Artistic Statement
How much can we control the past within us? Against the background of the biographies of my grandparents Irmgard Adam and Fritz Konrad I am concerned with the phenomenon of transgenerational traumatization researched in epigenetics. What is meant is the passing on of individually experienced traumas, which continue to have an effect over several years and which can reveal themselves in the self-image, in the emotional experience, in the unconscious action of future generations. I ask myself the accompanying questions: What does this mean for our generation and its descendants, what does it mean for myself? How much trauma experience of our ancestors is still in us today? How important it is to know the biographies of our grandparents better? Inspired by the confrontation with my own identity, I came across photographs, letters, documents and interviews, traveled together with my mother to fateful places in my grandparents life. As grandson I opened the small box of Irmgard Konrad’s memories: her fears, despair and loneliness keep the indescribable drama awake, but also her positive attitude to life, her social skills, her love and her tireless fight against fascism are part of the family memory and a reminding legacy at the same time. Raufaser is a photographic case study that uses own documentary photography and archival material to investigate my ancestors history. With this body of work, I want to raise awareness of how the aftermath of war and crisis can affect the generations that follow, and examine how collective memory is shaped and influenced. Creating a new sense of identity by confronting with himself with the past, spanning four generations, provides the basis for a detailed investigation of postmemory, mental health, war and history. Raufaser is a certainly a very personal story, however for me it is inseparably interwoven with our collective history as germans.

Project Statement
“It can’t have been experienced by a single person,” my grandmother sums up in a video interview for the Moses Mendelssohn Center in Potsdam in the mid-1990s. I have often heard her say this sentence. My grandmother was one of the few Holocaust survivors who were able and willing to talk about it. With her children and even more with her grandchildren. So there was a lot that was not new to me, which she told historians as well as many young people up to a ripe old age. Born in 1915 in Breslau, Silesia, politicized in the socialist youth movement, active in resistance against the Nazis, she survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, almost two years of forced labor for Siemens in the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp, and the “death march” thanks to the solidarity of other prisoners. After the liberation of the village of Kritzow in Mecklenburg by the Red Army, my grandmother went to France, hoping to find members of her family there. In Paris, she experienced for the first time again what a life in freedom feels like, only clouded by the uncertainty about the fate of her childhood love Fritz. Back in Germany in 1947 and finally reunited with him again after five years of separation, they both married a little later in Leipzig and had a daughter, my mother, in 1948. Now I am looking for traces of their eventful life, with its incredibly difficult but also beautiful times. I look for them on the outside and I look for them on the inside, deep inside me. I am interested in the phenomenon of transgenerational traumatisation, which is researched in epigenetics, i.e. the passing on of individually experienced traumas that continue to have an effect over several years and that can reveal themselves in self-image, in emotional experience, in the unconscious actions of subsequent generations. How important is it to know the biographies of our grandparents more precisely? Inspired by the confrontation with my own identity, I come across photographs, letters, documents and interviews and finally travel with my mother to fateful places in her life. On the journeys, the pictures find me, I hold on to them. As a grandson I open the boxes of my grandmother’s memories and live through her fears, despair and loneliness. They kept the indescribable drama alive for many decades. But my box of memories is also marked by her boundless love, her positive attitude towards life, her social competence, her tireless fight for humanism, against fascism and war.

Bio
Daniel Seiffert was born in 1980. Before studying photography at Ostkreuz School for Photography in Berlin, he earned a Master ’s degree in Political Science, Communication and African Studies from universities in Berlin, Potsdam and Lisbon.

View Daniel Seiffert’s website.