#6 Traces

Traces

‘Bend a tree while it is young’

Burcu, 26, on her background, expectations and what it means to shape your own life.

Traces

The drawer analysis: what our storage spaces reveal about us

From odds and ends to keepsakes: a tongue-in-cheek look at what we stash away – and why.

Traces

The neighbour nobody knew

A stranger’s bicycle in the cellar, a faded letterbox – and between them the life of a man who is suddenly gone. Who was he?

Traces

Into the bushes

From city parks to cemetery toilets: how public places became refuges for gay men – and why cruising still exists today.

Traces

Unexploded bombs beneath the city: the dangerous job of bomb disposal

Painstaking precision with deadly risk: a look at a profession in which every move has to be exactly right.

Traces

‘The wolf is a problem that can be solved’

Protect or shoot? How farmers and conservationists are struggling over the right way to deal with the returning predator.

Traces

Irmela Mensah-Schramm: fighting Nazi slogans with a scraper and a heart

For decades one woman has been scraping messages of hate out of public spaces – she has removed more than 140,000 of them. The attacks go on.

Traces

Life in Transnistria: a state without recognition

What is it like to live in a place that doesn’t even exist on most maps? Young people tell their stories.

A young couple sit in an empty grandstand at dusk, the girl leaning on the boy’s shoulder; both wear casual clothes. The background shows an urban setting with trees and a building.

Traces

From outlaw to spiritual healer

Alexander Golandsky was a criminal biker and cocaine dealer. Then he changed his life radically.

Traces

Lost place in the Harz: the abandoned Harzgerode sanatorium

Where children were once treated for tuberculosis, silence now reigns – a walk through crumbling walls.

Some stories are not out in the open. You have to follow their traces. That is exactly what the stories in our sixth focus topic do.

They search for a neighbour nobody knew and for unexploded bombs beneath the city. They accompany Irmela Mensah-Schramm, who has been removing far-right slogans from walls since 1986, and travel to Transnistria, a state that hardly anyone recognises.

Drawers leave traces, too: an analysis shows what the way we store things reveals about us. And in the Harz mountains, the path leads to an abandoned sanatorium.

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