Few 20th century artists provoked as much debate around the merits of their art as Joseph Beuys. In spite of the volumes of art historical and critical work dedicated to his legacy, there remain numerous gaps in the interpretation of his work. As many have noted, these gaps exist in part due to Beuys own efforts to obscure certain associations and interpretations during his lifetime. It has been, then, that only since his death have critical approaches to the formal and historical aspects of his work blossomed – beyond the long shadow of Beuys’ public persona. Of these post-Beuys critical projects, the recognition of his work as a significant and early attempt at German art ‘working through’ the past of Nazism and the Holocaust most informs the approach I intend to take. Just as that project uncovers a latent discourse of mourning in Beuys early work, I intend to disclose a latent political project in his later works, particularly in the monumental 7000 Oaks.
With an oeuvre so varied, tackling many themes simultaneously, attempting to read a ‘latent’ project in Beuys can quickly come to resemble divination. Potential Beuys readers must choose from a wide field of methods: from Jungian and gestalt, to historical materialism. The history of dream interpretation is rooted in divination, and I consider here Sigmund Freud’s attempts to raise their interpretation to a science as justification for my interpretive method. In his Introductory Lectures, Sigmund Freud leads his audiences through several exercises intended to prove significance of the subconscious. First, through his examination of ‘slips of the tongue’, and then by introducing the dream work: ‘The product of the slip [or dream] has itself a right to be considered as a valid psychic act which also has its purpose, as a manifestation having content and meaning’[1]. Beuys’ art contains the same confusing significations as dreams, and as I will examine below, Freud’s method of separating the dream-content from the thought-content informs a method of separating the latent and manifest content of Beuys’ work.
Politics is a dynamic process that must contend with competition on many levels. Politics (at least in one of its minimal requirements) encapsulates competing visions of time: interpretations of history and the present, projections of a desired (or feared) future. Politics also contends with different conceptions of individual/social, private/public, biography/history. This project is conceived with the intention of understanding the politics of Joseph Beuys’ ‘art’, which addressed all of these elements.
‘Art’, in the case of Beuys’ politics must be bracketed – the line between his life and his art was one that he intentionally and continually blurred. In fact, one of his most influential critics, Benjamin Buchloh, has taken these blurred boundaries as a sign of charlatanism. Buchloh’s critique will be addressed in detail below, as any approach to Beuys’ politics must acknowledge and address his objections. Before examining this critique I will review the situation of Beuys’ life and work within the particularly German milieu of ‘working through the past’.
With this chapter, I’m introducing a project that is divided unto itself, this is because it must deal with a subject matter that has also been divided unto itself. Beuys was born in the unstable Weimar Republic, and experienced the Nazi rise to power when he was 12 years old. Arguably, both the instability of the Republic, and the rise of the Nazi party, were predicated upon the divisive aftereffects of the Treaty of Versailles[2]. During the Nazi regime, Germany was divided along racial and political lines. After the war, Beuys and his generation were confronted with the literal division of Germany into Allied and Soviet spheres, eventually to become two separate nations. The most poignant division however, for the purposes of this study, took place in the consciousness of Germans who were old enough to have participated in the defense or expansion of the Third Reich. For many in the aftermath of the war, the Holocaust could only be conceived as a Zivilisationsbruch [rupture with civilization], though some intellectuals and artists (Beuys included) were troubled by how much of the Zivilisation that produced the Holocaust seemed to remain[3]. Beuys described his recognition of the full horror of the war as ‘ a shock, certainly, and an irreversible one’ and ‘my fundamental experience, which…led me…to really go into art’[4]. Beuys’ recovery from this shock would, in many respects, inform the content of his work throughout his life – from projects of memorial for Auschwitz, to the fundamental resistance to bureaucracy and managerialism of his political work.
Two scholarly works, both produced after unification, are of particular relevance in understanding the situation of someone such as Beuys who intervened in both the artistic and intellectual communities of post-war Germany. The first work: Mueller’s Another Country: German Intellectuals After Unification, gives a very precise account of the responses to Nazi terror from the philosophic and literary communities in both the West and East. I will rely on this account to situate Beuys’ political organizing (of the Free International University; DSP and Grünen parties), as well as his autobiographic inventions. To situate Beuys’ artistic position in post-war Germany I will refer to Gellen et. al.’s comprehensive survey German Art: From Beckmann to Richter.
