In Russia the urge to obliterate all traces of the old regime has led to the wholesale destruction of images of Stalin and Brezhnev. Not even the granite portraits of Lenin and Marx have been spared. Meanwhile, in Germany, monuments erected to the eternal glory of Communism remain intact.
In Berlin you can still rest by the ugly monument to Marx and Engels, which took Ludwig Engelhard ten years to complete and you can still have your photograph taken under Kerbel’s massive head of Marx that clutters up the centre of Karl-Marx-Stadt. In Dresden the colossal statue of Lenin which blocks off the Pragerstrasse gazes inscrutably into an uncertain future. East Germans asked about their views on removing the monuments recommend using a pneumatic hammer. The “threat” of conservation comes from the West.
Here, enthusiasts of postmodernism, concerned with the preservation of all fragments of the past irrespective of the ideology that inspired them, do not feel involved in the problem; quite the contrary. So-called “Socialist Realism” has many fans: in the 1970s gallery directors like Uwe Schneede and Georg Bussmanput works by Sitte and Mattheuer on show. Former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt recently sat for a portrait by Heisig, the third of the “notorious” trio of former artists of the regime.
There is still a market for the one-time “court painters” and neither are they short of prestigious commissions. Three years ago, Johannes Grützke was commissioned by the city of Frankfurt to decorate the oval dome above the stairwell of St Paul’s church. In his thirty-three metre long frieze, Grützke shows that realism, with its clean, lifelike style, provides a fitting link between the sacred and the secular — not dissimilar from some of the naive painting of the mid-seventeenth century. In a large number of canvases, the painter has chosen the theme of the constituent national assembly which met for the first time on 10 May 1848. The deputies appear in a procession of 200 black-clad figures in the variety of attitudes.
The crowd of brightly dressed peasants, workers and women enliven the scene but provide no more than a backdrop. Grutze’s recently installed major work has its counterpart in another kind of historical painting. At the Modernes Museum in Frankfurt, another artist from the East, Gerhard Richter, uses harsh, surreal tones to portray the disturbing activities of the Baader-Meinhof Group.