german painting in the cold war

German Painting in the Cold War

Andreas Huyssen

Modernism and the PostwarIn their Santa Monica exile, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno began to develop a cluster of philosophical fragments under the impact of emerging knowledge about the Nazi death camps. Published six years later in 1947 as Dialectic of Enlightenment, this book contains one of the fiercest, most unsen-timental indictments of the constitutive role that violence, sacrifice, and repres-sion have played in Western modernity. Nazism appears here not as the out-break of primitive irrational forces in the midst of civilizationa view that held sway in the West for many years after the warbut as the logical end point of a culture of rationality traced back all the way to Homers Odyssey. It is a story of Western civilization gone awry. Though over the top in its rhetoric of exaggeration and lack of historical and political differentiation, Horkheimer and Adornos work has helped bring the dark, destructive side of modernity fully into view.

In their book, the two refugees have nothing much to say about the mod-ernist arts, but Thomas Mann, a fellow exile in California, acknowledged the umbilical cord that tied modernism itself to the dark side of modernity. Mann

New German Critique 110, Vol. 37, No. 2, Summer 2010DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2010-011 2010 by New German Critique, Inc.

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This essay was first published as Figures of Memory in the Course of Time in the exhibition catalog edited by Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann, Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cul-tures (New York: Abrams in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art [LACMA], 2009), 22439. It is reprinted here with the permission of LACMA. The artworks mentioned in the essay are easily accessible in the catalog.

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Published by Duke University Press

210 German Painting in the Cold War

inscribed Adornos theory of modern music into his novel Doktor Faustus, written in those same years in Santa Monica. Adrian Leverkhn, the German composer in the novel, maintains his ability to create his modernist composi-tions only through a fatal pact with the devil, an allegory of Germanys pact with Hitler. Of course, the Nazis had branded modern art as degenerate in their 1937 denunciatory exhibition, Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art), as Mann was well aware. At a deeper level, however, Nazism was never simply the antag-onist of either modernity or modernism, both of which it selectively drew on, and not all modernists were impervious to Nazisms seductionone thinks of Emil Nolde, Gottfried Benn, and Martin Heidegger. Surely, to pose the problem of modernist art by rewriting the Faust myth and relating it to German music was to emphasize its national dimension. But Mann was cosmopolitan enough to know that Leverkhns condition was not a narrowly German one. Nor was it limited to the medium of music. Reading the crisis of art as represented in Manns novel together with Horkheimer and Adornos dark reflections on West-ern culture at large casts a different light on the visual arts of twentieth-century Germany. It allows us to look at postwar German art comparatively, through the prism of memories of modernism as they pertain to World War I, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust.

Let me begin with an ide reue. Just as Nazism in the popular imagi-nation is often considered simply as a betrayal of Western civilization rooted in the failure of Germany to develop democratic institutions and a democratic Western-style culture, twentieth-century German art has often been seen as an anomaly within modernism. Neither expressionism, nor dada, nor Weimars Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) played a significant role in Alfred Barrs powerful and influential coding of the twentieth centurys visual arts in New Yorks Museum of Modern Art. The German special path (Sonderweg) in the arts was explained, if not dismissed, with clichs about subjective expression, irrationalist frenzy, and dark romanticism, all of it presumably typical of Ger-man national character and left behind by the triumph of classical modernism from Paul Czanne via the cubists to abstract expressionism. The starkly anti-bourgeois photomontages of Berlins revolutionary avant-garde were sim-ply ignored as too compromised for Cold War palates. Indeed, very little in the contradictory trajectory of German art fit the triumphalist narrative that emerged with the Cold War and secured New Yorks place in the pantheon of modernism. In its foregrounding of figuration, apocalyptic religiosity, and political satire, German expressionism failed to receive the imprimatur of a modernism of rational purity, abstraction, autonomy, and transparency that served so well in the cultural Cold War to prove the superiority of the free art

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of the West over state-regimented socialist realism. Memories of revolutionary Berlin dada in turn could only have disturbed this political codification of Cold War aesthetics.

However, as a darker view of modernity has taken hold in recent decades and the classical codifications of a modernism of aesthetic autonomy have lost some of their luster, these German traditions and their political valences are increasingly being recognized as a vital part of the arts in the century that the historian Eric Hobsbawm has called the age of extremes. Adornos aesthetic of negativity and objective Ausdruck (expression) is the most substantive articula-tion of this whole trajectory of a dark modernism in international context, pertinent both for the interwar period and for the post-1945 years.

Looking across the divide of 1945, we find that twentieth-century Ger-man art offers a compelling case study of the modern crisis of representa-tion, and it gives powerful expression to the instabilities of the visual field in metropolitan modernity. In its aesthetic practices, German art has negotiated all political extremes of this most violent century: two world wars, fascism, communism, and the trials of Cold War modernization. A country that lived through two total military defeats, experienced four collapses of the state in the span of some seventy years, and had to cope with the guilt of and respon-sibility for the systematic murder of six million Jews could not be expected to produce a continuous narrative of art or rely on a stable national tradition to ground aesthetic developments. Instead, there are fractures and ruptures, muti-lations and wounds that resulted in compulsive repetitions as symptoms of unacknowledged trauma. In the visual arts, such symptoms reveal themselves in conflicting artistic practices, from Christian humanist iconography and varieties of realism to modernist abstraction and radical avant-gardism, enough to challenge any developmental narrative of modern art. If anything, the col-lapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the subsequent unifi-cation of the nation have highlighted rather than harmonized this conflicted scene by adding a whole new dimension of retrospection and repression, replete with aesthetic recrimination and political resentment. Staging an exhi-bition of the art of divided Germany in the United States after 9/11 inevitably raises questions of art and memory under conditions of political and social extremity.

