Photographer Arne Piepke’s project “Based on True Events” looks at how war is remembered.
Photo assignment editorAmerican Civil War reenactors at the end of a reenactment at a military training area in Walldürn, Germany, on Sept. 4, 2021. War is brutal. It leaves death and psychological damage in its wake. It rips us apart. And yet, it keeps rearing its ugly head over and over. At this moment, there is a war raging and ravaging between Russia and Ukraine. You can barely escape it; coverage is everywhere.The world is often juggling multiple conflicts, some bigger than others.
For all the brutality of war, it is curious how we nonetheless are fascinated by it. It shapes our worldview. I cannot escape the images and stories I was told about World War I, World War II and Vietnam. In this country, we still seem to be grappling with the Civil War and its aftermath. A curious thing, indeed.Photographer Arne Piepke understands this fascination with war. He spent time documenting war reenactments in Europe for his project “Based on True Events.
“I interweave reality and fiction to provide a complex insight into these enactments and to question the boundaries between documentation and truth.“With each of these reenactments, the true events behind them, are constantly reinterpreted and thus run the risk of being altered. Reenactments are always a kind of perfect warfare that cannot represent death, displacement and trauma.
“I visit reenactments of the Napoleonic Wars of Liberation, the American Civil War, and World War I and II. While some of these events are performed in front of an audience, many take place on private property and are closed off from the outside world.”There is a quote that is often dredged up from the philosopher George Santayana that goes like this: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
For all the history books and documentation of war and palpable destruction scores and scores of people have encountered because of it, it persists. Maybe that says something about human nature. Although we have seemingly sufficient memory, we continually repeat our mistakes and the evils of the past. And it goes on and on and on.
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