About the exhibition
The exhibition featured the photographs in the estate of Heimrad Bäcker, which have been housed at mumok (Vienna) since they were bequeathed as a gift in 2015. These more than 14,000 images testify to Bäcker’s lifelong confrontation with the Holocaust. A selection of photographs, notes, texts and found objects were shown in the exhibition. Many of Bäcker’s photographs were taken long before there was any public attempt to address Germany’s Nazi past. They show former concentration camps overgrown with plants or deliberately repurposed. Bäcker’s photographs and found objects were shown together with Tatiana Lecomte’s sound work A Murderous Noise and Rainer Iglar’s series of photographs Mauthausen 1974.
Particularly relevant for the current work of the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism – especially for the development of a “living memorial site” at the former forced labour camp in Neuaubing – is Bäcker’s documentation of a moment of transition when former forgotten or ignored victim sites for the first time started to play a new and central role in the public perception as memorial sites.
