History and Personal Memory video
After my previous video ‘A la recherche de
Michel Foucault’, this video, ‘History and Personal Memory’ is about my own story, my investigation about power structures,
the overstepping of boundaries, my home land, etc
My critique group and Jean Marie saw
an earlier version of this at the end of October / beginning of November. In
the meantime, I have made several changes and will in the following weeks work
on partly subtitling, partly bringing in a voice-over into the film. I have
just translated the whole spoken text into English and am including both
versions, German and English, in this text.
In contrast to my previous films, I
am utilizing my own film images. Also, I wanted to introduce working with my
body to see if I can use it as a tool of investigation. I am using my voice,
recording what I read, I have captured imagery that shows my hand working on a
painting. I am walking on train tracks in another scene. And I am utilizing a
projection of my grandfather's portrait onto my body.
With this new video, I would like to create
a piece that connects my work about my German identity, my personal memory and
my painting work to this medium that is new to my work practice - film. The
subject matter of my film might not be ideal for experimentation in video, however,
I am compelled to explore some stylistic elements such as split screen,
overlays, etc.
The video starts with images of
the destroyed city of Berlin which were filmed right after Germany’s
capitulation in May 1945. I overlaid these images with images of my paintings.
In my painting work, I create layers and juxtapose images of the past with
images of today, to discuss identities of then and now. The overlay rationale
is extended in my film.
I am reading a poem by Nietzsche
about Heimat, home land. I am questioning what home land represents to me. I am German and live far away from my
former home. I chose to leave my home country and to live abroad. Living abroad
allows me to deal differently with events that happened to me in my past.
In this
poem ‘Abschied’ (also: ‘Die Kraehen schreien’ and ‘Vereinsamt’) Nietzsche has a
conversation with himself. In the first part of the poem (which I am reading in
the video), Nietzsche describes the view of the lonely wanderer in the winter
who is without his home land. The wanderer remembers his lost home land. And in
Nietzsche’s answer to this text, he denies that he might be longing for his
home, in the ‘stupid happiness of the main room’, which he left as a free
spirit. It is far more important to always remain a free spirit, than to have a
home land. (source: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Anti-Ethik und Uebermensch.
Ein kleiner Blick in die Grundprinzipien des ethischen Denkens von
Nietzsche).
Abschied or Die Kraehen schreien or
Vereinsamt
Die Krähen schrein
Und ziehen schwirren Flugs zur Stadt:
Bald wird es schnein. -
Wohl dem, der jetzt noch - Heimat hat!
Nun stehst du starr,
Schaust rückwärts, ach! wie lange schon!
Was bist du Narr
Vor Winters in die Welt entflohn?
Die Welt - ein Tor
Zu tausend Wüsten stumm und kalt!
Wer das verlor,
Was du verlorst, macht nirgends halt.
Nun stehst du bleich,
Zur Winter-Wanderschaft verflucht,
Dem Rauche gleich,
Der stets nach kältern Himmeln sucht.
Flieg, Vogel, schnarr
Dein Lied im Wüstenvogel-Ton!
Versteck, du Narr,
Dein blutend Herz in Eis und Hohn!
Die Krähen schrein
Und ziehen schwirren Flugs zur Stadt:
Bald wird es schnein, -
Weh dem, der keine Heimat hat!
Lonely
The
crows caw
and
go with zipping wings to the city:
soon
it will be snowing.
Happy
is he who now yet has a homeland!
Now
you stand numbly,
gazing
backward, ah! for how long already?
Why,
you fool,
did
you flee into the world as Winter approached?
The
world - a door
to
a thousand wastelands silent and cold!
He
who has lost
what
you have lost, never stops anywhere.
Now
you stand pallid,
cursed
to wander in the winter,
like
smoke
that
is always seeking colder skies.
Fly,
bird, rasp out
your
song in the melody of a bird of the wastes!
Hide,
you fool,
your
bleeding heart in ice and sneers!
The
crows caw
and
go with zipping wings to the city:
soon
it will be snowing.
Woe
is he who has no homeland!
While I
read the poem aloud in my film, I am showing images of my home land, the German
landscape. I question what my home land represents for me now.