The Situation of Intellectuals
Beuys was an artist who was particularly concerned with the situation of art, and artists, in the building of a new German (and ultimately global) culture. His projects often veered into realms of politics, and into the intellectual culture of post war Germany. To cite two, of many, examples: he was one of the first of his generation to engage with the ‘generation of ‘68’ by founding the German Student Party (DSP); he also engaged with the intellectuals of his own generation, notably co-founding the Free International University with Heinrich Böll. Because of this public intellectual life, it is important to consider Beuys actions and motivations within the broader situation of intellectuals in post war Germany.
While it is true that the history of Nazism was sublimated in the West by building the economic miracle, and was sublimated in the east by the process of anti-fascism in the service of establishing socialism; artists and laymen on both sides of the line held individual responsibilities for the Nazi past to ‘work through’.
On returning to Germany from his wartime exile, Theodor Adorno was one of the first social commentators to report on the reconstitution of German identity. At this time the German peoples referred to the task as Vergangenheitsbewältigung [coming to terms with the past][5], and this was reflected in state policies both East and West.Adorno is dismissive of the attempts to ‘work through’ the past he observed (West) Germans making in the 1950’s. ‘The attitude that everything should be forgotten and forgiven, which would be proper for those who suffered injustice, is practised by those party supporters who committed the injustice.’[6] In this analysis ‘forgetting’ is considered as less of a disservice to the past than it is a means of evading the persistence of National Socialism – it is an ‘intention to close the books on the past’[7].
Adorno characterizes psychological/psychiatric approaches as inappropriately individualistic: ‘the forgetting of National Socialism surely should be understood far more in terms of the general situation of society than in terms of psychopathology.’[8] Psychologically, many Germans were ready to minimize what happened in the Holocaust – shifting guilt to those who tolerated Hitler’s seizure of power, even to the point of shifting the guilt onto the victims. These shifts and evasions manifest as a wounded character, a wound more appropriate to the victims.[9] ‘Guilt’ itself is equally problematic from a psychiatric perspective: psychiatry treats ‘guilt’ as pathological, as unreal, a psychogenic condition produced by the individual’s psychological disposition. ‘[T]he terribly real past is trivialized into merely a figment of the imagination of those who are affected by it.’[10] Furthermore, there is another possibility offered by psychiatry: that ‘bearing the burden of the past’ is ‘pathological’, and a healthy psyche is marked by an orientation to ‘the present and its practical goals’. Adorno treats this view as a Mephistophelean evasion, for it is revealed by Goethe that ‘the destruction of memory’ is that demon’s ‘innermost principle’. [11] The murdered – the truly wounded, the true victims – are denied even memorial, their only bequest to the present.
Guenther Grass established a response to Adorno’s ‘supposed prohibition on writing poetry after Auschwitz’[12]: he recognized himself as a part of the generation of perpetrators, but would not accept this damnation of culture. He wanted, instead, the response to Auschwitz to ‘centre on the aesthetic and the affective’[13] and in doing so to acknowledge the cultural (Kulturnation) potential for Auschwitz to occur again. This position developed from the fears of the Left that, should unification occur the ‘moral imperative to remember the past’[14] would fall to the wayside.
Grass and Adorno occupy fairly distinct responses to the aftermath of Auschwitz. As Mueller’s work makes clear, there are as many responses to the Holocaust as there are intellectuals in Germany to respond. While it may ultimately be useful to place Beuys on this spectrum of intellectual life, his work as an artist confounds precise philosophical positions with ruptures into Dada, expressionism, even shamanism. For the purpose of this study, which seeks to interpret the ruptures of latent and manifest reactions to Auschwitz, Beuys’ intellectual work will be held in balance with his artistic output. Next, I will briefly examine the situation of artistic responses to German history.
Artistic Positions
The full title of the Museumspädagogischer survey show of postwar German art refers to a divided country[15]. The curators had originally intended to capture the differences between East and West German cultural landscapes, though the unification of the two set the project on a different course, one forced to contend with an altered historical context. Rather than expose different cultural contexts, Gellen’s survey highlights the multitude of individual responses to the traumas of German history. Even at the individual level, many of the works reveal consciousnesses divided unto themselves.
