Transcending History at Kunsthaus Dahlem: Dr. Dorothea Schöne on Recontextualizing the Postwar Canon
- Grace Miskovsky
- Nov 14, 2023
- 12 min read
In a large, concrete, classically designed studio in Dahlem, the Nazi sculptor Arno Breker created works which were designed to uplift the images and aesthetics Hitler's regime. After the fall of the National Socialists, the building sat as West Berlin decided what to do with the space. German society encountered, in this case, yet another ethical dilemma regarding remembrance and reconciliation of their traumatized past: how could they re-envision a formerly Nazi space? The Kunsthaus Dahlem was formed in 2015 as an institution to exhibit German sculpture from the postwar period. Dr. Dorothea Schöne came in as Museum Director with her own vision for the space: to show art in all mediums by formerly persecuted and ostracized artists during and after the war. I sat down to talk with her about her curatorial work, her role at the Kunsthaus, as well as the future role of museums in society.
GRACE MISKOVSKY: I’d like to start off by talking about the exhibition you worked on with Stephanie Barron at LACMA in 2009 - The Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures. Can you explain your role in the exhibition and what the show was all about?
DR. DOROTHEA SCHÖNE: Stephanie Barron had a history of mounting really groundbreaking exhibitions on German art, primarily German expressionism and then the restaging and revisiting of the Degenerate Art show. She was making American audiences familiar with German art history in the 20th century and the impact of the NS regime on the development of the art scene. It was a must to continue what happened after 1945, so she mounted this exhibition on German art in East and West Germany after 1945 until the fall of the wall. It wasn’t just her, it was also in collaboration with Eckhart Gillen, who is a Berlin-based curator really renowned for German art, and then also with Sabine Eckmann, who was born in Germany but is now the director of the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum in St. Louis, who was primarily in charge of the catalog, which is really the scholarly approach to the whole topic. My job as a curatorial assistant was doing a little bit of the ground work, doing research, going to archives, looking for background material. A little bit of everything, and just being the second row of learning and observing and seeing the crazy madness of museum life.
GM: I’m interested in this exhibition because in your own life and work, the art of Germany is quite central. How was the curation process different when curating for an audience abroad, who may not have as much background knowledge of the idea of two postwar Germanys?
DS: That’s a really good question because something I only realized when actually being there was that - I’m not saying that the American audience is not educated enough, but of course everybody has their respective countries' history they’re more familiar with. What’s interesting with an American audience, specifically in California, is that you have a group of elderly people, a lot of them with Jewish background or families that migrated from Europe to the U.S., who are very familiar with European history and German history in particular, but then you also have a younger audience who may know about Hitler and the NS regime but may not know about the specifics of the division of Germany and the fall of the wall and Socialist Germany and West Germany and all these things. You have to find a way of not re-narrating everything that people may already know. You have to get an idea of how familiar your audience is with German history, and what you need to tell them and what you can assume they know. While in Germany, I don’t need to explain the division of Germany, and I don’t need to explain when the war was over. When it came to actually preparing tours for the exhibition, we had to understand how sensitive the topic is for a second or third generation of survivors that may come to the show with mixed emotions. And, very specific expectations of how I as a German introduce it to them. That was a steep learning curve. When it came to the more recent history, we had to make people understand that there were individual art scenes, or more liberal art scenes, in the East but it was underground culture. To understand that it existed and was not all censored but it had to have a very multilayered, multifaceted aspect to it. To understand what artistic expression in the East was is something that was really complex to tell people, because most of them just say, “In the East there was a Socialist dictatorship,” and it’s like, “No!” There were these pockets in society where you could live your life as long as you depoliticized it. On the first impression, you’re unpolitical but then when you dig deeper you understand that it is political yet on another level. To explain that to an audience that may not be familiar with the very specific characteristics of Socialist everyday life was something that was very interesting.
GM: Aside from this exhibition specifically, how do you see the reception of German postwar art varying from the United States to Germany?
DS: It’s very hard to say because there are also different expectations. It ties into what I just said about the fall of the wall. Most of the visitors in the American show said, “People must have been so happy when the Socialist dictatorship was over.” And it’s like, “Actually, no.” There are a lot of people who lost their jobs, who believed in something for four decades and suddenly it’s all over and somebody tells you, “Start believing in something else.” It’s not that easy. To understand how people respond to a change of regime - I’m not saying a postwar German society wasn’t de-Nazified per se, so it was not a process of liberation, it was a very slow process of re-educating people. I believe that postwar German art was very much dictated by the occupying powers, and from a foreign perspective, which isn’t bad at all, I think it pushed the Germans to democratize their art scene. To then understand at what point German experts regained the power to narrate it themselves, and how they emancipated themself from foreign opinions on their art scene is something that is still going through research processes and revisiting of academia.
