Babenhausen
Synopsis
The vivid account of an Antifa-activist (original sound at a demonstration) offers a chronology of anti-Semitic harassment and agitation in Babenhausen using the example of the history of the Merins, a Jewish family. On the visual level, this is accompanied by a series of views of their burning house. The result is a striking documentation of the way one element of the collective mentality of Nazi Germany persists into the present, remaining visible in the way an entire community deals with its own past.
© Hito Steyerl
The first video, Babenhausen, tells the story of a Jew who returned to the hometown after the Holocaust. The shame of the persecution is made explicit by the remains of the ransacked house. In Normality 6, anti-Semitic violence is told through its antithesis, a neo-Nazi demonstration. In Empty Center, a bare Potsdamer Platz, a dislocated center in Berlin, is the scene of a difficult reconstruction.
XIBT Contemporary Art Magazine, XIBT Contemporary Art Magazine, 2019-05 · read the full text
Eine Videoarbeit von Steyerl aus dem Jahr 1997 vergegenwärtigt die Hetze gegen die jüdische Familie Merin in Babenhausen. Bilder des angezündeten Hauses sind hinterlegt mit der Rede eines Antifa-Aktivisten auf einer Kundgebung. Die Konstellation von Bild und Text kommentiert sich selbst, zugleich ist sie wie eine Veranschaulichung von Roslers Botschaft in der Montage von Arendt-Zitaten: Nicht einzelne, auch nicht einzelne Politiker, sondern alle tragen dazu bei, das Schicksal der Menschheit mitzubestimmen.
trans.A video work by Steyerl from 1997 brings to mind the campaign of hatred against the Jewish Merin family in Babenhausen. Images of the torched house are underlaid with the speech of an Antifa activist at a rally. The constellation of image and text comments on itself; at the same time it is like an illustration of Rosler’s message in her montage of Arendt quotations: not individuals, and not individual politicians either, but everyone contributes to determining the fate of humanity.Beate Söntgen, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 25 July 2018 · in German · read the full text
Credits
Germany 1997, 4 min, Beta SP. Director and camera: Hito Steyerl.