Maps of Mourning by Oliver Koerner von Gustorf

Hans Platschek Prize winner Paula Doepfner turns fragments of text into complex linear structures

Branches, arteries, neural pathways. A living organism in a stream, hairline algae, chains of spawn. Spiderwebs, threads of blossom on the wind, animal or human hair caught up in barbed wire. Galaxies, a haze of gas and dust, the light of a long dead planet.

Paula Doepfner’s pen and ink drawings on Japanese paper are somehow cartographic, like landscapes with criss-crossing paths and streams. They map a cosmos that might be gigantic or microscopic. They depict countless fine details, fragile worlds. At the same time, they’re open to a vast space where everything is entangled and intertwined. They bear titles that sound like blues ballads, though the suffering they address is almost beyond words. And yet they’re breathtakingly factual – right down to the smallest horrific detail.

I got nothing, Ma, to live up to is the title of a work made between 2022 and 2023 and shown at Doepfner’s exhibition Darkness at the break of noon at the Kupferstich-Kabinett in Dresden. Both titles are quotations from the Bob Dylan song It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding). Doepfner worked on this drawing for a year. Its linear structure is based on her sketches of neural pathways and regions of the brain, sketches she made while observing autopsies and surgical operations in the neurological clinic at the Charité Hospital in Berlin. But the ramified lines are strings of text comprised of tiny letters measuring no more than a millimetre, and she draws them with the naked eye.

The barely legible text is taken from Alwin Meyer’s book Never Forget Your Name: The Children of Auschwitz. Meyer spent years seeking out those who survived having been deported as children. He recorded what they remembered and asked them how they have lived in the aftermath.

Other text-based drawings in the exhibition are derived from works by the likes of Paul Celan and Canadian poet Anne Carson, or texts like the Istanbul Protocol, a United Nations handbook on the documentation of torture. In YOU and ME (Breaths of a Summer’s Day), made in Rome between 2016 and 2017, Doepfner worked with unfinished drafts of the eponymous chapter from Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, where siblings Ulrich and Agathe dream of utopias and mystical new states at the outbreak of the First World War. Doepfner was born in West Berlin in 1980 – manmade catastrophe and the horrors of civilization are ever present in her work.

Recalling her student days, Doepfner says it was her professor Rebecca Horn who first encouraged her to address the Holocaust in her work. ‘But at that point I didn’t really feel ready for it. If you want to deal with a subject like that at all, you need to be really well prepared. I wanted to have seen all the sites and to have read everything I could.’ In the end it was twenty years before she felt able to formulate any sort of statement.

Latent violence has featured in Doepfner’s work since her early sculptures, where she started using botanicals and broken glass. But after the horrific terror attacks by Hamas, the war and the present humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, her work on the Holocaust and the award of the Hans Platschek Prize at Art Karlsruhe come at a fraught moment. According to Marion Ackermann, general director of the Dresden State Art Collections and judge of this year’s Hans Platschek Prize for Art and Text, Doepfner’s text pieces are ‘impressively relevant’. But relevance can be contentious. Questions about antisemitism, racism and the use of terms such as ‘ghetto’, ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ have never been more controversial, the debates never more polarised. And the ethereal, almost mystical quality of Doepfner’s drawings leaves other questions hanging. How should we remember? What contribution can art make? Can it bring about change? ‘At the moment it feels like it’s all about which side you’re on. But for me it’s impossible to take sides,’ says Doepfner. We discuss the Holocaust and the question of whether its sheer incomprehensibility places it outside of history, or whether we actually ought to be comparing it, identifying similarities in order to prevent the same causes leading to the same catastrophic effects. ‘In my opinion the Holocaust is singular in human history,’ she replies. ‘But that needn’t mean relativising all other suffering.’

This universal view of the suffering of others is absolutely characteristc of Doepfner’s work. The result may look delicate and poetic, but her practice is extreme. In the operating theatre at the Charité Hospital she stood right behind the lead neurosurgeon. She calmly recalls the recumbent patients, almost completely concealed beneath surgical sheets, with only their skulls visible, drilled or sawn open. The smell and spurts of blood were challenging at first. The cerebral matter was carefully moved aside, then you could see the nerve pathways. It’s also hard to imagine how Doepfner can transcribe descriptions of asphyxiation, dental torture, torture by electric shock. How she turns the accounts of the children from Auschwitz into text pieces, children who remembered medical experiments and being bitten by rats and dogs, children who didn’t know their names or ethnicity, children who didn’t know what it meant to die naturally and just assumed that everyone was shot, gassed or beaten to death. ‘For me the most important thing was listening the voices of these children,’ says Doepfner, ‘the children who speak through Alwin Meyer’s book.’

I tell Doepfner I still have a hard time with poetry. In place of facts and answers, teachers in the 1970s who had themselves been soldiers or Nazis would recite Paul Celan’s Todesfuge (Deathfugue) as a form of exorcism: ‘Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening / we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night / we drink and we drink / we shovel a grave in the air where you won’t lie too cramped’. No one ever said ‘gas chamber’ or ‘crematorium’ or ‘extracted gold teeth’ or ‘mountains of cut hair’. But the Jewish poet Celan was also broken by the Holocaust – he took his own life in 1970. As with torture victims and the concentration camp children, Doepfner gives him a voice while simultaneously transforming it into something almost material, corporeal, something more than mere symbolism – a remnant, a trace, of language, of life, of the self. It’s not a picture or a poem. It has to be regarded forensically, as fact.

In any case, disturbing images may provide an initial spark to ‘the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics’, as Susan Sontag wrote in her famous essay, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). Yet that sympathy is to be set aside in favour of ‘reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may – in ways we might prefer not to imagine – be linked to their suffering’. Paula Doepfner has started drawing such a map. Its contours show us how much work we still have to do.

Oliver Koerner von Gustorf
February 2024

Maps of Mourning – Platschek Prize winner Paula Doepfner, article published in Monopol Magazine.