GDR lost generation

Lothar de Maizière, the last GDR prime minister, attending the Korean-German Consultation Committee on Reunification, says the South Koreans are uninterested in what the North wants.

"They say: 'It's up to us in the South to solve the unity problem. We have the money.' Well, it was no different with us. That was, of course, the German problem. Afterwards there can be a very pronounced feeling of colonization... Historical ruptures always leave behind a lost generation." (De Maizière in Gutsch, 2012a)

De Maizière also notes that "the Koreans basically don't want unity to cost too much, and I tell them it will cost much more than you can imagine."

The last GDR defense minister Rainer Eppelmann, another German delegate, says "I've realized that the South Koreans are trying to figure out a way for the North Koreans to remain in the North after unification... The South Koreans were talking about border controls. I'll be damned! They seriously intend to close the border after the wall has fallen!" Kim Chun Sig, South Korea's deputy unification minister, says "that is also a very sensitive question. Let's put it this way: Perhaps the North Koreans could remain in their homeland, yes? And we will help them" (Gutsch, 2012a).

Kim doesn't seem to know whether the North Koreans want reunification, as he claims "we have no information about this... we don't know. We only have the defectors who tell us that the conditions in the country are very poor" (Gutsch, 2012b). According to Kim, around 35% of the 19 to 40-year-olds see Korean unification as an important political issue.

"The desire to unite is continuously ebbing. South Korea's older generation has long since lost touch with friends and relatives north of the border. The younger generation has never had a chance to meet. Viewed from the South, North Korea is a distant, uninhabitable planet. It's not even possible to hop across the border for a quick look, as West German schoolchildren used to do on field trips to East Berlin." (Gutsch, 2012b)

Gutsch, Jochen-Martin (2012a) Seoul Searching: Germans Give Pep Talks on Korean Unification. [Online]

 http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,807123,00.html [06/01/2012]
Gutsch, Jochen-Martin (2012b) Part 2: 'I Will Live To See Korean Unifiaction [Online]
 http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,807123-2,00.html [06/01/2012]

Erasing the border of art and life

The Global Contemporary exhibition at ZKM in Karlsruhe showcases post-1989 art practices that have emerged as a result of political changes.

Guy Ben-Ner shot Drop the Monkey (2009) with all materials cut live on camera while the artist made over 25 trips between Berlin and Tel Aviv [Site Gallery, 2012]. Ben-Ner "picking out the conditions and the process involved in the production of the work itself along with arguments for the pros and cons of the mingling of art and life as a central theme" and highlights "the present-day state of (artistic) diasporic identity as marked by inner conflict and melancholy" (Marten, 2011) with a messsage he writes onto his T-shirt "I WISH, I WAS SOMEWHERE ELSE".

"At the time of Drop the Monkey I was living in Tel Aviv and my girlfriend was living in Berlin. I decided to use that commission as means to see her every once in a while and create a movie that should talk about the proper or improper use of art. The constraints were quite unique, erasing the border between my life and the piece I was working on." (Ben-Ner in Donovan, 2010)

Donovan, Thom (2010) Guy Ben-Nerby. [Online]
 http://bombsite.com/issues/111/articles/3443 [05/01/2012]
Marten, Antonia [2012] Guy Ben-Ner. [Online]
 http://globalcontemporary.de/en/artists/94-guy-ben-ner [05/01/2012]
Site Gallery [2012] Guy Ben-Ner: Spies. [Online]
 http://www.sitegallery.org/archives/3163#.TwYMZTX4WSo [05/01/2012]

Creating Photo Opportunities

"They linger in and as memory; as we look at them we reflect, try to make something out. Images seen from a railway carriage or car; flicked over in a magazine, or flickered in front of us on a television screen... Each image makes distinctive, subtle but insistent interplay with us, with our memories, desires, hopes and feelings." (Crouch, 2009)

Photo Oppotunities by Corinne Vionnet is a collection of images of tourists' destinations around the world. Images are created from around 100 photographs posted online. Vionnet wondered if "we were trying to reproduce the image that we already know. How much does the image - through films, advertisements, postcards, the internet - influence our gaze? Are we trying to reproduce the image of an image?" 

David Crouch notes that viewers are "affected by the image, usually but not always visual, that someone else has already taken and that we have seen" and that photographs provide a referencing point to "a memory or something we wish was in our memory, like a longing, or provocation amongst others". He also claims that images "enrich the mixture in which we place our own experience" as they "share mindspace with stories, with sounds, with friends who have shared with us of these same places and other similar ones they have, or want to visit- and why they want to do so". 

"Our photographs are personal and shared reminders, and come alongside the making of myths in a popular visual culture of our own, sharing experience of 'being there', in vivo. Shared popular visual culture includes friends' photographs and stories, postcards we have received and sent; narratives that background their pictures." (Crouch, 2009)

Crouch, David (2009) Photographs, experiences and memories. [Online]
 http://www.corinnevionnet.com/site/1-photo-opportunities.html [04/01/2012]
Vionnet, Corinne [2012] Photo Opportunities. [Online]
 http://www.corinnevionnet.com/site/1-photo-opportunities.html [04/01/2012]

Documentation and live imprisonment at Hohenschönhausen

Franziska Vu's exhibition Detained [Inhaftiert] combines photographs with interviews of Stasi prisoners, to create an exhibition to reflect on recent German history. Vu's collaborative "live-imprisonment" (DPA/The Local, 2009) project in 2009 at the Stati prison Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Stasi prison, with former prisoner Carl-Wolfgang Holzapfel planning to live in a cell for a week, ended with Holzapfel's psychological distress [Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, 2012].

DPA/The Local (2009) Emotional strain ends former Stasi prisoner's live re-enactment [Online]  http://www.thelocal.de/society/20091102-22971.html [03/01/2012]
Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen [2012] 24/7 Stasi-Live-Haft [Online] http://www.stiftung-hsh.de/page.php?cat_id=CAT_1&con_id=CON_1516&page_id=867&subcat_id=CAT_1&recentcat=&back=
 [03/01/2012]
Kulturring in Berlin [2012] Inhaftiert/Detained. [Online]
 http://www.kulturring.org/konkret/inhaftiert/index.htm [03/01/2012]

B
Herschdorfer, Nathalie (2011) Afterwards: Contemporary Photography Confronting the Past. London: Thames & Hudson.
Rosenberg, Steve (2009) Reliving Stasi isolation - for art. [Online]
 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8333148.stm [03/01/2012]

UK should hand over Stasi files: poll

Three out of four participants of the Guardian poll said that the British government should hand over the files containing the names of Britons who spied for the Stasi to Germany. 1056 (75.8%) were in favour and 337 (24.2%) against. The poll is now closed.

The Rosenholz (Rosewood) microfilm images "contain 280,000 files giving basic information on employees of the foreign intelligence arm of the former GDR" and were obtained by the CIA shortly after the opening of the Wall. The "files relating to Stasi activity in the UK were given to MI5 by the Americans in the 1990s" and "they will be made available, unredacted, to scholars and historians" if the files are returned to Germany, disclosing British Stasi collaborators for the first time (Pidd, 2011).

"Asked by the Guardian why Britain refused to hand over the Rosenholz files, the Foreign Office, which handles press requests for MI5 and MI6, said: "We don't comment on intelligence matters." (Pidd, 2011)

Pidd, Helen (2011) Stasi files row as Britain refuses to return documents to Germany. [Online]

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/28/stasi-files-row-britain-germany [01/01/2012]