Before and After – War or Peace
Johannes Birringer*
Abstract
This essay reflects on the politics of memory, trauma, and artistic responses to historical and ongoing wars. Framed by the commemorations of the 80th anniversary of World War II’s end, the essay introduces the exhibition Vorher und nachher / Krieg oder Frieden at Gallery Puzić in Saarbrücken (Germany), which juxtaposes archival and contemporary documentary images of war-damaged cities, and refers to performance interventions and architectural visions of reconstruction. Central themes include the impossibility of art to heal or resolve, but its power to illuminate and disturb; the persistence of violence and aggression (Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Syria) and the tension between remembrance and forgetting. Birringer draws connections between photography, landscape, architecture, and literature – also evoking Walter Benjamin’s comments on the “angel of history” and Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota – to explore how layered histories of destruction and recovery complicate notions of progress, peace, and cultural resilience. The essay ultimately questions whether “before” and “after” are meaningful distinctions, as violence continues to return like a haunting, cyclical force in human experience.
Keywords: War, destruction, architecture, photography, landscape, concepts of history
In the beginning of May 2025, many commemorative events took place throughout Germany and Europe to remember the end of World War II, the surrender of the German Reich on May 7/8, 1945 – 80 years ago – and the liberation from National Socialism. In England, the memory of the victory is marked with annual contemplative festivities; this year, the oldest living veteran was 110 years old. The Dutch celebrated Liberation Day (Bevrijdingsdag) on May 5 and remembered the victims of the war and occupation on May 4. In Moscow, a massive military parade was held on May 9 to commemorate the victory in the Great Patriotic War.
Different people have different memories, of war and destruction, of flight and liberation, of loss. Some of us, even those of different generations, may carry with us difficult, unresolved wounds. If they fled Ukraine or have family and friends in Israel, Palestine, Syria, or Lebanon, then they suffer from very fresh, unhealed wounds.
Art is, of course, not therapy. It cannot heal wounds or force new perspectives on our memories. It can only inspire, instigate, open viewpoints or uncover symbolic documents, hint at discreet psychological profiles, perhaps disturb with drawings or installations. However, there is enough disturbance in the daily news, and the gallery should not submit itself to expand on this constant stream of negative reports and catastrophes.
Before and After / War or Peace approaches its difficult subject rather cautiously, with a few excerpts from the stream, and also aims to offer a glimpse of hope, even though art, like architecture, can only point to some trails. This year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, for example, was given a promising motto by curator Carlo Ratti: “To face a burning world, architecture must harness all the intelligence around us,” and the French pavilion responded by designing a very broad scenographic palette (Vivre avec/Living With) with various subthemes to be explored in an open, temporary space (next to the pavilion’s renovation site):
- Living with the Existing
- Living with Proximity
- Living with the Damaged
- Living with Vulnerability
- Living with Nature and the Living World
- Living with Collective Intelligence
What was striking was the large number of invited projects from French and international teams, including the Kharkiv School of Architecture (Ukraine), which focused on Odessa, on “living with war on the Black Sea coast; Ukrainian cities and citizens live daily with the risks and damage posed by Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine. This project examines past, present, and future conditions at four levels of intervention: sea, city, neighborhood, and home, and develops visions and strategies for Odessa’s recovery and transformation towards a resilient urban future” (Institut Français, Vivre Avec/Living With, press kit, 2025).
But in the face of war and climate disasters, and a burning world, can such repairs –“living with the damaged (abîmé)” – even be imagined? What would they look like in Gaza? Perhaps like President Trump’s bizarre references to a “beach resort”? Could this give the people of Gaza a false sense of faith in a future? O should one rather collect donations for refugees or provide humanitarian aid to people trapped in concentration camps?
The risky new exhibition at Gallery Puzić in Saarbrücken does not offer such suggestions, but it opens up a space for reflection and perhaps also for mutual understanding. Upon entering the gallery on opening night, visitors experienced a performance by a young musician, Leon Amelung, playing Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor on his cello in the front room. On the wall behind Amelung, there is a photograph of the magnificent National Library in Sarajevo (as it appeared before the bombing and after its restoration).
