Feuilleton

Geld stinkt eben doch

Voll waren die Auftragsbücher zu Nazizeiten: Eine Ausstellung in der ifa-Galerie Berlin erinnert an Profiteure des Massenmords

Article with photo still Röslein sprach…, (Money stinks after all - the order books were full during the Nazi times: an exhibition in the ifa Gallery remembers those who profited from mass murder) (unpublished) Berlin (D)

Boss & SS

"…The British artist Tanya Ury, who now lives in Cologne, has taken Hugo Boss AG on, most well known for its highly advertised gentleman's collection. Ury recalls the early history of the Metzingen industrialist, who soon after his becoming a member of the German National Socialist Party in 1931, received large orders to complete SA (Storm Trooper), SS and Hitler Youth Uniforms. As Elisabeth Timm discovered from her research work, commissioned by Hugo Boss AG, but since its completion in 1999, still unpublished, the firm advertised themselves as "Contract Firm for National Socialist Party Uniforms from 1924"…"

"…Ury undertook a certain correction of the Boss logo and produced a "BoSS" T-Shirt. The painful process of remembering the Forced Labourers, above all in the 1940's, when the company went to Poland expressively, to seek them out, is made most perceptible in the artist's performance. She sews the Boss logo into her hand with many stitches. The soundtrack is "Sah ein Knab ein Röslein stehen" (A boy once saw a rosebud rare, Goethe/Schubert).

In a photoseries, Ury presents her body, sparingly covered in a Nazi Luftwaffe leather coat, alongside Boss advertisements and together with the naïve illustrations from Spanish postcards of the Franco era, that aim to lend an erotic aura to the already social attractiveness of the soldier…"

Part of an article by Matthias Reichelt (English translation Tanya Ury)