FAMILY ALBUM

When I was younger I used to think that people had been different before. Before was when the "civilized countries" could descend to mutual extermination, had it been thanks to the provocative assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand or the growth of German nationalism, enticed by the alienating sanctions and misconceptions around this country some two decades later. To me it was all history. That is to say, an overwhelming story about a different sort of humans, the pre-war generations, born when humanity was yet to be taught its main lesson and forever realize what we, who came later, already take for granted.

I have met many of those "different" people, those whose lives stretched across what I used to imagine as several years of apocalypses. I have even grown up with my great-grandmother, born in 1904, taking care of me. But no, no matter how much I loved her, to me she was made of different flesh and carried different brain cells in her snow-white head. She was pre-war.

Of course I knew there were more modern bloodsheds going on, some even in the same vast empire where I lived. But those conflicts were very local, and although often unprecedented in their atrocities, in my imagination they did not compare to the World War, when the whole "civilized world" had been involved. "Now it is peace", we learned at school at the so-called peace lessons every year on September 1. The Soviets were stuck in Afghanistan , the Americans were sponsoring the Mujaheddins, but "it was peace". At least in the "civilized world", I thought then.

Years passed. I changed from ignorance and flag-waving to grief and shame about Chechnya and was disgusted with the hypocrisy of the invasion in Iraq . Yet I don't think I had truly understood anything until one day I saw a little-known film by Hungarian cineaste Péter Forgács. The film was called The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle. It was compiled from already existing, found footage once shot by Jewish family living in Amsterdam in the 1930s. The family, whose last name was Peereboom ('Pear Tree' in Dutch), apparently very fond of their camera, filmed many events in their lives, from goofing around at the beach to serious wedding ceremony, to the evening they were packing their bags getting ready to vacate their house and leave to a concentration camp the following day. On film they don't know that they all would die shortly afterwards. The documentary also included some (colour!) found footage of Heinrich Himmler and Arthur Seyss-Inquart (the puppet leader of the occupied Holland ) playing tennis with their wives in a beautiful garden.

It was while watching these scratched images, that joked around, got drunk, fell down, made faces and plans for the future just like we do today, that I realized that n o t h i n g has changed.

Many family films followed. I made a couple found footage compilations myself. Watched my eyes to tears going through the kilometres of moving memorabilia. They were us! You don't see that on stiff official photographs or professional-made newsreels, but they were us. And we are them. We will be them to our grandchildren. Only to our grandchildren I don't want us to be "the pre-war people".

Because now I know that what happened then to the same sort of humans as we are today, can also happen again. As I hear yet another ghost roaming the "civilized world", the brave new world.