Twentieth-century German art is haunted by the trauma of war, mass death, and destruction. Expressionism, dada, and the Neue Sachlichkeit are unthinkable without the killing fields of World War I and their traumatic effects on memory and the imagination. The violence, cynicism, and aggres-sion inherent in much Weimar art are too obvious to ignore. Nazi art in turn

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monumentalized war, death, and sacrifice, and its heroic images of German life invariably conjure up the violently caricatured counterimages of inferior races destined for slavery or liquidation. The shadow of destruction is constitutive of the Nazi fantasy of the healthy Aryan Volk, as Anselm Kiefer acknowledged in his painting Dein goldenes Haar, Margarethe (Your Golden Hair, Margarete, 1981), a powerful translation of Paul Celans poetic lines from Death Fugue (1948) into image. In turn, the trauma of exile, with its loneliness and economic deprivations, may have found stronger expression in literature than in the visual arts. For many years, the West German cultural establishment displayed an unwelcoming and self-righteous attitude toward exiles such as Mann or Alfred Dblin, and the GDR participated in the eastern-bloc anti-Semitic campaigns of the early 1950s. Already split along multiple political and aesthetic lines during the Weimar Republic, German art bifurcated after the war into largely separate trajectories once the iron curtain had descended over Europe. Achieve-ments, relationships, and degrees of separation can be fully assessed only now that the art of the Cold War has become history and the culture wars of the 1990s between East and West Germans have waned.

No Stunde NullOne thing, however, is clear from the outset: 1945 was never a Stunde Null (zero hour), a radical new beginning unburdened from memory, in either part of Germany. Older exiles returned and mingled with artists of the so-called inner emigration who had stayed and continued to work during the Third Reich, either compromising with Nazi rule or pursuing their work quietly out-side the public view. Obviously, these two groups very different memories of the Nazi years were not simply forgotten. After 1945 the split in the younger generation ran between those who had grown up in the Hitler Youth and served in the war effort and those who were born too late to experience the Third Reich firsthand. At any rate, memories of Weimar, the Third Reich, exile, and the inner emigration together with generational affiliations transcended the political rupture of 1945 and shaped artistic practices into the 1950s and beyond. Not surprisingly, there were still many iconographic commonalities between artists East and West in work pursued in the immediate postwar years. Devel-opments began to diverge only with the consolidation of the Cold War and the political division after the currency reform of 1948 and the founding of the two German states in 1949. It is not enough, however, to deny that there ever was a Stunde Null. The point is to understand the popularity of this metaphor as the beginning of a denial and willful forgetting of the past that shaped the history of both German states for decades to come.

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A comparative look at painting in the two postwar periods after both 1918 and 1945 reveals one major difference. Radically modernist and apoca-lyptic images of the Great War and its effects abounded in the 1920s. The mutilated veterans of George Grosz populated the painting of the Weimar Republic, and Otto Dixs images of the trenches join in our imagination with the narrative of Erich Maria Remarques antiwar novel All Quiet on the West-ern Front or the story of Franz Biberkopf in Dblins metropolitan novel Ber-lin Alexanderplatz. As opposed to 1945, the trauma of the Great War generated new forms of visual and literary expression. Photomontage and typographic experiment, the mixing of media, semiotic anarchism in language, and other avant-gardist strategies of representation were dominant. By comparison, painting in the late 1940s and the 1950s remained surprisingly mute, uninven-tive, and derivative; one must go to the work by the Allied photographers of the liberated camps or to the photography of the bombed-out German cities for a visual sense of the Holocaust and the saturation bombings.

Of course, there are exceptions: Wilhelm Rudolphs subtle drawings of Dresden after the raid of February 1945, made at a time when the Soviet occu-pation imposed a prohibition on photography, or Hans Grundigs moving alle-gorical tribute to concentration camp victims (replete with the Star of David), a subject rarely addressed at the time anywhere in Germany. Only Lea Grun-dig, Hanss Jewish wife, rendered the death camps and the Eastern European ghettos, in several series of drawings from the mid- to late 1940s (Never Again, Ghetto, and Ghetto Uprising). Overall, however, there is a sense that the image orgy of Nazism and its fiery downfallfrom torch marches and political spec-tacles at Nuremberg to Albert Speers floodlight operas in the night sky and the fireworks of antiaircraft flak over burning citieshad overwhelmed and exhausted the German visual imagination, both East and West. Many years later, the filmmaker Werner Herzog lamented this visual deprivation of the German postwar; indeed, the New German cinema of Herzog, Wim Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Alexander Kluge can be seen as an attempt to create a new visual vocabulary to deal with the presence of the past in postwar Germany. At any rate, the relative lack of compelling pictorial representations of the immediate war and postwar experience in the late 1940s was not based on some theoretical Bilderverbot (prohibition of images) grounded in insight into the limits of representing extreme trauma. Confronted by the photographs and films from Dachau and Buchenwald, psychosocial image denial took over. The experience of crushing defeat and bombed-out cities, combined with a guilty conscience, produced paralysis of the visual imagination. The result was an inability to mourn the victims of Nazism both at home and abroad.

