From Germany to Hungary and back

Babette Steiner´s room in an old age asylum in Neuhaus, Bavaria, with a picture of her son, Georg Steiner. In their lifes they had to cross many frontieres. Babettes life seemed to be star-crossed from the very beginning in a little flat in Munich, her family never put much hope in the weak, rachitic girl, born a few month after the end of The Great War. Later she moved to a village with her husband who died a few years after. Her only son Georg lost his job as a telecomunication repairman suffering from herniated disc problems and heavy allergic rashes. After a time the only way he saw to deal with severe depression and growing alcohol problems, he spent the rest of his pay-off on a little house between the austro-hungarian border and Lake Balaton. Soon the money was wasted, maintaining the house and looking after his ill and impoverished mother lead to his total ruin. Today he is working ocassionally in a junkyard to get some cash to visit sometimes his now run-down house, once his liftime dream and the only hope to leave behind a miserable life.

Thüringen, May 2010

Some pictures made during my road trip through Thüringen in the last days, searching for remainings of the border between the FRG and the GDR. They show the bearer of the lottery wheel at a trade fair in Schmalkalden, the highway A4 near Point Alpha, the inter-German grenzland between Hessen and Thüringen, a small recreation settlement near the spa town of Bad Salzungen and a sowjet war graves memorial in Herleshausen.

Aufschrei durch Bilder

Article by Alois Pribil on my project on borders in Eastern Europe in Kulturvision 13/2010, p.8: www.kulturvision.de.

New Europe - Old Frontiers

Some new pictures for my project about new borders in Old Europe: the first one is taken on a new pavemented road near Mitrovica, Kosovo. The woman in the picture spent there the whole night and I found her lying in front of a filling station, she was dehydrated, powerless and unconscious when I stopped to give her some water. The next one is from Mitrovica, Kosovo. Every evening the mothers of the fallen serbian soldiers gather near the bridge mourning over their dead sons. The third picture is also taken in the northern part of Mitrovica, stickers with the portrait of Vladimir Putin are omnipresent in this part of the city, inhabited mainly by serbian population. The next one is also from Mitrovica, every evening the mothers of the fallen serbian soldiers gather near the bridge mourning over their dead sons. The fourth picture is taken during a rehearsal in South Mitrovica and shows the actress Irma Ibrahimi, acting in the play "The visit" of Friedrich Dürrenmatt. The table with the empty cups are the remainings of a conference about breast cancer in the office of the NGO Community Building Mitrovica and the last one with the dog is taken a few meters from the border between Macedonia and Albania.

Gavoidija revisited

Ten years after I returned to the psychiatric hospital of Gavoidija, near the city of Lugoj in Romania. In 1999 I visited the ward for long-term inpatients and documented the poor conditions of health care system in Romania together with the journalist Claudia Popa for Renasterea Banateana. Ofelia, the woman on the first picture already appears in one of the pictures from 1999...

Bjeshket e Namuna, the Cursed Mountains, Albania

These pictures are part of a photo reportage produced in the Bjeshket e Namuna, the Cursed Mountains, in the north of Albania, close tot he borders to Kosov and Montenegro, only two weeks ago. The portrayed people are living near Theth, a town in the heart of the alpine wilderness of this part of the Albanian Alps. There is a man who survived the spiral of violence and revenge of the kanun, the old set of laws developed in the 15th century, after the fall of the communist regime in 1990 these ancestral laws had a bloody revival. After his brother was killed because of a few square meters of land, he was obliged to take vengeance, so he shot the murderer and was hidden by his family for years in a secret place.
The woman sitting on the bed was also living for years in fear of the violent actions of another family's members with which her family carried out a cruel blood feud.
The old woman on the third picture suffered in a different way of the hard life in the mountains: her husband was one of the many men who managed to leave the country, more than forty years ago. He never came back, she never left her home.

The Visit

Pictures taken during one of the last rehearsals for the theater-play "The Visit" (Der Besuch der alten Dame) of Friedrich Dürrenmatt in Mitrovica, Kosovo. This production is a collaboration between Catastrophic Theatre (Tony Barilla, Houston, Texas), the Mitrovica Cultural Center and the local NGOs Blackbird Books and Art & Media. Today, 31st of july, over a dozen artists from Mitrovica and the surrounding region present a performance of this classic piece about revenge, greed, corruption, violence and democracy in Pristina. Best of luck!

Judo Trepča

During the production of promotion material for the local Judo federation, Judo Trepča, I asked the athletes after the shooting to pose for a black and white portrait. According to the president of the Kosovo Olympic Committee, Besim Hasani, Judo is one of the few disciplines, athletes from Kosovo would have the potential to win medals. The members of Judo Trepča are competing on a high level, including bronce medals in the European Championships and in last year´s Balcan Games.

Thank you!

Thank you!

