December 22, 2005

Presenting: Susanne Schleyer - A young German photographer confronts German history

History can be a fascinating topic. Personal family history, particularly in the case of German families, bearing the historical legacy and burden of the Second World War, can be even more so.

My brother, who continues to be a great source of story ideas, came across an interesting German multi-media artist and photographer by the name of Susanne Schleyer, who had recently published a book called “Unterwegs” (“On the Road”), that includes photos of 12 world cities that she had visited, that were used as an inspiration for stories written by well-known German authors.

From 1994 to 2004 Susanne, together with her artist partner Michael J. Stephan, created an extensive project called "Trilogie" in which they confront German history in a very personal way. All three components of Trilogie use large-scale and regular size photos along with sound collages and interview sequences.

Part 1, "Asservate" (“Exhibits”) includes 160 black and white photos, sound recordings and a table and a chair. It illustrates 3 generations of German men in 3 different societies: After finding out about her grandfather's role during Nazi Germany, Susanne created a three-dimensional photo album portraying her grandfather, representing the Nazi years; her father, who grew up in the former Communist East Germany; and her brother, who represents a modern reunified Germany.

Part 2 of Trilogie is called "Bueno!” and encompasses 449 photos and 23 oversize images with sound recordings. Susanne and Michael travelled to Buenos Aires to research and portray the German emigrant community: Germans that emigrated to Argentina before, during and after World War II, including a motley collection of Jewish refugees and Nazi perpetrators. While Asservate drew on German photo albums, Bueno! was produced directly on-site in present day Argentina. What in Europe had become a far away past, was preserved and upheld at the other end of the world – German history shock-frozen in the past.

Part 3 of the trilogy, entitled “Sologubowka”, encompasses 8 tableaux with 130 large-scale black and white photos, examining Nazi Germany’s invasion of Russia in the context of the consecration of Europe’s largest war cemetery, housing thousands of German WWII soldiers, which stands in stark contrast to the one single symbolic grave, representing the almost one million victims of the Leningrad Blockade when the Nazis held Leningrad under siege for 900 days. This exhibition has a definite political edge to it.

As the daughter of an Austrian nazi who faught in World War II, who never talked about his past and has now been dead for more than 10 years, I have a bit of envy in light of the fact that my name-sake Susanne Schleyer has actually been able to find out about her family’s history. She knows what her grandfather was involved in, whereas to this day I am still in the dark about my father's past.

Here you can read this fascinating story about a modern-day German artist who has had the courage to confront her own personal and her national history.

1. Please tell us about yourself and your background.

I am from a small town in the German province of Thuringia [in former East Germany] and have been living in Berlin since age 18. I studied arts and German philology and later took an artistic photography degree in Leizpig. As an artist and photographer I live and work together with the artist Michael J. Stephan.

2. In the context of your art photography projects you have travelled a lot. Please tell us about the countries and cities that you have seen.

Because of our projects we had to travel a great deal since they were conceptual works which are implemented using images, text and sound. In order to take the pictures and to record the sound you have to travel to real locations. It would take to long to list all the cities and countries, but we have traveled all over North America, South America and Europe.

3. Please tell us about your recently published book „Unterwegs“ („On the Road“). How did you get the idea for it, how did you realize that idea?

During our travels for the various projects photos came about that were outside of our ideas. These were very narrative photos describing daily life in the various countries or cities. That’s how I got the idea of creating a book about twelve metropolitan cities: Berlin, Prague, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Saint Petersburg, Vienna, Amerstam, Rome, Venice, London and Paris. I gave these images to twelve very well-known young German authors and asked them to write stories for the photos. This was the opposite of the way it is usually done where normally visual artists always illustrate texts that have already been written.

The only condition was that these authors had already travelled to these cities before. In their stories they had to hook themselves into 2 or 3 photos and describe details of the photos. This resulted in very interesting combinations. Stories that entertain. Stories of murder, stories of love, detective stories etc.

4. Together with Michael J. Stephan you created a large-scale project with the title Trilogie. What triggered this project?

It is a matter of course for us artists that we make political statements. Art for the pure sake of art does not interest us. At the beginning of our work on Trilogie (1994) there was a time in Germany where the historical and sociological processing of the Third Reich had progressed a great deal. However, we, as the grand children of this generation, were not told anything about the daily life and the daily circumstances of how things could have developed into this situation. Even in artistic projects abstract statements were made. People spoke in the third person or of “other people”. When I decided to say “I” (use the first person) in the project Asservate (“Exhibits”, part one of the trilogy) and to connect German history with my own family, I encountered a great lack of understanding.

I don’t mean rejection, but people were simply not used to make personal references to the Third Reich. Today this is totally different. Many young authors and creative artists use their families’ stories in their work. This trend began at the end of the 1990s and continues today.

5. Please tell us in detail about the project „Asservate“ (“Exhibits”). What does it consist of, how did you execute it?

Much more often than one could guess through official reports or familiar conversations, we encounter in daily life and in the history of Germany a phenomenon that is the topic of the project “Asservate”. It deals with the question of how children and grand-children of Nazis live with their inherited “burden, the burden of the past.

