For him it was a souvenir, a reminder of his own past. During the war he had been stationed in Greece, and in the 1970s he returned there once more, this time as a tourist. For me, however, this figure was never just a trinket. It later became a symbol of the entanglement between personal memory, experiences of war, and the heavy burden of German history, both for my family and for the nation as a whole.
When I transformed this into “Dem Deutschen Volke”, my intention was not simply to reproduce the warrior. I wanted to show how deeply Germany still struggles with its past. The body of my figure is strong, heroic, almost monumental, yet I deliberately fractured it through small but decisive interventions. He wears dark “armored” sunglasses, a Smiley spreads across his chest, and the entire body is painted in glaring colors reminiscent of Nazi symbolism. These elements strip the figure of its dignity and unmask the pomp as mere pose. The marble base carries the inscription “Dem Deutschen Volke”, as on the Reichstag in Berlin. But in this new constellation, the phrase is no longer solemn; it becomes an open question: What does this “people” mean today, and how does it face both its past and its future?
For me, the work reflects a contradiction I often feel in my own life. On one side is the awareness that Germany and the Jewish people are forever linked by guilt, suffering, and death. I have many friends in Israel and have visited the country often and for long periods, yet this history can never be laid aside. It hangs like a shadow over everything we do. On the other side is the attitude I frequently encounter in Germany: we hide behind our past. We say “Never again,” but at times we use this formula as an excuse not to take responsibility in the present. We avoid involvement, we refrain from taking a stand, we fail to act.
“Never again” becomes “Never intervene.”
The sculpture I created exists precisely within this tension. It is, on the one hand, a caricature, colorful, absurd, almost ridiculous. On the other, it is a memorial that takes this very absurdity seriously. It shows how memory and responsibility are intertwined, and it makes visible how memory itself can become paralyzing.
I did not create this work to provide answers. I created it to lay open the questions that continue to trouble me:
What does it mean to be German? How do I live with the eternal guilt of my heritage? Can art help me to make such contradictions visible, or does it merely reveal how deeply they are embedded?
Since 2015, Dem Deutschen Volke has been part of the NO!art Collection curated by Dietmar Kirves in Berlin. For me, it matters that this piece is located there, in a city that more than any other embodies the confrontation with German history.
Berlin 2015
