The step from forgetting to symbolic remembering is considerably shorter than that to active remembering work. Aleida Assmann

To remember – this is an intimate, personal moment that is simultaneously projected onto the foil of collective remembering and quotes the metaphors of memory from past times. It is the contemporary occurrence – taking place in the present – of the mind impressing and recalling specific content, a process of deconstruction and construction that has to perform contrary functions like the preserving and deleting data.

At the Branch Office for Temporary Remembering, this process could be followed in a conversation between teller and listener, in a dialogue between experts and in an interview with the public. The labyrinth-like building of the Hamburg Kammerspiele was the stage for a theatre of memory in which we simultaneously appear and perform as author, actor, director and prompter.

Dialogue formats

Artists, scholars and scientists, contemporary witnesses, media theorists, archivists and collectors came together in five different dialogue formats: expert talks, presentations of archives and research projects, presentations by artists and their collections, interviews with the public and a memory laboratory.

Amongst the themes covered were how the metaphors of memory and remembrance are changing in the media age, the rituals and memorials of remembrance, the Jewish history of the building at Hartungstraße 9, the problematic of digital archiving, and trauma research. The dialogues were broadcast live into the audience room, where those in attendance watched the talking heads on monitors and projection screens. Broadcasting was from nine offices, so that 18 dialogue partners were simultaneously ‘on air’, each for a period of four hours. The audience had various possibilities to take part: they could send questions to the offices, make appointments for a conversation in some offices, be interviewed by experts in oral history research, or could book to take a look at the archive on display in the basement. Several tours through the house were conducted every day.

A temporary place of remembrance

A place of encounter was created temporarily that remembered itself and of itself. No memorial, no fixed ritual, no model of memory conceived permanently, but rather a space for dialogical observation and use, one that brought before the public various processes and techniques of remembering, without any symbolic reading and artistic monumentalizing.

It was an exhibition of communicating screens which showed an immaterial, flowing, passing-by image of how remembering works. A stream of language that overlaid and overlapped itself, a mirrored present space of remembering, an acoustic palimpsest.

Concept: Hannah Hurtzig, Anselm Franke (Tulip House)
Stage: Penelope Wehrli
Media: visomat inc., Berlin
Internet-Edition: Wieske’s Crew KG (nach einer Idee von Peter Gorschlüter und Felix Götz)
Project Management: Katharina von Wilcke
Research: Sonja Valentin
Guides: Studierende der Literaturwissenschaft und der Schauspiel-Regie der Universität Hamburg
Consultation: Lutz Engelke, Katharina Albrecht, triad, Berlin;
Frau Dr. Müller-Wesemann, Zentrum für Theaterforschung der Universität Hamburg

Hamburger Kammerspiele:
Director: Ulrich Waller
Management: Christiane Schindler

A Co-production between Hamburger Kammerspiele and Tulip House