How did young people experience the end of the Second World War in Germany in May 1945?

Stories of the war and of life afterwards often shape families for several generations - wherever peace cannot be taken for granted. How can children or grandchildren comprehend the experiences made, what do photographs from this time tell us about material and emotional destruction, but also about ideas of happiness and a successful life? The artist Nadine Wölk, born in Thuringia in 1979, took two photographs kept by her grandparents as her starting point. One of the drawings, both made in ballpoint pen, shows Wölk's maternal grandmother as a very young woman lying in a meadow, while the second motif shows her paternal grandparents at a table in the garden against a dark background.

Nadine Wölk's drawings combine familiar family motifs with possible views of Dresden after the end of the Second World War, in the midst of a world that offered little support and orientation. Her pictures attempt to come closer to the contradictory emotions of this time, in which the surviving were forging new paths between trauma and individual or collective guilt, the search for individual happiness and hoped-for new beginnings.

Nadine Wölk is a freelance artist living in Dresden. She was invited by the state theater, Staatsschauspiel Dresden together with Dresdens City Gallery for Contemporary Art, Kunsthaus Dresden to design the banners shown here for the 80th anniversary of May 8, 1945.