Marta
Pruszyńska

The history of the Allach porcelain factory in the Dachau concentration camp is the beginning of my search for what the object is for the human being and what the human being is for the object. Porcelain and death are like black and white – good and evil. In this story, these opposites have merged and created a model of the world that seems unreal. Deprived of dignity and torn out of their current life, prisoners created gifts for their tormentors.

When reading Edmund de Waal’s book on the history of porcelain A white trail. A journey through the world of porcelain, I came across the chapter about the Allach factory. I immediately started thinking about an encounter of these two extremely different worlds. I got around to looking for similarities and connections between them. It may seem absurd, but the longer I examined this topic, the closer both worlds became towards each other. Comparisons between porcelain and death and between ceramics and the camp seem inexplicable, but this situation did really happen. Apart from the place, one of the aspects connecting these terms is the ceramic stove and the gas stove. The temperature of burning is similar in each of them. The former was used for burning porcelain deer figures, and the latter for burning prisoners’ corpses. This creates a picture of the reality that we would prefer not to see. An extremely uncomfortable, almost painful reality. Therefore, we do not wonder about that and do not bring such entirely different problems of existence together.

The history of the Allach porcelain factory in the Dachau concentration camp is the beginning of my search for what the object is for the human being and what the human being is for the object. Porcelain and death are like black and white – good and evil. In this story, these opposites have merged and created a model of the world that seems unreal. Deprived of dignity and torn out of their current life, prisoners created gifts for their tormentors.

When reading Edmund de Waal’s book on the history of porcelain A white trail. A journey through the world of porcelain, I came across the chapter about the Allach factory. I immediately started thinking about an encounter of these two extremely different worlds. I got around to looking for similarities and connections between them. It may seem absurd, but the longer I examined this topic, the closer both worlds became towards each other. Comparisons between porcelain and death and between ceramics and the camp seem inexplicable, but this situation did really happen. Apart from the place, one of the aspects connecting these terms is the ceramic stove and the gas stove. The temperature of burning is similar in each of them. The former was used for burning porcelain deer figures, and the latter for burning prisoners’ corpses. This creates a picture of the reality that we would prefer not to see. An extremely uncomfortable, almost painful reality. Therefore, we do not wonder about that and do not bring such entirely different problems of existence together.