GDR images in Potsdam: Once upon a time there was one nation | EUROtoday

It is alleged in lots of locations right this moment that the GDR was higher than its popularity. It provided safety, safety, jobs, strong buildings, dependable CVs. Some of that is true, particularly given right this moment’s crises. But the general image is mistaken as a result of it ignores the darkish facet of the GDR actuality. The value of safety was bondage, that of safety was surveillance. The jobs have been unprofitable, the buildings have been outdated, and the CVs have been hopeless. The system was exhibiting indicators of wear and tear. You do not must learn historical past books to comprehend this. It is sufficient to have a look at among the images taken within the late employees’ and peasants’ state.

For instance, the images that Christiane Eisler took of “difficult to educate” ladies within the Crimmitschau youth heart close to Zwickau in 1982. They toil within the spinning mill. They smoke listlessly within the widespread room. You are within the penalty nook. Or the pictures by Merit Schambach and Tina Bara, wherein younger ladies with defiant faces, self-made garments, screaming mouths and difficult seems to be may be seen, in East Berlin and elsewhere. Or Ludwig Rauch’s pictures of on a regular basis work within the “Karl Marx” brigade at VEB Elektrokohle in Berlin-Lichtenberg: the decrepit methods, the insufficient protecting clothes, the clouds of coal mud that decide on pores and skin, material and respiratory tract. Rauch had an official task, however his pictures have been by no means revealed, similar to the images that Tina Bara took in 1988 of the abuses on the Buna plant in Schkopau and the environmental destruction across the refinery. The regime of lies held tight.

“Seeking the Far” is the identify of the exhibition within the Brandenburg Museum in Potsdam, wherein the collection of photographs by Rauch, Eisler, Bara and Schambach come along with pictures by Ute Mahler, Barbara Wolff, Jürgen Matschie and 5 different photographers. The concept of ​​the present is to confront the fact shortly earlier than the autumn of the Berlin Wall with the circumstances within the first years after reunification, ideally by the eyes of the identical artist. This means, for instance, that Christiane Eisler’s images from Crimmitschau stand subsequent to her images of employees whose corporations are about to be liquidated in 1990/91 in Leipzig, Delitzsch, Zwickau and Weißenfels. Or that Peter Oehlmann’s bleak “Greyland pictures” from Honecker’s crumbling empire are mirrored within the collection “Bruchzeit”, with which he later tried to seize the complicated mixture of departure and demolition in reunified Germany.

Ute Mahler, however, documented the widespread “erotic shows” within the massive and small cities of the GDR a yr earlier than the autumn of the Wall. Two years later she travels by East Germany once more and observes the identical phenomenon, solely in a distinct kind: In the meantime, the will for pornography has unfold to the on a regular basis sphere, an house has turn into a intercourse store, a restaurant has turn into a porn cinema. Exposure in every single place.

A primary motif of late GDR images is the lethargy that spreads in every single place. You can nearly really feel them bodily in Joachim Richau’s impressions from the Brandenburg village of Beerfelde: a baby doing a handstand on the village road; a girl on the potato sorting machine; two farmers’ ladies in entrance of a barn; a farmer along with his tractor; the LPG workers through the breakfast break. Barbara Wolff discovered very related photographs in Sixteeneichen close to Königs Wusterhausen: a “consumer” retailer with an empty window, a rustic highway with out vehicles, a sparsely attended village pageant and, lastly, the “exit baggage,” because the picture is titled, of a household between the piled-up furnishings of their house. The villages, the cities, your complete nation appear to have been left behind, ready for a future that merely will not come.

And then? The wall falls, the financial system collapses, companies are liquidated, foreigners are attacked, in Rostock-Lichtenhagen the sunflower home wherein Vietnamese contract employees dwell is besieged, in Eberswalde the Angolan Amadeu Antonio dies from the boots of neo-Nazis. Christian Fenger, Ute Mahler and Ludwig Rauch photographed these “baseball bat years” and their victims. When considered along with the exhausted, dusty and suffocating idyll of the late Honecker years, the violence whose traces they seize on digital camera seems much more surprising; it brings to gentle what was sleeping beneath the floor of the mannequin socialist nation. Four a long time later, for a lot of, this nation has as soon as once more turn into the epitome of an intact previous. That’s why exhibitions just like the one within the Brandenburg Museum are so essential: they present what it actually appeared like again then.

“Looking farther away. Photographs from the late GDR and early 1990s”. Brandenburg Museum for the Future, Present and History, till March twenty second. No catalog.