Built during Nazi Germany’s military expansion, the barracks later became part of the American military presence in Germany during the Cold War. Their changing occupants turned the same structures into physical evidence of two very different periods of German and American history before the complex was finally abandoned.

The site was near Bremerhaven, the port my German grandparents left when they emigrated to America. Visiting the emigration museum there and then photographing military ruins nearby connected war and migration in a way I hadn't expected. My grandparents left Germany as Catholics who had experienced discrimination; decades later I returned as their American grandson.