DIRK
« That time of year thou mayst in me behold »
The man immediately agreed to collaborate on this intimate project, without setting any conditions. However, it had been 25 years since I had seen him.
His story had been calling me for a long time.
In 1995, 3 years before his arrest, I was 17 when I met him for the first time, hidden in the Normandy bocage. People were calling him Dirk, but he was elsewhere known as Hans-Joachim Klein (HJK), a repentant terrorist. Put in safety and protected by a network of friends, German and French intellectuals, he was working in a small farm. Even if people spoke little about it, his past was known.
In the 1970s and 80s, Klein belonged to the Revolutionary Cells (Revolutionare Zellen) organizing extreme left-wing urban guerrilla actions in West Germany. Lending support to militants of the Red Army Faction (RAF) and carries out terrorist actions with the Bande à Baader. The death of one of its members following a hunger strike in prison in 1974 marked a turn in the violence of Klein's commitment. In 1975 he participated with the terrorist Illitch Ramirez Sanchez, aka Carlos, in the taking of hostages in Vienna, of 66 people during the OPEC ministers conference. Three people lose their lives and Klein, seriously wounded by a bullet in the stomach, manages to flee with the commando to Algeria.
In 77, HJK decided to leave terrorism and sent to Der Spiegel, his personal weapon and his fingerprints, accompanied by a letter explaining the reasons for his departure. Protesting against anti-Semitism in international terrorism, he denounced a planned attack against two leaders of the Jewish community in Berlin and Frankfurt. Started 20 years of hidding , during which while fleeing the police and his former comrades, he tries to build a new life. Finally arrested in 98, he was extradited to Germany, tried and sentenced to 9 years in jail. Released in 2003, he returned to the village in Normandy. He was finally pardoned in 2009.
Now 74, in the ashes of his youth mingle his utopias, the death of his ideals, his revolt, his loneliness, his pride, his isolation... I thought the fall of his life is worth telling. It interrogates us about passage of time as well as forgiveness to ourselves, sometimes impossible to grant. Through my photographs I seek to question the look we are able to have on humanity of a being who has committed acts that most of us qualify as inhuman. For several months I established a closeness and trust that allowed me to access his intimate territory, without mask or vanity. Helped by his inexhaustible will not to disappear, we started a journey together, engaging with each other. This serie is an invitation to contemplate - through Dirk – a man at the twilight of his life.
“That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long”.
Sonnet 73 - William shakespeare
“Tu peux revoir en moi ce moment de l’année
Où, tremblant sous les vents de l’hiver, les rameaux
- Naguère tout remplis du doux chants des oiseux –
N’ont plus pour vêtements que des feuilles fanées,
Tu contemples en moi la fin d’une journée,
Lorsque, dans l’Occident, elle tombe en lambeaux
Et qu’on la voit descendre au fond du noir tombeau
Où par la Nuit elle est lentement entraînée.
En moi tu vois encore la suprême lueur
D’un feu qui se débat sur sa jeunesse en cendres,
Lit funèbre où sa flamme a dû venir s’étendre
Détruite par cela qui faisait sa splendeur.
C’est pourquoi ton amour est devenu plus tendre
Pour celui dont bientôt tu devras te déprendre”.
Sonnet 73 - William shakespeare
