The Art of

150
11
SILKE WENK
“Rhetoriken der Profanisierung:
Rahmung
des Blicks auf die
NS-Verbrechen,” in:
Insa Eschebach et al.,
eds. Gedächtnis und
Geschlecht: Deutungsmuster
in Darstellungen
des nationalsozialistischen
Genozids,
Frankfurt am Main:
Campus Verlag, 2002,
p. 279.
through a keyhole. In Railroad to America, the “slight barrier” that Bourke-
White believed she was erecting between herself and the “white horror” by
pressing the shutter release is exposed as voyeurism and turned against not
only the famous photographer and the unknown photographer, but also
against the reproduction and viewing of the images of the corpses in the
liberated concentration camps. Silke Wenk describes the deconstruction of
the photographs showing piles of corpses in Railroad to America as follows:
“In her obvious purpose, the pin-up girl confronts the viewer with a pornographic
gaze at the photos of the murdered, throws it back, and can
therefore interrupt the desire to ‘fathom’ things through viewing them.” 11
The extent to which Lurie‘s deconstruction applied not only to voyeurism
but also to the force of the photographic eye, which transforms the corpse
into an object, is indicated by the third collage, Hard Writings (Load) from
1972, which reproduces the same photo. The word “Load” and its full spectrum
of meaning (literally as a burden, cargo, freight, and also figuratively as
in loading a gun, putting a film into a camera) are staged here in red capital
letters across the reproduced photograph. At the same time, the fourth
letter is shifted to one side and opens the curtain, so to speak, to reveal a
view of the heaped-up corpses.
The three collages as well as the Saturation Paintings by Boris Lurie deconstruct
photographs that were made in and of the liberated concentration
camps, but also the history of their impact in the media. Thus they prepare
the way for those reflections on the Holocaust in contemporary art in which
priority is no longer given to the historical event itself but to its communication
via the media.
In the sixties, the reception of the Holocaust was decisively influenced by
the publication in 1960 of the illustrated documentary account of the Shoah
entitled Der gelbe Stern (The Yellow Star) by Gerhard Schoenberner and
by legal cases against the National Socialist perpetrators, in particular by the
trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem (1960/61) and the Auschwitz trial in
Frankfurt am Main (1963–65). This is also expressed in the contemporary art
of that period.
Lurie‘s friend Wolf Vostell, for example, developed a large-format work in
1964 that reproduced an article by Bernd Naumann in the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung written about the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt. The title of
the work, Wir waren so eine Art Museumsstück (We were a kind of museum
piece) is taken from the heading of this article and cites the statement of a
survivor made in the courtroom. The work combines the report of the trial
with famous photographs of other events in postwar history (for example,
17 June 1953, the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, or the assassination of
John F. Kennedy in 1963) and makes the reproduced images and texts disappear
behind black, white, and yellow areas of paint and red splashes of color.
MIRJAM WENZEL