An Empty Space in Ottensen, Contaminated by History, Capital, and Asbestos
1993

A group performance of bus riders as part of “Stadtfahrt” (city tour)
Hamburg

In 1993 in Hamburg, Germany, Rosler conducted a bus tour to the sites of two Jewish cemeteries—one extant but closed, the other destroyed. The latter, in the city's Ottensen district, had been eradicated by the Nazis, who dug air-raid shelters on the site. After World War II, a department store was built there. When the store, in turn, was demolished in 1991 to make way for an immense shopping mall, gravestones and human bones were found. The Green Party attempted to block construction with the assistance of members of a Hasidic Jewish burial society. Rosler was invited to take part in a project comprising bus tours created by artists. She wrote a script in short paragraphs to hand out to the participants. At the first stop, an early Jewish cemetery, the group looked at the customs of Jewish burial. At the second, the site of the vanished graveyard, they read their paragraphs aloud, together constructing an intricate narrative fabric embracing past and present, the economics of land use and private ownership, the recollection of Nazi and other persecutions of Jews, shopping centers, bones buried and exhumed, and historical and literal contaminations, posing the question whether and how land contaminated by history may be reclaimed.