Letters from Vienna #105
Gerhard Richter
Three of the most memorable exhibitions of recent memory were those of David Hockney (see Letter #64), Jürgen Messensee (about whom I’ll write at a later date) and Gerhard Richter. All three were organized by Bank Austria/Kunstforum Wien, which also generously provided the photos for this letter as well as for those for Letter #64.
Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden, on the 9th of February 1932 to Horst Richter, a teacher who’d studied at the Technische Hochschule Dresden (at a time when Victor Klemperer (see Letter #38) was still teaching there) and Hildegard Richter, who’d studied to become a bookseller.
“In an interview with Robert Storr, Richter described the early years of the family as “simple, decent, orderly – mother played the piano and father earned the money.””[1]
“In 1935, Horst Richter was offered a job at a school in Reichenau, then Saxony, now Bogatynia in Poland. The family reluctantly moved from lively Dresden to the small town, which offered far less stimulation but proved to be much safer during the war. In the late 1930s, Horst was drafted into the Wehrmacht, was soon imprisoned by the Allies and stayed in American captivity till the end of the war. A year later he returned to his family, who’d meanwhile moved from Reichenau to the even smaller Waltersdorf, near the Czech border.”[2]
Years later Richter commented: “I had no relationship with my father. He came out of the war, a complete stranger to me...”[3]
Not only was Dresden devastated, Richter’s family was too. His mother was raped by the Russians[4], two of his uncles failed to return[5], while his aunt: Marianna, who’d been diagnosed as being schizophrenic and sterilized in 1938, was starved to death by the Nazis.
“As for many families, the post-war years were a difficult time for the Richters. Horst’s reception was less cordial than hoped. It was only years later that Richter noticed that many of those who returned home shared the same fate as his father: “And after that I – or we, the family – had become so unaccustomed to one another that we no longer had anything to do with one another. This was not an isolated case.” Although Horst Richter never took an explicitly political stance, it was difficult to find a position as a teacher because of his previous membership in the NSDAP – all teachers had to become party members. That’s why he worked temporarily in a weaving mill in nearby Zittau until he found a job in the administration of a distance learning institute in Dresden.”
“For Gerhard, those early years were marked by conflicting feelings of emotional closeness, distance, affliction, and excitement. Although the family left Dresden early, he remembered both the house where he was born on Grossenhainer Strasse and that of his grandmother: “Not far from there was the headquarters of the Sarrasani circus, where as a small boy I could see the elephant stables through the basement windows. My great-grandmother’s sewing kit – a stuffed armadillo; a man falling from a ladder that I alone saw….”
“Gerhard’s memories of Reichenau are poorly documented but the time in Waltersdorf has survived, not least because Gerhard was already over ten years old when the family relocated. “We had moved to a new village and from the start I was the outsider there. I didn’t speak the dialect….” Gerhard was very reluctant to attend the new school, always plagued by the feeling that he didn’t belong in Waltersdorf, which was partly due to the strange dialect. Richter was considered “highly talented yet a notoriously bad student.” Richter left high school in Zittau and attended a business school, where he learned shorthand, bookkeeping and Russian.”[6]
“Although the family lived in the country, Gerhard’s later memories of the war were extremely vivid. Like most boys of his age, he had to join the “Pimpfen” in 1942, the youth organization of the Hitler Youth. Fortunately, he was too young to be drafted into the Wehrmacht in the last year of the war. In addition to material limitations and the absence of his father during the formative years of his childhood, the family was not spared personal losses either: Hildegard’s brothers Rudi and Alfred were both killed at the front. “What was gripping, was how my mother’s brothers had fallen. The first and then the second. How the women screamed. I’ll never forget that.” Hildegard’s sister Marianne, who was committed to a mental hospital because of a mental illness, starved to death there as a result of the Third Reich’s euthanasia programs.”
