Witnessing and Re-imagining Through the Arts Meditation on a Dialogical Project

8/2/2019 Witnessing and Re-imagining Through the Arts Meditation on a Dialogical Project

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WITNESSING AND RE-IMAGINING THROUGHTHE ARTSMeditation on a Dialogical Project

Bjrn Krondorfer (in collaboration with Karen Baldner)

Uprootedness is a loss of home, of Heimat . It is the pained awarenessof that loss. It is a nostalgic yearning that throbs like a heartbeatunder the surface of the present.

To be uprooted is less the result of a deliberate cutting of ones rootsthan a response to unsettling forces greater than oneself: exile, expul-sion, and emigration. Replanted into new soil, the soul remains stringedto a past that now lives on only in the imaginary. What is lost cannot berecovered. The awareness of loss, however, can settle into ones presentlife, expressing itself in sentiments that oscillate between resentment


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and bereavement, public regrets and private tears. Nostalgia: the pain(algia ) for the nest ( nostos). While yearning for a lost home immobilizes, a

lived sense of at-homeness is restorative.The collaborative art project that Karen Baldner and I have embarked

on circumambulates the themes of uprootedness and at-homeness likeother people circumambulate sacred sites. There, in the center, are thestories of our families of origin and the accumulated layers of emotionaland political baggage of generations: experiences of conquest and exile,of forced ights and voluntary migration, of refugees and immigrants, of assimilation and defeat, of lost childhoods and interrupted lives, of new beginnings and unnished business, of bodies violated and restored, of men and women, of Jews and Germans, of Karen and I, of I and Thou.Karen is a visual artist who comes from a Jewish-German family perse-cuted during the Nazi era. She grew up in post-Shoah Germany but today resides in Bloomington, Indiana. I come from a non-persecuted Germanfamily. I grew up in postwar West Germany and now teach ReligiousStudies at a college in Maryland. Together, through the medium of art,

Karen and I unpeel layers of family memories and cultural histories. Unearthing old longings, we revive worn stories. We discover anew

the intimate other in our families, often catching a glimpse only of shad-ows. We greet the dead sitting at our tables. We decipher handwrittentestimonies on forgotten postcards, diaries, and letters. We talk to thosestill among us. We recall family utterances about Jews and about Ger-mans that leave us with a visceral discomfort in the act of summoningthem. We recall resentment and love expressed in the familiarity andfragility of kinship. We mix the contradictory richness of family lore intothe wet pulp like precious spices and embed them in sheets of paperlike traces of a fragrance.

We quote from visual and oral family archives, sometimes with theapproval of loved ones, at other times against their reticence. Wearrange retrieved fragments of the past in light of the here-and-now. We make transparent to the public the material that emerges, and webecome, in the process, transparent to each other: beyond shame,beyond guilt beyond recriminations Not that these feelings do not exist

W I T N E S S I N G A N D R E - I M A G I N I N G T H R O U G H T H E A R T S


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How do two Germans who come from a Gentile and a Jewish family background listen to each other in a world ruptured by the Holocaust, a world bleeding still from old and fresh wounds? As children of differentfamilies and circumstances, we recognize that the effects of historictrauma make impossible any unencumbered, innocent meeting. As aman and a woman, our relationship is also held together by bonds of affection, yet complicated and enriched by gendered assumptions. Wehave been able to negotiate the sensitive nature of our encounters by anchoring our dialogue in the materiality of art objects.

The artistic process mediates, facilitates, and deepens our dialogue.In turn, our art becomes the dialogue it has engendered. As objects, ourart makes visible a subjective experience: they bear witness. They leavea material trace of personal conversations. We want people to look atour pieces but also to touch them. As visual and tactile witnesses, ourobjects are accessible to, and available for, public consumption.

In light of the post-Shoah chasm between our communities there

Figure 2. Detail of Wit(h)ness (2008). Baldner and Krondorfer. Girdle book.

