Lotte Laserstein- Evening Over Potsdam (Abend Uber Potsdam) 1930
I steer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern. My hopes indeed sometimes fail, but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy.
–Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, 8 April 1816
With two weeks to go until the election, I am bouncing between hope and fear. The consequences for this election seem to have a magnitude far beyond any past presidential race and there are days when I feel as though there is a bit of hope and light that the American people will not roll willingly into an autocracy that will forever change our nation’s future and character.
But there are also darker days when we seem destined to that path, that too many of us don’t recognize the peril or think it won’t affect their lives in any way. They are like sleepwalkers trudging in the dark.
Jefferson’s words give me a tiny bit of comfort. Hopefully, that feeling of black foreboding that sometimes fills me these days will drift away behind us as we sail into the bright light of the future, never to bother us again.
These feelings reminded me of a German painting from the 1930’s. I wrote about it here back in 2014 and it feels like a fit for today. It is slightly edited from that earlier post.
While looking up some the artwork that was branded as being entarete kunst, or degenerate art, by the Nazis in 1930’s Germany, I came across a number of amazing works, many by well-known artists but some from artists who were unknown to me. Many of these were Germans who were well on their way to establishing big careers as important artists before the war and its buildup but never really regained their momentum after the war. That is, if they even survived.
Lotte Laserstein at work on “Evening Over Potsdam”
The painting shown above, Abend Über Potsdam, or Evening Over Potsdam, by German-born artist Lotte Laserstein , stopped me in my tracks when I stumbled across it. It is a large painting that speaks volumes with just a glance. At first, all I could see was a sort of classic Last Supper type arrangement as if it had been painted by Norman Rockwell while he was in the deepest depths of despair.
It was big and brilliant, over 43 inches high by 80 inches wide. The facial expressions and the body language evoke a mood that is beautiful and tragic at once, perhaps filled with the foreboding of what was to come for these people and that city and that nation.
Perhaps the dog, a sleeping German Shepherd, is symbolic of the German people being unaware of what is ahead, an omen of what might be lost when the shepherd is not vigilant.
This was painted in 1930, just as the Nazis were beginning to make their fateful move to take over the German government. I can only that imagine someone with the keen perceptive powers of an artist such as Laserstein could easily imagine what might be coming for the German people in those dark clouds massing over that German city.
Laserstein grew up in Prussia and was trained as an artist in the creative whirlwind that was post- WW I Berlin. Art in all forms was flourishing, fueled by the desperation and fatalism of living in a post-war world. There was change in the air. Women were becoming bolder and more empowered, and modernity was pushing away the conventions of the past. Laserstein embraced this life, typifying the image of the single, self-sufficient New Woman. The painting shown to the right, her Im Gasthaus (In the Restaurant), is a great example of that time, showing a single woman with bobbed hair and fashionable clothes sitting alone in a restaurant. The hands are strong and the expression is pensive, thoughtful. It’s a great piece and a wonderful document of the time.
Laserstein was gaining stature at this point but in 1933 was marked as being Jewish and her career began to stall in Germany. In 1937, the same year as the famous Entarete Kunst exhibit put on by the Nazis where they displayed and mocked artwork labeled as being degenerate then destroyed much of it (a story worthy of another post), Laserstein was invited to have a show in Sweden. She traveled there for the exhibit and stayed until her death in 1993.
After the war she basically fell off the radar, although she was active until the end of her life. However, her work after the beginning of World War II lacked the fire of her earlier Berlin work. It was good work but it was less full, less expressive. No doubt the war had sapped away a great part of her. Her earlier work was rediscovered in her late 80’s and had a retrospective at a London gallery and in 2003, ten years after her death, she returned to Berlin, in the form of her paintings, with a large retrospective.
There were many victims of that horrible time. Lotte Laserstein survived and did produce work for half a century but was a victim, nonetheless. As with many surviving victims, there was something, some part of themselves, lost. We will never know fully where her work might have taken her without the war. As it is, she has left us some wonderful work to appreciate.
And in Evening Over Potsdam, to serve as a warning to stay forever vigilant.
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