A Layla Productions book.

Judenmord is the first collection of works of art specifically by German artists from the end of the war to the end of the 1960s that comment on the Holocaust.

The senseless horror of the Holocaust continues to send shockwaves through history. Few would question its profound influence on post-war philosophy, morality, theological and political thinking. Yet the impact of the Holocaust on the Fine Arts, and in particular on contemporary art, has still not received the attention it deserves. This new publication accompanies a pioneering touring exhibition. It comprises a series of illustrated essays by leading experts, addressing: the art produced by victims of the Holocaust during the Holocaust; the influence of the Holocaust on artists who were not camp inmates, working during the war and in the post-war period; Holocaust memorials and their significance; and the work of a younger generation of artists, many of them non-Jews, whose relationship to the Holocaust is more oblique. Among the artists included are R. B. Kitaj, Picasso, Francis Bacon, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Christian Boltanski, Melvin Charney, Shimon Attie, Zoran Music, Susanna Pieratzki, Mick Rooney and Nancy Spero. The works selected have in common a determination not to rely on over-used visual stereotypes, nor to indulge in nostalgia, morbidity or sentimentality. Aesthetically compelling, they force us to reassess a subject all too often dismissed as overworked, and to reconsider the nature and potential of artistic activity 'after Auschwitz', as the century nears its end.

Dora Apel analyzes the ways in which artists born after the Holocaust-whom she calls secondary witnesses-represent a history they did not experience first hand. She demonstrates that contemporary artists confront these atrocities in order to bear witness not to the Holocaust directly, but to its "memory effects" and to the implications of those effects for the present and future. Drawing on projects that employ a variety of unorthodox artistic strategies, the author provides a unique understanding of contemporary representations of the Holocaust. She demonstrates how these artists frame the past within the conditions of the present, the subversive use of documentary and the archive, the effects of the Jewish genocide on issues of difference and identity, and the use of representation as a form of resistance to historical closure.

Mark Godfrey looks closely at a series of American art and architectural projects that respond to the memory of the Holocaust. He investigates how abstract artists and architects have negotiated Holocaust memory without representing the Holocaust figuratively or symbolically.

Although the Holocaust represents one of the worst atrocities in the history of mankind, it is thought of by many only in terms of statistics—the brutal slaughter of over 6 million lives. The art of those who suffered under the most unspeakable conditions and the art of those who reflect on the genocide remind us that statistics cannot tell the entire story. This important and diverse collection focuses on the art expression from the inferno, documenting the Holocaust through sketches of camp life drawn surreptitiously by victims on scraps of paper, and through contemporary paintings, sculpture, and personal reflections. From an informative and comprehensive perspective, this book evokes a powerful response to the 20th-century catastrophe.

In the face of strong moral and aesthetic pressure to deal with the Holocaust in strictly historical and documentary modes, this book discusses why and how reenactment of the Holocaust in art and imaginative literature can be successful in simultaneously presenting, analyzing, and working through this apocalyptic moment in human history. In pursuing his argument, the author explores such diverse materials and themes as: the testimonies of Holocaust survivors; the works of such artists and writers as Charlotte Salomon, Christian Boltanski, and Armando; and the question of what it means to live in a house built by a jew who was later transported to the death camps. He shows that reenactment, as an artistic project, also functions as a critical strategy, one that, unlike historical methods requiring a mediator, speaks directly to us and lures us into the Holocaust. We are then placed in the position of experiencing and being the subjects of that history. We are there, and history is present--but not quite. A confrontation with Nazism or with the Holocaust by means of a re-enactment takes place within the representational realm of art. Our access to this past is no longer mediated by the account of a witness, by a narrator, by the eye of a photographer. We do not respond to a re-presentation of the historical event, but to a presentation or performance of it, and our response is direct or firsthand in a different way. That different way of "keeping in touch” is the subject of inquiry that propels this study.