Witness & Legacy - Contemporary Art about the Holocaust
And the Lion Shall Dwell With the Fish
The Holocaust Experience as Reflected by Five Installation Artists

Yehudit Shendar
Classical and Near Eastern Studies Department
University of Minnesota


The plant sprouting from this dream ladder of mine, had a fascinating and utterly beautiful shape....One of the most astonishing fruits I ever encountered on this plant, was my old friend the fish.....I first met the fish in my childhood. Every Jewish kid had a chance to eat fish, but this fish of mine was not intended for eating. My father was swinging it above our heads in one hand, while mumbling a silent prayer. The traditional fowl used for expiatory sacrifice was disqualified that year, during those fearful days, in fear its crow would turn us in. So the fish took its place. The fish is a silent victim. It can't cry out against oppression. This fish is so close to me that if it miraculously grew on me-like a hand, I would accept it as a natural anatomic growth. In absolute contrast to it, as far as I am concerned, stands the lionThe living, mourning lion, standing on his slaughtered kin's grave. The bereaved lion is weeping, for he was doomed to be the sole survivor, and the keeper of his people's glowing ember....The fact that I lived through this, puts a responsibility on me: It commands me to testify as to what happened, and if only by way of my humble means: line and color. [1]
Naftali Bezem
     At the age of fourteen, in August 1939, Naftali Bezem arrived in Palestine alone. He did not understand why his parents had boarded him on a train bound for this strange, remote and desolate place. Little did he know he would never see them again. Thirty years later, a prominent Israeli artist, he still empathized with the fish – he was not taught to cry foul. But destiny had left him with a legacy, and he had been transformed into the weeping lion, whose roar was to be heard to the edge of the earth. And the lion shall dwell with the fish forever in his soul. Robert J. Lifton, reflecting on this sense of destiny, has suggested that "the impulse to bear witness, beginning with a sense of responsibility to the dead, can readily extend into a 'survivor mission'." [2]
     Although the five installation artists presented in our exhibition are not survivors in the traditional sense of the word, the four born in Europe had firsthand experiences regarding the events of the Holocaust – events that eventually shaped their future. When approached to comment on the rationale behind creating these works, they reiterated the "survivor mission." The fish, as a comforting and inviting option for the process of healing personal and private wounds, posed no viable choice. The legacy called for "the lion's roar" – the individual tragedy was enlisted to a higher cause. The responsibility is to remember-for everyone to remember.
     When analyzing the installations displayed in Witness and Legacy, one can see the close ties between the personal histories of the artists and their creations. Meaningful childhood experiences, mainly those that pose conflicts, had a direct impact on their art. At times the four survivor or second-generation artists among the five feel that relatives who never made it to American shores were uninvited ghosts, occupying a residency in their own childhood memories. Later in life, they comprehended that these family members lost in the Holocaust never ceased to be part of their parents' existence. By way of transfusion and by identification, the parents transferred their own sense of pain and loss to their children and bestowed upon them the legacy of becoming a living yahrzeit (memorial candle). As Gabrielle Rossmer has commented: "What I always knew, though, was the intense pain that my father felt over losing his parents. I became aware that the great sadness that my father felt was something I actually felt as well." [3]

Edith Altman

It is important to preserve these memories, not only to memorialize those who died, but also, to remember that it actually happened. These memories carry with them a responsibility, I would say. [4]
The artist doesn't always choose her subjects. Sometimes the time and place in history demands that certain work be done. [5]
     Edith Altman was born in Altenburg, Germany. She was eight years old on Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, when German troops came to the family home and took her father to one of many subsequent detentions in the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp. Altman's father fled to the United States in May 1939 by obtaining a forged passport. For the family left behind, conditions worsened. She and her brother were expelled from school and the family's property was confiscated. As conditions deteriorated, Altman's mother fled with the children to Amsterdam and later to the United States to reunite with her husband. When the war was over, it was learned that all eight of his siblings had perished in concentration camps.
     After her father's death, Altman was compelled to return to the place where he was made victim. "I hoped that if I was able to reevaluate fears of old anger I could achieve balance in my life. My father's acceptance of his role as victim was his torment, and he could not help but turn his torment against those he loved." The shamanlike ritual Altman performed in Buchenwald in 1984 was her attempt to cleanse herself from this dibbuk ("demon"). This act enabled her, forty-five years after she had escaped Germany, to unite opposites: pain and joy, good and evil, anger and forgiveness.
     In her installation The Art of Memory: Reclaiming the Symbol, Altman throws the spectator into the shaman's chamber. On one wall we are faced with a dominant, giant, gold swastika, with its mirror image, now in the familiar black Nazi color, rested on the floor. The wall on the opposite end of the room has detached elements of the Star of David, a shape made of triangles, used in different colors by the Nazis to identify other groups of prisoners: Communists, Gypsies and homosexuals. Incorporating textual and visual elements as didactic material to study these images, Altman encourages the onlooker to redefine his relationships with these symbols, so heavily burdened by attributes, evil or good, assigned by past societies and cultures. In her shaman dance, Altman has made gold out of base matter. Now she assumes the role of the alchemist, and we take part in her transformation of nature – in this case the nature of symbols.

