HANS PETER FELDMANN: Die Toten

Die Toten (The Dead) is a book published in 1998 that presents newspaper images Feldmann collected of 87 people who died and 3 who are “missing” as a result of the terrorist violence and state reaction between 1967 and 1993. On the cover of the book Feldmann lists the main oppositional groups involved: “Student Movement, APO, Baader Meinhof, June 2nd Movement, Revolutionary Cell, RAF…”. This subtitle is probably meant to give the browser a quick idea of what the book is about, for inside the book we see an equation of the terrorists, their victims, and the victims of state violence, each given a single page with their name and date of death preceded, obituary style, by a cross.

At the bottom of the first, otherwise blank, page is an entry from a German dictionary – “terror,oris, m:latein. – Schreck(en)” – which tells us that the word “terror” is of Latin origin and means “frighten.” After thumbing through the collection of haunting and often grisly press photos we are bound to agree that these events were and are very frightening. He has said that the purpose of the book was to “convey the size of this number of victims in graphic terms”. In email correspondence with Feldmann, he told me of his inspiration for Die Toten: “Around the end of the eighties, I happened to look in a police car which passed by and I saw two typical young policemen, mid twenties – the same age as my son at the time. It jumped into my head – ‘What could happen to these young policemen, with such a dangerous job?’ And also, ‘What could happen to my son? And I remembered in this moment the pictures of young policemen and students who were killed in the seventies.”

While we are emotionally moved by the experience of turning page after page of tragedy, Die Toten’s overall strategy is sober and factual. At the end of this hall of the dead, Feldmann includes a legend with further identification and details for each person. It was clearly important to the artist to be correct in his information and respectful of the dead, never cheapening their memory by dubious aesthetic gestures. The book informs as much as it affects.

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