B J R N K R O N D O R F E R A N D K A R E N B A L D N E R


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Jewish traditions. Books contain worlds: intimate notes and dogmaticdeclarations; prayers and business records; stories and prohibitions;

memories and visions. They contain knowledge of good and evil. Youcan close worlds by closing books. You can burn books. You can lock them away. You can enshrine them. You can carry them around your waist. You can make them transparent. You can hide messages in themor adorn them with marginal notes. You can erase words. You can turnpages into mirrors so that you may encounter yourself. Karen and I areplaying around such possibilities, exploring the quality of different mate-rials and searching for the style that ts best the stories we have to tell.

In homage of medieval book binding, we have created girdle books.These are pocket-size books that can be carried around your waist, close to your body. They are intimate and inconspicuous, and yet add weight to yourbody. They are a little piece of home you can take along wherever you go.

We have worked with crude iron frames surrounding fragile revela-tions transposed on Plexiglas panels. Like wooden wings on a triptych,these transparent panels swing open, squeaking in their rusted metalhinges. Even when closed, they make visible the (family) secrets scrib-

bled onto their surface. We code those secrets as memories that are bothpersonal and collective

Figure 3. Heimat (2005). Baldner and Krondorfer. Girdle book.



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families and communities. We remain aware of the incompleteness of our endeavor to restore the past to the present.

We have created written testimonies that cannot be pressed betweenthe covers of a book: strings of words owing out of ngertips of paper-cast handsthe blood and ink of our lives. Each word, each phrase thatstreams out of our ngers is part of how we articulate ourselves intobeing. As these printed strings cascade down to the oor, they entangleand intertwine and thus become part of an assemblage that does notinsist on separation. Acknowledging that our roots are found in a sharedhistorical and geographical spacea space lled with hurt, betrayal, andlosseswe begin to bond to each other.

Karen is the artistart is her life. She knows about the tradition of book making. She knows how to turn pulp into paper, how to print andetch, and how to wrap book covers in ne leather. She has the patience tocut, fold, sow, glue, stitch, and press. She has the artists courage to discard

pieces when they do not satisfy her aesthetic standards. She is familiarwith the art history of books and with binding techniques She knows how

Figure 4. Detail of Tikkun/Mending (2006). Baldner and Krondorfer. Paper-sculpture.



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maternal grandparents owned one of the largest literary publishing housesin Germany. As assimilated Berlin Jews, they were an integral part of Ger-

manys cultural life. They published Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Werfel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, HermannHesse, and Alfred Dblin. In 1935, they tried to rescue their publishinghouse from the Nazi encroachment by resettling in Vienna. In 1938, they had to abandon their Austrian apartment overnight and escape to Stock-holm. Even Sweden turned out to be an inhospitable place. They edagain, this time to Moscow, and from there with the Transsiberian Expressto Wladiwostok, to Japan, to Santa Monica, to Connecticut.

Unlike most Jewish refugees, Karens maternal grandparents decidedto return to Germany after the war, gathering and rebuilding of what wasleft of their publishing enterprise. Toward the end of their active andembattled lives, they retired and retreated to Italy. The wounds of betrayalnever healed. Grandmother and grandfather both left extensive autobiog-raphies, testifying to their love of German culture and, simultaneously, totheir lingering suspicion toward a nation that they once called home. 1

Karen was born to one of their daughters on November 9, 1952. When I met Karen for the rst time in the early 1990s, she did not

want to talk publicly about her grandparents. Her family biography seemed of little interest to her American environment. She was also reti-cent to talk about her family to me, to this German man, who, one day,unexpectedly crossed her path when she left the college library carryinga book about art and the Holocaust. We started a conversationtenta-tively, hesitantly, and cautiously. It took almost ten more years before we decided to embark on a collaborative artistic project.

