text tabula rasa

Burcu Dogramaci and Marta Smolińska

REMAINS AMONG THE RUINS: HANNA SJÖBERG’s EIN TISCH FUR KÜSTRIN

In the still wintry aura of March 1993, Swedish artist Hanna Sjöberg, who had just moved to Berlin, took a trip to the recently opened German-Polish border. On that occasion, following Christian Graf von Krockow’s book Fahrten durch die Mark Brandenburg: Wege in unserer Geschichte, published in 1991, she discovered Kostrzyn/Küstrin. In 1997, in her diploma dissertation written at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, Sjöberg was to recall: “I found my way to Küstrin after reading Fahrten durch die Mark Brandenburg. The quotation from this book by von Krockow begins with the sentence: “The old Küstrin is no more’, and I eventually took this as my point of departure for my work — a lost place.” She stresses that her intention was not to reconstruct the non-extant fortress and city, or to bring them back to life, but to show that they once existed and can serve as a kind of universal example of the terrible consequences of wars, forced border shifts, and ruthless population expulsions. Strolling around the overgrown, rewilded site of the razed town of Küstrin, Sjöberg drew a comparison of its situation with the then contemporary condition of Vukovar, which had shortly beforehand been destroyed during the war in the former Yugoslavia. She thus came to see Kostrzyn/Küstrin as a symbolic site referencing the consequences of the merciless drawing of borders and resettlements of entire populations.

In her text, Sjöberg further emphasized the spectral atmosphere of the abandoned place, where in 1993 no digs had yet begun, so that any traces of the former town were in fact invisible, concealed under a thick layer of vegetation. She wrote that the first element to attract her attention was the head of a cheap rubber doll that had been trodden into the sticky earth, with yellow painted hair, blue eyes, and a round hole for a mouth, awaiting a bottle with a teat. It was this objet trouvé, this vestige and remnant, that was the first thing to be photographed, and so in her eyes it became a meta-image for the bordertexture of Kostrzyn/Küstrin. Thus we could fairly say that in this way Sjöberg set in train the processes of borderscaping and palimpsesting this abandoned, forgotten place, by attentively studying its unique character as a heterogeneous border assemblage and posing questions about the possibility of universalizing this particular story in relation to border narratives typical for post-expulsion regions.

In the course of this first mapping of the overgrown terrain, where no paths delineated by the topography of the former town were visible, the artist also noticed numerous porcelain shards of shattered crockery lying scattered in the grass. Only on bending down to inspect them did she realize that she was tramping over brickwork grown over with luxuriant weeds. She likened her collecting of these ceramic shells to gathering mushrooms — morels and chanterelles — an activity motivated by the same collector’s instinct that motivates mushroomers. She was at once fascinated by this bordertexture and shaken by the consequences of the border shifts and expulsions that had led to such total eradication of what had once been a lively town. It was this gathering of remnants in the ruins, remnants unearthed like an almost illegible layer of the site’s palimpsest, that was the inspiration for her conception for an installation entitled Ein Tisch fiir Küstrin composed of objects, excerpts from fifteen texts selected by the artist, and photographs, some archival and others taken by her in 1993. Sjöberg planned that all these elements should function on the same level, and that a visual, textual, and spatial border narrative be built, calling forth the spectres circling over the abandoned site.

As part of her exhibition at the Kunstspeicher Friedersdorf in the spring of 1995, Sjöberg put these porcelain shards on display in their tangible form, rendering them a pars pro toto of everyday life in Küstrin. In this way, she was inviting her audiences to ask questions, on the basis of their contact with the vestiges unearthed from the ruins, about the whole from which those fragments came, and about those who had used those objects in their non-extant houses. These porcelain shells became media of both individual and collective memory, initiating reminiscences and confronting viewers with the consequences of borders shifted pursuant to political decisions. Among the objects which became receptacles for such tragic border narratives there was also a rusty pre-war pot, a propaganda children’s book published by the Nazis, and a buckled toy bus, clearly dating from after the war. Sjöberg produced a palimpsesting of Kostrzyn/Küstrin that took account of the sedimentation of its history. Her method also shed clear light on key bifurcation points that had led to a border assemblage of this particular constitution on the German-Polish border.