Gabrielle Rossmer

     Rossmer was born in Bamberg, Germany. By 1933 the thriving Jewish community of one thousand people dwindled to a few elderly souls. During the previous decade, only ten Jewish children were born in the city, Gabrielle being one of them. The morning after Kristallnacht, along with all Jewish males under the age of sixty-five, Rossmer's father was arrested and sent to Dachau concentration camp. After five weeks he returned home. Soon after, the parents, with one-year-old Gabrielle, boarded the SS President Harding in Hamburg, bound for New York.
     Left behind were Rossmer's grandparents, as well as an aunt and uncle. New rules and decrees restricted their lives. Gradually they lost all their possessions and civil rights. In a letter of July 1941, written to their son Stephen in New York, the grandfather urged him to act fast on the immigration forms from Washington. Unfortunately, Rossmer's grandparents never made it to America. They were deported in the Spring of 1942 and perished in Poland, east of Lublin. By November 1942, all the Jews of Bamberg were gone.
     Stephen Rossmer, Gabrielle's father, died in 1983. At the funeral, she read a poem he had written for her as a child. Its last stanza reads:

Grandparents who never came
A sacrifice to Germany's shame
We will always remember you
We are tied to you
by an eternal bond.[6]
After the funeral, Rossmer observed that "there I discovered the bond that he has left me as a legacy." [7]  The result was the exhibition at Hainstrasse 4a in Bamberg, which Rossmer described as "truly a site specific piece of work....But I don't feel that I have finished the task of reshaping memory, and examining history, and memorializing those we have lost." [8]
     In her installation In Search of the Lost Object, we find the most direct encounter with ghost imagery: the suspended freestanding figures made of stiffened gauze-hollow shells, faceless and bodiless. Rossmer recounted her experience mounting the installation in Bamberg, which by the strangest coincidence took place in the city's Municipal Museum, where in 1943 her grandparents resided before their deportation. Rossmer refers to the space as "the place where the ghosts of my grandparents also resided." [9]  A closer look at the seemingly classical drapery, reminiscent of the famous female figures of Ecclesia and Synagoga in the Gothic cathedral of the city, reveals it is soiled by ashes. The eternally blindfolded Synagoga is mourning for the dead.
     Holocaust ghosts haunt one's life not only as embodiments of lost family members. They transform to feelings of hate and anger: "My father lived the rest of his life angry. He trusted no one. He never resolved the torment of being the one who survived." [10]

Gerda Meyer-Bernstein

In my native Germany, I witnessed severe violence and social upheaval and was permanently marked by it. I made a vow not to remain silent. [11]
     Gerda Meyer-Bernstein was born in Westphalia, Germany, and spent the larger part of her childhood in Nazi Germany. On Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, fifteen-year-old Gerda, with her family, had to hide on the roof of their home. While her immediate family eventually managed to leave Germany for London and subsequently America, her grandmother, aunt and uncles did not.
     Although Gerda Meyer-Bernstein fled her native Germany like Altman and Rossmer, she does not reflect on personal demons haunting her memory. What she remembers most is political injustice, a theme that can be understood in terms of the linkage she establishes between the Holocaust and the current American social agenda. "My work is political because political events have shaped my life. The political and social upheaval I witnessed in my native Germany has sensitized me to all political atrocities. My concerns are racism, sexism, censorship, political killings....Man's inhumanity to man." [12]
     Meyer-Bernstein's installation Shrine is but one in a series of works that were shaped by her political conscience. Her art becomes a weapon in fighting for the elimination of extreme horrors and violence, be they in Hiroshima or South Africa. Like other contemporary American artists, she reflects on the beastly aspects of the twentieth century as it comes to a close. For Meyer-Bernstein, the Holocaust experience bears one important lesson – silence leads to consent. Her art is a nonviolent revolution, as it constitutes the means of effecting change. Shrine – a black, painted chamber with barbed wire and a series of images of the crematoria at Auschwitz intercepted by images of the appelplatz – recalls the doom and the hope of the inmates in the concentration camps. Photographs of the ultimate destruction site of the Holocaust and photographs of its commandant, Rudolph Höss, at his postwar trial in Poland enable the viewer to make an intellectual linkage with the historical events of the past, while the grim, dimly lit environment evokes an emotional response. Meyer-Bernstein hopes that by experiencing this cohesive whole, her audience will pose the inevitable question: "Why is there so much violence?" [13]

