Lebensunwertes Leben or Life is not Worth Living, 1979 watercolor on cardboard by Gottfried Helnwein (b. 1948 -) Austrian-Irish painter
In 1979, spurred into action by an interview in an Austrian tabloid in which the country’s top court psychiatrist, Dr. Heinrich Gross, admitted killing children at Vienna’s Am Spiegelgrund Paediatric Unit during the war by poisoning their food, Helnwein painted Lebensunwertes Leben or Life is not Worth Living – a watercolour of a little girl “asleep” on the table, her head in her plate.
Helnwein recalls:
“He was the most celebrated forensic psychiatrist and a member of the Social Democrats and he had all the medals of honour that you could get and then they found out that he killed 800 children. So the reporter asked “did you poison them?” and [Dr. Gross] said they were looking for a humane way [of killing them] so they came up with putting poison in the food; so when the kids were eating they were not aware that they would die. When I read [the article] I was in shock because somebody had just admitted he had killed 800 children and everybody couldn’t be more relaxed. I thought this should have raised a storm of protest or something but not one voice, not one guy would write to this fucking newspaper, there was nothing.
At the same time on National Television for the first time, it was not an anchor man but some guy in television was appearing with out a tie, like with a white shirt but no tie. They got 3,500 letters of protest, they freaked out, people were freaked, this is the end of everything, you know? They were completely upset and I thought something is wrong. Here is a guy with no fucking tie and people think it is the end. Here a guy killed 800 and it was nothing.
And I thought OK, maybe it is a reading problem, so I called the guys from the news magazine and I said “Give me a page, I need a page, I will paint an open letter to the guy.” And they said “Ok you can have it in two days” and so I had to paint, day and night. I painted exactly what he said – the girl with the food and her head in the plate. I painted it realistically with watercolours and then I wrote this small thing thanking him and that actually caused a storm of protest and so now suddenly people wrote to this magazine upset about the painting, not about the guy. This tiny little picture started a huge discussion.” [Dr. Gross was eventually forced to resign.]
Excerpt and photo from Gottfried Helnwein, Memorializing the Holocaust (a dissertation)
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