Nürnberg

The roads I walk along with the Italian gentlemen and ladies I am getting to know in the field are not just any roads. We walk among ghost towns, a Nürnberg of yesterday, a Schwabach that no longer exists.

As I listen to them, I see a house rise where there is now a parking lot, I imagine the mass of bodies, stories and hopes that filled a factory that is now disused at cadenced times, I discover a frost-covered countryside where a three-lane beltway now runs in each direction. Places that were hated and loved at the same time, that for some became home and family, for others never really took the place of "country".

Places that were chosen, that happened by chance, that survive vividly in memory. I was expecting these walking interviews as a journey through space, whereas instead, they are often turning out to be a journey through time.