2023-09-13 17:55:51
Memorable images of the GDR repeatedly played a role in Norbert Bisky’s work, but it was the project of a double exhibition on the thirtieth anniversary of reunification in the Villa Schöningen and Friedrichwerder Church that in 2019 showed a complex of works that was dedicated to the influence of the East in Bisky dedicated to creating. At that time, Norbert Bisky was a year older than his father Lothar Bisky, the cultural scientist and left-wing politician, was at the time the Wall was opened. What opens up for him now?
The passage of time sometimes brings things closer instead of moving them away. This is known from old people who can reproduce the smallest details of their earliest childhood. It also seems to be the same with memories of the GDR. A good 25 years after the opening of the Wall, a culture of remembrance emerged that is less a state-sponsored and “from above” administered form of signification than a form of collecting and viewing contemporary witness, as carried out by various actors at the basis of social life is operated. Think of the GDR narrow film collection Open Memory Box, an die Stories from the interim the Leipzig platform FREI_RAUM for democracy and dialogue or it’s your turn Occupy History the Berlin Festival, which I was able to initiate. These are alternative forms of remembering that add and counteract other and equally authentic perspectives to the larger picture of reunification, which has been shaped in recent decades primarily by West German journalists and experts.
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Because as much as we want and plan for inner-German integration, this historical process was and is experienced completely differently in East and West Germany and memories of the last thirty years are very different here and there. For a long time, these differences in the experience of the transition and the early years after the former GDR joined the Federal Republic were hardly discussed. The new federal states and their situation were often more distant from the old states, more mysterious, but also more peripheral in their importance than the situation in France or the USA. Only in recent years have the real experiences in the East entered the mainstream discourse – certainly also due to the search for reasons for the AfD’s electoral successes there. This closer approach to East German experiences in the long years after reunification led to increased and much more thoughtful attention to other perspectives on the course of reunification history.
Not everything in the GDR was dictatorship, gray or prison
The normality of life in the GDR and its everyday culture, which was also characterized by friendships, feelings of home, ideals and structures of a multi-layered sense of familiarity, slowly became the subject of a more mindful perception. Not everything was dictatorship, gray or prison. Not everything deserved the total feelings of devaluation that arose in the souls of East Germans when they looked back on what they had achieved after their first contact with the affluent Western society.
Bisky’s private Sistine: The pictures all on the church ceiling in his exhibition “Pompa”, November 2019, St. Matthäus at the Berlin Cultural Forum, Markus Waechter
Even their own revolution was soon to stop again because the West German government converted it into an accession, and suddenly there was a lot of money, so much power, which promised to take care of themselves. Thirty years later, a new look also takes a look at the scientific achievements of the GDR and the strength of its combated avant-gardes: Here, too, it was not all failure – a unique type of scientific work emerged, which was often collective, left-wing and materialistic, but also idiosyncratic searching the edges, cosmopolitan, even world-hungry. These other realities of research in other fields, with other goals, other sources, had their own seriousness and existed parallel to the aspects of life impregnated by the SED dictatorship – no one was just a child of totalitarianism, everyone was also that of a family, a network .
After twenty or thirty years, the hardships and traumas in the biographies of many East Germans, which were the result of the trust policy, are slowly coming into focus. Now that what happened can no longer be changed – the de-industrialization of entire regions and a redistribution of wealth that has never before taken place on such a scale in the history of Germany – it is simply a matter of trying not only to supplement our view of history with these experiences , but also about acknowledging these traumas and hardships. They clearly contradict the self-image of the majority society, which only wanted to help the “backwards East”.
But through the slow recognition of the side effects I think our kind of reunification gave rise to a new perspective in the discussion of our coexistence, which has a lot to do with younger actors and their questions about our society today has to do. It is slowly seeming possible not to ignore the differences in the experiences in the East, but also not to confuse them with an apportionment of blame – now that people are suddenly talking about the wounds of the years of upheaval and the electoral successes of the AfD-East.
I was recently asked by a friend in Vienna why the East Germans today don’t seem to have a problem with the GDR spy chief Markus Wolf, but they do have a problem with the West Germans. I understand how this impression can arise. But I don’t think that the East Germans retroactively glorify life in the GDR or want it back. Rather, I believe that addressing the burdens, fears and inadequacies from the time after the Wall was opened is a cathartic process: it does not separate us, it is not a whining and, after three decades, it is no longer a reproach, but rather it brings out the poison and the secrets from the dark rooms of the East German soul to the light. And like every secret that is revealed, like every debate that brings something hidden to light, this statement takes away some of the power from the other, West German side, which arose from a feeling of superiority and a supposed greater knowledge.
Thoughtful: Norbert Bisky in his Berlin studio in front of a picture where everything is flying to shreds – things, time, certainties, Lars Reimann
Arrival of the East German perspective in public discourse
In my view, the images of previously buried normality that emerge thirty years later, as well as the voices of complaint, are indications of the arrival of the East German perspective in the public discourse of majority society. Because about that Mode of operation, in which history took place, we talked much less than about the results of the economic, monetary and social union. Reunification did not simply make us equals among equals. It is the Mode of operationwhich shapes the result – and so do Norbert Bisky’s pictures.
His memorial paintings thirty years after reunification are “candy-sweet apocalypses,” as Johanna Di Blasi once described it, composed of fractures, snippets and puzzle pieces of memory. Its basic tone is light blue and friendly. In the whirlwind of their elements, these young men stand forward, “figures of innocence,” as his brother Jens Bisky once called them. These images do not delve into the private lives of the figures, but always show a figure in a pose: even if it appears casual, it has already been published, has been modeled by others, is a thing in itself, a body code that has an immediate effect, as if you had seen him before. In Bisky’s paintings, these figures seem to be placed in the composition of a mood that is experienced through them as if from outside. They react to their environment with an attitude that they carry like a weapon or a tool with which they are armed safespacewhich meets the uncertain outside.
Isn’t that our view, our situation, thirty years after the famous sentence “I think that applies from now on,” which manifested the opening of the wall? This instant can be felt in every picture by Bisky: his pictures respond to the sudden swirling of the old world with pop poses, with men’s bodies riding the waves of change.
Norbert Bisky needed his teacher Baselitz’s advice to delve into his Eastern past in order to paint his inner California. This, his California, dreamed of in Marzahn, only appears to be idyllic and has made him famous.
Dr. Thomas Oberender founded multi-year formats for theater, art and literature at the Ruhrtriennale, the Salzburg and Berlin Festivals and designs time-based exhibitions. His “Immersion” series and publications such as “Empowerment Ost” or “Occupy History” attempt to think together aesthetic and political events.
The text is in the book “Traumaland” published by Franziska Richter, Dietz Verlag Bonn 2021.
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