At the opening of a new exhibition hall in the Polish town of Oświęcim last week, a curious crowd of visitors seemed impressed with the purpose-built architectural structure: a minimalist, Aldo Rossi-like building that feels more like a tomb than a gallery. They initially remained more sceptical of the artworks inside, however. “Is it a painting or not?”, some people asked each other. “Take a closer look – can you make out what it’s made of?”
Obscurity is in the essence of German artist Gerhard Richter’s Birkenau cycle, arguably the single most important artwork by one of the most influential artists alive today. It is hard to look beyond the surface of these four 260 x 200cm pictures, which the artist covered with thick layers of paint that were then scratched off, reapplied and scratched off again multiple times with a squeegee, before veiling them in black, grey, green and red. You can stand in front of them for hours before you start to make out the more figurative paintings underneath the abstraction, depicting several naked bodies, some of them lifeless.
The donation of the Birkenau cycle to the International Youth Meeting Centre in Oświęcim is a sensation. Not just because of Richter’s status and because his works sell for dozens of millions of euros, but because Oświęcim lies next to the site of the former Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. It was in the Auschwitz-II death camp on the other side of the tracks in Brzezinka (Birkenau) that the four photographs the paintings are based on were covertly taken by members of the Sonderkommando – mostly Jewish prisoners who were made to deal with the corpses of prisoners killed in gas chambers.
The photographs, depicting naked women being rushed along the forest to the gas chambers and the burning of corpses in open air, were smuggled out in a toothpaste tube by members of Polish resistance. They remain the only pictures taken by prisoners of the concentration camp atrocities.
Richter first discovered them in the 1960s and was struck how some could be perceived at first as benign photos of the forest. The necessity to look deeper drove the way he decided to deal with the Birkenau pictures, not by repainting their content but by blurring it. Only by obscuring the unthinkable did Richter succeed in making the horror present.
The cycle’s original version, which was completed in 2014, has been on display at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie since last March. The idea to bring a print to Oświęcim came from Christoph Heubner, a long-standing member of the Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste (“Action Reconciliation Service for Peace”), a German organisation devoted to confronting the crimes of nazism.
“Richter’s pictures in a way are coming home,” Heubner says. “It’s a homage to the prisoners who made the photos. He tried in his own tradition to repaint the photographs and realised very quickly it was not possible. These photographs are unique, so he intended the cycle as a requiem to those who made the photographs.”
Approval of the Birkenau cycle is not universal: the pictures have been described by some critics as “manipulative”, “obscene”, or even of amounting to a glorification of the Holocaust. Even their method of production invites debate.
The edition inside the custom-made pavilion is not made up of oil paintings, but of prints on metal plate. Richter, who rejects the idea of uniqueness and originality, released an edition of three, one of which now hangs in the entrance hall of the Reichstag in Berlin. The oil version remains in the ownership of the Richter Foundation, where the artist keeps those of his works he doesn’t want to circulate on the art market. Does it matter that Richter donated the prints and not the “originals”?
“To me this rather is a kind of repetition compulsion,” 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 open to debate.
Richter has spoken of his struggles to fully understand the Sonderkommando pictures, which hung on his walls for years. That failure to comprehend their meaning spoke of an intellectual honesty that Bojarska says she appreciated in the artist. Translating painting to photographic copy and exporting it from Germany to Oświęcim, on the other hand, suggests a confidence in German remembrance culture that some might say is misplaced. The Erinnerungskultur of Richter’s native country, while widely lauded in the past, has been debated more critically since the start of the current conflict in the Middle East.
It’s a testimony to the power of Richter’s cycle that it works in spite of such reservations. A tall tree looks into the glass ceiling from outside, connecting the paintings to the historical site. The interior of the exhibition hall is dimly lit in a way that makes discerning the content of the lifesize prints even more difficult. Copies of the four Sonderkommando photographs hang alongside the paintings, and opposite the prints there is a huge grayscale glass mirror reflecting the crowd of locals, journalists and art lovers, catching them between the past and the present.
The reason to go to the Auschwitz Memorial is to look into one’s own life
The mirror is significant given that there were none inside the Auschwitz extermination camp. Other than by catching a glimpse of themselves in windows, prisoners did not see themselves for months. “The reason to go to the Auschwitz Memorial is to look into one’s own life”, says Heubner. “To me this is also what Richter’s cycle wants to evoke.”
“What we see is not Birkenau or paintings, but ourselves, forced to ponder what I would do in the prisoners’ place, how I would behave”, says Marian Turski, the president of International Auschwitz Committee who himself survived the camp and the 1944 death march to Wodzisław Śląski.
The worst thing about being in the camp, he says, was not the physical torture, but the stripping of dignity: “The part nobody who wasn’t there can imagine is the dehumanisation. I don’t think naturalist painting makes a sufficient impression to tell the story about the Shoah. To me they are like documentation, like photographs, which were forbidden in the camp. The only art which came close was not realistic, but conceptual, where we are forced to think.”
The fact that Richter, a German artist, should be granted such pride of place close to the Auschwitz site might awaken some sceptical instincts, as does the fact that the pavilion’s construction was financed by German carmaker Volkswagen, a company with its own dark past as a provider of Nazi infrastructure.
“What strikes me is that it’s a local project, where the City of Oświęcim is engaged on equal footing to the German side”, says Zofia Wóycicka, a sociologist and historian of changing memories of the Holocaust. “The Germans are not simply coming here with their money. Given Germany’s role in the crimes of the second world war, some might argue that projects like these are their obligation – some even say that Germany isn’t doing it enough.” Significantly, it’s on the International Youth Meeting Centre and not the camp, she says.
On my walk from Auschwitz to the centre I pass by several schools with groups of pupils hanging out after finished lessons, swearing loudly and smoking cigarettes, which seems like an act of defiance in the face of their surroundings. Reconciling everyday normality with the monstrous events that took place here has always been Oświecim’s reality. With this latest gift from history, the city has gained another layer of contrasts. History goes on, and perhaps nowhere else is the importance of that greater than here.
