Gerhard Richter and Adolf Eichmann

It is an art-historical truth almost universally acknowledged that, with few exceptions, the Nazi past remained a taboo topic in the immediate postwar period either for discussion or as an artistic theme in West Germany. While this taboo appears to have been fundamentally shattered (particularly in the late 1970s by Anselm Kiefer and others), the occasional earlier works by artists such as Wolf Vostell or Joseph Beuys that thematised the National Socialist past occur in art history (if at all) as isolated phenomena that are out of sync with the public silence on National Socialism in general and the destruction of the European Jews in specific. A typical example would be an article from the late Stefan Germer, one of the most careful critics of the philosophical and aesthetic implications of Gerhard Richter and other artists of the postwar generation: ‘[Richter] encounters history within the materials that he uses for his pictures. He discovers the historical in the sites into which one had displaced it after the end of the Third Reich. What had disappeared from the public sphere has kept its place in the private [world], in the photo albums and memories of war’.1 Whereas Germer argued that the historical experience of National Socialist Germany is still a burning theme for artists like Richter, he asserted in addition that the power of such avant-garde artists was their occasional attempts to break the silence over the Nazi past, which reigned as a contemporary social condition for their work. Or, as Benjamin Buchloh put it, ‘Richter, as a subject of the postwar period, would now have to rephrase this very question, namely, whether it could even be possible to conceive mnemonic images at the moment of the most violent, collectively enacted repression of history ...’.2

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · German · Literature · Nazi Germany · Nazism · Period (music) · Political science · Power (physics) · Silence · Taboo · Theme (computing) · German History and Society · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration

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