Beuys carefully managed the interpretation of his artwork; the significance of the actions, sculptures, and assemblages were derived from his own pronouncements, and in relation to his fictionalized autobiography. However, as critics such as Buchloh would point out, there was in fact significance in Beuys’ work that could be interpreted by the standard of art history. In the years that have followed Beuys’ death, one task of his interpreters has been to describe this latent signification, and to consider its relationship to the signification Beuys’ made manifest during his living engagement with the works.
Divided Literature
Care must be taken when approaching the Beuys literature; there are at least three distinct modes of analysis, which rarely overlap in spite of attempts like those of Adriani to ‘counteract both prejudices and the unmediated enthusiasm cult of his ardent admirers’[16]. The first mode, enthusiasm, is apparent in the work of Caroline Tisdall, and in Beuys’ reception by gallerists Richard DeMarco and René Block. The prejudicial mode is expressed by Benjamin Buchloh, and in the orientation of his October colleagues. The third mode – and this is the one in which I, of necessity, must work – could find its form only in the years following Beuys’ death. For the time being, I suggest that this mode should be considered as the post-biographical mode.
Both enthusiasm and prejudice were forced to contend with Beuys’ near-total manipulation of the interpretation of his art, and the ‘facts’ of his autobiography. Beuys brought these first two modes to a close symbolically in his final installation Palazzo Regale: there, he displayed two glass cases – or caskets – containing artifacts from his past actions. In each case, the artifacts are arranged in a form suggesting a corpse upon a bier. This work has been widely interpreted as his last ‘testament’, and was unveiled exactly one month preceding his death[17]. The work was accompanied by his last public statement, ‘ I have tried to bring out two elements, present in all my work, that I think ought to be contained in every human action: the dignity of the self-determination of one’s own life and one’s own gestures, and the modesty of our actions and our work in every moment.’[18] This statement, alongside the display of his two ‘corpses’, draws the era of the imposed determination of his work to a close. The ‘corpses’ are composed of objects whose meanings were determined by Beuys, but are now arranged as funerary, signal an interpretation open to ardent admirers and detractors alike.
Whether Palazzo Regale, and Beuys’ death signalled the end of polarized interpretations of Beuys is debatable (in fact it’s unlikely). However, within ten years of his death efforts like those of Mario Kramer became de riguer, and I wish to refer to them as post-biographical. Post-biographical interpretations of Beuys treat his statements about his work and biography as two more modes of manifest content to be analysed. That is to say, analysed on an equal footing with the objects themselves, the objective histories of the objects, and the objects formal significations within art history. Only when weighed as objectively as possible, and with as much attention to breadth of interpretation, can scholars begin to triangulate a second ‘latent’ interpretation. I present here first the authoritative interpretation of Beuys in a prejudicial mode: Benjamin Buchloh’s article predicated on formal and art-historical prejudice.
Twilight
This interest in the history of Beuys and the Holocaust can be traced back to Benjamin Buchloh’s Artforum review of Beuys’ 1979/80 Guggenheim retrospective. In Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol Buchloh criticizes the ‘ahistoricity’ of Beuys’ work, his ‘obliviousness toward the specific conditions that determine the reality of an individual’s being and work in historical time’[19]. The review provoked a critical response to Beuys’ autobiography – his origin myth – that has become part of the contemporary reception to Beuys, and before continuing with Buchloh’s critique a summary of the contentious myth is necessary.
