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This allegory for Europe, seeming indifferent to the horrors that have taken place and its own wounds, was chosen by artist Harald Pickert in 1945 as the cover image for his cycle titled Pestbeulen Europas (Buboes of Europe) – a merciless treatment of the years he spent imprisoned at Nazi concentration camps. Tragically, this very Europe, this personification of indifference, also reflects the response that Pickert encountered from those around him in the years immediately after the war, when he wished to testify to his experiences.

A closer look at the cover page shows pencil lines used to align the letters and words and that have been erased. Alongside documenting the horrifying reality that Pickert endured as a prisoner at the camps, his sketches, drawings, and etchings also offer insight into his artistic process.

Just a short time before or after he was liberated from the Dachau concentration camp, he made sketches that captured his experiences in images, some of them on pieces of cardboard, sandwich wrappers, and official camp letterhead, as paper was in short supply.

Now, an exhibition titled Harald Pickert:Die Pestbeulen Europas. Naziterror in Konzentrationslagern, 1939-45 (Harald Pickert: Buboes of Europe. Nazi Terror at Concentration Camps, 1939–45) jointly organized by the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism and the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (Central Institute for Art History) showcases a selection of Pickert’s works. Scheduled to run until July 29, 2020, the exhibition traces to impressive effect how the sketches developed into ink drawings and etchings.

Pickert, who was born in 1901, spent his youth in the town of Kufstein. After apprenticing as a painter and etcher, he took over his father’s publishing business and print shop in 1928. He was interned as a political prisoner in 1939 for openly criticizing National Socialism.

Pickert spent the next five and a half years interned at several concentration camps: Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, and Dachau.

He compiled and published his cycle Pestbeulen Europas in St. Anton, in the Tyrol region, in 1946. It documented the violence he had experienced in the camps to drastic effect, but met with hardly any interest in the immediate postwar period. Pickert never spoke of his experiences again. He died in Kufstein in 1983.

It was not until 2015 that the drawings were rediscovered as part of his estate. Since then, his granddaughter Elke Pickert has made them accessible to the public, online and in exhibitions.

Pickert added comments to most of his drawings, giving the viewer not just additional background information on the scenes depicted, but also inviting further consideration due to ironic juxtapositions.

The aim of his stark drawings was to hold a mirror up to postwar society and force it to look at “the buboes of Europe.” But this kind of open approach to the past was undesirable both socially and politically – and so Pickert packed up his “mirror,” his drawings, his memories, and kept silent.

What might have happened if he had been able to post his pictures on social media? Would they have gone viral, triggering public outcry and protest? Or would they have been lost in the flood of images washing over us day after day?

And how might each of us as individuals have responded to these drastic depictions of violence and cruelty?

This final question is not a hypothetical one, unfortunately, as each new day brings us news and images telling of inhumanity and injustice in our times.

What is our answer?

By Elisabeth Schulte, research associate at the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism