Deutsches Historisches Museum - Verf�hrung Freiheit. Kunst in Europa seit 1945 - Blog

A Wednesday morning at the German Historical Museum: The exhibition is open to the public since last night and we are only interested in one thing—the response in the press. The computers in the project offices are quicker than usual, the Google Alerts are already in the mail boxes, and the outside world’s digital evaluation is quickly consumed. There is no audio record of events, but our responses reflected a wide range of emotions. 

The Tagesspiegel titled its article, ‘The Lonely Self’, adding ‘Postwar history as seen by art’. Editor Bernhard Schulz asks, as did his colleague from Die Zeit, ‘What led a history museum to stage an exhibition based exclusively on artworks?' Schulz found the museum’s approach ‘fascinating’: The Council of Europe exhibition attempts to ‘reinterpret Europe’s postwar history, presenting a history based in a continuing Enlightenment, rather than a history of the ideological confrontation between the power blocs.’ For Schulz, a highpoint of the exhibition was the 11th Chapter, ‘Self Experience: Testing the Limits’, which, in his opinion, addresses the ‘meaning and objective of freedom’ through ‘experiencing and asserting the own self’. His conclusion: the exhibition is ‘apolitical in a touching way, because it refuses to focus on the concrete conditions during at least six decades of postwar history under which the exhibited artworks were created.’

The radio station Kulturradio des rbb finds it appropriate that a large exhibition in Berlin asks what the actual status of the ideas of ‘freedom’ and European peace is, in the face of the recent awarding of the Noble Peace Prize to the European Union. In the print edition of the segment, editor Anke Schäfer, however, begins by asking: ‘Does the exhibition actually show something?’ She is critical of what she saw in the rooms, but immediately qualified her statement: Although there are ‘surprising references and astounding interconnections’, the artworks came across ‘as if they were being sold off in a curiosity cabinet at a fair’.

The Deutschlandradio cultural broadcast led with: ‘Artworks that speak for themselves’. Editor Carsten Probst associated the exhibition in the lower level of the Pei Building with a ‘huge picture cabinet’ and feared that unprepared visitors might be ‘disturbed’ by the ‘great confusion of works by well-known European artists from the postwar period’. Nonetheless, Probst’s conclusion remained positive: The positions on display presented ‘a multi-voiced perception of the two-edged phenomenon of so-called ‘freedom’ and the ‘images in their multiplicity suddenly merge with each other, like in a kaleidoscope’.

Die Zeit titled its article ‘Everything is Art’, adding ‘A Grand Conception—botched: the Desire for Freedom exhibition in the German Historical Museum in Berlin aims to explain the 20th century’. According to editor Sebastian Preuss, ‘the exhibition’s levelling approach’ turns Europe into a ‘single, uninterrupted artistic landscape’. He goes into the fate of the artist Lenke Rothman (represented only in the catalogue) and her Retroactive Drawings (1956). In her drawings, the artist deals with her experiences in Auschwitz. The sketch-like pages mirror the healing process as well as the resistance to forgetting. The editor uses this work to underscore his conclusion: ‘Art can do all of this, but do we need a historical museum to present it?’