Gesche Wuerfel
“What Remains of the Day – Memories of World War II” grapples with time and memory in contemporary Germany. The memory of World War II in Germany is fading as people who experienced the war firsthand get older and die. Many oral histories have been recorded but once the survivors...
“What Remains of the Day – Memories of World War II” grapples with time and memory in contemporary Germany. The memory of World War II in Germany is fading as people who experienced the war firsthand get older and die. Many oral histories have been recorded but once the survivors perish, most of their memories will be buried with them. Yet the memory of World War II is living history because the recent arrival of refugees from the Middle East and Africa in Germany has reinvigorated important questions. Most notably: what responsibilities do Germans have based on their history?
I photograph a range of places that evoke the horrors of the Nazi regime. A way of showing how our memories of these places fade is by overexposing negative film so that only traces of the resulting images are recorded. I overexpose the images for one second for every year since the war ended. For example, photos taken in 2016 (71 years after the end of World War II) were overexposed for 71 seconds. Much like memory, the photographs are fragmented and ambiguous, and either in color or black and white.
Read More
Prisoners’ Barracks (Stalag XB, Sandbostel, Germany)
Valley of Death (Flossenbuerg Memorial and Museum, Germany)
Foundation of Secret State Police, Berlin Wall, Reich Aviation Ministry (Berlin)
Jewish Ghetto (Krakow, Poland)
House of the Wannsee Conference - where the Final Solution was decided (Berlin)
Reich Chancellory (Berlin, Germany)
Pond with ashes (Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, Poland)
Congress Hall (Nazi Party Rally Grounds, Nuremberg, Germany)
Watchtower (Dachau Memorial and Museum, Germany)
Tree on Foundation of Prisoners’ Barracks (Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum)