Transitland

transitland

"Transitland is a collaborative archiving project initiated on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Its main outcome is a selection of 100 single-channel video works, produced in the period 1989-2009 and reflecting the transformations in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe. Transitland is not only the widest-spanning presentation of video art from Central and Eastern Europe but also a unique attempt to address and reflect upon an extensive period of transformation and changes." [Transitland, 2010]

Transitland [2010] Archive. [Online] http://www.transitland.eu/archive/

[11/06/2010]

Transmediale [2010]Transitland Destination Berlin Participants. [Online]

http://www.transmediale.de/en/transitland-destination-berlin-participants-en [11/06/2010] 

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2009) Transitland: Video Art from Central and Eastern Europe 1989 - 2009. [Online]

http://www.arts.rpi.edu/pl/news/transitland-video-art-central-eastern-europe-1989-2009 [11/06/2010] 

Jonathan Borofsky

"For me, this hundred-foot tall aluminum sculpture composed of three figures meeting in the center, not only refers to the lightness inside our own solid bodies, but also the figures joining in the center, refer to the molecules of all human beings coming together to create our existence. This symbolism is especially poignant for this 100-foot Molecule Man on the Spree River in Berlin since the river marked the division between East and West Berlin." [Borofsky, 2010a]

In 1997, Jonathan Borofsky constructed the 30 meters tall Molecule Man, a permanent installation made of aluminium, on Spree River. His large sculptures, created by a team of multi-professionals, connect with wide range of audiences internationally; from boardrooms to public spaces, from tourists to politicians. Borofsky engages with audience through these installations, "reminding us that our shared commonality, our humanity, is the knowledge that we are here to achieve" and "his sculpture ensemble serves also as a respite—a place to go and reflect, separate from the teeming crowds and the din that surrounds and fills the site" [Klein, 2010].

The artist had also worked on the Berlin Wall in 1982, "Running Man at 2,541,898", which was carried out under cover of night, and was torn down with the Wall in 1990. 

"That 'Running Man' took me about two hours to make. I had a ladder so I could paint the image all the way up to the top of the wall. Three quarters of the way through the image, the patrol truck came. We all scattered and hid behind some rubble. We left our ladder leaning up against the wall. The British [patrol was] trying to figure out what the heck is this ladder doing here. They were about to take it away, and we came out from hiding. I said I was an artist working in an exhibition in this space next door called the Martin-Gropius Bau, an international exhibition space, doing this project on the outside. They said, 'Well, have you gotten permission to do this?' And I said, 'Not really. But I’m almost finished.' They gave in. 'Don’t tell anybody that we said you could do it.' I think the painting went down with the wall [in 1990]. Somebody sent me a chip from it." (Borofsky, in Curran, 2002)

Borofsky, J. [2010] Molecule Man. [Online]
http://www.borofsky.com/index.php?album=moleculemanberlin [11/06/2010]
Curran, A. (2002) Informatin about the Artist. [Online]
http://www.borofsky.com/pastwork/info.htm [11/06/2010]
Klein, M. [2010] Jonathan Borofsky On a Grand Scale. [Online]
http://www.borofsky.com/pastwork/info.htm [11/06/2010]

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City by Walter Ruttman

This silent film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City [Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt] was directed by Walter Ruttman, and released in 1927. While documenting a day of Berlin, Ruttman deploys aesthetic camera angles, actively creating his image of the metropolis (Crang, 1998). 

Crang, M. (1998) Cultural Geography. London: Routledge.

Internet Archive [2010] Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. [Online] 

http://www.archive.org/details/BerlinSymphonyofaGreatCity [11/06/2010]

Right life in the Wrong Life

Joachim Gauck talks about Ossis and Wessis, opposition, conformism, and the long-term psychological effects of a dictatorial regime. An interview with Joachim Güntner.

signandsight.com
Neue Zürcher Zeitung

Joachim Gauck rose to international fame after 1990 as "Lord of the Stasi Files". Born 1940 in Rostock, at the age of eleven, he witnessed the deportation of his father to a Russian Gulag. Typical for opposition figures under the SED regime, he studied theology and became a pastor: His political sermons in the spirit of the civil rights movement contributed to the fall of the Wall. As a member of Bündnis 90, he became a member of the first freely elected East German Volkskammer, in the final chapter of GDR history before German reunification. His autobiography "Winter in Sommer – Frühling in Herbst" was published in 2009. Since the publication of this article, Joachim Gauck has been nominated as the candidate for the SDP and the Greens to replace Horst Köhler as the next German president in the Federal Assembly elections on June 30.

NZZ: Herr Gauck, as a oppositional pastor in the GDR in Rostock, you gave a voice to the civil rights movement, between 1990 and 2000 you were the first Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Files. Now, at 70, you are something of a travelling democracy teacher. The eternal activist?

Joachim Gauck: I cannot retreat quietly and enjoy my retirement. I need to be engaged in dialogue, otherwise I can't enjoy life. Then there's the political element. I lived most of my life under a dictatorship, I played a role in bringing it to an end, and then, as a member of our first freely elected parliament, I was assigned the job of working through the past. So political discourse became very important to me. I love freedom and I live in a country which certainly likes freedom but, as Heinrich Heine said in his day: while the Frenchman loves freedom like his betrothed, the Englishman like a demure wife, the German loves freedom like his old grandmother. It is this rather limited affinity for freedom that I must grapple with.

Have you experienced hostility at your lectures or when you talk in schools as a witness of the time?

Especially in the East, people react very differently to me. They either expect almost too much of me or they want nothing to do with me. It it not necessarily hurtful to be fought by the counter-Enlightenment. Sometimes things can get very emotional but I don't encounter that much hostility because my enemies rarely attend my events. 

