Pictorial Narrative in the Nazi Period

This book investigates creative responses to the Nazi period in the work of three artists, Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and Arnold Daghani, focusing on their use of pictorial narrative. It analyses their contrasting aesthetic strategies and their innovative forms of artistic production. In contrast with the autonomous, modernist art object, their works were explicitly linked with the historical conditions under which they were produced – the pressures of persecution and exile. Conditions in the slave labour camps and ghettos in the Ukraine, which shaped the paintings and drawings of Daghani, are contrasted with the experiences of exile in Belgium and France, which inspired Nussbaum and Salomon. In defiance of conventional artistic practice, they produced word-image combinations that can be read as narrative sequences, incorporating specific references to political events. While there has been a wealth of literary, philosophical and historical studies relating to the Holocaust, aesthetic debate has developed less extensively. This is the first comparative study of three artists who are only belatedly achieving recognition and the recent reception of their work is evaluated. By identifying the aesthetic principles and narrative strategies underlying their work, the book reassesses their achievement in creating new forms of modernism with an unmistakable political momentum.

This book was published as a special issue of Word & Image.

Edward Timms is Research Professor in History at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies, University of Sussex, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is best known for his book Karl Kraus – Apocalyptic Satirist, published in two volumes as Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (1986) and The Post-War Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika (2005).

Deborah Schultz is Research Fellow in the Centre for German-Jewish Studies, University of Sussex. She is the author of Marcel Broodthaers: Strategy and Dialogue (2007) and co-editor with Edward Timms of Arnold Daghani’s Memories of Mikhailowka: The Illustrated Diary of a Slave Labour Camp Survivor (2009).