At her next exhibition, held in the autumn of 1996 in the orangery of the Pückler- Stiftung, Sjöberg did not use the physical presence of such traces and vestiges, showing instead photographs of them and thereby conveying their tactile physicality through the medium of image. In so doing, she rendered them even more spectral, thus adding a new layer to the palimpsest and opening up a still more intense possibility of perceiving the particular situation of Kostrzyn/Küstrin in universalizing terms. In this way she also confirmed the thesis mooted by the theoreticians of the border-aesthetic palimpsest, Kinossian and Wråkberg, who aver that the palimpsesting process is limited to neither historical artefacts nor still functional material structures, but also extends to ideology and the accumulation of knowledge. In eschewing material structures (the porcelain shards) she focused attention even more sharply on the ideologies behind the official Polish and German border narratives. We also believe that this gesture on the artist’s part may have been connected to the dynamic changes taking place in the border zone on the Polish side. These were such that by 1997 the structure of the ruined town and fortress had been laid bare, dug out from beneath the layer of vegetation in order to reveal the history of the “Prussian Pompeii”. The border crossing itself had also begun to teem with life, accenting the changes compared to March 1993, when Sjöberg had first set foot on the Polish side of the border.

Among the textual quotes used in the two Ein Tisch für Küstrin exhibitions were excerpts from the letters of Walter Benjamin drawing attention to the inseverable bond between the past and the present, to the creation by them of heterogeneous constellations, and to the impossibility of capturing an image of the past, which begins to fade even as it blazes forth; quotes referencing Küstrin itself from the abovementioned book by von Krockow; reminiscences of expellees from the town juxtaposed with memories of liberated inmates of concentration camps; Max Frisch’s words describing the ruined Warsaw, which he visited in August 1948; excerpts from Polish propaganda texts enthusiastically encouraging settlement of the “Recovered Territories”; remarks by German historians on Polish history and the delicate Polish-German relations; and personal texts by writers such as Adam Zagajewski and Peter Weiss, relating their own experiences connected with the brutality of war. Through this constellation of texts, Sjöberg tries both to show the Polish and German stances, and to draw attention to Kostrzyn/Küstrin at once as a specific place and as an “every-place”, i.e., a universal example of a town annihilated by war and not rebuilt due to a shift in borders, and thus necessitating the creation of new border narratives for the post-war residents of the “Recovered Territories”. In her review of the first, Friedersdorf Ein Tisch für Küstrin exhibition, published in the Oder-Journal on 4 April 1995, Silke Miiller quoted the speech delivered at its opening by von Krockow to stress the significance, in the context of its subject, of the fact that the artist is Swedish: “From his point of view, it was an advantage that the subject had been tackled by a neutral Swede [emphasis ours], Hanna Sjöberg. A German or a Pole would have been biased even before undertaking the research.” This assertion shows clearly that the border narratives of both the Polish and the German sides in this period were ideologically spiked: the Polish side consistently effaced German traces in border regions, allowing the ruins of the fortress and town of Küstrin to become totally overgrown with weeds. ‘The Germans, for their part, focused on the situation of the expellees who had lost their homes. In her installation, Sjöberg proposed a counter border narrative, and carried out a borderscaping that in the end effect did not reference either the Polish or the German positions, but showcased the condition of the ruined locality as a universal example with a lesson for both contemporary and future generations. For the same reason, she also mentioned in her commentary to the installation Ein Tisch fir Küstrin the famous figure of the Angelus Novus from the 1920 watercolours of Paul Klee, masterfully described by Walter Benjamin as flying into the future, but facing the past and looking down on the ruins.

What is of particular importance in the context of Sjöberg’s installation, however, is the following quote from a speech by Winston Churchill delivered on 15 December 1944:

For expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble …. A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before.

The English sentence “A clean sweep will be made” translates into German as ”Man wird reinen Tisch machen”, literally: “we will make the table clean”. It was this aspect that inspired Sjöberg to exhibit the eponymous table as empty, rather than placing on it the porcelain shards as media of memory and material elements of the border palimpsesting process.

The installation Ein Tisch für Küstrin also includes photographs: a collection of postcards portraying life in the town from around 1900 until the war, and a set of blackand- white photographs taken by Sjöberg herself in 1993. This is a confrontation of two diametrically different situations, which triggers the critical borderscaping process by prompting questions as to what happened in the fateful time between, which is not shown on the photographs. It is an empty place, within which every viewer can look upon the cumulative palimpsest and memoryscape of Kostrzyn/Küstrin to develop their own counter border narrative.

Sjöberg’s work thus demonstrates clearly that all the layers of the border palimpsest are inextricably intertwined, and together testify to the historic changes linked to the wartime bombardments, the establishment of the German-Polish border along the Oder-Neisse line in 1945, and the Polish post-war propaganda surrounding the alleged history of what was referred to as the “Recovered Territories”. In Kostrzyn/Küstrin, the heterogeneous, often opposing and changing strategies of constructing official border narratives and border images are brought sharply into focus, provoking the creation of border art works that open up the potential for critical borderscaping and for such “distribution of the sensible” that can bring about changes to aesthetic regimes.

Grenze / Granica, Art on the German-Polish Border after 1990

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