In the northwest of Braunschweig, Lower Saxony, lies a site covering around 480 hectares, which today is home to the Thünen-Institute, the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), and other research institutions. In the mid-1930s, the National Socialists began establishing a large-scale research facility for military-related aeronautical research here, amid the extensive forests and open fields on the outskirts of the “City of Aviators”: the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Luftfahrt / Luftfahrtforschungsanstalt Hermann Göring, DFL/LFA. By 1945, wind tunnels and ballistics ranges specially designed for the facility had been constructed, along with laboratories, office buildings, workshops, and aircraft hangars. In the immediate post-war period, the site was occupied by American and British troops. In 1947, it was made available to the PTB and the newly established Forschungsanstalt für Landwirtschaft, FAL.
Images: Anonymous, Wind tunnel measurements on a glide bomb model, Braunschweig 1941, Archive of Deutsches Museum; Anonymous, DLG-Test facility, Braunschweig 1950-1955, not yet archived, Johann Heinrich von Thünen-Institut.
The project, which investigated this site between 2020 and 2023 as a collaboration between TU Braunschweig and the Thünen Institute, traced the history of the site, the research-policy structures from which the institutions emerged, the research findings produced on the site, and the biographies of the people who worked there through both the visible remains in the forests of Völkenrode and the surviving archival records.
The project resulted in the publication of the book A Place of Research in 2023, which traces the histories of the institutions located on the site between 1936 and 1966. At several points, the text is interrupted by photographic series by photographer Matthias Zielfeld, who visited the site throughout 2021. His work repeatedly engages with the stories behind what is depicted. Through a rethinking of documentary photography, he explores shifts in meaning that become visible at particular sites. This approach is especially productive in light of the site’s changing uses over the course of its more than 85-year history. In combination with the historical research into the institutions and biographies, this resulted in a reciprocal working process over the course of the project, in which the visuality of the site shaped the work with the archival records, and vice versa.
In Braunschweig-Völkenrode, the photographies trace of the site’s eventful history. Since the buildings characteristic of the DFL, the wind tunnels and ballistics ranges that shaped the appearance of the research establishment between 1936 and 1947, were almost entirely dismantled or demolished, they focus on details that might easily escape the attention of visitors to the site. They do not stand alone, but are always part of a series. In this way, what is documented is the photographer’s process of perception as he engages with “what is,” and perhaps also with “what might be.”
Download the full publication (in German) on TU Braunschweig’s official Open Access Server:
Images: Daniel Jankowski