Status: 29.10.2023, 09:32 a.m.
By: Michael Schleicher
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Tells of strong Jewish women: Zuzanna Hertzberg in her installation "Mechitza". © Oliver Bodmer/Münchner Merkur
How can the Shoah be remembered in the future? The Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism is breaking new ground in the show "Materializing".
For example, Fela Levinsohn. She stands at the window, her eyes lowered, the photographer has taken her from the side. There is hardly much more to learn from her picture. However, the longer one looks at her larger-than-life portrait, which is now being shown together with others in the show "Materializing" at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism, the more the outlines of the young woman seem to blur. Just as her generation, the generation of contemporary witnesses, disappears – in real life, but also in memories and stories.
"Materializing" can be seen at the NS-Dokuzentrum Munich until February 25, 2024
Paweł Kowalewski, born in 1958, one of Poland's most important painters, who once co-founded the legendary artists' association "Gruppa", saves Jewish women like Fela from oblivion in his series "Strength and Beauty" (2015). Women who lived in Poland during World War II, including the artist's mother, who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Kowalewski created his large-format portraits based on a historical photograph and printed them with ink that fades over time. In this way, the people are transformed into an abstract shadow play when they look at them. The motifs are supplemented by short texts, fragments from biographies that mark the point at which life tipped over, as Kowalewski puts it: in Fela's case, for example, how there was an unexpected knock on the door, she opened it – and when she returned to the kitchen, she found her father dead at the table. He had poisoned himself because he feared the Gestapo.
Fading portraits of women by Paweł Kowalewski in the show "Materializing" at the NS-Dokuzentrum Munich. © Oliver Bodmer/Münchner Merkur
The new special exhibition at Max-Mannheimer-Platz, which is well worth seeing, brings together seven contemporary art positions that deal with the "Shoah in Poland". All of the works on display impress with their high artistic quality. Three types of access to history by the invited women and men can be identified. While Kowalewski approaches the story in a very personal and thus highly emotional way, Elżbieta Janicka and Wojciech Wilczyk, for example, choose a quasi-documentary approach. In their photo series "The other City (Inne Miasto)", created between 2011 and 2013, they look out from rooftops over the area of the Warsaw Ghetto, which was reduced to rubble and ashes by the Germans in 1943. Past and present are intertwined in the face of the city.
Zuzanna Hertzberg, born in 1981, takes a completely different approach to the past. She is represented with her expansive installation "Mechitza" (2019-2022) and tells the story of Jewish women during the Shoah and World War II in a style schooled in comics and agitprop – after all, their achievements are still all too often ignored or trivialized. Hertzberg reports on them, celebrates the enormous legacy of women and appeals to those born after them. We should take a look. Information about the exhibition: Until February 25, 2024, Tue.-Sun. 10 a.m.-19 p.m., Max-Mannheimer-Platz 1.