You must meet a lot of young people who know almost nothing about the history of the GDR, and who don't want to know.

There is a certain ignorance among the young. For them I am an old man talking about something they know nothing about. Before, when I was still with the federal commission, I focussed my energies almost exclusively on the Stasi. Repression, arbitrariness, corrosion were the key words. I would talk about political justice and I used plenty of data and life stories to illustrate my point. Of course people were shocked, but the learning process was limited. To create more empathy, I started to use different examples and now I only talk about everyday life situations. How does one become part of a society like that? In the West I say somewhat bluntly: I will now tell you how to become an Ossi. I list all the steps towards socialisation in a completely intransigent system. First school, and the party's Pioneer organisations, the Young Pioneers with their blue kerchiefs, the Thälmann Pioneers with their red kerchiefs, and the Free German Youth (FDJ) with their blue shirts. Then I explain where it goes from there, how you get a degree or not, as the case may be, how you get into high school, or not – like my children who never belonged to these organisations.

Permanent education in conformism.

Which did not end with school. I talk about compromises and humiliating gestures of deference. What it is like to have to join a party just to become a foreman in a industrial plant, or a head engineer on a boat or a forester in the woods. Then silence engulfs the room, and I feel an intensity among the people which was not greater when I was talking about Stasi brutality. People can relate very closely to these life stories. None of them will have been in a secret police prison but all of them went through school or have pursued a profession or a job. Suddenly the people can imagine themselves as part of a uniform society. Everyone can accommodate to a dictatorship.

You are excusing the Ossis.

Not excusing them. I just want people who have not gone through these experiences to understand how people can change. We have two political cultures in Germany: the culture of a society in transformation in the East, and a halfway stable structure of a civil society in the West. When the two meet, of course misunderstandings occur. In my opinion, these differences stem more from the way mentalities are shaped than from participation in the communist ideology. Only a few people really believed in communism. But many people still feel that a free society is something very alien.

Even after three years in Leipzig, as someone born in West Germany I still come up against differences in habit, and I feel I stick out like a sore thumb.

You are immediately recognisable because you talk differently. You look at things differently too. Why is this a problem? A attitude that says, the world is my oyster. And this manifests itself in an open-mindedness and a readiness to chat about anything at any time. And lots of people here cannot relate to that. 

Perhaps these are nothing more than differences between Friesians and Swabians.

Regional differences certainly play a role, but the East-West divide dominates. There is a reason why I like talking about schools so much. Very little repression remained in the education system in the West. Teaching methods in the communist countries, however, can only be described as black pedagogy in red. Add to this, that no school encourages its pupils to be individuals. The ones that still risk saying "I", that stick their necks out, that question everything "only have themselves to blame" when they are not allowed to take their school leaving exams. This is why, among the generation which went to university in the GDR, people so readily exercised immense self control. It was all internalised. This constant observation of one's social surroundings results from something I call the fear-conformation syndrome, a signal system which tells the individual: don't let yourself be too easily recogniseable, it could be dangerous.

The amazing thing is how long it takes, even in conditions of freedom, to shake off the GDR mentality.

This is a result of what historians refer to as the longue duree phenomenon. The brown dictatorship lasted 12 years in the West, but the red one continued in the East for a further 44 after that. The length of the period of powerlessness plays a role. The complete absence of communication forms normal to civil society, the absence of discourse, the absence of individual autonomy. The strongest imprint left by a dictatorship is not the "seduced thinking" that Czeslaw Milosz talked of, it is in the attitudes. We can talk about a different East Germany when everyone who lives in it has gone through a school where they vote for class representatives instead of FDJ secretaries. It will all change with time. 

Your parents were members of the Nazi party. And in your autobiography it says that you come from an anti-communist family. But aren't these completely unrelated?

Yes, absolutely. My parents were tacit supporters of the Nazis. Life made us anticommunists. Perhaps I should say here that there aremany different types of anticommunism in Europe and throughout the world. One type comes into being far away from communism, in the heights, for example the Bavarian heights of conservative life and a confidence of thought. It is an attitude. But it does result in an intellectually well-founded form of anticommunism. The other type to which I am referring, is one that grows out of communism. It is born of suffering, of the absence of justice and freedom. It is a form of humane thinking. In South America or South Africa I would never have become an anticommunist, because I often felt very sympathetic to the communists who fought injustice there. 

In 1951, the Russians packed your father off to a Gulag and he did not return for four and a half years. In your autobiography you write that it is not easy for a teenager to challenge his parents when the father has been a victim.

Later, when I came into contact with the families of opposition figures, I learned how difficult it is for families who have built an altar to their patriarch. In my case, it delayed the generation conflict. I didn't talk to my parents about the Nazi era until I had started studying theology and was already developing my own form of anti-fascism. I wanted nothing to do with the anti-fascism of the regime. They had lied to me and betrayed me to such an extent that I did not want anything of theirs. It was through the church that I learned about anti-fascist issues, the persecution of the Jews and the endless murdering, and it was then that I retreated emotionally from everything, my parents included. It was very strange. It was not till much later that it all came out. I was an adult, a pastor already, I went to visit them one evening in their home and they were sitting in front of the TV, weeping. They had just been watching "Holocaust", a sort of soap opera series about a Jewish family which was most effective at the time. 

You were a pastor, but it was not piety, it seems, that brought you to the church, it was more to do with civil rights activism and the protected space for free speech that the church provided in the GDR.

