Beginning of the friendship with Simon Wiesenthal

Simon Wiesenthal
1988

"Not even the children were spared; they, too, fell victim to the destruction.
It was Gottfried Helnwein's most convincing idea to present the consequences to this "period without mercy" in such an unconventional manner. He made no use of photos of heaped corpses; children's portraits force the observer to stop and consider this idea. The fury with which the neo-nazis reacted to these portraits is understandable inasmuch as it is the very same fury with which they have for years been fighting against The Diary of Anne Frank; the murder of children rouses abhorrence and conflict in every human, whether they are motivated by ideology or insanity. The urge to destroy has survived; the portraits bear witness to its rage - an attempt was made to cut them to shreds. "People, please, stop,... look at these children's faces, multiply their number by a few hundred thousand. Only then will you realise or gain an inkling of the extent of this holocaust, of the greatest tragedy in human history!"

Gottfried Helnwein, Ninth November Night
Catalogue for thr Installation "Ninth November night"
Museum Ludwig Cologne 17.9. - 30.11.1988
Museé de l'Elysée Lausanne 22.6. - 30.8.1990

THOUGHTS, by Simon Wiesenthal

Gottfried Helnwein - Ninth November Night
Museum of Tolerance, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Los Angeles
Documentary "Ninth November Night" , Children and the Holocaust in the Art of Gottfried Helnwein
Jonathon Keats
November 9, 2003

In fact, his work is insistently open-ended. Like Goya's Disasters of War, his art queries time and again, "How can this have happened?" Sometimes viewers reply, assaulting pictures of innocent children, worshipping those of a murderous dictator. Yet such reactions can only bring us to inquire again, louder and with greater urgency, "How can this have happened?" At last we recognize that Helnwein asks questions not in order to solicit answers - hate has no reason - but rather in order that we might begin to pose our own.

THE ART OF HUMANITY, by Jonathon Keats