I am an imaginative person but not an artist by profession. I teach, Ido research, I write. I have patience with words. I facilitate interculturalencounters between people divided by an antagonistic past. But I haveneither the training nor the techn required for book binding, paper-making, or printing, and I have low tolerance for solving the technicalhitches in the artistic process. Yet I am thriving when I nd spaces thatallow me to think and act creatively. Earlier in my life, I was enthralledby performance art and in 1985 I co-founded The Jewish-German Dance



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audiences in Germany and the United States. Through movement, we crafteda tapestry of images and reminiscences, expressing our apprehension

and uncertainties about what it means to inhabit a post-Shoah world.2

When I met Karena book on Holocaust art tucked under her armthedance group had already disbanded, though its spirit was still very muchalive within me. I suggested to Karen that we continue our conversationthrough the unconventional means of movement improvisation. We tried,but failed. After a brief attempt at improvising, the process stalled. ForKaren, the idea of exploring through movement the mistrust that had accu-mulated over three generations was hitting home too closelyand it fright-ened her for other reasons as well.

Our bodies are our home: they provide comfort, pleasure, and safety.Our skin demarcates the boundaries of this home, a boundary between me and the other. Skin repels and absorbs, invites and rejects,and tickles and burns. Skin protects and gets torn. As permeable mem-brane, it facilitates the exchange between inside and outside.

Karens body knows pain. Her pain is present in the form of inher-ited anguish of her familys severed roots. It also came in the form of abullet that sliced the esh below her ribcage and struck the woodenoor of her American home. The scars are still visible today, both in her

body and in her house. The assailanther husbandkilled himself afterthe attack Suddenly her house and her body had become unstable vio-

Figure 5. Krondorfer performing in The Jewish-German Dance Theatre (1988).



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Years later, she became victim of yet another assault, this time by aman unknown to her, who had broken into her house and raged against

her body. De-skinned. Flayed. Raw. Naked. Karen needed to work withbodies in her drawings to restore herselfto restore what seemed like achain of violations: from her maternal grandparentss ight from Berlinand her paternal grandfathers imprisonment in a Nazi forced laborcamp to her American home in Bloomington. She needed to draw her-self on paper, limp and naked. She needed to render the body of theothermale and Christianwounded and vulnerable.

When I met Karen, the assaults had been in the past, but the road torecovery not yet completed.

When Karen met me, she saw a man who smiled and who spoke

with a German accent: Lets open our past to each other. Lets becomevulnerable in each others presence I did not know about Karens shat-

Figure 6. Privacy Skinned/Boned (1992).Baldner Charcoal drawing.

Figure 7. Stations OFF the Cross (1992).Baldner Charcoal drawing.



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What comes as a surprise, however, is that we managed to stay in con-tact despite the fact that we did not see each other, with the rare excep-

tion, for many years. The distance between Indiana and Maryland madeimpossible any face-to-face encounter, so email and the occasional phoneconversation were the only means to keep us connected. During this time,I worked on issues of religion and masculinity, exploring the intersectionof the religious imagination and the male body. When I needed an artpiece for my book cover, Karen provided it from her drawing cycle StationsOFF the Cross. This marked the rst moment when her and my work inter-sectedand, not so coincidentally, in the form of a book.

The torn, naked, crucied male body, drawn with charcoal on hand-made paper, was the perfect t for Mens Bodies, Mens Gods. Karen claimsthat in the introduction to this book I express in language what she hadstruggled with in her painting: The theological insistence on the simul-taneity of Jesus maleness and Christs asexuality seems to have beenexperienced as a continuous source of frustration, for it produced a para-doxical notion of male spirituality by insisting on phallic power while

denying the sexual penis.3



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To have her painting on the cover beneted both Karen and me. Thisevent, however, was more of a coincidental meeting of minds than the

result of a collaborative effort. It took many more years of intermittentcorrespondences until, one day, Karen asked: I am ready. Would youstill want to work together now?

Several developments contributed to Karens wish to return to dia-logue through the medium of art. For one, her search for understandingher family origins had taken on an urgency she had not felt before. With her grandparents dying (and having already lost both her motherand her brother at a younger age), Karen felt called to become a visualscribe for her familys legacy.