In the families there is much silence or denial. It was rather late that I found out about the involvements of my grandfather with the NS regime. 1994 I then decided to research the past of my family in detail, and to process it through photos. A kind of walk-through family album had materialized from the extensive collection of materials. A personal family story/history was created that is prototypical for a large part of German families. The photo materials of my grandfather that I found are the basis for the project. I juxtapose the material of the son (my father) and the grandchild (my brother). The merciless banality, the routine processes quickly lead to a usual daily routine, even after the historic catastrophe. Life goes on, only the algebraic signs change, so to speak.

6. In what cities has the exhibition been shown? What was the reaction to the „Asservate“ photo exhibit?

So far the exhibition has been shown in 16 different locations, in German museums in larger and smaller cities, but also in the Netherlands, among other places. There was a sequence of reactions that was always the same: the viewers discovered themselves in the images time and time again with their own family histories. In very few cases people actually talked about the real persons that were the topics of the exhibition. In the Netherlands the media asked what is this German woman trying to tell us? We don’t have anything to do with this war, etc. In Germany there was a great media response. Apparently I had hit a blind spot.

7. Please tell us about the project „Bueno!“. Where did the idea come from, how did Michael and you complete it?

We worked on the Trilogie for a total of 10 years. We always knew that the project Asservate could not remain by itself. Trilogie consists of an imaginary cycle.

Part 1: personal German history
Part 2: German emigration, affecting all Germans who had to leave Germany
Part 3: the campaign of conquest of the German Wehrmacht and its failure. This is a very brief synopsis.

In Buenos Aires we were looking for German emigrants who had to leave Germany before, during or after the Second World War. This applies to Jewish refugees as well as to avowed Nazis.

In contrast to the “average German family”, great fissures open up here which could never be closed due to life in exile. They were not hushed up, but rewritten. New old pictures in the albums.

Stories were personally mystified: Whatever had passed in Germany a long time ago had been conserved at the other end of the world. We met Jewish refugees and non-religious leftists, economic adventurers, economic refugees, and last but not least, avowed Nazis. Victims and perpetrators were mixed together at random. The Black Box of the German minority in Argentina brightly reflects the periods of our Germany history because they were frozen in time.

8. In what cities was the photo exhibition shown? What was the reaction to “Bueno!”?

The photo exhibition “Bueno!” has so far only been shown in Buenos Aires, and in part it has encountered the same lack of understanding that it isn’t permissible to show images of victims and perpetrators in one exhibition side by side. The participants, however, had no problem with this. We definitely wanted to show that all these people were Germans and what had become of them.

9. Please tell us about your personal experiences with the German emigrants in Argentina, for example with the Jewish refugees as well as with the ex-Nazis. How are the relationships between these two groups today, what is the story of the second and third generation of these emigrants?

From our personal experiences I can only say that the two groups live side by side and have little to do with one another. For the grandchildren in the meantime, the past hardly plays a role at all. They speak very little German and they see themselves as Argentinean. Little is spoken about the past so that many grandchildren, for example, no nothing about the involvements of their grandparents during the Nazi regime.

But it is also important to clarify that not every non-Jewish German is a Nazi, even in the group that arrived in Argentina after 1945. Unfortunately people often make sweeping statements and people are assigned collective responsibility who did nothing wrong based on their own proper behaviour.

10. Please tell us about your time in Buenos Aires. What did you see and learn during that year?

We experience a multi-cultural city where the German minority is one of many minorities. Buenos Aires is a city of immigrants. We liked this mixture of South American flair and European culture very much and we felt very comfortable there.

11. Please tell us about the project „Sologubowka“ and its historic background. How did you get the idea, how did Michael and you complete it?

In the fall of 2000, the largest cemetery for German soldiers in all of Europe was consecrated in Sologubowka. The small town is 70 km outside of Saint Petersburg. On the huge property only one symbolic grave reminds of the hundreds of thousands of Soviet victims [of the Leningrade Blockade]. We were present during the official German celebrations. We met German army veterans, former Red Army soldiers and Russian civilians, and again recorded sounds and images.

We put everything together in tableaux which also integrate photos from German and Russian photo archives. Removed from their usual contexts, assigning the photos based on criteria of nationality all of a sudden becomes almost impossible. The victims recognize themselves in the perpetrators, the perpetrators find themselves in the victims. A depressing image. Again we show the perspective of historical heritage. The heritage of war.

12. What was the reaction to this photo exhibition? In which cities has it been shown?

This photo exhibition was shown in Saint Petersburg, in the place where the people of Leningrad, or of Saint Petersburg as it is called today, have created a memorial to honour the victims of the Leningrad Blockade. As grandchildren of World War II Germans we had a somewhat strange feeling to have the first exhibition in a memorial that has always only been a memorial since its inception.

The reactions were varied. On one hand, the project was welcomed. After all we did not secretly sneak into this memorial, but we were invited by Russian museums. On the other hand we again encountered a great lack of understanding, especially since we are from Germany. This wasn’t really because of the project itself.

13. Please tell us about your other artistic projects. What else do you have planned?

Trilogie has been completed for 2 years. Currently we are working on a photo exhibition about my high school class.

What has become of the various students after 20 years? We completed high school in 1982, in a time were East and West Germany still existed. We grew up in East Germany in an area that was called “Sperrgebiet” [“Prohibited Zone”] that was very close to the German-German border. We lived on an island inside of an island. That interests us. How did this „island life“ impact on our life today? We can’t say any more abut this at the moment, since we have only been working on this project for a short time. Again, this will be a multi-media project.

Thank you, Susanne. We appreciate your unique insights into using art to deal with personal and national history. Good luck with your future project!