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Ever since it has been possible to capture real-life events using photography, the Jemaa El Fna in Marrakesh has become a photographic motif constantly used by various photographers. The fascination with the place starts with its name “square of the hanged” – which awakens inevitable memories of oriental despots. And throughout the past, there have been numerous literary descriptions of an aura which grips everyone who visits the square, an aura which offers its constantly-changing audience, not only through its architecture, but just as much through the people who cross it, its goods and its arts of storytelling, fire eating or snake charming. The square becomes a stage and the actors become part of this stage, resulting in a synthesis of the arts which exists in and because of daily life and which materialises each time in a new way for each individual, who can only be part of it for a certain period of time.
Together with his wife, the ethnologist Sigrid Westphal-Hellbusch from the Free University (Freie Universität, Berlin), and their mutual friend Kurt Krieger, curator for Africa in the then museum of ethnology, Heinz Westphal travelled to Morocco in the summer of 1959 in his Volkswagen Beetle, which he lovingly called ’the green one’ because of its colour. The journey lasted two months – August and September – a month of which the group spent in Morocco stopping at new towns almost every day.
Heinz Westphal kept a diary of every day of the journey, so we know that the longest stay of the trip was dedicated to the city of Marrakesh where they stayed for four days. All photos of the journey were just as carefully documented and were transferred to the museum as part of Sigrid Westphal-Hellbusch’s estate. The photos and diary entries can be drawn upon and compared with one another so that the context of the photos becomes clearer, helping us with our interpretation. The participant anticipation and photographic recording occurred from a distance, from a balcony, as though being present in or close to the work of art could disturb it. No photographs were taken while crossing the square.
Diary entry for 08/29/59 by Heinz Westphal
Read more"Bright, warm, cloudy in the afternoon, short thunder shower.
Get up at 7 a.m., eat breakfast downstairs alone at 7.30 and then drive the car to the Volkswagen garage, meet Putti (his wife) and K at breakfast. We leave at 9, buy a hat for Putti, a belt for me, go across the Av. Mohammed V to Djemaa el Fna, drink Oulmès (mineral water), search in vain for the douane. K is stung by a wasp. We then travel with the bus back to Guéliz, where we get 8 films stamped at customs and send them off. Get the green one back at 12, everything is supposed to be okay and the brake pads are still good. We go to the hotel, eat well and lay down for a sleep. I wake K at 3, at 4 we hire a hotel tour guide, travel via Koutoubia to Bab Agenou, visit the Tombeaux Saadiens (graves of the Saadites), travel past the Sultan’s palace across the 3 Méchouers (? illegible), then to the museum Dar Si Said, then to a house which has been converted into a Moorish restaurant. * Then to Jemaa El Fna where we first drink Oulmès on the balcony and then walk across the square. From there we go through the new town back to the hotel where we pay our guide (800 francs). Drank a beer, then went for a swim and ate in the hotel. Putti goes upstairs to write postcards. K and I go to the open air cinema (James Cagney, L’homme au mille visages). Back at hotel at 12.30, go to bed at 1. The green one is parked on the street.
* Near the carpet seller, we don’t buy anything though."
The mathematician and physicist Heinz Westphal accompanied his wife on all of her expeditions, wrote travel diaries and took photographs. Comparably few of his numerous photos were published and when they were, only in Sigrid Westphal-Hellbusch’s scientific publications. We have no publications about the Morocco journey and so no photos of this trip have ever been published. The fact that the photos were only ever used for his wife’s scientific-ethnological publications suggests that his photos were understood to be a documentation tool for ethnological research, which would conform to the views of the era.
Photographs not only tell of the society caught on camera but also of the photographer’s society. Both have material objects in common. This exhibition only shows objects which can be linked to Jemaa El Fna’s past, for example, goods sold there like rinds for teeth-cleaning or tobacco pipes or musical instruments used by different jesters. They were collected in the course of the colonial and scientific development of Morocco. Max von Quedenfeldt (1851 – 1891) travelled to Morocco often and extensively in the 1880s, intermittently as a representative of the firm Krupp. His ethnological work represents the beginning of the scientific-ethnological exploration of Morocco. P. Otto Zembsch was an imperial lieutenant commander and collected items in 1877 for the Ethnological Museum. More detailed circumstances of the collection, comparable to Heinz Westphal’s travel diaries, are not known, in particular with regard to Zembsch, who didn‘t leave any publications about Morocco behind.
Heinz Westphal’s photographs and Max von Quedenfeldt’s and Otto Zemsch’s objects are a documentation of Jeema El Fna at that point in time, even though the documentation was influenced by the interest which led to the photos being taken or the objects being collected. The question of whether they stay on this level of documentation or go further auratically in their impact remains unanswered here. In the book Storytelling in Chefchaouen Northern Morocco by Aicha Rahmouni, the storyteller says that, when narrating stories, he thinks about what people are like, how they lived and how they were – how they ate, drank and lived their lives. For him, that is relaxation, medicine (p. 10). As part of the piece of art, the genuine, unique, unapproachable [1], he does not need to ask the question about aura.
PD Dr. Ingrid Pfluger-Schindlbeck is a former curator of the North Africa, West and Central Asia collection at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin.