I have
asked my sister Regine to talk about our whole family on camera, discuss dozens
of images of our family tree, on both sides of our heritage. For the film, I
selected the image of my grandfather, Karl Sattler, who was a member of the
NSDAP and a Hauptmann in WWII and in charge of aerial bombardments. His image
is on screen, while my sister’s voice speaks about him. This is the first time
in my life that I am approaching this theme. While it is extremely difficult, I
find the process somewhat healing because I am finally addressing something
that has been tormenting me, excruciatingly since my childhood.
Karl Sattler war geboren in Lochhausen
bei Muenchen.
Seine Eltern waren der Schulrat Sattler
und sein Frau,
sie wiederum war eine geborene
Lauterbach, sie war
die Tochter eines Kunstmalers, die sind
hier zu sehen,
die haben irgendwo in Straubing gewohnt.
Und dies
hier ist ein Bild auf dem man sieht dass
Carl Sattler
was a Hauptmann during WWII und ein
ueberzeugtes
Parteimitglied gewesen ist.
Karl
Sattler was born in Lochhausen near Munich.
His
parents were the school principals. His mother’s
maiden
name was Lauterbach and she was the
daughter
of an artist. You can see them here, they
lived
in Straubing. And in this photo, you can see
that
Carl Sattler was a Captain in WWII. He was a
loyal
member of the Nazi Party.
As in my
previous video, I am working with texts by Michel Foucault again. Foucault’s philosophy
and his discussions about power encouraged me to discuss my own past, hint at
what happened to me in my childhood, while simultaneously discussing Germany’s
Nazi past.
I am interested in thoughts about power and
how people force power over others. I am interested in the psychological
consequences to those who had been overpowered by others and what happens if a
child’s boundaries get transgressed. When you don’t learn how to protect
yourself in your childhood, as an adult you constantly struggle with how to
protect yourself. It is difficult to find a proper way to reject those who come
too close to me and do not respect my privacy and necessary mind space.
Die Macht ist nicht eine Institution,
ist nicht
eine Struktur, ist nicht eine
Maechtigkeit
einiger Maechtiger, die Macht ist der
Name
den man einer komplexen strategischen
Situation in einer Gesellschaft gibt.
Die Frage lautet nicht, wie Macht sich
mani-
festiert, sondern wie sie ausgeuebt
wird.
Wo es Macht gibt, gibt es Wiederstand.
Und doch oder vielmehr deswegen liegt
der Wiederstand niemals ausserhalb der
Macht.
Sobald die Machtbeziehungen erstarren,
und sich als unveraenderlich erweisen,
tritt der Zustand der Herrschaft ein.
Power is not an
institution. It is not a structure.
Power is the name that is
given to a complex
strategic situation in a
society.
The strategic adversary is fascism...
the fascism
in us all, in our heads and in our
everyday behavior,
the fascism that causes us to love
power, to
desire the very thing that dominates
and exploits us.
The
question is not, how power manifests itself,
but
how it is exerted.
Where
there is power, there is resistance. The
resistance
is never outside of power.
As
soon as the relations of power solidify and
become
unchangeable, the statues of a regime arise.
From ‘Method’ in ‘History of Sexuality Volume I,’ pp. 92-102
Foucault's theories primarily address the
relationship between power and knowledge and how these are used as a form of
social control. Foucault asks many questions
and opens doors to look at concepts from different perspectives.
In Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, page 26, he
described power as something exercised, put into action and relationships.
Power is an active relation rather than a possession or static state of
affairs.
“...[power]
is never appropriated in the way that wealth or a commodity can be
appropriated. Power functions. Power is exercised through networks, and
individuals do not simply circulate in those networks; they are in a position
to both submit to and exercise this power. They are never the inert or
consenting targets of power; they are always its relays. In other words, power
passes through individuals. It is not applied to them.” And he carries on : “Power is relations;
power is not a thing, it is a relationship between two individuals... such that
one can direct the behavior of another or determine the behavior of another.
