The Bureaucracy of Terror – an exhumation, 2013, Scrutineer Publishing
By means of her artworks the English painter Barbara Loftus materializes the evidence she has exhumed in the State Archives to reconstruct the lost Berlin world of her German-Jewish mother, Hildegard Basch and her fate of her family…
‘As one of the second generation I carry the the often stifled memories of our parents, the survivors. By giving visual form to the events which preceded my birth I want to give form to and make tangible my inheritance. My re-enactments focus on episodes from my mother’s early life and on her identity as a Jew who came of age at the beginning of the Third Reich. This work reflects my research into the mundane forensic evidence of the bureaucracy of terror as the system closed in around those who had always believed themselves to be assimilated German-Jewish citizens.’
