Dhe Buchenwald and Mittelbau Dora Memorials Foundation acquires the 140 square meter installation “Reminiscences” by the Polish artist, theater director and director Prof. Dr. Jozef Szajna (1922 to 2008). As a Polish resistance fighter, Szajna was imprisoned in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. The “Reminiscences” are today regarded as one of the main works of his artistic examination of National Socialism and the Holocaust. The cultural foundation of the federal states supports the purchase with 273,000 euros.
Józef Szajna made the so-called “Environment” (installation) in Kraków in 1969. With the installation he refers to the arrest and murder of 169 professors and graduates of the Kraków Art Academy in 1942. In 1970 “Reminiscences” was shown at the Venice Biennale and acquired by the collector Gertrud Johnssen. Since 1998, the installation has been exhibited as a loan in the memorial’s art museum; Szajna set up the environment there with his own hand. The Buchenwald and Mittelbau Dora Memorials Foundation is now acquiring the work from the heirs of the late collector Gertrud Johnssen. During the Ruhr Festival in 1972, Szajna’s installation was shown in Germany for the first time. At that time, the social coming to terms with the crimes of National Socialism had only just begun (Frankfurt Auschwitz trials 1963 to 1965) and so Szajna’s work still encountered resistance in society. His work was not permanently exhibited and ended up in the depot of the Kunstmuseum Bochum. The installation came to Weimar in 1998. After a change in the understanding of the culture of remembrance in the Federal Republic of Germany, the installation is now considered one of the most important works in dealing with the crimes of National Socialism in Germany.
Józef Szajna was born in Rzeszów, Poland, in 1922. At the age of 17 he joined the resistance against the Nazi occupiers, was arrested in 1940 and imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp. After attempting to escape, he was sentenced to death in 1943. He survived the penal company and was transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944, and later to the Buchenwald subcamp in Schönebeck near Magdeburg. Szajna secretly produced his first artistic works in Buchenwald, two of which have been in the possession of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau Dora Memorials Foundation since 1990. Szajna returned to his native Poland in 1947, where he studied graphics and stage design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. He worked as a stage designer, later also as a theater manager and director. In 1972 he finally got his own theater and became a professor at the Art Academy in Kraków. A museum is dedicated to him in his native town of Rzeszów. Today he is considered one of the founding fathers of performative theater (auteur theatre).
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