World War I dealt the first death blow to the optimism of the nineteenth century. The interwar period was initially characterized by anxiety and uncertainty. Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck (1925), as well as poems like Orhan Veli's Kitabe-i Seng-i Mezar (1938) or W. H. Auden’s The Unknown Citizen (1939), give voice to the loneliness and despair experienced by small men, by ordinary individuals confronting the kinds of nameless, faceless bureaucracies that Kafka, too, shrank from in The Castle or The Trial. Nazism as the German variety of Fascism seized upon those little people, put them in uniform, and sent them to fight for global domination. It offered nothing good or beautiful to humankind, not a single shred of any positive cultural or intellectual development. Defeated, its collapse amounted to a singular devastation. In 1945, Germany lay not only in material but in much deeper spiritual ruins. Baselitz and his generation were born into this desolation. His deformed 'heroes', his 'new types'; or upside-down figures reflect this profound upheaval, this ethical disorientation, this loss of all rational grounding for existence.

The conference will be held in Turkish, and no translation will be provided.

A valid museum entry ticket and registration online is required to attend the conference. Click here to register.

Date: 5 October 2024, Saturday

Time: 14:00 - 15:30

Location: SSM Conference Hall