Günter Schuler, journalist and author, asks the artist Bernd Rausch about the pictures he has contributed to the “Frankfurt Auschwitz” exhibition:
SCHULER: What made you decide to represent the
annihilation of the Roma and Sinti in pictorial form?
RAUSCH: In the course of a project we were working on Joachim Brenner
of the Roma sup-port group in Frankfurt took me on a guided tour. From
the left rear of the Paulskirche we went down the Braubachstrasse and
then into the Battonnstrasse. Standing before the me-morial plaque for
the Roma and Sinti murdered at the Public Health Board we reflected for
the umpteenth time in the course of many years how little popular awareness
there is of the murder of the Roma and Sinti. There, in the Braubachstrasse,
in front of the memorial plaque, the idea for the exhibition was born.
SCHULER: The Frankfurt – Auschwitz exhibition consists of two parts:
a historical / docu-mentary part and an artistic part. Does it make sense
to create pictures which offer new re-flections on the familiar pictures
of Auschwitz – the crematorium, the gas chambers, Arbeit macht frei,
the dead, the camps, the mass graves –?
RAUSCH: My pictures arose 65 years after the crimes committed by the Germans.
These pictures are different pictures. The documentary exhibition contains
texts and pictures which show the factual horror of the extermination
of the Roma and Sinti. Light is shed on the ac-tive role of the Frankfurt
Public Health Board in the selection and annihilation. The complicity
of this authority in the post-Nazi years is also shown. The 16 large-format
pictures displayed in the artistic part of the Frankfurt – Auschwitz
exhibition are reflections prompted by the fac-tual extermination of the
Frankfurt Roma and Sinti. Whether the pictures make sense will be seen
from the forthcoming exhibitions.
SCHULER: You say that in many portrayals the death of the individual coincides
with the death of all. In your pictures the individual is barely perceptible.
What exactly are you trying to say?
RAUSCH: The no-longer-being-there, the empty spaces, the execution sites,
the place of annihilation: Auschwitz-Birkenau, the wounds in the inward
and outward nature of humanity that remain, these are pictures that remind
us both of each individual and of the totality.
Schuler: Can the annihilation, the extermination, the Holocaust be portrayed?
Do your pictures contain a form which can portray the annihilation?
RAUSCH: In my pictures I attempt to give the crimes against humanity concrete
form by try-ing to pin them down while at the same time failing in this
attempt.
SCHULER: What do your pictures show, and why should people be interested
in looking at them?
RAUSCH: The study of the picture’s components act on the viewer
in two ways: one, by re-vealing the apparently real which cannot be captured
and, two, by means of abstraction, which can only capture a detail of
the barbarity. Taken together the contents of all the exhib-ited pictures
represent a compression, an approximation to the mass murder inflicted
on the Roma and Sinti.
SCHULER: Some of the pictures deal with the present, with the murder of
Roma and Sinti, with racist, inhuman deeds perpetrated decades after the
annihilation of the Nazi period.
RAUSCH: They are pictures exposing the racism practised against Roma and
Sinti. The fact that in some – mostly East European – countries
the murderers of Roma and Sinti often go unpunished is intolerable. The
pictures in the Frankfurt – Auschwitz exhibition are part of a cycle
on the Nazi crimes.
Underlying, surrounding and pervading all is the civilizational breach called Auschwitz
Kazimir Malevich painted his black square in 1915. It became a symbol of Modernism. The black square replaced the icon of "God’s Triangle", which had dominated centuries of dark-ness. Modernism shattered twenty-five years later in the concentration and extermination camps of the Nazis. The extermination of the European Jews, the Roma and Sinti, and mil-lions of others severed the path of Modernism, which otherwise might have held. The pic-tures are both an outcry and a memorial to the murdered. The Holocaust precedes all de-bate. The pictures are at once approximation and destruction. So unbounded was the crime of annihilation perpetrated by Germans during the Nazi period, so radical was the destruction of culture. The portrayal is also unbounded. Any desire to comprehend the extermination assumes a willingness to focus on what happened while at the same time making clear that what happened cannot withstand such a focus.
The artistic part of the Frankfurt – Auschwitz
exhibition shows pictures of the annihilation of individuals in pictorial
(alienated) form and of the extermination in abstract form. The first
picture "The Broken Square" (hope, extermination, annihilation,
destruction of Modernism) provides access to the portrayal.
The pictures focus on the Roma and Sinti and the liquidation of the "Gypsy
camp" at Ausch-witz-Birkenau. The pictures show wounds that are still
open, destruction that endures, scenes of the crime, dead bodies that
are not silent. They are pictures of the destroyed. The extermination
has inflicted wounds on the inward and outward nature of humanity that
are still present today. They testify to the grief and the indictment,
they are a cry that does not fade away. Pervasiveness and ambivalence
as to content and in form, doubts accompanying the whole process of their
creation, destruction, decay, wrestling with each picture in turn –
all these things were aspects of the process whereby the pictures came
into existence, pic-tures whose subject is the murdered both as individuals
and in their totality. The annihilation is at once abstract/objective
and figurative/subjective. In many of the pictures on display the death
of the murdered individuals form a unity with the annihilation of all.
The last three pictures of the exhibition concern the present, the pogroms
and the murders that came after the annihilation of the Nazi period. The
16 pictures in the exhibition bear wit-ness to unleashed barbarity, they
are designed to expose the present-day racism practised against Roma and
Sinti and the pogroms conducted in European countries. The pictures in
the Frankfurt – Auschwitz exhibition are part of a cycle on Nazi
crimes.
Bernd Rausch
