November 2011 marks the 70th anniversary of the first deportation from the “Judenlager Milbertshofen” (“Milbertshofen Jewish Camp”) to the ghettos and extermination camps in Eastern Europe. To commemorate the events, artist Paul Huf, Holocaust survivor Ernst Grube, author and journalist Renate Eichmeier and educationalist Helga Hanusa are travelling to the destinations of the deportations from Munich to Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Piaski and Kaunas. Ernst Grube (born 1932) was himself interned in the barrack camp in Milbertshofen and was deported to Theresienstadt in 1945.
Paul Huf explores how we can represent this part of German history today, and which images and texts are appropriate and suitable to counteract the process of forgetting.
The research trip starts on 5 November 2011 with a walk from the Kulturhaus Milbertshofen to the Milbertshofen goods station. The reports, photos and drawings from this journey are projected in real time onto the outside façade of the Kulturhaus Milbertshofen on Curt-Mezger-Platz every day from 6 to 20 November 2011. The travel impressions can also be viewed online at www.forschungsreise-wider-das-vergessen.de.
After his return, Paul Huf’s pictures are on display to the public in an exhibition at the Kulturhaus Milbertshofen from 2 December 2011 to 27 January 2012 and are then loaned to Milbertshofen households. Through this campaign, which actively involves the city’s society in the process of the “Memorial against Forgetting”, the responsibility for communicating this research trip to the Eastern European Nazi concentration camps is passed on. Remembrance moves from the public to the private sphere and thus becomes more deeply rooted.
Accompanying the “Forschungsreise wider das Vergessen” (“Research Trip Against Forgetting”), events will take place at the Kulturhaus Milbertshofen in cooperation with the Petra Kelly Foundation and the Hanns Seidel Foundation, supported by an audio station from Bayerischer Rundfunk.
Paul Huf, born in 1967 in Guadalajara (Mexico), lives and works in Munich and Berlin.
