Todtnauberg

Project Overview

  1. Dennis Del Favero
  2. 2009

Single Channel DVD Video. 4 minutes. BW. Stereo.

Todtnauberg is a video work dealing with the ‘epoch making encounter’ between the Jewish poet Paul Celan and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger in 1967, commemorated in a poem of the same name.

While previous interpretations of this encounter have focused on Celan’s disappointment with Heidegger, this project concerns itself with the silences that haunt their meeting. On the one hand other is Celan’s attempt to remember the dead, counterpointed by the guilt he feels towards his parents who died in the death camps. On the other hand is Heidegger’s silence regarding the regime’s extermination of countless millions and his membership of the Nazi Party, counterpointed by his attempts to remember his philosophical achievements.

Celan looks back at the meeting and the holocaust it evokes, while Heidegger looks to the future and the new holocaust he believes has been sown by the last.

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Todtnauberg

Exhibited at

  • University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, 2011
  • Galerie Marion Scharmann, Cologne, 2009
  • Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydney, 2009