Ruth Liberman
RUTH LIBERMAN (born in Frankfurt, Germany; lives and works in New York City)
Accounts
1999
Typewriter film carbon, rubber cement, latex, and fabric
16 x 60 x 3"
Courtesy of the artist
The texts in Accounts are excerpted from the book "The Good Old Days": The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders, 1991.
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Statement
My preoccupation with narrative, with issues of disclosure and secrecy, is no doubt related to my having grown up Jewish in Germany after World War II, and has lately been reinforced by an abundance, mostly on screen, of simplistic, distorting representations of the Holocaust. History in Germany–as it was taught to me in school–ended with Hitler's rise to power. The events of the Third Reich were then not much spoken about in public. In my surroundings, there were only autobiographical accounts of survivors and no "official" history that could contain them. Even now, the extent of first-hand accounts of German perpetrators is entirely lacking in proportion to the atrocities committed.