"That time of year thou mayst in me behold" Karine BIZARD Creative documentary and Photojournalism with Magnum Photos and Speos - 2021/2022
I was 17 years old when in 1995, shortly before his arrest, I met him for the first time, hidden in the Normandy bocage. People were calling him Dirk, but he was elsewhere known as Hans-Joachim Klein (HJK), a repentant terrorist. Now 74 years old and in the ashes of his youth, his utopias, the death of his ideals, his revolt, his loneliness, his pride, his isolation are all mingling together. This series is an invitation to contemplate – through Dirk – a man at the twilight of his life.
I thought the fall of his life worth telling. It interrogates us about the passage of time as well as about the ability to forgive oneself, sometimes impossible to grant. Through my photographs I seek to question the empathy we can have about a human being who has committed acts that most of us qualify as inhuman. For several months I lived with him, we talked, spent time together, without mask or ego. Helped by his inexhaustible will to not disappear, we started a journey engaging with each other.
Dirk immediately agreed to collaborate on this intimate project, without setting any conditions. However, it had been 25 years since I had seen him. His story had been calling me for a long time. When I met him, he was put in safety and protected by a network of friends, German and French intellectuals, he was working in a small farm. Even if people spoke little about it, his past was known.
In the 1970s and 80s, Klein belonged to the Revolutionary Cells (Revolutionäre Zellen), an extreme left-wing urban guerrilla group in West Germany. He was lending support to militants of the Red Army Faction (RAF) and carrying out terrorist actions with the Bande à Baader. Following the death of one of the Bande à Baader member during a hunger strike in 1974, Klein turned to violent action. In 1975 he participated with the terrorist Ilitch Ramirez Sanchez, aka Carlos the Jackal, in the taking of 66 hostages in Vienna during the OPEC ministers conference. Three people lost their lives and Klein, seriously wounded by a bullet in the stomach, managed to flee with the commando to Algeria.
In 1977, HJK decided to leave terrorism and sent to Der Spiegel his personal weapon and his fingerprints, accompanied by a letter explaining his reasons for repenting. Over the years, he had become incredibly critical of antisemitism in international terrorism and of the extreme violence of the movement. For the next 20 years, HJK will live in hiding between France and Italy. Eventually arrested in 1998, he was extradited to Germany, trialed and sentenced to 9 years in prison. Released in 2003, he moved back to the village in Normandy where we first met in 1995. He was finally pardoned in 2009.
BIOGRAPHIE Karine was a Defense attorney in Paris for many years, specialized in criminal law and protection of foreigners on French soil. She left her job in 2017 when she relocated in Southeast Asia, switching medium but still telling stories that matter. Working on long term documentaries is a way to plead again, not with words but with pictures, focusing on people who can’t necessarily find their place in our society, and bringing them justice.
https://www.karinebizard.com/ karine.bizard@gmail.com @karine.bizard +33660697991