A portrait of Hermann Graebe, the only German witness to testify against the Nazi state at Nuremberg and his attempts to project the Volhynia Jews under his employment.
Topography of Rescue. Zdolbuniv Museum of Local History—Zdolbuniv, Ukraine. June–July 2026.
Implemented by the Centre for Sustainable Initiatives NGO, and Max-Leven-Zentrum Solingen e.V., in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut Ukraine.
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The project idea was born on a phonetic level: the German word “ZEUGE”, meaning "witness," and the transliterated name of the town, “ZDOLBUNIV”, both begin with the letter “Z”, which has been grating on the ears since 2022. Zdolbuniv, a witness-town, and Hermann Graebe – a German who testified against Germans at the Nuremberg Trials. Together, they are “ZEUGEN” (witnesses). During the residency, this homophony took the form of an audiovisual exploration of collective memory, language barriers, and the ethical boundaries of representing historical trauma.
Matthew focused on the figure of Hermann Graebe, a German engineer for a construction firm who managed operations in Zdolbuniv and Rivne during World War II, and went on to become the sole German witness at the Nuremberg Trials to testify for the prosecution against the Nazi regime.
The artist's work is built on the deconstruction of archival and personal materials. The author intertwines official Nuremberg transcripts, fragments of Paul Celan's poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”), excerpts from a 1984 audio interview with Hermann Graebe, and his own childhood memories of an irrational fear of the incomprehensible German language encountered in newsreels and video games.
The central visual and metaphorical motif of the video installation is the railway of Zdolbuniv – a major transit hub. Matthew reframes this landscape: shifting from a mundane, utilitarian space of travel and the contemporary aesthetic of "urbex" (urban exploration) to an ominous symbol of deportations, concentration camps, and the industrial-scale slaughter that has haunted European culture since the Holocaust.
Text / Marta Pogorila
Zdolbuniv Museum of Local History. Zdolbuniv, Ukraine. July 17th 2026.
TOPOGRAPHY OF RESCUE.
JUNE/JULY 2026.
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