Degree Year

2024

Document Type

Thesis - Oberlin Community Only

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Jewish Studies

Advisor(s)

Shari Rabin
Laura Herron

Committee Member(s)

Shari Rabin
Laura Herron
Anna Perry

Keywords

The Limit Case, Deep Memory, Common Memory, Gerhard Richter, Zbigniew Libera

Abstract

This thesis applies Jill Bennett’s theory of “the limit case” and Charlotte Delbo’s and Lawrence L. Langer’s concepts of “deep memories” and “common memories” to Gerhard Richter’s Onkel Rudi, Tante Marianne and Birkenau series, as well as Zbigniew Libera’s Lego Concentration Camp. This application buttresses the exploration of avant-garde art’s capacity to represent Holocaust traumas which touch the limit case of comprehension. At the limit case, incomprehensible traumas can only be understood viscerally, and not cognitively. This paper argues that only through demolition of form, language, and linear narratives, can deep memories of Holocaust traumas be represented in a manner which illuminates deeper caverns of truth. These truths being embodied traumas which cannot be relegated to the past, subdued, or aestheticized. Richter’s Onkel Rudi and Tante Marianne represent the simultaneous trauma and complicity which exist in his one German family. In his Birkenau series, Richter artistically abstracts oil copies of the Sonderkommando photos, to represent the brutally violent images which he previously found to be unpaintable. Contrary to these works, which still uphold a world view which values esh, Libera reduces the horrors of Auschwitz to the plastic of Legos. He mirrors the rigid sadism of the guards and gas chambers of Auschwitz, to honestly represent the torture which was inicted upon the inmates. Understanding these artworks through Bennett’s and Delbo’s theories reveals that no cognitive paradigms of redemptive narratives, or linguistic understandings, can capture embodied Holocaust traumas.

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