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To be sure, there was a brief period of cultural euphoria, hope for a dem-ocratic revival of the arts, and reflection on past horrors right after 1945, but the dominant visual language of those years fell back on Christian images of the Passion, martyrdom, and apocalypse, rendered in an expressive realist style close to allegory. Traditional Pathosformeln (formulas of emotion) risked bor-dering on a helpless antifascism after the fact. This is true even of the best of this work, including that of the Grundigs as well as the work by Gerhard Alten-bourg, who titled his drawing of the dying warrior Ecce Homo. In paintings of war and urban ruins, demons and skeletons abound, reminiscent of the imag-ery of the medieval dance of the dead (Karl Hofer, Totentanz [Dance of the Dead]). The visual language deployed emphasized existential human suffer-ing, universal lament, and melancholy in derivative expressionist forms.

Adornos notorious and often-misunderstood statement about the bar-barity of poetry after Auschwitz seemed even more pertinent for the visual arts than it was for literature.1 There was no pictorial language available to repre-sent the horrors of the Holocaust and of Nazi barbarity behind the Eastern front, and none was being developed. What was barbaric to Adorno was not poetry itself, of course, but the claim that German Kultur had not been tainted by what had happened. He demanded radical self-reflection from the arts, rather than recourse to earlier artistic traditions and their fatal claim of sepa-rating art and culture from politics. But the latter is precisely what happened. Especially in the West, frequent exhibitions of the Weimar artists Ernst Bar-lach and Kthe Kollwitz spoke to the need for a self-indulgent lament about what the historian Friedrich Meinecke called the German catastrophethat is, the loss of national sovereigntyand they provided consolation and trans-figuration without politics and without memory of Germanys victims.

The attempts to face reality with a kind of expressive realism (Hofer and Theo Balden in painting; Gerhard Marcks and Georg Kolbe in sculpture) soon waned and gave way to abstraction in the West and socialist realism in the East. With Kultur restored by the late 1940s and the classical humanist leg-acy of Germany celebrated on both sides of the iron curtain for the bicenten-nial of Goethes birth in 1949, American abstraction and Parisian art informel became dominant in the West; socialist realism, with its antimodernist Lukc-sian doctrine of the organic closed work of art, became the only idiom in the East. Literature took a similar path. In the immediate postwar years, a kind of helpless Christian humanism prevailed in the novels of Elisabeth Langgsser

1. Theodor W. Adorno, Cultural Criticism and Society, in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 1734.

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and Ilse Aichinger, and a Kafkaesque placelessness and timelessness took over in Hermann Kasacks City beyond the River (1947; trans. 1953). By the mid-1950s a wave of absurdism had swept in from France, moving literature into the realm of abstract parable and allegory in the wake of Eugne Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. Kafka was read as if he were a contemporary author. Both abstraction in painting and parable in literature aimed at expressing some uni-versal human condition of alienation and thus served an apologetic memory politics in a context that required facing specific guilt and responsibility for one of the most murderous regimes of human history. In addition to Wolf-gang Staudtes film The Murderers Are among Us (1946), very few literary works, such as Wolfgang Koeppens novels Pigeons on the Grass (1951; trans. 1988) and Death in Rome (1954; trans. 1961), confronted explicitly and in for-mally demanding ways what W. G. Sebald has called the real state of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself.2 As denazification was cut short in the West and official antifascism became state ideology in the East, both Germanys assumed their position as front states in the Cold War. Eco-nomic miracle and socialist reconstruction blocked traumatic memories and genuine mourning on both sides of the iron curtain.

Cold War OppositionsDuring the same period, the rediscovery of modernism and abstractioncodified by the first two documenta shows in 1955 and 1959helped West German culture move beyond the muck of nationalist and fascist image tradi-tions and reestablish links with international developments. Despite doubts about the painterly quality of some of the German abstractionists of the 1950s (Willi Baumeister is no Pablo Picasso, and Ernst Wilhelm Nay is no Jack-son Pollock), the reconstruction of modernism combined with the embrace of French and American trends clearly denationalized the culture of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). However, as Nay and Baumeister replaced classi-cal modernisms ethnographic gaze at the primitive with an uncritical celebra-tion of the archaic and prehistorical, their work approached escapism in rela-tion to both the Third Reich and the rise of an obsessive consumerism. This was symptomatic of a time that also saw the success of plays focusing on archetypi-cal situations, such as Thornton Wilders Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and the impact of T. S. Eliots religious modernism in his plays and in his poetry. Internationalization it was, but in a typically conservative 1950s mode.

2. W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (New York: Random House, 2003), 10.

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Far from being a triumphal march, abstraction was still rejected by the majority of the public, and it faced stiff opposition from the Catholic Right, which saw all modern art as nihilistic and antihumanist. Curiously, this debate about modernist abstraction remained by and large oblivious to its obvious analogies in Nazi cultural politics over so-called degenerate art. And in yet another unacknowledged analogy, though differently motivated, the East Ger-man regime condemned all modernism as bourgeois, decadent, and nihilistic, replaying the fundamental Stalinist tunes from the Soviet realism debate in the 1930s. As before the war, the reactionaries on both sides of the iron curtain were united in their attacks on nihilism and decadence, one of the telling sim-ilarities between East and West underlying Cold War political conflicts.