Voluntarily determining it in terms of a number of objectives which are also
one’s own”. Power is “the exercise of something that one could call government
in a very wide sense of the term. One can govern a society, one can govern
a group, a community, a family; one can govern a person. When I say ‘govern
someone,’ it is simply in the sense that one can determine one’s behavior in
terms of a strategy by resorting to a number of tactics”I did not find all the answers to my questions in Foucault, but his questions have helped me think about power structures in different ways and helped me understand how power evolves. When we think about the rise of the Nazis to power, for example, Foucault suggested that power relations do not operate only through repressions. He wrote, “In defining the effects of power as repression, one adopts a purely juridical conception of such power, one identifies power with a law which says no, power is taken above all as carrying the force of a prohibition. If power were never anything but repressive, ... do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse” (See ‘Discipline and Punish’ p. 27-28)
I investigated Foucault’s ideas about various models of power structures, which contributes to a dialogue my work embodies. I am interested in how people can gain power over others. Also, I am exploring the rationale associated with people who are not necessarily in a power position but who enable those in that position by assisting them. I was also interested in the power structure of the church and the power certain individuals have over others, reflecting on my childhood sexual abuse experiences.
In theory, people can only
have power over others because at one point in time, the victims allowed the perpetrators
to have power over them. In my case, as a helpless, vulnerable child, I was
told that I would be killed if I told anyone about the sexual abuse. The abuse
would not have been possible without the help of my grandmother, who
‘disappeared’ for an hour every day while it happened and while my grandparents
where in charge of watching me.
I project the Foucault text, overlaying my voice during
a scene with train
tracks. Recently, I only travel by train when in Germany. Train travel allows
contemplation about Germany and its landscape. I associate trains and train
tracks with the Holocaust, which represents the darkest element of Germany’s
history. Walking on train tracks, for me, is a means of meditation about how
possibly to come to terms with addressing the German past.
I have
also included elements of my short film, ‘Grenzueberschreitung’. This video is
about what can happen when personal boundaries were not respected in childhood.
I utilized my own writing combined with texts by Freud about that subject. I
filmed the visuals at the former East/West border in Berlin between the former
GDR and BDR, at the remnants of the Berlin Wall.
Immer, wenn Eltern die Intigritaet des
Kindes beschaedigen,
dann haben sie die Grenzen des Kindes
ueberschritten.
Wenn das Kind satt ist und zum Aufessen
genoetigt wird,
ist das eine Grenzueberschreitung. Wer
oft erlebt hat,
dass die eigenen Grenzen ueberschritten
wurden, dem
faellt es oft schwer die eigenen Grenzen
wahrzunehmen.
Wann habe ich genug davon?
Wann tritt mir jemand zu nahe?
Wann stellt mir jemand zu direkte
Fragen?
Always,
when parents hurt the integrity
of
a child, they have overstepped the
boundaries
of a child’s welfare. A child
that
often ex-periences that someone
oversteps
its boundaries has a hard time
identifying
its boundaries in later life.
When
is it enough?
When
is someone offending and
hurting
me? When is someone asking
questions
that are too direct?
I projected the voice of Holocaust survivor, Dr. Peter
Gary (who I interviewed in Victoria, Canada in 2016) onto right wing
populists’ and extremists’ marches occurring weekly in Dresden, demonstrations
against the acceptance of war refugees from Syria. I
used my own voice reading poems by Holocaust Survivor Primo Levi and projected those sounds onto images of burning refugee homes
in Germany today.
The film includes images of high ranking Nazis that I am showing
together with my grandfather and later, together with original sounds of the bombardments of
Berlin in 1945, with a speaker, on the radio, the Deutschlandfunk. The speaker
announcing the bombardment proclaimed that there is a battalion of war planes
over Hannover at that moment and that the bombardment of Berlin would happen
shortly. The voice said he would come back later but all one hears are the
sounds of sirens. Then, the sound of the
bombardment is heard.
Without
the actions of the Nazis and their politics of aggression, the war, the death
of 65 million people as well as the destruction of Europe and many places
outside of Europe would not have happened.
History,
my own childhood experiences and Germany’s history, that one is trying to
forget, trying to erase from our memory. I am tearing pages from a history book
about the Third Reich, a time in Germany’s history that one would like to have
never existed. Germans would have liked to erase this part of our history and
to put a leaden blanket onto our past. Yet, it is important to face and to
discuss this past, to discuss how it was possible for the Nazis to come to
power, to prevent a scenario like this from ever happening again.
