BARBARA LOFTUS - a Statement

The project is a sequel to my recent narrative sequence A Confiscation of Porcelain in as much as it takes as its theme events from my mother's youth as a Jew in Germany during the Third Reich.

As with my previous project it will consist of narrative image-making in the form of paintings, drawings and a limited edition artist's book.

I am concerned with finding visual metaphors for the cultural and psychological problems of the German-Jewish symbiosis. I employ images of nature which have secondary meanings about the idea of "Germanness" and "Jewishness". The Third Reich promoted fear and suspicion of the metropolitan assimilated Jew - camouflaged as a German, but subverting the purity of the race. The assimilated Jew was depicted as web-spinning spider or a poisonous toadstool - a rootless parasite undermining the true German rooted in his German soil.

I am currently engaged in a large panoramic painting (10' x 5') in the tradition of the Moral landscape, a single image narrative composition which takes place in a Northern European forested landscape. From Tacitus' Germania to the Brothers Grimm, the forest was always central to German identity and imagination - with its mythic associations, it was a setting for life-changing events.

The German word Holzweg means a path through the forest. In my composition the holzweg is walked by a group of young ramblers - the Wandervögel. My mother - an assimilated German Jew, is one of them. The holzweg is a metaphor for the path taken in Germany in the first half of this century which led to the failure of the German-Jewish symbiosis, and the Holocaust. Simon Schama has written vividly about the idea of the Holzweg in his book Landscape and Memory.

"The second path took Deutschtum - Germanness - into darker and less innocent glades - though it would be a mistake to assume that every forest tramper was a recruit for the Reich to come. The Wandervögel youth movement and the ramblers who communed Siegfried style, around bonfires on forest hills attracted not just those who saw themselves as the new generation of Hermanskinder, but also some on the left, not least the young Walter Benjamin. Left and Right after all, shared contempt for bourgeois urban materialism proclaimed by Reihl and were prepared to follow him in extolling Nature especially the sublime German portion of it, as of transcendental value. The craving was for some immutable rural community that had not been prostituted by industrial modernity."

My moral landscape * belongs to the tradition of tragic German landscape painting. The lyricism of a sublime landscape which refers to the catastrophic events which characterise Germany in the Third Reich presents a paradox because we know it to be a landscape whose beauty is now defiled.

*A moral landscape is a landscape in which certain ethical propositions are embedded as part of the narrative structure - as direct reference or symbolic presence. Artists who have explored this direction include Caspar David Friedrich, Breughel and John Constable.

HILDEGARD LOFTUS - a Statement

I was a schoolgirl at the Gymnasium Augusta Victoria in Berlin during the 20's and 30's. I was one of only three Jewish girls at the school which was popular with the military and diplomatic members of Berlin Society.

I thought of myself as a German, my Jewishness seemed much less important - in fact I was pleased that I didn't look Jewish - like the orthodox working class Jews who lived in the poor part of the city. My family was bourgeois and comfortable - we lived in a good part of Berlin - near the Tiergarten. All my friends were Gentiles - I didn't have Jewish friends.

When I was about twelve, the school was visited by one of the leaders of the Wandervögel youth movement. This girl told us about the Wandervögel and invited us to join their meetings and find out about their activities. I and some other girls in my class were interested and went along to the meetings which were held in the homes of the older members. Then, at weekends, and in school vacations, we would all take the train or tram to the edge of the city - where in groups of eight or nine we would make long walks in the woods and by the lakes. We sang folk songs as we walked or sat by our camp fires - somebody always had a lute or guitar. It seemed very romantic to me at that time - it was the chief pleasure of my youth. Life had started to get more difficult because of the inflation - there was little money to spend, because my father's company went bankrupt like so many others in Germany, and he was forced to take any work he could get.

As time went by the Youth Movements became very politicised and the simple folksy ways of the Wandervögel came to seem out of date. My group had always been liberal and tolerant - many Wandervögel groups were anti-semitic and wouldn't allow Jews to join.

Some of my Wandervögel friends joined the left wing youth groups and asked me to join them, but life was dangerous now that the Nazis were coming to power and I felt it would not be wise. After 1933 I had to break of contact with most of my Gentile friends because it would not have been acceptable for them to be known to be fraternising with a Jew.