“Srebrenica, a work of art in the municipality of Haar”

That was the subject of an email I recently found in my laptop’s inbox.

That was surprising. Did the municipality of Haar, which had bought this sculpture years ago, want something from me?

As I quickly discovered, that was not the case.

Although the email came from Haar, it was not from the municipal administration, but from a citizen of the community, a Muslim Bosnian who himself lost relatives in the Bosnian war, although not in Srebrenica.

Finding a work of art in his new home that commemorates the victims of the war had moved him deeply.

But before I go on, it is probably useful to tell a little more about the history of how this sculpture came about.

Between 1992 and 1995, a bloody civil war raged in Bosnia and Herzegovina following the declaration of independence from Yugoslavia.

During this brutal war, the town of Srebrenica was besieged by Serbian-Bosnian militias, even though the United Nations had declared it a safe zone for the Muslim Bosnian civilian population.

I wanted to use artistic means to draw attention to this unbearable situation and the horror of war in general when I created my sculpture, or more precisely, the first version of this sculpture, during a symposium in Italy in 1993.

I called the sculpture “Assedio – Siege” in Italian because the siege of Srebrenica had already been preceded by other brutal sieges, such as that of Sarajevo, which I also wanted to draw attention to.

It was difficult for me to bear reading about this war every day in newspapers and seeing it on television without being able to do anything about it.

In some way, I wanted to say at least: “Look at this and finally do something!”

The sculpture I created at the symposium was certainly impressive and earned me a special mention from the jury.

But the very soft and, for my taste, a little too beautiful limestone that I had available for this sculpture did not really satisfy me.

One of the sculptor colleagues at the symposium, the Austrian Christian Feierle, repeatedly repeated to us other participants his belief that granite, which he normally worked with, was the "only honest stone" because it was the only one that really challenged the sculptor.

That gave me the idea to make the sculpture again, this time out of granite and a little bigger, a real challenge.

An opportunity to do so arose that same year at the Sculptura exhibition in Kevelaer.

If you were selected by the jury to take part in the exhibition, you were paid a fee - not a lot but enough to finance a large block of Norit*.

I submitted a model of the sculpture, was accepted by the jury and ordered the stone block.

The story of how the block came to me and the difficulties I had to overcome with it would go beyond the scope of this article. I'll write about that another time.

After I had finished the sculpture, it was transported to Kevelaer and exhibited there for a year and a half.

Then I had to ask myself what to do with the sculpture.

After all, the thing weighed over four tons. Putting it up in the front garden of my parents' house, for example, would have been pretty difficult.

Then chance or, if you like, a stroke of luck came to my aid.

At that time, I was teaching modeling and stone carving at the adult education center in Haar, and shortly after the exhibition in Kevelaer ended, the center wanted to hold an exhibition of all the teachers of the creative courses.

So I offered to put up my sculpture in Haar, during the exhibition and afterwards, as a permanent loan.

The adult education center and the community agreed, and the sculpture ended up in the community's depot shortly afterwards, where they had the necessary equipment to unload it and transport it further without any problems.

Then we looked for a location for the sculpture with the mayor at the time, Mr. Dworzak, and employees of the municipal administration.

There were essentially two options to choose from. One was the current location at the fork in a cycle path, and the other was the entrance area of ​​the forest cemetery.

Ultimately, I decided on the location on the cycle path because, in my opinion, the location at the forest cemetery was aesthetically beautiful, but for my taste, too beautiful for the bitter message of the sculpture.

The then somewhat less attractive location on the cycle path, surrounded by high fences of the adjacent industrial areas (which almost reminded me of prison or warehouse fences), seemed more suitable to reinforce the message.

So the sculpture found its place there and was purchased by the municipality a few years later.

That was the end of the matter for me for the time being.

Until I got the email mentioned at the beginning of my story.

The man who wrote to me, as I said, a Muslim Bosnian, had been living in Haar for a long time, but had only recently discovered the sculpture.

He wrote to me that since then he had been working hard to show the sculpture to as many members of the Bosnian community as possible.

His wish was to have it officially inaugurated with a ceremony, as a kind of memorial.

He also asked me whether I would agree to an information board being put up next to the sculpture and whether I could write a text about it if necessary.

In addition, the location of the sculpture should be made more beautiful and the number 8372 and/or the Srebrenica flower should be engraved on the sculpture.

8372 is the number of people known to have been murdered in Srebrenica so far, a number that probably doesn't mean much to most people in Germany today, but which every Bosniak knows.

The Srebrenica flower is a symbol of remembrance of the massacre. While the 11 petals commemorate July 11, 1995, the beginning of the massacre, the color white symbolizes the innocence of the murdered, while the green color in the middle stands for the awakening of hope for all people in this world.

Of course asking me he ran into open doors.

If this place is now to be developed and redesigned as a memorial site, this will of course result in a change to the original statement.

But I can well understand that the people who suffered so much in the Bosnian war want a dignified, aesthetically pleasing place to commemorate them.

I definitely don't want to stand in the way of that and I'm excited to see how this matter develops. 

*Norite is a igneous rock from South Africa, as hard as granite but without quartz (which means that you don't risk silicosis when working with it)