After Nuremberg

Last summer, a small yet unsettling exhibition opened at Art Cru Berlin, a below-radar art space dedicated to outsider art whose modest profile belies its prime location in the heart of Mitte. The show featured vivid drawings by Nathan Hilu, a Jewish American artist and the son of Syrian immigrants, whose extraordinary experience as an eighteen-year-old soldier guarding Nazi war criminals during the Nuremberg trials became the source of his lifelong artistic endeavour.

Nathan-ism commemorated eighty years since the trials began, with the unprecedented aim of establishing that individuals could be held legally accountable for violations of international law. The first and most significant trial, held from November 1945 to October 1946, charged twenty-four senior Nazi officials with war crimes, crimes against peace and crimes against humanity, a new legal category formulated in response to the ‘Final Solution’. For decades, Hilu translated his memories of moments spent alongside Nazi leaders such as Hermann Göring and Rudolf Hess into raw depictions executed on scraps of paper with felt-tip pens and crayon. The exhibition was accompanied by a screening of Elan Golod’s 2023 documentary of the same name, which contextualises and questions some of the memories captured on paper.

Nathan Hilu, Untitled, undated, felt-tip pen, marker, permanent marker on paper, 39 x 37 cm. © Elan Golod. Courtesy Galerie ART CRU Berlin

One motif haunts Hilu’s drawings with obsessive intensity: the prolonged kiss between Göring and his wife, a moment that Hilu claims concealed the passing of a cyanide pill used to evade execution. Hilu revisited his direct proximity to the principal perpetrators of the Shoah time and again through his writing and drawings up until his death in 2019, at the age of ninety-four.

Silent Abstraction

Conversely, it would take at least two decades after the end of the Nuremberg trials for artists operating within conventional cultural systems to approach the horrors of the Holocaust. During the late 1940s and 1950s, West German art was dominated by abstraction – movements such as Art Informel and Zero that functioned in part as an aesthetic refusal of figuration but also avoided confronting Nazi crimes. Memory was displaced rather than addressed, as West Germany’s denazification process was still underway and, in hindsight, was never truly accomplished. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that artists began to engage with memory, sometimes inviting controversy by invoking war and devastation.

Joseph Beuys, the best-known among them, is considered by many to be a trailblazer, but he largely circumvented honest engagement with his personal culpability. Beuys’s legacy too often obfuscates the fact that in 1940 he volunteered to join the Luftwaffe and served as a dive-bomber pilot. In 1944 he crashed in Crimea and was saved – an event he would repeatedly mythologise in his work using fat, taxidermy and felt.

Anselm Kiefer, Besetzungen 1969 (Interfunktionen N°12) (detail), 1969–1975 , 18 black and white photographs, collage, in a magazine with adhesive binding. © Anselm Kiefer. Photo: Atelier Anselm Kiefer. Courtesy Gagosian

A Late Awakening

The following decades saw artists belonging to a generation born during or directly after the war – including Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and the French artist Christian Boltanski – explore trauma through fragmentation and absence, highlighting the impossibility of fully representing the Holocaust. In his book Das Verschwinden des Holocaust (The Disappearance of the Holocaust, Edition Tiamat, 2025), the German historian Jan Gerber discusses how the Holocaust’s presence in collective memory has changed over time. He reminds readers that it was not widely acknowledged as a defining historical event after the Second World War. It entered mainstream memory decades later, from the 1970s onward. Public engagement with the Holocaust accelerated after the German broadcast and international success of the US TV series Holocaust, as audiences began to grasp it as a distinct historical event rather than a background detail to the war.

The artworld and, eventually, the art market embraced such engagement, despite the controversy initially provoked by the invocation of Nazi symbols. Anselm Kiefer’s confrontation with Nazi crimes began with his 1969 action and resulting photographic works Occupations/Heroic Symbols, in which he dons his father’s Wehrmacht uniform and performs the Nazi salute at various European locations. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Kiefer produced paintings that explicitly reference Paul Celan’s 1945 poem ‘Todesfuge’ (Death Fugue). The poem’s incantatory repetition, ‘death is a Master from Deutschland’, stages genocide through rhythm, fragmentation and lyrical structure rather than description.

Anselm Kiefer, Besetzungen 1969 (Interfunktionen N°12) (detail), 1969–1975 , 18 black and white photographs, collage, in a magazine with adhesive binding. © Anselm Kiefer. Photo: Atelier Anselm Kiefer. Courtesy Gagosian

Kiefer recognised early on that this refusal of literal depiction offered a model for how art might address historical catastrophe without aestheticising it. The painting, Nürnberg (1982), whose title references the Nazi party rally grounds, depicts a desolate field strewn with straw, transforming a site of spectacle into a landscape marked by historical guilt and ruin. Through these works, Kiefer established a monumental language to reckon with Germany’s traumatic past. Representing West Germany alongside Georg Baselitz at the 1980 Venice Biennale marked a turning point in his international recognition, but the validation of his 1984 Israel Museum exhibition helped legitimise him as a serious artist grappling with German guilt and Jewish memory rather than a mere provocateur.

