Supercargo's blog/

Road in the snow

My wife and I spent last week in Sundsvall in the north-east of Sweden. We lived in Sundsvall for 10 years in the 90s so it was fun to go back and visit our old haunts though a lot has changed since we moved away. We stayed with our friends Lena ("northofsweden" on these pages and on Fl*ckr) and Peter and their daughters. Saw lots of other friends and former colleagues. It was also nice to get a real slice of winter snow after months of Gothenburg rain (and occasional frost). If you are interested to read more about this visit, please come and look at my Commonplace Book.

Prora, on the Baltic island of Rügen, was not quite the world's first holiday camp, but it was the first large-scale camp in concept. Designed by the Nazis to be an integral part of their Kraft durch Freude (KdF - Strength through Joy) workers' indoctrination programme, Prora was to be capable of housing 20,000 people at any one time, all in rooms with a view of the sea. Each room would have piped radio, centrally controlled.

Today some parts of the sprawling building are used for a museum, other parts are occupied by a youth hostel, or rented out to local entrepreneurs. At the time this film records, most of the structure that was still standing was empty.

I visited the camp with a group of history teacher colleagues in February/March of 2008 and have been looking ever since for some way to use the photos and film I made at the time. The place was very empty, the beach very beautiful and the buildings rather prosaic and almost melancholy in their uncompleted dilapidation. At the same time the story of Prora, the reason for its existence, was intimidating, conjuring up associations in my mind with army camps and concentration camps, the Gulag Archipelago and 1984.

This music by Endlos seemed to fit the mood of the images I had - a mixture of electronic and rock with a driving rhythm and a minimalist quality. To me it suggests progress through time. Things change, it's true, but only slightly, and combinations of notes come back just as events repeat themselves. Children play, waves break, seagulls and people walk the strand. What are politics and human social engineering in the face of this?

All film and photographs, including photos of archive images, were made in or near Prora on the German Baltic island of Rügen between 29th February and 2nd March 2008. The sound of the sea at Prora was recorded at the same time. Music is by Endlos
http://www.endlos-toene.de/endlos.php
from "renne durch dein leben", track 2 on the album "kein grund, zufrieden zu sein". http://www.endlos-toene.de/endlos.php?link=tontraeger.html&sublink=tontraeger/kgzzs.html

For more information on Prora visit the virtual museum of the Prora camp: dokumentations zentrum prora. Go to this page: http://www.proradok.de/index.html Follow the links from here links to the German or English language sites.

The above is an abbreviated version of my Internet site's page on the film here: www.thesupercargo.com/pror_rug.html