Georg Baselitz, Painter Who Confronted Nazi Past, Dies
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- Georg Baselitz has died; born in 1938, he was seven when the Third Reich fell and retained direct childhood memory of Nazi Germany and later East German communism before crossing to the West
- Baselitz's "Heroes" series depicted uniformed young figures with blood spurting from mangled limbs, ironically titled and set in what the author calls "the guilty depths of the German forest"
- His 1961 painting Die große Nacht im Eimer (The Big Night Down the Drain) portrayed a stunted, nude figure with Hitlerian hair and a square moustache, masturbating in military-style shorts; a later reworking made the figure's identity even clearer
- Baselitz carved a large polychrome wooden statue of a saluting Hitler that rises from a recumbent position "like a mummy waking from its tomb," and painted upside-down German eagles evoking the infernal ruins of Berchtesgaden
- He exhibited the zombie-Hitler sculpture in the German Pavilion at the 1980 Venice Biennale — a Nazi-era neoclassical building inscribed "Germania" — in a joint show with Anselm Kiefer
- Baselitz and Kiefer were accused by some of being fascistic, which the author calls a misunderstanding: the work deliberately confronted the Pavilion's grotesque heritage rather than tastefully ignoring it
- In his late work, Baselitz portrayed himself and wife Elke nude as vulnerable, decaying old bodies, and recently made art using his walker — a vulnerability he explored with the same unflinching gaze he applied to history
Why it matters: Baselitz was among the last generation of artists with direct childhood memory of the Third Reich, and his work insisted Europe confront — not aestheticize — its Nazi past. His death narrows that living generational witness at a moment when the author argues the lessons he painted are fading: the conscience and probity Baselitz tried to preserve are themselves "now history."
