L'EUROPE DU SILENCE (2000)
From 1979 to 1997 the French photographer Stéphane Duroy traveled constantly around Europe. He primarily wanted to understand how a civilized continent could have so surrendered itself to war and violence. He found the best illustration of this antithesis during the Cold War in Berlin. Here he perceived the two faces of the German people, ‘the one extremely refined, the other that of a monster’. It made him decide to research further in the DDR and the rest of the East Bloc, where the advanced Weimar culture and Auschwitz could exist alongside each other. There he encountered a region where time seemed to have stood still. Duroy ended L’Europe du Silence (2000) in his homeland, France, in the landscape that still bears the scars of the massive slaughter that took place there during the First World War.