In the
film, I have interwoven my short film ‘Gott ist tot’. The title refers to
Nietzsche’s ‘Zarathustra’ and ‘Die froehliche Wissenschaft’ texts. I read and
recorded my text about why I think there cannot be a god. I discovered this
idea in my childhood while I was counting the lines in the carpet during
sermons in church on Sunday mornings. My grandfather went there every Sunday to
have his sins forgiven. While I was suffering because of his actions, I asked
god to help me. There was never an answer for me. Just darkness.
I
chose to call the previous short film ‘Gott ist tot’ (God is dead) because in my childhood I thought that God maybe
did not exist anymore. Later I became convinced that there has never been a
god.
Since the mid 18th century industrialization, society has devised rules
that impact how our lives should appear to others and how we should conduct
ourselves in public and in private. Why has it become so difficult to question
moral, the 'mendaciousness' of society, and structures of power? The church has
had a malicious influence on society. It set up rules about what is morally
right and wrong, yet forgives pedophiles, if they are upstanding members of the
church?
Als
ich klein war, hab ich die Rillen im Teppich gezaehlt, in der Kirche.
Ich
hab gehofft, die Predigt waere bald vorbei. Ich wusste schon, und
ich
war vielleicht 6 oder 7, dass es keinen Gott geben kann. Kann es
gerecht
sein, jemanden, der andere verletzt die Suenden zu vergeben?
Kann
es gerecht sein, dass einem als Kind so viel boeses angetan wird?
Wo
bist du Gott fuer mich? Bitte mach, dass ich nicht mehr im Bett des
Grossvaters
liegen muss, dass ich mich anfassen lassen muss, dass ich
seinen
alten Penis anfassen und in den Mund nehmen muss. Wo bist
du
Gott fuer mich? Ich hab gebetet und um Hilfe gebeten aber er hat
mich
nicht gehoert. Es kann keinen Gott geben. Ich weiss es ganz genau.
Wenn
es einen Gott gaebe, wuerde er nicht zulassen, dass Kinder leiden
und
sterben. Wohin treibt die Menschheit, die sich erklaeren moechte,
dass
Gott das fuer uns tut. Wie will e runs erloesen. Sieht niemand,
dass
wir auf den Abgrund hintreiben. Will niemand aufstehen und
es anhalten.
Wir, wir sind die alleinig Verantwortlichen fuer unser Tun.
When
I was little, I counted the lines in the carpet, in church.
I
was hoping the sermon would come to an end soon.
I
knew already, and I was maybe 6 or 7, that there cannot be a god.
Can
it be just that someone who hurts others, gets his sins forgiven?
Can
it be just that a child must endure such horrible things?
Where
are you god for me? Please change my life so that I do
not
have to be in the bed of the grandfather anymore, that I
must
be touched by him, that I must hold his penis and put
it
into my mouth. Where are you god for me? I have prayed
and
asked for help, but he did not hear me. There cannot be
a
god, I know that with certainty. If there was a god, he would
not
allow, that children suffer and die. Where is mankind drifting?
Who
can explain that god is doing all that suffering for us? How
does
he want to redeem us? Does no one see that we are drifting
towards the precipice? Does no one want to
stand up and stop
all
this insanity? We, we are the only ones who are responsible
for
our actions and all insanity.
While
I am reading this text, I show images of that church carpet. Also, I include images
of my painting with my hands and am showing a cross with several thousand nails
that I built.
At the
end of my video, I leave Berlin. My departure is a way for me to dissolve my
problems from the past and to cope with my memories. I leave because I must go
to find space for myself to breathe and to feel safe. The ending of the film
shows images of leaving Berlin and going to a different place. In the film, I
always travel from east to west, eventually leaving the city by plane in that
direction. This imagery is my metaphor for how I deal with all of this, which
is to go away.
Many,
many good memories also connect me to Germany. I will not list them here. The
memories of walks on Sundays under the grey autumn sky, the beautiful
landscapes in the country side, longing for my sister and wonderful dear
friends, create a nostalgia and heaviness in my heart. Leaving for me is
resolving my heaviness from the past, but leaving is also very sad every time.
I like Edmond Haraucourt’s words about leaving, Partir c’est mourir un peu. ‘To leave is to die a little bit’.
Leaving
is to die for what one loves. One leaves behind a little of oneself at any hour
– any place.
