Panel Discussion and Vernissage: Forced Labour in the Donbas 1945 – A Diary

"In the end, my grandfather didn't come back, but this diary did," sums up photographer Damian Michael Heinisch, who grew up in Poland and Germany and lives in Norway.

For his installation "1st-51st diary of Walter Heinisch (2021)", Damian Heinisch photographed his grandfather Walter Heinisch's diary from dawn to dusk in the light of the Norwegian sun.

Walter Heinisch documented his difficult fate as a forced labourer on densely written pages. Like him, around 400,000 German civilians were deported to the east of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic at the end of the Second World War as so-called "reparation labourers". The conditions in the Soviet labour camps were extremely harsh, with the result that only around half of those deported survived.

Almost eighty years later, his grandson Damian Heinisch travelled to Ukraine to follow in his grandfather's footsteps. He used a plate camera to take colour photos using the historic autochrome process.

The new gallery exhibition on the first floor includes installations, landscape portraits and historical documents.
 

Programme

Greeting

Dr Gundula Bavendamm, Director Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion, Reconciliation, Berlin

Introductory lecture

"Deportation of Silesian civilians to the Soviet Union in 1945"

Dr Dmytro Myeshkov, Research Associate at the Northeast Institute,

Institute for Culture and History of the Germans in Northeast Europe e. V., Lüneburg

Panel discussion

Damian Michael Heinisch, photographer, Oslo

Moderation

Dr Sophie-Charlotte Opitz, curator and author, Hamburg

Afterwards, we invite you to a small reception.

At the same time, there will be an opportunity to visit the new gallery exhibition Forced Labour in the Donbas 1945 – A Diary.

Admission free / Language: German

Duration of the gallery exhibition: 27 September 2024 to 5 January 2025