The Holocaust Within the Artistic Postwar German Society

Holocaust survivor and esteemed writer, Primo Levi, defines “Memory of Offense” as the memory of a wound that can never heal, and which permanently cements the perpetrator and the victim in their roles as such. Levi believes that in the case of the Holocaust, it is imperative that both the perpetrator and the victim preserve the memory; however, during the first twenty years of the Federal Republic, West Germans were not encouraged to confront the events of their recent past.

Postwar German society, stripped and dismantled, was powerless and afflicted with what Theodor Adorno describes as a “damaged collective narcissism.” (Biro) In West Berlin, artists studied with tachistes and informel painters to create an international, neutral mode of abstraction. (Foster) George Baselitz and other German painters rejected this international neutrality and instead attempted to continue the pre-Weimar painterly practices and establish an unbroken link through the German cultural tradition. (Foster) However, this continuity belied the historical destruction of the Nazi era, which led artists like Gerhard Richter to champion post-traditional formations of national identity in painting.

Both Gerhard Richter, during the immediate postwar period, and Anselm Kiefer, during the second-generation postwar period, attempted the project of renationalizing cultural production. Richter’s work probes the question of when and whether the Holocaust can be subject of visual culture. Kiefer’s work confronts his country’s history, inherited through visual representations and verbal and written accounts, and its tense relationship with his generation.

Richter and Kiefer recognized the need to confront Germany’s past, and their art reflects this through formal content and conceptual and stylistic reflections. Richter’s use of photography and his photo-painting technique present his ambiguous sense of perception and memory, whereas Kiefer expresses an ambiguously bipartisan confrontation with traditional German and Nazi imagery. The two artists attack the Holocaust legacy in Germany from disparate angles, with distinct generational concerns motivating their works, yet both confront the themes of visual culture and historical memory, and express the prevailing ambiguity and uncertainty in German postwar society and identity.

Richter was born in Dresden in 1932 and he studied at the Dresden Art Academy in Communist East Germany. Just prior to the erection of the Berlin Wall, Richter and his wife fled to Dusseldorf in West Germany. Poised in the 1960s, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol strongly impacted Richter, and several critics compare Richter’s work to Warhol’s. Though the two do share some artistic concerns, unlike the Pop artists, Richter was not interested in critiquing consumerism; his interests were in the “everyday.” (Storr)