Unfinished, finished!
Unbelievable!
To come across a typewriter with a sheet of paper clamped into it, on which is typed an unfinished press release about my book — which was published 26 years ago in 2000 — borders on a miracle.
It was my first book with the renowned art publisher Hatje Cantz, titled “Red Land, Blue Land.” Thematically, it explores the history of wars in an abstract form: war simulations and weapons systems, depicted over the course of a century—from the horse shelters of the Imperial Army in the 19th century to the digital age of computer-simulated warfare.
The book was published after long and difficult years of negotiations regarding access and contracts for the use of images. These negotiations involved both the German Bundeswehr and the British Army of the Rhine, which has been in command of the Sennlager Training Center military training area from 1945 to the present.
On the one hand, roads leading from nowhere to nowhere, shot-up tanks and wrecked cars, mock villages and mannequins. On the other, there stands an almost boundless experience of nature and it’s ever rarer biodiversity in the military training area, hermetically sealed off to non-military personnel. A horror showroom and, at the same time, an ecological treasure. I had already begun working on the project while I was still a student at GHS University in Essen. What an exciting time!
I have never personally met the author of the text about my book.
And then this!
A typewriter from a bygone era, combined with an unfinished manuscript — together an intriguing, already historic document of its time with startlingly current relevance— merge into an “objet trouvé” that couldn’t be more beautiful.
Silent proof that some things find their final form precisely in their incompleteness.
Thank you, Mr. Steinorth!
Claudio Hils