The starting point for the work “X-Ray-Fehlschuss” (X-Ray-Misfire) was the question of how we remember and how the past can re-emerge into the present through historical evidence and its materiality. In his installation, the artist refers to events from the time after the founding of the German Reich in 1871, when the term anti-Semitism was established and instrumentalised in political debate. By definition, ‘anti-Semitism’ means a certain negative view of Jews, to whom generalised characteristics are ascribed in place of perceiving them as individuals.

In order to bring the anti-Semitism debate of the past into the present and create an artistic image for it, Daniel Hausig has drawn on photographs published in a radiological textbook (Positioning in Radiography) in 1939. These images show models depicting the optimal positioning of the human body for taking X-ray images. By presenting the photographic material as backlit images in shooting boxes, the people shown are not presented as individuals, but more for their anonymous function as demonstration objects – and in combination with targets at that.

The discussions that arose shortly after the founding of the Reich, which promoted anti-Semitism as a political programme and called for an ‘ethnically homogeneous’ Germany, proved to be the precursor for the first ‘ethnic cleansing’ by German troops in occupied Poland two generations later, in which thousands of Poles, Jews, civilians and prisoners of war were murdered. In this respect, the depicted models and the targets symbolise thousands of individual fates, above all Jews, who became the concrete targets of stereotypical character attributions and deadly violence.

The work X-Ray-Fehlschuss is based on findings the artist made in his own family estate. Two of the objects on display define the historical context of the installation like a temporal bracket: on the one hand, Hausig shows a photograph his grandfather, Paul Wilhelm Hausig (1914-1978), took in 1939 as a soldier during the deportation of the Jewish population in Lodz (Poland) to the Litzmannstadt ghetto. Secondly, he shows a publication by his great-great-great-uncle Ferdinand Hausig (1831-1895), who published his lecture ‘Christ und Jude – wider den Judenhass’ (Christ and the Jews – once again hatred of the Jews) in Berlin in 1878. This text was written in the context of the incipient anti-Semitism debate and is a response to anti-Semitic writings, such as Richard Wagner’s text ‘Was ist Deutsch?’ (What is German?) (1865/1878), whose text has been included as an object in the installation.

What distinguishes F. Hausig’s text from other authors is that he defends Jews as human beings and contradicts the racist and pseudo-scientific ‘otherness’ of Jews as a group based on the understanding of a universal Christian ethic of love for one’s neighbour. In the artist’s opinion, the historical debate of that time has structural similarities to today’s discussions, in which the term anti-Semitism is once again being used with heightened emotional charge.