From our current vantage, it’s difficult to imagine, but exactly one year ago, Daniel and I spent a week in Gernsbach, Germany, a small town in the Black Forest where his grandmother, uncles and young cousins live. The town was celebrating its 800th anniversary, and together we shot a film to accompany  photographs  he would be making of his family and the surrounding landscape of Baden-Württemberg. 

We can both trace our family histories to Germany. I am the grandson of Jewish Prussian/Lithuanian Holocaust survivors, and Daniel is the grandson of a soldier of the Third Reich. From opposite ends, we are connected to this country whose Nazi ideology defined the parameters of Aryan Whiteness, which sought to annihilate all other peoples as less than human.

As friends we are fascinated by the intertwining personal and political histories to which we are bound. The enormity of our inherited family experience has led each of us to continuously attempt to re-situate ourselves within and apart from the weight of our histories. 

One evening at dusk, we drove up the hillside to the local monument on the Rumpelstein. In 1936, during Hitler's reign, the Nazis constructed memorials all over Germany to champion national history and honor those who perished in the first world war. 

The current monument displays a combination of insignia from WWI and WWII: A large rotunda inscribed with names encircles an oversized stone likeness of a steel helmet. At the top of the structure, an Imperial Eagle clutches an empty ring, which once contained a swastika, now chiseled away. After World War II, villages around  Germany quietly ascribed new names of fallen Nazi soldiers to the existing monuments, while erasing the infamous symbol of the Third Reich.

History is written and perpetually re-written. The ghosts of the past are avoidable only if you will them to be.