Inexpressible banality of Evil in Gerhard Richter’s Birkenau Paintings
Installation view of the exhibition Birkenau, Photo credit © Irina Sheynfeld, 2020.
By Irina Sheynfeld
January 1, 2021
The Birkenau paintings by Gerhard Richter are on view now at the Robert Lehman Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They were first exhibited in this country at the Met Breuer as part of the artist’s one-man show Gerhard Richter: Painting After All, which was closed on March 12, 2020, after only eight days on view. For Richter and for us this is a great loss, since the artist, who is now 88, is unlikely to see another major exhibit in New York during his lifetime. Richter is one of the most important artists still alive and working today. He was born in Soviet Dresden but escaped to West Berlin in 1962. His work spans about six decades and includes a wide range of styles – from representational, which he occasionally called Capitalist-Realistic, to pure abstraction and everything else in between. The use of photography in Richter’s work is a crucial part of his practice, and the central theme of his oeuvre is art’s inability to address the Holocaust and the legacy of Nazi crimes. The Birkenau paintings, completed in 2012, consolidate both of these major pillars of his life’s work.
Installation view of the exhibition The Birkenau, Photo credit © Irina Sheynfeld, 2020.
Theodor W. Adorno famously proclaimed that “the production of lyrical poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric.”[1] In the exhibition catalog Gerhard Richter. Painting After All (2020), one of the preeminent scholars on Richter’s work, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh writes that “Richter’s growing consciousness of the Holocaust was not motivated merely by aesthetic questions concerning the possibilities, or rather, the impossibilities of representation …The first question concerned the indisputable condition of collective German guilt.”[2] Buchloh goes on to describe Richter’s early attempts to deal with the past, first with his lyrical pen-and-ink drawings on paper illustrating The Diary of Anne Frank (1957), then with collage mixed media works on canvas Ershiebung (Execution), (1962) and Tagebu(ch) (Diary) (1962).
Richter’s third cycle of work, in which the artist addresses Nazi crimes less directly but more powerfully, consists of family portraits. In paintings such as Uncle Rudi (1965) and Aunt Marianne (1965), Richter positions himself and his family right in the middle of the search for collective guilt. The subjects of his portraits – the young Wehrmacht soldier Rudi and the victim of the Nazi sterilization and euthanasia program, Aunt Marianne – are side by side: the victim and the perpetrator; both are part of the same family, and just a few years older than the artist. The truth of their roles and places in history is blurred by the relentless winds of time, similar to the way the sharp outlines of their features are smeared and blurred by the force of Richter’s squeegee. The ambiguity, the uncertainty, and the erasure of the plane that separates right from wrong are unsettling. Perhaps Richter wonders what would happen to him, what his role would be if he were just a few years older during the war.
The Birkenau paintings are the artist's latest attempt to represent the unrepresentable, to speak the unspeakable. The four canvases are based on four photographs that were secretly taken by a member of Sonderjommando – a group of Jewish prisoners forced to work in the gas chambers – and smuggled out of Auschwitz-Birkenau to the Polish resistance. The banality of evil, captured in blurry photographs that were taken from a doorway or a window opening of the unknown structure, is staggering, unspeakable, outside of anything that can be described with language. Language, a tool of civilization and culture, is powerless here. Any artist, one good example being Steven Spielberg with his nevertheless epic historical drama Schindler’s List (1993), is unable to convey the horror and blood-curdling chill, the unfocused face of evil, which was somehow captured in these rare documentary shots, exhibited right now at the Met alongside Richter’s paintings. The photographs create the context and the explanation for Richter’s work.
Installation view of the exhibition The Birkenau, Photo credit © Irina Sheynfeld, 2020.
The four Birkenau works are large, raw, and covered with painful scratches that open to blood-red gashing vermilion wounds. The pallet is limited to red, black, grey, and green. The brutal physicality of paint confronts visitors as they enter the irregularly shaped room, which is located at the very back of the octagonal interior of the Lehman Wing. Each of the four colors chosen by the artist tells its own story: the green seems to speak of the grass and the helpless nature that was bound to see and bear it all; the red of the crime, and murder; raw white of the canvas gesso and black speak of death, abyss, and of nothingness; and the blurry grey seems to be the color of the muddied history, color of the stories, explanations, trials, the muck of time that is bound to cover the crimes, the victims and the guilt. It is a space where uncertain images come and vanish, a narrow narrative plane where Richter allows glimpses of the past to come forward.
The artist began his work by enlarging and carefully retracing the images in the photographs as he had done with his other photo-based work in the past. As Richter worked on his preliminary drawings for about a year, he began feeling that the closer he got to his subject the further evil was disappearing behind the banality of the representation. In her New Yorker article from 1963, “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Hannah Arendt describes the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who was responsible for transporting millions of Jews to the death camps. Eichmann was kidnapped in Argentina and brought to trial in Israel on the charge that he played a crucial role in “the Final Solution of the Jewish question.” As the totality and the unspeakable evil of his crimes came forward during the trials, the small man almost became blurry and disappeared behind the banality and absurdity of his defense – he claimed to have never harmed a single Jew in his life, he only moved papers around his desk. He didn’t look equal to his crimes. Arendt writes that there was an unbridgeable “dilemma between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them.”[3] The effect of the incompatible relationship between reality and what lies beneath is the dichotomy that Richter manages to depict in his abstract and representational work, and in particular in his Birkenau series. As one comes closer to the canvases, the meaning recedes, resists closer examination, and hides in the grayscale shadows, but the fragments of the horror can be glimpsed through the paint and scratches.
Even though, as Richter claims, the story of the Holocaust cannot be represented in its totality by art, the truth of the Holocaust is not hidden. It lives in the stories, documentary evidence, and the collective memory of the survivors and their posterity. The art such as Birkenau paintings keeps our memories alive like a candle in the temple of the dead.
Gerhard Richter, Birkenau, 2014, Oil on canvas, 8 ft. 6 3/8 in. × 78 3/4 in. (260 × 200 cm).
Photo credit © Irina Sheynfeld, 2020.