Finding Lenin

Rick Minnich goes photographing statues of Lenin in his work The Book of Lenins (1993-96), which documents his journey to publish a book about Lenin monuments. Minnich digs up the 60 foot Lenin statue which stood in East Berlin until 1992 and was buried by the new German government (Minnich, 2011).

According to a Spiegel report, Berlin plans to dig up this statue for an exhibition at Spandau Citade, to be displayed among statues of various German era (Crossland, 2010).

Crossland, David (2010) 'Hello Lenin': Berlin to Resurrect its Disgraced Monuments [Online]
 http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,674218,00.html [16/02/2012]
Minnich, Rick (2011) The Book of Lenins - English version [Online]
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPoejKEuc_Y [16/02/2012]

Longing for Germany in exile

Margot Honecker, the GDR education minister between 1963 to the autumn of 1989 and the widow of former leader Erich Honecker, "lives with her mind in Germany" reportedly missing forests and mushrooms (Spiegel Online, 2012). 

Spiegel Online (2012) Exile in Chile: Former East German Leader's Wife Is Homesick. [Online]
 http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,813785,00.html [13/02/2012]

Architecture and memory in films

Brutalität in Stein [Brutality in Stone] (1961) by Alexander Kluge connects history and memory through architecture and speeches by Hitler. Kluge has also directed Abschied von Gestern/Yesterday Girl (1966)  about a an East German refugee trying and failing to get a foothold in West Berlin (Lee, 2010). The film opens with the text "what separates us from yesterday is not a rift but a changed position".

bluaCONVAIR880 (2011) 1 - Abschied von gestern - 1966 - Kluge [Online]
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMa5TvLpPVA [14/02/2012]
Brody, Richard (2010) The Way West. [Online]
 http://www.newyorker.com/arts/events/revivals/2010/05/24/100524gomo_GOAT_movies_brody [13/02/2012]
dekonstrukcija (2010) Brutalitat in Stein - 1961 - Alexander Kluge & Peter Schamoni. [Online] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=islUtYwOOx8 [13/02/2012]
Lee, Kevin B. (2010) 993 (129). Abschied von Gestern—(Anita G.) / Yesterday Girl (1966, dir. Alexander Kluge) [Online] http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2010/01/993-129-abschied-von-gestern%E2%80%94anita-g-yesterday-girl-1966-dir-alexander-kluge/ [14/02/2012]

Mitch Epstein in Berlin

"Berliners have chosen to leave traces of the worst of themselves in their architecture and landscape. They have understood what a largely amnesiac America has not: reform relies on memory." [Epstein, in Steidl, 2012]

Winning the Berlin Prize in Arts and Letters in 2008, Mitch Epstein photographed the city's "layered and famously tormented history" by photographing its war and postwar histories and remnants, capturing "unique capacity for the contradictory and surreal. [Epstein, 2012].

Epstein, Mitch [2012] Berlin [Online] http://mitchepstein.net/work/berlin/index.html [09/02/2012]
Steidl [2012] Berlin [Online] http://www.steidlville.com/books/1183-Berlin.html [09/02/2012]

Kippenberger, Susanne [Trans. Hofmann, Jennifer] (2008) Epstein's Berlin [Online] http://mitchepstein.net/writing/reviews/2008_dertagesspiegel.pdf [09/02/2012]
[Online]  [09/02/2012]

Wende Museum

A short clip about the Wende Museum in LA.

ReasonTV (2012) Wende Museum: An Archive of the Cold War.

[Online] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAn9bpF4DeU [15/02/2012]

Siegfried Zielinski on Now

Siegfried Zielinski tells us "we can't lose time, because we never possessed it. Time is the only thing, perhaps, we can't possess. We do not have [it] - time has us". He talks about perceptions of time, melancholy and paranoia based on negative theology of time Michael Theunissen, and discusses attempts by Danny Hillas' clock "stretch the now... into eternaty" (Zielinski, 2010). He concludes that we can only "intervene in the rhythm and velocity" and organise it.

Zielinski, Siegfried (2010) Siegfried Zielinski (de) in Atemporality - A Cultural Speed Control? [Online] http://www.transmediale.de/de/siegfried-zielinski-de-atemporality-cultural-speed [13/02/2012]

Memories and revisits

Red Tours (2010) by Joanne Richardson and David Rych focuses on statue parks, museums and theatrical re-enactments of communism - which are "not places of remembering, but ciphers of active forgetting" - in a "docu-fiction" approach with three parts and perspectives, "Red Tours seeks to question the meaning of documentary and the politics of montage" [Richardson, 2012c].

In Transit (2008) by Richardson is "a diary of a journey through space and time, made up of subjective impressions of the present and childhood memories of the past", with a reflecting monologue on "transition, the re-writing of history and the relation between images and memory" [Richardson, 2012a]. In a travelogue highlighting "the problematic nature of travel discourse and its affirmation of cultural superiority by portraying traveling to the East as a journey back in time," Letter to Moldova (2009), also by Richardson, is narrated through ten letters that reflect on the collapse of the Soviet Union, also revealing "the limits of the tourist gaze through the narrator’s own misunderstandings and inherited prejudices" [Richardson, 2012b].

The films Red Tours (in 3 sections), In Transit and Letter to Moldova are available online.

Richardson, Joanne [2012a] In Transit. [Online]
 http://subsol.c3.hu/joanne/video_transit.html [11/02/2012]
Richardson, Joanne [2012b] Letter from Moldova. [Online]
 http://subsol.c3.hu/joanne/video_moldova.html [11/02/2012]
Richardson, Joanne [2012c] Red Tours. [Online]
 http://subsol.c3.hu/joanne/video_redtours.html [11/02/2012]

Hering, Tobias [2012] Joanne Richardson Counter-documentary and making Art Politically. [Online]
http://www.no-w-here.org.uk/index.php?cat=1&subCat=docdetail&id=265 [11/02/2012]