Was it necessary to be a reporter for more than 40 years to make Berlin the city of his heart?
It is necessary, like Francis Kochert, to be more than a historian of the moment, far from the caricature cliché of the journalist – to honor – in reporting always the long course – the memory of the past to better preserve the future.
One must have been moved to the tears to capture in Berlin the slightest trace of the horror experienced during the fatal night of Cristal night November 9, 1938.
One must be master in the art of photographing, with attentive meticulousness, the surviving signs of the then incipient barbarism.
It is necessary, like Francis Kochert, to have been dozens of times walking the alleyways, streets and avenues of the German capital: Friedrichstrasse, Kantstrasse, Uhlandstrasse and many others, to give us the chance to see a new curtain no longer of iron but images tracking down “obscene, edgy words, pixelated shadows of posters” *.
Each image of Francis Kochert creates, stone by stone, the graphic emotion that takes us through the Brandenburg Gate of … our memory engulfed by the flood of clichés that overwhelm us and anesthetize our contemporary vigilance.
Such Francis Kochert must be expert in the banal proliferation of street art to enrich it with a pertinent return to the evil sources of “murderous shadows” * that still permeate the walls and windows of Nazism, then conquering, always threatening.
We must have experienced so many new conflicts, which should never have been, for Francis Kochert to guide us with his sharp eye to “pick up scraps of dried blood spread over the rowdy surface of time.”
Francis Kochert is like the Champollion of a European-lighthouse capital who 80 years later reveals the hieroglyphics of the tragedy announced, towards the second world war.
We need Francis Kochert to help us – by this edifying book “The Ghosts of Berlin” to re-read the Great History, to live an aesthetic walk all in black and white and better “tame the chaos and question the past in the darkness of the night. A night that is returning all over Europe again “tattooed on the skin of Berlin, like the shroud of our dreams, fragmented, revolted” *.
It is necessary to be Francis Kochert, journalist, photographer, member of the National Academy of Metz, President of the Theater Festival “Passages”.
There is something in him of Bertold Brecht, as his images go through time and pierce our consciences to keep them alert. Natürlich.
Alain Mingam
Francis Kochert – The Ghosts of Berlin, Die Geister Berlins
Edition Promenade
108 pages, approx. 200 photos b / w
stitched hardcover
21 x 24.5 centimeters
2019 promenade edition
ISBN 978-3-944897-17-2
30 euros
