‚Hannah Arendt: Besuch in Deutschland 1950’
Drawing | Object
© Susanne Kienbaum 2001
Dimensions: 250 x 149 cm
Materials: acryl, paper, collage pieces mounted on self-made cardboard
This drawing and paperwork uses excerpts from an essay written by Hannah Arendt: The essay with the German title ‘Besuch in Deutschland 1950’ was published in 1950 in the United States one year after the first visit of Hannah Arendt in Germany which took place sixteen years after her flight from Nazi Germany. She came to visit Germany in her role as director of the Commision on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction. During her visit she was writing her 40-pages essay under the title „The Aftermath of Nazi-Rule. Report from Germany“ which was published one year later in the United States. The German translation was only published 36 years later in the ‘Rotbuch-Verlag’ under the much ‘softer’ title ‘Besuch in Deutschland 1950’, a further translation in 1993, the latter completely under the sign of the end of the GDR and the German reunification. The text collages from 1950 – 5 years after the end of world-war II and Nazi-Germany – cited in this paper work are serving as a reference to the year 2001, approximately 10 years after the incorporation of the former German Democratic Republik (GDR) into the German republik. The collage pieces are derived from the ‘Shelter’-light installation (®) which shows minor language deviations indicating the ‘non-digestion’ of German world-war-II-history in daily life and associated newspaper articles collected during 2001 which was exhibited during the same show.
Concept | Realization: Susanne Kienbaum
Grunewald 79, Grunewaldstrasse 79, D-10823 Berlin
Fotos: © Sebastian Dieckmann