If the embrace of abstraction internationalized the West German art scene, the GDRs internationalism was predicated on the Soviet doctrine of socialist realism that became Cold War aesthetic dogma throughout the east-ern bloc. The influential Lukcsian insistence on realism and mimesis in the East was plausible as a strategy against Nazi imagery, but in its dogmatic rejec-tion of anything smacking of modernism as formalist, it proved a straitjacket rather than a stimulus to the arts. By contrast, 1950s abstraction in the West brought with it a promise of freedom and experimentation, even as its ground colors in Baumeister, Nay, and Fritz Winter remained tellingly somber and dark. Inevitably abstraction could not actively confront the past, and soon enough it ossified into market dogma. East German artists, for their part, had to face real censorship in the 1950s, but eventually some managed to operate on the margins of the state-prescribed aesthetic (Willi Sitte, Harald Metzkes), if not in quiet dissent. Nevertheless, in public discourse and in practice, the reductive Cold War opposition between abstraction and figuration, modernism and realism, held sway through the 1950s. Both remained rather provincial, and neither had much to say about the Holocaust.

Also common to literature and painting in the two Germanys is the absence of explicit references to the Cold War division of the nation itself. With rare exceptions, it is not pictured in painting or, apart from spy novels, narrated extensively in fiction. True, Jrg Immendorff engaged with the Dres-den artist A. R. Penck across the Berlin Wall, one of very few direct contacts among artists East and West before the late 1970s, and both made German division a subject of their paintings (Immendorff in Caf Deutschland, Penck in Der bergang [Passage]). There also are the Berlin Wall paintings of the Moritzplatz neoexpressionists (named after the Gallery am Moritzplatz, hot spot of such Neue Wilden artists as Rainer Fetting and Salom), but the Wall figures here more as a symbol of universal alienation in the tradition of urban expressionism than as a cipher of national division.

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Novels on both sides occasionally feature excursions of their protago-nists into the other Germany (which they typically dislike), but such narrative moments remain marginal in Uwe Johnson, Heinrich Bll, or Christa Wolf. There was no German Pynchon to render the Cold War paranoia and hostility that dominated German politics until the late 1960s, when Chancellor Willy Brandts new Ostpolitik initiated a new stage in East-West relations. Apart from Johnsons Two Views (1965; trans. 1966), Peter Schneiders much later The Wall Jumper (1982; trans. 1998), and some of Heiner Mllers plays about German fratricide such as Germania, Death in Berlin (begun 1956; published 1971; trans. 1990), the horizontal East-West relationship is largely absent from both literature and painting, while the vertical axis between present and past is dominant in both Germanys from early on, though in radically different form.

This absence of the present and presence of the past is easily explained. Given the abuse of national identity in the Third Reich, artists were simply not interested in issues of national unity or national culture. A negative national-ism held sway on both sides of the Wall. And until the 1970s the iron cur-tain and the Wall effectively kept East and West apart, while memories of the pastconscious, repressed, or unconsciouspointed to certain commonali-ties. At the same time, the Cold War division of the country was like an invis-ible veil that shaped artists perception of both real existing socialism and capitalist realism, as Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter called it. But neither Germany was exotic or attractive enough for the other to trigger the creative imagination, and both tried to capitalize on the memory of the Third Reich and of the Holocaust in the cultural confrontation of the Cold War. The national division is thus invariably refracted through memories of the Third Reich. But here is yet another absence: the focus remained on Germans rather than on their victimson the alleged logic of German history, the criminality of the regime, the desire to prove the legitimacy of the respective postwar state. Remembering the Third Reich was not identical to remembering the Holo-caust. In retrospect, the absence of the Holocaust victims from artistic produc-tions at the timeand well into the 1970sis stunning. Wolf Vostells 1958 assemblages of found objects (Auschwitz-Scheinwerfer 568 [Auschwitz Flood-light 568], Deutscher Ausblick [German View], and Treblinka) are singular exceptions. One year later, in his seminal 1959 essay, What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean? (trans. 1961), Adorno linked the dominant evasion and destruction of memory to the pathology of postfascist reconstruction.3

3. Theodor W. Adorno, What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean? in Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 11437.

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The paradox of the early postwar decades is that the Holocaust was always subliminally present in the Cold War confrontation, while being evaded or repressed on both sides. More often than not it was present as a politically deployed cipher, not as a subject of real historical knowledge or a fully under-stood acknowledgment of collective symbolic guilt. This changed substan-tively only in the 1980s and in the postunification decade, but in the 1960s the seeds for a new national consensus on Holocaust memory had been sown by a few artists. Yet there remained a fundamental aporia. In his Negative Dialec-tics (1966) Adorno retracted what had been widely viewed as his earlier prohi-bition to represent the Holocaust: Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream.4 How could any postwar German artist claim to give voice to Holocaust victims without either usurping their position by speaking for them or adopting a reductive moralizing stance? The invisibility of Jews in postwar Germany was a reality that carried over into the realm of representations. Yet one should not simplistically condemn the absence of the Holocaust or the Jewish figures in the early postwar decades in literature, film, and painting by comparing it with their overwhelming figu-rative presence in the memory culture of the post-1989 period. There can be traces of presence in the absence of representation, just as presence in repre-sentation may lead to new forms of forgetting and invisibility.

