My great-grandmother was one of twelve million people banished in 1945 in the wake of the second world war. She lost her home in the little village „Tschirne“ which is, since then, on polish territory. She wrote her memories down in an unspectacular, plain notebook. In this thesis-project I reframed her notes by transcribing and designing it in a new way.

I designed the book with a lot of attention to the detail. I screen-printed both sides of the cover. While the front shows my great-grandmothers original handwriting, the back illustrates the different exodus routes [1]. Every route stage mentioned in the diary is topographically mapped [2]. Many people lost their life in the course of banishment. My attempt to give the sterile number of deaths an emotional dimension, I punched a hole in the infographic for every person lost [3]. To me, this project was more than a design project. It was genealogy, reprocessing and the impulse for many family conversations.

BORDER-TOPOGRAPHY

Before I redesigned my great-grandmothers diary I researched the historic background to her banishment. In the book »border-topography 1945« you can find infographics, text and topographic maps, related to the polish-german border-shifting in 1945.

individual project | 2017 | 70 pages 

Besides historical texts, the book contains more than thirty pages with infographics, related to the topic. Important events in 1945 [1] for example. Or the pace of the Red Army compared to the refugee treks [2]. All pages of the book are clustered by a page navigation system [3].

← back home