Roger Loewig B born in Silesia B has carried with him the trauma of his earliest years throughout his life to this day. He has fought against oblivion with his artwork. He calls himself the 'disappointed eyewitness of forgotten reports and documents' and reaches for his pen. Impressions and experiences are transformed into drawings. 'Memory is actually my model.' His tools are pens, technical drawing equipment and India ink. He carries out painstaking precision work with his pen to portray his store of images. >Der Weg war steinig= ('The path was riddled with stones.')

Everything in Loewig=s work becomes a monument to the dead. They are roots of an ancient ancestry which, in the transformation of aging, try to stem the fracturing, the brokenness. The victims become a sign of the barbarian.

The human as outsider, refugee, intruder and devoured victim, an empty being. 'Und der Schutt begräbt die Wege/ er verklebt mir beide Augen/ dass sie anderes nicht sehen' (And the rubble bars the paths/ It glues both my eyes upon it/ so that they see nothing else), wrote Loewig in a poem. A collection of children's poems from Theresienstadt from 1942-44 accompany Loewig's lithographs of 1968. Loewig experienced the war as a child. His identification with the children who faced the march to Auschwitz preoccupied him immensely. 'The battlefield of the million victims who rolled in the mud, who burned to ashes. They would like to keep the horror awake in the face of future horror, and they would like to point to the great power of humanity to avert the appalling,' such were Loewig's words in his essay 'Uferlose' (Boundless). Even in 1967, contemporary pillage and destruction was reflected in Loewig's paintings - everything in his art pleaded for non-violence.

The gruesomeness of war had poisoned Roger Loewig's childhood. Traumatized, none of it faded in his memory, the boy was distraught with the collective guilt of his society, an exile. He felt called to inform, called to hear the suffering. From a sense of moral atonement, the artist gave a set of 150 works (mostly drawings in chalk and pen and ink, as well as etchings and lithographs) to the National Museum of Warsaw in 1986 (Catalogue, Warsaw, Irena Jakimowicz). This same museum had given him his first one-man exhibit in 1966 and has remained closely linked with his Silesian origins. 'No-man's land became the residence place of his visions.'

His Jewish series from 1965 recalls drawings by Barlach and, even more so, by Käthe Kollwitz. This is an eleven-print series in tribute to the fate of the Jews in times of trouble and persecution (cf. Roger Loewig. Katalog der Zeichnungen und Lithographien. Berlinische Galerie 1988). The 'Floss der Medusa' (Medusa's Barge) becomes a mass grave. One senses the painstakingly precise, nearly scientific stroke in some prints. Again and again, a set of eyes emerges in the midst of vegetation, and from the harmless flotsam on the beach, a shipwrecked soul appears.

Loewig had sought to make an existence between 1945 and 1951 in the Lausitz region, near the source of the River Spree. Even this was a land in between - the Sorbish region along the eastern German border. It was a land wounded from the war and from uranium and brown coal strip mining, yet at the same time a wonderful land of springs, rich in forests, a primeval forest. Swamp trees towered in the skies like aeolian harps. The overgrown Spreewald forests were ideally suited as the playground of the spirits.

The 'metaphor of Icarus, who attempts to escape the narrow fate of humanity' is evident. First of all came the India ink wash drawings: 'Gehetzte' (Harassed), 'Auf der Flucht' (Fleeing), 'And a World Uninhabitable in the Future' (1962). The suffering is extended to the birds: in the whirlpool forests only 'migratory birds' show any trace of existence. The area remains a stop-over, a no-man's land and waiting hall.

His experience with the former forests and farmers comes out in the structural aspects of his creations. People like torn out roots, like livestock, wounded vegetation, the lichen, the moss of the heart. Plains pressed flat, the empty soul of an excavator shovel. Loewig's lyric texts accompany his images. He creates many series of drawings and graphic art. 'I have never set my images in a specific geographical location. Time and place mean nothing - it is unfortunately never over.' Loewig does not want to hurt others. As he says, it is his way of coming to terms with his pain. His gestures lose force, they become milder, in his drawings as well. The wounds and wounded are transformed into images of nature. Now it is nature which is threatened, fragile like filigree work and mute. ek