The 1960s as a Turning PointRepresentations of the Holocaust emerged very slowly in the arts of both Ger-manys. Yet we must avoid the danger of measuring that past by later standards of commemoration rituals. The widespread memory obsessions with the Nazi past and the Holocaust that characterize our own present are of relatively recent vintage. This is not to claim, as some have done, that Germans simply ignored the past until the 1979 American television miniseries Holocaust forced them to open their eyes. Though not widely named Holocaust until later, the sys-tematic murder of European Jewry was publicly acknowledged in both Ger-manies in the first postwar years, and this acknowledgment took multiple shapes from the moment that the camps were opened to public view and the Nuremberg trials commenced. As elsewhere, memory of the genocide moved in fits and starts before it became a sustained focus in West German culture and in the world at large. It emerged forcefully with Alain Resnaiss documen-tary film Night and Fog (1955) and with the many performances of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hacketts 1955 play The Diary of Anne Frank, works that came from France and the United States, respectively. Yet public opinion at the

4. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1999), 362.

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time was more concerned with fears of nuclear war, German rearmament, and anticommunism than with the Holocaust.

The situation changed only in the early 1960s, when the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem occupied center stage and the subsequent Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, comprehensively transcribed in the daily press, generated one of the major artistic articulations of Holocaust memory in Germany: the exile Peter Weisss play The Investigation (1965; trans. 1966), which at the time became a defining theatrical event in both Germanys. Yet even in the 1960s Holocaust memory was not as central to cultural production as it became dur-ing the 1980s, and vast differences marked the memory politics of East and West. Indeed, it is one of the ironies of postwar German history that the West German government, flush with former Nazis and dragging its feet when it came to prosecuting war criminals, initiated restitution and became a solid supporter of Israel, while the East German regime slavishly followed Mos-cows lead in spouting anti-Semitism and embracing anti-Israel policies. More determined and efficient than the FRG in purging Nazis from public life, the official GDR mostly ignored the memory of the Holocaust, claiming to be free of guilt and celebrating a legitimizing antifascism instead. Indeed, the anti-fascism of its first leadership generation was the GDRs founding myth, and the countrys memory politics focused on the Anglo-American terror bombing of Dresden rather than on German responsibility for the Holocaust. In both countries there was a tacit contract: public memories covered private ones, veiling past crimes and criminals.

In the West, by contrast, the memory of the experience of the saturation bombings was publicly repressed (plausibly enough, since the FRG had become a member of NATO), though it was mobilized often enough in intergenera-tional discourse to make the point that the Allies had committed war crimes as well. A major national self-examination of the Third Reichs legacies, however, emerged only in the wake of the generational rebellion of the 1960s. Many on the West German left of the time focused on the Holocaust but saw it quite dogmatically as an outflow of capitalism, a view that shapes even Weisss pow-erful documentary play about the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt. Then the 1967 Six Days War in the Middle East caused a deep division in the Left and led, in revolt against the official philo-Semitism of the German establishment, to often self-serving identification with the plight of Palestinians as victims of the broader Middle Eastern conflict. The trajectory of the Red Army Faction (RAF) into mayhem was a direct result of this constellation.

Only in the post-1968 period did the Holocaust become a serious topic of cultural memory politics. And it took until the late 1990s and the publica-tion of Sebalds Natural History of Destruction (1999; trans. 2003) that the

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second topic of willed forgetting, the air war against German cities, became part of a major national debate at a time that saw the passing of the genera-tion that had lived through this traumatic experience. But these two sets of memories, I would suggest, were always there: the knowledge of the death camps, which after all were not a German trauma, and the memories of the bombings, traumatic for the bulk of the countrys urban population. The juxtaposition of Holocaust and air war always defined the complex role of Germans as both perpetrators and victimsvictims as a consequence of their own actions, but victims nevertheless. This victim-perpetrator dialectic pervaded the relation between generations; it shaped the relationship to Israel and Palestine; and it appeared generationally and politically displaced in the conflict between the West German state and the RAF, which occupied so much of the politics of the 1970s, a decade often described as a bleierne Zeit (leaden time). It was articulated cinematically in Germany in Autumn (1978), a collaborative project about the RAF by Fassbinder, Kluge, Edgar Reitz, Volker Schlndorff, and others, and it emerged eleven years later as a memory topic in its own right with Richters mug shotbased Stammheim paintings.

New Departures in the ArtsThe generational revolt of the 1960s has often been credited with initiating Germans serious confrontation with the living legacies of the Nazi past and the Holocaust. The 1960s was also the decade that rediscovered and embraced that other modernism: that of the historical avant-garde (Berlin dada) and the Weimar intellectual Left (including Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt School). These leg-acies made it possible to think of modernism and realism as relational rather than irreconcilable. It is thus no coincidence that the 1960s also rediscovered the vital debate about expressionism and realism, much of which had filled the pages of the journals Das Wort and Internationale Literatur, published in the 1930s by German exiles in Moscow. That debate had already prefigured the radical opposition between abstraction and figuration, modernism and real-ism in the writings of Georg Lukcs, whose authority determined the doc-trine of socialist realism in the postwar GDR until the mid-1950s. The counter-position to Lukcs was articulated by Anna Seghers, Brecht, and Bloch, who already in the 1930s argued for modernism as a realism for the twentieth century.5

5. For some of the key texts of this debate, see Ernst Bloch et al., Aesthetics and Politics (Lon-don: New Left Books, 1977).

