Preface: From Weapon to Washing Machine
In the introduction to OnCurating issue 33, documenta. Curating the History of the Present,[1] Dorothee Richter and I highlighted the importance of situating the birth of the exhibition series in the social, political, and economic context of Germany during the Cold War, where shortly after the country’s separation into the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and socialist German Democratic Republic (DDR, both states established in 1949), the newly independent FRG was seeking integration into the transatlantic West and gained its independence in 1955, the same year documenta first took place. “In this light,” we wrote, “documenta initiator Arnold Bode’s dedication to primarily expressive modern art and art historian co-curator Werner Haftmann’s promotion of “abstraction as a world language,” a slogan devised for the second documenta [in 1959], may be read as an ideological affiliation of documenta with the [so-called] “free West,” where artistic liberation from naturalist representation was considered as expression of individualism, whereas (socialist) realist art was regarded as “unfree” because it did not cut its ties to extra-artistic reality.”[2] As we shall see in the following, however, the depoliticizing ideology of abstraction that was promoted in the early documenta editions as a sign of artistic autonomy from politics cannot be explained by the exhibition’s function as a “Weapon of the Cold War”[3] alone. Taking  into account the uncanny echoes of Nazi rhetoric permeating the first documenta editions’ catalogues that I started to examine in 2018 for a presentation at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, the following text, based on a lecture delivered in Thessaloniki in 2019 and first published in an abridged version in 2020, argues that it also necessary to reflect on the ways in which exhibitions like documenta may serve as “Washing Machines” for (art) history.[4]

Even if some art historians had already questioned the exhibition’s spotless image in recent decades,[5] this has remained largely unnoticed by a wider public until the symposium documenta. Art and Politics, organized by German Historical Museum (DHM) in Berlin on October 15, 2019.[6] The conference eventually triggered broader public discussions in German newspapers and art journals during the winter of 2019/2020 that primarily evolved around the news of the NSDAP membership of documenta co-founder Werner Haftmann. The consequent exhibition in 2021 furthermore revealed that Haftmann had participated in the hunting of partisans in Italy.[7] Thanks to the authority of an institution like the DHM and the hard facts presented there, my linguistic diagnoses could no longer be disavowed, called into question, or excused as mere resonances of the “jargon of authenticity” fashionable at time.[8] It became clear that they also needed to be understood in the context of more explicit Nazi entanglements of the documenta founding fathers, whose historiographic, curatorial, and educational practices and ambivalent legacies I am currently investigating in the context of a larger body of work titled documenta as a Haunted Exhibition.[9]

Introduction: Complex Continuities
The first documenta took place in 1955, in the re-erected Museum Fridericianum. After it had been bombed to ruins during the Second World War, the exhibition’s first home and main venue ever since was partially reconstructed with whitewashed brick walls. These white walls would become such a prominent feature of the early shows’ overall design that—together with plastic curtains as wall covers—they define the signature look of the 1950s documenta editions.[10] The ruin-scenario has proven to be the perfect backdrop for a hagiographic master-narrative that celebrates the founding fathers of documenta as creative individuals, who created the exhibition ex-nihilo after World War II.[11] This essay, in contrast, attempts to provide a critical feminist re-reading of documenta’s early history that problematizes such a heroizing historiography by focusing on the exhibition’s socially reproductive (or even reparative) functions as a cultural midwife of the West German, revamped identity.

fig. 1. Ruin of Museum Fridericianum after its bombing 1943, Photographer Unknown

fig. 2. German Rubble Women, Photographer unknown, Source: https://www.br.de/radio/bayern2/sendungen/radiowissen/geschichte/truemmerfrauen-nachkriegszeit-104.html

fig. 3. Rotunda of Museum Fridericianum during the first documenta (1955) with whitewashed brick walls and Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s Kneeling Woman, Photo: Günther Becker, Copyright: documenta archiv.

