making visible, the past? Dealing with injustice is not only a matter of gut feeling, which believes to recognize such injustice, but also a mental examination and classification, as well as dealing with alleged perpetrators and a social morality, which legitimizes or prohibits punishments. If every perpetrator can potentially also be a victim, dealing with suffering caused by people has other consequences, also in the historical reappraisal of events, than a simple, black-and-white perpetrator-victim thinking. And I know the events of this place mainly from hearsay! One of the main scandals of this place is the multiple, by different regimes prevented processing of its history and now there are hardly survivors!

For whom do we actually remember? In my attempt to protect myself through distance, I keep drifting away from the question of what bereaved people might need. Are there any? To what degree does a person count as a survivor? Is it a national question? Is the memory of killed children of forced laborers of Polish nationality some 80 years ago a need for people of today's Poland, of today's Germany, of the people around the place of death? Does it concern all of us, because we are human beings and especially in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern we know how quickly administrative borders and national affiliations can change? Does it concern me more than I wanted to know that there was "something like that", that it is injustice, that it should not be repeated, no matter where in the world? Why should I even spend my life dealing with such issues? I have enough on my plate! I take care of peace in my social environment as far as it is in my power. Is that not enough?

What am I doing here?
Did the people who spent stages of their lives here ask themselves the same question? Home directors, nurses, "fosterlings," protégés, millers, transients?
Maybe I don't want to do anything in this place. It heals itself.
However, it is a place that stands in segments of its past for quite a few others, only that here we know of some points. It can be a proxy place. Many phases of our history, atrocities and professional, which we can pedagogically valuable. The place as a martyr so that we do not have to overlook the whole country with scars, so that grass can grow.

How do you move on when these obvious, overarching stories brand entire regions? Put up benches and flower pots? Cultivate a picnic area behind the washhouse? Illustrate fragments of disaster? Set up an ominous "never again!"? Talk about what was? How to talk, about what was and how to continue afterwards? To talk with whom? Talking to whom without overburdening? If I talk to people on the spot, am I possibly implying an obligation or even complicity through silence? I don't want to talk down anyone's living environment! And there was forced labor all over Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, so why here of all places? We are so sparsely populated that every speech has something personal. The atrocities in Maurinmühle were largely systemic - reinforced by anticipatory obedience. If what happened at that place had structural causes and people acted according to the moral ideas of their time, doesn't cognition change social morality in conjunction with other structures prevent the repetition of said events? Does this question imply that the people involved were morally inferior or uneducated? Are our structures different? If so, are they evolved with respect to the vision of a just society?

I wanted to make art here! The place seems to be so in process that it seems to me counter-productive, invasive, to make a visible, detectable intervention. I have nothing to add to this! I cannot heal. I do not want to admonish.
What is the purpose of art? The task of art is neither historical research, nor the illustration of its results. What art can do is communicate on an emotional level and open up spaces for issues that don't have enough space in our everyday lives. We can raise questions.

Now I'm sitting here in the midst of my raised questions.

What am I doing here?