"Drawing Against Oblivion" is the title of a touring exhibition that has attracted international attention since 2013.
After Vienna, Berlin, Lisbon, Zagreb, New Jersey and other places, the portraits of children murdered in concentration camps can be seen in Bernrieder Sommerkeller in May.
Bernried
- "No one cried for these children and it would be wonderful if we could do that now," says the Klagenfurt artist Manfed Bockelmann about his project.
Using charcoal, he drew more than 120 portraits of children and young people between the ages of two and 18 who were murdered in a Nazi concentration camp.
About 20 of these large-format, free-hanging pictures will be on display in the Bernrieder Sommerkeller, says David Kunac, producer of the documentary film, co-organizer of the exhibition and close friend of Bockelmann.
The exhibition in Bernried opens at 6 p.m. on Friday, May 5th and can be seen until Friday, May 26th.
Bockelmann (79) will also come to the opening, and the saxophonist Edgar Unterkirchner, who composed and recorded the film music, is also invited.
The award-winning, 67-minute documentary film entitled “Drawing Against Oblivion, Too” can also be seen.
During the exhibition, a video production about a nocturnal journey through Vienna runs in a continuous loop, during which Bockelmann projected the images of the murdered children onto the apartment buildings in which they once lived.
Bernriederin gave the impetus
The show is organized by Brigitte Funk-Rütten from Bernried, the municipality and the Bernried train station group, as Mayor Georg Malter explained at the municipal council meeting.
Every year on April 28, the train station group recalls that the so-called concentration camp train with 2,000 people stopped in Bernried in 1945 before the Americans liberated the prisoners two days later at Seeshaupt train station.
The contact was made by Brigitte Funk-Rütten, who had seen the exhibition in Vienna and was very impressed, says Kunac, who is also the managing director of the company "Finale Frame", which produced the film.
However, Corona delayed the exhibition date in Bernried.
The family history of the Bockelmanns was the trigger
Before Bockelmann could start his drawings, he had to do extensive research with contemporary witnesses, relatives and various archives, including those in Auschwitz, to get pictures of the murdered people.
The majority of the children and young people were photographed by the Gestapo before they were deported in order to document their alleged differences.
Others who were not immediately killed were photographed in the concentration camps, Kunac said.
Manfred Bockelmann, a brother of the late singer Udo Jürgens, has been involved with the project for decades.
According to the exhibition's homepage, his motivation was his family history and a bad conscience.
His father was a landowner, mayor of a small town in Carinthia and a member of the NSDAP, but not a dogged Nazi.
When asked by the son, who was born in 1943, there were only evasive answers.
Bockelmann, who also lived at Lake Starnberg for a number of years, was therefore looking for an artistic answer.
He found it with the “Drawing Against Oblivion” project.
Information: about
the project and the exhibition at https://zeichn-gegen-das-vergessen.de/.
School classes who would like to visit the exhibition should contact zgdv@finalframe.de.
