For an exhibition by the painter Fritz Winter, then 57 years old, the art critic Will Grohmann wrote in 1962, “What connects him, the older artist, with the younger generation is his relationship with the earth, this earth which is made in such a way that after all the detours humans have taken through space, it makes itself known again.” [1] At a time when the extinction of many species and the climate catastrophe can be felt in our everyday lives, this sentence draws our attention. Winter himself made a similar statement: “One thing is certain; in the future we will continue to stick closer to the earth than to the Sputnik.” [2] However, it is his emphatic insistence on connection with the earth that casts doubt on whether his work can really point toward the future. Thus, the Winter researcher Gabriele ­Lohberg laments the fact that reception of his work has veered too much into nature philosophy: “The actual work ends up being hidden behind extravagant gushing about ‘elemental forces,’ ‘cosmic visions,’ and ‘connectedness with the universe.’” [3] Lohberg also acknowledges that the artist himself played a part in this “gushing” and even goes so far as to attest that he had a certain “proximity to Nazi vocabulary.” [4]

Without wishing to resolve this ambivalence, I would like to test out a different interpretation. It seems to me that the Triebkräfte der Erde (Driving Forces of the Earth), a series of paintings in which Winter sounds out his terrestrial orientation in depth, offers criteria for a decidedly emancipatory relation to nature. Mythologization and reification are both overcome by an aesthetic that I will describe as “anti-fascist abstraction.”

The work cycle of the series consists of 45 small oil paintings, in which earthy undercoats and geometric surfaces overlap, light is refracted into crystalline forms, and strong colors occasionally come to the fore, but overall, muted brown tones and milky white layers take precedence. [5] Winter completed the paintings during his convalescent leave from the front between Christmas 1943 and spring 1944. He painted on typewriter paper, because as a “degenerate” artist, he was forbidden to exhibit and to work, and he did not have access to any of the painting materials that were rationed by the Reich Chamber of Culture. [6]

In 1930, Winter received his diploma from the Bauhaus, where he was influenced especially by Paul Klee. Coming from a mining family in the northern Ruhr and having communist sympathies, he was an unusual figure in Dessau: he had worked in the mines as a trained electrician, and for a while he was so short of money that he slept in the cellar of a school. “Compared with him, we were babies,” remembers his fellow student Hans Fischli. [7] After Hitler came to power, Winter moved to the Bavarian countryside with his partner, Margarete Schreiber-Rüffer: “it seems we will have to do our work in exile for a while,” he said in a letter, writing in lowercase according to left-wing principles. [8]

Schreiber-Rüffer, who had completed her studies of political economy in the city of Halle in 1915, the first year in which women were permitted to graduate, was distinctly more active politically. [9] She belonged to the socialist women’s movement and kept a “guest house” in her home in Dießen am Ammersee, where Jews were provided with passports allowing them to leave for Switzerland. [10] She was friends with numerous artists, including Else Lasker-Schüler. Without Schreiber-Rüffer’s patronage, Winter would have lacked both public recognition and the external conditions necessary for his prolific work. When he returned in 1949 from a Russian prisoner-of-war camp, ­Schreiber-Rüffer’s strategic management had enabled him to become famous in his absence.

But what defines the core of the work she supported? If one simply considers the themes of “driving forces” or the “energy” of nature, this does not necessarily reveal any emancipatory content. Is Winter’s art only indirectly anti-fascist, then, by virtue of belonging to a persecuted art movement and through association with Schreiber-Rüffer, while the theme of nature led him toward a retreat from the world or toward a new paganism that was open to right-wing influences?

Constructing such an opposition seems misguided to me. The dividing line is not between naturalization and denaturalization, between country and city, between romanticism and objectivity. At all points, it runs right through nature itself, as a line between domination and emancipation. Domination over nature is – like all modern domination – a form of propertization. [11] It relies on the reification of something living, which is treated as property.

