The neon works of the series Titles I refer to the English booktitles of the German Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger, recreated in his specific version of the old german handwriting style Suetterlin.

In summer 2003 I spent three months in Los Angeles at the Villa Aurora, the former Californian residence of Lion Feuchtwanger who fled from Nazi Germany in 1940 and made the Villa in Pacific Palisades the cultural center for the exiles like Bertold Brecht and Thomas Mann. During my stay in the Villa I learnt that Feuchtwanger refused to handwrite in English. Therefore there are no handwritten notes of his booktitles in English as I was told by the custodian of the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library at the University of Southern California (USC), Marje Schuetze-Coburn.
The project came up to recreate Feuchtwanger’s English booktitles by sampling his own handwritten german characters. After copying and scanning pages of his original manuscripts (which were written in the old german style of Suetterlin) the characters were digitally cut out and, according to Feuchtwanger’s specific handwriting style, put together again to form the English title. Finally this composition was executed in neon.

Creating a fiction of personal handwriting and displaying it as oversized neon wall writings, Titles I (after Feuchtwanger) links metaphorically the private and the public as well as the Old World Europe and the New World America.