My family is of Jewish provenance and has been persecuted by Hitlers Nazi regime. I grew up in post-war Germany steeped in a precarious world of denial, paranoia and lack of open commitment to grieving. The scars of the war where palpable on every level and surfaced especially in the fragmented war stories which all adults around me continually exchanged. Evesdropping on these fragments and the ambience of a post-war world set the seed for what I feel to have inherited as a shared memory of sorts - even though I did not participate in the actual persecution trauma my elders experienced.
I created "November 9th" as a kind of memorial ground for the unhealed pain of my ancestors, a place to uncover and contemplate that which has transferred itself into my own life. Even though this is my very personal journey I am aware of it as also representing a process for a whole generation and culture. In this sense I put myself on the line as a token story, a token thread which links me to the past and the future. I hope for this piece to be a mere beginning on a lifelong process of creating peace with the perpetrator who is simultaneously the culture from which I stem.
"November 9" is a composite piece in progress in which I attempt to transport the experience of inherited memory into my contemporary reality in the same way in which I experience the absurdity and incongruence of such an overlay . As this work accompanies an ongoing process in my life it is a growing composite of single works which over time have taken on various directions and forms. What combines all pieces is my interest in trauma as it ingraines itself into the body as physical memory causing it to take on aberrant,painful and grotesque shapes while at the same time remaining functional, productive and even beautiful.
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"November 9" is a two panel, 18 foot long 9 foot high paper wall comprised of flax paper and human hair. Installed it hangs from the ceiling removed by a few inches from the wall so it may sway slightly with the air, like a breathing presence, symmetrical like a human body but scored by its center seperation.
The repetition of the numbers accross the surface of this piece allude to the date of November 9th when in 1938 Hitler began his systematic purge of the Jewish population in central Europe ("Reichskristallnacht"). It also alludes to the same date when in 1989 the dividing wall between East and West post-war Germany came down laying bare a large undigested portion of Germany's past. November 9 also happens to be my birthday - in 1952. By sharing this date with the history of the Holocaust I see myself momentarily as a symbolic carrier of its memory, and in this piece I allow the events to metaphorically coalesce on my own skin as a token story and a token birthday, the way I feel the heritage of my family's persecution coalescing in my own life.
The flax paper is reminiscent of human skin and the incorporation of hair alludes to the use of human hair cut from Jewish death camp inmates for the forging of blankets during the scarcety of the war years. The entire surface of the piece is covered with earth colored stenciled letters which read : NOV 9, 1938/89/52, like an endless repetition, a mantra or a chant. They are like the endless repetitions of familial survival stories , and their yearly reverberation in their immense meaning for me on my birthday.
I have made this piece very large so that it may overpower the space it is installed in. In part this is to make it hard to overlook. But it is also an attempt to create a reference to the celebration of memory. I am thinking of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, a place with age-old embeddings of sorrow and pain, a symbol for both fragileness and resilience, in the Jewish world a place to visit for continuing prayer and hope.
