Beyond Irrepresentability

Exploring Images from Nazi Camps, Ghettos, and the Holocaust

Verena Krieger, Ella Falldorf, Verena Krieger

• Publisher: Böhlau Köln
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9783412533793
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

Despite the doubts about the representability of the Holocaust, thousands of works of art and visual artifacts were created by prisoners in Nazi camps and ghettos during and immediately after the Holocaust. Yet, both art historians and historians rarely dealt with them for decades. Because of their mostly figurative language, researchers and memory institutions often reduced such images to the status of spiritual and political resistance, praised their artistic quality, or consulted them as illustrations of "how it was". But these images do not speak for themselves, they require analysis. In this volume, 19 international scholars, curators, and educators explore the potential of analytical approaches to drawings, albums, paintings, and prints created by victims and witnesses of the Nazi regime. They consolidate current approaches to these multifaceted objects and take the images seriously as images.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Body
• Verena Krieger/Ella Falldorf: Preface
• Conceptual Considerations
• Verena Krieger/Ella Falldorf: “To Tear These Images from Time”. Images Created in Nazi Camps and Ghettos during the Holocaust from the Perspective of Art History
• Ziva Amishai-Maisels/Ella Falldorf: Thirty Years after Depiction and Interpretation
• Michaela Haibl: Visible, Invisible, Absent. On the Structure of Artifacts from Concentration Camps
• Giedrė Jankevičiūtė/Nerijus Šepetys: Visual Representations of the Holocaust Reality. The Problem of Authenticity
• Social Dimensions
• Eugenia Alexaki: Isaac Menasse: A Greek Jewish Amateur Painter’s Unknown Drawings from Bergen-Belsen
• Olga Stefan: Artistic Production as Resistance in Vapniarka, the Camp of Death
• Agata Pietrasik: Pictorial Eyewitnessing. Sara Gliksman-Fajtlowicz’s Paintings from the Łódź Ghetto
• Diverse Iconographies
• Kobi Kabalek: The Nazi Whip. Terror and Pain in the Artworks of Former Nazi Camp Inmates
• Daniel Véri: The Monsters’ Metamorphosis. Early Holocaust Works and the Antifascist Narrative. From Ferenc Martyn’s The Great Swamp to The Monsters of Fascism
• Piotr Słodkowski: Superfluous Memory. Halina Ołomucka’s Testimonies in the Context of Postwar Images of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 1945 – 1956
• Manuel Fabritz: gezeichnet. From Buchenwald to Switzerland – A Series of 39 Images drawn by Kalman Landau
• Transformations of Representations
• Rachel E. Perry: Telling It Over Time. Regina Lichter-Liron’s Visual Testimony, 1946 to 1978
• Verena Krieger: Boris Taslitzky’s The Little Camp in Buchenwald. Changing Meanings, Ambivalence, and Disambiguation in Art Created During the Camps and After
• Sarah Wilson: Returning to Boris Taslitzky. Holocaust Representation in Postwar France and Contemporary Revivals
• Julie Constant: France and the Works of Testimony and Memory of Artists who Survived the Nazi Camps. A Missed Opportunity
• Exhibiting and Educating
• Eliad Moreh-Rosenberg: The Yad Vashem Museum of Holocaust Art. Changes and Evolution. Changes and Evolution
• Volkhard Knigge/Verena Krieger: “Aesthetic reception and historical understanding cannot be separated”. The Conceptualization of the Buchenwald Art Museum after German Unification
• Mackenzie Lake: Visual Art Created in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp as a Primary Source in Education. A Conceptual Framework for Praxis
• Anna Paola Bellini: On the Educational Use of Drawings from the Camps. The Case of the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris
• Contributors
• Illustration Credits