A black and white close-up photograph of a man with glasses and slicked-back hair, smoking a cigar outdoors. He is wearing a collared shirt and appears to be focused or contemplative.
A pile of chopped wood logs stacked in a snowy outdoor landscape, with a forest of evergreen trees in the background.

TODTNAUBERG

or the eternal return

Close-up of a black dog with curly fur lying on a light-colored floor near a piece of furniture, with part of the furniture visible at the edge of the image.
A view through an old window with divided panes, looking into a rustic wooden building with a window and weathered wood siding.
An old wooden barn with a steep roof covered in snow, situated on a snowy landscape with bare trees nearby.
A pretzel on a white plate with salt crystals, a cup of black coffee on a saucer, and a floral tablecloth.
A black and white side profile of a man with glasses smoking a cigar outdoors.
Black cat with reflective eyes standing on a concrete surface, with boxes and a wall nearby, in black and white.

I grew up not far from Todtnauberg. Heidegger had his hut there, in the Black Forest. We breathed the same air.

My grandfather was a Nazi. I have three portraits of him, smoking a cigar. He is the Meister aus Deutschland — the master from Germany — the figure Paul Celan conjured in Todesfuge: the one who plays with serpents, who commands, who gives orders with precision and grace. He is ordinary. He is familiar. He is mine.

Todtnauberg is a series built from that inheritance — from growing up in landscapes that were beautiful and complicit, from belonging to a lineage that I cannot choose and cannot erase.

A house covered with snow, with a snow-covered roof and a chimney on top, in a winter landscape with bare trees and a cloudy sky.
A group of grotesque, painted mannequin heads with exaggerated facial features and large, wide-open eyes, arranged closely together.
A rustic wooden hunting or lookout tower in a wintery forest landscape. The tower is elevated with stairs leading up to a small enclosed platform.

In 1967, Paul Celan visited Heidegger at Todtnauberg. The poet — survivor, witness, author of Todesfuge — came hoping for a word of acknowledgment, perhaps atonement. He left with nothing but a line in a guestbook. That silence is one of the open wounds of the 20th century. The philosopher who had thought being more deeply than almost anyone, could not think his way to a single honest sentence.

The series moves across places where that wound has left its mark. In the Black Forest around Todtnauberg, landscapes of fog and silence — the beauty that harbored complicity. In Amsterdam, a single image: a lock of my daughter's black hair, taken after visiting the Anne Frank House.

Celan wrote: dein goldenes Haar Margarete, dein aschenes Haar Sulamith. Golden hair for the Aryan myth. Ashen hair for the woman reduced to smoke. My daughter has black hair. She is the granddaughter of the Meister, and she carries Sulamith's hair. The poem's racial partition has collapsed into a single child, alive, standing in the house where another child did not survive. This is what inheritance looks like when history folds back on itself.

In Athens, sheep heads: the ancient, wordless fact of sacrifice. Before ideology, before the camps, before philosophy — the slaughter that precedes all the others.

A side view of an older man wearing glasses, holding a cigar.
Snow-covered landscape with a partially buried underground building and a forest of evergreen trees in the background.
A grayscale photo of a young girl standing in a garden, covering her eyes with her hands, with a partially constructed house in the background.
Black and white photograph of a snow-covered landscape with a narrow stream of dark water running through the middle, surrounded by snow and leafless branches.
Black and white portrait of a woman with short dark hair, wearing a floral headpiece and a sheer veil.
Christmas decorations hanging on a wooden ladder, including star, gingerbread man, moon, and heart ornaments, with black beaded strings and lights.
A black-and-white portrait of a man with a serious expression, partially shirtless, with prominent facial features and a short beard, against a plain background.

Todtnauberg is not a series about the past. It is a series about the eternal return of authoritarian regimes — the way they rise from the same soil, speak the same language of order and purity, find their Meister in every generation. My grandfather's portrait is not a relic. It is a mirror held up to the present.

Between the old man with the cigar and the child with black hair, I stand. I cannot undo what was done. I can only look — at the landscapes, at the faces, at the hair — and refuse to look away.

Prints available. • Contact for exhibitions and acquisitions • Published in The Eye of Photography 2025 • Published by Kamira Institue 2025 • Published in FK Magazine 2026 • Shortlisted Athens Photofestival 2026

Prints & exhibition copies Available as limited editions: 40 × 50 cm and 60 × 80 cm. Piezography carbon inks on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308g. Signed and numbered. Exhibition loans available on request. → matthias.koch@pm.me