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As the radical Cold War opposition between abstraction and real-ism began to wane in the 1960s, a few German artists took up the real his-tory of the Holocaust and its effects. They lifted the prevailing prohibition of Nazi imagery that had dominated high culture. It was as if long-forgotten or repressed memory images returned, often in highly stylized form, in the paintings of Georg Baselitz, Eugen Schnebeck, Markus Lpertz, Richter, and Kiefer in the FRG. In literature, everyday life under fascism became a major topic in Gnter Grass, Martin Walser, Bll, Kluge, and Wolfbut it was the everyday life of German Gentiles, not of German Jews.

The new uses of figuration in painting, though very different from artist to artist, were primarily initiated by artists who had grown up with the demands for realism before leaving the GDR and resettling in the West (all of the above except Kiefer). These artists were therefore not steeped in the dogma of abstrac-tion and informel. Their pictorial strategies included the expressive and dis-torted male bodies of Baselitzs oedipal paintings; Lpertzs provocative use of steel helmets, uniforms, and flags as props of the Nazi pageantry; Richters transfer of photography to canvas with his signature painterly blur; and Kiefers mix of expressionist and abstract expressionist brushwork in his Nazi architec-ture and Holocaust memory paintings. It would be interesting to read Kiefers controversial Deutschlands Geisteshelden (Germanys Spiritual Heroes, 1973) as a response to Richters 1972 Venice Biennale photo project, 48 Tafeln (48 Portraits), then relate both to the representation of historical figures in Immendorffs Caf Deutschland.

With different pictorial and media strategies and very different inten-tions, all three of these artists try to deal explicitly with Germanys fractured intellectual traditions, and they do so by drawing on both figuration and abstraction. The work of Lpertz and especially Kieferwhich was politically much more challenging to West Germanys Left-liberal consensus and its image prohibitions than Richters cool and politically neutral blurred family photograph paintingswas often misunderstood as protofascist by Germanys bien-pensant critics. What was not seen in this taboo-ridden view of Kiefer was that all of his painting and sculpture of the 1970s and 1980s responded to the overdue demand to grapple with repressed fascist image worlds and their effects on the present. Kiefer did this provocatively by reflecting pictorially on issues of monumentalism in ruins, the fate of painting after Auschwitz, the role of romantic high-horizon landscape painting, the myth of the genius artist, and the relation of German intellectual tradition to the Holocaust. Because of the power of discursive and visual taboo zones in Germany, his critical project, in part analogous with much of the New German cinema of these same years, was often better understood abroad than in his home country.

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In the GDR the new Leipzig school of painters of the mid-1960s increas-ingly abandoned the idealizing genre painting of socialist reconstruction, turn-ing instead toward the specters of the past, either to historical and antifascist subjects (Werner Tbkes Reminiscences of Schulze series, Bernhard Heisigs Nazi and Communards painting) or to metaphorical parable painting (Wolf-gang Mattheuer), but they shied away from any outright critique of their own dictatorship. Antifascism and anticapitalism held sway, and the presence of censorship undeniably affected the work of painters such as Tbke, Sitte, and Heisig, producing a conformist streak in all three. Yet in their work, too, as in the writings of Wolf, Mller, and Volker Braun, there slowly emerged spaces of political criticism clawed out from under the pressure of censorship and enforced self-criticism. Aesthetic deviation from socialist-realist norms, com-bined with continued commitment to socialism as abstract utopia, emerged muted and couched in the exuberant baroque mannerisms of Tbke or in the censorship-eluding slave language of mythological or biblical imagery. In works such as Mattheuers Die Flucht des Sisyphos (The Flight of Sisyphus, 1972) and Kain (Cain, 1965), as in Mllers plays Philoktet (1958, 1964) and Herakles 5 (1964, 1966), myth and parable functioned as subliminal critique in a system of state censorship, whereas they would be merely escapist in a society where no such strictures on critical expression exist. It is not a coincidence that in Eastern Europe Kafka was read as a critic of bureaucratic socialism, whereas in the West he was read as representing universal existential alienation.

In West Germany, the Eichmann and Auschwitz trials (1961 and 196365, respectively) triggered the postwar generations confrontation with the Nazi past of their parents as well as many representatives of the political and indus-trial elites. However, attacks on patriarchy and oedipal power structures in the German family and the state took precedence over concerns with the victims of the genocide. This was the dimension of the generational revolt shared with what has become known globally as 1968. In literature, as well as in intel-lectual life in general, this confrontation resulted in a radical critique of the present, often subjectively shrill and provocatively expressive, as in Baselitzs disfigured and monstrously mutilated bodies of fathers and sons or Rolf Dieter Brinkmanns Beat-inspired protest writings. Sometimes this critique was deliv-ered in a more objective form, as in Richters photo-paintings (Onkel Rudi [Uncle Rudi], 1965) or in the documentary plays by Rolf Hochhuth, Peter Weiss, and Heinar Kipphardt. Nevertheless, overall political engagement in the FRG was much more limited in the visual arts than in literature at a time when social theory, sociology, and political thought had become the dominant dis-courses in intellectual life.

