My World

This has been my world for weeks and months. The application Cubase that I used to edit the interviews of the “Shadow Of War” project.I would begin by listening to the entire interview. The 23 interviews that I selected at the end were ranging from 15 minuets to 3 hours in length. Then I started a process that I call “puzzling”. I cut pieces of the recording away while trying to preserve the main message of the interview and reconnect what is left over (blue lines). I was bringing down a 2 hour interview to about one hour, then to half an hour and eventually would end up with ten minuets. Then the toughest part began, the attempt to create a five minuet version.I ended up with 20 five minuet versions, one six minuet version and two ten minuet versions.It is not an easy process to shorten them while still being able to tell an intact story. It was an amazing opportunity to practice letting go of the perfectionistic programming I received while growing up in Germany. In the process I had to accept that I would have to let go of often very interesting parts of the interviews and that the end product would be imperfect by nature having had to go through such a drastic editing process.At the end I went with what had the biggest emotional impact on me and realized that these stories about war, imprisonment and destruction are my stories as well.One of my grandfathers had fought in both World Wars, the second one fought at the Eastern Front  in WWII. My grandmother (my second grandmother had died before I was born) had lived through this time and fled after the war from what would become East Germany to West Germany while my father grew up in midst of rubble in Frankfurt during the bombing raids.As intense as some of the stories I‘ve been listening to over and over again are, I had heard similar ones from my grandparents and my father.Wolfgang Hecht, one of the interviewees mentioned how much what he had lived through as a child during WWII had influenced his personality and that the experiences the war generation made will influence at least the following two generations in a negative way.I’m the child of a child of war.  I realize now how much my own life was influenced by this time period.This project is as much about the people I interviewed as it is about myself. It was and is an opportunity to look at where I come from.I never saw war, I never had seen the rubble of a destroyed building before 9/11, I never saw combat action but growing up I was surrounded by people who had experienced  all of the above.Growing up there was always a sense of danger in the air. While we had enough to eat today it was not for sure we would have enough tomorrow. There was peace but the feeling  that war could break lose any moment again. There was freedom but during that time of the Cold War the Russians supposably were just waiting to take it from us and because of WWII there was a fence running through the entire country separating East from West Germany and cutting families including my own apart.This project has helped me to understand how much this war has influenced who I am today.For most of my life I have relived my parents and grandparent‘s experienced by constantly projecting danger, scarcity and worry onto the future and I received what I expected.My hope is that by going back in time and looking at what happened I will be able to let go of what has in a way overshadowed my entire life and the lives of millions of other people on all sides of this war that is recorded as the time of the greatest destruction in human history.May this project help us to learn from history and prevent that something like this will ever happen again. May it also enable us to realize that this war has ended many years ago and that constantly living subconsciously though what has happened either because we have experienced it in person or picked it up by people surrounding us will not help anybody but influence our lives negatively and will keep war alive.A constant state of war that is not fought on the battlefield but in our heads.   "My World" Manhattan, New York City, Cubase Screen on my Laptop 09-22-10 at 3:40 PM

Please check out my website at carstenfleck.com