This was certainly the layer of motivation that I find easiest to pinpoint. Below that was the longing for a spiritual home, which even a child can sense is not of this earth, and it longs for something beyond the worldly horizons. This is just the conditio humana. This sort of yearning religiosity existed independently of any experience of suffering. My book describes my first encounter with biblical texts, listening to the Christian teachings of a man in a chilly garage somewhere on the outskirts of town, who told incredibly moving stories, some of which lodged themselves firmly in my childish dreams and imaginings. But it's true that my decision to study theology was ultimately based on my experience of the church as a place of greater freedom – and of Christians as more trustworthy that the people who had the say in my country.

The Evangelical pastor Joachim Gauck, a thorn in the side of the SED (Socialist Unity Party) state, founded a community in a pre-fab housing estate in Rostock-Evershagen. With remarkable success.

People can do more than they believe. There is power to be gained in distancing yourself from the system. It gives you the sense of being somebody, if you stay true to your values. You might not get very far in society, but you will be your own person and other people will recognise that you "have something". And they will thank you for this because they also dream about being someone. Young people in particular – young people ask about the meaning of life much more than the older generation, who have already learned what you have to do to get ahead in this world – and they believe in alternatives, in 'living in the truth' as Vaclav Havel put it. One of the accepted dictates in Western political-philosophical discourse says "there is no right life in the wrong life". But Adorno was wrong when he wrote this.

A question of perspective.

It was a foolish statement, or at least confusing one. There are many forms of right life in the wrong life. It is an experience shared by lots of people in situations where, in worldly terms, it is counter-productive to stay true to your values or beliefs or – in another sphere – your art. Artists who refuse to compromise their view of the world or, in the case of composers, their music. Others made a living with their Stalin cantatas, but they refused. This reconnecting with one's core can be quite infectious.

This article originally appeared in German in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on 22 May, 2010.

Güntner, J. (Trans.: LP) (2010) Right Life in the Wrong Life. [Online]

http://www.signandsight.com/features/2039.html [08/06/2010]

Cammann, A. (2010) Joachim Gauck: Winter im Sommer – Frühling im Herbst. [Online]

http://www.goethe.de/kue/lit/prj/lit/sac/002/enindex.htm [08/06/2010]

Lærke Lauta: Motion, Still & Dual Channel

Lærke Lauta [Laerke Lauta] is a Danish artist who works with video installations as well as still images, and her works have been exhibited in various settings from galleries to internet. The following are some of her video works. 

Hun Mødte Sig Selv (2006)

Super 8 transferred to video, 1 channel, 12 sec loop

Hamsterbegravelse (2007)

DV-cam, 1 channel, 1 min loop

Both Hun Mødte Sig Selv and Hamsterbegravelse combine still and motion images into one. Lightsleeper places two channels of videos adjacent to each other.

Lightsleeper (2008)

HD, 2 channels, 6:30 min loop

Lauta, L. [2010] Video. [Online] http://www.lauta.dk/video.html [05/06/2010]
MCASD [2010] Lærke Lauta. [Online] http://www.mcasd.org/exhibitions/609/ [05/06/2010]

Museum Calls for Walls

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) is looking for sites, building walls, in the downtown San Diego to be used by artists for its exhibition Viva la Revolución: A Dialogue with the Urban Landscape [Obeygiant.com, 2010]. MCASD will organise "a multifaceted exhibition that explores the dialogue between artists and the urban landscape" at its galleries as well as urban sites, as it claims the majority of the world's population lives in urban areas for the first time in history and "the urban setting and its corresponding lifestyle are major sources of inspiration in contemporary culture" [MCASD, 2010].

"This is an historic revolution in visual culture, in which the codes and icons of the everyday—found on the streets in graffiti, signage, waste, tattoos, advertising, and graphic design—have been appropriated and used as an integral part of contemporary art-making. The urban landscape inspires and serves as both a platform for innovation and a vehicle for expression for many artists. The city itself, its buildings, vehicles, people, and advertisements, are not only the surface where the art is applied. The city fuels the practice." [MCASD, 2010]

Shepard Fairey, Street Mural Miami, 2008, stencil and mixed media collage

MCASD [2010] Viva la Revolucion: a Dialogue with the Urban Landscape. [Online]

http://www.mcasd.org/exhibitions/616/viva-la-revolucion [05/06/2010]

Obeygiant.com [2010] Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego Calls for Walls. [Online]
http://obeygiant.com/headlines/museum-of-contemporary-art-san-diego-calls-for-walls [05/06/2010]

South Korean Election Result

"There is no winner if war breaks out, hot or cold," (a South Korean voter, in Harden, 2010)

South Korean voters are said to have rejected the hostile campaign against the North Korean government during the local elections held this week, and supporting dialogue offered by the main opposition Democratic Party (Harden, 2010, & Yonhap News Agency, 2010). The rhetoric pitched by the ruling Grand National party seemed too high-strung and sent voters to opposition Democratic Party, which ran a successful campaign. 

"Experience teaches South Koreans not to overreact" claimed a professor at the University of North Korean Studies Ryoo Kihl-jae, analysing "people here interpreted Lee's response to the Cheonan to be like a new Cold War... and that kind of thinking is seen as old-fashioned, as well as harmful to the economy and people's standard of living" (Harden, 2010)

Harden, B. (2010) South Korean Voters Opt for 'Reason over Confrontation' with the North. [Online]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/04/AR2010060404659.html and
page 2 of the same article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/04/AR2010060404659_2.html?sid=ST2010060404845 [05/06/2010]
Yonhap News Agency (2010) (LEAD) (News Focus) Election defeat casts gloom over Lee administration, ruling party. [Online]

http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/national/2010/06/03/30/0301000000AEN20100603001000315F.HTML [05/06/2010]

The Hankyoreh (2010) Military Leadership Adding to Cheonan Chaos with Contradictory Statements. [Online] http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/413450.html [05/06/2010]

Thomas Hoepker

The Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker's work is being exhibited at Galerie Hiltawsky in Berlin. Hoepker "shaped the German magazine scene, working for the magazines such as "Stern" and "Geo", and "he was among the first with a special permit to travel freely between West and East Berlin, managing to tell the everyday life in the 'brother country' (East Germany) as realistically and impartially as possible" [Magnum Photos, 2010].

