After Nuremberg

Last summer, Nathan-ism, a small yet unsettling exhibition, opened at Art Cru Berlin, a relatively unknown space dedicated to outsider art. It featured drawings by Nathan Hilu, an American artist and the son of Syrian-Jewish immigrants, whose unique experience as an 18-year-old soldier escorting Nazi war criminals such as Hermann Göring and Rudolf Hess during the Nuremberg trials became the source of his lifelong artistic endeavour. The show commemorated 80 years since the first of the Nuremberg Trials, in which the Allied Forces prosecuted leading figures of Nazi Germany with an unprecedented aim: to establish that individuals could be held legally accountable for violations of international law. The first and most significant trial, held from November 1945 to October 1946, charged 24 senior Nazi officials with war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity—a new legal category formulated in response to the “Final Solution.” For decades, Hilu translated his memories of moments spent alongside Nazi leaders into raw drawings, executed on scraps of paper with felt-tip pens and oil pastels. The exhibition was accompanied by a screening of Elan Golod’s 2023 documentary, also titled Nathan-ism, which contextualises and questions some of the memories captured on paper. 

One motif haunts Hilu’s drawings with obsessive intensity—the prolonged kiss between Göring and his wife, a moment that Hilu claims concealed the passing of the cyanide pill Göring used to evade execution. (This theory could never be substantiated.) In his art, Hilu revisited his direct proximity to the principal perpetrators of the Shoah time and again, until his death, in 2019, at the age of 94. It would take at least two decades after the end of the Nuremberg trials for artists operating within the conventional art system—especially West German artists—to approach the horrors of Holocaust as artistic material. (The case of Soviet East Germany demands its own analysis, with the exception of Gerhard Richter.)

In the late 1940s and 1950s, Postwar West German art was dominated by abstraction—movements such as Art Informel and Zero—which functioned in part as an aesthetic refusal of figuration that also avoided confronting Nazi crimes. Memory was displaced rather than addressed, as West Germany’s denazification process was still ongoing—and in hindsight, was never truly accomplished. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that artists began to engage with memory, sometimes inviting controversy by invoking war and devastation. Joseph Beuys is considered by many a trailblazer, but he largely circumvented honest engagement with personal culpability. Beuys’s legacy too often obfuscates the fact that in 1940, he volunteered to join the Luftwaffe and served as a dive-bomber pilot. In 1944, he crashed in the Crimea and was saved—an event he would repeatedly mythologize in his work using fat, taxidermized predators, and felt. 

The following decades saw artists belonging to a generation born during or right after the war, such as Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, or French artist Christian Boltanski explore trauma through fragmentation and absence, highlighting the impossibility of fully representing the Holocaust. In his book Das Verscwhinden des Holocaust (The Disappearance of the Holocaust), (Edition Tiamant, 2025), German historian Jan Gerber discusses how the Holocaust’s presence in the collective memory has changed over time. He reminds readers that the Holocaust was not immediately or widely acknowledged as a defining historical event after World War II. It only entered the mainstream memory decades later, especially from the 1970s onward. In fact, public engagement with the Holocaust began particularly after the German broadcast and international success of the American TV series Holocaust, as people began to grasp it as a distinct, singular historical event rather than a background fact of World War II. 

The art world, and eventually, the art market, embraced such engagement—although controversy was provoked at first through the invocation of Nazi symbols. Anselm Kiefer’s confrontation of Nazi crimes began with his 1969 performance and photo series Occupations/Heroische Sinnbilder, in which he dons his father’s Wehrmacht coat and performs the Nazi salute at various European locations. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Kiefer produced a number of paintings that explicitly reference Paul Celan’s 1945 poem Die Todesfuge—most notably works titled Margarethe and Sulamith, both figures named in Celan’s poem. The Poem’s incantatory repetition (“Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland”) stages genocide through rhythm, fragmentation, and lyrical structure rather than description. Kiefer recognized early on that this refusal of literal depiction offered a model for how art might address historical catastrophe without aestheticizing it. Kiefer’s Nürnberg (1982) depicts the Nazi party rally grounds as a desolate field strewn with straw, transforming a site of spectacle into a landscape marked by historical guilt and ruin. Through these works, Kiefer established a monumental language to reckon with Germany’s traumatic past. Representing West Germany alongside Georg Baselitz at the 1980 Venice Biennale marked a turning point in Kiefer’s international recognition, but it was the validation of his 1984 Israel Museum exhibition that helped legitimize him as a serious artist grappling with German guilt and Jewish memory rather than a mere provocateur.