GM: Let’s move towards your work at Kunsthaus Dahlem. The building has quite a weighted history as being the former studio of prominent Nazi sculptor Arno Breker. In 2015 the Kunsthaus Dahlem opened, and in your role as the museum’s director, you have the opportunity to recontextualize and transform the space. I’m wondering how you go about grappling with the building’s history through your curation practices.
DS: When I was appointed as founding director, a lot of the groundwork had already been done previously, like the mission statement, and the dedication of the building. It originally was dedicated to exhibit postwar German sculpture. For me, there is no “German” art per-se because I do believe that we can only exist with transcultural exchange and mutual reception. To insist on this national narrative was for me a little outdated. I am a firm believer that we should constantly revisit and recreate our historical and art historical narratives. Our canon is in a constant process of re-examining and flux. If we accept that as a characteristic of art history and museum history, we constantly re-discover names. For postwar German art, it was a specific case because the Nazis had eliminated so many names from the canon. I always wanted to exhibit those who were defamed and persecuted and in some cases, even murdered, to include them in this postwar narrative, which is economically speaking, hell. If I were to do Giacometti, Picasso, people would line up because they love familiar names. People always go to museums where they can discover something that already has their label as being “important” art. While we have currently in view Laszlo Peri. Who knows Laszo Peri? Nobody. I personally like to discover new artists and I like to add pieces of the puzzle to the canon. Of course when you run a building or an institution that has such a tainted history, of course people come up to you saying, “Why don’t you exhibit Breker? Why don’t you exhibit Nazi art?” I personally believe that one should exhibit it to educate people and to make them understand the toxic nature of these aesthetics, and what they do to you, and what they’re designed and meant to do to you on a psychological level. This is not the right venue, because at the end of the day, it is not big enough. It would be almost like restaging it in the original habitat. It would be a choreography of an exhibition that I find so disturbing. I believe that somebody like the German Historical Museum or the National Gallery, where you have a more neutral and possibly more historical setting. Instead of exhibiting it, I decided to do a publication series, and different forms of dealing with the topic yet not exhibiting it.
GM: In that way, the staging of it becomes very important. What you’re trying to do is use the heaviness of this location to transcend its history in a sense. I want to go back to Laszlo Peri who is this odd, ostracized character throughout his life. As a museum director, you have the unique position of deciding what is worth pursuing, and who is worth legitimizing. Most artists of the postwar world were put on the map because a gallery or museum decided their work was worth something. Walk me through the decision to show his work, and where he fits into the postwar modernist movement.
DS: I look into what these artists have achieved until 1933. Where were they exhibiting? What did art critics write about them? Who were they networking with? What did they try to change or address, and what were their interests in their own art-making? At what stage was it interrupted? How singular is it and how groundbreaking is it, and how does it differ from the established canon of the pre-war era? In the case of Peri, he’s one of these artists that leads you to the question of “If we would not have had Stalin and Hitler, how would Socialist art have developed?” We always like to think of Socialist art as Socialist Realism, but that’s not true. Leftist art used to be New Objectivity, it used to be Constructivism, it used to be all kinds of forms of expression. Peri’s interest in art was to translate the interest of the working class people, so he thought that people who were less fortunate in means of education needed to understand his art easily. He figured abstract art was talking over the heads of people, so he went back to figurative art. To see these social, political, aesthetic and formal interests in his artistic life was something that was unique. He had an established position in the art scene in Berlin at that time, but he also had a very unique, singular way in the whole context of pre-war art. When it comes to the post-war decades, I’m less strict with achievements because their entire habitat was taken away from them. They lost collectors, museum connections, art critics, all the factors you need to remain a famous, established artist. There were exiles, they had to suddenly move to a completely new market in a language they were not necessarily fluent in. Peri struggled his entire life with English. To expect from a foreigner to be able to sell their work in a market that was also not interested in figurative art - there are so many obstacles. Like, did he have good exhibitions after 1945? How could he?
GM: I’m reading a book called A Brief History of Curating by Hans Ulrich Obrist, in which he conducts interviews with prominent curators of museums across Germany and Central Europe, such as Seth Siegelaub, Franz Meyer, and Walter Hopps, all pioneers in curating in the 60s and 70s. In their conversations, many of these curators expressed interest in transforming the structure of the museum into a more social, communal space of interdisciplinary engagement. You saw the emergence of community events, exhibitions as social spaces, cafes and bookstores built into the museum, and the line between art and play beginning to be erased. I feel that the future role of museums in society is somewhat uncertain today, as less young people are interested in attending them. How can you keep young people interested and engaged? And, is it a priority of Kunsthaus Dahlem to create this sort of social, young space, or are you interested in strictly presenting a comprehensive and academic programme?