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In the political debates of the mid- to late 1960s and their radical critique of all aesthetics as bourgeois and escapist, too many on the West German left, outraged by revelations of former Nazis in key positions of government and eager to prove their antifascism, embraced the GDR-sponsored notion that the FRG was a protofascistic state. This view was grounded in a Marxist analysis of Western democracy and a one-dimensional understanding of liberalism as repressive tolerance.6 The death factories were said to represent the logic of capitalist exploitation driven to extremes. Legitimate outrage about the Viet-nam War led to a reductive identification of U.S. capitalism with fascisma political internationalization of the German past that gave protesters a kind of belated, part genuine, part deluded antifascism. As in the 1950s, the Holo-caust remained a cipher to be mobilized for political purposes: no wonder that it didnt figure in visual representations at the time. Early neoexpressionists such as Baselitz and Lpertz, as well as (in a very different mode) Richter and Polke, took up Nazi imagery with critical intent, but Holocaust imagery itself remained absent from their work. Kiefer, in a few of his paintings, remained the exception. To attribute this absence to some deeper understanding of a Bil-derverbot would be giving too much credit to the artists; their work was by and large in tune with the Zeitgeist.

Radicalism in the visual arts in the 1960s did not even manifest itself primarily in painting. There were the radical happenings and performances of the transatlantic Fluxus movement, but apart from the happening in Aachen on July 20, 1964, that took place on the twentieth anniversary of the failed Wehr-macht plot against Hitler (and that ended in a ruckus with Beuys getting his nose bloodied), Fluxus did not focus on the politics of German memory and history. Neither did Beuyss very biographically vested memory work of those years, which, apart perhaps from his Auschwitz Demonstration, was good for controversial happenings, but lacked the hard edge of Vostells political dcol-lage, Immendorffs early paintings, and Hans Haackes installations. No won-der Beuys became central to what the curator Harald Szeeman later called individual mythology at documenta 5 in 1972.

There was a consensus among artists of the 1960s on the need to reject abstraction and informel as sterile and obsolete, but not much beyond that. This rejection could take the rather idealist forms of the aesthetically stunning light works of the Zero Group (Otto Piene, Heinz Mack, Gnther Uecker) in the early 1960s, which were so central to documenta 3 in 1964. This work stepped

6. See Herbert Marcuse, Repressive Tolerance, in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 81123.

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decisively out of the shadows of the German past, embracing the youthful upsurge of the Kennedy years before the escalation in Vietnam and the mount-ing violence of the later 1960s. When it came to documenta 4 in 1968, the focus on pop and op art, minimalism, and color-field painting seemed strangely out of touch with the Zeitgeist, which had migrated into political theory, sociol-ogy, and a radical critique of consumer culture. The protests of the later 1960s took aim at Cold War anticommunism, the Vietnam War, colonialism, and the perceived danger of a revived Nazism in West Germany. The political pop ico-nography of Thomas Bayrle tackled the Cold War, but his focus on China was international and did not address the national division of Germany.

Political happenings were the order of the day, but the radical Left in West Germany had become increasingly antiaesthetic and condemned even the progressive visual arts as elitist and bourgeois. Except for a few events like the 1967 Berlin multiartist show Hommage Lidice (Lidice was the Czech village razed, all its inhabitants murdered, in revenge for the partisan killing of a major Nazi figure), direct political interventions by visual artists were rare. Vostell, Haacke, and a few others were the exceptions. Much art, East and West, remained oblivious to the mounting political protests and the radical ques-tioning of ossified aesthetic categories in the international scene of happen-ings, minimalism, and conceptualism. At the same time, the borders between East and West became porous during the 1970s as a result of treaties between the GDR and the FRG. Especially after the songwriter Wolf Biermanns forced expatriation from the GDR in 1976 on a concert tour in West Germany, and the renewed cultural repression in East Germany, a wave of artists, writers, and theater directors and actors left the GDR for the West, giving a fresh impetus to the West German cultural scene.

The Rise of a Public Memorial CultureBy the 1980s Holocaust memory entered the public sphere in broader ways, articulated in local and regional oral history projects, in the rise of witness literature, and especially in film and television. This development was cru-cial in creating a much larger public memory sphere than the one generated in the 1970s by Weisss plays, Vostells assemblages, or Kiefers paintings. Films and television series about the Holocaust and the Third Reich in com-bination with key historical anniversaries reached mass audiences and created a long-lasting public memory boom with all its repetitions, rituals of Betrof-fenheit (shock, dismay, concern), claims about breaking taboos (such as Hel-mut Kohl and Ronald Reagans controversial meeting at the Bitburg ceme-tery, which includes graves of Nazi Schutzstaffel, or SS officers), Freudian

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7. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).

slips, and controversies about how to speak and write about the past (such as the politician Philipp Jenningers speech mimicking the convictions of nor-mal Germans in the 1930s). The Holocaust took center stage in all public dis-cussion about the Nazi past. This memorial obsession in turn can be seen as the discursive ground for the wave of what James E. Young has called counter-monuments, the work of artists such as Jochen and Esther Gerz, Horst Hohei-sel, Alfred Hrdlicka, and Norbert Radermacher.7

By comparison, the deep concern with the German past faded from the more traditional enterprises of the visual arts such as painting or drawing. It was not Kiefer but Polke, a painter very much focused on media images, who was influential with the next generation of painters. A few younger artists such as Martin Kippenberger (Ich kann beim besten Willen kein Hakenkreuz entdecken [I Cant for the Life of Me Find a Swastika], 1984) or Albert Oehlen (Fhrerhauptquartier [The Fhrers Headquarters], 1982) revealed what they saw as the artificiality and mise-en-scne not just of older painters like Lpertz, Immendorff, and Kiefer but of public memorial culture in general, which, to them, fostered yet another kind of forgetting. But the intensity of their cri-tique seems significantly scaled down in comparison with that of the previous generations.