Second, she realized that her own sense of victimization as a resultof domestic and sexual assault was somehow linked to the ambience of victimhood in her childhood home. She writes: My own wounded body t right in with the familiar wounded family body. It is this awarenessthat brought me to seriously immerse myself in my family history. Thetorment she experienced in her female body became entwined with the

anguish of her Jewish-German family origins.Third, she gently urged her father (who had previously been reluc-

tant to talk) to share with her how he had survived the war years in Ber-lin. In the terminology of Nazism, her father had been classied a Halbjude: his mother (who came from a renowned Jewish family thatowned a German department store) had married Max, a non-Jewish clas-sical musician. Every so often, Karen would call or email me for feed-back and advice. Since I had explored the vicissitudes of family biography in intercultural settings, I sometimes could serve as a sound-ing board.

Lastly, if one were to ask Karen, she would credit my ongoing inter-est in listening to her family history for her wish to return to dialoguingacross the abyss. She would also credit my willingness to absorb her mis-trust vis--vis Germany for her ability to let go of deep-seated fears.

When Karen asked me to re-ignite our dialogue beyond the occa-sional conversation, I was somewhat hesitant. Having worked for many years on issues of post-Shoah relations both in facilitated encounters



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aspect of my fathers life: At the age of seventeen, he had been stationedin a military unit in close proximity of a Jewish slave labor camp. I

learned this fact only coincidentally and through the detour of a Jewishsurvivor. Why? Because I had had the opportunity to listen to the testi-mony of Edward Gastfriend, who was born is Sosnowiec, Poland. Edwardsurvived several camps, among them Blechhammer in Upper-Silesia,about forty miles west of Auschwitz. Years later, during a dinner conver-sation, my father made a brief reference to Blechhammer when talkingabout his adolescence, not knowing that I would recognize this location. And in this very instance, worlds collided that hitherto seemed apart:my own family biography and the history of the Shoah unexpectedly overlapped.

My father had been stationed in the vicinity of Blechhammer in orderto be trained in an anti-aircraft unit. Edward Gastfriend, during the sametime, struggled to keep alive under the severe conditions of the slavelabor camp. My father and Edward are of the same age. They were bothteenagers when the war uprooted them. Dropped in the forested region

of Upper Silesia, where the Germans were building a sizable industrialcomplex to produce synthetic gas, my father and Lolek (as Edward wascalled back then) lived parallel lives. For several months, between 1943and 1944, each of them experienced the region of Blechhammer (Blachov-nia in Polish) from different sides of the fence: My father protected thechemical plant from the bombing raids of American warplanes, while the very same factory exploited the labor of a Jewish teenager. 4

In 1996, my father and I traveled to Poland in search of Blechham-mer. We eventually found the camps remnants overgrown in the forest; we even found the spot where the big anti-aircraft gun had been posi-tioned that my fathers unit operated. As I moved with my fatherthrough this landscape, the geography of Blechhammer became part of my own world. I also began to realize that my father and Lolek musthave seen each other back in 1943 on a road leading to the industrialsite. Each has separately described to me a small stretch of road they had traveled on. In the mornings, Lolek shufed to work under thewatchful eyes of guards while my father passed columns of Jewish pris-



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It was the arts that intrigued me. And I said yes.

Karens rst artistic forays into her Jewish-German identity occurred

during a process of restoring her need for feeling at-home again. She nolonger could escape the coincidental signicance of her birthday:November 9. This is the Night of Broken Glass. Karen was born on a day on whichfourteen years earlierJewish stores had been smashed, syn-agogues burned, and people beaten, arrested, and killed. November 9,1938, foreshadowed the genocidal killing that was about to be imple-mented as a policy across Nazi-occupied Europe. Raised in postwar Ger-many into a family of Jewish remigrees, Karen would celebrate herbirthday each year while, across Germany, the annual rituals of com-memoration inevitably took their course. On this day, public representa-tives would feel moved to recite the political wisdom and moralcertitude of never-again. Each year, Karen would sense the gapbetween the smoothness of public memorializing and the emotional tur-moil of family memories.

Thirty seven years later, in 1989, another layer was added to thisdate: the fall of the Berlin Wall, which ended the postwar divisionbetween East and West Germans

Figure 9. Blechhammer 1943-44 (2007). Krondorfer. Linocut.



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with the imprinted date has the appearance of a piece of oversized skin.In its fragility, the paper panel exhibits something most intimateher

birthday. But its size also points to a collective experienceJerusalemswailing wall (as Karen says) and, perhaps, the Berlin wall with itsgrafti. I also see it as gigantic scroll containing a very personalmidrash.