The ‘origin myth’ was presented by Beuys as an addendum to his Lebenslauf/Werklauf – a fantastical account of the artist’s life (the entry for his birth reads ‘1921 Cleves – Exhibition of a wound drawn together with plaster.’ Not only an evocative image of birth, it also obscures his actual birthplace of Krefeld.) The origin myth is set within Beuys wartime Luftwaffe service, which is covered by the Lebenslaufin entries such as ‘1942 Sebastopol Exhibition during the interception of a Ju – 87’. Beuys served in dive-bomber squadrons during World War II, and the myth originates with the crash of his Ju – 87 in the Crimea. The plane had been struck by Russian flak, and the subsequent crash killed the pilot, and left Beuys unconscious and severely injured in the snow. What happened next is the subject of Beuys’ mythologizing: he claimed that German rescue parties had failed to find the wreckage, and that he had been given up for dead. However, the local nomads, the Tatars, found the wreckage:
I remember voices saying ‘Voda’ (Water), then the felt of their tents, and the dense pungent smell of cheese, fat and milk. They covered my body in fat to help it regenerate warmth, and wrapped it in felt as an insulator to keep warmth in.[20]
Thus, we are given the ‘origin’ of Beuys’ materials: fat and felt. Buchloh also draws our attention to another element of this story, as Beuys recounted this myth he prefaced the rescue scene by claiming that he had already established a good rapport with the Tatars. ‘”Du nix njemcky” they would say, “du Tartar,” and try to persuade me to join their clan.’[21] Buchloh calls this story a ‘retroprojective fantasy’[22]. He describes it as Beuys’ attempt to come to terms with the period of Fascism. The description of the Tartars calling him one of their own is evidence of Beuys own attempt at denial of his citizenship.
Most damming: Buchloh then goes on to claim ‘the return of the repressed’ creates the modus operandi of Beuys work, giving it a Fascistic inflection. Beuys’ work possesses the ‘anal retentive character, which forms the characterological basis of authoritarian fascism…accurately concretized and incorporated into an act of the postwar period.’[23]
By his projection of martyrdom and mourning (on display in the Guggenheim show that is the focus of Buchloh’s critique) Beuys’ provided for a too-early ‘pardoning and self-reconciliation’ for the collective German consciousness. Buchloh – echoing Adorno – is concerned that Beuys allows us to accept fascistic elements of our current political situation because we are given a false sense of release from fascism’s nightmares. He ‘restored that sense of a – however deranged – national self and historic identity.’[24]
The Sublime
Critique of Beuys’ engagement with German history has now swung away from its Buchloh nadir; the current assessment made by Antliff and others speaks of ‘Beuys’ readiness to address the legacy of Nazism through art in deeply personal, and at times, provocative ways’[25]. Buchloh himself made a conciliatory gesture in this direction twenty years after his scathing assessment. In ‘Reconsidering Beuys – Once Again’ he acknowledges that his original critical approach is now ‘de rigeur’ that is: ‘to situate an artistic practice such as that of Beuys’, in a critical historical framework.’[26] Furthermore, he recognises the disclosed latent project as introducing reflections on German responsibility for the Holocaust, ‘into the field of cultural production of postwar European reconstruction culture.’[27] In fact, he now condemns the rest of the avant garde for having not confronted the catastrophe in their midst. Buchloh maintains many of his contentions from the original Artforum article, particularly his position that Beuys aims for ‘transhistorical truth’, and a ‘social hegemony’, but he has begrudged enough to latter-day interpreters such as Gene Ray to justify ongoing ‘reconsiderations’.
Gene Ray’s essay ‘Joseph Beuys and the After-Auschwitz Sublime’ addresses the relationship between Beuys’ works and words. ‘The much repeated claim that Beuys life was his art…assumes that Beuys’ stated intentions were always successfully realized in the works. As a few critics have noted, the reality is more complicated.’[28] Ray’s approach to this complication is to make a test case out of Beuys responses to Auschwitz. He notes that Kim Levin had first proposed this reading in review of the first Guggenheim retrospective – twenty years before Ray’s attempt, but that it hadn’t materialized.
Psychoanalysis and Method
Beuys’ work often presents a confusion of materials and significations, sometimes with a meaning assigned by the artist, and other times left open to any interpretation. This system of signification operates in a fashion resembling Freud’s categorization of dreams – Beuys’ poly-significant art is a physical manifestation of the ‘dream-content’, and can be interpreted along similar lines. Freud: ‘our doctrine is not based upon the estimates of the obvious dream-content, but relates to the thought-content, which, in the course of interpretation, is found to lie behind the dream.’[29] Seen in this light, material and formal interpretations suffer from ‘obvious’ conclusions. Interpretation must take place at the commissure of the art-content (standing in for dream-content) and the thought-content underlying it. Beuys’ art is among those that can be considered ‘public dreams’[30], perhaps even more so than the earlier work of the surrealists.
