Deathly Still

Fifty years have now passed since the end of the World War II and the first shocked reports of the concentration camps. In the immediate aftermath of that ghastly discovery, writers, artists and philosophers asked how one could still write after the Holocaust: the brute facts of human cruelty seemed then to exceed the powers of any possible representation. But today, a half century and three generations later, our culture urgently needs to preserve the reality of the Holocaust. In 1987 Dirk Reinartz set out on his sad itinerary: Dachau, Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, Treblinka. The list goes on. Seven years later he has compiled this series of 200 black-and-white photographs of the 24 ruins of the death camps.