the missing house insubstantial encounters
absent spaces | houses by julian jason haladyn drawings by miriam jordan
registration loss appropriation ber l in dispersal
The physical structure of a house or home is an intensely personal demarcation of private space in which one can be separated, even temporarily, from the world outside. The architectural boundaries of the home are often violated in times of war. A notable example is the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, in which even in the most remote attic areas of the building where Anne Frank hid from the occupying Nazis were subjected to the violent politics of World War II. To visit the site now, as Miriam Jordan and I did a number of years ago, is to experience the traces of this violation. In a sense, the historical site of the Anne Frank House bears witness to the irrefutable connection architectural structures have to the effects of war. It is important to note that my view of this interrelationship between architecture and war is influenced by the personal experiences of my grandfather Cheslaw Haladyn, a Holocaust survivor who passed away September 19, 2008. I have vivid memories of hearing his stories about the war, many of which make direct reference to buildings or structures in an attempt to ground the unimaginable horrors experienced. In one incident Cheslaw described the space between the barracks in the concentration camp at Auschwitz as a means of articulating the distance he had to crawl after being beaten for stealing some potato skins. In another he discussed a little German house near the railroad line that the prisoners were building, where he went to borrow a sled in order to help an injured fellow prisoner back to his bed. Given the extreme unreality of the experience, which was in large part created through the confined structure of the camps – what Hannah Arendt has described as ‘laboratories in the experiment of total domination’ 1 – it is not surprising that architecture served as a type of sign designating and substantiating his experiences in the war. The walls of buildings function to delineate the structures of normalcy that are rationed and regimented during wartime. It is the loss of the intimate space of architecture during times of war that is put on display in Christian Boltanski’s The Missing House . The premise of Boltanski’s project is quite simple: located on the walls of two existing buildings are a series of placards that provide the name, profession, and the periods of occupancy for tenants who lived in the domestic spaces of the now missing structure between the walls. The absent building was destroyed in a bombing by allied forces on February 3, 1945; although the buildings on either side were reconstructed after the war, this particular structure was not. As a result there is a literal gap in the cityscape
of Grosse Hamburgerstrasse where it is located in the former East Berlin. It is important to note that The Missing House , which was part of the 1990 city-wide project Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit (The Finitude of Freedom) that celebrated the unification of East and West Berlin, had a second component located in the former West Berlin that consisted of cases displaying archival documentation on the missing building. The research into the missing building that was used for this second component – conducted with the help of Christine Büchner and Andreas Fisher, art students who assisted with this project – led to the unexpected discovery that the building’s Jewish ‘tenants had been evicted, displaced, deported, and presumably liquidated’ by the time of the bombing and the people killed were actually ‘German Aryans who had replaced the now-vanished Jewish residents’. 2 The complexities that emerged out of Boltanski’s simple project again serve to highlight the manner in which architecture designates and substantiates wartime encounters, whether it be the dislocation and likely extermination of the original Jewish tenants or the death of German occupants: both histories overlap in and through the walls of this now missing house. Similar to the Anne Frank House, Boltanski’s The Missing House addresses the architecture that remains after the violence of the war is over. Yet, whereas the Anne Frank House stands as a monument to that loss – one that serves in a sense as a site of comfort and remembering – The Missing House highlights the impossibility of situating this memorialisation of the missing victims of war, both Jewish and German alike. Boltanski’s project serves to highlight the void of life through the absence of architecture, an act of signification that is a powerful reminder of the absences and gaps left in the aftermath of such major conflicts. From a personal perspective, seeing the nothingness of The Missing House functioned as a visualisation of the gap or lacuna that was ever-present in the stories of the war that my grandfather recounted. And like the tattooed numbers on Cheslaw’s arm, the series of placards bearing the names of people functions as a perpetual reminder of that which was lost with the house. C 1 Hannah Arendt, ‘Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentra- tion Camps’, Essays in Understanding: 1930 – 1954 Formation, Exile, and Totali- tarianism . ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1994) p 240 2 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘Mourning or Melancholia: Christian Boltan- ski’s ‘Missing House’’ Oxford Art Journal 21.2 (1998) p 3
Julian Jason Haladyn is a Canadian writer and artist living in London, Ontario.
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