PS. I followed Helen’s and Jay’s advice to
work with someone who has some experience with editing since my editing style
is a bit rough or raw. So, I pre-edited the film and asked Joshua Jones, a
first-year film student I met at Plymouth last year, when I was invited to the
Future Imperfect conference with my film ‘Black Milk of Daybreak’, to help me with
the split screens.
In my second MFA year I started my research
with Michel Foucault (‘Wahnsinn und Gesellschaft’, ‘History of Sexuality’,
‘Discipline and Punish’) and his thoughts and different concepts of possible
structures of power. My research lead me to the discussion of memory work and I
read Frigga Haug’s books ‘Female Sexualisation’ and ‘Erinnerungsarbeit’ (Memory
Work) and Simone Weils ‘Ueber die Ursachen von Freiheit und gesellschaftlicher
Unterdrueckung’ (‘Reflexions sur les causes de la liberte et de l’oppression
sociale’).
I wanted to see my video and my painting
work together as a tool of investigation into my memory work. The experiences
of my past shaped and formed me as the being I am today, the experience that
can be seen as a lived practise in the memory my self-constructed identity.
Erinnerungen, tragen uns durchs Leben,
durch diese Erinnerungen und Erfahrungen,
die wir sammeln auf dem Weg, werden wir
als Menschen geformt. Nie werde ich in der
Lage sein, die Erlebnisse meiner Kindheit
von mir abzustreifen, ich glaube, dass sie
mein ganzes Leben gepraegt haben. Meine
Unsicherheit, mein Minderwertigkeitsgefuehl,
mein Schuld- und Schamgefuehl, alles lag
unter der Oberflaeche, bis ich endlich, erst
vor wenigen Jahren, in der Lage war, diese
Erfahrung in eine Erkenntnis umzuwandeln,
dass ich meine Art zu sein als eine
Tatsache,
als ein Geschenk annehme.
Our memories carry us through our lives,
those memories and our experiences that
we encounter on the way, form us as beings.
Never will I be able to shed the experiences
in my childhood, I believe they have formed
and shaped my whole life. My insecurity, my
self-consciousness, my feeling of guilt and
shame,
all those lay under the surface until I was
finally able,
only several years ago to transform them
into a
finding or the perception that I accept my
way
of being as a given, as a gift
What I
have gained in creating this work is a degree of self-confidence. The creating
and research into transgression of boundaries, is an exploration of new territory.
As Frigga Haug suggested, once we make public the events of our lives,
“wriggling free of the constraints of purely private and individual
experiences, from a state of modest insignificance we enter a space in which we
can take ourselves seriously.” This work is not so much about telling a story,
and how others receive the story, it is more about the process of me collecting
the memories and making them public. Haug described the experience of
publishing memory work: “Hauling ourselves out of the water taught us nothing
about flying, but a lot about gravity”.
The
process of experimenting with how I can possibly work through my memories and
come to terms with my past is the vital part of this work, which I must say
helped me heal already. I was always scared to talk about what happened to me,
but now that I am making it public, I feel liberated and more confident.
One of
my aims for using my body in this research and in my video was to identify the
ways I live in my body. I want to start and define my relation to other human
beings and the world.
Invitation
to exhibit my work in the show ‘History and Personal Memory’ in Victoria in
February 2018 pushed me to use my memory and my own experience as a basis of
knowledge combined with a collective memory of the German past.
Paintings
I have created two more paintings with text
for the ‘Omnipresence of Power’ series.
As with the first painting out of this
series (here below is an image of the group exhibition opening at the Front
Gallery in Edmonton), I have been writing my ‘Gott ist tot’ text on these three
canvases with pastel crayons and oil sticks. Then, I have overlaid a text by
Michel Foucault with stencils onto these words. The stencil text can hardly be
seen, only when one stands right in front of the piece.
Please see explanation to both the ‘Gott
ist tot’ text as well as the Foucault text above in the writing about the
video. With this new work, I wanted to bring my video and painting work together.
I use the same elements of research in both the video and the paintings and I also show the paintings and the actual application
of paint in the film.
I am currently working on this painting. I
have discussed both with Andrew and Jean Marie that I would like to bring
several of the big canvases to Berlin and exhibit them there. This painting is 8 foot by 11.5 foot big
