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Bogdan Korczowski 
Poland, its Jewish past, Technocracy, Painting, and the Logic of War... Selected moments from a long talk with David Applefield, soon to be a book.
Bogdan Korczowski is a painter from Krakow who is lived in Paris for twenty years. His grandfather, Wilhelm Korczowski, a political prisoner, died in the concentration camp at Mauthausen on January 14, 1941.
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Bogan Korczowski |
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The incredible part about violence created by humanity is that it doesn´t come out of nowhere. It always comes from advanced thinking, from cutting edge technology. The burning of books in early Nazi Germany first required a "knowledge" of literature. To determine that a book was "rotten," one had to know what was in it. This was the work of Cultural Commissions, appointed experts, careful deliberation. The recent war in Kosovo began with the elimination of Albanian literature ten years earlier, the ousting of professors, the closing of libraries, the censorship of newspapers, the shutting down of television stations. The same in South Africa, Cambodia, and elsewhere. It always starts with the repression of writing. Culture always originates with the written word. And totalitarianism and fascism always depend on the professional destruction of culture.
The threat isn´t the cultural object itself. What is really art? Look at the recently-found watercolors of Adolph Hitler himself. You can always invent a scenario to attack the content. But, the freedom of creating a work of art is already a threat to most totalitarian regimes. The Nazis removed paintings from museums; the paintings themselves were innocent--Cubism and small abstract paintings. It was the mere idea of having the freedom to create abstract paintings that was threatening. Remember, they didn´t select anti-Nazi works specifically, they destroyed the writing of poetry, paintings and books by writers who wrote about love, and that had nothing at all to do with politics. They burned books precisely to show that the only volumes that were "good" were the ones that celebrated themselves. And it worked very well. The schools of fine arts and institutes of music flourished at the same time. This barbarism wasn´t the work of tribalistic mobs who destroyed at random. The modern barbarism lay in the hands of great minds, top engineers, architects, city planners...First, they burned books, then paintings, then entire peoples, to show the superiority of others. Achievements. The horrible logic of the time, we must remember, occurred in the most civilized country in Europe in the 1930s. Even now, the butchery in Rwanda was carefully planned by some of that country´s most talented managers.
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