“I made this series of eight masks for the Krampus group Beelzebub for a run in Toblach. Why am I making a whole group of masks for a run?
There’s a simple reason: Toblach is our penultimate Krampus run of the seaon, so it had to be something special. At the beginning of this year, I came across the film “All Quiet on the Western Front” and gained insight into the Western Front of the First World War. These images of dead people, distorted, twisted faces, and wounded, desperate, but also initially motivated people shocked me, so I delved deeper into them, studying these feelings and these wounded faces…
I quickly realized that this is an incredibly important topic, so I picked up a pen and scribbled a little. It was imporant to me in this work to depict the grim and twisted faces, as well as the emotions that arise in such a situation, using masks. I quickly realized that I wanted to use these masks to depict the atrocities of World War I and World War II and also make them public in the spirit of a subsequent Krampus parade.”
– Tobias Mueller, maskmaker
