Gerhard Richter e Herta Müller ou: quando as imagens se posicionam

Abstract

The German artist Gerhard Richter has caused some controversy through his use of the abstract painting technique to approach the Holocaust. One of his most recent works, “Birkenau”, uses as its background images the photographs taken by some of the Jewish prisoners who were part of the Sonderkommando group in 1944. Some critics accuse Richter of hiding Auschwitz’s truth. On its turn, “The Hunger Angel”, a novel by Romanian-born German author Herta Müller, consists of successive poetic imagery arising from the picturesque vision of its narrator, Leo Auberg. At the age of seventeen, the young Romanian is deported to a gulag after the occupation of his country by Soviet troops and finds in observing the beauty of the elements of his daily life at the forced labor camp a way of resisting the physical and psychological violence to which he is subjected. This research project aims to suggest that instead of concealing the horrors of the concentration and forced labor camps, the aestheticization found in Richter's and Müller's works emphasizes the cruelty of the crimes committed by the Nazis and Soviets.