Below is a video by The Economist magazine, that shows Hoepker's still images alongside his narrative. 

EconomistMagazine (2009) Life behind the Berlin Wall. [Online]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8BojR2BEt8 [05/06/2010]

Magnum Photos [2010] May 1 - June 19, 2010, Berlin, Germany Thomas Hoepker. [Online]

http://events.magnumphotos.com/exhibition/thomas-hoepker [05/06/2010]

Galarie Hiltawski [2010] Thomas Hoepker: Cate. [Online]
http://www.hiltawsky.com/ [05/06/2010]
Usuda, T. (2009) 2 Narratives by Thomas Hoepker of Magnum. [Online]
http://berlinmitberlin.blogspot.com/2009/12/magnum-photographer-thomas-hoepker-life.html [05/06/2010]

photo animation idea

Lemeh42 (2009) abcd. [Online] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJxf1e6Fva8 [04/06/2010]

Soviet Union’s forbidden art unveiled

St Petersburg’s first private art museum opens, showing Soviet underground and Russian contemporary art

John Varoli
The Art Newspaper

A private Russian collector is due to open St Petersburg’s first private art museum on 4 June. Novy Museum, the brainchild of Aslan Chekhoev and his wife Irina, is devoted to Soviet underground and Russian contemporary art. The museum is centred on the Chekhoevs’ collection of nearly 300 paintings, works on paper and photographs assembled over the past five years.

The couple has spent E1m renovating three floors in a 19th-century building on the historic Vasilievsky Island, not far from St Petersburg State University and the Russian Academy of Fine Arts. The collection features works by 69 artists—including Yevgeny Rukhin, Evgeny Mikhnov-Voitenko, Komar and Melamid and Oscar Rabin—and the inaugural exhibition features a sample work by each artist.

When asked why he embarked on this project, Chekhoev said: “We see this as something for history and for St Petersburg, because around 70% of our collection is comprised of important Moscow artists whose works are not well represented in our local museums.”

Chekhoev will rotate the exhibition around three times a year, and he also wants to collaborate with other collectors. The Chekhoevs have been active buyers at major European and US auction houses, spending around E5m to build the collection. Their most notable purchase was Komar and Melamid’s Yalta Conference: the Judgment of Paris, 1985-86, which they purchased at MacDougall’s in London in November 2007 for £184,400. The three-metre-wide canvas depicts the conference that divided Europe during the second world war in the guise of Greek mythology. The painting shows Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin as Greek goddesses and Hitler as the shepherd-prince Paris.

“Russian art of the second half of the 20th century is truly unique, but it is not appreciated in Russia and abroad,” said Chekhoev. “Underground art arose in extreme situations of dictatorship; never mind the censorship and repression, it was simply difficult to get materials. While this slowed them down, it also forced them to be more creative and resourceful, and this spurred an incredible level of originality.”

Varoli, J. (2010) Soviet Union’s Forbidden Art Unveiled. [Online] http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Soviet-Union-s-forbidden-art-unveiled/20914 [04/06/2010]

Fighting Over the Past: Former Stasi Headquarters Provide Headache for Berlin

Wiebke Hollersen
Translated by Christopher Sultan
Spiegel Online International

The former Berlin headquarters of the East German secret police, the Stasi, are in a sorry state of disrepair, but no one can agree on what to do about it. Civil rights activists, the federal government and local politicians all have their ideas in a dispute that revolves around how to deal with the communist past.

Maybe the police will show up, says Jörg Drieselmann, sounding as if it might not be such a bad thing for the authorities to come and evict them, the people who, for the last 20 years, have been occupying the former office of Erich Mielke, East Germany's head of state security for more than three decades.

Drieselmann looks nervous as he perches on the edge of the old couch in his conference room in Berlin's Lichtenberg neighborhood. He glances at the window and the yellowed curtains. The curtains, the light switches, the linoleum -- all the furnishings, in fact -- are "all still genuine East German." Drieselmann, 53, is a gaunt man with a gray beard. As a teenager, he spent time in a Stasi prison in the East German city of Erfurt. Since German reunification, the office of Erich Mielke, the former East German minister of state security, has been his museum.

But now he is being asked to get out, and to take his exhibits with him. According to a letter that Drieselmann and his organization, "Anti-Stalinist Action" (Astak), have received, they are to vacate the building "immediately, by no later than May 31, 2010, complete with your personal effects." As of Thursday, however, Drieselmann had not been evicted.

The Right to Interpret History

The German government wants to take over the building where Mielke had his office, Building 1 in the former Stasi headquarters complex. The government plans to renovate the building and turn it into a national memorial.

The government's plans have civil rights activists and the Chancellery's culture specialists battling over every detail. Ultimately, they are arguing over who has the right to interpret East German history. Government officials are worried about things like water damage and fire safety, and they have threatened to shut down Building 1 if it is not renovated. Civil rights activists, on the other hand, are concerned about things like light switches and linoleum. They want to make sure that everything will look the same after the renovation, and that the building isn't turned into yet another slick, modern museum.

What should happen to the former Stasi headquarters complex? How much of it should offer a glimpse into history? Who should do the work? And what will happen to the many other Stasi buildings, most of which are now empty and dilapidated? Twenty years after citizens stormed the grounds in January 1990, the two sides are fighting over the past and future of the buildings that were once at the center of the East German surveillance state. The government no longer wants private initiatives to be in control of the monument to the East German state and its apparatus of control. But the activists are unwilling to allow the federal government to simply take away their life's work. A third group, in the form of local politicians in Lichtenberg, is anxious to finally shed the district's image as the home of Stasi headquarters.

