Ruth Beckermann
Ruth Beckermann, Vienna, 11 March 2023
“Commemoration is not an aseptic act.”
This conversation begins with a flashback to a book: in a 1982 essay entitled “Unzugehörig,” filmmaker and author Ruth Beckermann expounded upon just what its titular descriptor—which literally denotes “non-belonging”—entailed for her generation and for her personally, as a Jew, during the 1950s and ’60s: learning to read one’s parents’ silence; being confronted with the Anti-Semitism that still ran rampant in an Austria subject to new conditions; developing a political consciousness yet simultaneously affirming Vienna as one’s home city. What has changed since then? A conversation about “missing images” and necessary frictions during “years of remembrance” and in front of memorial sculptures.
In cooperation with the Austrian daily newspaper “Der Standard”, this Kontakt Video Portrait was published on their website www.derstandard.at on 31 March 2024.
“Commemoration is not an aseptic act.”
This conversation begins with a flashback to a book: in a 1982 essay entitled “Unzugehörig,” filmmaker and author Ruth Beckermann expounded upon just what its titular descriptor—which literally denotes “non-belonging”—entailed for her generation and for her personally, as a Jew, during the 1950s and ’60s: learning to read one’s parents’ silence; being confronted with the Anti-Semitism that still ran rampant in an Austria subject to new conditions; developing a political consciousness yet simultaneously affirming Vienna as one’s home city. What has changed since then? A conversation about “missing images” and necessary frictions during “years of remembrance” and in front of memorial sculptures.
In cooperation with the Austrian daily newspaper “Der Standard”, this Kontakt Video Portrait was published on their website www.derstandard.at on 31 March 2024.