I have a hand-me-down memory of my grandmother’s from just after the end of the Second World War. She is standing next to her bicycle looking over a field of rubble where her old neighbourhood used to be. She had grown up and lived here in Hannover for more than thirty years but now she cannot find her house, nor can she find her way around. There are no streets left to guide her, just piles of rubble as far as the eye can see. She returned to her husband’s bakery in the countryside and vowed never to go back.

I grew up in a village very close to hers; a place where many of the old families are related to mine and where people in the street know me by face. It was my entire world and the only place I knew, until, at the age of nineteen I packed a bag and left. I ended up in London and decided to start a new life. Eighteen years later i am married and still here.

Despite my long absence from the village, it sill occupies a central part of my identity. It has indelibly shaped my sense of the world, who I am and how I function. Even now that i have lived abroad longer than i have lived in Germany, I still call this place home.

In the spring of 2008 I returned home for the first extended period in over a decade to try and put my feelings about the place into photographs. I stayed for two and half months, reconnecting with old friends, revisiting my old school and spending time with family. My parents were in the process of retiring and their very routine lives were in an unusual state of transition. Spending time with them and people I had not seen in many years was both wonderful and exasperating. People started asking if I had given up on living in London. I started wondering myself. I had always been slightly uneasy about going back home, as if the mere journey back had the potential to undo my hard won new life in London. If returning home would question the act of leaving I knew i would struggle to defend myself. But one thing I didn’t know was that returning and photographing what was once so familiar felt like a form of catharsis.

The Germany I grew up in didn’t feel like an old country. It was a place obsessed with making new. New roads, new houses, new cars. As if by making new we could somehow undo the past. When i was a schoolboy the Nazi period from 1932 to 1945 was so dominant that those years overshadowed all other past that came before. It was clear to us that the years that had past were also never enough and that we were left only with perpetual renewal, heaping layer upon layer of present in order to one day get away from those painful years.

The German poet and critic Hans Magnus Enzenberger wrote somewhat caustically ‘ The Federal Republic of Germany is blessed with a unique deficit. The Germans have single-handedly blown up their history: a brutal demolishing business that has rendered the county into a spawn of the New.’

Returning o my village I knew the past needed to become part of the work. So I went over my family’s photo albums. In my grandmother Thea’s I discovered the colourful life she had lived in the years of the Weimar Republic. Photographs of playful moments with friends, carefree holidaying by the sea, seemingly a better life before the war changed everything, before she married a much older man and moved to the countryside. Pictures of a time i had no access to. The trail of pictures Thea left behind ends with a wedding - not her own, of which strangely there exist no photographs - but of her best friend Lizzy to a man in a SS uniform. The remaining pages of the album are empty.