Below hangs the remarkable picture by Mikhail Evstafiev, who photographed the partially destroyed National Library during the war in 1992, with cellist Vedran Smailović sitting among the rubble. During the siege, which, at 1,425 days, became the longest siege of the 20th century, Smailović played Albinoni’s Adagio for 22 days, beginning on May 28, 1992, in honor of 22 civilians killed the day before by a mortar attack. They were waiting for bread outside a bakery on what is now Ferhadija Street. He also often performed at funerals, which were frequently targeted by Serbian snipers; this photo shows him in the National Library, destroyed in August 1992. This emphatic performance of resistance became a symbol for those trapped in Sarajevo.
This pairing of photographs begins in the front room with a series of archival photos dating back to the end of World War II and the devastated old town of Saarbrücken (1942-1945), a gesturing towards local memory and how such photos may reposition our familiarity with urban reality today. The images of the rubble and fires (including the Jewish synagogue in smoke and flames, set ablaze during Kristallnacht in 1938) are tracked by Saarland artist André Mailänder, who revisited and rephotographed the locations using almost identical camera angles. One sees the Luisenbrücke, the Palais Freital on Ludwigsplatz, the Old Saarbrücken city center which was completely destroyed by air raids in 1944, the main train station, and the rebuilt synagogue on Beethovenplatz.
At the same time, Mailänder exhibits three illustrated books he conceived and published during the past few years: Woven Places (Urban Fabric), vol. I; Woven Places (Green Facility), vol. II; and Woven Places (Succession), vol. III. He added a brief note to these photography books, explaining what his intense landscape photographs actually refer to: namely the invisible behind the visible, traces imagined in an overgrown earth, brushwork and trees concealing secrets. In some scenes, these interweavings through nature-growth can be seen with great intensity, dramatized by subtle lighting: hidden in the “Daarler Wiesen” in St. Arnual, Mailänder explains in his note, lie the remains of the destroyed old town, rubble that was dumped there, along with construction debris from the unfinished airport in the 1970s.
“A secluded area, accessible only via a few entrances. On one side, a meadow, on the other, covered with bushes and half-grown trees. ‘successional vegetation,’ a bird sanctuary. A strange case of an Arcadian landscape. A year-round dog walking area, in the summer a rumored nudist area on the fringes of social convention. The edge of civilization? Originally planned as an industrial park, canceled in the 1970s; an intact, but nameless bridge leading into the void testifies to this. Formerly the site of the city’s first airport – an unfortunate location, due to the high groundwater level in the floodplain. The city’s bomb debris brought here after the war. Later, construction rubble and the material excavated from the river straightening were added. Layer upon layer was piled up. A meaningful mixture. Symptoms of the war, mixed with symptoms of the ongoing repression of the traumas afterward. Left to time and to itself.”
Mailänder’s outline of the project with its focus on layers of local history also evokes Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, which the philosopher Walter Benjamin (who took his own life in Portbou, Spain, in 1940 while fleeing German racial policies) so fascinatingly interpreted in his 18 “Theses on the Concept of History.” We shall return to the ninth thesis later. Without a doubt, concepts of history, both political and local, economic, social, and environmental, are crucial to the standpoint of the exhibition Before and After. However, the symptoms of current wars or refugee crises in recent history are more difficult to cope with, because we live directly in the eye of the maelstrom. The debates on “remigration” (the dubious term used by the political far right for the expulsion of immigrants and refugees) are echoing through the media every day. The “succesional” in history, here in the German context after the last war and the Holcaust, and the annexation of the former GDR after the fall of the Berlin Wall, has nothing lightly “floating” about it as Joseph Vogl imagined in his aesthetic homage to lightness and fluidity (Meteor, 2025), a wishful study of perceptual processes with gazes upwards toward the sky.
Wim Wenders once made a much-admired film about angels and the sky above Berlin (Wings of Desire). This year, the director celebrates his personal return to Reims, traveling to the French city and the high school where, in the secret map room, the Allied High Command signed the German surrender on May 7, 1945 (The Keys to Freedom). The camera glides through the present-day classrooms, past young students as well as old archive photos and film footage, and Wenders paces through it all, while we hear his solemn, narrative voice: “The darkest period in Europe’s history is thus coming to an end…” There is something oppressive about the pathos-laden tone. One is embarrassed by Wenders’ self-stylization, the way he inscribes himself into history in front of the camera.
