I killed Anne Frank

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I have Anne Frank killed is a paper cut - Installation of Felix Droese . It was created for the documenta 7 exhibition that took place in 1982.

description

The installation consists of four parts,

  • from a central, freely hanging paper cut of 7.35 m length,
  • documents arranged in a circle on the floor beneath glass panes, an iron ring and a glass ball,
  • from two tondi , attached to the wall behind the paper cut,
  • from a large cardboard box with a paper silhouette on the floor, covered by a slanted pane of glass.

The large paper cut consists of several pieces of black photo cardboard, which are applied to ordinary curtain material ( gauze ). They are glued together, and the cut edges partially overlap. Their surfaces are worn and creased in places. The curtain fabric has a larger area than the actual paper cut, especially in the lower area. Four thin lines of red paint run into the construction from above.

A torn old cardboard box lies compressed on the floor of a window niche. It is encased in a figure silhouette made of thin, white, semi-transparent tissue paper. A large, inclined pane of glass is leaning protectively over it.

On the floor under the paper cut hanging from the ceiling, written documents, a collage and two cardboard backs of a picture frame are laid out in a circle . Above it, glass panes lie in a disorderly distribution, some of which have broken. In the middle of this arrangement there is a green glass ball in an iron ring ( float for driftnet fishing ). The left sheet of the paper cut points to them.

The written certificates are

  • an open letter to the former chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Leonid Brezhnev ,
  • the tender text of the Artists Union of the USSR for the international poster competition The poster in the struggle for peace, security and cooperation and
  • a list of participants for an invitation from the Federal Minister of the Interior, Gerhart Rudolf Baum .

The collage is titled Homecoming of the Troop Transports or Rhythm of the Performances . It is dated March 7, 1981 and has been reworked with Indian ink.

The two cardboard back walls of a picture frame come from the bulky waste. According to the label on the back, they belonged to the oil chalk study Tränenwiese , which the Düsseldorf academy teacher Walter von Wecus had sent to the House of German Art in Munich in 1944 for the Great German Art Exhibition . The frame is filled with book covers such as Sophocles ' Antigone , Franz Kafka's The Judgment , On Communist Education , a pamphlet by the leader of the Korean resistance movement against the Japanese, Kim Ir Sen , a German language education by Rahn - Pfleiderer , an election notification and tears from pornographic magazines.

history

Since the mid-1970s Droese worked with the technique of paper cut, whereby the sizes increased steadily. The black-and-white contrast he valued and exhibited in his monumental woodcuts was achieved when cutting paper by making cutouts from black cardboard.

The external impetus for the installation I killed Anne Frank was an article that the German news magazine Der Spiegel published in issue 41 of October 6, 1980 under the title Blue Paste . It was reported that according to an opinion of the Federal Criminal Office , the diary of Anne Frank has been edited afterwards. The authenticity of the document was thus further questioned. Simultaneously with this doubt, neo-Nazi groups spread in Germany that denied the existence of the extermination of the Jews during the “ Third Reich ” . Droese reacted to the coherence of these events and thus to the question of the history and the current consequences of National Socialist ideas with a complex room installation made of various materials. The installation made him known internationally. It was later exhibited in the Koernerstrasse bunker in Cologne - Ehrenfeld . Today it is owned by the Hamburger Kunsthalle .

reception

In 1982, at a review of the work, Der Spiegel magazine saw references to Droese's Maoist past and was keen to recognize the effects of his life experiences and the “transcendental” art of his teacher Joseph Beuys in his oeuvre . As an “original inventor of forms” and as a “committed political artist”, the former “demonstrator against the Vietnam War ” has now replaced the “ agitational motifs” with “multi-sensory encrypted forms”. A sense of " original sin " let the grown in an old Catholic rectory artists blame for the death of Anne Frank's feel and give this debt by a "remarkable self-incrimination" in the title of the work expression.

Ursula Perucchi-Petri compared the overall shape of the paper cut with a mandorla . Paul Ludger Göbel saw in the image of the paper cut a reference to an entry in Anne Frank's diary of October 29, 1943, in which she compared her hiding place with a bird cage and herself with a songbird whose wings had been torn out. He interpreted the installation as “a complex, abstract system of signs in which the subtle structures of reference between historical events and current socio-political developments are tracked down.” The installation stands “like a monument in space” and resembles “a warning sign of an ominous creeping up almost imperceptibly socio-political development. "

Daniel Belasco found that the translucent installation suggests the dematerialization of meat into a sacred status. He classified them in the works of German artists such as Anselm Kiefers , who used images such as that of Anne Frank as part of an abstract vocabulary in order to be able to reconcile themselves with their own historically burdened identity through an active memoralization of the Holocaust.

literature

  • Michael Schwarz : Felix Droese. I killed Anne Frank. A riot of signs . Verlag Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 978-3-59623-955-9 .
  • Ursula Perucchi-Petri: Felix Droese. The balance of disorder . Ed. Cantz, Stuttgart 1991, ISBN 978-3-89322-236-0 .
  • Paul Ludger Göbel: Paper as a material in the fine arts . Dissertation University of Potsdam, Berlin 2006, p. 67 ff. ( PDF ).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Schwarz, p. 20 f.
  2. ↑ Blue Paste , article from October 6, 1980 in the portal spiegel.de , accessed on December 8, 2014
  3. ↑ Göbel, p. 67
  4. ^ Gottfried Knapp: Felix Droese - committed artist and Aldi supplier . Article of December 3, 2003 in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, website of May 19, 2010 in the sueddeutsche.de portal , accessed on December 8, 2014
  5. ^ History: The Hochbunker and the Ehrenfeld Synagogue , website in the portal bunkerk101.de , accessed on December 8, 2014
  6. ^ Biography Felix Droese , website in the portal skulpturen-achse.de , accessed on December 8, 2014 ( PDF )
  7. ↑ Experience in the gully . In: Der Spiegel , No. 52/1982
  8. ↑ Petri-Perucchi, p. 10
  9. ↑ Göbel, p. 68, footnote 92
  10. ↑ Göbel, p. 69
  11. ↑ Daniel Belasco: Suturing In: Anne Frank as Conceptual Model for Visual Art . In: Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Jeffrey Shandler (eds.): Anne Frank Unbound. Media, imagination, memory . Indiana University Press, Bloomington / Indiana 2012, ISBN 978-0-253-00661-5 , pp. 254 f. ( online )

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