Leipzig Holocaust Museum

The #1 topic of discussion in Leipzig art circles this week has been the announcement by city officials of approval for a new Holocaust museum, to be built in the former Soviet pavilion on the grounds of the old Leipzig trade fair. Developers had previously hoped to build a multiplex cinema in the pavilion, with its church-like steeple topped by a massive red star.

Renowned German architect Meinhard von Gerkan has been selected to design the project. Von Gerkan was responsible for Berlin’s new central rail station and is currently involved in planning a new Chinese city outside Shanghai, as well as designing several soccer stadiums in South Africa for the 2010 World Cup.

Planners feel housing the museum in the former Soviet pavilion will allow the institution to expand discussion beyond the Holocaust, to anti-Semitic oppression during the Soviet era, a period in which many surviving Jewish leaders were sent to labour camps or into exile. In an interview in Die Zeit, historian Frank Nesemann of Leipzig’s Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture said he believed broadening the dialogue to include the state-sanctioned anti-Semitism of the GDR and Soviet Union will contribute to our understanding of the rise of genocidal regimes.

There’s an English-language story in Deutsche Welle, but it focuses primarily on the architect. Here’s a link to a more comprehensive story in the European Jewish Press.

My Weimar weekend

Johann Dieter Wassmann, GOETHEHAUS, WEIMAR, 1894.
Albumen silver print, 18 x 23 cm, WF 736004.

The weekend saw a trip to Weimar, where I celebrated an American Thanksgiving (two days late) with senior staff from The Wassmann Foundation, including director Jeff Wassmann, at the city’s celebrated Hotel Elephant. Despite its role as the epicenter of German Enlightment, Weimar remains as intimate and cozy as it must have been then, all the more so in autumn.

The highlight for me, however, was a short stroll over to the grounds of the first Bauhaus School, originally designed as the School of Arts and Crafts by Henry van de Velde in 1907. A nephew of Johann Dieter Wassmann was one of the carpenters responsible for the iconic spiral staircase in what is now the College of Architecture, Building and Construction. This central building, recently renovated to its early glory, always guarantees me goose bumps, as a life-long student of modernism.

No less inspiring was my pilgrimage to Goethe’s home, now a museum, pictured here in a photograph by Johann in 1894. Unfortunately, the Nietzsche Archives was closed when we popped by, but the stunning Art Nouveau building was worth a peak through the gate all the same.

The good news is that I can report we appear one step closer to completing a repatriation agreement with the Wassmann Foundation, bringing the works of Johann Dieter Wassmann long-last home to Leipzig. Stay tuned…

Nietzsche 306P

Johann Dieter Wassmann, NIETZSCHE 306P, 1897. 370 x 280 x 100 mm.

The lesser-known companion piece to yesterday's post, IN THE STAR CHAMBER, is Johann's provocative work, NIETZSCHE 306P.

In 1889, Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown, often attributed to his contraction of syphilis, resulting in his admission to various clinics before he was moved to Naumburg, where his mother looked after him until her death in 1897. At that point his sister Elisabeth shifted him to Weimar, where she continued his care, as well as promoting his legacy and allowing the occasional audience with guests until his death in 1900.

It was in Weimar that Johann briefly visited Nietzsche, but finding only a shell of a man he returned home to produce this work, depicting simply and eloquently the empty collar of the man, an organ stop with the name 'Nietzsche' printed on it, and an opium-stained bone apothecary spoon. The objects are placed against a dappled blue wall, reflecting Nietzsche's penchant for blue-lensed spectacles.

Our thoughts go out today to the family of Nietzsche's most recent biographer, Curtis Cate, who we understand passed away earlier this week in Paris at the age of 82. The New York Times is preparing an obituary for publication in the next few days. In the meantime, here's a link to the Times review of Curtis's biography, FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (Overlook Press), from August of last year.

In the Star Chamber

Johann Dieter Wassmann, IN THE STAR CHAMBER, 1897. 380 x 280 x 100 mm.

Looking back over the past couple weeks I see a pipe theme developing, so I thought I'd continue with this pre-Surrealist motif by presenting what is arguably Johann's best-known work, IN THE STAR CHAMBER.

16969

Johann Dieter Wassmann, 16969, 1896. 440 x 310 x 150 mm.

By request, I'm posting an enlarged view of the central work in the installation "Planck's Constant", which I showed you Thursday. The piece is currently in the collection of The Wassmann Foundation, Washington, D.C., pending finalisation of a repatriation agreement that will see the works of Johann Dieter Wassmann return home to Leipzig for our July 2008 opening (preferably with time to spare).

