: Bedřich Fritta, Film and Reality, 1944
Pen and ink, 31,1 x 56,1 cm
© Thomas Fritta-Haas, long-term loan to the Jewish Museum Berlin, photo: Jens Ziehe

In late summer 1944, when the Red Cross had left, the SS used the "beautified" ghetto as a set for its propaganda film "Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area." Apart from the cameramen, all those working on the film were prisoners. Almost all of them were deported to Auschwitz soon after filming was completed.

Phantasmagorias

In this group of drawings, Fritta works with the visual language of the fantastic and grotesque. He depicts the ghetto as a theater of death triumphant and the end of the world. The pictures are influenced by the iconography of the Flood and the Dance Macabre, and by the uncanny pictorial worlds of symbolism around 1900, such as the art of the Austrian Alfred Kubin.

Fritta sometimes also gives this surreal atmosphere to drawings that portray specific events or common situations. In Life and Death in the Yard, the grotesquely enlarged head of the figure in the foreground reveals the artist's vision of the uncanny and dangerously unfathomable aspects of everyday ghetto life. In Film and Reality, Fritta creates an eerie tableau by distorting the set of a propaganda film.

: Bedřich Fritta, Life and Death in the Yard, 1943/44
Ink, pen and brush, 53,2 x 81,8 cm
© Thomas Fritta-Haas, long-term loan to the Jewish Museum Berlin, photo: Jens Ziehe

to top

: Bedřich Fritta, Drum of Death , 1943/44
Pen and ink, 43,8 x 31 cm
© Thomas Fritta-Haas, long-term loan to the Jewish Museum Berlin, photo: Jens Ziehe

to top

: Bedřich Fritta, Tower of Death, 1943/44
Pen and ink, 46,8 x 33,8 cm
© Thomas Fritta-Haas, long-term loan to the Jewish Museum Berlin, photo: Jens Ziehe

Fritta's Tower of Death can be regarded as alluding to the tower of the camp headquarters, topped by a flag. In the basement of that building, there was a jail where prisoners were locked up and tortured.

to top

: Bedřich Fritta, Fantasia, 1943/44
Pen and ink, scratched crayon, 40 x 57 cm
© Thomas Fritta-Haas, long-term loan to the Jewish Museum Berlin, photo: Jens Ziehe

The extravagant figure raising her champagne glass may be read as the Whore of Babylon. She appears in the biblical Book of Revelation holding a golden cup and drunk with the blood of saints, as the embodiment of evil. In this picture, her saber and shako refer to the military history of the Theresienstadt fortress.

to top

: Bedřich Fritta, Fantasia (The Flood), 1943/44
Pen and ink, 38,6 x 54,8 cm
© Thomas Fritta-Haas, long-term loan to the Jewish Museum Berlin, photo: Jens Ziehe

to top

Bedřich Fritta
Drawings
from the
Theresienstadt
Ghetto

Phantasmagorias