Documenta's Chronopolitics of the Contemporary, or Un/Curating Nazi Continuities in Werner Haftmann's Historiographic Practice

Abstract

After it had been bombed to ruins during World War II, the partially re-erected Museum Fridericianum became the first home of documenta and its main venue ever since the inception of the exhibition series in 1955. The ruin-scenario with whitewashed brick walls has proven to be the perfect backdrop for hagiographic master-narratives that celebrate the founding fathers of documenta as creative individuals who created the exhibition ex-nihilo after the so-called “Zero Hour”. This chapter seeks to correct the canonical (hi)story of documenta as an arbiter of democracy whose makers were performing a radical break with the Nazi past, by addressing the exhibition’s reproductive and even reparative functions as a cultural midwife of West German identity. documenta’s chronopolitics of the contemporary, I argue, contributed to whitewashing German art and its history by obscuring völkisch-nationalist continuities both on an ideological and a personal level. Situating Werner Haftmann’s historiographic practice in the history of völkisch thought before 1945 and 1933, this chapter seeks to historicize the notion of the contemporary by calling attention to its politically ambivalent genealogies that haunt exhibitions and museums of contemporary art until today.