Gerard Richter's Birkenau paintings, on display in Oświęcim. Photo: Dominik Smolarek
At the opening last week of a new exhibition hall in the Polish city of Oświęcim, a curious crowd of visitors seemed impressed by the purpose-built architectural structure: a minimalist, Aldo Rossi-esque building that feels more like a tomb than a gallery. Initially, however, they remained more skeptical about the artworks inside. "Is it a painting or not?", some people asked each other. 'Look closely. Can you see what it's made of?'
Darkness is the essence of German artist Gerhard Richter's Birkenau cycle, perhaps the most important work of art by one of the most influential contemporary artists. It's hard to see beyond the surface of these four 260 x 200 cm images, which the artist covered with thick layers of paint that were then scratched away, reapplied and scratched away again with a squeegee, before being cloaked in black , gray, green and red. You can stand in front of it for hours before you start to make out the more figurative paintings beneath the abstraction, depicting various naked bodies, some of them lifeless.
The donation of the Birkenau bicycle to the International Youth Meeting Center in Oświęcim is a sensation. Not only because of Richter's status and because his works are sold for tens of millions of euros, but because Oświęcim is located next to the site of the former Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. It was at the Auschwitz-II extermination camp on the other side of the tracks in Brzezinka (Birkenau) that the four photographs on which the paintings are based were secretly taken by members of the Sonderkommando - mainly Jewish prisoners who had to handle the corpses. of prisoners killed in gas chambers.
The photos, which show naked women being chased through the forest to the gas chambers and bodies being burned in the open air, were smuggled out in a tube of toothpaste by members of the Polish resistance. They are still the only photographs taken by prisoners of the atrocities in the concentration camp.
The story continues
Richter first discovered them in the 1960s and was struck by the fact that some could initially be seen as benign photographs of the forest. The need to look deeper was the driving force behind the way he decided to deal with the Birkenau photographs, not by repainting the content, but by blurring it. Only by covering up the unthinkable did Richter manage to make the horror present.
The original version of the cycle, completed in 2014, has been on display at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin since March last year. The idea to bring a print to Oświęcim came from Christoph Heubner, a long-time member of the Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste ("Action Reconciliation Service for Peace"), a German organization dedicated to combating the crimes of Nazism.
"Richter's photos hit home in a way," says Heubner. "It's a tribute to the prisoners who took the photos. He tried to repaint the pictures in his own tradition and soon realized that this was not possible. These photos are unique, so he intended the cycle as a requiem for those who took the photos."
Approval of the Birkenau cycle is not universal: the images have been described by some critics as 'manipulative', 'obscene' or even as a glorification of the Holocaust. Even their production method invites discussion.
The edition in the custom-made pavilion does not consist of oil paintings, but of prints on metal plate. Richter, rejecting the idea of uniqueness and originality, published an edition of three, one of which now hangs in the hall of the Reichstag in Berlin. The oil version remains the property of the Richter Foundation, where the artist keeps the works that he does not want to circulate on the art market. Does it matter that Richter donated the prints and not the "originals"?
"For me this is more of a kind of compulsion to repeat," says art historian Katarzyna Bojarska. "The artist reproduces his gesture and shares it with numerous sites and subjects." Whether this amounts to an act of generosity or a kind of complacency, she says, is up for debate.
Richter has spoken of his struggle to fully understand the Sonderkommando photos that hung on his walls for years. That inability to understand its meaning showed an intellectual honesty that Bojarska said he appreciated in the artist. By contrast, translating painting into photocopies and exporting it from Germany to Oświęcim suggests a confidence in German memory culture that some believe is misplaced. The Remembrance culture van Richter's native country, while widely praised in the past, has been discussed more critically since the beginning of the current conflict in the Middle East.
It is a testament to the power of the Richter cycle that it works despite such reservations. A tall tree looks into the glass ceiling from outside and connects the paintings with the historic site. The interior of the exhibition hall is dimly lit in a way that makes distinguishing the contents of the life-size prints even more difficult. Copies of the four Sonderkommando photographs hang next to the paintings, and opposite the prints is a huge grayscale glass mirror that reflects the crowd of locals, journalists and art lovers, capturing them between the past and the present.
The reason to go to the Auschwitz Memorial is to look into your own life
The mirror is significant, as there was none at the Auschwitz death camp. Except for catching glimpses of themselves through windows, prisoners did not see themselves for months. "The reason to go to the Auschwitz Memorial is to look into your own life," says Heubner. "For me, this is also what the Richter cycle wants to evoke."
"What we see is not Birkenau or paintings, but ourselves, forced to think about what I would do in the place of the prisoners, how I would behave," says Marian Turski, the president of the International Auschwitz Committee, who himself survived the camp and the 1944 war. death march to Wodzisław Śląski.
According to him, the worst part of being in the camp was not the physical torture, but the loss of dignity: "The part that no one who wasn't there can imagine is the dehumanization. I don't think naturalistic painting is impressive enough to tell the story of the Shoah. For me they are like documentation, like photographs, which were forbidden in the camp. The only art that came close was not realistic, but conceptual, where we are forced to think."
The fact that Richter, a German artist, should be given such a place of honor close to the site of Auschwitz might arouse some skeptical instincts, as might the fact that the pavilion's construction was financed by German car manufacturer Volkswagen, a company with his own dark past as a provider of Nazi infrastructure.
"What strikes me is that it is a local project, involving the city of Oświęcim on an equal footing with the German side," says Zofia Wóycicka, a sociologist and historian of changing memories of the Holocaust. "The Germans don't just come here with their money. Given Germany's role in the crimes of World War II, some might argue that projects like these are their duty - some even say Germany doesn't do it enough." Significantly, it is at the International Youth Meeting Center and not at the camp, she says.
On my walk from Auschwitz to the center, I pass several schools with groups of students hanging around after classes, cursing loudly and smoking cigarettes, which in the face of those around them seems like an act of defiance. Reconciling everyday normality with the monstrous events that took place here has always been the reality of Oświecim. With this latest gift from history, the city has received a new layer of contrasts. History continues, and perhaps nowhere else is its importance greater than here.