Associated with the Stasi

The people of East Berlin associated certain street names-- Magdalenenstrasse, Normannenstrasse, Ruschestrasse -- with the Stasi. The organization's most important buildings were located between these streets, and Building 1, where the minister's office was located, was at the center of the complex. The office of Markus Wolf, the former head of the General Intelligence Administration, was in Building 15. At the other end of the complex was Building 18, with facilities catering to the needs of Stasi employees, including cafeterias, a supermarket and a travel office.

The headquarters complex consisted of more than 20 office buildings that housed the offices of Mielke's and Wolf's organizations, as well as another 13 auxiliary buildings. A total of 7,000 full-time employees worked there, where they managed the business of keeping all of East Germany under surveillance.

After reunification, Deutsche Bahn, the German national railway, took over the Soviet-era building once occupied by Wolf's foreign division. The federal agency responsible for the Stasi archives now uses Buildings 7 to 11 to store its files, and the Finance Ministry and a medical center now have offices in Building 2, the former counterintelligence headquarters. But now the biggest tenant, Deutsche Bahn, is moving out, and others have already left. The facades of many of the buildings are beginning to crack, and there are no prospective new tenants.

What should be done? This is the burning question for Jörg Drieselmann, the civil rights activist, for Helge Heidemeyer, an official who works for the agency that oversees the Stasi archives and who represents the government in the dispute, and for Andreas Geisel, the Lichtenberg city council member in charge of urban development.

Part 2: The Silent Terror of the Stasi

Heidemeyer is sitting in the high-end restaurant Borchardt in Berlin's Mitte district, wearing a dark suit. He is friendly and cautious, like a diplomat discussing a difficult part of Southeast Asia. He talks about the old Stasi headquarters, which, though less than half an hour away by subway, feels very distant.

Heidemeyer heads the Department of Education and Research at the Office of the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives (BStU). His agency will be responsible for developing the new memorial in Mielke's office building after renovations are complete. "Building 1 will be the place where we address the subject of repression in the East German dictatorship," he says. For Heidemeyer, it is important to point out that the federal government and the German parliament, the Bundestag, have passed an official "memorial plan," and that Bernd Neumann, the German government's commissioner for culture and the media, is charged with implementing the plan. In a certain sense, Heidemeyer has come to this meeting at the restaurant as a representative of the entire German government.

The German capital already has a Berlin Wall museum at Checkpoint Charlie, a colorful museum of East German culture and sightseeing tours in the iconic East German Trabant car, all of which are privately run. Together, they make up a sort of East German theme park for tourists in the German capital. The federal government does not want to leave the task of interpreting history completely up to entrepreneurs and private associations, which is why it has introduced its strategy for the Stasi memorial. "No other place in Germany symbolizes the silent terror of the Stasi in quite the same way," the strategy paper states, referring to Building 1, and Heidemeyer says that this is the guiding principle for his work.

But neither does he want to be Drieselmann's adversary. No one does. He says that planning something in collaboration with Drieselmann's organization is "a great opportunity." He talks about "interactive elements" and says that the BStU has an exhibit that would be very well-suited for Building 1, as well as a wide range of education programs. Unfortunately, he says, Anti-Stalinist Action is currently unwilling to cooperate with his agency with the planning.

Another Government Agency

Drieselmann, sitting on his couch in Lichtenberg, laughs hoarsely when he hears this. He is convinced that the government wants to turn him and his agency into a mere appendage, possibly even part of its exhibition: the last civil rights activists.

He is skeptical about a documentation and education center created together with the BStU. "One government agency shouldn't be replaced with another," he says.

Drieselmann picked a fight with East Germany early in life. He went to prison at 18, and the West German government later paid for his release. Although he was no longer living in East Germany, he still considered himself an East German dissident, and he returned shortly after the end of the dictatorship.

Perhaps this is why he is so attached to the role of someone who opposes authority. If he had his way, nothing would change. He would simply like to continue running his museum, with the 34 people in his group -- but not with the government agency -- and continue to conduct tours of the building in his own way. Although Drieselmann lacks modern museum technology, he is a good storyteller. The "interactive elements" in his museum are the tours he and his colleagues conduct.

And they have been successful at it. In 2009, 100,000 visitors came to his museum. The numbers have been going up every year, particularly after 2006, when the Stasi-themed movie "The Lives of Others" was in theaters. Some of the scenes in the film were shot on the floor where Mielke had his offices.

Drieselmann bristles at the federal government and its "memorial plan." He has written angry letters, made demands and refused to comply with the order to vacate the premises. But the officials from the Chancellery have coldly reminded him of the parliamentary resolution. As of June, his museum will no longer receive public funding, which represents two-thirds of its budget.

Part 3: Alternative Plans for the Complex

For all too long, hardly anything happened in Drieselmann's quarrel with the German government. Meanwhile, the grounds surrounding Building 1 have become dilapidated, creating a burden for the Lichtenberg administration.

"A city needs to continue to develop," says Andreas Geisel. He is standing next to a snack bar across the street from the museum, wearing jeans and a blue jacket. This is his district. A member of the center-left Social Democrats, Geisel grew up in Lichtenberg and has been a member of the district council for 15 years. He is responsible for urban development, which to him means the future, not the past. He wants to see his district finally shed its old image of being home to "the Stasi, neo-Nazis and Soviet-era tower blocks," as he himself puts it.