Planck's Constant

Here's a look back at "Planck's Constant", last seen in 1998 at The Wassmann Foundation’s Centennial Exhibition in Washington, D.C. The installation explores the intellectual convergence that occurred through Johann Dieter Wassmann's friendship with the physicist Max Planck. The installation will be restaged at MuseumZeitraum Leipzig’s inaugural exhibition in 2008.

MuseumZeitraum construction update

I've realised I'm long overdue for an update on MuseumZeitraum's construction progress. Here's a look at the sub-basement, which will one-day house the museum's archives. Finance and final architectural plans are pending, but we're still on track for our summer 2008 opening (fingers crossed). For an exterior view, have a look at my August 24 post.

Mut zur Lücke

Johann Dieter Wassmann, PRINCE OTTO VON BISMARCK, 1896. 660 x 530 x 130 mm.

The recent release of Rohan Kriwaczek’s AN INCOMPLETE HISTORY OF THE ART OF FUNERARY VIOLIN (Overlook Press) has prompted several commentators to disparage the Guild of Funerary Violinists as something of a 'pre-modern' relic. This points up a significant misunderstanding of the role of the funerary violinist in the development of the modern era, a misunderstanding that warrants further discussion.

Pope Gregory XVI’s instigation of the Great Funerary Purges of the 1830s and 1840s was a deliberate, and it must be said effective, strike at the spartan musical form advocated by funerary violinists, a form that we now appreciate revealed the buds of early modern intellectual independence. As Kriwaczek rightly points out (see Wednesday's post), “…the genre of Funerary Violin evolved in its own distinct manner, following a path of rooted modality and direct expression, and eschewing all displays of virtuosity… in order to explore simply and honestly our relationship with our own and others’ mortality.” This reductivist urge, which I might also add was largely devoid of narrative, was a radical departure by any measure, but like the electric car in our current age, powerful forces made certain it was not to be, at least not yet. When it did find a foothold in the late 19th century, success was the domain of others.

In the visual arts, a similar reductivism came to inform the boxed works of Johann Dieter Wassmann in the 1890s. Not surprisingly, Johann’s elder brother, Hugo Wassmann, was himself a funerary violinist, as I have mentioned. In her essay, "A Carpenter's Tale," Maime Stombock points out that it was Johann’s sudden and humiliating recognition in 1889 of the depth of his own bourgeois values that long last allowed the fog to lift:

"The final period of work that grew out of these revelations can only be described as early modern. Johann's competence as a carpenter, along with his total command by this point of the medium of the wooden box, allowed him to plunge headlong into works unlike anything he had considered prior. The most striking feature of these pieces is their simplicity of line, plane and form. This new sensibility he referred to by the German expression die Mut zur Lücke -- the courage to leave things out. Several works even verge on abstraction, most notably his politically charged pair KAISER WILHEM II, 1894 and PRINCE OTTO VON BISMARCK, 1896. The enigma of these works, an enigma which creates puzzlement even today, rests in the subtlety of their comment, rather than in the compelling presence of a narrative, as was often the case in earlier works."

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The Art of Funerary Violin

A post-election day reading from Rohan Kriwaczek’s AN INCOMPLETE HISTORY OF THE ART OF FUNERARY VIOLIN (New York: Overlook Press, 2006):

“(T)he genre of Funerary Violin evolved in its own distinct manner, following a path of rooted modality and direct expression, and eschewing all displays of virtuosity, in terms of both performance and compositional artistry, in order to explore simply and honestly our relationship with our own and others’ mortality, in all its many and varied historical and cultural aspects. Had it survived until today, who knows how it would have reflected our current disowning of death; however, it is certain that it would have proved more profound and deeply cathartic than the contemporary tendency towards recorded music played on a ghetto blaster. But then maybe a spiritless age deserves a spiritless death. It is not for me to judge.”

Engraving by J. Forn from the collection of The Wassmann Foundation, Washington, D.C.

Music of the Spheres

Johann Dieter Wassmann, HARMONISCH 1895. 145 x 145 x 70 mm.

Last week I focused on the composer Hugo Wassmann's involvement with the Guild of Funerary Violinists and the Mizler Society, a theme I don't want to leave just yet, so this week I thought I'd open by looking at the impact of music on Johann Dieter Wassmann's boxed works. Maime Stombock makes the point in her essay, "A Carpenter's Tale," that it was Johann’s friendship with the physicist Max Planck, and their mutual interest in the epistemology of music, that in many ways directed his thinking:

"The late night dialogues Johann records between himself and Planck more often than not centered around music. But then, he was a Leipziger: Wagner, Mendelssohn, Strauss, Liszt, Schumann, Brahms, Grieg, Mahler, they all spent crucial years in the city (as well as in Weimar) during the course of Johann’s life, allowing him to come in contact with each, as well as to see all but Wagner and Schumann either conduct or perform. It would be impossible to overstate the importance of music in his work, despite there being only a handful of direct musical references in his boxes.

