OVERVIEW
“The long shadow of the past”
in the short light of
present
Horst Hoheisel
Artist
A
leida Assmann, who will be awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book
Trade together with her husband Jan Assmann this year (14 October 2018),
has chosen one of my works (1) as the title image for her book “Shadows
of Trauma: Memory and the Politics of Postwar Identity”. On 27 January 1997, the
German Holocaust Remembrance Day that marks the anniversary of the liberation of
the Auschwitz concentration camp, I projected ARBEIT MACHT FREI [Work sets you
free] onto the Brandenburg Gate. After reunification, the reopened Brandenburg Gate
became a national symbol for the German people representing unfractured German
identity and historical continuity. However, the German people have lived in the
shadow of a rupture in civilisation since Auschwitz. Their identity is broken. Along
with the Brandenburg Gate, the Holocaust Memorial does not mark a clean break
with history. If the Germans celebrate their Brandenburg Gate as a national symbol,
they should never forget the other gateways they have also built – the gateways to
the concentration camps. In this lighting display, “Die Tore der Deutschen” [The
Gateways of the German People”], both gateways fuse into one single image for a
night of remembrance and commemoration.
The light of the present could no longer be
separated from the shadow of the past.
50
Observing Memories
ISSUE 2