…like I always do when I have no time for posting.

I had never seen these photographs before. I watched Hiroshima mon amour 10 years ago (France 1959, directed by Alain Resnais), which made me feel so sick, yet is one of the most remarkable films ever. The very fact that it exists is remarkable. In the meantime I have obviously suppressed the memory. This was a refresher: Somebody called Fogonazos has posted Pictures they didn’t want us to see’. I think it’s worthwhile looking at them again now. Nuclear radiation turns you into charcoal immediately if you happen to stick around ground zero.

[» Link to Photographs].

I admit I also didn’t know about the discrimination of the Hibakusha (“those affected by an explosion”) that Fogonazo reports:

[The Hibakusha] and their children were (and still are) victims of severe discrimination due to lack of knowledge about the consequences of radiation sickness, which people believed to be hereditary or even contagious. Many of them were fired from their jobs. Hibakusha women never got married, as many feared they would give birth to deformed children. Men suffered discrimination too. “Nobody wanted to marry someone who might die in a couple of years”.

Or give a job to such a person.

The comments below the pictures inevitably jump right into the comparison of Hiroshima and 9/11, or rather 75,000 immediate killings (and a double number who died later; plus the victims of Nagasaki) vs. 2974 (plus 25 still missing). I really shouldn’t embark on this discussion yet it makes me sick to the bone that civilized countries develop bombs which they call Little Boy and Fat Man and turn against hundreds of thousands of civilians.

I am busy buys busy clearing out my old flat, hence no time for intelligent posting. Instead, the next days will feature some of my brother’s photographs – I am not so easily impressed by photographs these days as people are photographing everything to death, but keep being amazed by his pictures (also because I come obviously from the same village where he still lives and whenever I am there I can find the views he plucks NOWHERE).

Another photo my brother took. Btw, today is the 17th of July which is my father’s birthday whom I have seen I think three times in ten years. Maybe four. Difficult to forget the date though: 17th of July used to be a German holiday, Tag der deutschen Einheit, until Germany was reunited on the 3rd October 1990, which has then become the new holiday. Also, ironically, after my mom moved back to her home village (after having followed my father to the town where he soon left her for a 22-year-old), our phone was given the number 1707 (it as a rather smallish village). I might call him today nonetheless. Unless I forget of course:-)