Can we learn from WW2 for the War in Ukraine? "The Shadow of War" Multimedia Project
It has been almost 14 years since I traveled from NYC, where I was residing at that time, to Berlin to interview and photograph Germans who lived through the Second World War. These images and interviews became "The Shadow of War" multimedia show. It is so far the biggest and longest personal project I have worked on. It took me a month to take the photographs and to interview the people, and then about a year to get everything into exhibition form. In the fall of 2010, "The Shadow of War" was very successfully exhibited in the German House in NYC. Visitors could walk around and listen to the interviews on provided mp3 players. A DPA (German Press Agency) article was written and picked up by countless German newspapers.
The purpose of the project was to show the horrors of war and how the experience of war overshadows the lives of people as well as entire nations. The Germans I interviewed were deeply affected and scared by what they went through and were never able to forget what happened to them. But war does not even end when the fighting stops.
My father experienced WW2 as a child sitting terrified in his basement in Frankfurt, hoping his building would not get hit and collapse on him during the intense bombing raids. Many of his childhood friends were less lucky and got buried under rubble. For the rest of his life, he was a very fearful man who constantly felt uneasy. He passed those anxieties on to me. Initially, I was not even able to figure out where my fears came from. It took me decades of working on myself, countless spiritual books, different therapies, and I don't even dare to count how many hours practicing yoga and meditating to be able to let at least some of them go.
War does not only create physical destruction and scars; it also inflicts emotional and psychological damage that not only stays with people for an entire lifetime but is also easily passed on to the next generation.
When we talk about wars, we often talk about who started them, but I keep wondering if that really matters. What difference does it make to the individual? Did it make a difference for my father, who at the tender age of nine saw a baby burn into the asphalt, as well as many other horrendous things because his neighborhood was hit by phosphor bombs? Did it make a difference for the estimated 420,000 Americans, 27,000,000 Soviets, 5,820,000 Poles, 9,000,000 Germans, 3,120,000 Japanese, 20,000,000 Chinese, 550,000 French, 454,000 Italians, 45,400 Canadians, 450,900 British people who died during WW2? The total body count is a staggering 75 million.
What kind of control over our lives do we have as individuals anyway? We can't choose where we are born. The only difference as to why one ends up on the Russian or Ukrainian side in the current conflict is because one was born Russian or Ukrainian.
When children fight, we teach them that it does not matter who started the trouble. We tell them to make peace and to continue playing. As adults, we know better but act less insightful. Here, someone has to be right and have the moral high ground. Germany was deeply shaken after WW2. They really investigated what happened, and as one of the people I interviewed for my project, Mr. Scholz, stated, they looked deeper into their past than any other country ever had. But the frustrating thing about humanity is that it forgets. Almost all the people I interviewed all those years ago have died in the meantime. Of course, they have. It has been 78 years since WW2 ended. And again, we have a war in Europe, and as in the past, we do what we do best: blame, fight, and kill each other. We still think murdering, devastating, and destroying is the solution, and if we just do enough of that, then peace will come.
We have not learned from the past, and the people who made the experience are no longer here to warn us about the outcomes. So far, an estimated 124,500 to 131,000 people have died in the Ukrainian war; some talk about 500,000. Husbands, wives, children, and animals are killed. Buildings and houses blown up and landscapes devastated. Dreams broken, limbs lost, and many tears shed.
That is why I decided to put the full-length interviews of "The Shadow of War" multimedia project in English and in German online. Can learn from those stories how to deal with the current situation in Ukraine? I believe we absolutely can. They show the brutality, the inhumanity, the destruction, and the physical, mental, and emotional scars that war inflicts.
When we understand the futility of the violence and the killing, I firmly believe that we will do what Albert Einstein suggested:
"We must be prepared to make the same heroic sacrifices for the cause of peace that we make ungrudgingly for the cause of war. There is nothing that is more important to me and more dear to my heart"
You can find the images and interviews at www.theshadowofwar.com.