It is a forgotten fact today that a crucial figure in the broader art world’s acceptance of Kiefer was Suzanne Landau, the recently retired Director of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, who organized his solo exhibition there in 1984 while serving as Curator of Contemporary Art. Landau’s curatorial support provided an institutional framework that recognized the ethical urgency and seriousness of his approach to cultural memory. That exhibition, and Kiefer’s subsequent travels in Israel, profoundly shaped his practice, leading him to engage more deeply with Jewish history, the Hebrew Bible, and Kabbalistic thought. It also won him a devoted collectors base. 

One of Kiefer’s most important patrons, Martin Z. Margulies, collected deeply and installed monumental Kiefer works in a dedicated space at The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse in Miami. His recent donation to the Israel Museum of the 17-feet-tallinstallation Die Erdzeitalter (Ages of the World)— which references the Tower of Babel and Jacob’s Ladder—exemplifies how Kiefer’s market, with an auction record of nearly $4 million, often culminates in institutional placement, not resale.

But along with the market success came a certain universality to Kiefer’s work, a handling of general, unspecified traumas, in a manner that resonates with Gerber’s critique about the “disappearance” of the Holocaust. For Gerber, it is not mainly about the death of a generation of eyewitnesses, but about a loss of conceptual distinctions: the will and ability to differentiate between antisemitism and racism, Nazism and colonial regimes, Holocaust and other crimes is weakening, and with it judgment and discernment. The private Almaty Museum of Arts (AMA) in Kazakhstan, financed by gas and retail tycoon Nurlan Smagulov, which opened this past September, boasts a Kiefer room dedicated to a monumental installation bought straight from the artist’s presentation at Palazzo Ducale in Venice, in 2022. The suite of works is titled Questi scritti, quando verranno bruciati, daranno finalmente un po’ di luce (These writings, when burned, will finally cast a little light) and combines thick layers of oil, lead, and other dense materials. AMA’s Artistic Director, Meruyert Kaliveya, explains that the violent protests that have erupted across Kazakhstan in 2022 and the societal unrest of that period inspired the acquisition. “It’s a complicated chapter with many unanswered questions and conflicting agendas,” she says, “but the title’s universal message of hope spoke to us.” 

Gerhard Richter, the most expensive living German artist with an auction record of $46.3 million, has repeatedly approached the problem of history through abstraction. Born in Dresden in 1932 and shaped by both National Socialism and the visual regimes of the GDR, he has often resisted direct representation of historical trauma. His Birkenau cycle (2014) marks a rare and consequential departure: a direct engagement with Auschwitz, mediated through photographs clandestinely taken in 1944 by Alberto Errera, a Greek Jewish member of the Sonderkommando revolt at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Richter initially translated the photographs into figurative paintings before systematically obscuring them through successive layers of paint, staging the Holocaust as something that resists visual legibility while nonetheless insisting on presence.

A permanent, site-specific installation of Birkenau opened on 9 February 2024 at the International Youth Meeting Centre in Oświęcim, near the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial. Installed in a dedicated pavilion, the work is presented as an edition of the cycle: four large abstract compositions printed on metal plates, displayed opposite grey mirror panels and accompanied by documentary material relating to the original photographs. The original painted Birkenau cycle is held by the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, as part of a group of 100 works that Richter placed on long-term loan with the institution. Since 2023, the four canvases have formed the conceptual core of the exhibition Gerhard Richter. 100 Werke für Berlin at the Neue Nationalgalerie, where they are shown together with four grey mirror panels that echo those in the Oświęcim installation. The works are intended to enter the collection of the forthcoming Museum of the 20th Century at the Kulturforum, reinforcing their status as a central statement within Richter’s late practice and within Germany’s ongoing confrontation with Holocaust memory.

It is precisely this institutional embedding that has drawn criticism. Art historian Annika Wienert, a research fellow at the German Historical Institute Warsaw, argues that Birkenau exemplifies a memorial culture that stabilizes trauma through carefully designed spaces of reflection. The abstraction that signals ethical restraint may also produce contemplative distance, allowing viewers to engage with painterly surfaces while remaining insulated from the historical violence they reference. She points out that artists like Richter and Kiefer are treated as representing “ideals” of Holocaust engagement and thus fulfil an important function for the German majority society, while the actual victims and their descendants receive nowhere near the same attention. Why are white German artists, she asks, allowed to turn the extermination of Jews into their theme without including them, when such a move would be unthinkable if it concerned any other ethnic minority? 

Wienert stresses this imbalance is symptomatic of a broader structure in which Jewish perspectives, culture, and history are treated as marginal; she notes that many—including highly educated people—know little about Jewish culture, religion, and persecution. Reactions to discussions of antisemitism are primarily defensive rather than reflective, indicating deep-seated thought patterns that inhibit empathy. From the perspective of Wienert and Jan Gerber’s critiques of memory culture, the canonical works of Richter and Kiefer ultimately expose how even the most ethically self-aware art can become entangled in a system of remembrance that manages, aestheticizes, and neutralizes the very history it seeks to confront.