November 9 initiated Karen into her second-generation explora-tion. In another piece, she attached multiple papercasts of her head ontop of each other, each layer being peeled away to reveal another. Shestenciled the words Jew and German into the paper as watermarks.The faces enigma: does it portray the bursting of a unied personality or the birthing of a new self?

Slowly, Karens acute woundedness and personal uncertainty gave way to communal concerns. In her drawings, she left behind depictionsof de-skinned individual bodies (in which everything internal is exposed)and moved, instead, toward a communal project in which womenexplored intimate aspects of the female body. Karen started the Blooming-ton Breast Project , where women of all ages and walks-of-life createdpapercasts of their breasts and exhibited them as installations in public

Figure 10. German/Jew (2004). Baldner. Book structure.



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from soul-searching with respect to Jewish-German dialogue. I felt I hadexposed myself enough and also became protective of my parents. 5

We retreated for ve days to a friends studio in Manhattan. During

these days, we mostly talked, interrupted only by simple drawing exer-cises. We told each other our family histories in great detail and open-ness. We sketched our family trees on poster-sized papers and pinnedthem to the wall. We added names and dates, drew arrows between fam-ily members, appended our emotional relations to them, and inserted(cultural) interpretations to familys experiences: Exil, Flucht , Vertrauens-bruch , Versteck , Assimilation, Kriegsgeschichten, Vertreibung . . .

What Karen had appreciated about my listening skills in previous years, she now reciprocated with kind generosity. Without judgment,she listened to the stories I knew about my family. She allowed herself to see my father as a teenagerbeyond the Wehrmacht uniform. Sheteared up when I showed her a postcard I had recently retrieved fromthe family archive. It had been written by my grandmother to my mother in January of 1945, when she had stayed behind as the last per-son of her family at her home near Knigsberg, East Prussia. The Soviet Army had already encircled this region and my grandmother did notexpect to survive To her seventeen-year-old daughter whom she had

Figures 11 & 12. The Bloomington Breast Project (2000/1). Baldner. Public installations.Figure 13. Center: Private Backache (1993). Baldner. Drawing.



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hour, the situation grows worse, rescue is hopeless. In eternal love yourloving mother. Luckily, they both survived the chaotic ightbut they

did not know this when my grandmother had sent these words whichshe must have believed to be her last testament.

During these days in Manhattan, we did not create a single artobject, but when we left the studio, we had gathered a treasure of con-ceptual ideas about how to translate emotionally charged memories intocontemporary art.

Karen and I work with maps. We cut out maps of Europe from his-torical atlases. On them, we mark the birthplaces of parents, grandpar-ents, and great-grandparents. Surprisingly, we discover that thegeographies of our families of origin overlap in several places. Connect-ing the dots, we trace the migration patterns of our Jewish and Germanancestorsand the European landscape becomes crisscrossed like a spi-der web. Despite the many losses of homesfrom Transylvania to EastPrussia, from Moravia to Berlinwe sense something like Heimat whenimmersing ourselves into geographies.

A maps surface gains in depth: We dig beyond the smooth print andunearth the smell of our rootsalmost as palpable as the wet pulp we will later mix. The pock-marked landscape becomes a staging ground forour post-memories.



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We realize that, in the 1950s, Karen and I lived as children in thesame neighborhood in Frankfurt.

We trace the silhouettes of our faces as if tracing geographical pat-terns. Our faces become maps, their shapes like genetic contours. Pat-terns imposed on maps, words imposed on silhouettes, memoriesimposed on the present.

We refrain from making deliberate references to other second-gener-ation artists, but one cannot read art outside of context. The astuteobserver may see and hear echoes of Jean Amery, Paul Celan, Shimon Attie, Christian Boltanski, Bracha Ettinger, or the inverted relics of Rachel Whitereadeach artist struggling in different ways with thepresence of absence. 6 The recurrence of our facial silhouettes may remind others of the cut out gures of Kara Walker, the African-Americanartist who evokes the history of stereotypes concerning black identity in the United States. 7 There is, however, a difference. While Walkerssubversive subtlety de-individualizes historical subjects and lets unre-solved memories collide, our work seeks to bridge the distance between

individual facial contours to entice viewers to imagine their own storiesabout the familiar other.

