Paula Markert’s A Journey through Germany. The NSU Serial Murders takes as its subject a case that forced the Federal Republic to confront how its institutions had read — and misread — a decade of right-wing violence. Between 2014 and 2017, the Hamburg documentary photographer retraced the topography of the National Socialist Underground: the crime scenes where ten people were killed, the holiday retreats of the perpetrators, and the ordinary German places that the group moved through unnoticed. Hartmann Books published the project in 2019, a year after the Munich trial concluded with Beate Zschäpe and four supporters sentenced, and the book holds that moment without letting it settle into a verdict.
Markert’s photographs are set beside twelve text fragments and interview excerpts, so that the sequence moves between evidence, portrait, and architecture rather than building a single argument. Portraits of victims, lawyers, and institutions are placed in the same visual field as the murderers’ landscapes, and the effect is a study in adjacency: how much of this history was hiding in plain sight. The book is not a tribunal record; it is a photographic inquiry into the conditions that allowed the connections between the victims to go unrecognized for so long, and into the questions that remained unresolved after the court rose.
The design — a Swiss brochure with flaps, 112 pages and 63 illustrations, 22.5 × 28 cm, with German and English texts and a preface by Arvid Jurjaks — treats the material with the composure of a documentary publication rather than a news object. For readers of German postwar photography and of work that examines the visual culture of political violence, the book records both a specific trial and a wider failure of attention. Its significance lies less in any claim to completeness than in the way it holds the case’s unanswered parts in view.
This is a book about looking at Germany through the traces of a crime, and about what photography can do when the record is contested. It belongs with the serious documentary work that has come out of the NSU period, not as an illustration of the news but as an independent examination of place, memory, and responsibility.
