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Federal Republic of Germany The Murderers Are Among Us In the Federal Republic of Germany there was an ongoing discussion about the question of guilt from the beginning, although for a long time it was carried on by minorities. Right after the end of the War the crimes of the various organizations of the "SS state" were present in the consciousness of the population – not least of all because of the Nuremberg trials. Films like "The Murderers Are Among Us" were well-known, and the book "The Diary of Anne Frank" had been published in 1950. The first Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, which convened on December 20, 1963, can nevertheless be identified as a turning point in the discourse about National-Socialism. With this trial began the "working over of the past". In 1961 Eichmann went on trial in Jerusalem. This inquest excited genuine interest in bringing the criminals directly involved in the murders to trial. At the beginning of the 1960s Rolf Hochhuth's stage play "Der Stellvertreter" ("The Deputy") caused a sensation, and the children of the perpetrators, the '68 generation, launched into a theoretical debate that went down in history under the appellation "Fascism criticism". The so-called "German Historians' Controversy" in the 1980s flared up around the question of the way historical science has dealt with the National-Socialist past. For some years now one topic follows fast in the footsteps of the next – crimes of the Wehrmacht, memorial for the murdered European Jews, forced labour, expulsion from home territories, etc. |
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In his painting "Uncle Rudi" Gerhard Richter takes up a problem which had previously not been discussed. It reminds us not only that soldiers of the Wehrmacht had participated in the mass murder, but also that one of them could have been our uncle. This realisation first entered the public discussion in 1996 through the exhibition "War of Extermination – Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944". The painting came about in the context of an exhibition organized by the Berlin art dealer René Block in 1967 to commemorate the victims of the massacre in Lidice. Block had asked 21 artists to provide one work each for the exhibition "Hommage à Lidice". Gerhard Richter was one of the contributors, alongside such artists as Joseph Beuys, Dieter Roth, Wolf Vostell, Günther Uecker and Gotthard Graubner. These works were intended as a gift to the museum in Lidice, which was then in the planning. |
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The exhibition "Admonition of the Past" which was shown in Berlin in 1960 reveals that a minority of people in Germany were interested in remembering the German crimes even before the Auschwitz trials. It must be noted, however, that the advisory board stipulated that Gerhard Schoenberner and Hanno Kremer, who were responsible for putting the exhibition together, were specifically forbidden to name the names of high-ranking politicians and officials of the Federal Republic of Germany who had already been influential before 1945. These included for example Theodor Oberländer, Hans Globke and Theodor Maunz. On the poster the boy from the Warsaw Ghetto is placed opposite the portrait of Albert Einstein. The first design had been turned down as being too negative. It showed only the reproduction of the photograph with the boy from the Stroop report. The alternative now contains the desired "positive element". Correspondingly, it was also required to accentuate the emblems of the Waffen-SS. The reason: the Wehrmacht did not do such things. |
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