This chapter and, consequently, the entire long-term project “War without War” goes back to a formative experience in 2007. I experienced the “National Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945” in Kiev. How can a harmless museum visit have such lasting impact? The museum is a landmark of Kiev, housed in the pedestal of a huge statue called “The Motherland Calls”, an impressive structure that is 102 meters high (40 meters of the pedestal, 62 meters of the statue). 14 large halls are dedicated to the history of the struggle and victory of the Red Army over Hitler's Germany.

But what impressed me even more than its sheer size was the fact that the museum was the most popular in all of Kiev. It is not only popular with World War II veterans, but especially with young people: 70 percent of visitors are children and teenagers. This high proportion may also be due to the many school classes visiting the museum, but conversations with visitors confirmed how much young people enjoyed walking through this landmark. There was this young couple on a Sunday, she from Kiev, he from another city visiting here for the very first time. At the top of their list of priorities was a visit to the museum! Of course, the Soviet Union, with a total of 25 million people, soldiers and civilians, suffered the highest number of war dead of all warring parties.

Nevertheless, it seemed absurd to me at the time that a war that took place over 70 years earlier was still having such a mobilizing effect. It seems that the longer the war lies in the past, the more intense and shrill its commemoration is. This led me to ask: when is a war actually over? Can a war really be said to have ended when its traces are still so strongly manifested?

In his novel “The Well-Behaved”, French author Jonathan Littell has his protagonist ask: “Are you even sure that the war is over?” In a way, the war is never over, or it is only over when the last child born on the last day of the war is safely buried, and even after that it lives on in its children and their children, until the legacy gradually dissipates, the memories fade and the pain subsides.”

The question of when a war is over led me to further questions: When does a war actually begin? And what happens alongside a war? My project developed from all these questions, and I gave it the following working title: “Before, after and alongside the war – searching for traces on the fringes of conflicts”. Or, to put it very casually: I do war photography without going to war. One night, the title “War without War” came to mind and to this day I still think that it is very fitting for my work.

After the formative experience in Kiev, I decided to learn more about this distinct culture of remembrance of the Second World War in the former Soviet Union. May 9 is Victory Day and is celebrated in most states of the former Soviet Union. I decided to stay in Volgograd, the former Stalingrad, around this time. There, too, I encountered a statue of “The Motherland Calls”, which, at 85 meters high, is just as colossal as the one in Kiev. On Victory Day, a constant stream of people wound around this statue, an event that reminded me of a pilgrimage.
On a friendly and sunny spring day, it was a Saturday just before May 9, I visited the state “Center for Complementary Education for Children, Guard Post No. 1”. There I came across a staircase leading to a windowless room in the basement and met a motionless young woman standing in uniform holding a machine gun. She voluntarily practiced standing guard at the eternal fire. In the Soviet Union, they began training schoolchildren to do this, among other things, to help them feel the weight of the weapon. According to official sources, this promotes the patriotic qualities of Russian citizens.In the picture, the young woman seems almost lifeless, like a statue. Is she, are we so trapped in our history?

Later, I visited Fyodor Slipzhenko, an 85-year-old war veteran, founder and acting director of the “Volgograd Pedagogical Male Boarding School”, where aspiring teachers receive a patriotic education. However, my translator and I had to sit at the far end of a long table occupied by a few employees and silently listen to his wordy speech. It would never have occurred to me to interrupt and ask a question. The speech lasted a long time and the word “patriotism” was used at least hundreds of times. In terms of content, it was a merciless reckoning with the West that seemed to come directly from the Cold War era. When I later took a portrait of Slipzhenko and, for the sake of the camera angle, got down on my knees in front of him, a smile flitted across his face for the first time. After that, he relaxed a bit and the mood became much more easy going.

After these two trips to Ukraine and Russia, I tried to make sense of what I had experienced. Of course, this form of remembrance was alien to me and also eerie, and of course I recognized the propaganda aspect. At the same time, I tried to rationalize everything I experienced. Take for example, the high death toll that the Soviet Union bore, the fact that the victorious allied states continue to celebrate the end of the Second World War in a pompous manner, and the hope that this patriotism shared by the old people who had experienced the war would disappear through “natural wastage” at some point.

Today, in 2025, I have to admit that this view was trivializing and whitewashing. Of course, there is nothing wrong with commemorating a war like the Second World War, which left such scars, and paying some kind of tribute to the fallen. But I would never have dreamed that Russia would annex Crimea in 2014 and start a war in Donbass, and then launch a full-scale invasion of the Ukraine in 2022.

How can you prepare a people for a new war against a neighboring country? By using a trigger function that has been consolidated by years of propaganda: the fight against fascism! According to Russian state media, the fight is again against a supposedly fascist junta in Kiev. While they fought together against Hitler's Germany in World War II, Russia is now accusing their neighbor of fascism in order to legitimize the attack.

In 2023, the Soviet emblem was removed from the huge Motherland statue in Kiev, and the hammer and sickle were replaced by the trident, the national emblem of Ukraine. Symbolically, the Motherland statue calls on the soldiers to follow her into battle to defend the fatherland. In the Second World War, Stalin threw his soldiers into the ultimately victorious battle and historians argue that this victory was also due to Stalin's cynical calculation and that the lives of his own soldiers had little value. Even today, we read again and again about the various “meat grinders” at the front, where little value is placed on a soldier's life.