The legacy of intergenerational trauma is complicated to untangle. What we pass onto others and try to shield them from is often at odds with the need to unburden the experiences and traumas that have been suffered. It sags in our heart like a loose sock sliding down an ankle, a rock in the shoe, a constant reminder of everything awful about the preciousness of the human condition. History repeats like a doomed rhyme. It has an emotional debt that cannot be bundled and sold off at consolidated prices. Its credit system is repeated. Memory is the fallacy we want to endure, but on the whole, it lets us down with a great thudding sound, cracking shoulder blades, and grinding our hopes into a fine dust, leaving us stiff, cold, and without elevated accomplishment. Doomed to repeat, too kind.
Europe is on the precipice of letting go of a generation that is the last connection to the Second Great War. There will be no more ear to the chest, no more pulse to check. With the slow turn of the gears, all those defeated emotional slag heaps will be subsumed into the thicket while the children of their children are reminded by the tightening global garrote of different wars, class wars, wars not of roses but of the thorns strengthening agenda born, not of growth but from the Zone.
War all day, and it was supposed to be the final war, the war to end all wars, and like spring, new thorns grow, prosperous deviations all told. The generation that told themselves no, never again, such a beast to behold, will slumber now, reminding us that all things grow cold. Memories distant, tripping over our shoelaces in the race to store water and 72 hours’ worth of food, with wind-up radios waiting for a signal from the new nuclear winter as hope fades. Days marked by a broken red crayon, checking off the never-ending to-do list against a tsunami of pain. The house is never in order. Never in order. Never in order. Never. In. Order. Always leaving empty-handed.
Boris Wanders is a poet. Judith Lechner is an artist using photography. Both have come together, a union of artistic energy, but also of familial bond. As a couple, they are reconciling the history of Dutch collaboration with the Nazis during WWII. The concept carries with it a guilt of blood, a libel in which the horrors and atrocities of the Second World War are catching up with a generation whose grandparents made decisions that affected the lives of those around them in their axcquiesence to Nazi occupation. Through the book, the journey is a discussion between the two artists reconciling this aspect of their family history. Their granddaughter makes an appearance, and the debate is clearly about how one places oneself between the pages of history while simultaneously letting go of the accumulated debris of guilt burning a hole in their hearts as their granddaughter frolicks in the woods.
The book is melancholic. This is heavily drawn through place and images of forested roads in a muddy late winter. A brooding stable/house appears, no doubt a relic of where the unimaginable claimed. It is sequestered in the woods, the lead-up is muddy roads and barren winter branches. The much lighter images of Boris, offset by his white undershirt, pull the images into a space of reflection. There is a feeling of intimacy in the portraits and a feeling of release in the photos as if they are part of a ritual in which the couple wishes to release their connection to the events before it can contaminate their granddaughter. It is an effective use of sequencing. The poems, in Dutch, also help shade the feeling of intergenerational trauma and how it is processed. The book is an excellent example of collaboration between a couple and their granddaughter, illuminating vital issues we will face again. These direct links to the past and the understanding of trauma are essential. Without those who remember, those who never knew will only have a repeated and ill-advised chance to forget.
Boris Wanders and Judith Lechner
On/t/schuld
Studio 174