Beyond the Limits of Representation. Artistic Artifacts of Concentration Camp Inmates as Visual Interpretation of the Camp Reality

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Artistic artifacts created by prisoners in the National Socialist concentration and extermination camps focusing on the camp reality endured by the artists do not directly depict this reality, but attribute meaning to it through pictorial means. Therefore, these images do not speak for themselves, but require analysis. This statement is not self-evident, since such works predominantly use a realistic visual language and thus appear inartistic and unambiguous. Hence, historical researchers use them as sources on camp reality, while art historians rarely consider them as relevant research objects. Instead, the reception history of these works is largely characterized by their appreciation as manifestations of resistance and self-assertion, but also by political instrumentalization. A decidedly art-historical and at the same time historically and sociologically informed study of artistic artifacts from concentration camps is a desideratum. Based on the art historical axiom that every depiction, even the realistic one, is always already an interpretation of what is represented, the research project intends to analyze the pictorial works of concentration camp prisoners as visual interpretations of camp reality. With the critical instruments of art history and visual studies, the works will be examined regarding means of depiction and inter-pictorial references, whether these are based on artistic or political intentions or on pre-reflexive references to visual memory. The specific conditions of production in the camps must be considered as well as the challenge to find images for "extreme situations" (Bettelheim 1943), which deprive all culturally transmitted values and models of their basis. It is therefore especially when established compositional structures and iconographies appear in the concentration camp images that the objective becomes less about pointing out continuities rather than to find ruptures, transformations, and ambivalences. The core of the project is a monographic study of pictures created at the Buchenwald concentration camp, which will be analyzed along thematic groups (artist portraits, forced labor, couples and friendship, "Muselmänner", and pictures of the dead), with comparisons to artworks from other camps. An accompanying essay will examine the reasons for the exclusion of works by concentration camp prisoners from the discourses of art and cultural theory "after Auschwitz." A workshop will serve to clarify the status of pictorial interpretations of camp reality in the junction of historical reality, the subjective perspective of experience, and the specificity of pictorial articulation. An international workshop brings together current art historical research on images from concentration camps for the first time since 1989.