The district itself has developed relatively well, he says. He points out that most of the old tower blocks have been renovated, there is a lot of green space and many families are living there. Then he looks at the surrounding Stasi buildings: 101,000 square meters (1.1 million square feet) of office space, with a 50 percent vacancy rate that is likely to soon rise to 90 percent. Things cannot continue like this, says Geisel, who points out that vacancy leads to deterioration and vandalism. "This affects the surrounding community," he says.

Bold Ideas

Geisel has already heard many proposals. Students from the Technical University of Cottbus, southeast of Berlin, have just designed plans for the site, which include turning the offices into apartments and putting in a park. Other ideas have included artists' studios and rehearsal space for bands. Geisel shrugs his shoulders, and says: "First you'd have to find that many artists and bands."

Geisel is more in favor of a large government agency using the space in the office buildings. Installing the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's domestic intelligence agency, as the Stasi's successor would be a bold and rather defiant idea. It is, however, entirely unrealistic: The BND is already building a new €1.5 billion headquarters complex in Berlin's central Mitte district.

Instead, a completely new way of thinking is needed. Geisel wants to have the complex declared an official redevelopment area. If all goes well and Berlin's Senate approves the plan, it could happen as early as this summer. One of the first steps then would be to hold an international architectural competition.

Geisel doesn't want to anticipate the outcome, particularly as the German capital, plagued by a high vacancy rate for commercial buildings, is having a tough enough time with investors at the moment. For this reason, Geisel could imagine entire buildings being demolished, leaving very little of the old complex standing. In his opinion, the best solution would be to simply tear down the entire, useless former Stasi complex.

Money Available

However, Building 1, which contains the museum with Mielke's office and which has protected status as a historic monument, will undoubtedly remain standing. Drieselmann and the federal government will have to come to an agreement soon, because the roof is leaking and the basement is already under water. Besides, money for the renovation happens to be available now, in the form of €11 million from the government's economic stimulus program. The construction work will have to begin soon, or the money will go to another project.

Members of culture commissioner Bernd Neumann's staff are now trying to reach a compromise. In a new "rough plan," they propose that Drieselmann and his group, as well as the BStU, each receive one floor in Building 1, and that the Drieselmann group manage the floor where Mielke's offices were. Besides, they have suggested that both sides work together to develop a new overall strategy that they can agree on. It looks like a relatively good offer.

But Drieselmann, the old civil rights activist, is still putting up a fight. Now he wants to see the construction plans and have a say in the renovation, "down to the last detail," as he says. He simply has a hard time trusting the government.

Hollersen, W. [Trans. Sultan, C.] (2010) Fighting Over the Past: Former Stasi Headquarters Provide Headache for Berlin. [Online]
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,698267,00.html#ref=nlint
[04/06/2010]

East German Cinema

Heinz Leo Kretzenbacher
acmi

In the 40 years of its existence, from 1949 to 1990, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was widely perceived as "the other German state", the drab and dreary one, the poor relative. This perception was shared - if unacknowledged - by GDR officials whose constant self-praise of the "world class" of everything in the GDR just showed the size of the chip on their shoulders.

In hindsight, there were very few fields where the GDR could compete with West Germany, but one of these was the arts. Fine art, literature and film, in spite of having to deal with the censorship of a mistrustful bureaucracy, produced not only the mass of escapist kitsch and mandatory ideology that could be expected, but also many works of solid quality and a substantial number that reached international standing.

As a medium with mass appeal, the cinema played a special role in the art landscape of the GDR. Geography and politics gave it a running start: The Babelsberg studios of UFA, founded in 1917, former workplace of Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder and later the hub of cinematic propaganda in Nazi Germany, were situated in Potsdam in the Soviet occupation zone that would become the GDR in 1949. It was at these studios in 1946, three years before the separate states were founded, that the first German feature film after World War II was shot (Wolfgang Staudte's The Murderers are Among Us). The UFA's successor, the GDR monopolist DEFA, went on to produce around 700 full-length features, around 750 animated films and more than 2000 shorts and documentaries before German reunification in 1990.

ACMI's Focus on East German Cinema gives a broad panorama spanning the time from Wolfgang Staudte's mentioned The Murderers are Amongs Us, shot in the stark landscape of post-war Berlin, to Helke Misselwitz's documentary After Winter Comes Spring (1988), which gave voice to the overwhelming atmosphere of stagnation and the hope for change in the dying years of the GDR. Between these extremes of the anti-fascist and humanist ambitions that marked the ideological and hopeful beginnings of the state that understood itself to be the "better" Germany, and the weariness and resignation of people living under a fossilized regime, the ACMI retrospective shows many different facets of GDR cinema. It is this diversity that makes the retrospective so attractive.

While many of the films in this program have found international acclaim, ACMI wisely refrains from showcasing only the most internationally successful films and also avoids the cringeworthy output of Stalin-era GDR propaganda. So while Solo Sunny (1980), Konrad Wolf's film about a young woman's struggle for autonomy in a rigid and boring society, represents the top level of GDR films, others of the same standing, such as Frank Beyer's Traces of Stones (1966), are not part of the retrospective, and neither are embarrassing communist hagiographies such as Kurt Maetzig's two films on Ernst Thälmann from 1954 and 1955.

A great variety of genres is represented in Focus on East German Cinema. While After Winter Comes Spring is the only example of the rich documentary tradition in the GDR, Frank Beyer's Naked Among Wolves (1963), set in the Buchenwald concentration camp, and Konrad Wolf's autobiographical I was 19 (1968), dealing with his return to Germany as a Red Army soldier in 1945, join The Murderers are Among Us as examples of anti-fascist films. And just as Wolf's Solo Sunny observes the struggle of a young woman to find her place in a rigid society in the year 1980, so does Herrmann Zschoche's Carla in 1965.

