Johannes Grenzfurthner:
You’ve been active in pop culture, in art, for almost five decades, and it’s incredible to see what you’ve achieved. I remember the impact your paintings had on me as a teenager. What would you tell teenagers now, compared to your youth in the 1960s? What would you give as advice?


Gottfried Helnwein:

Well, it was a very different time, growing up in Vienna in the 50s. It was like being born into hell because in the aftermath of WWII this city was really a dark place.
In my earliest memory as a little child I felt like a stranger who just landed in the wrong place. I felt I didn’t  belong there. I perceived my surrounding as ugly and hostile — all the grown-ups appeared to be grouchy, bitter and depressed. Even though I had nothing to compare it with, I had the feeling something was seriously wrong.
What I didn’t know at that time was that my parents’ generation had just lost two world wars in a row and in the process accomplished one of the biggest genocides in history.

I guess I was  an annoying child because I was always asking questions — but I didn’t get any answers.
Nobody talked. People seemed to be unable to speak about the past, or to remember anything — they were in a state of total denial, and a whole generation seemed to be stuck in some kind of collective amnesia.  
 
The only thing I ever heard in school about that time was this stupid sentence: “Austria was the first victim of Adolf Hitler”. That was it.

But in a way, Austrians were very smart.  When Stalin offered to withdraw his troops if we became a neutral country, Austrians agreed, and we were free. The allied occupying forces left and turned the justice system over to the Austrians. That meant that all the war criminals were tried in Austrian courts, by Austrians.

I remember in the early sixties, reading about the trial against former SS-officer Franz Murer. A guy who had destroyed the Jewish ghetto of Vilnius, a spiritual centre of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe and exterminated almost the whole population of some 80,000 people. He killed many of them with his own hands. He tortured people. There was one report of an incident that stuck in my mind that I’ll never forget: He ordered one of the Jews to put his hands into the door frame. Then he slammed the door until his fingers fell off.

The few witnesses that survived that horror and had the courage to travel to this country and testify were received with hostility, called liars and laughed at, and their suffering was dismissed as fabrication. Someone in the court room even threw up a Hitler salute .
At the end of the trial that monster was acquitted. He walked home a free man.
On that day all the flower shops in the city of Graz were empty, cleared out by the people for the celebration.
 
When I read this, I was in shock and something inside me broke. I distanced myself from the world of my parents, their tradition, their culture, their values. I didn’t want to be part of it.

It was beyond my grasp, how the generation of my parents could have committed crimes on that scale. When I looked at them I just couldn’t see it. These mediocre, boring, dull, subservient, gray un-cool folks had been the Nazis?  Shiny boots, silver skull and bones on their black SS uniforms and all? The demonic forces of inconceivable evil?  

I was dumbfounded. I didn’t understand, but I became obsessed with trying to understand, and that brought me on a life-long quest for answers.

Most of my generation must have felt the same way, because in the late 60s all hell broke loose when young people, mainly students, took to the streets and rebelled against the establishment and a system that we perceived as corrupt and rotten to the core. In Germany, Paris, in Europe and America. It was a furious, somewhat naive, but honest and enthusiastic attempt to break this cycle of oppression, corruption, hypocrisy, and endless wars.
In vain, of course.
Because history has the annoying tendency to repeat itself, and so, a new empire rose from the ashes of the vanquished old one.

Many members of the American military industrial complex, especially Allen Dulles, the head of the intelligence agency OSS (precursor of the CIA) were fascinated by the efficiency of the Nazi machinery. Dulles became friends with Himmler’s deputy, war criminal SS-General Karl Wolff, and made sure that he didn’t get hanged in Nuremberg.

In their secret program “Operation Paperclip” the US military industrial complex brought 1,600 top-Nazis, scientists, doctors, and psychiatrists to America, who had experimented on people in concentration camps. Amongst them war criminals and mass murderers like Klaus Barbie.

General Rainhard Gehlen, Hitler’s chief intelligence officer on the Eastern Front — one of the worst war criminals, responsible for the death of millions — was their favourite.  He was saved from prosecution and hired to resurrect and oversee his vast network of intelligence to spy for the CIA, with whom he signed a contract for $5 million Dollars a year. His Organisation helped over 5,000 Nazi war criminals, like Eichmann and Mengele, to flee Europe to South and Central America to avoid prosecution.
In 1955, the Gehlen Organization was turned over to the West German government, where he founded the BND (Federal Intelligence Service), which he staffed with former Gestapo and SS criminals.  He ran the agency until 1968.
 
Hans Globke, the executive Nazi official for Jewish Affairs in the Ministry of the Interior, co-created the anti-semitic Nuremberg Race Laws which gave the Nazi Party the legal ground for the discrimination and prosecution of the Jews, setting the path to the Holocaust.
After the war he became the éminence grise, the most influential public official in the government of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and was the German’s main liaison with NATO and other western intelligence services, especially the  CIA.
It was as Noam Chomsky said: ‘The Nazis Won the War”

Injustice, Terror, warfare and violence didn’t end with the fall of the 3rd Reich, we were already in new wars against Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos.
It was a historic necessity for our generation to rise up against the establishment.

