Walter Liggesmeyer | Auschwitz

Exhibition: November 25 to December 9, 2025

The opening will feature a lecture by author and journalist Alwin Meyer on “The Children of Auschwitz.”
Individual poems by Liggesmeyer will be recited.

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In November 1988, painter and writer Walter Liggesmeyer was a guest of the Krakow Writers’ Association. The visit included a trip to the Auschwitz 1 concentration camp (main camp), located about seventy kilometers from Krakow, and the Auschwitz II extermination camp (Birkenau).

Walter Liggesmeyer had not initially intended to express himself on this subject in words or pictures. After about a year, however, he decided to express the thoughts and images that had gradually formed in his mind and would not leave him. As he wrote in his picture and text book Mein Kind trägt Locken (My Child Has Curls), he was aware that the incomprehensibility of the events was indescribable.

The images and poems are therefore to be understood as his personal reaction to his visit to Auschwitz. For this reason, he also called the book Gedanken eines Deutschen nach dem Besuch des Konzentrationslagers Auschwitz (Thoughts of a German after visiting the Auschwitz concentration camp).

The impressive 28-part picture cycle – most of the pictures are 1.40 m x 1.70 m in size – has been shown in its entirety or in parts since the 1990s, often at events of remembrance and warning.

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The painter and writer Walter Liggesmeyer was born in Paderborn in 1938 and grew up in Bad Lippspringe. He lived in Dortmund from 1956 onwards, completed a law degree, and worked as a legal advisor at Sparkasse Bochum. From 1983 onwards, he devoted himself mainly to art and writing. He was also interested in social issues. He was committed to diversity, tolerance, and democracy, and championed the cause of disadvantaged people. Walter Liggesmeyer died in 2017 at the age of 79.