“Even if Waltersdorf was spared the direct bombing raids that Dresden was exposed to, war was omnipresent. In a conversation with Jan Thorn-Prikker, Richter remembered the defeated German soldiers, the airplanes, weapons and trenches. With the Russian invasion came looting, rape and sometimes barley soup for the children in the huge camp. Gerhard was fascinated by the military: “When the soldiers went through the village, I went there and also wanted to belong.” He told Robert Storr: “At twelve you’re too young to understand all the ideological mumbo-jumbo.” Completely boyish, inquisitive and adventurous, he played with his friends in the woods and trenches; they played shooting games with guns lying around. “I was fascinated, like all boys.” Despite his young age, he understood the scope of the war and remembered how Dresden was almost completely razed to the ground in February 1945: “That night everyone ran out into the streets of the village, which was a hundred kilometers away from Dresden. Dresden was being bombed at that very moment!””[7]
“Speaking to Robert Storr, Richter explained: “It was horrible, but when the Russians came to our village and confiscated the villas of the rich who had already moved or been driven out, they set up libraries in the villas for the population. And that was fantastic.” In a later conversation with Jan Thorn-Prikker, Richter continued: “Cesare Lombroso: genius and madman, Hesse, Stefan Zweig, Feuchtwanger, all that great bourgeois literature. It was a wonderfully free time.” Hildegard encouraged her son to read Nietzsche, Goethe, Schiller and other authors and writers and so, according to Elger, it was “this endless supply of illustrated books, which inspired him to make his first drawings.” In an interview with Jeanne Anne Nugent, Richter primarily remembers publications about Velázquez, Dürer and Corinth, which aroused his particular interest.”[8]
“At the age of 15 Richter began to draw regularly. One of his first sketches showed a nude that he copied from a book and to which his parents were as embarrassed as they were proud. He also remembered often painting landscapes, self-portraits and watercolours. In a conversation with Storr in 2002, Richter described a picture that was taken in Waltersdorf and showed a group of dancers: “It was a visit to a club, I watched the others dance and I was jealous, angry and bitter. And in the watercolor, all the rage of a sixteen-year-old is expressed. The same with the poems I was writing at the time – very romantic, but bitter and nihilistic, like Nietzsche and Hermann Hesse.”[9]
“While Richter attended commercial school in nearby Zittau in 1947, he took an additional evening course in painting. Little is known about this first painting class, but Elger notes that even before the course was completed, Richter was satisfied that he’d probably learned everything the teachers there could teach him. But even after completing business school, he still didn’t seriously consider becoming an artist, but rather different professions such as forestry, dentistry or lithography.”[10]
“He finally left Waltersdorf in order to accept his first job as a trainee in a painting company in nearby Zittau, which produced political banners for the GDR government. In the 1940s, this was a common way to start a career. Storr reports that for the first five months, Richter rarely got an opportunity to paint posters himself, instead having to take down and clean the old banners before his colleagues could paint them again.”
“In February 1950 he went to the Stadttheater Zittau, where he found a job as an assistant for prospect painting. During these months, Richter worked on sets for Goethe’s Faust and Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell…. When he refused to paint the theater’s staircase, he was promptly fired.”
“He decided to apply to the art academy in Dresden. It’s unclear if he was already planning to do this while at the theater or if the layoff was the impetus. After the first application failed, his examiners advise him to work in a state-owned company in order to increase his chances of admission. Elger pointed out that state employees were given preferential treatment at the time. In fact, the advice seems valuable, because no sooner had Richter worked as a painter for Dewag [German advertising and advertising company] in Zittau for eight months than he applied again to the academy and was immediately accepted. In the summer of 1951 he returned to his native city of Dresden and officially began studying painting.”[11]
In 1951 he also got to know Marianne (aka Ema) Eufinger, who was living in a neighboring house and was studying to become a fashion designer.
An artist colleague, Wieland Förster, later commented sardonically (perhaps out of petty jealousy?): “Gerd was very attached to her, 55% out of love and 45% due to her wealth, who knows?” [12]
Richter soon moved into the big house, in the Wienerstrasse, where he could live rent-free, a not unimportant consideration for any budding artist, and enjoyed the good-will and generosity of Ema’s otherwise stingy father: Professor Dr. Heinrich Eufinger, without whose patronage Richter’s career would most probably never have been possible.
Ironically though Professor Dr. Heinrich Eufinger, who’d been by the SS, had been directly responsible for the sterilization of Richter’s aunt.
Yet as Richter himself put it: „I didn’t know anything about the Nazi rank. The family never told me... It was said that Eufinger was an honorary member of the SS, but as a famous man he couldn’t do anything about it. The doctor also treated Goebbels’ and Goering’s wives, maybe both. “They said: It wasn’t his fault that he was in the SS.” Richter clarifies. „I liked Ema, not him!““[13]
In 1957, the couple married, in 1961 they fled to the West, to Düsseldorf, and in 1966 their daughter: Betty, was born.
[1] https://gerhard-richter.com/de/biography
[2] Ibid
[3] p.37, Ein Maler aus Deutschland, Jürgen Schreiber
[4] p.16 Ibid
[5] p.242 Ibid
[6] https://gerhard-richter.com/de/biography
[7] Ibid
[8] https://gerhard-richter.com/de/biography/as-a-young-man-2
[9] Ibid
[10] Ibid
[11] Ibid
[12] p.168 Ein Maler aus Deutschland, Jürgen Schreiber
[13] p. 231 Ein Maler aus Deutschland, Jürgen Schreiber
Here is the film, "Never Look Away" 2018 which is among my 'Must See' films. The same director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, of the widely acclaimed "Lives of Others"
https://ervern.monster/movies/play/5311542-never-look-away-2018?mid=17&sid=&sec=a0be8b85f864040a9203235f9e48c458dd18e849&t=1668999113
For subtitles I used "English 10"