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Making some order in my slides, I found some pictures of my collages from the sixties and seventies which are all lost. Some of them, I remember, were made with authentic documents I inherited after my father's death in 1974. The one I want to talk about is an enquiry sent by the German Gestapo, the secret policy of the Third Reich:
In fact they wanted to talk about my mother. And the problems began. I mixed the document with the cut out silhouette of an SS officer through which you can see some architecture. The inhuman character of the institution is meant to be demonstrated by this artifice. 35 years after I must say that I wouldn't handle the subject in the same way, but I still feel the sincerity in it. Still there is some ambiguity between the silhouette and the main character of the collage: my father. He had been a German officer in world war I, and one of the rare righteous during the Nazi period, saving his family and several people from deportation and death. So the collage is more about the persecutors than about the heroes, a comprehensible sin of a descendant of a family that has suffered a lot during those times. Today I feel more about building a monument to the glory of those who dared/chose to resist.
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