Project Statement
re-imaginings across the abyss:
Jewish/German Dialogue through the arts
Karen Baldner and Björn Krondorfer
How do two Germans talk to each other in a post-Shoah world if they come from a Jewish and a non-Jewish family background? We explore this question not only through verbal conversations but substantially through the language of the visual arts. Together, we have created works of art that take on the medium of the book, a format rooted in the German and the Jewish traditions. Our book-objects are not only catalysts for the deepening of our dialogue, but they also witness our intensely personal and artistic process. As objects, our art also invites the audience to participate in our personal conversations: In the face of the post-Shoah chasm between our communities, can we imagine spaces where genuine dialogue can take place?
Our work emerges from the intimate sharing of our family histories. It is the interpersonal and subjective dimensions that enable us to render the past as present as our living experience in the “here and now.”
We have individually explored themes related to the Holocaust for many years. Karen Baldner comes from a Jewish-German family persecuted during the Nazi era. She grew up in postwar Germany but today resides as a visual artist in the United States. She works in the media of Artist Books, addressing issues of victimization, empowerment and identity. She teaches Drawing and Bookarts at Herron School of Art & Design in Indianapolis, Indiana. Björn Krondorfer comes from a non-Jewish German family, grew up in Germany, and now teaches Religious Studies at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, USA. As a scholar, his research and projects center on the legacy and the intergenerational transmission of the Holocaust. We met in 1992 at St. Mary's College. Since then we have cultivated a friendship based on respect and inspiration for each other’s dedication to addressing the legacy of the Shoah, National Socialism as well as larger issues related to violence.
Collaborating artistically has helped us to get through the sometimes arduous and emotional nature of such dialogical processes. By anchoring our dialogue in material objects, the art focuses our dialogue serving as a “witness” to our process to each other, while also establishing a forum for the wider community.
Our decision to work with book objects and installations is a result of our initial conversations: Books represent best our shared interests, skills and respective traditions. Books are central not only to Karen’s previous artistic work and Björn’s scholarly endeavors, they have also been central for centuries to the cultures in which we are embedded.
Each of the objects emerging from our collaboration is the result of the circumstances of our work. Since we do not live in the same region and can see each other only a few times during the year, each art object, each “witness,” has its own special location within our dialogical relation. One of our books, for example, is small enough that we have sent it back and forth through the mail. It is called “Heimat.” In this book made of handmade paper, containing pieces of European maps and lithographed family pictures, we look at our identities through the lens of a most intimate part of our lives, our different “German” homes. Uneasy about the term “Heimat” we have tried to wrestle with the worlds that this term evokes, often through juxtaposing conflicting bits of memories, ideas, quotes, and claims. The book has a diary-quality; it unfolds page-by-page through concise, sometimes stream-of-consciousness entries. The book is bound in leather, following a German medieval binding style, thus connecting our personal “re-imaginings” to a larger cultural history.
Another book was shaped from materials which emerged from our parents’ family documents. Some of these documents were already in our possession, others were contributed by family members. “Obituaries/Nachrufe” is a book-object that most explicitly links the past to the present, forming a dynamic continuum between us and our stories. In this work, we call upon the memories of our unknown grandfathers. We had each one grandfather who died before we were born: on Björn’s side a Wehrmacht officer who died of cancer during the war; on Karen’s side, a Berlin musician who died a year after the war from the effects of his camp experiences. As the grandfathers’ personae unfold through the obituary materials, two different sides of German society come into focus through intimate and public remembrances. The aesthetic vocabulary in “Obituaries/Nachrufe” relies on light and relatively small materials, a collapsible structure that people are permitted to move and manipulate. Transparent plexiglass panels can be moved so that the fragmented obituary stories can be layered and differently combined, with the result that surprising synchronicities and non-linear chronologies emerge. There is not only one story to tell.
Our choice of materials (handmade paper, plexiglass, leather, hair, plastic, colored wire threads, rusted steel, lithographs, etc.) is based on blending contemporary sensibilities within cultural histories. We find ourselves choosing combinations which juxtapose the contemporary with the feel of the old. In a piece called “Who Am I In Your Presence/Wer bin ich in deiner Gegenwart?”, our first work, we placed a scratched mirror into a strong, rusting steel frame, with one plexiglass panel hanging on each side. Those panels showed the profile of our faces. Behind the mirror, a map of Europe reveals itself through the scratched surface; symbolic markers on the map indicate the geographical locations of the various homes of our respective families.
As our stories rooted in our families unfold in these works, their histories maintain their characteristic separation from each other. But the integration of two different stories into a unified visual art piece produces a blending and morphing effect. The structure of “Who Am I In Your Presence/Wer bin ich in deiner Gegenwart?” facilitates thus a simultaneous merging and separateness, which can be manipulated by the viewer through moving the plexiglass panels. The blending and crossing over of the visual is, in actuality, a reflection of our own dialogue: We have taken the risk to listen to each carefully, moving beyond the inherited demarcations of victim and perpetrator. There is no longer a fixed and predetermined position from which we speak.
At times, the process of “materializing” our conversations, especially when they touch sore spots in our Jewish/German dialogue, has helped us to move back from our emotionality. By stepping back, we are able negotiate the differences through the artistic choices we’ve made; we re-embrace the issues aesthetically and intellectually. By looking at the art-object--our materialized “witness”--, our conversation seems to look back at us, as if asking whether we have accomplished the level of honesty we are striving for. A topic may suddenly be accessible that has previously fallen through the cracks of interpersonal tensions. Hence, the artistic-visual process can act as a mediator and facilitator.
There is a particular advantage for us in working in the United States, far away from the pressures of our families and dependence of our respective cultures. It is as if this “neutral” place allows us to meet as equals. Geographical location, we have learned, can open and strengthen the process of difficult dialogues.
Lastly, sharing our work with the public is an important component of our work. We are still experimenting with what works best when inviting the public into our interpersonal creative space. So far we have had three exhibits in the US (Jewish Community Center Gallery, Indianapolis, Indianapolis Art Center, Soho20 Chelsea Gallery in New York City) and one in Germany (Deutsch Amerikanisches Institut in Heidelberg). Of all four shows the one in Germany may have been the most vibrant and productive perhaps because so much of our work is rooted in German culture and addressing German issues. For that reason we are currently focused on bringing our work back to Germany.
The deeper we enter the dialogue process, the more we become aware that our initial questions may remain unanswered—at least in our generation. How do we talk to each other as two contemporary Germans from a Jewish and non-Jewish background? It is perhaps the nature of engaging our two sides in each other’s presence that provides a haunted, unresolved space between us. It may be prudent to view our dialogue not as a place to find solutions but as a forum where cultural secrets can be exchanged, personal memories appreciated, the past accounted for, and the presence re-imagined.