Self-portrait with my mother in our hotel room in Laon, France

My mother in a poppy field on one of the former battlefields of the Somme, near the so-called “ Schwaben Redoubt ”, Thiepval, France.The poppy became a symbol of remembrance for the victims of the world war. It goes back to the poem "In Flanders Fields" by a brigade doctor, who was impressed by the sight of red flowers on the devastated battlefields in Ypres. I photographed my mother as she strolled through the field of flowers and kept thinking about what this place must have looked like 110 years ago. It is very quiet on this day, you can only hear the distant conversations of a small group taking a guided tour along the war graves. There are many British visitors here. Very few Germans.

Self-portrait on one of the Somme battlefields. - Thiepval, Somme department, France.

My mother is combing her hair in our B&B room in Ypres. Her grandfather, Ferdinand Schütte, participated in the Third Battle of Flanders at Ypres. Since 1928, the fallen soldiers of the former British Empire and its allies who died in the Ypres Salient are commemorated daily in Ypres with the "Last Post," the traditional final salute to the fallen.

The house that my great-grandfather built and where my mother grew up.

Burial site of my great-grandfather. The grave was removed years ago.

The Shape of F. S.

2023 - 2025

The Shape of F. S. explores my great-grandfather’s history as a German soldier in the First World War through the fragmented traces he left behind and the uncertainty that surrounds them.

A French bayonet is the only remaining object known to have been brought back from the war by my great-grandfather. After returning home, he sealed it inside a wall of the house and, supposedly, forgot about it. For decades it remained hidden there, until one day, during renovation work, it suddenly fell out of the wall.

Structured around the limits of historical knowledge, the project follows a journey along the former Western Front undertaken by my mother and me. Moving through landscapes where the war once unfolded, the work reflects on how individual war experiences continue to exist through family histories more than a century later.

Field post letters written during the war provide clues about places, time and emotional states. These historical traces are used to continue the story 110 years later. While the letters establish an intimate connection to my great-grandfather as a person, a central question remains unresolved: how should his role as a perpetrator in this war be understood?

The project unfolds as a narrative across three generations: the soldier, his granddaughter, and his great-grandchild. Although rooted in an individual family history, the work addresses questions of guilt, inheritance, and historical responsibility within German society.

The visual narrative of this project incorporates traditional documentary photographs of the contemporary landscape as one layer. These places remain charged by their historical context. The focus lies on decisive places rather than decisive moments—an attempt to explore the point at which time turns into the past.

This layer is complemented by still lifes of found objects, reinterpretations of historical photographs, self-portraits, and subjective moments from the shared journey across the former battlefields. Together, these elements form a constellation in which past and present enter into dialogue, guided by uncertainty and the search for answers.

The Shape of F. S. approaches the emptiness left by history and the questions that cannot be resolved. Rather than offering conclusions, the work seeks to provoke an emotional confrontation with historical wars and their cultures of remembrance, while leaving space for speculation.

Exhibition at Superraum Dortmund, Germany, from 10.10 - 02.11.2024

Arne Piepke

Arne Piepke

The Shape of F. S.