The beautiful tale of documenta as an arbiter of democracy, whose makers were performing a radical break with the Nazi past, has only recently come under serious scrutiny by scholars calling attention to the complex continuities, both on an ideological and personal level. With this in mind, I ask if the dehistoricizing celebration of the timeless universality of abstraction during the first three documenta exhibitions did not perhaps serve its founders as a means of whitewashing German (art) history, including their own roles in “Third Reich” cultural politics. Based on Irit Rogoff’s elaborations on how constructions of innocent femininity can be deployed to turn the vanquished into victims, and how a feminizing focus on the mundane everyday survival of German civilians has been used to relativize German guilt,[12] I will furthermore discuss to what extent documenta’s depoliticizing domestication of modern/contemporary art was instrumental in forgetting, repressing, or covering the immediate past by focusing on the present, thus “clearing the conscience” of an entire nation.[13] In line with Rogoff’s discussions of the museum as a “funerary site for uncomfortable or inconvenient historical narratives,”[14] I will think about the ways in which documenta contributed to clearing away the dark spots of the Nazi past that was haunting documenta then and keeps haunting it up to today.[15]

Teleology towards Timelessness
In my 2018 talk “Presenting as Presenting,” which was dedicated to the philosophies of history informing different documenta editions,[16] I problematized the reactionary dimensions in the universalizing notions of timelessness of modern abstraction that were evoked by Haftmann and his colleges during the early documentas. The presentation of “abstraction as a world language” conceived of modern non-figurative art as the end point of a teleological development towards abstraction.[17] Although the slogan was coined only for the exhibition’s second edition, the first edition already included a visual curatorial prologue showing photographs of African masks, archaic Greek portraits, pre-Columbian sculptures, and Mesopotamian castings that served to legitimize modern abstraction by providing an argument of transcultural and transhistorical kinship of the arts of all times.[18] (fig. 2) In his book, documenta. Mythos und Wirklichkeit, Kassel-based art historian Harald Kimpel argues that the aim of this presentation (that was lacking any chronological or geographical order) was “dehistoricization by way of history” resulting in a “static notion of art,” rather than “making transparent the historical processes underlying contemporary art.”[19] Artist and designer Arnold Bode’s “ahistorical way of thinking,” according to Kimpel, corresponds with a Nietzschean “meta-historical blurring of the past and the present in a multiplicity of omniscient unchanging types of eternal value and meaning.”[20] This idea of trans-historical validity or timelessness—which Kimpel links to the notion of the Gleichzeitigkeit (i.e., synchronicity) of all cultures, developed by universalist historians like Arnold Toynbee or the right-wing conservative Oswald Spengler[21]—however, was not merely the consequence of an ahistorically minded artist. It was also a deliberate historiographical choice by the art historian Haftmann to present contemporary art in continuity with a specific branch of European prewar modernity.[22] By thus promoting an evolutionary development of art history towards art’s timeless abstraction, the documenta founders were curating a very selective history of the present with many blind spots—for instance, largely factoring out leftist political traditions, realism in general, works by Jewish artists, as well as “non-Western” art, and, with very few exceptions, art made by women.[23]

fig. 4. Photographic prologue at Fridericianum during the first documenta (1955), Photo: Günther Becker, Copyright: documenta archiv

In the introduction to the catalogue of the first documenta (in 1955, dedicated to art of the 20^th century), Haftmann, for instance, seemingly apologetically elaborates on the lack of temporal distance to contemporary art and mentions the difficulty of dealing with contemporaneity without historical hindsight.[24] The lack of oversight in the midst of what appears as “chaos” of the present is taken up again in the preface to the catalogue of the second documenta (in 1959, dedicated to art since 1945), where Bode and other members of the exhibition committee stress that the “temporal proximity to the exhibited artworks made the selection more responsible […].”[25] Likewise, Haftmann, picking up on his earlier statements, notes that “even the discipline of history admits that the ordering and mastering of historical visions cannot do without the insights of contemporary thinking and perception.”[26] His response to the challenges contemporaneity poses to control and mastery is creating an essentializing teleological master-narrative in which the “inner necessity”[27] of the development of European modernism since 1890 provides the basis of mastering (and even celebrating) the timeless present, thereby turning the unmasterable fascist past into a blind spot.[28]

