About Time.
With Alfred Ullrich

And a lot more besides!

That was around 1976 – after a few years of wandering around Europe aimlessly, and when the German author­i­ties no longer had me regis­tered for mili­tary service – how old would I have been? Maybe 28. I had been in Bavaria for some time. I am actu­ally Vien­nese, you know. When I needed an ID card as a young man, I was prac­ti­cally drafted for mili­tary service at the same time. The nature of my family circum­stances actu­ally helped me: Although my mother had only been married to my German father for two years, I was able to apply for German citi­zen­ship. No way did I want to do mili­tary service with supe­riors who had been actively involved in the Third Reich – I couldn’t bear the thought . And as a 14-year-old I couldn’t think of anything other than applying for German citi­zen­ship. Which meant that from then onwards in the city I had grown up in I had to regu­larly go to the police as a “foreigner”. It was a weird situ­a­tion. Thus it was that at some point I moved to Munich as a German citizen, and worked among other things in a printer’s work­shop. For the Czech Josef Werner, who himself produced a lot of prints for other people. I learned a lot back then and really enjoyed working with color etch­ings. Never­the­less, at some stage things felt too constricting for me in the family busi­ness …later I found a house in Dachau and was able to set up my own copper plate etching work­shop. Then grad­u­ally I not only did a lot of work for other artists, but also began my own works. Back then it was still possible to put your port­folio under your arm and do the rounds of the Munich galleries – and some­times they exhib­ited the one or other of your works.

Yes, I only really became aware of my biog­raphy when I moved into this house in the Dachau district. This old Roman street, I would walk past the former concen­tra­tion camp every day. At the time I thought: So, actu­ally I know every­thing through my surviving rela­tives, I don’t need to look at it. Only later did I find out that three of my uncles had been impris­oned in this camp.

Then again, I had to settle in. It was inter­esting for me to see what artists get up to, what this culti­vated, middle-class life is like and what standing art has in it. I didn’t find that out until then. After all, my life had been completely different.

Yet there was this polit­ical aware­ness. In the mid-1980s the so-called “Group D” was founded in Dachau, which campaigned for a memo­rial and meeting place at the former concen­tra­tion camp . Now and then I myself trav­eled with “Group D”; for example, we were invited to exhibit in France by a onetime Resis­tance fighter. And we were invited to Vermont or to the Auschwitz Youth Meeting Center. Back then the past was more or less suppressed – in the 1960s, there were even plans to demolish the entire site. There is said to have been a politi­cian who claimed he would oppose such a meeting place “to the last drop of blood” [the Chair of the CSU group on the City Council, Manfred Probst, editor’s note.] It’s inter­esting how politi­cians responded at the time – now it’s called Max-Mannheimer-Haus and is a study center that is used for educa­tional purposes and as a meeting place, a memo­rial site and youth hostel.

Actu­ally I learned a lot of things without reading any “recipe books”, simply by trying things out for myself, working on my own, and then I often discov­ered that this or that method had already been used by artists decades ago. Somehow, certain things just suggest them­selves when you’re working with etching.

I was self-taught and there­fore didn’t have a clas­sical training as an illus­trator and usually started spon­ta­neously. That spon­ta­neous begin­ning, this etching inspired me to continue. However, this also means I might have been plan­ning to produce the atmos­phere of a morning, but my exper­i­men­ta­tion turned it into more of an evening mood (laughs). Now I have a lot of my own tech­niques that I can work with. That’s good, because I am still far too rest­less to spend hours, day or months on end sitting and drawing, for example.

Right, with the help of friends who are much better acquainted with the tech­nology than I am because I real­ized that I couldn’t do justice to the topic with abstract etch­ings alone. These actions or videos like “Land­fahrerplatz, kein Gewerbe” (Trav­eling Folk Site, No Trading) allowed me to ques­tion some­thing through perfor­mance because I recog­nized that without provo­ca­tion nothing changes in society.

