Denying Difference to the Post-Socialist Other: Bernhard Heisig and the Changing Reception of an East German Artist

This article traces the reception of East German artist Bernhard Heisig’s life and art—first in East Germany and then in the Federal Republic of Germany before and after the Wall. Drawing on post-colonial and post-socialist scholarship, it argues that Heisig’s reception exemplifies a western tendency to deny cultural and ideological difference in what the post-socialist scholar Piotr Piotrowski calls the “close Other.” This denial of difference to artists from the eastern bloc has shaped western understandings of Heisig’s life and art since reunification. Once perceived as an intellectually engaged, political artist, both in East and West Germany, after the fall of the Wall and German unification, Heisig was reinterpreted as a traumatized victim of two dictatorships, distorting not only our understanding of the artist and his work, but also of the nature of art and the role of the artist in East Germany.


Figure 1
Bernhard Heisig, Fortress Breslau -The City and its Murderers, 1969. Oil on Canvas. In East Germany, by contrast, Heisig's life and art were interpreted quite differently. His Nazi past was not seen as a traumatic source for creativity, but rather as the reason he chose to become a communist and to live in East Germany, where he remained throughout the Cold War period. For him, as for many German intellectuals in the wake of World War II, Communism's critique of imperialism and its emphasis on pacifism seemed to offer a better path for the future. Rather than an artist obsessed by trauma, Heisig was presented in East German scholarship as a politically engaged artist who created more from his intellect than his psyche. His wartime paintings were linked to his biography, but the emphasis was on how they functioned as a critique of the continuation of fascism in the West. They were "never a simple history illustration." 13 Not only did East German critics interpret Heisig's images of war differently than post-Wall critics, they also emphasized a greater variety within the artist's oeuvre, which include portraiture, murals, still lifes, and literary illustrations. These artist rather than a painter and for having a straightforward, realist style. In a review of the Fifth Regional Art Exhibition in Leipzig published in the national magazine Sonntag in 1959, Horst Jaehner stated that Heisig's portrait drawings and lithographs on the Paris Commune showed he was one of the most talented artists of the younger generation in the exhibition. 15 In another review, this one of a small exhibition of his prints and drawings, the unnamed author praised Heisig's portraiture, stating that "every single one of these faces betrays something of the soul."   The following year, in August 1961, Heisig became director of the Leipzig Academy, one of East Germany's four main art schools, and introduced a painting class to the curriculum.
Three months later, he exhibited two paintings and ten lithographs at the Sixth Regional Art  These texts about Heisig's paintings at the Sixth reveal the importance of art in East Germany, where not only did the head of State visit the exhibition and offer his opinion on some of the works displayed, but the exhibition itself was discussed in great detail in the press. The interest in Heisig's paintings reflected both the importance of the Paris Commune to East Germany and the importance of Heisig's role as one of East Germany's earliest history painters. These early articles also offer insight into Heisig's working process and, in particular, his interest in engaging with others in the creation of his art. As one article noted, Heisig responded to criticisms raised by the jury that the paintings were too static by reworking one of the compositions. 22 This is one of the first mentions of Heisig's tendency to rework paintings, and the reason given is an intellectual rather than emotional one.  5), for example, which was the most controversial of those he created, bright colors swirl together in organic shapes that combine the large, simplified face of a working woman with the shapes and symbols of the city into a composition that, according to the Leipzig journalist Rita Jorek, "did not make it easy" for the viewer. 26 In a positive review, Jorek explained that these murals "are not to be understood as an illustration of thoughts and ideas, but rather as independent artistic creations." She then quoted Heisig as stating that "all too frequently it is forgotten that the happy attitude towards life that a work can produce also has an ideological function." This article was the first of four in a series published in the Leipziger Volkszeitung that engaged with the complexity of Heisig's murals from both positive and negative perspectives. The intent of the series was to help the general public to better understand and appreciate art, presumably in response to the State's desire-heavily promoted in the wake of the building of the Wall in 1961-for a higher quality of art for the "educated nation." 27 23 Resignation letter from Heisig to Binder, 19. February 1964. Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (HGB) Archive. As will be discussed later, Heisig's resignation as director was later seen by western scholars as politically motivated, a punitive action based on the controversial speech he gave in April 1964. His resignation letter, however, predates this event, and its pre-conference date is confirmed by two other documents at the Archive of the Leipzig Academy.  fig. 6) combined multiple moments and events into one image, which showed more than fifteen people engaged in hand-to-hand combat in the final days of the Paris Commune. Early on, critics in Leipzig praised the work as "energetic" and "explosive," a "symphony of dramatic tones" that made "the unstoppable strength of the Communards noticeable." 28 As the exhibition wore on, however, critics from places other than Leipzig began to attack the painting on both stylistic and thematic grounds.
