The Past in the Present
New York Times, Tuesday, September 11, 2001 (Microfilm, National Library NY, 2004)
Alt Wien 1908. (Washington, 2005) In October 1908 this watercolor was part of the portfolio submitted by Adolf Hitler in a second vain attempt to be admitted to Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts.
Becelaire 1917 (Washington, 2005) Adolf Hitler made this watercolor painting during the First World War when he wasencamped in Becelaire, a municipality in the vicinity of Ypres. Although in February 1914 Hitler was found physically unfit to serve in the Austrian army, when the First World War broke out he was granted permission to join the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment as a message runner. After just two months of training this regiment fought in the bloody First Battle of Ypres; of the 250 men in Hitler’s company only 42 survived. Hitler himself was wounded twice during the war. In October 1916, shrapnel hit him in the face during the Battle of the Somme and he spent five months in a hospital in Berlin. An attack with mustard gas in the night of 13 – 14 October 1918 left him blind for three months. Hitler was still hospitalized when he learned that Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany was forced to abdicate on 9 November 1918. The armistice was signed two days later, which greatly dismayed Hitler. He later explained that at this point he decided to enter the political arena, in order “to save Germany”.
The watercolors, (Washington 2005) After the Second World War the US army discovered four watercolors by Hitler in a German castle. They belonged to Heinrich Hoffmann. The US army found about 2.5 million negatives in this same castle, some of which would serve as evidence in the Nuremberg trials. The watercolors were classified as “military objects” and transferred to the US, where they disappeared into the vaults of the Pentagon and simply labelled ‘The watercolors’. In 1982, while conducting research for his book ‘Adolf Hitler: The Unknown Artist’, Billy F. Price came across the watercolors and acquired the rights to them from Hoffmann’s heirs. A long drawn-out legal battle about ownership of the watercolors began in 1985. Billy F. Price – who proclaimed himself an internationally acknowledged expert on Hitler’s art and owner of one of the largest collections of Hitler’s artworks, but was described by the US Court of Appeals as a “Texas Businessman” – sued for 99 million dollars in damages for being denied the right to exploit the works. However, it was maintained that the very brush strokes on the painting had such incendiary potential that they had to be guarded from the gaze of all but screened experts. The US government’s position was, however, as clear as day: ‘The United States is entitled to retain Hitler memorabilia which came into our nation’s possession because we won the war.’ The US government eventually won this 18-year-long legal wrangle in 2002 before the Supreme Court decreed that the watercolors would never again be allowed to leave the vaults of the Army Center of Military History.
Ypres 1914-1918. (2007) This ordnance survey map was used by the British army during the First World War to indicate the battlefield around Ypres in West Flanders.Ypres was hemmed in on three sides by German troops for the duration of the First World War. The Germans failed to capture the town, despite ambitiously planned battles in which half a million soldiers lost their lives. The Germans first used lethal chlorine gas on the Western Front during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915. Mustard gas was first deployed on a large scale during the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917, earning it the nickname yperite. The town itself was utterly devastated in the process. After the war there were calls to leave Ypres as it was rather than rebuild it, as a macabre memorial. The town was, however, restored to its pre-war state, largely thanks to financing from the Wiedergutmachung, the ‘reparations’ exacted from Germany. Reconstruction took more than 40 years. To the left of the map, which covers an area less than 35 kilometres across, stands Steenvoorde, the place where the Iconoclastic Fury erupted in the Low Countries in 1566.
Queen Wilhelmina, Jakarta. Defacement 6 May 1960. (2006, Amsterdam, archives of the RIjksmuseum) Two days after Japan’s capitulation on 17 August 1945, the influential nationalistic leaders, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta declared the independence of the Dutch East Indies. Sukarno became the first president of the new Indonesia. Initially the Netherlands resisted these developments with the so-called ‘police actions’, but in December 1949, under pressure from the international community, it eventually recognized Indonesia’s independence, with the exception of the eastern part of New Guinea (present-day Papua). Wilhemina was Queen of the Netherlands from 1890 to 1948, one of the longest reigning monarchs ever. Nevertheless, she never set foot on Indonesian soil. Her portrait hung in the offices of the Dutch High Commissioner in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. On 6 May 1960, during a protest against the continuing retention of Papua by the Netherlands, nationalistic students forced their way into the building and damaged the portrait of Wilhelmina with paint and thrusts of their bayonets. In 1963, after a period under temporary UN administration, this colony was also transferred to Indonesia.
Map showing Polish military maneuvers as part of a Warschau Pact invasion plan. The projected invasion of Western Europe involved the atomic bombing of several cities (marked by red bombs on the map), followed by massive troop movements towards the Federal Republic of Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium. Polish soldiers would serve as cannon fodder, marching into contaminated territory. Army leadership estimated that radiation sickness would render them incapable about seven days into the war, at which point fresh Soviet troops from Ukraine and Belarus would take over. Wojciech W. Jaruzelski, Poland’s communist Minister of Defense, signed the map in 1970. At that time, the US had 3,900 nuclear warheads and the USSR had 3,100. Jaruzelski was elected prime minister in 1981. In 2005, the anti-communist government of Poland ordered the Polish Institute for National Remembrance (IPN) to open the country’s controversial Warschau Pact archives to historians. This decision ran counter to the Russian government’s policy of keeping these archives closed. Access to the map for the purpose of taking photographs was requested repeatedly, but the IPN formally denied it. However, after two and a half years of bureaucratic hassle, an IPN historian unexpectedly answered a telephone call and sent photographs of the map that he had made during a press conference of the Polish Minister of Defense in 2006. These pictures were then combined into a reconstruction of the original map. This composition stems from the historian’s choice of photographing only certain segments of the map.
Installationview of New York Times, Tuesday, September 11, 2001 at The Art of Iconoclasm curated by Sven Lütticken at Bak, Utrecht
Installationview of New York Times, Tuesday, September 11, 2001 and Queen Wilhelmina, Jakarta. Defacement 6 May 1960, at the exhibition Monumentalismus, One's history is another's misery at Autocenter, Berlin (curated by Jelle Bouwhuis)