When my father died it was as if the final burden had been added to the tragedies that the family could carry, and we all just broke apart. As a child I longed for a sign from him, something that would tell me how we could live despite, or with, such accumulated sorrow. My mother’s and grandmother's history of Holocaust survival darkened our present. My German father, instead, seemed to have remained untouched by war: he had left an oeuvre of boundless color and beauty.

When my mother needed to talk of her childhood, though, he couldn't listen. His creation simply of "a feast for the eyes" seemed the failure of someone too scared to face the ugliness of reality. Angry and disillusioned, I could not make sense of the contradicting memories that remained of him after his death; his paintings were unintelligible.

"Georg" is a quest to understand my father. It is a story of loss, idylls, illusions and longing: a love that unites two worlds, an idyll to make up for what the war had destroyed, a struggle for an uncompromising art. And it is the story of a tragic shipwreck of those ideals in the face of reality and a haunting past, a story of alcohol and death. In the end all that remains is the longing for the idyll my father created, even if it was just an illusion...

Website:                                               www.georgklusemann.org