2023-10-08 16:40:47
Helmut Kohl was right. Steep thesis, of course, but if one day a historian or an alien with a research assignment comes to the former GDR territory in order to find out what happened in the 1990s and if, for this purpose, he comes to the local government If he looks back at the images stored in the archives, he will recognize: Yes, the Chancellor of Unity did not promise too much – blooming landscapes everywhere, heart-warming poppy fields, magnificent armies of sunflowers, fruit-promising cherry blossoms, insect-friendly meadows, as far as the eye can see.
And also in a figurative sense, the future viewer from the outside will see a picture in which a hard-working and good-humoured society strives towards the light, trades, builds and works, celebrates and dances. Smiling people everywhere, dressing up in traditional costumes, laying foundation stones, breaking ground, inaugurating attractive hiking trails and powerful motorway sections. A whole bunch of discount stores, video stores, large discos, gas stations, fast food outlets, media stores and supermarkets are opening. The beautiful word “business park” tries to shed its irony.
The great redistribution
The imaginary researcher will marvel at this colorful mosaic, because he may also have a few economic figures in his dossier that tell a different story from this time. A story of liquidation, unemployment and migration. The collapsed real socialist industrial country of the GDR has been shut down, the ore smelters in the Mansfeld region, the textile industry, the chemical triangle, the brown coal mines, heavy engineering, the power plants, steel mills and rolling mills. The trust has taken over 8,000 state-owned combines and companies. It sold around 50,000 properties, almost 10,000 companies and more than 25,000 small businesses – 85 percent to West Germans and ten percent to international investors. Not even five percent came into the hands of East Germans. Where should they have gotten the wealth from?
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Photo gallery
Haberkorn / Johne Collection
Haberkorn / Johne Collection
Haberkorn / Johne Collection
Haberkorn / Johne Collection
Haberkorn / Johne Collection
Haberkorn / Johne Collection
Haberkorn / Johne Collection
Haberkorn / Johne Collection
Haberkorn / Johne Collection
Haberkorn / Johne Collection
Haberkorn / Johne Collection
Haberkorn / Johne Collection
Haberkorn / Johne Collection
Haberkorn / Johne Collection
Haberkorn / Johne Collection
Haberkorn / Johne Collection
Only one in four of them kept their job, and unemployment rose to over 20 percent, although this figure is heavily adjusted. Around 3.75 million ex-GDR citizens, whose identity in the workers’ and farmers’ state was shaped by the collective, allowed themselves to be sent into early retirement. Others took up temporary job creation measures (ABM), and many moved away. It will not be possible to find a family, i.e. no biography, that has not experienced loss from this unprecedented redistribution. In the pictures in the publicly maintained archives you can find nothing of these events. Or next to nothing.
This is the finding of the two photographers Falk Haberkorn and Sven Johne. For more than two years, the two have been digging through municipal and municipal archives in former industrial strongholds of the GDR. They have now more or less sifted through the archives available to them in the southern half of Saxony-Anhalt. How can it be that such a structural change leaves hardly any trace in the public memory that these archives are tasked with preserving? How can this gap in tradition be explained and interpreted?
Maintaining archives is one of the municipal obligations. Every authority must check whether a file should be stored in the archive before it “collects” it, i.e. throws it away. But the archive system was also affected by the transformation and was subject to austerity pressure. “In GDR times,” says Johne, “it was a very stringent process. There was a manual that listed positions to be included. After ’89, a lot of jobs were saved and departments were merged. Added to this is the migration of skilled workers. You can see this in the very different conditions in the archives. But either way: There always has to be someone who decides on behalf of the public what goes in or what doesn’t go in.”
This also applies to the image stocks. After the end of the GDR, photos were no longer proactively collected and compiled, says Haberkorn. “Since the early 1990s, the employees have only looked at material that was offered.” According to the preliminary inventory by Johne and Haberkorn, the main part consists of images that convey the desire for hope. Things should move forward; commercial settlements and infrastructure measures were reasons to press the trigger. In photos of festivals, often with historical themes, a connection to home is shown. The love for local nature, which can definitely be seen as a turning point thanks to the closure of many dirt throwers, is also shown in detailed photos of renaturation measures. This desire for the positive is also touching in its futility. Lovingly designed folders appeared, for example from the inauguration of a composite paved road, beautifully bound and decorated with calligraphy, presumably the work of an ABM force who was looking for meaning in their work.
