German has a unique word for coming to terms with its wartime past: Vergangenheitsbewältigung. A concept that originated in academic circles and was adopted by Federal President Theodor Heuss in the early 1950s. It’s a compound word that often defies easy translation, and because of the specific historical context in which it arose, is usually left untranslated. Although its initial interpretation leans toward personal processing, from the outset it referred to three aspects: a collective, moral, and political reckoning with guilt. Dutch has no equivalent for “the guilt of,” a question the Netherlands began to grapple with in the 1960s, when it became inevitable to ask: how was it possible that so many Jews were deported from the Netherlands? Seventy-three percent did not return. “Uncritically obeying the occupier” was the headline in de Volkskrant as recently as May 22 of this year. More a concluding judgment than a first provocation, since the role of governmental institutions and civil servants has already been extensively examined in recent decades. Here, too, it concerns a collective, moral, and political processing of guilt.
I would like to add a caveat to this idea of a collective process, because it needed a push—at least, that’s what some artworks suggest. Without wanting to ascribe a heroic role to artists, there are examples of artists who caused a shock in the 1960s or even slightly earlier. In Germany, Anselm Kiefer with his Besetzungen (1969), photos taken in Nazi-occupied European cities, in which we see him from behind giving the Hitler salute. And Georg Baselitz, who moved from East to West Germany in 1958 and created his Heroes series in 1965–66. In Austria, the Wiener Aktionists, some of whom had fought on the German side after the Anschluss, made public appearances. They, too, were engaged in Vergangenheitsbewältigung in their own way. While their own traumatic experiences cannot be overlooked, their primary concern was Austria’s hypocritical stance after the war. Due to the collective denial of Austria’s fascist past, they saw for themselves an initiating, therapeutic, and literally leading role in the public space. Hermann Nitsch began his Orgien Mysterien Theater in the late 1950s but only gained international recognition ten years later, after legal trouble in Munich in 1966 prevented him from traveling freely between Austria and Germany due to ongoing legal proceedings. Other names include Günter Brus and Otto Muehl.
Through the Guilty Landscapes of Dutch artist Armando, we know that everything can be guilty, but also that those who are not guilty—such as the children and grandchildren of NSB members—cannot always lay aside the past of their parents or grandparents. What stood out over the past year were the published stories of this third generation. Armando first formulated the idea of a guilty landscape in the 1970s in his paintings, poetry, and essays. He was praised because, as one can read, he managed to take the question of guilt a step further: from a personal, to a collective, to an abstract concept of guilt—without nullifying the question itself. The poetic and penetrating form he employed turned out to be a new kind of language. Very different was the reception of the paintings he made in 1956 and 1957, with titles like J’ai tué mon frère Abel and Peinture criminelle. This was in a time still largely regarded as the Reconstruction era, when looking forward was almost an obligation. Readers of the daily newspaper Het Parool urged the paper’s art critic, J.M. Prange, to respond to his “criminal paintings,” which Prange did—and he wasn’t alone. Armando and other informal painters like Henk Peeters were accused in the years that followed of defeatism, nihilism, and even scatological painting. Out of misunderstanding? Or too much imagination? Did the viewer not fully grasp the crusty surface of this art, the symbolism of its colors, and the meanings of the titles? Vergangenheitsbewältigung may have been the task of the Germans, but the victims of the Nazis were grappling with processing their war trauma—though at the time, this was often kept under wraps or confined to private spaces.
P.S. In The Permanent Revolution – Waiting for 0=ZERO, the first essay of my new book (forthcoming), more can be found on how the Dutch informal artists who presented themselves under the name Holländische Informelle Gruppe turned for their expositions to Germany and continued after 1960 as the Nul Group.
