Beautiful Dachau was on a city tourism poster that became the name for a video installation that Professor Marcus did in 2006 that was the forerunner for the film he re-edited which became In Place of Death. One of the paradoxes of the medieval town of Dachau is that it is quite beautiful and was an artists’ colony before the war. Indeed, there was a Dachau school of landscape painting. This image then and now stands in sharp contrast with the concentration camp and its impact on place naming, urban inclusion and remapping of the city, including and importantly in relation to its physical connectedness with Munich.
Attendees may wish to view the 30min film made by Prof. Marcus that he will be making reference to in his talk. The following link and case sensitive password will permit viewing. Notably, for a film on the town and site of the Nazi’s first state concentration camp at Dachau, there are no archival images included, as this experimental work, which has been screened widely at universities, including Harvard, Princeton and Cambridge, focuses on the contemporary urban context.
https://vimeo.com/187303703
Password: Dachau
In addition, attendees can read the following book chapter, ‘A Tale of Two Cities: Dachau and KZ Munich’, that Prof. Marcus wrote about the film’s subject, which is germane to his presentation:
https://www.abdn.ac.uk/staffpages/uploads/enl333/Two_cities.pdf
Alan Marcus is Professor in Creative and Cultural Practice at the University of Aberdeen. As a filmmaker and cultural historian, he often explores themes associated with the impact of mass tourism and urbanization on iconic post-traumatic sites. Works include films set in Dachau, Venice, Hiroshima, Guernica, the US/Mexican border and Hawaii. His doctoral research at the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge involved fieldwork in four Inuit communities in the Canadian Arctic. His book publications include Relocating Eden (1995) and Visualising the City (2008) and articles in journals such as Visual Anthropology, The Journal of Architecture and the History of Photography. He is a life member of Clare Hall and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Cambridge Philosophical Society.