"For Johann, music and only music could create such an idealization of space as to transcend time, while still existing within it as an undivided whole. Music is at once truth and form, knowledge and sensation. Music defies absolute space and time by not only transcending the boundaries, but by suggesting the very boundlessness of the universe itself.

"Another to have passed through Leipzig—in this case on his way to Vienna—was Sigmund Freud. In Freud, Johann found his journey had come full circle. Where Johann had begun by challenging his students to question the veracity of truth through his enigmatic displays on human physiology, he ended by proffering that truth is neither supreme nor absolute; our universe may be governed by laws, he suggests, but truth resides just outside our reach, amidst the deepest dark corners of a world we have only just begun to unravel: that of the human mind."

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Saxony-Anhalt 1897

JOHANN DIETER WASSMANN, Saxony-Anhalt, 1897. Albumen silver print, 18 x 23 cm, WF 745003.

After a wordy and somewhat contentious week, I thought I'd end as I prefer to do on Fridays, leaving the picture to tell the story.

Tschüss

Hugo Wassmann & The Mizler Society

The recent release of Rohan Kriwaczek’s AN INCOMPLETE HISTORY OF THE ART OF FUNERARY VIOLIN has opened a pandora’s box of questions surrounding Hugo Wassmann’s involvement in the Guild of Funerary Violinists. No less puzzling, however, were Hugo’s ties to the Mizler Society. This late-Baroque musical society was founded by Loren Christoph Mizler von Kolof for the programmatic study of music’s innate relationship to science. Mizler, who attended the University of Leipzig and was a former student of Bach’s, devoted his master's thesis, “Quod musica ars sit pars eruditionis philosophicae,” to the development of a scientific approach to music grounded in mathematics and philosophy. Early members of the society included Bach, Handel and Telemann. Gatherings posed such troubling questions as why parallel fifths were undesirable.

Hugo Wassmann (Johann Dieter Wassmann's next elder brother, pictured dimly here in 1869) was introduced to the then-struggling Mizler Society while studying philosophy at the University of Leipzig. For reasons that are not well understood, Hugo remained a devotee to this antiquated, and decidedly anti-modern, society right up until his death in Weimar in 1915, at the age of 76.

A charming website examining the Mizler Society was recently launched by violinist John Rodgers, so turn up your speakers, click through and enjoy.

Hugo Wassmann & the Guild of Funerary Violinists

Several correspondents across the Atlantic have, in recent days, raised queries over Hugo Wassmann’s falling out with the Guild of Funerary Violinists in 1901 (last Thursday's post). CRWM, writing on the blog AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS (link below) asks, “Did you not find it interesting that [Rohan Kriwaczek's] AN INCOMPLETE HISTORY failed to mention the irony that brother of one of the greatest proto-modernists was one of the last links to this most pre-modern of traditions?” Indeed, this fraternal relationship is a curious one, but I also find it telling that it was only after Johann’s death in 1898 that Hugo reconsidered his affiliation with the Guild.

A letter from the noted Swedish music publishers Elin and Ulla Johnson, dated 5 December 1901 and addressed to Hugo, sheds some light on Hugo’s state of mind in coming to what must have been a wrenching decision (above). The letter is currently in the archives of The Wassmann Foundation, Washington, D.C. Although written in an old Swedish dialect, I will translate as best I can.

The letter opens thanking Hugo for a photograph (fotographi) he has recently sent them. They then go on to reassure Hugo he has made the right decision in leaving the Guild (def Gál), heartening him with the conviction that the saxophone will one day be the centrepiece of both orchestral and funerary composition, although not necessarily among Lutherans. The letter closes with this encouragement: “The burden is on your shoulders Hugo but God will provide.” It is signed on the reverse, “Elin & Ulla Johnson,” with the added remark, “…send Helge and Eva our love.” Helge and Eva were Hugo’s two surviving daughters.

I hope this sheds further light on the last remaining years of the Guild.

