18. Oktober 1977: Gerhard Richter's Work of Mourning and its New Audience

Abstract

In 1999, eleven years after Gerhard Richter's 18. Oktober 1977 paintings were first exhibited, their cathectic energy had become exhausted—so much so that the presence of these extraordinary pictures was no longer regarded a necessity in Germany. The fifteen canvases commemorate the imprisonment and death in 1977 of members of the radical Baader-Meinhof group, who were convicted of acts of terrorism in what was then West Germany. It should come as no surprise that Richter's work of mourning, which so beautifully expresses the painful and tragic complicity of perpetrators and victims, should have become dislocated and removed, both literally and figuratively, from the place where the incidents occured. And why not? A generation after the terrible events of 1977, the leaden years of the Deutscher Herbst (the German Autumn, as the terrorist period is known) seem more distant than ever.