Thanks largely to Buchloh’s critique; Beuys’ originary story has become a well-known case for examining the possibilities and problems of a psychoanalytic interpretation. I present it here in conjunction with Auschwitz Demonstration as a set of significations that can be ‘read’ together to reveal tensions and intensities within Beuys’ manifested world. This reading is conducted in the interest of furthering the post-biographical mode of analysis. A foundation in Freudian theory allows a critical view of the enthusiast mode, which takes the manifest content of the work for a foundation; it is also critical of the prejudicial mode, which rejects Beuys’ manifestations as puerile – insisting that they’re the product of willful ignorance.
The ‘Story’ – as Peter Nisbet refers to Beuys’ account of his crash and rescue – ties together at least three historical periods in Beuys’ life: his youth in Kleve, including his membership in the Hitler Jüngen, his wartime service as a Luftwaffe pilot, and his proposal for an Auschwitz memorial in 1958. If we look at these three moments manifest content (their art-form), we see a member of Germany’s ‘guilty generation’ romanticizing the war and its victims. Beuys said of his time in the Hitler Jüngen ‘the situation was to a certain extent ideal for young people to live a full life’[31]. He describes his service in the Luftwaffe as a series of ‘exhibitions’: the death of his friend Fritz Rolf Rothenberg as ‘1943 – Oranienburg interim exhibition (together with Fritz Rolf Rothenberg and Heinz Sielmann)’[32]. His proposal for the Auschwitz memorial took the shape of three elevated geometric forms he called ‘landmarks’, these form three additional gates along the railway lines in the camp, and lead to a polished silver bowl ‘monstrance’[33]. To summarize the art-form interpretation: Beuys romanticized his relationship to Nazism, treating it as a boy’s adventure tale; when confronted with the legacy of Auschwitz he reverted to his Catholic upbringing by treating the victims as martyred saints – the absence of their remains corrected by the display of a ‘monstrance’.
The ‘Story’ also obscures shocking details of Auschwitz’ association with his materials fat and felt. Via the ‘Story’, we are lead to believe that his use of these materials was inspired by the Tartars –who wrapped him in fat and felt to regenerate his body heat. Ray has noted that the fat from victims of the gas chamber was collected beneath the crematoria, to be used as fuel for their fires. Furthermore, hair from the victims was collected to be processed into felt – the Allies found seven tons of it awaiting processing when they liberated the camp[34]. Seen in this way, Beuys’ performances of wrapping himself in felt take on a grim element of wrapping himself in the skins of Nazism’s victims. Or, as Ray suggests, the actions resemble the donning of hair shirts by Christian penitents.
Kramer’s analysis of the Auschwitz Demonstration
Mario Kramer’s analysis of the Auschwitz Demonstration has received much attention for its elegant elision of the latent/manifest problem. Kramer combines biographical knowledge of Beuys’ relationship to the objects, with a detached reading of those objects’ significations to Germans, and of their significations in broader historical terms. This approach is regarded as successful, in that Beuys is neither valorised, nor demonized. He is shown to be a conscientious member of his generation who wished to engage in a working through the past that avoided both representation and denial of what had occurred in the concentration camps.
Beuys was, as his lengthy Luftwaffe[35] service makes clear, a member of the generation used by the Nazi regime to carry out its notorious crimes. The inclusion of his Auschwitz vitrine in this exhibition marks an important departure for critical and curatorial treatment of Beuys’ presentation of German history. Kramer’s annotation of the objects found in the vitrine have spurred a new direction in Beuys scholarship.
Though the objects in the case were derived from works of the period 1956-1964, they were assembled by Beuys in their current form in 1968, the case was also the only vitrine from Darmstadt brought to the 1979 Guggenheim show. The timespan covered by the life of these objects – both in their original application and as an ensemble – provides an opportunity to observe Beuys’ changing relationship to the Holocaust. A sketch prepared in 1957 for the Auschwitz monument competition has the ‘character…of tracks that a wounded animal leaves behind’[36]suggests that Beuys was at first inclined to the wounded nation trope identified by Adorno and others.
