August 23: Wednesday
Today, we had the honor of visiting an art gallery in Vienna's Judenplatz - its old Jewish district. The gallery contains the artwork of Adolf Frankl, a Brataslavan-born painter who experienced and survived Auschwitz-Birkenau and later moved to Vienna. The administrator of the gallery is his son, the eighty-three-year old Thomas Frankl, who grew up experiencing the antisemitism of fascism and the Second World War. Thomas gave us a personal tour, and told his story to us.
Against Oblivion
Right: A plaque dedicated to Adolf Frankl, outside a cafe in Judenplatz that he lived above for many years.
I, for one, was not willing to be late, so I sort of rushed myself to arrive at the gallery. Nobody else was there, but the door was open, and I toddle my way inside. Its small, but professional. Art adorns the walls, with descriptions in both German and English. It's at once an art show and a biography-in-pictures, a place where history meets memory and they both meet emotion. All the art concerned his life under occupation, and in the camps.
The first thought I had upon seeing the art style was that it was Expressionistic. There's some much color, so many fast-moving shapes, so much patient distortion. One painting even directly recalls the Expressionist masterpiece, The Scream by Edvard Munch. The difference is that the screamer is a concentration camp prisoner. The description on the side, in Adolf Frankl's own words, explains that many prisoners wanted to scream in the camps, but they could not, for they would be beaten. Thus it was internalized, and never expressed.
Left: Fankl's depiction of the deportation, the Czech Fascist soldiers in the background have skull-like faces.
Below: Another expressionist-looking painting, and quite fittingly disturbing. Either by accident or suicidal intent, camp prisoners would electrocute themselves on the barbed white fences, sending out flashes of sparks.
Left: A depiction of Adolf Eichmann. This is the painting that most interested me in the gallery.
The fire in the background. The hat. And the shapes - human shapes, starved, dead shapes, wrapping around his face, making up his face, his identity.
And the badges on his jacket. Wheels on the trains that took families to die. The smoke of factories - crematoriums where bodies were burned.
For the most part, the art doesn't need to be closely interpreted or analyzed. Adolf Frankl didn't beat around the bush. The visual analogies are very direct. The color adds emotion. I feel like I'm being spoken to.
I've taken a class called "Genocide and Film" and a class on Holocaust Literature, but neither of those had any focus on a third category of art: paintings. For me, this was a fist direct experience with that. And I'm really glad I was able to see it.
Final Note
Of course, 12 days ago was the incident in Charlottesville, the "Unite the Right" rally where a group of hundreds arrived to protest the removal of Confederate monuments in Charlottesville, Virginia. This group consisted of white supremacists, white "nationalists", armed militiamen, KKK members, and neo-Nazis.
So, President Trump's pretty atrocious reaction - his slowness to disavow the racism behind the movement, his insistence that there was violence on both sides, day after a supporter was run over by a white supremacist in an obvious terror attack - got me and others worked up, even over in Vienna. The existence of Nazis right in America has always been kind of an acknowledged thing - I mean, sure, there has to be two or three or maybe even four of these shitheads somewhere in the states, right? Heck, the Blues Brother movie had Illinois Nazis as the incompetent villains.
But now things are serious. White supremacists - people literally shouting in public that Jews are America's biggest problem, people calling for race wars - are coming forth from the woodwork. And at a bad time, too - an era when the living memories of the Holocaust or disappearing, fast. In a decade or two... there will be no survivor left. What's that going to mean for Holocaust denialism? For the neo-Nazi movement? For the people eager to exploit fear and spread hate?
What's happening in this world?
