Walerian Wróbel. Zwei Blicke auf das Unrecht am jungen Zwangsarbeiter at Bremische Bürgerschaft

To uphold the memory of the terrible deeds of National Socialism, the Bremische Bürgerschaft (State Parliament of Bremen) commissioned Katerina Vatsella to curate an exhibition dedicated to the tragic fate of Walerian Wróbel, a young Pole who was sent to a farm in Bremen as a forced labourer.

Presumably out of homesickness and in the hope of being sent home, Walerian Wróbel set fire to the barn and was subsequently executed by the National Socialists at the age of 17.

The farmer’s daughter Luise, who reported the case to the Gestapo and thus indirectly shared responsibility for his execution, is the great-grandmother of photographer Stefan Weger, one of the two artists who deal with Wróbel’s fate in their work.

The other artistic approach comes from the painter Krzysztof Wróblewski, who came across the story by chance during an art scholarship in Bremen in 2004 and whose interest was immediately aroused because of the similar surname.

The different perspectives raise important questions about guilt, responsibility, memory and the duty to come to terms with the past.

The graphic design for the exhibition, titled Walerian Wróbel. Zwei Blicke auf das Unrecht am jungen Zwangsarbeiter (“Walerian Wróbel. Two views on the injustice against the young forced laborer”), was conceived and implemented by the local design agency Oblik. They used two colours in their design to create space for images, texts and documents, provide focal points and differentiate the perspectives in terms of content. Inspired by Stefan Weger’s photographic work, it also reflects colour accents from Krzysztof Wróblewski’s painting.

The headline typeface Lucifer by Nguyen Gobber purposefully stands in strong contrast to the exhibits. As the designers of Oblik explain, the almost threatening, but also contemporary aesthetics of Lucifer help to generate the necessary attention needed for topics dealing with historical guilt.

Atkinson Hyperlegible, which was originally created for the Braille Institute of America, is used as a complementary typeface. Its particular focus on legibility made it a fitting typeface for running text in smaller sizes.