"Vergangenheitsbewältigung (Struggling With Coming To Terms With The Past)"
© 2007 Quinn Jacobson


Ian Kershaw said, "The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference."

The Holocaust is a topic most people prefer to know only superficially, or to ignore altogether. I believe that an understanding of its complexity, as well as its violence, is critical to an understanding of our world and our humanity, especially today.

On November 9th and 10th, 1938, the Nazis, and the German people, unleashed terror and brutality on the Jewish people of Germany that had not been seen since the Middle Ages. Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were looted and destroyed. Over 1000 synagogues were desecrated and/or destroyed. 30,000 Jewish men were taken to concentration camps. Jewish people were beaten, raped, arrested, and murdered during the night of November 9th and early morning hours of November 10th, 1938.

Throughout Germany (and in Austria), the streets of the towns were covered with shards of broken glass from the synagogues and Jewish businesses. These two nights of terror have become known as "Kristallnacht”, or "The Night of Broken Glass.” This pogrom was the beginning of the Holocaust.

What Are You Doing?
My project deals with the tension between the memory of these events and the idea of "the other" today in Germany. As a person of Jewish heritage, and living in Germany, I find this tension palpable. As an artist, I feel compelled to make artwork about these feelings.

I'm photographing some of the sites, or locations, where the synagogues were destroyed. These aren't documents, but personal interpretations of what's left at the site or the feeling of the site. The landscapes in the work are a combination of significant locations to places where I've felt a certain kind of "presence" of the past.

I'm also making portraits of both German people and Ausländer (foreigners). I've included photo-illustrations, too.

This body of work is not photo documentary in nature, nor intended to serve as any kind of historical documentation. This work is my personal vision and based on my experience and emotion.

Why Are You Doing This?
The altruistic purpose is to do my part to ensure what happened to the Jewish people here is never forgotten. The world has said, "Nie Wieder”, or "Never Again” but look what happened in Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda and others places. Although many people, Americans and Germans, claim they suffer from "Holocaust Fatigue” (they're tired of hearing about the Holocaust), I still believe that it's never enough – and that my work will only be one small, but hopefully important, contribution toward the larger goal of preventing suffering and genocide from ever happening again.

Then there is my own desire or drive to confront and engage Germans about these events. I want to talk to them about these issues, not hide from them, or worse yet, forget them. I feel that there is something woefully out of balance referencing the magnitude of these events and daily life in Germany. I have a need to know what people here think about what happened and get it out in the open.

It has a practical purpose in promoting awareness and understanding to the young generation (who's at risk of not knowing, or succumbing to indifference or worse). I want to use this body work as a catalyst to start a discourse here (and everywhere) about what happened and why. Cultural understanding, education and tolerance will be the tripod this project stands on. Although everyone would be the intended audience, it would be specifically directed at the younger generation.

These photographs and this research raise questions about the representation of memory and memorializing at a time when the numbers of Holocaust survivors or witnesses are dwindling. At the start of the 20th century, there were 2,800 synagogues in Germany. About 1,700 of them were destroyed or damaged during the Nazi regime, most of these on Kristallnacht. However, even those that survived were destroyed over the years to come, or were converted for other uses. "Not only are there practically no actual synagogues in Germany, they have also vanished from the German public's consciousness," writes the historian Salomon Korn in his article in the catalog of the exhibition "German Synagogues: Virtual Reconstructions," which was on display at the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv. This project, in part, is to make these memories "real and relevant” for the communities here and everywhere.

How Are You Going To Do This?
For the last several years, I've worked in a very old photographic process called Wet Plate Collodion. This process brings a lot of metaphor to this project conceptually and specifically to the images. It's an abandoned and discarded process (in the late 1880s it was replaced by dry plates). The Jews and their synagogues were abandoned and discarded too. The images are made on glass plates, Ambrotypes (which I will make along with a negative for printing) and relate directly to the name, Kristallnacht, given by the Nazis and the pogrom itself, the actual shattering and breaking of glass. The images are "fixed" in cyanide, there's even traces of "prusssian blue" on the images. They also have the evidence of a handmade artifact. Rough edges, ridges, fingerprints, swirls, etc. all of this echoes our human imperfections. In my mind, this process is a perfect match for this concept and project, that's why I'm using it.

My Connection
My heritage is Jewish. My father's people left Europe about thirty years before the Holocaust. They emigrated as part of the third wave of Jews (1880s-1920s) entering the United States following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Revolution. This wave of immigrants included a lot of Sephardic Jews from the Balkans, Italy, Spain, Turkey and Greece, the places of my genetic heritage.

(view the photographs)