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Andreas Mühe

Obersalzberg

Mit der Kamera ins Herz der Finsternis

Andreas Mühe (b. Karl-Marx-Stadt, 1979; lives and works in Berlin), one of the most renowned German photographers, has come home: he is back in Germany’s heart, in the collective memory of a nation that cannot escape the dark shadows of its past. Mühe went to a place where the pain has not abated and time seems to have stopped, a mountain retreat enshrouded in legend: Obersalzberg. He took his camera to look for traces, capture the myth of this place, and see the Nazi regime’s favorite idyll with fresh eyes. His archeology of recollection is a journey into the present day of our visual memory, which has recorded those years and stored them away even as we never actually saw what Mühe’s pictures show us.

Presented in this book are his findings, a cycle of images that unmask the maniacal theatrics of those years as an endless shifting of scenes before a towering Alpine backdrop: where the leading characters of National Socialism staged their own show. With essays by Luc Tuymans, Hans Georg Hiller von Gaertringen and Matthias Struch as well as Karsten Ehlers.