A man lies naked on his stomach on gray earth trodden by footprints, his tattooed back covered with two columns of German sentences. Another is sitting on a children's swing in front of a wall of houses full of graffiti. A third has split in two, one half wears a beard, a fur hat cut in half and a caftan, the other is clean-shaven in a blue shirt with a striped tie. A woman in a red dress is sitting in a room full of picture frames; in many there are family photos. Another, younger woman is lying under her bicycle in the autumn leaves. A heavily pregnant woman, her right hand on her bulging belly, is standing behind a wooden table, next to her is a bearded man in an undershirt; on the painting between them you can see the legs of a giraffe.An elderly couple poses in front of a glass case with leftovers from the breakfast room of the Grand Hotel Esplanade in Berlin's Sony Center. Behind the two, in the reflection of the glass, the traffic rushes over Potsdamer Platz.
Andreas Kilb
Feuilleton correspondent in Berlin.
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If one looks at the pictures by the photographer Frédéric Brenner, which the Jewish Museum Berlin is exhibiting under the title “Zerheilt”, one could think of the famous miniatures of the prose volume “Couples, Passers-by” by Botho Strauss.
Because here, too, you can see people who seem to be completely with themselves, individuals, couples, a few groups, in whose lingering the viewer of the photos is immersed.
But Brenner chose a different method of observation than Strauss.
His photos are portraits that have been designed by the people portrayed themselves and completed in the eyes of the photographer.
Every picture is a conversation.
Every room is a stage.
And every person has a role, a part, a voice.
There is also something important. The people pictured are no chance acquaintances, no passers-by. Almost all of them are of Jewish origin, some come from Israel, some from America, many are part of Berlin's cultural life. The series of photos in which Brenner brings them all together shows, on the one hand, a section of humanity and, on the other, a special community. Their symbols are few and far between in the pictures, a rabbi hat here, a kippah there, Hebrew characters on a board. But you can find them. And they connect the views and self-portrayals of the people you see here with the history of a people, a religion and a culture, with the Shoah and with the place from which it originated, Berlin.
Berlin has become “a city addicted to redemption”, writes Frédéric Brenner in his introduction to the exhibition catalog.
Judaism is staged and celebrated everywhere, "from the theater to klezmer to Jewish cuisine," but this revival often feels less like an act of healing than a new form of distortion.
From this point of view, Brenner's photos are a counter-staging.
They do not show the fact that their protagonists are Jewish, but rather that they are for themselves.
You get involved in their world feeling.
The Jewish is in the mind of the beholder
In this world the fate of the Jewish people is always present, even if mostly invisible. It can be stuck in a scarf, the color of a duvet cover, an appetizer on the table. Above all, it is in the head of the beholder, who searches the unlabeled photos for familiar faces and legible characters. Instead, even familiar ones become alien to him. That is why it is not the poster motif, the rabbi cut in half, the icon of the exhibition, but the naked woman opened on German soil. It is Carey Harrison, the son of the Jewish film star Lilli Palmer, and on his back is the first piece from Adorno's “Minima Moralia”. Title: "For Marcel Proust".
Frédéric Brenner, born in Paris like Proust, is the chronicler of Jewish life in the diaspora. He has photographed congregations in Rome, New York, Sarajevo, Morocco, Ethiopia, Yemen and Portugal and viewed the ultra-Orthodox in Israel with the eye of exile. In “Zerheilt” he documents Jewish life in Berlin by individualizing it. We should look at the individual, not the church. The motto of the exhibition comes from Paul Celan, who wrote to an acquaintance that his stays in psychiatry had "healed" him. Brenner's pictures, one could say, liberate our gaze by denying it the false cure of stereotypes. What they show is not Judaism. It is humanity.
Frédéric Brenner: Healed. Jewish Museum Berlin, until March 13, 2022. The accompanying volume, published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, costs 58 euros