Love Letters from the War

Through his mother, Hanno Ketterer received a box containing nearly a thousand letters from his grandmother’s estate. They were written by his grandfather, a German soldier stationed on the Eastern Front during the Second World War.

The Letters

Karl, a thirtyyearold schoolteacher, is drafted into military service in 1943. He is married, and his daughter, Hanno’s mother, is two years old at the time. We follow him to the Eastern Front (Ukraine), where he works as a cartographer. He writes about his worries, his inner conflict with the rules of the army, the loss of freedom, and the sorrow of leaving his family behind. His words reveal doubt about the system and a profound aversion to the war. In small anecdotes, we meet an ordinary man who continues to search for beauty in everyday life, clinging to home and to love. And we witness the reality of war, which he survives as the only member of his company.

Although the letters are more than eighty years old, they sound painfully contemporary in a world once again marked by uncertainty and conflict. They remind us that war always strikes at human lives. And that even in the darkest moments, we have the freedom to choose how we act. Karl writes on 27 October 1944:
“All my letters were meant to be, and still aim to be, love letters in the truest sense. Love – pure, the most beautiful human love - brought us together. The eternal hatred among people separated us.”

The Project

Hanno Ketterer brought the letters together in the book Love Letters from the War (Kehrer Verlag, 2025), accompanied by blackandwhite photographs and drawings made by his grandfather. Alongside these, he created new colour images, developed with the help of AI and then hand-painted, depicting episodes for which no photographs exist but which his grandfather described vividly in the letters.

He also made a nineminute film using the same interplay of authentic blackandwhite material and his AIgenerated colour imagery. In the film, Ketterer reads excerpts from the letters.

At Pennings Foundation, the film is on view, along with an overview of the letters, several blackandwhite photographs, and the book. The book is available for purchase in the shop.

Artist Talk: Sunday, April 26, 2026 at 14:00.

Hanno Ketterer (1967) is an Amsterdambased photographer and visual artist. He worked for more than twentyfive years in management consultancy before beginning his studies at the Fotoacademie in 2022. Love Letters from the War was his graduation project, completed in 2025.

His practice focuses on independent documentary storytelling. In addition to the camera, he uses images generated by artificial intelligence. He explores how classical photography and AI can enrich one another, creating visualisations of moments and situations that no longer exist in the real world. He applies his photographic expertise to directing AI. As a result, AI is not used as an independent medium, but as a natural extension of his photographic practice and artistic signature. www.hannoketterer.com