Our choice of materialshandmade paper, fabric, leather, hair, felt,Plexiglas, plastic, twine, colored wire threads, mirrors, and rustedsteelblends contemporary sensibilities with cultural histories. In Who Am I in Your Presence/Wer bin ich in deiner Gegenwart, our rst work, we placed a scratched mirror into a strong, rusted steel frame, with onePlexiglas panel hanging on each side. Those panels show the prole of our faces. Behind the mirror, a map of Europe reveals locations of lostand abandoned homes.

Another example: our medieval girdle book Heimat is constructedfrom handmade paper and bound in yellow leather. The pagessomethe color of earth, others the color of ashescontain pieces of European maps: handprinted black letters dance on ocher paper, andlithographed negatives of family snap shots gild black surfaces. Stringsof yellow, red, and black wire thread pour out of Heimat, uncontain-able by the leather cover The pages recall conicting bits of memories



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cover: we imitate Albrecht Drers signature A but place it upsidedown.

We are pushing the boundaries of the book format. Inspired by themonumental work of the artistic maestros of German Vergangen-heitsbewltigung , like Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, and Anselm Kiefer, 8

we createon a far more humble scaleour own installations. Storiesemerge, for example, from a set of three typewriters installed waist-highabove the oor. Ghost-like hands seem to write stories. Authorless, eachtypewriter is fed by fragments of memories that leap upwards from amessy heap on the ground. From a pile of fabric, hair, and strings, mem-ories wind their way upward, dangling freely in the air, inchoate, oftenillegible. Eventually, these memory strings nd themselves pressed intothe mechanics of the typewriter, where they are bent to the rules of technology and grammar. A tellable story is imprinted onto the tangledmess of what is remembered and what is forgotten.

Another book installation emerges out of family documents that wecollected about our grandfathers who died before we were born. Thepiece is called Obituaries/Nachrufe. In this work, we call upon thememories of our unknown grandfathers On my side I have a Wehrmacht

Figures 15 & 16. Details. with-drawing the line: Triptych (2008). Baldner and Krondorfer.Installation.



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had married into a Jewish-German family) died in 1946 from the effectsof his imprisonment. As a mixed marriage, Max, his wife, and their chil-

dren had found refuge for a while at the Silesian estate of Yorck von Wartenburg, who later became involved in the July 20 plot to assassinateHitler. After the failed coup, the family returned to Berlin. Refusing toget a divorce from his Jewish wife, Max was sent to the forced laborcamp of Leuna. He never recovered from his deteriorated health anddied a year after liberation.

The personalities of the grandfathers we never knew (as Karenand I often call this piece) surface through obituary materials. Afxedbetween Plexiglas panels are fragments of letters of consolation fromformer comrades, public eulogies of friends, and various materials sym-bolizing their lives (fabric, hair, straw, and sand). Two different sides of German society thus come into focus. As an installation, Obituaries/ Nachrufe relies on light and relatively small materials and a collapsiblestructure that people are permitted to move and manipulate. The trans-parent panels can be differently combined, with the result that surpris-

ing synchronicities and non-linear chronologies emerge.

Language as home: For a long time Karen found it difcult to speak

Figure 17. Obituaries/Nachrufe (2005). Baldner and Krondorfer. Panel mounted on wood.



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I truly felt that, around her, I was in the presence of a fellow German who, like me, happened to live in the United States.

Since this conversation, we have changed: Karen now allows herself to indulge in longings for German culture while I have adopted the U.S.citizenship. We are comfortable to converse in German and Englishindiscriminately, often switching languages in mid-sentence. Yet we keepagonizing over the use of language in our art. What language should we speak? Since blending image and text is important to usas eachdeepens the act of witnessing that our art signiesshould we injectand insert ourselves in our mother tongues? Would we estrange an audi-ence unfamiliar with the German language? Would foreign words add alayer of enigma, like the patina of old photographs? 9

It is also an issue of artistic integrity: if we were to provide transla-tions, would we sacrice our aesthetic vision for educational objectives?Transforming the particulars of intimate memories to the universals of contemporary recognition is no easy task. 10

Our bi-linguality, we realize, comes as both a blessing and a burden:

We can feel home in two worlds but we are never completely complete ineither.

