German Painting in The Cold War

New German Critique
German Painting in the Cold War

Andreas Huyssen
Modernism and the Postwar

In 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 unsentimental indictments of the constitutive role that violence, sacrifice, and repression have played in Western modernity. Nazism appears here not as the outbreak 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 modernist arts, but Thomas Mann, a fellow exile in California, acknowledged the
umbilical cord that tied modernism itself to the dark side of modernity. Mann
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 Cultures (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.
New German Critique 110, Vol. 37, No. 2, Summer 2010
DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2010-011 2010 by New German Critique, Inc.
209
Published by Duke University Press
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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 compositions 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 antagonist 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 Western 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 imagination 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 German national character and left behind by the triumph of classical modernism
from Paul Czanne via the cubists to abstract expressionism. The starkly antibourgeois photomontages of Berlins revolutionary avant-garde were simply 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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Andreas Huyssen 211
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 articulation 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 German art offers a compelling case study of the modern crisis of representation, 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 responsibility 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, mutilations 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 collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the subsequent unification 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 exhibition 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 aggression 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. Achievements, 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 Null
One 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 outside 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. Developments 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 apocalyptic 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 Western Front or the story of Franz Biberkopf in Dblins metropolitan novel Berlin 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, uninventive, 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 occupation imposed a prohibition on photography, or Hans Grundigs moving allegorical tribute to concentration camp victims (replete with the Star of David),
a subject rarely addressed at the time anywhere in Germany. Only Lea Grundig, 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 spectacles 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 democratic 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 bordering 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 Altenbourg, who titled his drawing of the dying warrior Ecce Homo. In paintings of
war and urban ruins, demons and skeletons abound, reminiscent of the imagery of the medieval dance of the dead (Karl Hofer, Totentanz [Dance of the
Dead]). The visual language deployed emphasized existential human suffering, universal lament, and melancholy in derivative expressionist forms.
Adornos notorious and often-misunderstood statement about the barbarity 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 represent 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 separating art and culture from politics. But the latter is precisely what happened.
Especially in the West, frequent exhibitions of the Weimar artists Ernst Barlach 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 transfiguration 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 legacy of Germany celebrated on both sides of the iron curtain for the bicentennial of Goethes birth in 1949, American abstraction and Parisian art informel
became dominant in the West; socialist realism, with its antimodernist Lukcsian 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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Andreas Huyssen 215
and Ilse Aichinger, and a Kafkaesque placelessness and timelessness took over
in Hermann Kasacks City beyond the River (1947; trans. 1953). By the mid1950s 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 universal 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 Wolfgang 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 formally 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. Economic miracle and socialist reconstruction blocked traumatic memories and
genuine mourning on both sides of the iron curtain.
Cold War Oppositions
During the same period, the rediscovery of modernism and abstraction
codified by the first two documenta shows in 1955 and 1959helped West
German culture move beyond the muck of nationalist and fascist image traditions 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 Jackson 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 classical modernisms ethnographic gaze at the primitive with an uncritical celebration of the archaic and prehistorical, their work approached escapism in relation 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 archetypical 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 German 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 similarities 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 eastern bloc. The influential Lukcsian insistence on realism and mimesis in the
East was plausible as a strategy against Nazi imagery, but in its dogmatic rejection 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 Dresden 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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Andreas Huyssen 217
Novels on both sides occasionally feature excursions of their protagonists 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 nationalism held sway on both sides of the Wall. And until the 1970s the iron curtain and the Wall effectively kept East and West apart, while memories of the
pastconscious, repressed, or unconsciouspointed to certain commonalities. At the same time, the Cold War division of the country was like an invisible 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 Holocaust. In retrospect, the absence of the Holocaust victims from artistic productions at the timeand well into the 1970sis stunning. Wolf Vostells 1958
assemblages of found objects (Auschwitz-Scheinwerfer 568 [Auschwitz Floodlight 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 understood acknowledgment of collective symbolic guilt. This changed substantively 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 Dialectics (1966) Adorno retracted what had been widely viewed as his earlier prohibition 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 figurative 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 representation may lead to new forms of forgetting and invisibility.
The 1960s as a Turning Point
Representations of the Holocaust emerged very slowly in the arts of both Germanys. 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 systematic murder of European Jewry was publicly acknowledged in both Germanies 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 documentary 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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Andreas Huyssen 219
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 during 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 Moscows 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 antifascism 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 intergenerational 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 powerful 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 publication 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 generation 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 Arts
The 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 legacies 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 realism in the writings of Georg Lukcs, whose authority determined the doctrine of socialist realism in the postwar GDR until the mid-1950s. The counterposition 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 (London: New Left Books, 1977).
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As the radical Cold War opposition between abstraction and realism began to wane in the 1960s, a few German artists took up the real history 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 abstraction and informel. Their pictorial strategies included the expressive and distorted 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 architecture 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 intentions, 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.
New German Critique
In the GDR the new Leipzig school of painters of the mid-1960s increasingly abandoned the idealizing genre painting of socialist reconstruction, turning 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 (Wolfgang 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, combined 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 industrial 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 intellectual 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 delivered 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 discourses in intellectual life.
New German Critique
Andreas Huyssen 223
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 Vietnam 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 Holocaust 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 dcollage, Immendorffs early paintings, and Hans Haackes installations. No wonder 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.
New German Critique
decisively out of the shadows of the German past, embracing the youthful
upsurge of the Kennedy years before the escalation in Vietnam and the mounting 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, sociology, 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 iconography 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 questioning of ossified aesthetic categories in the international scene of happenings, 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 Culture
By 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 crucial 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 combination with key historical anniversaries reached mass audiences and created
a long-lasting public memory boom with all its repetitions, rituals of Betroffenheit (shock, dismay, concern), claims about breaking taboos (such as Hel
mut Kohl and Ronald Reagans controversial meeting at the Bitburg cemetery, which includes graves of Nazi Schutzstaffel, or SS officers), Freudian
New German Critique
Andreas Huyssen 225
slips, and controversies about how to speak and write about the past (such as
the politician Philipp Jenningers speech mimicking the convictions of normal Germans in the 1930s). The Holocaust took center stage in all public discussion 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 countermonuments, the work of artists such as Jochen and Esther Gerz, Horst Hoheisel, 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 critique 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 Berlin. 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 documents. 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 complex, but it certainly points to the limited possibilities of traditional or modernist 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
7. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1993).
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 commemoration rituals. It seems to me that in different ways the work of Immendorff (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 contributed 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, however, neither painting nor monument can solve the ultimate aporia of all memory work in our time: the fact that the disasters of the past cannot be undone
and continue to haunt our imagination.
Coda: Post-1989
When 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 emigration 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.
New German Critique
Andreas Huyssen 227
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, simply 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 juxtapositions in the visual arts came to be of interest. But every exhibition of East German 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 paintings at all, was roundly criticized for evading the critical questions of the relationship between art and the state and aiming at the illusion of a purely aesthetic 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 comparison 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.

German Painting in The Cold War

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New German Critique