The Mourning Play (Trauerspiel) of Shimon Attie

Abstract

Shimon Attie’s images of the Scheunenviertel (1991–93) district of Berlin are suspended by the palimpsestic associations established between the fixated dead of the past and their ghostly appearance in the now instant; images that contain as part of that palimpsest a collective cultural knowledge or reserve of the impending obliteration of community (both the Jewish and non‐Jewish citizens of Berlin) by mass‐produced death. In this article, the images are theorized both as a memorial activity and an index or habitation for history. This objective is achieved by responding to a series of propositions arising from Walter Benjamin’s text “On the Concept of History”.

Notes

1. Also known as Finstere Medine, Yiddish for “dark district”. The Writing on the Wall was part of a larger European project, Sites Unseen, representing a series of installations conducted between 1991 and 1996 in Berlin, Dresden, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Cologne and Cracow.

2. This is interpreted as: MENE, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; TEKEL, you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; PARSIN, your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians (The Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version, 1989).

3. These projections are short‐term urban interventions, appearing only for a night or two. The black‐and‐white projected images appeared as after‐images of the area’s history.

4. This is an understanding that demands the empathic engagement of an informed beholder in the contemplation of both formal and documentary signification.

5. The inscription Sopher in the window is more accurately translated as “Writer of holy books”. Tzizziot probably means that the owner of the store also copied Torah scrolls.

6. Signified by the prosaic detail of a car’s shimmering hood and windscreen in the foreground, which reflect the archival fragment.

7. Orphée (1950) is a film by Jean Cocteau. Orpheus, Heurtebise, Eurydice and the artist’s death (the Princess) enter the realm of the dead through a mirror; in the myth, photography and mnemonic and artistic processes become inexorably linked.