A mosaic of 60,000 images
Image material from monument protection contexts, a few press collections and a surprising number of aerial photographs that were apparently very popular with city fathers (from which, according to Haberkorn, some Berliner must have made a lot of money) allow a little more reality to shine through. Here and there you can find random private collections in photo fix bags or high-quality local history documentation from amateur photographers. Assigning captions is a problem. Many images are in analogue prints in boxes or even in the photo developer’s bags; some archives have already scanned the images and stored them in the hard-to-reach depths of hard drives. What Haberkorn and Johne got their hands on, they reproduced using a small mobile system and a smartphone. More than 60,000 images have now passed through their hands, around a tenth of which they have reproduced. Flowers, markets, festivals.
But where are the liquidated properties, some of which still stand in ruins in the landscape today? Where are the queues at the counters of the employment office, some of which had to move into containers because the space in the citizens’ offices and town halls was not sufficient for the mass layoffs? Who erased all the resigned people from the cityscape?
Johne and Haberkorn are thorough and patient. They studied photography at the University of Graphics and Book Arts in Leipzig around the turn of the millennium and took their first trip together in 2004, an 8,000-kilometer road trip through the accession area. For four and a half weeks, from October 3rd to November 9th, they wanted to make it look like autumn in their pictures. Johne photographed the endless fields and placed fictionalized reports from local newspapers as blocks of text like prefabricated buildings in the landscape: stories of people who used accelerant to defend themselves against being evicted from their apartments, of Reich citizens who were called something else at the time, of drunkenness, violence and depression. Haberkorn stayed in the car for his photos and adopted the protected perspective of a safari traveler; his series was published in 2018 under the title “After the Goldrush. Journey to Eastern Germany” published by Spector Verlag.
An investor with a private plane is welcomed on a tarmac in Saxony-Anhalt by representatives from business and politics. Haberkorn/Johne Collection
It was a journey into the dark, as they tell us today. The topic of East Germany and GDR identity was hardly recognized in art at the time, and the two themselves initially followed an indefinite biographical impulse. Both were born in the GDR, Johne in Bergen on Rügen, Haberkorn in Berlin-Köpenick. They were looking for the landscapes of their childhood, for the fading images of long Trabi rides over potholed highways through rather featureless small-format distances in lignite-espia.
What they found in 2004 sobered them. Haberkorn speaks of mildew, of desolation and of the fact that something was already brewing back then, which then broke out a few years later with the Monday and Pegida demos, the hatred of Merkel and helped the AfD to ever higher election results. For the two photographers, these phenomena articulate the brutal and, at least from today’s perspective, insultingly primitive humiliations that were swallowed up, which immediately followed the euphoria of the peaceful revolution of 1989 and hardly met with any resistance. Afterwards you are always smarter, of course, but the fact that the contemporary view has been cleaned up in such a way says a lot about the self-confidence of a community that has been battered by discrimination and devaluation.
When it came to the first archive addresses, the two of them still thought it was a coincidence. But now a big blind spot is becoming increasingly clear as a kind of negative. A society that just thought it had reason for optimism and hope finds itself in the grip of a largely externally controlled upheaval and diligently sifts out the insults, adversities, attacks, negative consequences, absorbs and lays down the individual experiences of loss and humiliation the bitterly rich wealth of experience as blooming landscapes in institutionalized memory.
What is that? Shame? Self-protection? Delusion? Displacement? A polite need to thank you for the freedom you have gained and the solidarity contribution? An awareness of the privileged situation compared to the other Eastern Bloc and especially third world countries? Are we dealing with semi-trained GDR citizen modesty, with censorship routine and willingness to submit? Or could it be that pride in resilience and transformation skills, which is now often talked about, is coming to the fore? To do this, what is depicted would have to be recognizable as its own achievement, not as a flimsy consumer backdrop of an unfettered market that siphons off purchasing power, no matter how small it may be, as quickly and thoroughly as possible. And another thought: Who knows what we filter out of our perception today and allow it to disappear into the gap in tradition out of shame for future generations?
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