The Jewish Cemetery of Weissensee in Berlin - Weißensee Friedhof

from Cemetery of Berlin-Weißensee Friedhof

“Berlin is obviously a place with a rich History”. According to the work of Regine Robin, the capital can somehow be considered a palimpsest. Each part of its History is successively covering the previous one, as the sociologist and historian developed. Aimed to be forgotten, denied, symbols of each era are destructed to constitute another layer of sedimentation, replaced by new symbols.

An illustration of this contemporary archeology is the Weissensee Friedhof (Jewish cemetery of Weissensee), on the northern part of the city. Witnessing the opulence of the community in Berlin before the rise of the nazism, this vast cemetery now displays a sour vision of an abandoned place. Despite few private donations and charities, the maintenance is far too limited compared to the destructive force of nature - yet sometimes perceived as a vain attempt of preservation in face of it. A real jungle covers largely its extent, as an illustration of the disrupture Shoah brought in History. As much as there are for the most part very few traces either of the richly-decorated marbled graves, or of the creative metal works, shattered under fallen trees, mostly covered by leaves and brambles. Year after year, scraps remain as sedimentation layers under an increasing humus. Sometimes a valuable marble mausoleum still comes out of a pile of lianas. On the surface, letters are gone, widely extracted by burglars’ chisels. Both nature and human kind finish the fatal work of oblivion.

The pictures of Didier Gaillard-Hohlweg show the evidence of what remains overwhelmingly of an entire community. Here, the photographic series brings out the consequent tension of an obvious confrontation of rhythms, a resulting friction between both the overburdened historical substance of this cemetery, low and heavy, and the constantly faster pace of our civilisation. Furthermore, this tension also leads to a necessary perspective on the violent and everlasting conflict between the ideals of society and what is designated to be denied and forgotten.

For a decade, photographer Didier Gaillard-Hohlweg captures the rhythm of seasons over this vast cemetery, illustrating the silent that governs its long transformation. Through these numerous images of Weissensee Friedhof, this series completes his documentary work dealing with the notion of amnesia, which constitutes for two decades the common thread of his photographic work.

“Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject” Hannah Arendt

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Cemetery of Berlin-Weißensee Friedhof