The Art of

146
04
INGA SCHWEDE
in a flyer for the series
of events soir critique.
Translated from
NO!art—Kunst nach
Auschwitz? produced
by the Academy of
Visual Arts Leipzig,
2002.
ings is a picture taken by Margaret Bourke-White at Buchenwald featuring a
group of survivors standing behind a barbwire fence. It became known under
the title The Living Dead of Buchenwald.
In Lurie‘s collage Saturation Painting (Buchenwald) | see image p. 22, the
iconic image of the male survivors is not rendered as a reproduction of the
photo but as part of a newspaper article by British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper
that was published at the time judgment was expected in the
Eichmann trial—under the headline “Eichmann Is Not Unique”—in the 17
September 1961 issue of the New York Times. Neither this heading nor the
name of the newspaper is recognizable in Lurie‘s collage, but the caption
under the photograph by Bourke-White certainly is, which takes up the
question being widely discussed at the time: “Can it happen again?” Inasmuch
as the survivor stages this photo not as a portrait of other survivors
but as part of a newspaper contribution to a contemporary debate, he underlines
its iconic significance in the context of the emerging media reception
of the Holocaust. Lurie‘s collage frames the photograph with other
media images, namely of half-naked, offensively posing pin-up girls. The
background is a canvas worked over with rough, flesh-colored brushstrokes
and scraps of pigment. The color and texture of the canvas as well as the
pin-up girls accentuate the aspect of vital, indeed, flesh and blood existence
that Roland Barthes identifies as the central feature of photography.
Both the erotically staged, half-naked women and the survivors pose in
front of the camera and seek the viewer‘s gaze. “At the same time, the emaciated
male camp inmates, standing in the semi-darkness behind the barbwire,
seem to gape at the woman—symbolic of sex, warmth, and prosperity—as
she exhibits herself, but they are too exhausted for stimulation,” Inga
Schwede writes about the reciprocal gazes that Lurie stages between the
survivors and the pin-up girls framing them. Given the men who are looking
at the viewer and the posing women, according to Schwede he or she “automatically
[becomes] a twofold voyeur.” 04
The viewer‘s and photographer‘s voyeuristic relationship with the subject
of the image is also examined in three other collages by the artist that
center around a photograph from the liberated Buchenwald concentration
camp: the image of an open flatcar piled with corpses. This picture played a
key role in the re-education of the German population: immediately after
the end of World War II, commissioned by the commander of the Allied
forces the American War Information Office published the brochure KZ—
Bildbericht aus fünf Konzentrationslagern (KZ—Illustrated Report from Five
Concentration Camps), which was distributed in huge numbers. According
to Cornelia Brink, this brochure represented one of the first re-education
measures and was “intended for those Germans who could not be led
through the camps.” 05 The first illustration in the brochure underscores
MIRJAM WENZEL