S.S. Gymnastics (48" x 36")
Docent Guide
This painting is based on a story the artist read about several years ago. On April 20, 1945, seventeen days before the end of World War II in Europe, a truck from the Neuengamme Concentration camp near Hamburg delivered twenty two Jewish children, between the ages of four and twelve years, to the empty school on Bullenhuser Damm in the northern part of the city. The children all had survived medical experiments in Auschwitz. The SS knew that alive, these children were living proof of the Nazi crimes. On the same April afternoon, the children were taken into the large gym and hanged them. The story was not made public until 1988 when information appeared in Lea Rosh's documentary, which was not shown to English speaking audiences. A former talkshow host, Rosh created the documentary Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland (Death is the Master in Germany) with Eberhard Jackel. The memorial was her idea, and she makes that clear. As she says, "It's not for the Jews; it's for the Germans."
Hirschberger included another Mother Goose rhyme in his didactic for this painting:
For every evil under the sun
There is a remedy or none
If there be one, see till you find it
If there be none, never mind it.
Hirschberger's attraction for Mother Goose is understandable. It goes well with the genre of his art. It has been noted that In the early days, before they were "collected" into the somewhat familiar form of today, these rhymes were actually methods of preserving history, customs, lore and fears for the common man. (We need to recall that the majority of people in the earlier centuries could neither read or write. That is why roving troubadours, bards and minstrels were so popular.)
Source: Paganism.com