11/9/2007
Ladies and gentleman,
Dear guests,
Welcome to everybody joining our difficult project. I am glad about your braveness showing you the way to this place. Thank you very much for assisting all those who dared to made possible this exhibition.
Is it allowed to paint Hitler like this? – A young German friend from Leipzig asked. Is it necessary at all to paint Hitler? – A Jewish friend and colleague from Jerusalem asked. Who is he, doing so? Who are we, coming and joining a topic being at the boundary of the unbearable?
As you see we invited into rooms not being finished. With Adolf Hitler we perhaps also are not finished. But be careful, there is a risk. "Are you now about to become a Nazi?" – The artist was asked more than once, even by those who are close to him. It is as if there is feared an infection.
When my husband, to prepare, ten years ago started to read "Mein Kampf" and biography's of Hitler, one after the other with the intension to be able to paint him, I was against it. I could not imagine that the outcome could be something else than obscene. Today you all can judge about.
Those 12 years, which costed the life of Millions of people, which put our country to ash and ruins and damaged the souls of all people on both sides, have been and are a catastrophe. The so called "mercy of late birth" definitely gives no escape. And our culture had definitely no break down, as me too wanted to believe years ago. It is the opposite. Our culture, the German culture, which brought up so much beautiful, has become the vehicle of contempt, inhumanity, hatred, mass murder and self-destructions. This makes a lot of what is German like being contaminated – contaminated with the poison of Nazi-idea. A lot of what Hitler and with him the Germans poisoned we did not succeed in winning back again – up to now. But to develop an antidote is only possible for those, who know the poison. Today there is the chance to have a meeting with it and for this I wish us all that the good in us is good enough.