The work on his proposal for the Auschwitz monument began while he was recovering from a serious collapse of body and spirit on the farm of his friends and patrons the van der Grinten brothers. Beuys would later say of this afflication that ‘war events were no doubt continuing to have an effect…something had to die’[37]. As in the traditions of the nomads he would imitate, the Shaman must first cure their own illnesses before ministering to the tribe – a cure often symbolised as a journey to the underworld to retrieve their own soul[38]. The challenge for Beuys after this cure, then, was to address the horror of Auschwitz without resorting to the popular tropes of Vergangenheitsbewältigung.
Beuys projects an awareness that the word Auschwitz elicits a nearly overwhelming flood of images and memories of what has been depicted already. In the face of this experience, the reality of what happened, the extent of the destruction ‘an abyss opens up. There is no real understanding.’[39] The Auschwitz Demonstration ‘addresses its challenges to the present’[40]. By addressing the present, Beuys avoids the insufficiency of representation – how to represent something that cannot be understood fully in terms of mimesis – and addresses instead ‘the content and meaning of catastrophe’ [41]. The horror of Auschwitz is not depicted as a historical episode, rather the horror is depicted by example ‘as decay and consumation’[42]. Beuys hopes to cure the human condition, which is permeated with the ‘principle of Auschwitz’ in ‘our understanding of science and political systems, delegation of responsibility to groups of specialists’[43]. The abject artifacts, and their dialectic of decay/survival, are to act as a homeopathic remedy to ‘Auschwitz in its contemporary character’: similia similibus curantur – heal like with like. This radical idea of honouring the legacy of Auschwitz by effecting a ‘cure’ on its perpetrators and survivors alike, can be read in our contemporary setting as resisting the reductive Betroffenheitkitsch [consternation kitsch] projects such as the Berlin Holocaust monument flirt with. Finally, in regard to the project of this book, the reappearance of ‘curing’ in Beuys’ later work on democracy and ecology take on a similar exemplary character.
The current recognition of Beuys’ latent Auschwitz project suggests that other ‘latent’ projects of Beuys could also be sought. In many ways, his later political work has been subject to the same charges of naiveté and messianism that were levelled at his earlier works. The interpretive depth Kramer has applied to the objects in the Auschwitz Demonstration can be applied to the objects Beuys associated with his political and ecological projects. By considering the formal qualities and historical significations of Beuys work in isolation from his projected meanings, we may uncover a latent political project that is as sophisticated as his project of mourning for Auschwitz.
Bibliography
Theodor W. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005)
Adriani, Götz, Winfried Konnertz, and Karin Thomas, Joseph Beuys, Life and Works. Translated by Patricia Lech. Woodbury, N.Y.: Barron’s Educational Series, 1979
Antliff, Allan. Joseph Beuys. London: Phaidon Press, 2014.
Buchloh, Benjamin H.D. “Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol.” In Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, edited by Gene Ray, 199 – 211. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2001.
–– “Reconsidering Beuys – Once Again.” In Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, edited by Gene Ray, 75 – 90. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2001.
Freud, Sigmund. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Translated by Stanely G. Hall. New York: Boni and Liveright. 1920
–– The Interpretation of Dreams, Third Edition. Trans. by A. A. Brill. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1913; Bartleby.com, 2010.
Kramer, Mario. “Joseph Beuys: ‘Auschwitz Demonstration’ 1956 – 1964.” In German Art: from Beckmann to Richter, edited by Eckhart Gillen, 261 – 274. Berlin: DuMont Buchverlag, 1997
Ray, Gene. “Joseph Beuys and the After-Auschwitz Sublime.” In Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, edited by Gene Ray, 55 – 74. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2001.
Müller, Jan-Werner. Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2000.
Nisbet, Peter. “Crash Course: Remarks on a Beuys Story” In Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, edited by Gene Ray, 5 – 18. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2001.
Stachelhaus, Heiner. Joseph Beuys. Translated by David Britt. New York: Abbeville
[1] Sigmund Freud. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Trans. Stanely G. Hall. (New York: Boni and Liveright. 1920) 26
[2] The treaty itself, a result of the divisive world war that had been an attempt to unite Germanic peoples.
