Mischling 1 takes as its subject the fate of Sara Davidmann’s family during the Holocaust, a history that reached her largely as absence. Her father could not speak of his childhood in Nazi Berlin, of the relatives who were murdered, or of his evacuation; what he passed on was not a story but an aversion, a silence around everything the Holocaust touched. The book is her attempt to work against that inheritance.

Davidmann builds the volume from heterogeneous material: family photographs, propaganda, artworks, texts, artefacts and documents. The method is montage rather than narrative reconstruction. Images are reworked through her own processes and set against archival matter so that past and present, silence and speech, memory and identity press on one another. What emerges is not a single recovered account but the overlap of personal and collective loss, and of survival.

GOST Books published the volume in 2021 at 116 pages, in hardcover, alongside the exhibition My name is Sara at Four Corners Gallery, London. The following year it was shortlisted for the Rencontres d’Arles Book Awards in the Photo-Text category, a recognition that speaks to how deliberately the book holds photographs and writing in the same frame.

For collectors, the interest lies in that structure. This is a photobook in which the sequencing of images and documents carries the argument, and in which a family archive is treated as evidence to be interrogated rather than illustrated. Its subject is difficult and its approach unsentimental; the book earns its place on the shelf as a sustained example of how photographic and textual material can be made to address what a family could not say.