One is being honored by a retrospective at the Center Pompidou in Paris and being admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts under the dome of the Institut de France, while the young writer Lukas Rietzschel takes up the life of the other in a literary transformation in his novel “Space Traveler”. The father’s war experience shaped both of their lives. It symbolizes a tin cup that was pierced by shrapnel in the winter of 1944 before it got stuck in the sergeant’s head. At the end of the 1950s, Georg Baselitz moved to western Berlin and Germany as an artist. War and broken soldiers returning from war are central motifs of his work. Günter Kern stayed in Upper Lusatia and was monitored and tormented by the State Security with his family for decades.
Günter Kern reports the following:
“Our father Johannes Karl Ferdinand Kern, born on May 17, 1904 in Leipzig, a teacher by profession, joined the NSDAP in 1933 and, like many others, became a carrier of Nazi ideology. He took part in World War II from 1939 until the end of the war in 1945, with one interruption. His ranks were sergeant, sergeant and from April 14, 1945 Oberfeldwebel. In August 1939 he was drafted into an ‘army horse hospital’ for military service and took part in the campaign in Poland. From May 18, 1943 he was back in military service in a ‘Transport/Security/Bataillon 4’. His task in the war was primarily one Fourier, the non-commissioned officer responsible for board, lodging and accounting for a Wehrmacht unit.
On December 4, 1944, during the ‘defensive fighting’ in the Vosges Mountains/France, he lost his right eye to shrapnel and was badly injured in the head. A shell that fell in the immediate vicinity of the entrenched soldiers also killed many of his comrades. The splinter penetrated his drinking cup before injuring my father so badly. On December 5, 1944 he was admitted to the hospital.
On January 4, 1945, the chief physician and chief physician in the hospital awarded him the ‘Wounded Badge in Silver’. Released from the hospital on January 11, 1945, he kept his bulletproof drinking cup as an expression of his wartime experience until the end of his life.
This severe injury disabled and burdened him mentally and physically until his death in 1987. The loss of his right eye and the splinter stuck in his head meant that our father often suffered from chronic headaches. The painful experiences of our parents during the war and in the post-war period were conveyed to us children in a very memorable way and lived as an example.
My brother Hans-Georg Kern (Georg Baselitz) processed our father’s injuries and humiliations in his well-known ‘hero pictures’.
For me, my father’s story made a significant contribution to being very skeptical about any ideology, no matter how convincing. My refusal to join the ‘SED’ in the GDR on June 5, 1963, and thus also to become a representative of this ideology, resulted in the documented revocation of my admission to study. The verdict that this happened ‘as a result of your insufficient political and ideological maturity’ was a major turning point in my professional and personal development in the former GDR.
Unfortunately, it was only through his experiences in the war that our father came to the conviction and bitter realization that he had followed a criminal system and its ideology. He saved us very effectively from falling into an ‘ideology’ like him, now a Marxist-Leninist ideology, and from having to go through bitter personal experiences like him.”
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