[3] Jan-Werner Müller. Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity. (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2000.) 21
[4] Mario Kramer, “Joseph Beuys: ‘Auschwitz Demonstration’ 1956 – 1964.” In German Art: from Beckmann to Richter, edited by Eckhart Gillen. (Berlin: DuMont Buchverlag, 1997) 261
[5] Jan-Werner Müller. Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity. (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2000.)1 This term is also translated as ‘working through’ or ‘working upon’ – the past. Mueller uses this, and its related compound terms (Vergangenheitspolitik etc.) throughout his text to frame German history between 1948 and unification. The original title of Adorno’s piece uses ‘Vergangenheit’ as the operative term.
[6] Theodor W. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) 89
[7] Ibid. 89
[8] Ibid. 91 Emphasis mine
[9] Beuys frequently expressed something similar, as the numerous references in his work to healing, homeopathy, survival, etc. attest. The supposed inappropriateness of this wound healing trope would be used to bolster the polemics of his critics.
[10] Theodor W. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) 8991
[11] Ibid. 91
[12] Jan-Werner Müller. Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity. (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2000.) 80
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid. 81
[15] Full title Deutschlandbilder. Kunst aus einem geteilten Land.
[16] Götz Adriani, Winfried Konnertz, and Karin Thomas, Joseph Beuys, Life and Works. Translated by Patricia Lech. (Woodbury, N.Y.: Barron’s Educational Series, 1979) 1 Buchloh accuses Adriani of falling into the latter camp – underlining the difficulty of keeping the three separate.
[17] Heiner Stachelhaus. Joseph Beuys. Translated by David Britt. (New York: Abbeville)168
[18] Ibid. 169
[19] Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol.” In Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, edited by Gene Ray, 199 – 211. (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2001.)200. Emphasis mine
[20] Peter Nisbet,. “Crash Course: Remarks on a Beuys Story” In Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, edited by Gene Ray. (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2001.) 6
[21] Ibid.
[22] Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol.” In Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, edited by Gene Ray, 199 – 211. (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2001.) 203
[23] Ibid. 203
[24] Ibid. 204
[25] Allan Antliff. Joseph Beuys. (London: Phaidon Press, 2014.)5
[26] Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Reconsidering Beuys – Once Again.” In Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, edited by Gene Ray, 75 – 90. (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2001.)76
[27] Ibid. 76
[28] Gene Ray. “Joseph Beuys and the After-Auschwitz Sublime.” In Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, edited by Gene Ray, 55 – 74. (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2001.)56
[29] Sigmund Freud. The Interpretation of Dreams, Third Edition. Trans. by A. A. Brill. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1913; Bartleby.com, 2010.) 48
[30] I enthusiastically borrow this phrase from Vancouver’s now-defunct ‘Public Dreams Society’: a group dedicated to ‘social sculpture’ that died the death-of-a-thousand-by-laws under the neo-liberal ‘Vision’ municipal regime.
[31] Götz Adriani, Winfried Konnertz, and Karin Thomas, Joseph Beuys, Life and Works. Translated by Patricia Lech. (Woodbury, N.Y.: Barron’s Educational Series, 1979) 12-13
[32] Ibid. 16
[33] Gene Ray. “Joseph Beuys and the After-Auschwitz Sublime.” In Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, edited by Gene Ray, 55 – 74. (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2001.) 60
[34] Ibid. 63-64
[35] Besides the famous crash recounted below, Beuys was wounded on four other occasions, and ended the war as a POW. (Adriani p.18)
[36] Mario Kramer, “Joseph Beuys: ‘Auschwitz Demonstration’ 1956 – 1964.” In German Art: from Beckmann to Richter, edited by Eckhart Gillen. (Berlin: DuMont Buchverlag, 1997) 262
[37] Ibid. 261
[38] McKenna
[39] Mario Kramer, “Joseph Beuys: ‘Auschwitz Demonstration’ 1956 – 1964.” In German Art: from Beckmann to Richter, edited by Eckhart Gillen. (Berlin: DuMont Buchverlag, 1997) 269
[40] Mario Kramer, “Joseph Beuys: ‘Auschwitz Demonstration’ 1956 – 1964.” In German Art: from Beckmann to Richter, edited by Eckhart Gillen. (Berlin: DuMont Buchverlag, 1997) 269
[41] Ibid. 270
[42] Ibid.
[43] Ibid.