Every emancipatory effort in today’s world is a struggle against such reification at two levels: the level of capitalist economics, which carves up ecosystems into resources in order to use them up and market them; and the level of fascist ideology, which creates phantasms with the appearance of property, on which the most favored groups of people focus their attitude of entitlement. I describe these illusions as phantom property. They obscure the question of the actual property relations and invent enemies against which it becomes possible to defend the scope of one’s own despotism. [12] When people say “We’re taking our country back,” they are not talking about the fields that have been sold to investors; rather, they are referring to the ethno-national lifeworld that is to be cleansed of non-white people.

Fundamentally, propertization, the transfer of the living into objects that are owned, is itself an abstraction. Multifarious entities, with all their far-reaching connections to each other, are reduced to the common denominator of potential property. But where the abstraction has become real through violent action, legal regulations, and ingrained ideas, concretion certainly no longer offers a remedy for it. A landscape painting is no more capable than a nude drawing of defending itself against the gaze that parcels out its subject and implies that it can be owned.

Fascist ecology expresses itself in phantasmatic domination over nature, or in blind submission to its supposed order. The Driving Forces of the Earth counters this with a different abstraction. We could call it the abstraction of an ecologically reflected modern age, or simply: anti-fascist abstraction.

Three factors define its specific quality. The first and perhaps most noticeable difference from the abstraction of propertization consists in the fact that Winter’s compositions do not represent things but dynamics. He is not concerned with representing nature but with comprehending its forces. [13] Winter, who took a great interest in the sciences, tries through aesthetic means to find models for dynamic relationships, particularly where these have been broken off by destruction and exploitation. The forests that had been exploded by positional warfare, just like the coal seams, are underpinned by the organic power of growth, which Winter methodically endeavors to make visible. The dynamic revealed in the abstract image, however, is not one of elemental force. When we consider the action taking place in the image, “a delicate structure can always also be traced, a quiet gesture, a whispering language,” as the art historian Tayfun Belgin puts it. [14] The force of nature that Winter uncovers is anti-fascist partly because it does not aim for the triumph of greater strength but seems to be interwoven with a striving for freedom. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer extend this striving to the whole of natural history: “The infinite patience, the tender, never-extinguished impulse of creaturely life toward expression and light.” [15]

The energies captured by Winter are, second, always already plural – in sharp contrast to fascist vitalism. This is no sovereign elemental force but an interplay between forces, depending on many conditions and taking many different forms: “Spiritual fusion, without the destruction of the individual form,” as Lohberg describes it. [16] The plural driving forces resist hierarchization. Already in response to the political conflicts within the Bauhaus, Winter emphasizes the following value of abstract painting: “the new composition […] knows no domination, but only an equality between all forces. is it meaningless to spend time with these things? does it have no value for our new form of life?” [17]

Thus, dynamic, egalitarian abstraction breaks the bounds of reification as well as the authoritarian subject-object relation of property-shaped abstraction. Added to this as a third characteristic is a transcendence that marks a fundamental uncontrollability. In attempting to capture creative forces, Winter is already aiming at the invisible. “it is not about showing what is there, but about revealing what is also there,” he writes in a letter during the war. The invisible which is also there means, on the one hand, the forces that Winter aims to trace in his paintings, just as the sand ripples on the seabed register the current. [18] However, he is also concerned with sensing the more spiritual forces that are specific to the human imagination but can only be portrayed through approximations. He writes,

I believe that only the human spirit can ascend to spaces and heights that surround the universe, ungendered, like day and night. And great insights have no vivid colors, they are either black or white or grey. […] I am glad that I am red and yellow, but I long for grey, the infinite … We have to serve that infinitude – and my only task in art is to say this over and over. [19]

It seems to me that the “degenerate” abstraction that represents nature as an infinite dynamic without domination really can be called anti-fascist. It resists both the totalitarian pose of limitless ownership and the authoritarian reification to a disposable object. Nor does it tend toward ecofascist hostility to humans, because it regards humans themselves as a significant part of nature. Fritz Winter’s terrestrial painting is an exercise in concentration that comes closer to the earth precisely because it translates it into new, free forms.

Translation: Lucy Duggan

Eva von Redecker is a philosopher and author. Her most recent publication is Bleibefreiheit (2023), published by S. Fischer Verlag.

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