Judenmord: Art and the Holocaust in Post-war Germany by Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius (review)

This book was originally published in 2014 as Bilder zum Judenmord, and its translation into English happily opens it to a wider public. The author has retained a German term for killing Jews, with its clear linguistic associations, to underline that she deals with the reaction of first-and second-generation Germans – fascists, anti-fascists, the consenting public, and the Jewish victims – to the Holocaust during the twenty-five years after 1945, years of many twists and turns that were ignored in most discussions on the reaction to the Holocaust in German art.¹ This is a very important contribution to the entire problem of the Holocaust in art, and to the ways East and West Germany each uniquely and differently coped with their guilt.

The book is written from the point of view of a German art historian born in 1937 with a Christian and Jewish background, whose great-aunt died in Auschwitz because she was born a Jew. Hoffmann-Curtius grew up under the Nazis, labeled as being related to Jews. After liberation, the dramatic history of her family, anti-Nazism, and her experience of enduring antisemitism were ever-present topics in family discussions during her childhood in West Germany. She is an expert on German modern art and has published on monuments commemorating World War I and Holocaust memorials. She has written as a feminist on the German artistic treatment of women from the femme fatale to femicide (the murder of women, Frauenmord) and, once involved in the research for this book, on a comparison between the way cartoonists Art Spiegelman and Volker Reiche rendered memory and guilt in the second generation.² She is thus amply qualified to investigate her subject and presents much new material based on unpublished data from German archives as well as from those of the artists.

Judenmord is well written and thorough, with full credit given to the author’s sources in meticulous notes that also add relevant information to make the text richer and more comprehensible. The notes show that the author has unearthed new information not covered by the many recent books she quotes that have also researched part of the material she discusses. She treats this difficult subject sensitively, providing good pictorial analyses and interpretations, as well as the artistic, textual, and contemporary historical sources of the works and the new meanings the artists applied to them, and their reception in Germany. The importance of documentary photographs and films and their interactions with art are discussed throughout the book. From the beginning, she also makes clear that although art flourished after the war, West German art ignored the Holocaust and turned to abstract art that had been forbidden by the Nazis, whereas East German art, while focussing on heroic resistance and a bright future, did also deal with the Holocaust.

The discussion develops chronologically, starting with a “Prequel” that includes a German portrayal of Jews being burned from the 1493 Nuremburg Chronicle³ and early twentieth-century Jewish works inspired by pogroms. This narrative gives a clear view of the progress of the postwar reactions in both Germanys to the persecution and murder of Jews, as well as the complex historical and biographical contexts that shaped the artists’ approaches. Many of these artists are now forgotten, while others have claimed a place in art history. At first, they are divided between those who had been in the Wehrmacht or the Hitler Youth and those who had been in the camps or in hiding. Only one Nazi, Hanns Georgi, showed feelings of guilt in a 1946–1948 image where he is hounded by his victims, an image that would have benefited from comparison with George Grosz’s Cain of 1944.⁴

Sometimes artists are misplaced within this development. Thus Otto Pankok’s depictions of Jews from 1939–1945 would make more sense...