The series ' WOHINUNDZURÜCK' is the result of a journey along the path that my departed grandfather Leo Dunz (1914 – 1996) treaded in the military during World War II.  After months of research I had reconstructed most of his time of duty in the German ‚Wehrmacht’ and, afterwards, war captivity in a city named Asbest in western Siberia, from where he returned to Germany in 1947.  My Grandfather had, during all his life, never talked about this dark period.
65 years after Leo’s return – accompanied by Swiss journalist and translator Marina Bolzli – I set off  for a journey into family- and world history, but instead of  a uniform and – partly – a rifle I carried a backpack and a camera.
It wasn’t the aim of the voyage to solely search for traces and to reprocess or even dig up historical events.  Rather than that I wanted to experience the intensity of the confrontation with places and people that have been and still are so closely related to world history and therefore my family history as well.  By visiting war veterans, towns, monuments and battlegrounds that are linked inevitably with my grandfather’s fate and that were connected by seemingly infinite train journeys across Eastern Europe, facts, dreams and longings got mingled up and resulted in two different, however closely related aspects of the story:  for one thing the confrontation with the witnesses of history, with obsolescence and the mechanisms of reminiscence and preserving; for another thing the emotional value of the journey – my own journey – which developed an independent existence through the accumulation of impressions.  How does what I know determine what I see and feel?    
From something that started out of pure curiosity with an old army photograph that I found on my mom’s attic, there should emerge the visual document of a voyage into time and space, into past and an uncertain present; and at the same time a road-movie diary about the monotony of many thousand kilometers on the train, about cold, frustration and fugacity, about the companionship of time and silence.

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