Kai Loges and Andreas Langen, who have collaborated under the name “die arge lola” since 1994, spent years visiting the neighbourhoods immediately adjacent to the Auschwitz I, II, and III camps. Their subject is not the camps themselves, which have been documented and researched from countless angles, but the ordinary homes of people who, by historical and biographical circumstance, became neighbours of those sites of terror. In *Next Door Auschwitz*, published by Hartmann Books, photography and writing serve as equal instruments of inquiry, recording houses, streets, and residents whose daily lives unfold in the shadow of an extreme history of violence.
The book pairs documentary photographs of locations and people with precise texts by Andreas Langen that reconstruct historical and biographical context. Photographs carry what they can; language supplies what images cannot. The questions the authors raise are direct: How can a community exist in the shadow of historical trauma? What is the relationship between individual and collective memory? What kind of biography emerges from the chance fact of being enveloped in an extreme history of violence? What is the spirit of a place, and how do we relate to Auschwitz today? The sequence moves between close observation and these wider questions without forcing resolution.
The German-and-English edition runs to 132 pages with 158 illustrations in a 23 × 30 cm hardcover format, designed by Ralph Musen. It accompanies exhibitions at the Museum der Alltagskultur in Waldenbuch (2021–22) and the Politische Akademie der Stiftung Demokratie Saarland (2023).
Loges and Langen have built a substantial collaborative practice: their exhibitions include the German pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale; they have taught at universities and worked as journalists for SWR2, *Photonews*, and others; and they have served on the board of the Deutsche Fotografische Akademie DFA. *Next Door Auschwitz* applies that experience to a subject that resists easy treatment, offering a considered photographic and textual record of a neighbourhood most accounts of the region overlook.
