the Photographer Frederic Brenner wanders through Berlin, it’s autumn. The leaves rustle in the radio play healed under his feet or when a gust of wind blows them away. During this walk, the idea for a new photo project matures in him, the sheets make it tangible, let it become more concrete: Brenner wants to portray Jewish life in Berlin. He associates the first images that come to mind with the leaves on the ground.
The leaves have died, eventually they will turn into humus from which new ones can grow. But from which one can no longer draw conclusions about the former sheet. With this nature analogy, the photographer explains in the radio play healed, in which he bears no name, his point of view. What he shows in the photographs, which were taken between 2016 and 2019, is how it is in healed means “a collapse of all history”, hence “a history of the absence” as well as “the presence of the enigmatic”.
Brenner’s paintings have been part of the collection of the Jewish Museum Berlin since last year. The photographer not only takes pictures of his protagonists, but also collects notes and statements from them. A large picture-text show, also with the title healedwhich is on display at the Jewish Museum Berlin until April 24, 2022.
“It is more exhausting to live with an anti-Semite than with a philo-Semite.”
Tobias Purfürst now detaches the texts from the photographs and assembles them into his 50-minute radio play. What initially sounds like smashing and mutilation works surprisingly well. Because many of the statements are so sharp and concise that they drag you onto this huge, winding, unmanageable field of conflict even without a photographic context. Where you are unexpectedly addressed yourself.
it goes in healed definitely also about neo-Nazis and anti-Semites. But even more so for the helpless and the affectionate. “It’s more exhausting to live with an anti-Semite than with a philo-Semite,” says one of the Jewish people portrayed. A disturbing sentence. He documents how difficult it is for many Jews to become the object of a German desire for reconciliation. When it comes to anti-Semites, the line of conflict is clear to them. But what about the many people who make Jews the projection screen on which they want to work off their own guilt? How to deal with those converts who have a pronounced urge to hug? Paul Celan wrote the sentence that gave the exhibition and radio play the title: “You healed me.”
healed deals with the possibility and the difficulty of Jewish life in Berlin, from a Jewish perspective. More precisely: from Jewish perspectives. Because each and every one of the protagonists has their own view of things. Some coincide, some contradict each other. everything is true
healedRBB Kultur, February 25, 2022, 7 p.m.