Word of Introduction by SANDER L. GILMAN
(Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences
and Medicine at University of Illinois Chicago)
Alexander Polzin was raised in the laboratories at the Charité. His mother was the head of the biopsy lab in the GDR and he spent time after school, writing his assignments on her lab tables. His is a new sight in German art.
In my imagination I see a laboratory in the Berlin Charité in which autopsies are performed.
They are performed on the dead -- the dead of all kinds. The old man who dies in his sleep,
the young girl run over riding her bicycle; these dead have names and histories and their
bodies are those of lovers and friends and fathers. But there are other dead in this laboratory
-- unnamed, without history -- some float in bottles of preservative as specimens. They are the
Virchow's collection of fetuses aborted -- either by God or by man-- because of their deformity,
their unviability.
What if these unnamed dead could speak? Would the fetuses say -- you -- God or man -- you labeled
us unviable! You demanded that we die and preserve us as a living memory of what you are not!
What would we have been as children, as adults, as aged crones? You have denied us the experience
of the living. Monsters frighten us; freaks are lodged in our nightmares. At night we start at the
shadows which seem to turn into twisted bodies threatening us. We fear that which we see as different
from us. Indeed, nature itself seems to fear the different. The one-winged fledging is push to its
death out of the nest. The spontaneous abortion occurs, we tell our selves, because the monstrous
fetus could not have survived even in utero.
But we are our monsters. We are them. "Nature" seems
to set models for our actions, because we read meaning into nature. We claim to plumb its secrets
and its patterns and we give it the meanings of the patterns which we have invented and call the
natural. The laboratory at the Charité has other bodies, besides those hidden in the bottles not
quite on display. Some are imprisoned in the copy of Eduard Pernkopf's Topographische Anatomie
des Menschen, Lehrbuch und Atlas der Regionär-Stratigraphischen Praparation which lies open on the
counter, some medical student having interrupted his studies to run out of the pathology laboratory
to the living patients on the floors above. Like all of the teaching hospitals in the Third Reich
-- from Berlin to Strasbourg to Vienna -- the bodies came, were processed, and left -- sometimes to
the crematoria, but often bits and piece mounted on slides for the classroom and the anatomy lectures.
These pictures in the anatomy books are so much less real -- they are seemingly only simulacra of
bodies, merely pictures, infinitely present in their technical reproducibility. And yet they too
were people once -- condemned before the people's court after the Anschluss and turned over to
the Viennese university's anatomy department which received the corpses of those executed by the
Nazis, including political resisters.
Whose bodies? Why the monstrous bodies, of course.
"Normal" bodies do not make interesting preparations for the classroom. Anomalies,
deformities, pathologies are needed. But, as we have said, we create the categories of the
monstrous which we need and which fulfill our sense of time and space. Our monsters define
ourselves. In Sauerbrauch's Charité the monstrous were the political, the Jews, the queers,
the exotics. Use the Luschan charts and determine the normal status of appearance and then use
the monstrous, now clearly defined, as your specimens. Not crudely, as in Mengele's
"laboratory," at Auschwitz, but one can not simply waste good teaching materials,
can one? Polzin's eye is an eye which, unlike the boring, self-important monumentalism of the
past generation, looks at the details dealing with the Shoah. His leporello of the monstrous
evokes the lives unlived because of the deformities and unviability of these lives as defined
by the world in which they almost lived. These are the monstrous unborn, they are Goya's nightmares
trapped within the world of the laboratory. These are the ideas unthought, the feelings unfelt,
the horrors unreclaimed. These are the "natural" made unnatural. The fetuses are not the victims
of the Shoah -- Polzin is not that crude, they are the nightmares present in the world --
nightmares dreamt by the perpetrators and experienced by the victims. His art crosses the boundary
between the world of the laboratory and that of the gallery -- and we are forced to thinking deeply
about what such a journey means. That such nightmares still haunt our sleep is a sign of their
timelessness.
