Heinz Weiß on War and Peace in the Kunsthalle Darmstadt

In the end, psychoanalysis had the last word. What was amazing that evening, after all, you couldn’t shake the feeling that she couldn’t get her subject under control. Not in the way the audience obviously hoped, anyway. Namely that Heinz Weiss immediately applied his clever and quite coherent ideas on the “aura of war” developed by Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, John Rickman and Roger Money-Kyrle to practical use. But here it was all about theory. And yet Freud had long since said everything that moved visitors to the Darmstadt Kunsthalle to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“The citizen of culture”, so Freud 1915 in the face of the horrors of the First World War, standing there at a loss “in a world that had become alien to him”. What characterizes the series as a whole on this second evening initiated by the Kunsthalle and the Evangelical City Academy to accompany the current exhibition by Thomas Sturm about the “aura of a torn world”. However, the upcoming events on the “Aura of our Cities” and the “Aura of Rituals and Symbols” will hardly be more topical than Weiss’s psychoanalytically motivated answers to the question of the fascination and horror of war.