Collaborative project: Art and cultural policy after National Socialism

Numerous art exhibitions in the post-war period, including the documenta, by no means stand for a “zero hour”, but rather refer to quasi self-evident and hushed-up continuities in art and culture alongside frequently remembered ruptures: on the one hand, exhibitions and museums were spaces of negotiation processes about the relationship between art and politics in post-fascist Germany. On the other hand, they were an expression of a new cultural policy. They are thus both places of remembrance and representation. They are reactions to a memory problem and formulate new memory needs.
Against this background, it makes sense to interweave questions of art history and contemporary history within the framework of an interdisciplinary and cross-institutional project. This means including political and socio-cultural contexts as well as questions of remembrance and reappraisal in exhibition studies and integrating the history of a cultural and art institution such as documenta into overarching contexts.
Based on a fundamental examination of the beginnings of the exhibition scene in the years after 1945 and the various biographies of the associated actors, including perpetrators, followers and victims, the project aims to trace the traces of burden and relief in the art field. The typical gaps in the biographies, their decades of tolerance and invisibility raise questions about the actors themselves, their contemporaries and descendants and, last but not least, the relationship between author and work.
Since 2022, we have approached associated questions from different perspectives and in collaboration with numerous partners. A joint project is currently in the consolidation phase in order to work together with various cultural institutions on the still very incomplete reappraisal of Nazi continuities in the art field. There are also plans to establish a working group to emphasize and promote the project's interdisciplinary approach.

Events

March 2025
The maltreated memory. Which strategies, against which background and with which actors?

April 2024
Panel discussion on the book launch of “Bruch und Kontinuität. Kunst und Kulturpolitik nach 1945” with Jutta Braun, Fabian Bechtle and Leon Kahane.

June 2023
Art and culture between 1945 and 1955. Interdisciplinarity in practice. An experimental workshop.

May 2022
The NS-past and continuities of art institutions. Workshop.

Credits Image:

Copyright Notice:
© documenta archiv / Foto: Erich Müller
Credit:
documenta archiv / Foto: Erich Müller
Fotograf: Erich Müller