Constructing a genealogy of abstraction that is rooted in the history of modernity, but is nevertheless untainted by political power constellations or sociological understandings of art, Haftmann naturalizes it as “evolutionary rather than revolutionary in nature,” stressing that the development of contemporary art “stands with all its roots in a strict continuity” with the insights of the earlier decades of the twentieth century.[29] In preparation for documenta III (1964, dedicated to art of the past five years)—according to Haftmann’s catalogue introduction—there were further (unrealized) plans “to exhibit great historical works and masters as examples erected in a hall of columns in order to liberate modernity from its temporal ties and place it on the fond of art’s timelessness.”[30] The years of the Nazi rule, between 1933-1945, however, are cut out of this continuous teleology towards timelessness, and in the first two documenta catalogues the Nazis are only alluded to as an oddly absent, ungraspable totalitarian force, in passages where Haftmann problematizes political interference with art in general.[31] Thus, he implicitly perpetuates a “horseshoe theory” of art by denouncing realisms on the left and the right sides of the political spectrum as equally totalitarian representations of mass culture that cannot be reconciled with abstraction’s liberal freedoms of individual expression.

Victimizing the Vanquished
Although he does not explicitly mention the so-called Degenerate Art exhibitions (the first and most famous of which took place in Munich in 1937), reading Haftmann’s catalogue introduction,  it seems as if, for him, the main problem with Nazism was not so much its racist and political genocides, but rather specific agendas of its cultural policy—i.e., the political instrumentalization of art and the ostracization of modern abstract tendencies.[32] Warning against the risks of “academization” and “petrification,” in the 1955 catalogue he maintains that contemporary art’s “great freedom” and the “moment that we celebrate as our present,” is not the result of “arbitrary chance” but had to be “bred upward” (heraufgezüchtet) in a “continual development of humankind.”[33] Notably, the German verb heraufzüchten means improving and nobilitating by breeding. The expression resonates with the eugenics and euthanasia-programs by the Nazis whose goal, only a couple of years earlier, had been to “nobilitate” and “purify” the so-called “Aryan race” by killing and “breeding out” everyone deemed unworthy of life. Moreover, Haftmann explicitly calls upon the “German spirit”[34] and repeats the words “German” and “Germany” in a way that leaves little doubt as to the importance he attributes to national identity.[35]

Rather than explicitly referring to the Nazi crimes, he only obliquely mentions a “fit of iconoclasm” as a somewhat unauthored “stepping outside” of the European “development logic” of modern art.[36] Thus avoiding explicit attribution of the iconoclasm to the Nazis, he likens it to a natural catastrophe that interferes with the “natural order” of artistic evolution.[37] Nevertheless, he maintains that the “outlawry” or “ostracization” (Verfemung) could not do much damage to the artists themselves.[38] Instead, according to him, “The damage was rather done to the nation, its understanding of contemporary culture, its passive will to art/culture.”[39] Here, Haftmann explicitly victimizes the German nation whose wounds and losses—he claims—documenta has come to heal by bringing back to light those male heroes of modernity who had gone “underground, painted in wash houses, modelled in ruinous factory halls and nurtured themselves like the lilies of the field.”[40] Besides, once again drawing on naturalizing metaphors of artistic self-sustenance under divine guidance, Haftmann forgets to mention those victims and casualties of Nazism—among them Jewish or leftist artists—who were tortured and killed by Nazis like Haftmann himself, thus conflating two incomparable modes of suffering.[41] In his later writings, he would even go so far to claim that the barren conditions for modern artists in so-called inner emigration during the NS contributed to nobilitating their art, as it forced them to focus on the essential inner truth rather than dealing with contingent realities, thus constructing a quasi-Darwinist version of art history as a “survival of the fittest.”[42]

