Berlin/Cologne. The International Auschwitz Committee (IAC) has honoured the Gerhard Richter as ‘artist, German, and as citizen’ by awarding him a statue of the inverted B in his studio in Cologne.
The inverted letter represents a sign of resistance and was originally integrated by prisoners in the inscription above the main gate to Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp.
The statue was presented to him by Marian Turski, the 97-year-old Auschwitz survivor and President of the IAC. In so doing, the committee expressed its gratitude to the worldwide renowned artist for entrusting the four paintings of his Birkenau Series to the IAC as permanent exhibits in Oswiecim/Auschwitz, as well as for his lifelong commitment.
The inverted B replicates what was a deliberate act of resistance by prisoners in Auschwitz. They secretly overturned this letter in the metal inscription Arbeit macht frei (work sets you free), which the SS had ordered them to weld together for the death camp’s main gate. “This was the only way for them to express their resistance in their helplessness, desperation and anger,” says Christoph Heubner, Executive Vice President of the IAC. Paradoxically, this deliberate ‘mistake’ was never discovered. The inverted letter later inspired the French artist Michèle Déodat to design the 15cm-high sculpture, which is manufactured by Volkswagen trainees while learning about Nazi crimes and especially about Auschwitz. Earlier recipients of the award include King Charles III of England (when he was still Prince Charles).
In his speech, the 97-year-old president of the IAC, Marian Turski, stressed the importance of Richter’s abstract art for the process of coming to terms with the traumas experienced during the years of imprisonment. The Polish-Jewish Auschwitz survivor said, Richter’s paintings open up spaces that help survivors to confront their memories.
Richter is currently working together with the committee making preparations for the exhibition of the four Birkenau paintings in a museum designed by him and located in the grounds of the International Youth Meeting Center in Oswiecim/Auschwitz, Poland. Richter based his paintings on photographs that were secretly taken by prisoners and smuggled out of Birkenau as documents of the mass murders taking place there. During the presentation of the award, he said he didn’t want to sell the pictures, and for this reason he was pleased that they can be exhibited in the place where they belong, thanks to Christoph Heubner’s initiative.
Because of his origins in Dresden, as well as the fate of his aunt who was murdered during the Nazi euthanasia programme, Gerhard Richter has repeatedly focused on Nazi crimes. Mr Heubner said it was for this reason that the IAC was honouring him not only as an artist, but also expressly as a German and an Enlightener – as a Citizen.
While in Gerhard Richter’s studio in Cologne, Marian Turski said that art can act as a form of liberating rescue for survivors. He said: “The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno once said that there could be no more poetry written after Auschwitz. But this is wrong! In fact poetry, music and painting give us survivors spaces to come to terms with what happened. This is something I have experienced personally, including through the works of Gerhard Richter.”
