# Books
## A Narrow Foothold
German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s monumental work the Arcades Project—which remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1940—represents both a treatise on the labyrinthine nature of the modern city and the realization of his dream of a book without authorship, composed almost entirely of quotations drawn from a wide range of sources. Taking their mutual appreciation for these aspects of Benjamin’s work as their starting point, friends and photographers Jonas Feige (Germany) and Alan Huck (United States) sorted through their archives of orphaned images in order to assemble a collective portrait of an anonymous city—one composed of severe geometric forms, vague symbols, and the spectral traces of a human presence. Intentionally trying to dissolve any sense of individual authorship, the two looked to Benjamin as their methodological guide, reminding them that “an enigma is a fragment that, together with another, matching fragment, makes up a whole.”
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## This Soil We Have Created For Ourselves
This Soil looks at Germany as a landscape haunted by its own history. The project traces the echoes of bygone myths, ideologies, and utopias through sites of memory, museums, and monuments, where the past is preserved, shaped, and presented as history, and through the everyday surroundings of German towns and villages.
At a time when calls for national identity and a clearly defined Heimat have grown louder, the work confronts the nationalist myth of a sacred homeland: the notion, common to all nationalisms, that a land has belonged to a people since time immemorial. The shadows of the past take on new form here, encroaching, unresolved, never fully closed. The project asks what this complicated relationship to history means for the present, and what potential it holds for Germany's future.
“This Soil is an investigation of sites of memory and yet its strength lies in not relying on a linear re-telling of events. It invites us to sense the significance of what we see before us and in doing so, attempts to strike a difficult balance between bringing attention to Germany’s dark past, while also refusing to give it honour or pay homage.” — Lucy Rogers, C4 Journal
“Jonas Feige’s This Soil We Have Created for Ourselves suggests that history is both an echo and a shadow. The artist photographs his native Germany, his Heimat, with a deeply poetic sensibility. Beneath the beauty of Feige’s images lies the suggestion that history remains incomplete, and that the echoes of the past are not fading but growing louder.” — Brad Feuerhelm
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## Zenker
In 1889, Georg August Zenker, a gardener and botanist from Leipzig, took charge of the Jaunde (present-day Yaoundé) research station in the German colony of Kamerun. After six years’ tenure, Zenker was summarily relieved of his duties. He was said to be leading a polygamous life at the station with several African women, some of whom had borne him children. Zenker left the country, only to return soon afterwards as a private citizen. He settled with his family (a woman from Dahomé and five children) in Bipindi, deep in the Kamerun jungle, where he built Bipindihof, a German colonial-style house and vast cocoa, rubber and banana plantations. The mainstay of his livelihood, however, consisted in collecting copious botanical and zoological specimens as well as ethnographic objects for German museums. Zenker’s thought and actions were, to be sure, heavily influenced by the colonial mindset. But on a number of occasions he clearly opposed the colonialist and militaristic practices of his superiors and other German countrymen. He died in 1922 and was buried on the grounds of his Bipindihof. Zenker’s descendants live widely dispersed in Cameroon and Europe today, but most of them still regard the now crumbling Bipindihof as the cradle of the family.
Yana Wernicke and Jonas Feige traveled to the present-day Republic of Cameroon several times for this photographic essay in order to retrace Zenker’s life there and portray his descendants. By bringing together recovered letters, photographs, drawings and paintings as well as interviews with Zenker’s descendants, they form a portrait of Georg August Zenker that emphasizes the complexity of his character and the complicated legacy he left behind.
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