Resistance and Art: The “Red Orchestra” Anti-Nazi Group in Berlin

BFA Visual and Critical Studies, the SVA Honors Program and the Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art host a lecture by painter and filmmaker Stefan Roloff, exploring the visual art and resistance of three members of the "Red Orchestra" underground anti-Nazi group. Finger food served; RSVP required.

The so-called “Red Orchestra” fought against the Third Reich within Germany from 1933 to 1942. The Gestapo labeled them as Communists and traitors, a theory that was upheld by Allied Secret Services until recently. Historians now officially recognize their work as that of the largest and most diverse civil anti-Nazi resistance group. The participants held a variety of political and religious beliefs while representing the gamut of German society. Many artists were among them and forty percent were women. Putting an end to Hitler was their common goal. In 1942, more than 50 members were betrayed and murdered.

Stefan Roloff will talk about them through the stories of three young painters whose work reflects their exposure to death, atrocity and resistance in a totalitarian empire:

Katja Meirowsky, a Jewish painter and performance artist managed to hide her identity from the Nazis and hid persecuted people in her studio. After the war her experiences resonated in a powerful multi-media project she created in collaboration with fellow artists. Mietje Bontjes van Beek secretly helped French prisoners of war under the radar of their watching guards. Her subsequent drawings transmit a feeling of their encounters. Rainer Küchenmeister became a painter while incarcerated at the age of sixteen, inspired by a fellow female inmate and resister who was later beheaded. After the war his work was shown at documenta among other venues.

Stefan Roloff is an independent artist and filmmaker working in Berlin and New York. In 1984, he was invited to experiment on prototypes of digital video and imaging computers at the New York Institute of Technology where he produced videos with Peter Gabriel and Suicide. He received a 1989 fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts for his pioneering digital work, which has been shown world-wide in museums and galleries. In 1997 he began work on his second documentary film “The Red Orchestra,” a portrait of his late father, Helmut Roloff, a resistance fighter against the Nazis, which was nominated best foreign film 2005 by the Women Critics Circle. For some years the subject of resistance remained a driving force in Stefan Roloff’s work. He created video-portraits of 80 dissidents from former Communist East Germany, resulting in a series of installations. Among other works he is currently working on a project about the smashing of monuments and a graphic novel-style feature about the Red Orchestra.

The Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art researches, discusses, publishes and exhibits artists whose life and work were affected by the German Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. They seek to commemorate their artistic achievements and educate a global audience about the Holocaust through the arts, initiating an active dialogue about individuality and artistic integrity in response to conditions of extreme duress and to political tyranny.