While You Were Here

I created this blog to sort through some thoughts, images and happenings in the process of making my documentary While You Were Here. It begins with an archive.

Thousands of letters, documents and photographs tell my grandmother’s life story, with emphasis on her family’s emigration from Germany to the US in the ’30s. But her archive is a methodical chaos – she might as well have stuck a post-it to the lot saying: “I want you to know, but not really.”

I have not organized it yet because to her it was ordered – she usually knew what she had and where it was. She chose what she wanted me to know.  But now I have the rest of it, and should I ever learn her ‘order’ I hope it might reveal something to me about what she saved or why.

I like the idea of this faulty archive, as incomplete and unreliable as her own memory. Since we rely on archives for facts, in support of truths, for what we can ultimately know, what happens when you can’t?

The facts about prejudice and persecutions in WWII Germany are well known, documented in countless ways.  They form stories of victims and perpetrators, fixed by our own moral compass: we always know what we would have done.  But the truth is more subjective and personal, it’s the internal narrative we create to move forward through our circumstance, whatever it may be.

While You Were Here follows a letter from my grandmother’s archive, back to her hometown, to the man who wrote it to her in 1946. The stories I collect along the way mingle facts and truths, extending and complicating the ones I grew up with, unfolding a complex history in progress.

Stay tuned – I’ll show you what I mean.