O Germany, Pale Mother

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“O Deutschland bleiche Mutter” (O Germany, Pale Mother) by Fritz Cremer, 1966
(The title is a verse from the poem Deutschland by Bertolt Brecht)
Bodestraße
Museumsinsel (Museum Island)
Berlin, September 2011

“The latter is particularly interesting—the work itself (which benefits from a fine large-size colour reproduction) of course, if only for its proposed location, the Memorial at Mauthausen Concentration Camp, but also its genesis and the commentary from Christa Lichtenstern. Fritz Cremer (1906-1993) was an Official Artist of the German Democratic Republic who discussed Henry Moore in a 1975 issue of Bildende Kunst, a journal which had denounced Moore as ‘late-bourgeois’. Now, Cremer also attacked Moore’s art—in the particular newspeak of the age inherited from Stalin—as ‘undialectic’ and ‘pre-historic’, and he got Moore’s views on Greek and early art completely wrong: but, and this is the excellent point made by Christa Lichtenstern, Cremer paid Moore the greatest possible homage in practice by getting inspiration from Moore in his own work, as evidenced by O Deutschland, bleiche Mutter.” (Henry Moore: Work - Theory - Impact, Reviewed by Antoine Capet, Cercles)