Haftmann thus not only naturalizes the Nazi regime but also conceptualizes the art(ist)’s response to the regime in biological terms. By foregrounding the reproduction of life over the production of works, he thereby also domesticates the surviving artists by using an imagery that situates them in the mundane and feminized realm of reproductive labor (washing and nurture), in which painting appears like a humble, privatized household activity. These feminized, mundane artistic labors are furthermore situated in a landscape of ruined factories—i.e., prototypical places of male (war) production rendered dysfunctional—thus, allegorically emasculating the artists and—by stressing their impotence—rendering them innocent “like the lilies of the field.” Painting is here portrayed as a domesticated, civilian, yet also heroic, reproductive activity of passive endurance during times of political Berufsverbot (professional ban). Against the backdrop of this makeshift domesticity that is mirrored in the improvised furnishing of the Fridericianum’s ruins, documenta’s highly selective display of formerly ostracized modern art is implicitly conceptualized by Haftmann as a curatorial extension of its earlier, unseen, reproductive functions of nursing the existential “will to art/culture”—presented by him as a basic need from which the German population, including the show’s visitors, was deprived for too long. Thus, the curator presents documenta not just as an instrument of care for the artists, but also “for the spiritual welfare of the nation.”[43]

Since the whole introduction to the first documenta catalogue not only factors out Nazi necropolitics in favor of stressing the biopolitical reproduction of life and the recreation of national cultural identity addressed to the youth and aimed at the future, I believe it is not too far-fetched to argue that, by employing naturalizing and feminizing discourses, Haftmann here activates its discursive function of victimization within what Rogoff calls the “culture of survival,” often located in the “supposedly timeless and ahistorical arena of women’s lives.”[44] Another part of the first documenta’s photo prologue, which staged modern artists as civilized heroes of modernity in black-and-white photos, may also serve as an example of such a domesticating whitewashing of history. (fig. 3) As Walter Grasskamp noted, many of the artists were shown wearing immaculate suits and ties so as to re-establish their respectability by juxtaposing these ideal types of modern citizens with the earlier delegitimatizing representation of their art by the Nazis in the Degenerate Art shows.[45] Showing them as a plurality of individualized civilians, rather than uniformed soldiers, moreover, the artists were exhibited in their “white vests,” even though some of them were not as politically innocent as the curatorial story would have it.[46]

fig. 5. Portraits of modern artists in the photographic prologue at Fridericianum during the first documenta (1955), Photo: Günther Becker, Copyright: documenta archiv

Biopolitics of Biography
The prominent inclusion of artists like Giorgio Morandi or Emil Nolde—artists who have often been cited as examples of the so-called inner emigration, despite their sympathies with Fascism or National Socialism respectively—is just one hint that the history of modern art was in need of active purification in order to appear innocent. In the Cold War context, where incomplete denazification had given way to anti-Communism, Haftmann seems to have been the right person for the job.[47] He, for instance, actively supported Nolde before and after the Second World War. Featuring the artist not just in his 1934 articles in the Nazi art journal Kunst der Nation and the first three documentas (1955, 1959, 1963),[48] Haftmann also wrote a biography in 1958 that factored out the artist’s racism, antisemitism, and Nazi sympathies and portrayed Nolde as a victim of Nazi persecution, due to the inclusion of his works in the Degenerate Art exhibitions.[49] (figs. 4) Perpetuating the myth of the “Unpainted Pictures”—allegedly painted in “inner emigration”—both in the biography and in the picture book Ungemalte Bilder (Unpainted Pictures) that he edited in 1963, the very year in which the second Auschwitz trials (1963-1965) began, Haftmann managed to depict the antisemitic artist, who was one of the first to join the Nazi party and had many admirers among the regime’s higher ranks, as bereaved by the National Socialist professional ban that allegedly prohibited him from painting.[50]

fig. 6. Installation view of Emil Nolde “Die Familie” (1931) during the first documenta (1955) at Fridericianum, Photo: Günther Becker, Copyright: documenta archiv

fig. 7. Emil Nolde: “Die Familie” (1931), scan of catalogue page, Copyright: Nolde Foundation Seebüll.

