A motorway viewed from a bridge. It is dark. Cars approach in slow motion, decrease their speed, and finally stop in the middle of the carriageway. People get out and remain almost motionless, lit from behind by the headlights. After a while they drive on. This moment of motionlessness is the central component of a video loop with the title »Trembling Time« by Yael Bartana. What is documented here is a minute’s silence on the Israeli Soldiers’ Remembrance Day, which is dedicated to the memory of those who have died fighting for Israel. This picture also metaphorically sums up the theme of the exhibition »Wonderyears«: Israeli official policies of remembrance that have complex political implications.
In the exhibition curated especially for this occasion, 23 Israeli artists examine the representation of the Shoah and National Socialism in present-day Israel. »Wonderyears« was conceived in a two-year-long process of discussion by a team of curators, some of whom some live in Israel and others in Germany. Its central focus is an examination of the way the Shoah is officially commemorated in Israel. Many of the artists perceive this as rigid, ritualized and tending to relativisation. In Moshe Zimmermann’s article in the catalogue, he places these theses in a historical context. He writes that the commemoration of the Shoah – in contrast to other forms of remembrance in the Diaspora – has been politically instrumentalised, becoming not only the national founding myth but also a legitimation for current policies towards the Arab world. According to Idith Zertal, however, this transferral of the situation of the Shoah to the Middle East has brought about a massive relativisation of the Germans’ crimes, and thus introduced a victim-perpetrator dichotomy into the present-day political landscape that has proven to be a dead-end. This can perhaps be seen as summarising the internal Israeli viewpoint, without which, according to the catalogue, the exhibition cannot be understood. Many works criticising these politics of remembrance have a very different resonance in the German context. For, in Germany, it is mostly right-wingers and national conservatives like Martin Walser who speak out against an allegedly rigid and ritualised culture of remembrance in order to promote a rehabilitation of German national awareness. In »Wonderyears«, however, the criticism levelled at official discourses of remembrance is articulated mostly by young artists who, in the interviews also shown at the exhibition, class themselves as belonging to the left-wing political spectrum. In this way, the absurd situation arises where criticism of official discourses of remembrance comes from opposite ends of the political spectrum in Israel and Germany, leading to complementary discourses of remembrance as mirror inversions of each other. Whereas in Israel the culture of remembrance may be widely determined by patriotic considerations, in Germany it is seen, at least by right-wingers, as a denigratory »permanent display of our disgrace« (Walser), and included rather hesitantly in the new national culture of the Berlin Republic.
In this complicated situation, signals do get crossed in the interpretation of the Israeli works, especially when they treat Nazi clichés in an ironic manner or banalise them. One of the most prominent subjects in »Wonderyears« is, for example, Hitler, whom various works attempt to deconstruct as a comic figure (Tamy Ben-Tor, Boaz Arad). Other Nazi themes, such as pictures of important Nazi figures (Dina Shenhav), Gothic script (Avi Pitchon), swastikas and Nazi dominas (Anat Ben-David), operetta songs and other Nazi kitsch, are appropriated, parodied and caricatured. Curator Adi Nachman explains this tendency towards pop art by saying that other styles, particularly modernist ones, have already been too extensively integrated into the official culture of remembrance. In a German context, these attempts at subversion also recall the culture of taboo-breaking in the eighties, which worked with similar formal means, and which vacillated indecisively between harmless irony and fascinated identification. These sorts of representation tend to repeat, rather than deconstruct, simplistic clichés about National Socialism under the motto »Hitler was a sick criminal acting on his own«.
Besides this approach, one which informs several works at the exhibition, there are also many attempts to find other aspects to focus on, rather than just exaggerating clichés. The video projection »Joseph« by Lior Shvil is among the most fascinating works. This video, edited in book form, recounts the Zionist model story of Joseph in silhouette-like vignettes: how he goes into the army, farms the land, etc.. The sharp contrasts of this legend, told in clear-cut black-and-white tableaux, do not only formulate the dichotomies of Zionist mythology: the black figures against a white background are also used as a way of narrating the story, one marginalised in Israel, of a black hero, thus addressing a view of nation based on the concept of »whiteness«. The work »Sapta« by Hila Peleg-Lavi also positions itself beyond the realm of parody. It is based on photographs of her grandmother, who obviously led an enjoyable life in post-war Germany. By presenting herself in her grandmother’s clothes and poses, the artist identifies herself with the former’s self-confidence and enjoyment of life, thus dissociating herself from the myth of the eternal victim. The video »Collected Silences« by Doron Solomon, in contrast, works along documentary lines. It shows another day of remembrance, this time one for the victims of the Shoah. Here, too, public life stops – people freeze on the streets and at commemorative events. However, Solomon’s video shows the many different reactions to the state-ordained minute’s silence. As well as people standing around embarrassed or with expressionless faces, the video also shows moments of true bewilderment. In this way, a broad panorama of reactions to the official culture of remembrance is created in which an arbitrary selection of passers-by is addressed and examined in completely different ways.
David I. Cohen-Tzedek blends two pieces of music – a love song by Eduard Mörike and an excerpt from the orthodox Jewish prayer book – to produce a sado-masochistic love duet. In Mörike’s song, love is imagined as a spectacle that is both unfulfillable and sadistic, in which fulfilment consists of girls submitting to it meekly like lambs going to the slaughter. A passage from the prayer book is inserted into this song in which it is repeatedly mentioned that the Jews are destined to be slaughtered like lambs. Here, two fantasies complement one another: one about the masochistic repetition of an eternally ordained victim status, the other, sadistic, about the fulfilment of love through the endless torment of this victim. The work can be read as a metaphor for the mirror-inverted, complementary discourses of remembrance in Germany and Israel, which makes the evolution of a universalistic mode of remembrance that is not couched in purely national terms seem an almost insoluble task at this time.

NGBK and Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien, 26 April to 1 June 2003

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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