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    Artist

  • Werdigier, Wolf

    • Title

  • Rosenstrasse - A decent gesture

  • Physical Description

    1 painting : acrylic on canvas ; 60" x 50" ; 152.4 x 127 cm

  • Date

    2006

  • Summary

    The painting is divided in half, the upper half painted with vague suggestions of buildings in gray (windows), the lower half with a gathering of women and children dressed in colorful clothing facing forward. While the paint was still wet, a wash of gray was painted over all, top to bottom, such that the brush caught the colors and diluted and smeared them, and the figures too became vague and smeared. Depicts the protest in Rosenstrasse. Signed and dated in the lower right corner.

    Until 1943, Jews married to Gentiles enjoyed a measure of security and were spared deportations to concentration camps. But during the final round-up of the last Jews of Berlin in early 1943, the Nazi regime began arresting Jews with Gentile spouses and incarcerated them in a former Jewish community center on Rosenstrasse. The non-Jewish spouses – most of them women—countered with an unprecedented protest in front of the prison, demanding the return of their husbands. The initial 600 protesters on the first day gradually swelled to 6,000 after a week. Again and again, the police scattered the women with threats of shooting them, but each time they advanced again unperturbed. Arrests seemed a foregone conclusion. It came as an utter surprise to all participants, when the Gestapo finally relented and released the 2,000 Jewish men, all of whom survived the war. Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary that the Nazis feared the protest might be noted abroad and also feared that non-Jewish relatives of Jews in concentration camps might follow suit and stage a protest of their own.

  • Subject

    Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945); Women in art; Children in art; Rosenstrasse Protest, Berlin, Germany, 1943

  • Place

    Berlin (Germany)

  • Medium

    Paintings

  • Accession Number

  • URL

Biographical/Historical Information

Architect, painter, designer, and media artist, Wolf Werdigier was born in Pegnitz, Germany in 1946, and he grew up in post-World War II Vienna. His father was a Jewish concentration camp survivor, and his mother was Christian. He began his “Hidden Images” project in Israel in 2001. In 2005 the artist conducted interviews with over 40 New Yorkers of diverse ethnic backgrounds and ages from which he created new works exploring race in America. Werdigier trained as an urban planner. Since 1985, he has maintained his studio in Vienna. Starting in 1979 he held various positions in universities and municipal departments in Vienna, and also in 1989 and 1994 as Visiting Professor at the Pratt-Institute, New York, for Urban Design. Werdigier explores the effects of suppressed trauma on the human psyche. In his work in Vienna, with Israelis and Palestinians, people in the Balkans, and, most recently, African-Americans and Whites, he has used the techniques of psychoanalytic inquiry and the “Social Dreaming Matrix” method. His paintings are informed by the dreams, associations and personal stories gathered in workshops and individual interviews that he considers to be “pathways for the unconscious to reach the conscious”. His works have been shown in Austria as well as in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ramallah, New York City, Philadelphia, and Cleveland, Ohio.

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Citation

Werdigier, Wolf: Rosenstrasse - A decent gesture, Leo Baeck Institute, 2007.1.