Pier Marton

The prophet Joel said tell your children about the exodus. Here we are a generation after the Holocaust and it is unbelievable as the waters parting! My parents' generation will slowly disappear, but the energy that created the Holocaust is still there. To forget is to kill twice. [14]
Pier Marton was born in France. His father was in the French Resistance. Being an artist and photographer, he forged documents and helped hide German deserters, actions for which he was almost shot by the German Gestapo. At the same time, Marton's mother was hiding in Hungary, in the back room of a commandant's office, sharing the space with eight other people, including a baby.
     Marton grew up in a Parisian apartment building that contained active memories of the Holocaust years in France. Years before, his father had created an escape route in the same apartment by sawing through an iron grill, which could be removed quickly. The presence of an escape route served as a constant reminder to Marton that one had to have fast legs to stay alive – legs his great grandfather and grandmother did not have. They perished in Auschwitz.
     After his father's death, Marton left France for America. For him, living in France was like living in a place where one needs constantly to know the route for escape. That claustrophobic cloud prompted his departure from France, where Marton felt he was surrounded by the same people who had betrayed his grandmother. Marton recognized the direct linkage of his family annals to his artistic oeuvre: "Knowing our parents had almost been killed many times, we grew up with a particular chill in our bones...in our homes and elsewhere, our families' grief, terror and anger found very little room to heal. I am a witness to my parents, their wound is mine." [15]
     However, unlike Altman and Rossmer, Marton elected to escape from European soil, where the Holocaust occurred. He carried with him his Jewishness as a badge of shame, and only in his new world could he free himself from his haunting ghost-the shame of being Jewish. Thus, in Marton's installation Jew, which includes a powerful, short documentary film Say I'm a Jew, the viewer is immersed into the artist's search for Jewish identity among the second generation. Seated on wooden benches in a simulated railroad cattle car, the viewer sees a video of collaged interviews with men and women who, like Marton, are children of European survivors now living in the United States. Those who speak on Marton's video describe their struggle of carrying the legacy and their rejection and acceptance of their Jewish heritage. The chorus of different voices says things that are hard to say and hard to hear. For Marton, to say the unspeakable is the only process for liberation – "to communicate one's own inhibitions, own oneself, the positive and negative, neglecting neither." [16]  The purpose of the exhibit for Marton does not end with self-healing, nor is it about creating guilt. It is about "what we can do to fight racism and anti-Semitism." [17]
     This last remark by Marton brings to surface the complexity of second-generation issues and the fact that the artist's inner realm is not limited to his personal memories. In fact, artists like Marton simultaneously wish to express the collective memory, the subconsciousness of the human race, from a Jewish perspective. This underlying universal moral objective is the backbone of all the installations in this exhibition. The stimulus in each case was a personal, firsthand experience. Gabrielle Rossmer's In Search of the Lost Object is the story of one Bamberg Jewish family. The faded family photographs, along with records, documents and letters, attest to the normal life before the upheaval and serve as a means to attain an intimate look at the family's saga. However, Bamberg is nothing less than Germany, and the Rossmers' story is the story of the six million – the story of racial persecution fifty years ago in Nazi Germany. If the Holocaust is incomprehensible to the human mind, the Rossmers' escape and partial destruction, like Spielberg's Schindler's List, is a story we can follow and internalize, and thus it can serve as a lesson for generations to come. In Kunst Arbeit, the catalog that accompanied Edith Altman's installation Reclaiming the Symbol in Chicago, the artist noted that "I seek to take my work to a more transcendental level...to consider social issues. My art, I hope, becomes a vehicle for contemplation about humanity." [18]
     Contemplation does not suffice for Altman. In the same interview she specifically mentions Tikkun Olam, a Jewish Kabbalistic notion that we can take an active part in the process of repair, the betterment of the world. By posing an ethical challenge for her installation, Altman implies the intrinsic quality of her work to instigate change-here and now. "The installation can only have a meaning if we get actively involved....It questions whether we are moved to take any kind of action when faced with evidence of others' pain." [19]

