Since typecases went out of use in the print industry in Germany, they have become a kind of furniture used to manage memories and keep kids’ rooms tidy. For young collectors, they were meant to function as a kind of everyday mini-memorial that fit into each household. However, when I talked to friends who each had one of these Setzkästen, they explained that, rather than preserving the memories of things and events, it helped to forget them.
You put them in an empty casket, and you don’t need to think about them anymore.
Four hundred bottles with soil are arranged in four typecases, in the same order that graves are arranged in the U.S. memorial graveyard in Carthage, near Tunis. Each bottle of earth corresponds to a number, which is engraved on the bottom of the case that shelters it. These numbers are the service numbers of the soldiers and civilians who died during the Tunisian campaign in World War II, from summer 1942 until winter 1943, which means that 2,833 Americans never left Tunisian soil and 3,724 people remain missing to this day.
He who lies buried here, fallen for his motherland, lies off the beaten track. Only a few of the bereaved will have undertaken the long journey to mourn by the grave.
– Falko Schmieder and Timo Kaabi-Linke