DS: I think it’s both. I have two obligations in a sense. I’m a guard and a safekeeper for public property, so my job is to preserve, but also to make things accessible. I like the idea of making the museum a more accessible, social place. I like to increase the time people spend at a venue. I want them to feel comfortable, to feel that they own a space, that it’s theirs. At the same time, there’s a tendency to make museums an event space. You have DJ’s playing, and you have to dance and have fun, it’s great! But we should not forget what our core mission is. If we don’t want history to repeat itself, we have to do both. We have to do the academic research and fill the gaps in history, but yet, when we’ve done this groundwork, then we need to think about how to make it more accessible. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I am not a firm believer that everything needs to be hip and cool. We just had a politician who said a year or two ago that all museums should be as sexy as the National Gallery. I don’t want to be sexy. I don’t need to be woke, or cool, because that’s not my job. I want people to feel comfortable and happy and entertained in a positive sense, but I’m not the IKEA playground. It’s not my job to, always and in every aspect, please. I’m also there to question, and to spark a discourse, and maybe be the one who causes a little bit of trouble and uneasiness.
GM: I think that role changes because of the weightiness of this space. It would be counterintuitive to have a DJ play in the ex-studio of Arno Breker. In terms of their trajectory in Germany, where do you see this phenomenon of museums as highly social, hip places fitting into their future role?
DS: I do believe that in a digital age, there are less and less meeting spaces. We tend to encounter like minded people. That’s a huge danger for society because there’s a tendency to only like to hear the opinions that are the same as our own. Museums are some of the last remaining spaces where we encounter other opinions, other forms of living and thinking about society. It may not please us, and it may not be what we like to hear, but that’s a fact: society is multifaceted and multilayered. Sometimes I think we need to relearn how to listen to each other and let people have their take on things. We have a very clear mission statement on what kind of political opinions we do not tolerate, yet you don’t always have to look at the most extremist forms of political expression. We can also have more leftist leaning people and more conservative people coming together and talking about things. It’s interesting to see what it does to people when they are forced to listen to each other. This is a very important moment because a museum is a place where it’s quiet, you have to listen to each other in a different way. There are very few social spaces where we interact.
GM: I feel like I have an interesting perspective on museum culture as a young person because yes, you don’t see a ton of young people going to museums, but my friends and I are going to galleries every weekend and getting very involved. You also have galleries that are becoming very hip places to be. Schinkel Pavillon is an interesting place to me - the first exhibition that was on when I came here was by Shayne Oliver. I think he’s a genius designer, but the exhibition fell flat to me, it seemed very Instagrammable, and there wasn’t a lot there. At the opening, you have the coolest, best-dressed, mullet-wearing people, but it’s hard to imagine that they’re really having a dialogue about the space, or thinking critically about what’s there. The exhibition I have on now, I felt like was totally different, and very in depth. I wasn’t at the opening but I can imagine that that type of curation could only spark some type of very deep connection.
DS: That’s the thing. Every exhibition we have a slightly different audience. A few years ago we had a contemporary art exhibition and the elderly visitors were so estranged. It was Henrike Naumann with furniture. Younger people came and they totally loved it, they thought it was so groundbreaking. It was interesting because when we gave tours, the younger people heard the questions of the elderly and there was this moment where we realized by answering these questions, we taught both sides why elderly people didn’t get it. When you have these meeting points, you suddenly have a moment where you can understand more about the gaps. I love to learn from my audience. But of course, certain exhibitions are just made for hipsters.
GM: My last question is what are you working on now? What is up next? What are you excited about?
DS: There’s this huge dilemma that we always have too many men in the programme. Postwar art is so male-dominated. So our next exhibition has seventy percent women, and it will be primarily on abstract works and textiles which I love. It’s around the ZERO group so I’m very excited about that. In the summer we’re showing Andreas Mühe, a very famous photographer who is transforming the entire space with a site specific installation, and I can’t say too much about it but it’s a little about bunker aesthetics. It’s completely insane. In a year and a half, we’re turning ten, so we’re starting to think about what to do and what we’d like to look back to. My next five year plan I should think about what to do with the institution next. It’s fun because it’s nice to get input from other people and to realize what else people like to see. It’s a laboratory. If you see how people respond to museums, I love that. I’m learning so much from my own institution and I think that’s the biggest privilege.
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