Journal Article

An Elephant in the Ruin: Coloniality and Masculinity in the Postwar Painting of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff

Rosen, Tobias

2024

Overview

By examining German colonialism within an expanded temporality, this paper implicitly rallies against two common mistaken assumptions: that the historical significance of German colonialism and the German colonial imaginary are restricted to the period before World War I (pre-1914) and their impact is less severe than those of the British and French empires.1 Schmidt-Rottluff’s fame dates to his student years at the Dresden University of Technology (1905-7), where he studied with Erich Haeckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Fritz Bleyl, other founders of Die Brücke. In 2021-2, following many decades of academic reckoning with the movement’s unsettling ambivalence, the Brücke-Museum in Berlin assembled the exhibition Whose Expression? The Brücke Artists and Colonialism in 2021-2 to further interrogate questions of cultural appropriation and the movement’s entanglement in the colonial apparatus of power.4 This important exhibition participated in recent efforts to decolonize Germany’s ethnographic museums, which has involved the restitution of the Benin Bronzes, the repatriation of human remains, and significant institutional rebranding. [...]the Great Depression, Noah’s Ark sets were among the most popular and widely exported goods (Fig. 2).8 Although toy historians agree the popularity of Noah’s Ark toy sets peaked in the 19th century, they were still widely available in Germany after 1945.

• Publisher: Rutgers University
• Subject: Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903-1969) / Colonialism / Morality / Visual artists