Gerhard Richter: ‘Post-remembering’ the Holocaust in German contemporary art

Dresden-born artist Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) was aged between nine and thirteen years old during the Holocaust. Nonetheless, it had a formative and conflicting influence on him. His black-and-white ‘photopaintings’ from 1965 raise questions about the role of photography as a means of remembering, forgetting, recontextualizing and expressing the traumatic acts committed to – and by – his own family members, even, on each other. This paper studies exemplary ‘photopaintings’ as a manifestation of Richter’s expression of a German ‘postmemory’ condition. In sum, this is a story about remembering, forgetting and denial – and photography as an agent exploring those phenomena.