So I started to research into political affairs and events and the history of violence and eventually I ran into forensic photographs of the bodies of dead children, which had been abused and killed right here and now in Austria and Germany, often by family members. These images are burned into my memory, and I couldn’t get rid of them.
 I tried to share my questions, feelings and doubts with others, but I didn’t know how.

And that was the moment when I realised that I had to become an artist.

I sat down and started to paint these little watercolors of children, mostly bandaged and wounded. I didn’t care about style or technique, I didn’t know if anybody would ever care to look at that stuff, or if it would mean anything to others.
I didn’t care what others would think about it.

And that’s how it all started.

It was not exactly the answer to your questions, but that’s what came to mind.






Gottfried Helnwein:
As long as there are individuals that trust themselves and their dreams, look around and make their own observations, think for themselves, use their own senses and judge by logic reasoning, draw their own conclusions and stick to their own values, there is hope.

But it is a risky endeavour because it will bring you inevitably into conflict with the official narrative.
There are always authorities that will let you know how you are supposed to perceive the world around you, what you have to like and what to reject. Politicians, parents, teachers, preachers, self appointed ‘experts’, Mainstream Media and the internet.
If you decide to stick to your own moral values and put them above society’s morals, there is hope.

But you have to be aware that you will upset lots of people and you have to be ready to be lonely at times.

Most people like to be part of a group with a collective belief system.
Belief systems are practical and cozy, because they explain the world, and all big questions are answered. It saves you any doubt and the trouble to be alert, to ask questions, to research and find out for yourself, and more importantly, you are part of a group of like minded people that think and feel exactly like you and who believe in the very same things you do.
It’s very reassuring when you all tell each other how right you are and how wrong all others are.

But I have to think of Mark Twain who said:  "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."





Gottfried:
Any belief system will pre-condition you to see only things that you are supposed to see, but it will make you blind to anything you are not allowed to perceive, even if it happens right in front of you.
Through various education systems in all history, people have been convinced to abandon their own values and dreams and have been programmed to think and behave in certain ways.  So people have developed a good workable system of selective perception.

But there are always those that can’t be broken and properly programmed:  artists, writers and thinkers.
Nothing scares authoritarian regimes more than art and free creation. Why would Hitler burn mountains of books and paintings and ban all arts? Why would Stalin—the master over life and death of almost 300 million people, a man who commanded the biggest army and secret service that ever existed—be afraid of a poem by Anna Akhmatova? Why would Mao be so obsessed with destroying China’s entire cultural heritage? Why would FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, while denying the existence of organised crime in the US, put so much effort into harassing and spying on every artist from Hemingway, Elvis, Thomas Mann to John Lennon?
The last thing any human society wants are free beings. Don’t wait for somebody to grant you freedom, it will never happen; if you want freedom, you have to seize it. Creating art is one way of doing it, and for me it’s the most effective way.
On this planet, creating means to stand up, to rebel, to resist.  It means striking back.





It’s true though, that our current Neo-capitalistic system is getting quite astute with that. It obviously analysed
past authoritarian ruling systems, examined their mistakes, their vulnerabilities, their successful actions and implemented that knowledge.
In old totalitarian regimes the tyrant was known, so he was a potential target and the death of the dictator could have ended the tyranny. In our current system the rulers are hidden behind international corporations, organisations, banks and trusts — or the so called military industrial complex. We don’t really know who they are. Politicians come and go.  They are not the ones that make the big decisions.
Another weakness of past dictatorships was constant scarcity of everything. People were starving, standing in long lines, hoping to get food or other basic necessities for their survival, and as history shows, too much suffering can lead to a revolution.
Our current consumerism dictatorship does quite the opposite: we have too much of everything.  We are getting flooded with too much unnecessary confusing and distracting information, cheap entertainment and million of things we don’t need. The obvious purpose is to overwhelm us and turn us into apathetic slaves to consumerism.

In a speech in 1961, Aldous Huxley predicted what we are experiencing right now:
“There will be in the next generation or so a method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears so to speak. Producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”




Gottfried:
I think there is unlimited potential energy in our universe. Nicola Tesla said: “electric power is everywhere, present in unlimited quantities, and can drive the world's machinery without the need for coal, oil, or gas.”
Tesla states in his work that we have an infinite source of energy floating through the ether in the form of charged electrons.
The capitalistic elite could not let that happen of course, because it would violate the core principal of capitalism.
Thus  banker JP Morgan destroyed Tesla’s lab, bankrupted and crushed him, thereby permanently removing Tesla as an unacceptable threat of producing and giving away free energy.

Nature is not the problem. Homo Sapiens is the problem.

