BIBLIOGRAPHY On European Ground by Alan Cohen

"Cohen's project is to explore, at the end of a century of mass death, how to represent historical trauma in a manner true to our own moment...His gift to us is to show us how to comprehend traces of history that are more radical than any of the inherited images that populate our mental archive - that are no less radical for being ubiquitous and humble."
--Sander Gilman, from the Introduction

After walking what had been the treacherous ground of the Berlin Wall and of Dachau, I understood that history, in a contemporary image, could be sited. Events could—and do- become geography. On European Ground is a visual meditation on the trauma that scars twentieth-century Europe and specifically considers the battlefields of World War I, the Nazi death camps, and the Berlin Wall. These images record the distance between what we remember about charged places and what we can still observe in them today. This book offers a space for reflection on the complex gravity and legacy of these sites and the very ground in which their history has dissolved.

Pictures of trenches and bunkers at the battlefields of Somme and Verdun explore the tension between the violence of the past and the inscrutability of its remnants. Photographs from the grounds of World War II concentration camps (at Dachau, Auschwitz, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbruck, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, and Sachsenhausen) solicit a provocative dialogue between the ordinariness of these sites today and their haunting memory. Images of the Berlin Wall show only the footprint of the barricade that once separated two hostile ideologies. They record the physical erosion and the disappearance of the Wall while capturing its reappearance as a memorialized abstraction.

Accompanying the photographs in On European Ground are essays by Sander Gilman and Jonathan Bordo, as well as an interview by critic Roberta Smith of the New York Times.

128 pages with 93 duotones. Hardcover $40.00. Published June, 2001.

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