These attacks culminated the following spring with an article by Harald Olbrich in Bildende Kunst in which he stated that Heisig's "superficial interests in problems of form... and writhing amorphously doughy masses decidedly limit the Party value of the Commune."    he stated that these works mark "the possible beginning of a thematic enrichment of his painting and maybe even a new socialist history painting." He ended the article by stating that painting was not just for a circle of aesthetes; it was something that was needed in East Germany.
The following year, in 1969, Heisig was at the center of another controversy, this time over the "loud, brutal, wild -and very sensitive" painterly style evident in his painting, The Brigade (1969), which was on display at the Regional Art Exhibition in Leipzig.      In a three-page review of the exhibition published in Die Weltbühne, the Berlin art historian Lothar Lang pointed out Heisig's painterly debts to Kokoschka and Corinth, before arguing that he had a different world view than these artists: Heisig reflected on the problems of the world in his art, but as a socialist, and his work contributed "to the intelligent socialist art" that required viewer engagement. 43 Lang also pointed out that it would be a disservice to Heisig to think of him simply as a "painter of landscapes or still lifes" since "his most important achievements are in portraiture and history." Mentioning Heisig's self-portraits, portraits of his mother, Lenin, the musical director Vaclav Neumann and The Brigadier, Lang stated that "from now on, Heisig must be considered one of our best portraitists." He then turned to Heisig's "history" paintings, stating that they contribute to "the historical consciousness of our time." He divided them into three main categories: the Paris Commune, German fascism, and the events and problems of the present.  Second, Heisig's paintings of war and conflict were largely interpreted in terms of his "personal entanglement" in the "horrors," "nightmare" or "barbarism" of the Second World War, rather than from an intellectual investigation of the mechanisms of oppression that led to it. 52 The latter was only rarely mentioned. Instead, Heisig was called a "deeply frightened warner," "traumatically touched" by his experiences, which "churn his innards" and "afflict him to the present day." 53 His work was thus seen as an "attempt to free himself from [the] angst" produced by his "traumatic experience of the destruction of his home town of Breslau." 54 As such, they were considered "authentic" expressions of the artist's personal experiences in the "chaos of German history." 55 A third element shared by most of the articles written by West German authors-and one also visible in East German texts, albeit to a lesser degree-was the desire to place Heisig's work within a Gesamtdeutsch (German without regard for East or West) tradition. In particular, leading Expressionist artists of the early 20 th century, including Beckmann, Corinth, Kokoschka and Dix, were frequently mentioned as important precursors to Heisig's work.
While the "Germanness" of Heisig's art was an important factor for most of the West   In the introduction to the catalog, the exhibition's curators-Peter Pachnicke from the East and Jörn Merkert from the West-pointed out that in comparison to music and literature, which can cross political borders relatively easily, the lack of access to original works in the visual arts had led to deep-seated stereotypes on both sides of the Wall. In the West, East German art was often thought to be "beautified Party-conforming Realism without artistic individuality," while in the East, West Germany was often thought to be an "art market dictatorship [promoting] abstract art with no relation to reality." 64 Such stereotypes only began to be redressed in the 1970s and 1980s. Now a deeper look at individual artists was needed, they argued: a comprehensive exhibition of Heisig's work was wanted by both sides.
The introduction-like the catalog as a whole-combined eastern and western perspectives of Heisig's work. It pointed out that in the West, his work first gained notice in the late 1970s at the documenta exhibition in 1977, and that it was particularly valued because of the "self-tormenting intensity with which he grappled with German history -and not as a moral finger pointer, but rather as someone involved… [Heisig] has created the 'work of mourning' that, according to Alexander Mitscherlich, is necessary for coming to terms with the darkest phase of German history." These works appealed to the West's recent "hunger for images" stemming from decades of abstract art, but were also different from the "wild painting" that had emerged there in the 1980s: "This is not painting from the gut… [here is] an intact, precisely calculated image… Heisig: a painter who sets the whole of his artistic means [in play]…" In addition to his value for the West, the introduction also emphasized his commitment to society: "for Bernhard Heisig, it is important to have the chance 'to work on a world view,' since he is convinced that the best art requires a connection to-and interaction with-society." The introduction is followed by nine articles, three of which are by East Germans: Pachnicke, Kober, and Sander. Pachnicke's article is by far the longest in the catalog and follows directly after the introduction. It attempts to correct some of the misunderstandings that surround Heisig's work in the West. First, he looks at the often-vehement artistic debates that took place in East Germany, especially those in the 1960s in which Heisig's Paris Commune paintings played a role. These conflicts, he explains, were a "dispute of opinions"-rather than merely clashes with "dogmatic narrow-mindedness"-over the definition of Realism in East Germany. 65 They were an attempt-ultimately successful-to "push through a new understanding of Realism against an historically outmoded [one, i.e., illusionism]." Also at stake was the role of the artist in society: "[Artists like Heisig] wanted a dialogical relationship to the public," rather than a didactic one. 66 These debates, Pachnicke points out, were the crucible in which Heisig forged his views on art; they were a "method of recognizing-and being able to formulate-his own truth." 67 Another important point Pachnicke made was that Heisig's theme (Thema) is not war, as is often contended in the West, but rather conflict; war is simply the subject matter "preparedness" for this theme-predates his wartime experiences. 68 As Heisig has stated, just being in war is not enough to make one want to paint it; one needs a special leaning toward it. According to Pachnicke, this leaning was already evident in Heisig as a child.
