This project is related to my own family history. It is a photographic exploration of the correspondence between my mother and Josef, her first husband. Josef was a soldier in the Second World War and he was officially listed as „missing“ from 1943 onwards. In 1993, fifty years later and shortly before her 70th birthday, my mother received a written notification from the tracing service of the German Red Cross that Josef had died on July 4, 1943, in a camp near Volgograd/Russia at the age of 27. The correspondence includes letters from the years 1940 to 1943. Josef wrote about one hundred letters and thirty letters from my mother have survived (she probably wrote even more). I unexpectedly found the letters in the summer of 2018 while clearing out my parents‘ house, in a small box for sewing machine accessories in the attic.

Wetzlar + Frankfurt/Main 2019, rework in 2024