Dark Spring: In Memory of Unica Zürn and a Brief Note on a New Exhibition Reimagining Her Legacy

Photo of Unica Zürn by Man Ray (1956) and a flyer for the 

Dark Spring - syzygy exhibition ft. Vicky Wright's V-Effekt (2024) 

 

"There can never have been a spring more beautifully dark than this ..."

 

 

I. 

 

Unica Zürn, for those who might not recognise the name, was a German author and artist, probably most famous for her anagrammatic poetry, automatic drawings, and the notorious nude photos produced in collaboration with her Surrealist lover, Hans Bellmer, in 1958, in which she was bound so tightly with string that it cut into her flesh.

 

Born in the summer of 1916, in the Grunewald district of Berlin, Zürn adored her (mostly absent) father; had a stormy relationship with her (uncaring) mother; and was sexually abused by her older brother. 

 

After leaving school, she began working at the film agency which produced propaganda material for the Nazi Party, although Zürn herself was not a party member (and, besides, a girl has to make a living somehow).

 

She married a much older - and also much wealthier - man during the War and bore him two children. Unfortunately, following a divorce in 1949, Zürn lost custody of both bairns, lacking as she did the means to support them (or indeed herself).    

 

Deciding that she was more suited to a bohemian life rather than one of domestic drudgery and child-rearing, Zürn began to hang around the caberet circuit and frequent the bars and clubs popular with artists, whilst earning what she could by writing short stories for newspapers and dramas for the radio.

 

Zürn also became romantically involved with the painter and dancer Alexander Camaro, although it was her meeting with Hans Bellmer in 1953 that was to prove pivotal; the two of them fleeing Germany and relocating to Paris, where she became his mistress, model, and muse. 

 

Whilst in Paris, Zürn also began experimenting with her own artwork; if Bellmer secretly wished to slice up bodies, she was more interested in how to fragment language and produce a style of writing she termed Hexentexte (1954). 

 

Before long, she and Hans were very much part of the Surrealist in-crowd, mixing with André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray ... and all the other usual suspects. But the good times were not to last and in 1960 Zürn experienced a psychotic episode - which may or may not have been triggered by her experiments with mescaline. 

 

Following this, dissociative states, severe depression, and suicidal thoughts became the norm and she was diagnosed as a schizophrenic (and not in the positive sense that Deleuze and Guatarri would later thrill to). If, on the one hand, she continued to produce new work, on the other, she destroyed many of her earlier drawings and writings.  

 

Long story short: in October 1970, 54-year-old Zürn committed suicide by leaping from the window of the Paris apartment she had shared with Bellmer, while on a five-day leave from a psychiatric hospital. She was buried at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris and, at his request, Bellmer was buried next to her upon his death in 1975.

 

One of Zürn's final written works was the semi-autobiographical Dunkler Frühling (1967) [1], which tells the story of an obsessive young woman as she has her first sexual encounters and experiences the onset of mental illness. 

 

Somewhat disconcertingly, Zürn's death seems to be foreshadowed in the text as the protagonist of Dark Spring also tops herself by jumping out of a window, although, as it rather poignantly says in the book: She was dead even before her feet left the windowsill.

 

This book has since acquired cult status, particularly amongst feminists, female artists, and those who find her life (and death) fascinating (even romantic). Thus it is, for example, one can wander around Hoxton on a sunny afternoon and come across a contemporary gallery space on Vestry Street running an exhibition entitled Dark Spring - syzygy [2] ...    

II.

There were only eleven paintings on show - two from each of the five artists featured in the exhibition, with an extra one for luck by Sadie Murdoch thrown into the mix - but I struggled to see how some of the pictures repurposed and re-routed the principles of Zürn's work, as promised in the exhibition press release (though I'm perfectly willing to concede this might be a failure on my part). 

 

I liked Murdoch's Pass-Way Into Where To (2022) - an ink-jet printed digital montage, operating, it is claimed, in "the field of power and absence, via the partial, the incomplete, the crop and the edit" (see Figure 1 below).

 

And I also really liked a canvas by Petra Williams entitled Floating Man (2024); not so much for the questions it posed re identity, isolation, relationship to others, the need to create one's own space, etc., but because the colours were so lovely (see Figure 2 below).

 

But perhaps my favorite work was a pair of pictures by Vicky Wright in her V-Effekt series (2024). For these at least gave us amorphous figures with distorted bodies and a layering of faces that one might expect and hope for in an exhibition inspired by Unica Zürn.

 

The writer of the exhibition press release describes them as anti-portraits and speaks of how their woozy painterliness troubles subjectivity, thereby obliging the viewer to reconsider the idea of the human self in relation to non-human elements, both demonic and animal (see Figure 3 below).        

 

Fig. 1 Sadie Murdoch: Pass-Way Into Where To (2022)

Fig. 2 Petra Williams: Floating Man (2024)

Fig. 3 Vicky Wright: V-Effekt II (2024)

Notes

 

[1] This short novel by Unica Zürn has been translated into English by Caroline Rupprecht and was published by Exact Change in 2000. 

 

[2] The exhibition at Cross Lane Projects (1st floor, 6-8 Vestry Street, London N1), runs until 19 April, 2025, and features work by Vicky Wright, Josephine Wood, Petra K. Williams, Sadie Murdoch, and Tracey Owusu. For full details and to download the press release from which I quote in this post, please click here.   

Auschwitz-Geschichten 2: Block 24 (The Dolls House)

Block 24 - just go through the big iron gates that read Arbeit Macht Frei and it's the first building on your left - was the Auschwitz brothel, commonly referred to as a Dolls House. 

 

It was one of several such institutions established by the Nazis within their network of camps in order to reward and incentivise prisoners and, Himmler hoped, reorientate the sexuality of those wearing pink triangles [1].

