Love Letters from the War

Love Letters from the War is built from nearly a thousand letters my grandfather Karl wrote to my grandmother Grete between 1943 and 1945, while he was a German soldier in the Second World War.

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The letters are not a record of resistance. They are the record of an ordinary man trying to remain human inside a system designed to remake him. He asks, in one of them, why the people he is meeting should be his enemies.

 

The project takes shape across three forms: a photo book published by Kehrer Verlag, a film, and an exhibition. Each weaves the original letters together with Karl's own drawings, historical photographs, and new images I generated and then reworked by hand through printing, drawing, painting, and layering.

 

The book reproduces the letters at 1:1 scale in a bilingual structure, German and English, so the reader holds the correspondence as an object.