Suzanne Landau, the recently retired director of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, who organised his 1984 solo exhibition there, is often overlooked as a crucial figure in Kiefer’s career. Her curatorial support provided an institutional framework through which the seriousness of his ethical approach to cultural memory was recognised. That exhibition, and Kiefer’s subsequent travels in Israel, profoundly shaped his practice, leading him to engage more deeply with Jewish history, the Hebrew Bible and kabbalistic thought. It also gave him access to a new collector base: at a time when Jewish households around the world were still largely avoiding German goods, it became acceptable to collect Kiefer’s work.

One of his most important patrons, Martin Margulies, collected extensively and installed monumental Kiefer works in a dedicated warehouse space at his nonprofit institution in Miami. Margulies’s recent donation to the Israel Museum of the seventeen-foot-tall sculpture Die Erdzeitalter (Ages of the World, 2014), exemplifies how Kiefer’s monumental works often move directly from private collections into institutions rather than circulating on the secondary market. This pattern has contributed to the aura of exclusivity that has helped make Kiefer one of the most expensive living artists.

Under A Single Sky

Along with market success came a certain universality in Kiefer’s work – a handling of general, unspecified traumas – in a manner that resonates with Gerber’s critique about the ‘disappearance’ of the Holocaust. For Gerber, this is not only about the death of a generation of eyewitnesses but also about the loss of conceptual distinctions. He argues that the Holocaust is historically singular because it involved a state-organised, industrial and ideologically total project to annihilate an entire people everywhere – not to dominate, exploit or expel them. He criticises approaches that dissolve the Holocaust into broader categories, such as colonial genocide, which erase its specific features. The crux of his argument is that acknowledging singularity does not forbid comparison but requires comparisons that preserve what was distinctive about Nazi antisemitism. When singularity is rejected, the Holocaust becomes vulnerable to political instrumentalisation, as evidenced in the alarming rise of antisemitic violence today.

The privately owned Almaty Museum of Arts in Kazakhstan, financed by gas and retail tycoon Nurlan Smagulov and opened last September, includes a Kiefer room dedicated to a monumental installation acquired directly from the artist’s presentation at Palazzo Ducale in Venice in 2022. The suite of works is titled Questi scritti, quando verranno bruciati, daranno finalmente un po’ di luce (These writings, when burned, will finally cast a little light, 2020–21) and combines thick layers of oil, lead and other dense materials. AMA artistic director Meruyert Kaliveya explains that the violent protests that erupted across Kazakhstan in 2022 and the societal unrest of that period inspired the acquisition. “It’s a complicated chapter with many unanswered questions and conflicting agendas,” she says. “But the title’s universal message of hope spoke to us.”

The Insulation Of Atrocity

Gerhard Richter has repeatedly approached the problems of history through abstraction. Born in Dresden in 1932 and shaped by National Socialism and his early life in the GDR, he has often resisted direct representation of historical trauma. His Birkenau cycle (2014) marks a rare and consequential departure: a direct engagement with Auschwitz, mediated through photographs clandestinely taken in 1944 by Alberto Errera, a Greek Jewish member of the Sonderkommando revolt. Richter initially translated the photographs into figurative paintings before systematically obscuring them through successive layers of paint, staging the Holocaust as something that resists visual legibility while nonetheless insisting on its presence.

A permanent, site-specific installation of Birkenau opened on 9 February 2024 at the International Youth Meeting Centre in Oświęcim, near the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial. Installed in a dedicated pavilion, the work is presented as an edition of the cycle: four large abstract compositions printed on metal plates, displayed opposite grey mirror panels and accompanied by documentary material relating to the original photographs. The original Birkenau cycle is held by the Nationalgalerie in Berlin and since 2023 the four canvases have formed the conceptual core of the permanent exhibition Gerhard Richter. 100 Werke für Berlin at the Neue Nationalgalerie, where they are shown together with four grey mirror panels that echo those in the Oświęcim installation. The donated works are intended to enter the collection of the forthcoming Museum of the 20th Century at the Kulturforum, reinforcing their status as a central statement within Richter’s late practice and Germany’s ongoing confrontation with Holocaust memory.

Gerard Richter’s Birkenau paintings, on display in Oświęcim. Photo: Dominik Smolarek

It is precisely this institutional embedding that has drawn criticism. Art historian Annika Wienert, a research fellow at the German Historical Institute Warsaw, argues that Birkenau exemplifies a memorial culture that stabilises trauma through carefully designed spaces of reflection. The abstraction that signals ethical restraint may also produce contemplative distance, allowing viewers to engage with painterly surfaces while remaining insulated from the historical violence they reference. She contends that artists such as Richter and Kiefer are given elite status, representing ‘ideals’ of Holocaust engagement that fulfil an important function for German society, yet the actual victims and their descendants receive nowhere near the same attention. Why are white German artists, she asks, allowed to turn the extermination of Jews into their theme without including them, when such a move would be unthinkable if it concerned any other ethnic minority?

Wienert stresses that this imbalance is symptomatic of a broader structure in which Jewish perspectives, culture and history are treated as marginal. She notes that many people, including the highly educated, know little about Jewish culture, religion and persecution. Reactions to discussions of antisemitism are primarily defensive rather than reflective, indicating deep-seated thought patterns that inhibit empathy. From the perspective of Wienert and Gerber’s critiques of memory culture, the canonical works of Richter and Kiefer expose how even the most ethically self-aware art can become entangled in a system of remembrance that manages, aestheticises and neutralises the very history it seeks to confront.