On May 27, 1945, just three weeks after Germany's capitulation, the German writer, Nobel Prize laureate, emigrant, and by then American citizen Thomas Mann gave his famous lecture "Germany and the Germans" before a packed Library of Congress in Washington DC. In this lecture, Mann provocatively argued that the rise and appeal of National Socialism were inextricably linked to the emergence of a distinctly German aesthetic sensibility in the works of the Romantics. Drawing on Goethe's dichotomy of the Classical as healthy and Romanticism as sick, Mann asserted that Romantic art and philosophy—despite their ostensible dedication to the Platonic triad of truth, goodness, and beauty and their elevation of art as an organon of truth—harbored a latent disease. Just as the rose caries the worm, Mann maintained that Romanticism's celebration of night over day, the irrational over the rational, subjective passion over clarity, and its idealization of Germany's mythic past concealed a "seduction to death," as he called it, seized upon and exploited by the ideologues of the Third Reich. Mann's critique of Romanticism as complicit in the horrors of the Second World War highlights the fraught position of Romantic art and culture in postwar Germany. For artists, writers, and intellectuals coming of age in the aftermath of the war, coming to terms with Germany's recent past necessarily entailed a confrontation with its Romantic artistic heritage. This tension with Romanticism is clearly reflected in the work of Georg Baselitz, whose oeuvre demonstrates a persistent engagement with Germany's Romantic past. In this talk, I will trace Baselitz's multifaceted engagement with German Romanticism from the beginning of his career until the last decade. More specifically, I will argue that his engagement with the German Romantic past offered him not only the opportunity to interrogate his personal entanglement with his country's troubled history but also gestures toward the possibility of reimagining a German artistic future—one not rooted in the negation of the past or the simplifications of the present, but in their thoughtful integration.
The talk will be in English, with simultaneous translation into Turkish. Entry to the conference is included with museum admission. Click here to register.