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Beauty is not pasted over suffering but grows out of it—like the proverbial shoot from parched ground. Bruce Herman

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German Glass Installations after 1945 - K. Mulder

From the Mirror of the Infinite to the Broken Looking Glass: Unveiling Beauty in German Glass Installations after the Holocaust

by Karen Mulder
 
Germany’s lengthy postwar reconstruction ostensibly provided the unique set of conditions that fostered a significant conceptual departure in the design of large-scale glass installations generically, but inaccurately, known as “stained glass.” After 1945, thousands of churches and civic sites shattered or gutted by Allied bomb raids required provisional and eventually permanent restorations, including glass replacements. Similarly fragmented, the nation’s ideations of its own identity were radically, irredeemably ruptured, and demanded aesthetic responses across all artistic disciplines that diplomatically confronted its citizens’ witting or unwitting complicity in the Holocaust.