The book Unpainted Pictures remarkably deals exactly with those years between 1938 and 1945 that the historian had bracketed out of his earlier genealogies of modern/contemporary abstraction. Haftmann’s highly apologetic portrait of Nolde’s withdrawal into his hidden studio closely resonates with and amplifies the scenario of inoperative underground existence, which Haftmann evoked in the first documenta’s catalogue, feminizing the artist’s invisible labors as a culture of mere survival in a private realm beyond historical time.[51] The repeated stressing of the small size of the space and the images he paints there as well as the introversion in the material handling of the paint almost evokes the 19^th-century stereotype of women sitting in their lonely chamber, bent over a piece of embroidery, or even Rumpelstiltskin’s imprisoned princess spinning straw into gold. “The more the outer life was reduced to the silent domestic circle, the more the inner life, this ‘real life’ started to shine.”[52]

Moreover, Haftmann repeatedly mentions that Nolde and his wife did not have any children of their own. According to the art historian, the paintings were like their children that the artist “wished to protect like bodily progeny.”[53] This simile suggests a transfer of biological infertility to political impotence and virginity, climaxing in Haftmann’s excuse of Nolde’s early Nazi sympathies as politically naïve.[54] Framing the small formatted “Unpainted Pictures” as embryos of real, large-size paintings,[55] Haftmann links artistic creation with procreation and restrained masculinity, whose realization of full creative potency had to be postponed until the paintings would see public light after the break of the Nazi “ban”/“spell.” Remarkably, Haftmann’s description of Nolde’s artistic work oscillates between a feminizing description of painting as a caring domestic labor of small scale that requires continuous effort and its masculinization as effortless automatic painting “that gave him the masculine pleasure to be and to be at work. Whenever he dressed himself in the king’s coat of his artistry all of his fears and all threats disappeared and he once again became the strong painter, who knew himself in front of a strong work.”[56] Haftmann’s portrait is characterized as a constant shifting between stress on Nolde’s innocent impotence (old age, political naiveté, professional ban, tied hands) and the creative sublimation of unrealized fatherhood or lack of recognition by the Nazis in a heroically stubborn dedication to painting against all odds.

A year after Haftmann’s publication on Nolde’s Unpainted Pictures, a selection of them were shown during documenta III (1964) as the only monographic cabinet in the survey of modern graphic arts at Alte Galerie (today’s Neue Galerie). As Haftmann wrote in the catalogue:

We furnish it just for Nolde, in order to show, in a space of their own, the small late water colors, sketches of never painted pictures, that he made in the dark years of war and ostracization. They are the poignant last word of a great German painter from the darkest times of German history.[57]

In contrast to this celebration of the German painter’s heroic suffering, the Shoah remained the exhibition’s unacknowledged blind spot. Instead of taking issue with Nolde’s antisemitism, Haftmann defended the artist against such charges when they were raised in the catalogue of Nolde’s 1963 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York by claiming that the artist was “by no means antisemitic.”[58]

As late as 1986, Haftmann wrote a study on degenerate art and inner emigration, commissioned by former chancellor Helmut Kohl, in which Haftmann perfected this story by claiming that the artist “was, when the massive attack reached him, the natural-born, the existential anti-fascist.”[59] Thanks to Haftmann’s support, Nolde was generally perceived as one of the prime casualties of Nazi cultural politics by the wider German public, until the 2019 Nolde exhibition Emil Nolde. The Artist during the Third Reich at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof caused Chancellor Angela Merkel to take down the artist’s paintings from the walls in her office. By turning a Nazi like Nolde into a victim, Haftmann managed to create for himself the image of an art historian who tirelessly fought for the rehabilitation of modern artists. His self-staging as a defender of the art that was declared degenerate thus not only whitewashed Nolde’s biography but also his own.

