Introduction: shifting contexts

In September 1987, the Stattzeitung, an alternative city guide for Kassel, carried a cover that showed a grisly scene of mass death: dozens of scattered corpses and body parts formed an undifferentiated landscape of death from which a single body stood out in the shape of an inverted crucifix. The image derived from a photograph that had been taken a few days after 22 October 1943. It depicted the retrieval of dead bodies from the public shelter of the Bürgersäle, which had turned into a mass grave on the night of the air raid. Significantly, the photo reporter of the Stattzeitung had not unearthed the motif from an archive but had discovered it in his immediate environment – in the form of a giant poster covering the entrance door of a World War II brick bunker (Fig. 15).