An important aspect of my work vom ich zum wir (from me to we) is the exhibition space itself, where the Void – which not least refers to the Holocaust – makes a strong architectural statement. It is a challenge to work artistically in this space. In my installation, the Void’s concrete wall is braced and partly covered, so it looks as if you are at the back of an exhibition stand or building site, creating the impression of a temporary structure. In an earlier work, I filmed the barracks at Birkenau, which are braced to stop them from falling apart. There, too, the ephemeral played an important role: for me, it stands for the fragility of the culture of remembrance, the history of reappraisal, and the role that these questions play in the cultural representation of a society.

In my work at the Jewish Museum Berlin there is a massively enlarged photograph that was printed in 1960 in the East German newspaper Neues Deutschland. It shows a work of art by my grandmother: she produced a wall mosaic for the GDR’s pavilion at the third World Agricultural Fair in Delhi. The 8.3 x 2.4 metre mosaic was apparently destroyed after the fair; all that remains is a head. It seems as though the body that belonged
to this head didn’t find a place within the mosaic. The head is a kind of survivor. The mosaic is called vom ich zum wir, and the idea behind it follows a typical GDR vision: subjectivity is left behind and a collective ‘we’ – a solidarity-based, socialist society – becomes the focus. My installation has the same title but incorporates a critique of this utopia, which legitimised so much abuse.

Wall mosaic by Doris Kahane in Delhi, 1960.

Doris Kahane, Vom Ich zum Wir, wall mosaic for the GDR pavilion of the World Agricultural Fair in Delhi, 1960.

Fragment from the wall mosaic Vom Ich zum Wir (1960) by Doris Kahane.

On the one hand, the title and visual language of the mosaic refers to the utopia of the GDR and of socialism, which my grandmother had hoped would bring a better and fairer world. On the other hand, especially in the context of an international agricultural fair, it also contains an implicit commentary on West Germany and the West more generally. The FRG and the GDR both succeeded the Nazi state. 

For me, this is the point where my work leaves the historical behind and refers to the present. There were three German-speaking, post-Nazi countries with three different variants of reappraisal. In Austria, there was externalisation – the myth of having been among the first victims of the Nazis, combined with the denial of their own involvement and responsibility. In West Germany, there was internalisation, which took a long time and resulted in the culture of remembrance becoming a central part of the country’s own culture, while also being perceived as alien. The third country was East Germany, with a universalisation of the culture of remembrance that made everyone – including Germans themselves – the victims of fascism. In all of these variants, the handling of guilt and responsibility has repercussions on cultural debates and the political present.

The representative role that is ascribed to artists or that they voluntarily choose to assume is always of particular interest to me. How often does an artist represent a country at an agricultural fair? But I also mean this self-critically: I have now brought my grandmother’s work into the Jewish Museum Berlin, where it takes on an entirely different function. My work also includes a film made up of various elements: there is 8mm footage from India filmed by my grandparents, in which Otto Grotewohl appears. In 1951, he asserted that “literature and art are subordinate to politics [...]. The idea of art must follow the march of the political struggle.” Animated figures crop up in the video that are strongly informed by illustrations from GDR children’s magazines. These figures sing in chorus of the so-called young nation’s spirit of optimism.

My work also includes a portrait of my grandmother from a GDR children’s magazine. The title of the article translates to ‘She Paints Children, Time and Again’. In the deportation camp Drancy, my grandmother experienced how 450 children were selected for the last transport to Auschwitz, and it is believed that none of them survived. She never got over this, and so she drew the children.

It is interesting that the portrait from the magazine does not contain these drawings, but it does include an etching of the zoo – as fascism in the GDR had finally been overcome. Nevertheless, the text does show an interest in my grandmother’s drawings of children and reinterprets them for propagandist purposes: it claims that fascism was now being directed at children from “Arabic countries”, meaning Israel. One of the drawings is also part of my installation.

Doris Kahane, Kinder von Drancy, drawing, 1944.

Extract from ABC Heft about the artist Doris Kahane, 1974.

In all of this myth-building through images and language, it becomes clear that the GDR always represented itself as childlike, naive and innocent. It claimed to be a young nation that represented a break with Nazism, yet political indoctrination began in childhood: “Who is the enemy?”, “And who are the good guys and what is right?” The characters in my film represent various ideology carriers from the GDR: an ear of corn, two hands in a handshake, the dove of peace. In total, there are six symbols singing solidarity songs in chorus. And you hear a voice reading passages about my grandmother’s life, passages about her experience in the camp. The chorus as a motif always has something of a new beginning, something innocent and pure. Sanitising one’s own history, you might say. The chorus is the epitome of a collective. Even my grandmother joins in. Through this, a great contradiction between the collective and the individual emerges. Because all the “from me to we” leaves little space for the biographies of the actual survivors like my grandmother, these Jews in the GDR.

Leon Kahane, Vom Ich zum Wir, 4K Video, 16 minutes, 2023. https://youtu.be/piQqlK3xt8g

When I saw the banner of Taring Padi at Documenta, the visual language reminded me of socialist realism. This was hardly addressed in its reception, and what this has to do with the artistic representation of political world views wasn’t addressed at all. Instead, it was widely argued that, because it comes from Indonesia, the representation must be viewed differently, particularly in relation to antisemitism. I have considered how, in my work, I can make visible that, in a global context, these aesthetic overlaps do not develop in isolation but are part of globalisation. My grandparents’ biographies clearly show this. They lived for a long time as correspondents in India and also spent time in Chile, Brazil and Vietnam. If you leaf through newspapers from the GDR, you quickly see how much they referred to each other. Of course, this was always also about legitimising and mediating their own worldview. Especially in contemporary art discourse, however, this historical knowledge seems to remain untouched, whether consciously or unconsciously. This is what the German reception of Documenta 15 showed me, and I think it is a problem. This is why I used my grandparents’ footage from India in my work: it shows their vision of the places in which they found themselves, using the visual language of their times. In my work, I am interested in the representative function of images, language and culture. How do art and culture relate to politics? In a totalitarian system it works differently than in an open society.

Leon Kahane, Vom Ich zum Wir, installation views, Jüdisches Museum Berlin, 2023.

The family biography is important to me because I can view it critically myself. I see my grandparents both critically and with a lot of understanding, because they actually were victims, because they – in contrast to the vast majority of GDR citizens – really were in the anti-fascist resistance and this meant they had an entirely different connection to the state. They were searching for something, and they may have under­estimated the abuse of their own history in the process. I can’t be sure that this wouldn’t happen to me, or even that it hasn’t already been happening for a long time. I think about this a lot.

This text was first published in: Tamar Lewinsky, Martina Lüdicke, Theresia Ziehe, Another Country. Jewish in the GDR, Foundation Jewish Museum, Berlin, Ch. Links Publishing, Berlin, 2023

Leon Kahane was born in 1985 in Berlin. He creates conceptual video works, photographs and installations that centre on themes of migration, identity, and coming to terms with majorities and minorities in a globalised society.