Inter­est­ingly enough, it was also through initia­tives like that of “Group D” that the more open-minded people came “out from under cover” – and visited and even endorsed these exhi­bi­tions. A certain change has taken place. And it was also some­thing of a relief for me to “acknowl­edge” my iden­tity as it were. After all, I often real­ized, for example when swap­ping ideas with fellow artists, that I have a completely different view of things. With the artist actions I was able to become more candid but without attacking anyone person­ally. That was always an impor­tant aspect for me. It was more that I wanted to push politi­cians into taking a stance.

By then I had already been known as for my prints for a good 20 years. My solo exhi­bi­tions were always attended by a lot of really inter­esting people. They also came to these exhi­bi­tions and really engaged with my art. For example, in the Neue Galerie Dachau I once installed a sofa, a little table, some small dishes with nuts, but then the tele­vi­sion showed a video that my sister had made with my mother where she talks about her time in the concen­tra­tion camp. It was very moving because she often had to stop, couldn’t go on speaking.

I just remem­bered some­thing my mother often used to say: “The Gadji, watch out, watch out, the Gadji – that’s what she called the Germans – they steal!” Inter­est­ingly enough, this is exactly how the majority of society still views the Sinti and Roma. Today, I think I know what she meant. The concen­tra­tion camps and the raids confirmed who the real thieves and robbers are.

Yes, I think that was 2011. Later the site was acquired by the Czech state, and in 2022 the pig farm was finally torn down. [Jana Horváthová, Director of the Museum for Roma Culture, stated that the fact that a memo­rial was erected here, the demo­li­tion, marked a “turning point”. The current Minister of Culture Martin Baxa apol­o­gized for the numerous politi­cians who for decades had ignored this aspect of the country’s history, editor’s note.] I am now being shown again in a group exhi­bi­tion at the Bien­nale. On arriving in Vencie by train, that was mid-April, a group of thieves robbed me. My money was stolen, my cards. When I reported it to the cara­binieri I had to fill out a form and one of the ques­tions on it was: “Can you remember: Were they Arabs or were they gypsies?” They actu­ally still ask that today. Then I felt quite different about this exhi­bi­tion – because this year’s world art show presents itself as being very concerned. A conster­na­tion that is almost diffi­cult to take, given that simul­ta­ne­ously the state that provides space for this cultural event issues such forms in 2024. I don’t imagine anything like that would be toler­ated in Germany.

Natu­rally, that makes me wonder what impor­tance art can have at all. This bien­nale has been held for 100 years and then to have a slogan like this year’s motto – is it all just for show? And if so, for whom? Way too many tourists visit Venice as it is …and there’s a certain irony in some­thing like that happening to me of all people.

I am producing it for the exhi­bi­tion in January in Berlin. As it was a naval battle and every­thing plays out at sea I didn’t want to get too specific. I cite the history of this place: The Spanish king had declared the Gitanos, the Roma living there at the time, to be outlaws – and they were then deployed in the galleys against the Turks. Conversely, the Turkish rulers also used the Roma as “oar slaves”. That was what moti­vated me to create these works, the real­iza­tion that this discrim­i­na­tion has persisted for centuries in many different vari­a­tions. And it continues to this day. I didn’t finish the works on time, but the exhi­bi­tion will later move from Venice to Berlin and I will show them there.

I suppose on the one hand I am inte­grated, if you like, but then again, I often still have the view of an outsider looking in. Although I am intrinsic to the system. I guess that gives me an advan­tage being able to do that but simul­ta­ne­ously looking at things from the outside. That said, I would like my artworks to func­tion for them­selves without presenting anything activist or ideo­log­ical. That’s impor­tant to me.

It’s diffi­cult for me to see myself as an artist. You see, prints were some­thing that I could put between myself and society. That meant I could avoid talking about the issues that really concern me. These old curtains that my mother used to sell as a hawker, and I often accom­pa­nied her, and which are the basis for many works: These curtains often hang as a veil between percep­tion – between what happened and how the descen­dants of the perpe­tra­tors like to portray it today. These are the curtains that hang between and which I feel prevent an authentic conver­sa­tion, a real reflec­tion.