Witnessing Tragedy, Looking at Risk: Rolf Zimmermann Revisited (The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 38, No. 4, Winter 1997-98) by Peter Chametzky, Francis Tomasic, aged 36, was buried on May 13 next to his father on the island of Hvar off the Dalmatian Coast. It seems to be profoundly important to note that Francis Tomasic was where he wanted to be--in Bosnia--doing what he wanted to do which was witnessing one to the greatest tragedies of our time. (Hon. Frank McCloskey, "Tribute to Francis William Tomasic," Proceedings and Debates of the 103rd Congress, Second Session, Congressional Record, Vol. 140, No. 68, May 26, 1994.)

1 The eye witness is at risk. My friend Francis Tomasic risked and lost his life in Bosnia, where he was taking photographs and translating Serbo-Croatian for his friend, novelist and journalist William Vollman. In addition to risking life and limb, the witness also produces risky testimony. Words or images representing tragedies risk exploiting them as spectacle. If they aspire to art and over emphasize their own artistry they run the risk of exploiting suffering as sublimely aesthetic; conversely, if significant artistic effect is lacking they risk trivializing, normalizing, anesthetizing. And whenever artistic interpretation is involved, there is the risk that the victim's suffering, or the perpetrator's sadism, will become another vehicle for displaying the artist's own. Readers of The Massachusetts Review may recall my essay "Rolf Zimmermann's Poland Paintings: A German Inheritance" from the Autumn 1995 issue. The subject matter of my text, a remarkable 1989-1990 cycle of drawings and paintings executed by the Karlsruhe artist Rolf Zimmermann, may have left an imprint. These haunting images were based on a handful of seemingly innocent snapshots that Zimmermann inherited from his uncle, Franz Zimmermann. The artist had long been tormented by his family heirloom, the only traces to return from Franz Zimmermann's service as a member of the SS on the Eastern Front. Rolf Zimmermann's very personal attempt to come to terms with his German inheritance, the unmasterable past, I claimed then and still believe now, managed a rather uniquely personal and responsible artistic reckoning with the Holocaust as a most risky artistic theme. The uniqueness, at least in visual art, of Zimmermann's attempt to approach the Holocaust through his own familial involvement is itself remarkable and telling. Despite well-known caveats, especially Adorno's famous dictum that "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric," the Holocaust has become a familiar theme of contemporary art, from Joseph Beuys to Judy Chicago. Given the idea that in order to be avant-garde art must transgress boundaries, and the relative difficulty after Dadaism of finding formal ones, it may be precisely the supposition that this subject is beyond representation that has made it so attractive, particularly in contemporary German art. What is so unique about Zimmermann's cycle, though, is that he engaged and worked through his personal inheritance--and by extension that of many Germans--rather than appropriating and supposedly deconstructing the public image the Nazis themselves presented. In the 1995 essay I specifically compared Zimmermann's project with the hugely successful works of the early 1980s by his contemporary, Anselm Kiefer. Like the more detached, ironic, postmodern works of Sigmar Polke, for instance, Kiefer reworked photographs from the public record of Nazism. But in powerful paintings such as Shulamite (1983), I argued, Kiefer appropriated not only Nazi motifs, but the overpowering, mythologizing, Wagnerian aesthetic favored by Nazism itself. His grandiose allegory distances the day-by-day, blow-by-blow, person-by-person reality of industrialized genocide, and his aesthetic reinvests the macabre totality of the Holocaust with a mythic aura of inevitability. The rewards of Kiefer's sublime artistry, I concluded, did not justify the risk to the subject.

Peter Chametzky is Associate Professor of Art History and Head of Academic Programs in the School of Art and Design of Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Ph.D., 1991, City University of New York Graduate Center, BA, 1980, Cornell University; further studies in Freiburg and Stuttgart, Germany. He has taught at Adelphi University, The School of Visual Arts, and New York University. His major field of research is modern and contemporary art, especially German modernism and contemporary art in Germany and America. His current research project is "Objects of History in Twentieth-Century German Art." His articles and reviews have appeared in Art in America, Arts Magazine, Critical Texts, Labor History, The Massachusetts Review, Oxford Art Journal, The New York Times, Zyma--Art Today, and in an international variety of exhibition catalogues, anthologies, and encyclopedias.