 

The (non-Jewish) women obliged to work in these brothels came mainly from Ravensbrück, although Auschwitz recruited sex slaves from among its own inmate population [2]. Usually aged in their 20s, the women had sex with an average of six or seven men every evening between 8 and 10pm. They also had to work on Sunday afternoons. Some of the women underwent forced sterilization; those who didn't and became pregnant were forced to have abortions.  

 

The (non-Jewish) male prisoners had to pay two Reichsmarks for a fifteen-minute session with a girl who was chosen for them. They were first examined to ensure they were (relatively) clean and healthy and were instructed that only vaginal intercourse in the missionary position was permitted (the doors of the girls' rooms had peepholes so that SS guards could keep an eye on proceedings and ensure there were no perverse or violent acts committed).  

 

As might be imagined, there was a fairly high turnover of women, who were fucked until either too exhausted or too ill to continue, at which point their services - and sometimes their lives - were terminated [3].

 

Despite this, there were other women desperate to take their place, as they at least got to have a small room of their own within the brothel, wear clean clothes, and be given additional food from the SS kitchen. They were even given rudimentary medical care. Naturally, this caused anger and resentment amongst other female inmates, but it did make surviving the camp significantly easier - and survival was ultimately the name of the game. 

After the War, the women rarely spoke of their experiences and they were not awarded any compensation - indeed, their existence was scarcely even acknowledged [4].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Himmler conceived the idea of establishing concentration camp brothels in October 1941. The first Dolls House was set up a year later, at Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Ultimately, the Lagerbordell did not produce any noticeable increase in prisoner productivity levels and I very much doubt they provided an effective form of gay conversion therapy. What they did do was further demonstrate the depth of Nazi corruption and depravity.   

[2] It is worth noting that some of the women had previously worked as prostitutes; indeed, it was this anti-social activity that had got them arrested and put in the camps in the first place. The SS reasoned that it would help with the establishment of their own brothels if they recruited professionals at least to begin with. Of course, the fact that some of the women had already been involved in the sex industry doesn't in any way mitigate the cynical cruelty of Nazi sexual exploitation. 

[3] After finishing their time in the brothels, some of the women were made camp functionaries and, according to recent research, those who withstood the hardship of brothel life did have an increased chance of escaping death in the camps. Indeed, almost all the women in forced prostitution survived. 

      Those interested in knowing more on this topic (and who read German) should see Robert Sommer, Das KZ-Bordell: Sexuelle Zwangsarbeit in nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern (Schöningh Verlag, 2009). A review of the book, by Thomas Kühne, can be found in Central European History Vol. 45, No. 3 (September 2012), pp. 593-595. Click here to read on JSTOR.  

[4] There are some notable exceptions to this silence, first and foremost among them the French documentary Nuit et brouillard (dir. Alain Resnais, 1956), which acknowledged the existence of concentration camp brothels based on interviews with survivors. 

      Mention might also be made of The House of Dolls (1953), a novella by the Jewish writer (and former Auschwitz inmate) Ka-Tsetnik 135633 (Yehiel De-Nur), which concerns the women who were kept for the sexual pleasure of German soldiers during World War II and known as the 'Joy Division' [Freudenabteilung]. 

    Written in Hebrew, De-Nur's work tends to blur the line between fact and fiction and has been described as pornographic by some critics, who see it as paving the way for later Nazi-themed sexploitation movies such as Love Camp 7 (dir. Lee Frost, 1969) and Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, (dir. Don Edmonds, 1975). 

 

 

To read other tales from Auschwitz, click here and here.   

 

 

Hello Dolly: On the Life and Work of Hans Bellmer

Hans Bellmer: Die Puppe (1936)

Despite the recent creations of the Chapman Brothers in this line, it seems to me that the dolls of German artist Hans Bellmer, constructed and photographed during the 1930s, still retain a greater power to disturb; they are somehow less comical and more creepy, more uncanny.

Opposed as he was to Hitler, Bellmer determined to make no work that could be appropriated by the Nazis or which might be interpreted in any way as supportive of fascist aesthetics. Thus his dolls, with their deformed and mutated bodies arranged in provocative poses, were consciously designed to challenge the prevailing idea of what constituted Aryan beauty and physical perfection.

This is not to deny, however, other sources of inspiration for his dolls project, both artistic and personal, including his love of pubescent girls and his pygmalionism. But it was undoubtedly his politics as much as his perversity which eventually brought him to the attention of the Nazis, who classified his work in a category designated degenerate art - i.e., work which insulted German sensibility and attempted to corrupt or confuse the forms of nature. To be fair, that's exactly what Bellmer wanted to do.

Forced to flee to France in 1938, Bellmer was welcomed with open arms by the Surrealists who had already published photographs of his dolls several years earlier. Briefly imprisoned as a German national during the early months of the war, he later aided the French Resistance during the occupation by making fake passports.  

Choosing to remain in France after the war, Bellmer lived in Paris until his death in 1975. Although he made no more dolls, he continued working into the 1960s, creating sexually explicit drawings, photographs, paintings and prints (mostly of young girls). Bellmer said of his own work during this period that it constituted an attempt to produce images that it would be impossible to think or describe in words.  

His place in 20th century art history is secured and his cultural influence has not been insignificant.

One final note: in 2006, the Whitechapel Gallery removed twelve of Bellmer's works from a retrospective exhibition. Ostensibly on the grounds of spacial consideration, the rumour persists that the action was due to the organizers concern that the pieces might be particularly offensive to the local Muslim population. Again, to be fair, Bellmer's work doubtless would upset Islamofascists for much the same reasons and in much the same manner as it did the Nazis, but one sincerely hopes there is no truth in this story ...