Astrid Reischwitz

Inheritance

At night, my village in Northern Germany is awake and breathes remnants of the past. Light shines on the old structures and reveals a previous lifetime. The dark hours of night echo the past and unveil the spirit of stories from years ago. But it also can bring moments of clarity that only the darkness can provide.

I grew up in this village in a time of peace, but with a sense that the German past of the Nazi period played an important role in my own family history and my journey through life. My parents’ generation, who grew up during the war, restlessly rebuilt Germany and helped to create the economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s. But their own fate, displacement, and unprocessed events are still a world that is largely undiscovered and afflicted with taboos.

These experiences of external and internal destruction live on in the next generation, in my generation, and are the essence of the unprocessed history that I photograph.

Website www.reischwitzphotography.com