14 apr 2026
Article on Brabant Cultureel: Film | Photography
English translation:
Exhibition Pennings Foundation: Gentle German soldier preferred flowers to bullets
‘Love Letters from the War’ is an exhibition of photographs and a video film at Pennings Foundation in Eindhoven. For its maker Hanno Ketterer, the letters his German grandfather Karl wrote during the Second World War are the source of inspiration. The exhibition turns the cliché image of the German Eastern Front soldier on its head.
by Henk van Weert
At the entrance to the exhibition ‘Love Letters from the War’ you encounter a short text. Translated from German: ‘All my letters must always be love letters. Love, true, beautiful human love, has brought us together. The eternal hatred of people has driven us apart.’ These are the words of grandfather Karl, addressed to grandmother Grete. The final years of the war: the woman is at home with her young daughter, the mother of Hanno Ketterer, while the man is far away in the east, where the German army is heading toward defeat in Russia.
Anything but that
The cliché image of the German Eastern Front soldier is that of a fanatic, often a volunteer, preferably a member of the SS. Ketterer’s grandfather was anything but that. He wrote almost every day a letter to his wife, nearly a thousand in total. They overflowed with love for Grete and for his daughter. He wanted nothing to do with all the violence.
Hanno Ketterer’s mother found the letters in the estate of grandmother Grete, and Ketterer began reading them long after the war. In this way, a classic unfolded: unknown, discovered letters led to art. In this case to the combination of a book and a short film, supplemented by a series of photographs from the private archive of Karl and Grete.
Flowers along the road
Hanno Ketterer (1967) has pasted a number of the letters on the wall at Pennings. The idea is not that you read them, for that they hang too high. But you immediately get an impression of Karl’s bombardment of love directed at his young wife. He was a soldier against his will. A gentle man. With an art education behind him, Karl had become a teacher of German. As a soldier he must have felt miserable. His letters show that he sought distraction in the small and beautiful things he encountered in the east despite everything. He writes about flowers along the road, in the middle of a devastated war landscape. He finds comfort and distraction in them.
Hanno Ketterer turned his grandfather’s legacy into a project. On the wall at Pennings hangs a substantial series of black and white photographs that Karl made of his family. They far exceed the level of the average family snapshot. That Karl had an art education becomes quickly clear. The photographs are well composed, the people (Grete, Karl, the child) are presented in a classically beautiful way. The photographs are square, a format much loved in contemporary artistic photography.
With the film, Hanno Ketterer takes a further step. For nine minutes he quotes from his grandfather’s letters. Real photographs appear on screen, but most of the material consists of images generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
AI as an additional tool
Is that possible, using AI in an artistic production? In photography there has for some time been a discussion about whether AI should or should not be allowed. Here too it is a struggle between purists and the more flexible. Some photographers reject AI and see it as the beginning of the end. Others consider it an additional tool that expands their photographic possibilities. Scott Kelby, author of many shelves of photography books, recently concluded that you should not use AI as an independent creative instrument, but at most as a useful technical aid. You may safely use it to remove blemishes from a portrait, but it goes too far to let AI create a portrait on its own. Most photographers will probably agree with this.
Yet photographer Ketterer goes a step further. He had AI generate images for his film, but based on his grandfather’s letters. In this way the letters guide the images. Suddenly AI airplanes fly over historical black and white images, and butterflies and birds flutter around that never existed. Within the context of the story he wants to tell, it is all very meaningful use of AI.
It is also an illusion to think that AI can be kept out of photography. If you start to see it as a tool of imagination that must be used responsibly, there is not much to worry about. In twenty years we will probably laugh at today’s attempts to exclude or restrain AI, just as we now laugh at the hardliners who thirty years ago saw the rise of digital photography as the beginning of the end.
‘Hanno Ketterer, Love Letters from the War’, until 9 May 2026 at Pennings Foundation, Eindhoven. Ketterer has brought the letters together in a book of the same title, published by Kehrer Verlag.