Not a spook, even on Hallowe'en

Must have been the champagne talking, not me; all the same, I do want to apologise to Wassmann Foundation director Jeff Wassmann for my wee hours post this morning inadvertently leaving open the possibility of Mr. Wassmann’s involvement with U.S. intelligence. He assures me unreservedly that his State Department stints in Beirut, Istanbul and Nairobi were all in the role of cultural attaché. Here’s our benefactor when we met in Paris a few weeks ago in an effort to finalise agreement for the repatriation to Germany of Johann Dieter Wassmann’s artwork after its 94-year absence.

Opening night at the Leipzig Film Festival

Pictured: Countess Eva-Maria von Schönburg-Glauchau at Café Spizz.

Leipzig’s glitterati, and then some, gathered last night at the Museum der bildenden Künste for opening celebrations of the city’s annual film festival, Das Internationale Leipziger Festival für Dokumentar- und Animationsfilm, running until 5 November (see link below). Although a poor cousin to the Berlin Film Festival, in focusing on the genres of documentary and animation, the Leipzig festival has found its niche.

As the reluctant subject of THE FOUNDATION, a documentary film currently in production by Australian filmmaker Richard Moore, I’ve been busily booking out the festival season to see what I’m getting myself into.

The evening kicked off with a screening of three powerful films, most notably the short TOWER BAWHER by the Bulgarian digital animator Theodore Usher, who currently lives in Canada. Featuring the score “Time Forward” by Georgy Sviridov, the work sees Russian constructivism deconstructed by the 2nd law of thermodynamics, as entropy rules Usher's universe of line, volume, colour and form.

To the festival organisers' credit, more women directors than ever are represented, but the Eurocentric focus of the directors chosen (if not their subject matter) remains a disappointment.

The usual drinks and chatter followed, with a gracious welcome from mayor Burkhard Junj, before the crowd sprawled out into the chill in search of late-night venues on a sleepy Leipzig Monday. A few years beyond raving, I made my way with the international, but mostly European, contingent to Café Spizz, a local jazz club.

After a grilling over MuseumZeitraum’s American financial backing and a round of questioning over rumours of Wassmann Foundation director Jeff Wassmann’s intelligence connections (yes, I believe Mr. Wassmann was formerly with the U.S. Department of State and has some tie to the Kennedy clan; no, he isn’t a spook, to the best of my knowledge), the evening eased into the usual late-night banter covering the war in Iraq, Prof Dr Angela Dorothea Merkel, the sorry state of film funding and, of course, to what extent our Leipzig School painters have ‘gone Faust’.

With first light breaking and the birds a-chirping, I'll say good night for now and keep you posted as the week progresses.

An Incomplete History of the Art of Funerary Violin

A special thanks to Prairie Lights bookseller Jim Harris for sending along an advance copy of Rohan Kriwaczek’s AN INCOMPLETE HISTORY OF THE ART OF FUNERARY VIOLIN. As many of you may know along with Mr. Harris, Johann Dieter Wassmann’s brother, the composer Hugo Wassmann, was active in the Lutheran wing of Leipzig’s Guild of Funerary Violinists in the 1890s. Hugo’s ultimate falling out with the Guild came in 1901 over his efforts to introduce the saxophone to funerary rights, a practice that failed in Leipzig, but would eventually take hold in the city of New Orleans with great success, although not among Lutherans. Meanwhile, the art of funerary violin all but died out in Europe by 1915.

Here’s a short excerpt from the book’s dust-jacket, and a link if you’re interested in purchasing this intriguing work:

“During the Reformation a new musical form developed to replace Catholic funerary ritual. A solo violinist became central to the conduct of the Protestant funeral. Despite its enormous influence on classical music generally and on the Romantic Movement in particular, this music has almost entirely vanished. In a series of ‘funerary purges’, the violinists were driven into silence or clandestine activity.

“This is a music that, despite all attempts at suppression, has haunted Europe’s collective unconscious for more than a century. Now Rohan Kriwaczek reveals its incredible history. He acts in the hope that by remembering the Guild we realize afresh what our music once was, and what it might be once again.”

Wednesday Archive #6 - The birth of the modern

The general consensus among academics dates the development of an early modern aesthetic in Johann Dieter Wassmann’s work to 1889. Beyond the presence of modernist concerns in his assemblage works, and later photography, his awareness of the changing nature of art can clearly be seen in his collected ephemera, currently held in the archives of the Wassmann Foundation, Washington, D.C.

The idea that innate images and objects may store substantial metaphorical content is as old as art itself, but it was the modern era that saw their removal from historical context, with essence alone left to both represent and raise doubts about traditional linkages. Johann’s very process of gathering material, either for future works or purely for enjoyment, involved just such a process of removal, stripping away historical ties, opening up potential new meaning for a modern world.