Holocaust memorial culture became increasingly international in the 1990s, resulting in several spectacular museum projects, such as the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, and Daniel Libeskinds Jewish Museum in Ber-lin. The Holocaust became a museal enterprise to the extent that the generation that experienced and witnessed it has faded, and younger generations know the Holocaust only second- and thirdhand, through images, films, and docu-ments. A transnational memory culture emerged that focused so much on the past that any future imagination withered away. Architecture, as opposed to sculpture, became the preferred medium of Holocaust and other memorials to trauma across the world. This is true for the American architect Peter Eisenmans Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, as well as for Michael Arad and Peter Walkers plans for the September 11 memorial site in New York. The rationale for this shift from sculpture to architecture is com-plex, but it certainly points to the limited possibilities of traditional or modern-ist sculpture as medium and site of public commemoration.

At the same time, these museums and memorials brought with them the danger of another kind of forgetting in this new and ritualized memorial

New German Critique



culture. If consolation and cultural reconstruction at the national level were achieved in 1940s Germany by celebrating the classical heritage in both East and West and evading the question of the Holocaust, then the risk today is that of another kind of consolation through comforting moralizing and com-memoration rituals. It seems to me that in different ways the work of Immen-dorff (despite its activist machismo), Baselitz (despite its adolescent oedipal anger), Kiefer (despite its seduction by the monumental and its sly insistence on artistic genius), and Richter (despite its abstinence from politics) all contrib-uted to a serious confrontation with Germanys past and present and achieved international resonance in this way. These artists know that there is more than one coherent narrative of national history or national art history. That is their legacy to the twenty-first century, to yet another generation of painters such as Neo Rauch and Daniel Richter. The older artists of the first genuinely postwar generation achieved in painting what the countermonuments achieved by problematizing the traditional medium of the monument. In the end, how-ever, neither painting nor monument can solve the ultimate aporia of all mem-ory work in our time: the fact that the disasters of the past cannot be undone and continue to haunt our imagination.

Coda: Post-1989When museums and curators began to compare East and West German art after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the unification resulted in something like a last fling of Cold War cultural politics. All the long-held Western prejudices against East German state painters flourished in public, and the thesis of a second German guilt colored all collaborations by artists and intellectuals with the Stasi. At stake again, as in 1945, was the issue of an inner emigra-tion and its political compromises. The Western media had come to expect active and public dissidence from East European artists. Writers such as Wolf and Mller had been celebrated in the West as real dissidents. This ignored the complex mix of adjustment and resistance in artists relationship to the state and its cultural apparatus, clearly different from the Nazi period as well as from dissidence in the Soviet Union and other East European countries. Once unification was achieved, the accusation of collaboration came down hard on those same dissidents who now counted as official representatives of GDR literature and art. This revisionist view affected Wolf and Mller in literature as much as Tbke, Heisig, and Mattheuer in painting, except that the attacks on the writers preceded the attacks on the painters by about a decade.

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Yet there was a difference. The degree of separation of East from West German literature had never been as thorough as that in the visual arts. East German authors could be published in West Germany and vice versa; in the visual arts, there was no such direct contact and exchange. West German art was like a black box in the East. The West German art scene, for its part, sim-ply ignored developments in the East, and museums, galleries, collectors, and the media, with few exceptions, shunned East German art. The East German contribution to German art seemed limited to those good artists who had relocated westward and moved to West Berlin or to the FRG: Uecker, Richter, Polke, Baselitz, Penck. It was only once Germany was unified that juxtaposi-tions in the visual arts came to be of interest. But every exhibition of East Ger-man art in the 1990s and beyond triggered an image war between West and East. The high point of denunciation was reached with the 1999 exhibition Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne (Rise and Fall of Modernism) that took place at the Schlossmuseum and other sites in Weimar and that combined Nazi art from Hitlers collection with art from the GDRsuggesting that art under totalitarianism equals totalitarian art. Largely because of tight hanging and overcrowding, many saw the show as analogous in gesture to Entartete Kunst. The counterpoint to this reductively politicized exhibition strategy was Kunst in der DDR (Art in the GDR) in Berlins Neue Nationalgalerie (2003), which avoided politics altogether, depriving the exhibited works and their viewers of necessary context. The show, which included no official socialist-realist paint-ings at all, was roundly criticized for evading the critical questions of the rela-tionship between art and the state and aiming at the illusion of a purely aes-thetic realm. Neither exhibition strategy did justice to its material. Both fell seriously behind the level of aesthetic and artistic complexity already reached in the 1930s debates on modernism as realism. Perhaps only a non-German museum could undertake the task of staging a show that makes genuine com-parison possible for the first time. Indeed, it may be resonant that such a show was conceived and realized in Los Angeles, temporary home to German exiles who had first explored the dark side of modernity and of modernism.

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german painting in the cold war

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