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SCHADENFREUDE explored anti-Semitism by way of a "Nazi wallpaper showroom." (Schadenfreude is a German word meaning the delight one gets from someone else's misfortune.) Using illustrations taken from one 1935 German Brockhaus dictionary I created six wallpaper patterns through combining and slightly altering the illustrations by drawing on them. While the designs may seem innocuous at first glance, their more tragic and ironic implications (as seen from the historical perspective of more than 60 years) are revealed with longer viewing. The motifs were first enlarged as photocopies, and then produced as silkscreened wallpaper which I ultimately arranged into a 1600-square-foot three-room installation at the Imperial War Museum, London, (1995) shown here.

For all the patterns I used wallpaper stock that would evoke a variety of Caucasian skin tones. Ink colors reflected a tattoo-like blue in LAMPSHADES AND SOAP, a dried-blood red in HANSLGRETL, and brown, a color associated with Nazi uniforms in RAUS.

A frieze was created by repeating a NOSE MOTIF along the lower walls. It referred to some of the cliché-characterizations of Jews during the Third Reich: the nose as an identification mark, and the comparison to lowly animals fit for extermination--like the scurrying rats suggested by the overall form of the drawings. This was printed on a brown Kraft paper, again, to suggest the Nazi uniforms.

Also included in the installation were two "impossible images": SOUVENIR WIEN 1938 SCRUB BRUSH and SARA/ISRAEL TOOTHBRUSHES. These two photographs (made to appear as if they were enlarged from an old tabloid newspaper) document invented artifacts--ersatz souvenirs in the guise of historical relics--which I fabricated to memorialize an incident in Vienna, 1938, when the S. S. compelled Jews to scrub the streets with brushes. Sara and Israel were the two names legally required by Jews to call themselves during the Nazi period.

The installation also included yellow-painted woodwork referring to the law-mandated clothing patch, and had Schadenfreude written on the wall in large gothic script--both as a graphic gesture associated with the Nazi era and a reference to similarly written "instructive" mottoes on concentration camp walls.