The engraving above is one such image, conjuring a wealth of surreptitious possibilities. Researchers at the foundation have since shown the engraving to be cut from E. Atkinson’s NATURAL PHILOSOPHY (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1887), a translation of A. Ganot's COURS ÉLÉMENTAIRE DE PHYSIQUE, one of several editions Johann owned. The image is, however, nothing more than a demonstration of concave mirrors, but in clipping it from the surrounds of its purpose, he has liberated it, and the viewer, from the historicism of its creation.

Park Sanssouci 1897

JOHANN DIETER WASSMANN, Weinbergterrassen, Park Sanssouci, Potsdam, 1897. Albumen silver print, 18 x 23 cm, WF 748030.

As a native Berliner, the arrival of autumn has, since the fall of the wall, beckoned a short trip to Potsdam and a Saturday stroll through the delicious gardens of Sanssouci. This autumn proved no exception, a weekend in Berlin catching shows and openings providing the perfect opportunity to escape to the park’s wonderfully Rococo decadence. The 18th century summer residence of Frederick the Great, Sanssouci is more villa than palace, full of quiet moments of intimacy and folly.

Johann Dieter Wassmann was no less fond of making the trek, although never in summer. Autumn and early spring were his preferred seasons for taking in the brooding melancholy of this most cultured pearl.

The moons of Galileo

"I should disclose and publish to the world the occasion of discovering and observing four Planets, never seen from the beginning of the world up to our own times, their positions, and the observations made during the last two months about their movements and their changes of magnitude; and I summon all astronomers to apply themselves to examine and determine their periodic times, which it has not been permitted me to achieve up to this day . . . On the 7th day of January in the present year, 1610, in the first hour of the following night, when I was viewing the constellations of the heavons through a telescope, the planet Jupiter presented itself to my view, and as I had prepared for myself a very excellent instrument, I noticed a circumstance which I had never been able to notice before, namely that three little stars, small but very bright, were near the planet; and although I believed them to belong to a number of the fixed stars, yet they made me somewhat wonder, because they seemed to be arranged exactly in a straight line, parallel to the ecliptic, and to be brighter than the rest of the stars, equal to them in magnitude . . .When on January 8th, led by some fatality, I turned again to look at the same part of the heavens, I found a very different state of things, for there were three little stars all west of Jupiter, and nearer together than on the previous night.

"I therefore concluded, and decided unhesitatingly, that there are three stars in the heavens moving about Jupiter, as Venus and Mercury around the Sun; which was at length established as clear as daylight by numerous other subsequent observations. These observations also established that there are not only three, but four, erratic sidereal bodies performing their revolutions around Jupiter."
Galileo Galilei, SIDEREUS NUNCIUS, March 1610.

This week I’ve been looking at Johann Dieter Wassmann’s little-known 33-piece suite “Der Ring des Nibelunge,” 1896. Each work in this remarkable ensemble takes the form of a pine box, shaped as an isosceles trapezoid, with the glass front constituting the smaller of the two parallel planes. When assembled in three groups, 11 boxes are positioned to form a circle, with the fronts facing inward, toward one another, rather than outward toward the viewer.

The last of these three groups shows Johann’s strong fascination with an increasingly reductive notion of pure space, space nearing the void of deep space itself. In each of these boxes the sole structural element is one or more planetary forms, but rather than being highly descriptive, these elements are depicted as nothing more than aged brown balls, leaving the focus of our attention on the void itself. The inner surface of these boxes is lined with heavily-stained text, in the case of the work above text from a 19th century French-German dictionary. “The Moons of Galileo” is sufficiently descriptive to allow us to identify the individual moons – from top to bottom, Ganymede, Europa, Callisto and Io – but grouped alone, without Jupiter, they are purposely lost at sea.

This metaphor of complete and possibly abject isolation – the isolation not of the void, but of the individual within the void – came to dominate much of Johann’s output in the remaining 18 months of his life.

The birth of the surreal

As spring 1896 moved on to summer, Johann Dieter Wassmann continued work on his seminal 33-piece “Der Ring des Nibelunge” (Ring Cycle – please see my previous post for background). During this period the tone of the works turned increasingly playful, covering a range of interests, until a sudden shift arrived with autumn, his final 11 works in the series reaching a dark and deeply introspective spatial void, which I will discuss in my next post. Prior to the void, however, came “The Heavens”, shown above, in which a bird’s nest sprouts not baby birds, but five doll's legs in yet another nod to the Dadaists and Surrealists to come. As cheerful as it is perverse, it brings to mind the eerie 1930s constructions of Hans Bellmer.