Christian Rothe arrived at the Ettersberg with an analog large-format camera and no fixed itinerary. Between 2017 and 2024 he returned to the wooded plateau above Weimar again and again, photographing what the forest had been allowed to absorb: foundations barely legible in the undergrowth, flights of steps that now lead nowhere, fence lines, tracks. The 119 duotone plates gathered in Buchenwald: In the Thicket of the Ettersberg treat the terrain itself as the surviving document, so that the camp appears less as a monument than as ground that has gone on growing.
That method places the book in a distinct tradition of site photography, and its counterweights are literary. Passages from three novels written by men who were imprisoned here—Bruno Apitz’s Naked Among Wolves, Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness and Jorge Semprún’s What a Beautiful Sunday—run alongside the photographs, as does José Fosty’s poem Der gefesselte Wald. Essays by the curator Andrea Karle, Heinrich Bedford-Strohm and the volume’s editor, Günter Jeschonnek, address Rothe’s visual language and the wider question of how remembrance is practised now, when the events themselves are receding.
Hartmann Books issued the volume in 2025, in a bilingual German-and-English edition of 240 pages, designed at 21 by 33 centimetres and bound in hardcover with an embossed backliner covering. The book appeared around the eightieth anniversary of the camp’s liberation, and recognition followed: the Stiftung Buchkunst award and a German Photobook Award for documentary photography.
For collectors working on contemporary responses to Holocaust landscapes, the book is a considered example of what a photographer can add to a place that has already been described many times over, and of how writing by survivors can be staged without being reduced to illustration. Its subject, its restraint and its production values all argue for attention.
