Ella Falldorf
Ambivalent Continuities: Forced Labor in Artworks of Political Prisoners in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp
2019 | Full access | Full thesis available for University of Haifa users only
The scholarly discussion of artworks created by inmates of Nazi concentration camps has viewed them either as evidence for spiritual resistance or as documentary historical illustrations, thus only rarely examining them using the methods of art history. In contrast, this study approaches them as artworks, which exceed documentation and cannot be reduced to narratives of resistance. They are analyzed as subjective interpretations of the camp experiences. The focus on one topic – forced labor – at one place – the Buchenwald concentration camp – permits me to closely examine a great number of artworks. In Buchenwald, most artworks were produced by political prisoners with a socialist background as well as a rather privileged position in the inmates’ hierarchy. Thus, one might expect them to pre-empt the anti-fascist postwar iconography. But even though they used socialist artistic traditions, a closer analysis reveals a striking diversity and ambivalence.
The first part of this study asks how the ideology of prisoner artists influenced their depictions of individual forced laborers. I show that the degree to which forced labor is appropriated within familiar frameworks of work depends on the purposes of these artworks. They often oscillate between idealization and documentation, similar to works of early Realism. Yet, while all the analyzed artworks somehow adhered to ideals of socialist imagery, their multifaceted character rejects any one-dimensional classification. The second part raises the question, how the specific kind of forced labor depicted influenced the artistic interpretation. I therefore compare depictions of inmates pulling wagons in the quarry and inmates carrying corpses to the crematorium. This reveals how the political prisoners’ encounters with the horrors of the Holocaust challenged previous patterns of interpretation. The corpse carriers were no longer characterized as resistant or heroic. Instead, the emphasis shifted to the relationship between workers and corpses as well as, the inmates surrounding them, who are at the verge of death.
Supervisors:
Prof. Verena Krieger
Dr. Kobi Kabalek