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Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies
chgs@umn.edu
612-624-0256
chgs@umn.edu
612-624-0256
Crimes Against Humanity: Contemporary Artists Confront the Legacy of the Wehrmacht
Exhibition at The Humanities Gallery, The Cooper Union
51 Astor Place (8th Street between 3rd and 4th Avenues)
New York, NY 10003
December 2, 1999 through February 11, 2000
Works by Susan Erony, Andrea Frank, Arie A. Galles, Melissa Gould, Komar & Melamid, Ruth Liberman, and Maciej Toporowicz.
Reception in the Gallery: Wednesday, January 26, 5-8 pm
Roundtable with the Artists: 6 pm
Information: (212) 353-4272
Gallery Hours: Monday - Friday, 12 - 7 p.m.
Saturday, 12 - 5 p.m.
(Gallery closed December 22 through January 3)
Installation View
Photo: Alex Akselrod
Crimes Against Humanity: Contemporary Artists Confront the Legacy of the Wehrmacht
Throughout the twentieth century, government-sponsored atrocities have challenged venerable assumptions of what it means to be human. How do we maintain a belief in the dignity and integrity of the individual in the wake of concentration camps, gas chambers, mass graves, killing fields and civilian bombing? What lessons are we to learn from our history? Can we overcome our legacy, or are we destined to perpetuate it?
Last March, as NATO launched its war against Serbia, the issue of moral responsibility in the military moved to the forefront of the news. Western policymakers and journalists reported that Serbian military forces were committing atrocities against civilians in Kosovo, and argued that NATO had the ethical responsibility, and the legal right under the Geneva Convention, to intervene. Many characterized Serbia's commander-in-chief, Slobodan Milosevic, as a Hitlerian dictator, and they justified bombing Serbia because of his apparent popularity with the Serbian people, who were vilified in the May 10 New Republic as "Milosevic's Willing Executioners." The allusions to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's controversial study about the German people under Hitler were clear. Explaining that Serbian media had misled its public with propaganda, NATO bombed the Belgrade TV station, a civilian target whose destruction resulted in the deaths of 20 journalists, technicians and other civilians, in violation of the Geneva Convention. Commentators celebrated the participation of the German Luftwaffe in the NATO-led war as evidence of the rehabilitation of Germany since World War II, when German forces had terrorized Serbia on behalf of the Nazi regime.
In Germany, politicians and media discussed NATO actions and German involvement with a good deal more reserve. There, the behavior of German soldiers during World War II has come under particular scrutiny since 1995, with the appearance of a major exhibition of historical materials documenting atrocities committed by the German army in Serbia and Eastern Europe. Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944 (War of Destruction: Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941 to 1944) toured 33 cities in Germany and Austria. Scholars have long known about these crimes, but they were news to the German and Austrian public, which approached the exhibition as an opportunity to work through unresolved feelings of guilt and contrition, or, less constructively, targeted it with verbal and physical attack (the show was firebombed a day before opening last winter in Saarbrücken). In addition to featuring crimes of the Wehrmacht, the exhibition examined the obfuscation of those crimes by post-war German media, including popular film, magazines and book-cover illustrations, which depicted German soldiers as brave and noble fighters for a misguided Führer.
This exhibition showcases new and recent works by eight contemporary artists who grapple with the legacy of military atrocity, in particular the historical example of the German army during World War II. From a diversity of backgrounds and countries, these artists pose wide-ranging ethical, sociological and historical questions through the complex, ambiguous and often ironic modes of communication which art so effectively affords.
Andrew Weinstein
Curator
List of Artworks and Artists' Statements
