Helnwein confronts the Holocaust

books:

	• Ninth November Night Gottfried Helnwein, William S. Burroughs, ... Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles, 2003 - 84 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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Helnwein confronts the Holocaust

On the night of November 9th, 1938, the Nazis began a coordinated attack on German Jews. By sunrise, 91 Jews had been murdered in the streets, 30,000 more had been arrested and were on their way to concentration camps, and over 200 synagogues lay in ruins.

Fifty years later, in September of 1988, Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein presented the installation "Ninth November Night" outside of the Ludwig Museum in Cologne.

The show featured 17 portraits of children, each piece measuring over 13 feet tall. Some of the children stare back at the viewer while others appear lifeless with their eyes either closed or nearly closed. The work was intended to spark dialogue about the selection process of the Nazis: Who was chosen for the camps versus who was chosen for the chambers.

And while it succeeded in doing just that, it also sparked anger amongst some locals.

Shortly after the exhibition opened, someone slashed each of the works and stole one entirely.

The result of the vandalism makes the work even more disturbing, more confrontational. Now instead of looking at the viewer with dead eyes, the portraits stare at us with seemingly slit throats.

This catalogue captures images from that installation, as well as the work's follow-up exhibitions in Switzerland (1990) and Russia (1997).

What's documented here is more than just the art itself, but rather a timeline of the events that took place during the run of the exhibition. The imagery is both disturbing and beautiful, but the story it tells is a reminder of how fifty or sixty years back unfortunately wasn't that long ago.

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Ninth November Night, 1938, was the night the synagogues burned in Germany. Jewish people were killed in the streets without police interference, their businesses and homes were looted and the windows of their stores were shattered. Inspired by the splinters of glass that covered the streets of Germany the next morning, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels cynically called this night "Kristallnacht" - crystal night. 50 years later, Austrian-born artist Gottfried Helnwein erected a 100 meter long wall of pictures in the city center of Cologne, between the Ludwig Museum and the cathedral to commemorate this night. He confronted the passers-by with larger-than-life children's faces in a seemingly endless row - children lined up as though "to be sorted". The central theme in Gottfried Helnwein's work is the human being. As a victim but also as a perpetrator. No other German-speaking artist of the post-war generation has so hauntingly dealt with the National Socialistic legacy and such issues as fascism, violence and intolerance. He has developed his own provocative, disturbing and to some extent shocking visual language in which its passion above all is dedicated to the weakest of the victims: the children. His images are a constant silent appeal against collective denial and repression.

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