Pearl Hirshfield

     Pearl Hirshfield is the only installation artist in the Witness and Legacy exhibition who was born in America. Her family, of Russian-Jewish background, arrived before the events of the Holocaust. As a Chicago native, she represents the American humanist conscience. A quick glance at her extensive past political actions reveals her involvement, both as artist and as political activist, on issues pertaining to the peace movement, nuclear disarmament, fighting racism and supporting rights for women. As she has articulated in a personal statement, "My art centers on the outrage I feel when confronted with the inequities and injustices of society, whether local, national or global." Because of her world-encompassing view, Hirshfield expresses her personal linkage to the events of the Holocaust as she continues: "I have been to Auschwitz-Birkenau...to find any trace of relatives who perished....It has been an ongoing painful and difficult process." [20]  The same trip took Hirshfield to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where she tried to make personal connections with the survivors of this disaster of war. Reflecting on both, Hirshfield admits that she still continues to attempt to make sense out of these two events in her work.
     At the entrance to Shadows of Auschwitz, her current installation, Hirshfield places a quote by Primo Levi: "Beyond the fence stand the lords of death, and not far away the train is awaiting...." This sets the physical and emotional mood of the installation space. The spectator is drawn into a darkened interior space, where the artist makes use of an array of vertical mirrors to effect dramatic changes in light and shadow, with light piercing through horizontal slots. The "height" of the experience awaits the viewer at the other side of the fence, where he encounters his own reflection with numbers across his body. The numbers are the actual Auschwitz numbers of survivors Hirshfield has met. They are authentic. Invention is not needed in this environment. An exit sign marked Ausgang directs one to the outside, but leaving with mentally tattooed numbers. Where does it lead to? Hirshfield would like to hope that we will all join the ranks of those protesting injustice, inhumanity, and persecution of every color or shape on the face of our globe.
     Thus far, the main issues articulated have focused on what these five installation artists wished to address in their works and the reasons they ventured into this highly charged subject matter. However, the question remains why so many artists in this show have chosen installation as their medium. Although there have been many predecessors in the form of assemblage, environmental art and happenings from previous decades, the eighties with their turbulence and violence have instigated a flourishing of site-specific installations.
     In many ways installation art represents an integral segment of the larger trend toward recognizable imagery, sometimes called "New Imagism." Artists in this group share an emphasis on narrative and content. They attempt to build a stronger bond between the art world and the so-called "real world" of social change. In this larger realm of New Imagism, artists like Borofsky, Bosman and Golub feel a need to direct their art toward specific aspects of their cultural, social or personal agenda. In this manner, their art is a manifestation of a certain social climate. The eighties expressed a heightened anxiety regarding the gloomy end of the twentieth century, which offers only a dark apocalyptic vision of the future. Thus, art needs to communicate these fears more directly, in the hope that the course of doom will change. As different types of social violence are expressed, however, most artists resort to the use of archival media, images, photographs, video and television clips to achieve the desired resonance between art and reality.
     These artists do not echo the others, but are equal voices that work in unison. Artists now confront head-on the interactive role of art in society. As the artist attempts to challenge the viewer, to force him into participation, installation art offers a viable solution. The signs Eingang ("Entrance") and Ausgang ("Exit") in Hirshfield's installation, for example, are a tangible reminder that we enter a space, just as we do a theater. Now we are totally immersed in the artist's reality, where we are not allowed a passive role. The viewer is challenged to reconsider old premises he has brought along. He is bombarded with static visual images, textual information, moving images and sound. This is not a time to contemplate a single element in this reconstructed reality. The viewer is challenged to absorb the complexities of this alternative environment as a whole. Intellectual and expressive modes are utilized to enhance new association, new perception by the viewer. Now the artist waits to see what course his changed citizen of the world will take: silent as the fish or active as the lion.
     Edith Altman, Gerda Meyer-Bernstein, Pearl Hirshfield, Pier Marton and Gabrielle Rossmer, by opting to use installations as the medium for their art, join the ranks of American artists of the eighties and nineties who wish to escape the "commodification" of art in the galleries. They are artists who rejected art for art's sake and enlisted themselves and their art to projects with social and moral accountability and responsibility. They are artists who are committed to making a change, yet maintain a fine edge in their aesthetics.
     In the beginning there was silence. The Holocaust wasn't discussed too much and wasn't taught. Its manifestations were found occasionally in art, literature and film. Suddenly, in the eighties, there was a sense of urgency for Jews to make themselves heard, to make themselves understood. Survivors will die and no direct witnesses will be able to bear witness. Following the initial repression, when we all embraced Bezem's fish mentality, a subsequent energized release of memory in all forms took place. Holocaust museums grew with public support in Washington and Los Angeles. Millions filled theaters to see Schindler's List. Witness and Legacy is but one more manifestation of the imprint of the Holocaust on human consciousness and on art in particular. Yet the exhibition bears the responsibility to join the lion's roar.