kosice, Kosice. Autobiografia (Buenos Aires: Asunto Impreso Ediciones, 2010), 39. 42. Michael Berkowitz, The Jewish Self-Image. American and British Perspectives, 1881–1939 (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 11–52. 43. Elena Walsh, Viajes y homenajes (Buenos Aires: punto de lectura, 2004), 56. 44. Kye Askin and Rachel Pain, “Contact Zones: Participation, Materiality, and the Messiness of Interaction,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, no. 5 (2011): 817. 45. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 23. 46. Nadja Elia-Borer, “Desillusionierte Blicke in der Fotografie. Heterotope Verfahren in der Medienkunst”,inHeterotopien. Perspektiven der intermedialen Ästhetik, ed. Nadja Borer and others (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2014), 298. 64 C. WIEDER

47. Burcu Dogramaci, “Migrants, Nomad, Traveler – Towards a Transnational Art History” in The Humanities Between Global Integration and Cultural Diversity. Concepts for the Study of Culture (CSC), Vol. 6, ed. Hans G. Kippenberg and Birgit Mersmann (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 55. 48. Kye Askin and Rachel Pain, “Contact Zones: Participation, Materiality, and the Messiness of Interaction,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, no. 5 (2011): 817. 49. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 23. 50. GerdaBreuerandElinaKnorpp(ed.),Gespiegeltes Ich. Fotografische Selbstbildnisse von Künstlerinnen und Fotografinnen in den 1920er Jahren (Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, 2014). 51. Leon Grinberg and Rebecca Grinberg, Psychoanalyse der Migration und des Exils (München/ Wien: Verlag Internationale Psychoanalyse, 1990), 52–54. 52. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 24. 53. Paula Bertúa, La cámara en el umbral de lo sensible. Grete Stern y la revista Idilio, 1941–1951 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblios, 2012), 22. 54. Idem. 55. At this point, it might even be possible to compare Stern’s work for Idilio with the work of Jewish photographers in Britain, who through the use of photography and the participation in mainstream culture had an important impact on political, social and cultural developments. See: Michael Berkowitz, Jews and Photography in Britain (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015). 56. Lisa Silverman, Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 5. 57. Dr. Richard Rest, “El psicoanalisis te ayudará,” Idilio, 26 October 1948; translated by the author, original: “Queremos ayudarle a conocerse a sí misma, a fortalecer su alma, a resolver sus problemas, a responder a sus dudas, a vencer sus complejos, y a superarse.” 58. See: David William Foster, Argentine, Mexican, and Guatemalan Photography. Feminist, Queer, and Post-Masculinist Perspectives (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 1–17; Valeria González, “Processes of Modernization in Argentine Photography, 1930–1960),” in Photography in Argentina – Contradiction and Continuity, Getty Trust Publications, ed. Idurre Alonso and Judith Keller (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2017); Luis Primaro, Grete Stern. Obra fotográfica en Argentina (Buenos Aires: Fondo Nacional de las Artes, 1995). 59. See: Marcela M. Gené, Un mundo feliz. Imágenes de los trabajadores en el primer peronismo 1946–1955 (Buenos Aires: FCE-Universidad San Andrés, 2005), 130–40; Andrea Giunta, “Eva Perón: imágenes y público”,inArte y recepción, ed. AA.VV (Buenos Aires: Centro Argentino de Investigadores de Arte, 1997), 177–84; Barbara Potthast, Madres, Obreras, Amantes. Protagonismo femenino en la historia de América latina (Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vervuet, 2011). 60. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27. 61. Michel Foucault, The Order of the Things (New York: Random House, Inc.), xviii. 62. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 26. 63. Ibid., 25. 64. “John Heartfield in einem Gespräch mit Bengt Dahlbäck vom Moderna Museet in Stockholm” (1967), in John Heatfield, ed. Akademie der Künste Berlin (Köln: DuMont, 1991), 14. 65. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 25. 66. Ibid., 27. 67. Ibid. 68. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone”, Profession (1991): 37. 69. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-century Art Forms (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1985), 32. 70. Idem. 71. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1994), 35. 72. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 26. 73. Bertolt Brecht, “On the Experimental Theatre,” in The Tulane Drama Review 6, no.1 (1961): 8. JEWISH CULTURE AND HISTORY 65

74. Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (London/New York: Verso, 1998), 6. 75. Walter Benjamin, “Der Sürrealismus (1929),“ in GS II.1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 300. 76. Jorge Schwartz, “Fundación de Buenos Aires: la mirada de Horacio Coppola”,inHoracio Coppola. Fotografía, ed. AA.VV. (Madrid: Fundación Telefónica, 2008), 22–33. 77. Stanley Mitchell, introduction to Unterstanding Brecht, by Walter Benjamin (London/ New York: Verso, 1998), xiii. 78. Paula Bertúa, La cámara en el umbral de lo sensible. Grete Stern y la revista Idilio, 1941–1951 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblios, 2012), 115.

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Notes on contributor

Christina Wieder is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna. She is currently working on a thesis on Visual Strategies of Self-Empowerment: Jewish women artists from Central Europe to Argentina. She was Junior Fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna and Visiting Researcher at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Currently Wieder works as a lecturer at the Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Vienna, focusing on Visual History, Exile Studies, and Gender Studies.