Regarding your quote of Foucault: “why do you want to know?”
The answer is: because you firmly believe in the humanitarian imperative. If you have empathy, and  if you respect and care for other human beings and all organisms — if that’s why you want to know, then you will find the right answers, and things will start to fall into place.

If you are looking for profit, power and control, you will come up with entirely different answers and solutions. You will keep your country in a permanent state of war, for example, because it gives you maximum control and profit.
And that is exactly what the war-machine of the Anglo-American Empire does. We live in a state of perpetual war, and we don’t even notice it.
While we sleep and eat, watch a movie or make love,  someone’s home, family, life and body are being blown into a thousand pieces in our names. Once every 12 minutes.  The United States military drops an explosive with a strength you can hardly comprehend, every 12 minutes.
George W.Bush dropped 70,000 bombs, but Peace Nobel laureate Barak Obama dropped 100,000 bombs in seven countries. He out-bombed Bush by 30,000 bombs and 2 countries.
Obama’s drone program oversaw more strikes in his first year than Bush carried out during his entire presidency. Obama’s drone bombings have killed more people in six years than the 300 year-long Spanish Inquisition. According to the C.I.A.’s own documents, the people on the “kill list” who were targeted, accounted for only 2% of the deaths caused by the drone strikes. Thousand others, including children were just collateral damage.

The Pentagon’s numbers show that during George W. Bush’s eight years he averaged 24 bombs dropped per day, which is 8,750 per year. Over the course of Obama’s time in office, his military dropped 34 bombs per day, 12,500 per year. And in Trump’s first year in office, he averaged 121 bombs dropped per day, for an annual total of 44,096. Trump’s military dropped 44,000 bombs in his first year in office.

In the 70s, my wife and her girlfriend went on a trip through Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India, Nepal and finally Afghanistan, where they stayed for quite a while, because for her it was the most beautiful country she had ever seen. She could go wherever she wanted and she always felt safe. People were warm and welcoming and the girls were always invited, and hardly ever had to pay for anything. It was a perfectly intact world in the tradition and with all the qualities of the old Orient. That was Afghanistan. Paradise.

Why is this country now, only a few years later, hell?

Because first the Soviet empire and then the American empire had to “help” this country, by invading, raping and looting it. When you look at the country now, the favourite phrase of American generals comes to mind: “we’ll bomb you back into the Stone Age.”  A promise that they usually keep.
Now, while the people suffer, drug lords produce 95% of the world raw opium. Protected by American and allied troops who oversee the wold wide trade of illegal drugs.



Gottfried:
But there is no money for education or a functioning health care system as we know it in Europe.
Many Americans live on the level of the so called 3rd world.




Gottfried:
From the early to mid 1900s Los Angeles had a street car system as a popular mode of transportation along Broadway and throughout the Los Angeles region. By the 1920’s it had developed into the largest trolley system in the world.
But then General Motors, Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, Standard Oil, Phillips Petroleum and other companies bought the street car transportation system and destroyed it.
 “Let’s get rid of of that crap so that every single person has to buy a fucking car.”  Then, as far as I know, they threw the streetcars into the sea and made sure that everybody had to have his own car.
They even ripped out all the tracks, so that there would never be an electric tramway system in L.A. ever again.

From a strict capitalist viewpoint it’s perfectly logical. Profit justifies all means.

.

Gottfried:
Yes, because along with that system comes the most sophisticated propaganda machine of all times. At the beginning of the 20th century, one of the founding fathers of modern Propaganda and Public brainwashing, Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, began his work. He was an expert in mass psychology. He worked for the advertising industry, big corporations, political parties and the government.
Bernays touted the idea that the "masses" are too stupid to make their own decision, and therefore that their minds can and should be manipulated by the capable few. He said: “Intelligent men must realise that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and constitute an invisible government which should be the true ruling power.”  And: “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organised.”
His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom”.  The first strategy was to persuade women to smoke cigarettes instead of eating. Bernays began by promoting the ideal of thinness itself, using photographers, artists, newspapers, and magazines to promote the special beauty of thin women. Medical authorities were found to promote the choice of cigarettes over sweets.
He also worked for the United Fruit Company in the 1950s, and was involved in the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954.
Goebbels was one of his great admirers and his best student.




Gottfried:
I always wanted freedom and independence more than anything else. I want to look for myself, think my own thoughts, and dream my own dreams. I want to draw my own conclusions, and I want to make my own decisions. I do not need any belief-system or self-appointed authorities to tell me how I should live or feel or think.
I was never violent; I am no danger to society in any way—so I don’t need to be under surveillance.  I don’t need to be disciplined, monitored or controlled by anybody. I can take care of myself.

I guess I am a very inquisitive person.  All my life I wanted  to know what’s really going on, and I keep asking questions. For some this might be annoying. Also I am somewhat obsessed with the concept of fairness and justice. I hate injustice and I hate to see people being hurt, abused, humiliated  and suppressed.   Maybe some consider this radical and think of me as a pain in the ass. They are welcome, but I have no intention to shut up.