Political Beauty?

ON MONDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2019, the controversial German art collective “Zentrum fur Politische Schönheit” (Center for Political Beauty, henceforth ZPS) erected a thick steel pillar in the center of Berlin's government district. The location on Heinrich von Gagern Street was the unmarked site between the Reichstag and the Federal Chancellery where the Kroll Opera House—badly damaged during the Second World War and eventually demolished in 1951—had once stood. Over two meters high and dark gray, the pillar's most immediately striking feature was its centerpiece: a glass “window” enclosing a display of ashes embedded in amber-colored synthetic resin. This was “Sucht nach uns!” (Search for us!), the ZPS's latest political-aesthetic intervention in the memory politics of the Berlin Republic. The installation was destined to be short-lived because of the controversy it created (more on which below); by January 2020 the local authorities had already removed it.

The collective claimed in a press release and on their project website that the pillar contained the ashes of Jewish Holocaust victims. Over a two-year period, ZPS activists had reportedly taken around two hundred soil samples from twenty-three sites of atrocity near concentration camps in Germany, Poland, and Ukraine. The samples had then been tested in laboratories and were found in over seventy percent of cases to contain human remains. The remains that featured in the pillar came from the area surrounding Auschwitz, where members of the collective searched rivers, dams, and fields. This area is the subject of a forensic-historical analysis of body disposal techniques at Auschwitz-Birkenau commissioned by the collective and available on the project website, Die Wege der Asche (The Paths of the Ashes). The title of the campaign itself, “Sucht nach uns!,” expressed an imperative from the Jewish victims of the Holocaust to posterity to “search for us.” It was inspired by the few victim testimonies that Soviet soldiers had discovered in Auschwitz in 1945. These testimonies bore witness to body disposal by mass incineration and feature in a further document on the project website, An die Nachwelt (To Posterity), a compilation of Jewish victim accounts including the Auschwitz materials and other testimonies that the collective researched and assembled over a twoyear period.