Decorative Debris
documenta, with its official aim to rehabilitate the artists that had been declared “degenerate” by the Nazis (but not those who were persecuted on racial or political grounds), was a good occasion to bury the dark past. It was founded as a satellite to the Federal Garden Exhibition, organized by Bode’s colleague Herman Mattern, another former NSDAP member and member of the documenta organizing committee, who had earlier been responsible for the 1939 Reich Garden Show in Stuttgart. (figs. 5a-c) Covering over the rubble of the city’s bombing with beautiful flowers, the show’s decoration of debris could be read in analogy to documenta’s display of a depoliticized teleology towards abstraction: just as the flower beds on Kassel’s rose hill (a pile of rubble) helped to elegantly camouflage not so honorable military memories of the city’s arms production that were the reason for its bombing,[60] the art show’s blooming fields of color allowed its makers to conceal their former Nazi entanglements behind the thorny blossoms of decorative ornamentation. Haftmann notably compares documenta’s “diversity” of international abstraction at the end of the 1955 catalogue to “a bouquet of flowers, in which each flower keeps its own scent and color while harmonizing within a larger universality.”[61] The ethnopluralist vision of abstraction articulated in this floral metaphor, with its reliance on notions of national character, however, has a more ambivalent genealogy whose problematic historical roots were deliberately cut off in favor of presenting a domestic image of harmony within European unity.[62]

fig. 8. Clearing away war debris from Fridericianum after its bombing in 1943, Photographer unknown.

In his speech during the public program of documenta III in 1964, titled “Über bildende Kunst im Maschinenzeitalter” (On Fine Arts in the Age of Machines), Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch interpreted the declaration of the new painting and sculpture as the “end of art” to be the “war cry of standstill of those whose own mind stands still.”[63] Without explicitly mentioning Haftmann, Bloch here takes issue with the essentializing cliché of subjective interiority, which Haftmann had described just one year earlier in his Ungemalte Bilder (1963) as the prime characteristic of contemporary art, i.e., that it expresses the “inner world of the subject” or “the reality hidden within the human.”[64] Even if art has figurative tendencies, like Nolde’s paintings, according to Haftmann, these contents are “turned into the timeless universality” in the same way that the artist’s entire life is comprised in his work’s formal qualities, thus “standing on the ground of the timeless-anonymous world of art.”[65] Bloch’s observation that—due to the “creative subject’s withdrawal into musical inwardness of the domestic living room”—these “objects appear as inhabitants of their own inner landscape,” or even as “mummified ornaments of our innermost Gestalt,” “which even denaturalizes the outside as an appearance of the inside”[66] sound like a direct response to Haftmann’s depoliticizing and dehistoricizing domestication of contemporary art.

Against the false appeasing appearance of plurality, which “pulverizes the antagonistic,” he calls to mind the ways in which montage was developed out of technological developments and may give rise to a simultaneous perception of “things miles apart,” thus countering Haftmann’s suggestions of “timelessness” with his own deterritorializing understanding of  “Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen” (synchronicity of the non-synchronous).[67] For Bloch, technology and the artistic technique of montage bear the potential to “adequately bring into the frame and on the pedestal our world […] half pile of debris, half figure in becoming.”[68] Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920), which happens to depict just such a hybrid fractured figure mediating between earth and sky, life and death, past and present, therefore signals “more than the end of the museal in the culinary cultural perception.”[69] (fig. 5d)

Notably, Bloch’s materialist critique of spiritual ontologies like that of Haftmann in many ways reads like an echo of Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the philosophy of history and on the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936). In his “Theses on the Philosophy of the History,” written in 1940 shortly before he committed suicide to escape capture by the Nazis, Benjamin actually refers to Klee’s Angelus Novus (which he owned):