Pachnicke also emphasized the importance of structure in Heisig's work, reinforcing the point made in the introduction to the catalog. He then ended the article by pointing out that Heisig's images are "not just about oppression and angst. An insatiable hunger for beauty, harmony and continuity fills… many of Heisig's landscapes, nudes and portraits."     88 Although the West also had politically active artists, the emphasis in western scholarship has tended to be on aesthetic innovation rather than on content. German and Cold War contexts in which it was created, and thus denied East German art any role in post-war German culture except as a negative foil. 89 Although this article has focused on Heisig's reception in Germany, the difficulties of interpreting these figures extends into English-language scholarship, which is only beginning to address East German art. 90 An important recent contribution to the field is the catalog for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's blockbuster exhibition in 2009, Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures, which conclusively proved that East Germany did have art.
And yet the catalog suggested that this art was created by dissidents or, in the case of official artists like Heisig, contained subversive content that "passed undetected through the censors." 91 The catalog left unchallenged the Cold War stereotype that sees official art in East Germany as little more than kitsch or political propaganda. In fact, in one of the two articles to focus on East German art, the German sociologist Paul Kaiser dismissed all official art in East Germany in one fell swoop, stating that the government "created a backwardlooking system of art whose conceptual guiding feature was an antimodernist, uncritical, apologetic socialist realism." 92 This view evidences the totalitarian approach to East Germany that came to prominence in Germany in the 1990s but that has largely fallen out of favor in recognize the quality of East German film and material culture. 95 The visual arts, however, have yet to follow suit: none of the artists held in high esteem by the East German government-such as Heisig-are well-known outside of Germany, the result of a lingering Cold War-era ideological emphasis on the necessity of "freedom" for the creation of art, and thus the incompatibility of art and State Communism.
The rewriting of Heisig's life and art to fit into western preconceptions impedes our ability to understand the artist and the complexity of art in East Germany. When Heisig clashed with cultural functionaries in the 1960s, he was not fighting for modern art in the western sense of artistic autonomy; rather he was fighting for a greater openness to the forms of modern art, which he believed artists could use in their efforts to create art that made a connection to the people. He did not believe in art for art's sake of the West nor the idea that the artist should be a loner. In fact, already in the 1950s he argued against the "artistic suicide" that he saw taking place in the West, where artists were rejecting a connection to society and the people in favor of exploring their psyches. 96 Instead, he believed artists should be involved in the world in which they lived and chose to live in the East because he felt he, as an artist, was needed there, and was excited to "participate in the creation of a world view," especially one that fought against imperialism. 97  In 2009, post-socialist scholar Piotr Piotrowski argued that to develop a truly global art history, scholars need to recognize "the one who speaks, on whose behalf, and for whom... not to cancel Western art history, but to call this type of narrative by its proper name, 'Western.'" 99 A study of Heisig's reception illustrates the profound impact of the temporalgeographical location of the "speaker" on the scholarship produced: texts written during the Cold War, for example, acknowledged Heisig's commitment to and engagement in East German society, whereas those written afterward elide these connections to emphasize trauma instead. This change in Heisig's reception illustrates the dominance today of a western perspective on East German art that differs from that which existed before the Wall fell. It also reveals the West's inability to see or accept difference in the close Other. Heisig's themes are reinterpreted through a lens that elides socialist criticisms of capitalism as well as alternatives to the West's emphasis on the individual. If we are to write a world history of art, however, we need to incorporate not just the art of the Other, both close and distant,