30 mrt 2026
Article published on March 30, 2026: The first AI Hollywood actress has been launched, voice actors fear for their jobs, and ChatGPT can write poems. In a series of articles, we ask people with creative professions what they do with AI. Part 5: Hanno Ketterer.
New stories from the war thanks to AI
The first AI Hollywood actress has been launched, voice actors fear for their jobs, and ChatGPT can write poems. In a series of articles, we ask people with creative professions what they do with AI. Part 5: Hanno Ketterer.
For several years, Hanno Ketterer did not dare to read the thick bundle of letters his grandfather wrote to his grandmother during the Second World War. The German photographer has been living in the Netherlands for twenty years. “As a child, I grew up in Krefeld and saw him every weekend. A friendly, neat man in a suit with a tie. He himself never spoke about the time he served on the Eastern Front for the Wehrmacht, but I heard fragments from my mother. ‘He rode ahead of the troops on a bicycle,’ the story went.”
Ketterer lives in Amsterdam, but tells his story at the Pennings Foundation in Eindhoven, where he is exhibiting his project Love letters from the War. He takes out a folder in which he keeps a small part of the thousand pages of letters. Light brown, discolored sheets, densely written in small, regular handwriting. There are also postcards among them, with Hitler’s portrait on the stamp.
Ketterer eventually began reading the letters thanks to the education he followed at the Fotoacademie. For twenty-six years he worked as a management consultant, but after the corona pandemic he decided to do something completely different: photography. He chose the letters as the subject of his graduation project.
Ketterer’s grandfather Karl Krug was a German teacher in Krefeld and was called up in 1943 to go to the Eastern Front. He was 31 at the time, married to Grete, and the father of a three-year-old girl who would later become Hanno Ketterer’s mother. “Even though he was not a Nazi himself, he was still part of the Wehrmacht. I didn’t know exactly what he had done. That’s why I postponed reading for so long.”
“But already in the first letter I read, he writes about how he sits in the evening at a farm in Poland where he is billeted, at the table with the resident and her little daughter. He is drawing; he worked as a cartographer and made small drawings in his free time, often for my mother. The child does not want to go to bed, and that makes him think of his own daughter.”
“‘I gave her my last chocolates,’ he writes. ‘I want to comfort her because her father is not there. He is fighting for the Russians.’ That made a deep impression on me. The Poles and the Russians were the enemy.”
In other letters, Karl also wonders why the people he encounters along the way should be his enemy. “Even if you are in a position where many bad things happen that you have no control over, you always have the freedom to choose how you deal with it. Despite everything, he continued to believe in love.”
Mischievous look
Gradually it became clearer that these were mainly love letters. “My grandfather was a romantic; time and again he wrote how much he loved Grete. And how their love would grow even stronger because they now had to miss each other so much.”
At the exhibition, a number of black-and-white photographs from the 1940s are also shown. Grete hanging laundry outside, or the two of them together, entwined on the couch, he with a mischievous look in his eyes. They not only testify to daily life during the war and their love, but also to his talent for composition.
Ketterer compiled a selection of the letters and photos in the book Love letters from the war. And he did more: he generated new images with the help of AI. “While reading the letters, images formed in my mind. Of the landscapes he describes, or the scenes he imagines of Grete. He did not take photographs at the time. I used the letters as a basis for prompts for photographic images.”
The difference with the historical photographs is clear: the AI images are in color, and he has edited most of them with manual overpainting. “I considered going to places in Poland where he had been. But after eighty years it is no longer the same. And not only that; I explicitly wanted to show my imagination, not reality.”
Pennings Foundation, until 9 May