Sieg Maandag: Trauma and Art in the Aftermath of Bergen-Belsen

Sieg Maandag (1937-2013) was seven years old when he was photographed by George Rodger as he walked among the piles of bodies in the liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. His father was killed there, his mother survived camp Beendorf and was reunited with him six months after the war. Sieg’s family were diamond dealers. After the war he learned to work with diamonds, traveled the world, fell in love, sang at the Paradiso night club, and painted hundreds of paintings and ceramics. This presentation, on the 80th anniversary of the photo documenting his liberation, focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to his art as representation and transformation.

Trauma is transformed through creative acts of living expressed in artistic form. This program explores the concept of the “afterdeath” in life after trauma, violence, and loss. What makes life after trauma possible? What is the role of art and literature in doing justice to the past and imaging different futures? In exploring “afterdeath” in relation to the Holocaust, we will offer compelling examples of how traumatic experience is transformed through creative solutions, how psychoanalytic treatment fosters this creative process. This program enriches understanding and work with the creative arts as pathways to representation, transformation, and change.

About the speakers

Dawn Skorczewski is Senior Lecturer at Amsterdam University College and Research Professor of English Emerita at Brandeis University.

Christine Schmidt is Deputy Director and Head of Research at The Wiener Holocaust Library, London, Wiener Library, London.

Bettine Siertsema is Assistant Professor of History emerita at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.

Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History at Royal Holloway, University of London, and director of its Holocaust Research Institute.

Laurien Vastenhout (moderator) is researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies and guest researcher at the University of Vienna.

Image: Karen Maandag, Lovers Dance, 1999.