Avoiding any pathos, the photographic pairings in Before and After address the present and past madness in our world, the fear of an unchanging, ongoing horror, repeatedly triggered by military conflicts, aggression, civil war. This is also due to humanity’s universal failure to find models of participation and coexistence that could lead to Earth’s society unlearning war and destruction (as Ada Palmer describes it in her science-fiction tetralogy Terra Ignota). This future remains a utopia.
In Germany, after 1945, people spoke of “never again.” It was compulsory pedagogy in the schools. Later, foreign policy debates often referred to a “raison d’état” (in all questions regarding Israel) based on collective responsibility for guilt. But these phrases now seem to have reached an end point and are almost empty, or they are facing sharp, sometimes even contemptuous, criticism. An AfD politician, for example, spoke of a “cult of guilt” and described the Nazi dictatorship as merely a “bird dropping in the long history of Germany.” War, autocracies, and new fascisms are frighteningly alive, the “never again” has expired, and global crises pose an ever-growing threat to self-determination and coexistence in multicultural communities, to a vision of a sustainable world. Under what sieges are we experiencing our coming of age today? And how do we survive the hardest nights?
“Dead philosophers, like fictional characters in novels, may not be able to repair bridges and sidewalks, but they can still sit beside us on the hardest nights and help us endure them.” (Ada Palmer, Terra Ignota)
“The narrator explains at the beginning of the film that this is not a war that has already been fought, nor one that will be fought, but just any war. ‘These soldiers you see are preserving our language and our time, but they have no fatherland but their spirit.’” (Stanley Kubrick, Fear and Desire)
The “we” from the perspective of a gallery and its visitors in southwestern Germany (where uninterrupted peace, growing prosperity, and social security have dominated expectations since 1945, i.e., for 80 years now) is perhaps presumptuous; it is a form of hubris. Nevertheless, one can use the plural, for we share a common fate of humanity, and also the shame and disappointment about the dehumanization we have to endure (and which the recently deceased Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer often spoke of). The daily bad news and the flood of images from the internet – they are almost impossible to cope with; the German-Ukrainian writer Katja Petrowskaja, who has just published the anthology As if it Were Over: Texts from the War (Suhrkamp 2025), is also aware of the difficulty of her task of making suffering and horror comprehensible to those not directly affected.
In a review of this book, I was struck by the cover photo of the article, a Caspar David Friedrich-like view from behind – two young women in the foreground gaze at the Law Academy in Odessa, whose roof was completely gutted by a rocket attack in April 2024. The women stare at the towers glowing gold in the fire and the sea beyond, and of course, we do not know what is going on in the minds of those observing this unreal, real scene. The image itself also distances us, in a sense; it trivializes the events in the same way as the photograph I recently saw of a family (recognizable only in silhouette) excitedly taking selfies with the glowing lava masses of an Icelandic volcano eruption in the background. You can see from the body language of the “tourists” that the desire for sensation outweighs the horror of the natural disaster.
Gallery Puzić presents a very reduced exhibition this time, without paintings or sculptures. At the center: a small sized documentary relay of paired photographs that pick up the theme (After the battle all generals are fucked) of the destruction and burning of life that audience was confronted with in 2024 when the Croatian/Slovene artist duo Šumonjakše (Bojan Šumonja & Marko Jakše) visited and brought their enormous battle canvas, After the battle… It still hangs in the gallery’s entrance hall – a kind of Menekel? The photographic series shows cities and regions (Sarajevo, Ukraine, Gaza, Aleppo, Karthoum) before and after war disasters. This is, however, a problematic proprosition, as the wars in Ukraine, the Gaza Strip, and Sudan are still ongoing; the conflict between India and Pakistan is simmering; and there has been no peace in Syria despite the successful rebellion against the Bashar al-Assad regime at the end of last year. Perhaps the biggest shortcoming of the selection is the almost complete absence of people, with the exception of the photographs of the civil war in Sudan. There, one can see the impact on citizens – they are refugees, people seeking protection, looking for a way out.