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.[70]

With this, we could perform a sort of reverse Benjaminian tiger’s leap into the present of 2007, right into the Rotunda of the Museum Fridericianum during documenta 12. Here, the curators Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack displayed a reproduction of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, with Benjamin’s discussion the “Angel of History” posted besides the image as a wall text.[71]

Whereas the first documenta editions referred back to ancient objects for legitimation of modern art as part of a declaredly timeless and universal tendency towards abstraction, thereby initiating a ritual of forgetting, d12’s display of a copy of an iconic picture by one of the modern masters heavily promoted in the early documenta editions was used to introduce one of the leading questions of the exhibition: “Is Modernity our Antiquity”? This was an invitation to revisit the past to actualize and politicize its gaps in the present of the now—rather than following the likes of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who took part in literally whitewashing the whole legacy of antiquity in the 18th century by spreading the erroneous belief in the whiteness of classical sculpture, thus institutionalizing pure whiteness as a norm that still haunts art history today, as documenta 14’s display in the Neue Galerie reminded visitors in 2017. As this essay has aimed to show, it is as important to revisit and correct the historiography of documenta, especially the myth of its political purity, by shedding light on its socially reproductive and governmental functions.

Postscript: Haunted House
From the perspective of early 2022, is seems even more urgent to address the ambivalent heritage of modernity and its uncanny hauntings today. During the pandemic, we saw a resurgence of antisemitism in the context of naturalizing and essentializing ideas of purity, with anti-vaccination activists (such as “Jana from Kassel”) demonstrating in 2021 in front of the Museum Fridericianum, wearing the yellow star and relativizing the Holocaust by comparing their situation to the persecution of the Jewish people and members of the resistance during the Nazi regime. As the complicity of historical life-reform movements with blood and soil ideologies should have taught us, the contradictions of capitalism cannot be healed by a simple return to purified ideals of nature.[72] Nevertheless, an important documenta figure like Joseph Beuys tried to counter Stadtverwaltung (municipal bureaucracy) with Stadtverwaldung (afforestation of the city) as his 7000 Oaks contribution to documenta 7 (1982) and is currently celebrated as a forerunner of the Fridays for Future movement, despite his biographical and ideological proximities to völkisch (ethno-nationalist) ideologies.[73]

fig. 9. Joseph Beuys planting the first of 7000 Oaks during documenta 7 (1982), Photo: Dieter Schwerdtle, Copyright: documenta archiv

fig. 10. Planting of so-called Hitler Oak during the NS, Photographer Unknown, Source: https://hugenottenrathaus.de/marktplatz-danach

Whilst climate change, pandemics, and the atomic bomb are serious threats to the livelihood not just of humankind but also the entire planet, we should be careful to react to these complex sources of anxiety with wholistic phantasies of healing, identitarian notions of community (such as the reenactment of a Western “we”), or “object-oriented ontologies” as cures to the alienating conditions.[74] Rather than subscribing to fairytales of good and evil or reactionary deployments of the idea of freedom once again, thus reenacting practices of moral self-purification by externalizing responsibilities, it is important to acknowledge the structural continuities of antisemitism, racism, and sexism as well as our own complicities in hosting those ghosts from the past—not just in cultural, epistemological, and economic infrastructures, but also in our own minds and actions.[75] (figs. 6e-f) Here lies another political potential of curating. Instead of turning exhibitions into weapons, washing machines, or hospitals for healing unhealable historical wounds,[76] we need to inhabit art institutions, such as documenta, as haunted houses, never ceasing to deal with the processes of dis/possession that define our histories, thus g/hosting the past and haunting the future.[77]

fig. 11. Installation view of wir alle sind gespenster: haunting infrastructures, Kunstverein at Fridericianum Kassel (2021), Photo: Nanne Buurman

fig. 12. Installation view of g/hosting the past at St. Kunigundis/documenta fifteen (2022), Photo: Nicolas Wefers