SCHICHT

Night. Wells. Toil. Future. Methodically, following the pace of her narrator’s ruthless scansion, Alex Gerbaulet unearths layer after layer half a century in the history of Salzgitter, an industrial town in West Germany. Before 1945, the industrial complex built there around iron mining and steelworks was called after its founder and leading figure of the Nazi regime: Reichswerke Hermann Göring. Later on, in the 1970s, in the grey and dull setting of a working-class neighbourhood that used to be a model town, a seemingly ordinary family is building itself a future: a house, two kids, a job at the mine and then at the factory. The father goes jogging. His wife keeps a diary. Before their whole world comes crashing down around them. Using private archives as research material, avoiding the usual trick of the personal narrative intertwined in the great course of history, Alexandra Gerbaulet goes deep into the past of her home town and family, and collides all the layers piled up in this apparently quiet, numb and levelled town. Mine, cemeteries and foundations are explored as well. Then what comes to the surface has little to do with family melodrama, but rather with a radical undermining process. The undermining of family, of work as an absolute value, of state authority. History’s common grave accommodates all the dead, and soon nuclear waste too. Future. Toil. Wells. Night. (CG)