Another problem is the connection between Saarbrücken (i.e., the local connection) and the geopolitical conflicts and upheavals we are experiencing today, especially the wars in Ukraine and Gaza/Israel that directly affect us. Ukrainian, Russian, Jewish, and Palestinian people live with us in the country where the gallery is exhibiting the documentation. However, the images cannot draw comparisons between the destruction and dehumanization.
Saarbrücken is not Sarajevo. Beirut is not Aleppo. Sarajevo is not Mariupol. Khartoum is not Gaza City. Comparisons are not necessarily intended, but destroyed buildings, streets, bridges, train stations, or airports suggest such associations. With a handful of documentary images, of which there are hundreds of thousands available online, no concrete historical or contextual investigation of the subject matter can be conducted without providing descriptive analyses, texts, testimonies and differentiated perspectives. Or without more closely examining the dark twilight of postwar families of silence, i.e., guilt by association and the nature of guilt by association, for example, in Germany, France, or Israel, especially with regard to accusations of genocide against Israeli military policy. However, the photographic pairings can provide clues, as Mailänder suggests in his search for traces of the buried and the overgrown.
Over the course of the exhibition, the documentary section was expanded, supplemented by two short films – Blind through Life (2011) and The Bare Island (Goli otok) / Vision in the Shadow (2018) – by the Croatian artist Željko Jančić Zec, which deal with escape and repression and are conceived with an autobiographical approach, as the artist himself appears in his films (just as Wenders is seen in the airplane flying to Reims, the striding through his short film). Željko Jančić Zec studied multimedia art in Amsterdam, and later moved to Vienna; he has had numerous exhibitions in Europe and abroad; working as a photographer, video artist, and painter, he is known for his surreal-expressionist paintings and animated films. In his work he tends to explore existential questions about life, human existence and the complexity of the universe in which we live.
Adequately addressing such complexity is, of course, not easy. The works in the exhibition, one could argue, are directed toward the future: they perhaps also delve into the hopeless drama of staying, of waiting for Godot, as Beckett dramatized it, although this Godot never appears or is explained as to who he, she, or it might be. They touch on the drama of anxiety, of great uncertainty. In that time when we knew nothing of one another. In order to bring knowledge about other places a little closer, the gallery arranged for a film evening on May 27 (2025) to screen the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land (directed by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor), followed by a debate on antifascism. Short readings were also offered from novels by Bosnian author Nenad Veličković (Night Guests [Konačari] 2025) and Silesian-Polish author Szczepan Twardoch (The Zero Line: A Novel from the War, 2025), followed by two short stories read by Russian émigré writer Natascha Denner.
The idea of a literary introduction to the topic brings two scenarios into polyphonic harmony, which are also suggested photographically in the exhibition. One scenario is the “night guests” seeking shelter in the Sarajevo City Museum during the siege of the city, told from the perspective of an 18-year-old girl, Maja, the daughter of the museum director. Outside, there is war, constant thundering, grenades raining down on Sarajevo. Inside, in the basement of the museum, a community of helpless survivors has gathered to defy the horrors: the vegetarian mother with a penchant for esotericism, the grandmother and her jealously guarded suitcase, the half-brother and his pregnant wife, who is nursing her hypochondria, the father, two partisans, and a dog. Maja writes down her experiences, laconic and with unusually dark humor (the book was originally published in 1995), as if she is yet unable to fully grasp what is happening. The author succeeds in evoking the daily demands through the eyes of the young woman without any false pathos.
On the other hand, in The Zero Line, there are the exasperated men engaged in trench warfare in the Donbass region, southeastern Ukraine. They are fighting on the “bad” side of the Dnipro River, which marks the line between Russian and Ukrainian troops, their artillery and drones. The men are each introduced by their nom de guerre—such as “Jagoda,” “Malpa,” “Leopard,” “Koń” (horse), or “Rat.” An unbearably visceral prose work slowly emerges, a still life of war experience, masculine war culture, and trauma from which there can probably be no return.