In our art, the different family backgrounds yearn less for documen-tation rather than transformation: separate memories morph into visu-ally unied pieces. We have taken the risk of listening to each othercarefully and we have moved beyond the inherited skin that traps us inthe roles of descendants of victims and perpetrators. There is no longera xed and predetermined position from which we speak.

Once our pieces are createdour material witnessesthey beginto stare back at us like mirrors. They prompt us to ask again whether we are accomplishing the level of honesty we are striving for. Whatmight have previously fallen through the cracks of interpersonal tensionmay now be revealed in the material objectivity of our art. How do wetalk to each other as two contemporary Germans from a Jewish and non- Jewish background? We are aware that our questions may be unanswer-ableat least in our generation.

A haunted and unresolved space remains between us Hence it may



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Notes1. Gottfried Berman-Fischer, BedrohtBewahrt: Weg eines Verlegers (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1971);and Brigitte B. Fischer, Sie schrieben mir, oder was aus meinem Poesiealbum wurde (Mnchen: dtv,1981).2. On the Jewish-German Dance Theatre, see Krondorfer, Remembrance and Reconciliation: Encoun-ters Between Young Jews and Germans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).3. Mens Bodies, Mens Gods: Male Identities in a (Post-) Christian Culture, ed. Bjrn Krondorfer(New York: New York University Press, 1996), p. 8.4. Edward Gastfriend, My Fathers Testament: Memoir of a Jewish Teenager, 1938-1945 , ed. withan Afterword by Bjrn Krondorfer (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000).5. See also Krondorfer, Ratners Kosher Restaurant, in Second Generation Voices: Reectionsby Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators , eds. Alan and Naomi Berger (Syracuse, NY:Syracuse University Press, 2001), pp. 258-269.6. On poetic voices, see, for example, Susan Gubar, Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knows(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); on visual and conceptualartists, see Lisa Saltzman, Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006); Dora Apel, Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Absence/Presence:The Artistic Memory of the Holocaust and Genocide, ed. and curated by Stephen Feinstein (exhibi-tion catalog, Katherina E. Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota, 1999); and Leslie Morris,Berlin Elegies: Absence, Postmemory, and Art after Auschwitz, in Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust , eds. Shelly Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 2003), pp. 288-303.7. On Walkers art, see Saltzman, Making Memory Matter (2006), pp. 48-74.8. On postwar German painting, see Lisa Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz(New York: Cambridge, 1999), and Matthew Biro, Representation and Event: AnselmKiefer, Joseph Beuys, and the Memory of the Holocaust, The Yale Journal of Criticism 16/1(2003):113-146. See also Astrid Schmetterling, Archival Obsessions: Arnold DreyblattsMemory Work, art journal (Winter 2007):71-83.9. Shows at galleries and exhibits include Witnesses (Center for Book Arts, New York,2008); Sndenbock (Meshulash Exhibit, Neue Synagoge, Berlin, 2007); book bodies (Indy ArtMuseum, IN, 2007); Conict/Peace (Columbia Art Center, MD, 2007); Annual National AfliateShow (Soho 20 Chelsea, New York City, 2006 and 2005); Homeland/Heimaten (DAI, Heidelberg,Germany, 2004); and Monologues/Dialogues (Arthur M. Glick Jewish Community CenterGallery, Indianapolis, IN, 2004).10. Similar issues were raised during a symposium at the opening of our solo exhibit push-mepullyou at Mathers Museum (Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, 2008). Participantsincluded art historian Lisa Saltzman and panelists Susan Gubar, Alvin Rosenfeld, EdwardLinenthal, and David Thelen.



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Witnessing and Re-imagining Through the Arts Meditation on a Dialogical Project