we will not come back tomorrow

The project focuses on the experience of being uprooted from one's home as a refugee & the lifelong yearning for the homeland by photographically examining the oeuvre of Friedrich Karopka, a painter & one of 14 mio. German displaced people after WWII.

Friedrich Karopka (1922-1976), a painter and a displaced person from Silesia's (present-day Poland) repeatedly depicted his native countryside. With his artworks and the outcome of my research for him I illustrate this longing and nostalgia in my project, helping us to better understand the fate of refugees at that time and today. Through my artistic research, I aimed to shed light on the frequently overlooked issue of the displacement of Germans by delving into his life story and highlighting the recurring nature of refugee flows throughout history.

Starting with a landscape painting that I repeatedly came across in a family photo archive, I began a detailed artistic research to find the painter Friedrich Karopka. A reddit-post revealed his fate: he was born 1922 in Thiemendorf in Silesia. After having lost his right arm in WW II, he was displaced from the former eastern territories and became a painter. Enquiries on eBay and other art auction websites revealed that Karopka often painted the same types of landscapes, enabling parts of the paintings to be pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle. Intrigued by the contrast between the peaceful natural landscapes he depicted and his strokes of fate, I assumed that he was painting over and over again the landscapes of his childhood and youth, from before his expulsion. This assumption was later confirmed by Thomas Karopka, the painter’s son. Moreover I found a postcard series by Karopka depicting former German touristic sights. I searched for the Karopka family, started an ongoing correspondence with the painter's descendants, and undertook a research trip to Silesia. Friedrich Karopka died in 1976 due to complications from a piece of shrapnel from World War II.

For this research project I am working with photographic found footage material, mostly from eBay, and official and private archives and combine them with my own photographs of Silesia and texts providing background information about exiles and my investigation. The material covers the period from the 1940s to the present, shedding new light on a fading memory and underlining the fact of the timeliness and ongoing relevance of displacement.

Big collage (two birches by a shallow stream)
The centrepiece of the project is a large collage of the 18 superimposed amateur photographs of the family who owned the original painting. The family members are celebrating various occasions in front of the painting in the living room. For at least 30 years and through two changes of wallpaper, the painting of a deserted natural landscape had hung in the same spot. My research revealed that the family had also been displaced from Silesia, which reinforced the idea that the landscape depicted in the painting represented their homeland for them.

Landscapes of longing 1-4
Photographs of eBay sellers offering Karopka’s paintings are showing that the painter was often depicting the same kind of landscapes, making it possible to put parts of them together like puzzle pieces. Thomas Karokpa, the painter's son confirmed that Friedrich repeatedly painting the Silesian landscape, where he grew up from 1922 until he was conscripted. His oil paintings thus reveal Friedrich's lifelong nostalgia and his way of dealing with the trauma of losing his homeland.

search?query=Karopka I-VI
Based on Karopka's CV, I searched for traces of him in Dortmund, where he studied and Lünen, where he held a solo exhibition in the 1960s. I found his name in an old digitalized address book of Lünen and contacted the city archive, who informed me that he had moved away in the '60s. After contacting two more city archives in cities that Friedrich had moved to, I finally found the city where he had lived from 1966 onwards and discovered that he had died in 1976. I also obtained the contact details of Thomas Karopka, Friedrich's son, and have been in contact with him ever since.

The series „search?query=Karopka I-VI“ as part of the art project showcases key findings from my research for the painter himself. The original material has been printed entirely and is covered by a large passe-partout with a cut-out allowing the audience to focus only on the most important parts of the evidence.

Postcards FK I-IX
Another finding on eBay was a black and white postcard series from the 50s painted by Friedrich Karopka. The postcard motifs depict sights of the former eastern territories, like the castle in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), the Crane Gate in Danzig (now Gdańsk) and the cathedral in Breslau (now Wrocław). Karopkas oeuvre is revealing the longing of the displaced people for their former homeland, their demand for the sights they were visiting and the places that represented their area, traditions and culture.

Translation of the text on one of the postcards:
Do not forget the German east!
Königsberg Castle / East Prussia
Originally created with the left hand by the severely disabled artist F. Karopka, who was an arm amputee. Secures the maintenance of severely disabled people

Publication „search?query=Karopka“
The publication contains a large selection of images that I collected during my research. It combines screenshots of websites and maps, archive material and notebook pages with the landscape photographs I made in Thiemendorf as well as texts by Elisabeth Pfeil, Christiane Hoffmann and me (192 pages).