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Gerhard Richter was born on February , , at the fateful moment in which the NSDAP consolidated its electoral victories at the end of the Weimar Republic. His mother, Hildegard, enjoyed music and literature, while his father, Horst, pursued a career as a teacher. In 1936, after a period of unemployment, his father took a teaching job in the small town of Reichenau, near the Czech border, moving the family away from their home in the cultured metropolis of Dresden. With the National Socialists in power since 1933, Horst had to become a member of the party to retain his job, although it appears that he was never really a true believer. In 1942, Gerhard himself joined the Pimpfe, a branch of the Hitler Youth for boys younger than fourteen. By this time, his father had already served three years in the military, and the family rarely saw him. In 1943, Hildegard was forced to move to the even smaller town of Waltersdorf, where they sold the piano to get by and waited for the war to end. Their town became part of the Soviet Zone in May 1945 and then, subsequently, the German Democratic Republic with the division of Germany in 1949. Meanwhile, Horst came home in 1946 after the American military authorities released him from custody. Officials in the Soviet Zone did not let him return to teaching, a job forbidden to anyone who had been a member of the Nazi Party. After a period of unemployment, he found a job as an unskilled worker in a textile factory. Given these events, Richter experienced firsthand the influence of the party’s disastrous politics on his life both before and after the war. Like so many of his generation , the continuity between the Nazi past and the postwar present was personal.1 47 2 GERHARD RICHTER AND THE ADVENT OF THE NAZI PAST THE PERSISTENCE OF THE PERPETRATOR As Susanne Küper was the first to argue, Richter deeply impressed his personal biography and that of his family on a few of his paintings that reference their actions and fate under National Socialism. Küper takes up the two key paintings Uncle Rudi (Figure 2.1) and Aunt Marianne (Figure 2.2), made in 1965 after the artist had immigrated to West Germany. For Richter, each of these works had a direct biographical connection to the Nazi past that was both revealed but also suppressed in the seemingly banal black-and-white family photos used as sources.2 Richter painted his maternal uncle Rudi smiling and posing in his army lieutenant’s uniform. He was killed in battle on the second day of the 1944 invasion of Normandy, and Hildegard Richter’s family often mentioned him as a model whom the young nephew should emulate. Against this commonplace soldier’s photo that belies the brutality of participation in the National Socialist military drive, the painting of his maternal aunt Marianne (with baby Gerhard) seems more private, less problematic. But Marianne also had a relation to the Nazi past: suffering from schizophrenia, she was placed in a mental institution in 1938 and died there during the war on February 16, 1945, reportedly of natural causes. It seems that the family did not ask but was aware of the many patients with mental illness whom Nazi doctors were killing in the euthanasia program, an important step toward the full-scale genocide of the European Jews. Jürgen Schreiber, working with Richter, has written an account of these biographical connections, including how his aunt was sterilized in the clinic before being murdered. However, with another turn of the screw, Schreiber discovered that Richter’s first fatherin -law, Heinrich Eufinger, had been a doctor active in the sterilization program . His in-laws had told the artist that Eufinger was “only” an honorary member of the SS who treated the wives of prominent officials such as Goebbels.3 With Uncle Rudi and Aunt Marianne, willing Nazi participant and innocent victim existed in the same family, each of whom had a history exposed and yet flattened out or obscured by the seeming neutrality and banality of the family photo. Art historians have tended to see these paintings as anomalous disruptions of Richter’s broader artistic agenda to explore the status of representation . For one brief moment, the repressed Nazi past hovered just out of focus, threatening to break through the silence imposed on society by postwar Germans in the Federal Republic...

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