With this sense of inescapability, I return to attempts at flying/flight and Walter Benjamin’s commentary in “On the Concept of History.” In the ninth thesis, he attempts to create a portrait, a mental image, before our eyes, derived from Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, a watercolor drawing from 1920 (not even 30 x 25 centimeters in size), which Benjamin acquired in 1921. Klee’s drawing, we learn from press reports, only survived because Benjamin hid it along with other papers in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris before his escape. From there, along with parts of his estate, it was rescued by Bataille and Adorno, then sent to Jerusalem (to his friend Gershom Scholem), where it now resides in the Israel Museum. Strikingly, the fragile Angelus Novus painting is currently on display at the Bode Museum in Berlin, in the exhibition The Angel of History: Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee, and the Berlin Angels 80 Years After the End of the War (until July 13, 2025).
As the museum’s website states, in addition to this watercolor by Klee (which, as a great exception, was borrowed from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem) and the manuscripts of Benjamin’s theses (three German copies and one French autograph), the exhibition also brings together other angels from Berlin museums that were damaged or burned during the Second World War. Furthermore, excerpts from Wim Wenders’s Der Himmel über Berlin (1987) are shown, a film in which two angels watch over divided Berlin and which explicitly references Klee’s watercolor and Benjamin’s interpretation of the work.
Benjamin writes the following about the picture:
“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” (Walter Benjamin, 9th Thesis, On the Concept of History)
This highly imaginative image evokes the dramatic and unresolvable (unredeemed) history of destruction and progressive dehumanization hinted at by the documentation at Gallery Puzić; it also implies the seemingly unstoppable destruction of the Earth and our environment through the devastating climate crisis, which is clearly addressed at the Architecture Biennale, but seems non-negotiable (Stop building! is what it says somewhere in Venice, yet the exhibition is full of projects, full of construction methods that are imagined to be more efficient and better with the help of artificial intelligence and sustainable materials…). Similar to the inexplicable, hidden layers of history in Mailänders’s Woven Places, labyrinthine and overgrown, a certain end point of the visions seems to have been reached here, as history lives on underground, but our generations, both old and young, perhaps no longer trust the Earth’s memory.
The ambivalence of a “before” and “after” – as if there were such a clear distinction – is just as unbearable as the uncertainty and stale assertion of a “never again.” Consequently, we may well be lost; the war keeps coming back to us, this Scheherazade of death, and should she stop talking for even a moment, it is already too late, the angel’s neck twisted.
Note: It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that other artists remember Benjamin’s comment on the “angel of history”: as it happens, during the 53rd Venice Theatre Biennial (2025) both Romeo Castellucci as well as the Greek theatre collaborators Evangelina and Mary Rantou cited the 9th thesis in their scenographies. Castellucci evoked the storm blowing away the angel in his staging of I mangiatori di patate, gruesomely enacted amongst dark ghostly corridors of the abandoned 14th century Lazzaretto Vecchio, whereas the Rantou sisters created the meditative performance Mountains at Arsenale – with a single dancer quietly moving across the stage filled with the rubble of stones, building a pile here, or moving next to an empty place there, conjuring the body as an archive, a repository of history and the present.
*Johannes Birringer co-directs the Design and Performance Lab with Michèle Danjoux, and has taught Performance Technologies at Brunel University London. He has created numerous dance-theatre works, video installations and digital projects in collaboration with artists in Europe, the Americas, China and Japan. He is also the founder of an annual intermedia laboratory held at a disused coalmine in southwest Germany. DAP-Lab’s recent dance installations, kimospheres III–V (2016–19), explore the convergence of physical-sensory and augmented VR spaces. The dance performances Mourning for a dead moon (2019) and The river of no one (2022) address the climate crisis. Birringer’s publications include Performance, Technology and Science, Dance and ChoreoMania, Tanz der Dinge/Things that Dance; his latest book, Kinetic Atmospheres (Routledge) probes the implications of environmental immersion and mixed reality digital architectures. Website: https://dap-lab.brunel.ac.uk/
Copyright © 2025 Johannes Birringer
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #31, June 2025
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