After more than two weeks of travelling around in Kosovo, Albania and Romania and before starting any editing work, I want to express my gratitude to all the friends I met on my way.
Thanks to all of you I would like to call friends from now on, although in some cases we spent only a few hours together.

First of all: thank you, Mr. Scaueru! Without your help I probably still would hang around in this little village near Orsova, Romania. The milimetric maneuvers to get my car back to the asfalt road seemed impossible to me before I watched you performing with your Mercedes Benz! Thank you for bed and breakfast in your wonderful house in Turnu Severin and for this unforgettable night eating out on this boat on the Danube river, listening to Roma music and talking all night long. The boy on the picture in your office you bought on a flee market in Munich in 1980 and you feel such an inexplicable attraction for: it could be me, six years old, wearing traditional bavarian clothes... I hope we meet again, during one of your visits in Munich (Mr. Scaueru is the most creative car dealer I ever met!) or in Romania, then we will head for this culinary paradise which has to be Brasov and we will try this dog leather-cheese...

In Albania I want to thank Zjef and his family for giving me shelter during my excursions to the Bjeshkët e Namun, the "Cursed Mountains". Thank you Giuseppe (I know how much you like the sound of the italian version of your first name) for the interesting conversations about the ancestral consuetudinary law of the kanun, for introducing me to persons living under this laws and for delicious bits of home-made cured ham, goat cheese, bread and the one or other glass of raki... Grazie, Giuseppe, I wish I would have had the opportunity to meet your beloved mother, too. She will always be with you, Giuseppe!

Most time of my journey I spent in Mitrovica, Kosovo, where I worked on a project for the NGO Little People of Kosovo about the situation of the Roma community living in terrible conditions in the camp of Ostaroda, in the northern part of the city.

Thanks to Besnik Hasanaj, excellent photographer, who introduced me to leaders the Ashkali Community in Mitrovica and gave me interesting insights in the actuality of Mitrovica. Thanks to the stuff of Community Building Mitrovica who made possible the many contacts to camp direction, humanitarian workers, artists, medical stuff etc. Thanks to Avni who attended with patience my needs whenever I had to ask for some help and thanks to Lindsey, humanitarian worker from the Netherlands, for useful information and for just being there. And thank you Mladen, you are not only an arquitect trained to construct houses, I am sure you will build strong bridges between human beings with your daily work. You are hard and severe, but always first with yourself - and you have a big heart! Thank you for your company, I hope you are enjoying your holidays...

Many thanks to Hilmjineta Apuk, lawyer, economist and head of the NGO Little People of Kosovo. Thank you for your support, I hope we can realize our project in a reasonable time frame...

Thanks to Tony Barilla, I would have liked to assist to the first function of your play "Der Besuch der alten Dame" in the cultural center of Mitrovica. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to assist to the rehearsals, today I will start to read again in Dürrenmatts piece about vengeance, democracy, corruption and violence... Good luck to you and all of your fabulous actors! And thanks Irma, great actress and beautiful person, thank you for your patience, I really hope the picture will be worth it!

In the Camp of Ostaroda I want to express gratitude to Dzafer Buzoli, Camp Officer, great professional and even better person. Thank you for assisting me during my stays in and around the camp, I hope, I can give you some good news very soon...

And now, last, but not least, the most special "Thank you" goes to a real friend, to Ershan! Thank you so much for guiding me and translating for me. It was really heartbreaking when I saw you struggling with tears when we had to say good-bye. I will always remember our rides in the car, listening to Roma music, the volume you proposed almost blasted my ears! And of course I will remember our playstation-soccer-sessions - but for the next time you will have to decide: Iker Casillas or Víctor Valdés, you know for which team my heart is beating...). And there is another thing: you did a great work with my camera, taking really good pictures of your family and your friends, perhaps more valuable than the pictures I did during my visit to Ostaroda... Ershan, many, many thanks for so much! And thanks to your adorable friends!

Chomutov, Czech Republic

More pictures from my project about frontiers in so called "New Europe". Last weekend, after a short visit at the f-stop festival in Leipzig, I travelled around in the northern part of Bohemia where I visited the local Roma community. In the last weeks they suffered of harrasment by radical rightwingers, some of them organized in political parties like the "Workers´Party, Delnicka strana, DS. In the next weeks I will continue working in Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia, Greece and Romania...

Pre-election party of the FPÖ in Frankenburg, Oberösterreich, 05.06.2009: during the speech of party-leader H.C. Strache.

Mauthausen. Cuando hay un silencio es que nadie habla.

Mauthausen, Oberösterreich: investigating about memory and history in this peculiar little town in Austria. Images of urban landscapes and interiors of Mauthausen (Announcement board, Guided tour in the concentration camp, Gas chamber, Alexander Nerat from the FPÖ (Liberal Party), Nightclub Prestige, Old People´s Home).