Kurt Maetzig's The Silent Star (1960) and Gottfried Kolditz's In the Dust of the Stars (1976) showcase the unique GDR take on science fiction. The former, adapted from a novel by Stanislav Lem, paints a bleak picture of a planet devastated by nuclear war - a prospect not entirely improbable at the height of the nuclear brinkmanship in the Cold War - while the latter is most remarkable for the ABBA-style clothing and hairstyles on show. Richard Groschopp's Chingachgook - The Great Snake (1967), based on James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Deerslayer, is representative of the GDR's considerable output of westerns, while Konrad Wolf's Sun Seekers (1958) deals with the Soviet uranium mining in Saxony after WWII - a chaotic period that has been described as the GDR's own "Wild West".

For the artists, producing films in a dictatorship often meant testing the limits of varying (and sometimes suddenly tightened) censorship. Sun Seekers appeared to question the leading role of the Communist Party and was not released until 1972, 14 years after it was made. Karla, along with almost all of the DEFA productions of 1965, fell victim to a sudden rollback in cultural policy after a short period of liberalization inspired by Khrushchev's Post-Stalin reforms in the USSR, and was not released until after the fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years later. Even in 1988, the documentary After Winter Comes Spring, enthusiastically received and awarded a prize at the Festival of Documentary Film at Leipzig that year, was not released for broadcast by GDR TV.

For audiences, watching films in the GDR often meant reading between the lines for things the censors might have overlooked. So while we might enjoy the involuntarily comical futurist costumes and sets of In the Dust of the Stars, a GDR audience would be aware of its ambiguous ending, which does not conform to the rules of socialist heroism. The fact that in I was 19 a young German woman seeks the protection of the protagonist out of fear of being raped by Soviet soldiers was a daring breach of a taboo subject. Even the teenage musical Hot Summer (1968) owed its phenomenal success not only to the leading couple, played by the most popular singers at the time, and the fiction of a spontaneous group holiday on the Baltic coast (unheard of in the strictly regulated and rationed system of distribution of holiday accommodation in the GDR). The film was also a welcome relief from the dark reality outside the cinema: in the summer of 1968, the armies of "socialist brother countries," including the GDR, crushed the short phase of liberalization in Czechoslovakia known as "Prague Spring."

Although some East Germans tend to compensate for their problems in getting along in the competitive world of unified Germany by looking back at the GDR through rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia, there is not much this 'other' German state produced that will stand the test of time. However, most of the art produced in the 40 years of the GDR's existence will remain valid and valued; including it's rich legacy of film.

Heinz Leo Kretzenbacher was born in Graz, Austria, and grew up in Munich, where he completed his PhD in German, English and Portuguese Studies. He is currently a senior lecturer and convener of the German Studies Program at the University of Melbourne.

A list of East German films

Kretzenbacher, H.L. (2009) East German Cinema. [Online]
http://www.acmi.net.au/east_german_essay_english.htm [04/06/2010]

Acmi [2010] Focus on East German Cinema. [Online]
http://www.acmi.net.au/fo_east_german.aspx [04/06/2010]

The View from the Wall

The View From the Wall

Huang et al (2009) created The View from the Wall, where the New York Times readers could upload their personal memories of the Wall before and after its opening. 

Huang, J., Tarchak, L., FANG, C., & Delviscio, J. (2009) The View From the Wall. [Online] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/09/world/europe/20091109-berlin-wall-reader-photos.html#/0 [04/06/2010]

candles

Amnesty International logo

"The symbol of the candle highlights perfectly the hope that Amnesty gives to so many people around the world by improving human rights." (Temperley, in Amnesty International UK, 2009)

Amnesty International adopted the candle logo which "continues to mobilise people of all religions, nationalities, cultures and customs to shine the light on the world's darkest corners", nearly 50 years after Diana Redhouse - a lifelong Amnesty member - designed an emblem based on a candle encircled in barbed wire. Peter Benenson, the organisation's founder, had the idea from a Chinese proverb, "Better to light a candle than curse the darkness" (Amnesty International UK, 2009).

Amnesty International (2008) Amnesty International Logo. [Online]

http://archive.amnesty.org/report2008/press-area/en/video-audio-photos.html

[04/06/2010]

Amnesty International UK (2009) Amnesty International and Alice Temperley launch limited-edition Amnesty scented candle. [Online] http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news_details.asp?NewsID=18480 [04/06/2010]

Rvf0elendil (2007) Schindler's List (theme). [Online] 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vEKNTsowd8 [04/06/2010]

Baron, Y. & Baron, D. (2007) Obituary: Diana Redhouse. [Online]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2007/dec/07/guardianobituaries.society [04/06/2010]

German Short Films in Shanghai

Cartoon and Animation (2009) Das Rad (“Rocks – English Subtitles) Academy Award Nominated Film by Chris Stenner, Arvid Uibel and Heidi Wittlinger. [Online] http://cartoonandanimation.com/165/das-rad-rocks-animated-short-film/ [04/06/2010]

Cibernautajoan (2009) Die Aussicht. [Online] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCGIbjNe_N4 [04/06/2010]

Kontrastfilm (2009) Edgar Trailer. [Online] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyiBur9UutM

interfilm Berlin Management GmbH [2010] interfilm Berlin Enriches the 2010 EXPO with German Short Films. [Online] http://www.interfilm.de/expo_2010_eng.php [04/06/2010]

Pine Tree Pictures (2007) Schwarzfahrer (with English Subtitles) [Online] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFQXcv1k9OM [04/06/2010]

Shortstv (2009) Toyland - Interview with the director of the Oscar Nominated Short Film 2009. [Online] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEtrrGwzQX8 [04/06/2010]

aniBOOM (2008) Our Wonderful Nature - 1st Place Animation: Jury Category Aniboom Awards 2008. [Online] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aFKSvw4bjU [04/06/2010]

East German artist encourages painting against the grain

As an artist in East Germany, Hans-Hendrik Grimmling painted himself out of "socialist realism" in the GDR. He and five other artists were pioneers in organizing an uncensored exhibition: the First Leipzig Fall Salon.

