PUBLIC AND PARTICIPATORY
Anecdota
Anecdota grew out of living in Weimar and a question that kept returning: which parts of its history does the city choose to put on display, and which does it leave out? Few places carry as much historical paradox. Some of the twentieth century's most consequential turns played out within Weimar's walls, shaping countless lives, yet the version of the city handed to visitors is narrow, organized almost entirely around a handful of canonical figures, Goethe and Schiller above all. To me the overview a tourist can absorb in an afternoon felt strangely detached from the people who had actually lived that history.
That detachment has a sharp emblem. The Gauforum — the monumental Nazi administrative complex begun in 1936, and the only one of some forty planned across Germany ever built — required the clearing of an entire historic neighbourhood and the city's green belt to make room for it, and was raised in part with forced labour from the Buchenwald concentration camp. Today the complex houses Thuringia's state administration, while its great assembly hall, conceived as the "Hall of the People's Community" for crowds of twenty thousand, has held a shopping mall since 2005: the Weimar Atrium.
The hall built to stage the Volksgemeinschaft now sells shoes and electronics. Tourism is an economic system, but it is also a form of education, and Anecdota asks where the balance between the two has gone.
Anecdota is a counter-map. Distributed in Weimar's tourist office alongside the official one, it trades monuments and opening hours for personal stories, gathered by interviewing people who live in the city. I found them through personal introductions and through a notice in the local newspaper, asking for the stories that the tourist information leaves untold. The result is a portrait of Weimar drawn by its residents rather than its brochures — the city as it has been lived, folded back into the very format that usually flattens it.