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

Our curator Monika Flacke talks about the thinking behind the third room’s title:

"The ‘Journey into Wonderland’ draws on the preceding exhibitions titled Myths of the Nations. The title for this exhibition was chosen after much thought and is intended to be provocative. We put forward the bold assumption that once the historical narrative becomes dependent on memories, it transformed into a land of wonders.

To help you understand this chapter, I will attempt to provide a historical context for the constructions of history. Most of the works in this chapter have to do with remembrance. Almost all of the artists ask about the identity of the perpetrators in the Second World War and how they were remembered after 1945. These artists mistrust memory. They notice that a majority of the Germans—the initiators of the War—denied their guilt, thought of themselves as having been seduced or innocent, or excluded themselves from any responsibility as ‘anti-fascist resistance fighters’ in East Germany.

There was indeed a discussion about responsibility in West Germany from the beginning, but it was long led by a minority. Although films like Murderers Among Us were known and The Diary of Anne Frank appeared in 1950, the historical debate first began to change with the Auschwitz Trial in Frankfurt on 20 December 1963, which marked a new direction in the discussion about National Socialism. Today we speak of dealing with the past. Art not only accompanied this acknowledgement, but also led to it.

The film Murderers Among Us is an early example that I highly recommend watching. In the fine arts, Uncle Rudi by Gerhard Richter, from 1965, can be considered a landmark, although the question raised by the picture would first be addressed some 30 years later, in the discourse on remembrance. This painting was shown at an exhibition organised in 1967 by the Berlin gallerist René Block. He had asked 21 artists to each contribute a work to the exhibition Hommage à Lidice. Anselm Kiefer was also among the participants, as well as Joseph Beuys, Dieter Roth, Wolf Vostell, Günther Uecker, and Gotthard Graubner. The exhibited works were later given to the Lidice Musuem in Prague.

Gerhard Richter shows not only the blurred figure of his uncle—his Uncle Rudi—standing there in his Wehrmacht uniform; his painting also touches on a problem that previously had not been discussed in West Germany—that the Wehrmacht—which at the time was generally viewed as an upstanding army—was or could have been involved in mass murders. This meant not only that members of the Wehrmacht might be mass murders; it also meant the mass murderer could be our uncle—the brother of the father or mother—and therefore a member of our family. This understanding was first discussed openly in 1995 with the exhibition War of Extermination: The Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941–44. Thirty years had passed.

You see, history is a wonderland, and artists contribute to the construction or deconstruction of these wonderlands."