The Haftmann case: From perpetration to success

Carlo Gentile, Vincenza Benedettino & Maria Neumann in conversation

In the series Vergiftete Verhältnisse - Gespräche zur Gegenwartskunst, Vincenza Benedettino, Carlo Gentile and Maria Neumann will talk about the Haftmann case on May 31, 2022 at 6 pm at the Forschungsstation am Lutherplatz.

Werner Haftmann, who made a career as an art historian, co-founder of documenta and first director of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in the post-war period, was a National Socialist: in 1933 he joined the SA, four years later, in 1937, Haftmann became a member of the NSDAP, and during the Second World War he took part in the partisan war in Italy. What do we know about Haftmann's thoughts and actions between 1933 and 1945? To what extent did Haftmann's Nazi past influence his work? And how does our image of Haftmann change against this background? Can the separation of author and work really be maintained in the face of such a biography?

Vincenza Benedettino studied art history in Trieste and art history and museology at the University of Heidelberg and at the École du Louvre in Paris. She then completed her doctorate at the University of Heidelberg on Werner Haftmann, the founding director of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Vincenza Benedettino was a Baden-Württemberg scholarship holder at the Central Institute for Art History in Munich as well as a scholarship holder at the German Forum for Art History (Max Weber Foundation) in Paris and at the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max Planck Institute for Art History) in Rome.

Carlo Gentile completed his doctorate in 2012 with a thesis on the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS in the partisan war in Italy. In his study, he systematically analyzed German war crimes in Italy between 1943 and 1945. He is the author and editor of numerous studies on the history of Italy during the Second World War and teaches at the Martin Buber Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Cologne.

Maria Neumann studied history, political science and economics in Berlin, Potsdam and Wrocław. She worked at the Humboldt University in Berlin as a research assistant at the Chair of 20th Century European History, where she wrote her thesis on “Die Religion der Anderen. Religious Socialization and the Cold War in Divided Berlin-Brandenburg, 1945-1990”. She has been a research associate at the documenta Institute since 2021.