Negotiating the Terror of History: Postwar German Artists

January–May 2010
Social philosopher Theodor Adorno once famously said that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” meaning that the horrors inflicted under National Socialism exceeded the possibility of representation, even through the evocative language of poetry. In both the East and the West, German artists who came of age after World War II were faced with a dilemma: either participate in a self-imposed collective amnesia over “those things” or find new ways to render the past open to scrutiny, and perhaps understanding. With a keen eye toward the specific postwar German context, Kolya Rice traces the trajectory of such attempts through careful analysis of key artists.

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About the Instructor

Kolya Rice

Kolya Rice, currently a Ph.D. candidate in modern and contemporary art history and criticism at the University of Washington (UW), was raised in the Seattle area and received his M.A. from Rice University. He has taught courses on western art, theory, and criticism at the UW, University of Puget Sound, and Seattle University over the past decade, and is an adjunct professor in the UW's Art History and Master of Arts in Museology program.