Zwangsarbeit im Donbass 1945 – ein Tagebuch

In the organizer's words:

"In the end, my grandfather didn't come back, but this diary did," summarized photographer Damian Michael Heinisch, who grew up in Poland and Germany and lives in Norway.

For his installation "1st-51st Walter Heinisch diary (2021)", Damian Heinisch photographed his grandfather Walter Heinisch's diary from dawn to dusk in the light of the Norwegian sun.

Walter Heinisch documented his difficult fate as a forced laborer on densely written pages. Like him, around 400,000 German civilians were deported to the eastern Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic at the end of the Second World War as so-called "reparations deportees". The conditions in the Soviet labor camps were extremely harsh, so that only around half of those affected survived.

Almost eighty years later, his grandson Damian Heinisch traveled to Ukraine to retrace his grandfather's footsteps. Using a plate camera, he took color pictures using the historical autochrome process.

Installations, landscape portraits and historical documents can be seen from September 27 in the new gallery exhibition on the second floor.

Duration of the gallery exhibition September 27, 2024 to January 5, 2025

Free admission