Olaf Kühnemann is an Israeli and German painter, although neither of these categories fully encapsulates his identity. His parents met in Germany. They moved to Switzerland to join an anthroposophical community in Dornach/Arlesheim, where Olaf was born in 1972. After their separation, the family moved to Canada with his mother’s new Jewish-Israeli partner. When he was eight years old, they moved to Israel where he lived most of his adult life. In 2009, he moved to Berlin, where he resides with his family and works from his studio in Kreuzberg. Questions about identity formation and transformation have thus been a motivating force throughout his artistic practice.

Kühnemann often uses family photographs as the point of departure for his storytelling. The expressive painting entitled “Child” is inspired too by an old and fading childhood photograph. It depicts his mother, aged three or four, in the garden of her parents’ house in Berlin. In the background, a baby girl’s dress and some clothes hang from a rope between two trees, signaling the innocence and peacefulness of a child’s play. The photograph, which at first glance appears to depict an idyllic childhood moment, was taken only a few years after the war, when the ruins of Berlin after the Allied bombing were still very present. The contradiction between the stillness and tranquility of the image and the destruction outside can be felt in the painting. It is clearly not a place of longing or nostalgia. The garden in the background is reduced to abstract gray heavy brush strokes, and the reclining child appears isolated and vulnerable, evoking an ominous desolation. This haunting painting, set against the biography of the artist’s mother, who grew up in the “Land der Täter” (Country of the Perpetrators), echoes the devastating cycle of transgenerational trauma of war and evokes the fragility of childhood affected by the visible and invisible wounds of war.

The meanings that emerge from the artwork become even more complex when placed in the particular context of its creation. Kühnemann was invited by the Israeli activist organization “Parents Against Child Detention”, to contribute to the wandering group exhibition: “Innocence Disrupted: Children in War Time”. The exhibition, which was displayed in public spaces in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem (where it was violently attacked by right-wing Jewish extremists), called for an end to the war in Gaza and to prevent further suffering of children living in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, by raising awareness of the harm inflicted upon children and their silent cry.

The linking of the German post-war trauma with another current, urgent and unfolding traumatic war in Israel and Palestine, evokes the convoluted Gordian knot that binds the fates of the three national groups. This intricate weaving can be read as a compelling call to respond emphatically to the suffering of others, in spite of their otherness. The work also goes beyond the homogenizing victim/perpetrator binary that so often characterizes the dominant discourse on the German-Israeli-Palestinian triangle. It offers us a potential vision in which different groups could recognize and acknowledge the burden of the other’s inherited trauma, not based on the logic of competitive victimhood, but on the pressing need for change.