Author: Nadine Wojcik

Editor: Kate Bowen
Deutsche Welle

Hans-Hendrik Grimmling was practically born with a paintbrush in his hand. By 14, he and a friend had already set up their own studio in Grimmling's hometown Zwenkau, near Leipzig.

The two boys did not just have art on their minds, though. Although they painted, copied works by artists including Franz Marc, and even sold a couple of pieces, the studio served more as a sanctuary of freedom. They used the space to drink and throw parties, and would rent the room to young couples in exchange for a glass of beer. Everyone else kept their distance.

"It felt great," recalled Grimmling. "At such a young age, we had already carved a niche and tried to free ourselves from convention."

The soldier with the painting kit

Grimmling, seen here in his studio, is now an art professor in Berlin

After finishing school, Hans-Hendrik Grimmling joined the National People's Army (NVA), as all young men in East Germany were required to do. He later described the experience as the most terrible time of his life, full of humiliation and hidden tears.

During his service, Grimmling's painting kit was one of the only personal items he was allowed to keep. He retreated to his room each night to paint and avoid the problems he faced in the military. "There, I painted just for myself as an escape and to feel a kind of tenderness. Painting saved me from the reality I faced and helped me survive," he said.

Upon completing his military service, Grimmling was accepted to East Germany's most renowned university for artists, in Leipzig. He and his classmates gained a reputation for being wild - but also unbelievably productive. 

"Completely strange imagination"

Grimmling finished his basic studies with Werner Tuebke, one of the most famous GDR painters, and was accepted along with five other students for the advanced class called "Free Art." It was led by Wolfgang Mattheuer, another important figure in the Leipzig art scene. Mattheuer's class provided Grimmling with an important forum where he could enjoy artistic freedom.

However, Grimmling was prevented from graduating just before the end of his studies. The faculty cited his "completely strange imagination" and the influence of "imperialistic decadence" in his work as reasons for his failure. There was nothing of the proletariat to be found in his paintings, they criticized.  

Faced with expulsion, Grimmling accepted an assignment to paint two miners in a piece called "Working Heroes." He explained that he had not yet developed a radically alternative perspective and still wanted the official recognition that a diploma confers.

"Working Heroes" led Grimmling to graduate with the grade of "very good" and he was offered a position at the Association of Visual Artists. The job provided for his basic needs and offered opportunities to take part in state-sponsored art projects and deals.

  "Umerziehung der Voegel" (Reeducation of the Birds),

 by Hans-Hendrik Grimmling, 1978

Catching the censors' attention

Alongside his official role, however, Grimmling was developing his own vision. He painted birds without wings or with contorted bodies turning in on themselves, while experimenting and testing boundaries with fellow artists.

His work began to draw attention from the East German censors. In particular, a line from a poem he and artist and friend Olaf Wegewitz posted above a gallery door raised concern. The line ran "The word ruins the way," and the censors wondered whether Grimmling meant to implicate the ruling SED party.

Government officials cancelled the gallery's planned exhibition one day before its opening date and ordered that it be taken down. The episode frustrated Wegewitz and Grimmling, who recalled, "We were humiliated, but, at the same time, we felt a sort of pleasure in being able to define ourselves differently and not belong to 'them.'"

Beyond the state's imagination

Another of Grimmling's exhibits was forbidden a year later, but the artist did not give up. He sought new ways to exhibit his work, and finally he had a stroke of genius.

Together with five other artists, Grimmling organized the "First Leipzig Fall Salon." The 1984 event became the first uncensored exhibition to take place in East Germany.

Due to their membership in the Association of Visual Artists, Grimmling and fellow painter Guenther Huniat were able to rent a space for the exhibit from a government agency in Leipzig. The state officials couldn't imagine that the artists were not planning to show official works from the Association, but their own independent creations.

Eventually, the Stasi - the East German secret police - caught wind of the group's plans and documented the work of Grimmling and his peers as hostile and negative. Security officials wondered, however, whether banning the exhibition would draw too much attention to the artists.

In light of these concerns, the exhibit was allowed to take place but with an important proviso: No more than six visitors could see the exhibition daily. Nevertheless, the show was a hit and attracted more than 10,000 visitors in the course of four weeks.

A threat to communism

Despite the exhibition's success, it proved to be a defeat for Grimmling. It became clear to him that the state would never permit a second installment of the Fall Salon. This conclusion led him to a significant decision: He filed an official request to be allowed to travel out of East Germany.

The Stasi file on Grimmling reveals that he was viewed as a lost cause who could not be won back for the good of society. As such, Grimmling's request to leave the country was processed and approved in an unusually quick manner.

In 1986, the artist traveled into West Berlin, together with his wife and young daughter. They lived with friends while Grimmling created a makeshift studio and began to paint with limited materials on packing paper from a hardware store. He was also able to sell a few paintings left over from his time in Leipzig.

 "Mauerbild" (Picture of the Wall),

by Hans-Hendrik Grimmling, 1983

Moving forward in Berlin

Gradually, Grimmling established himself more and more in West Berlin. He had begun offering painting courses by 1988. In 2001, he became a lecturer and later a professor at the Technical University for Art in Berlin.

He said of his work there, "Now and again, I try to explain to my students that it makes sense and can even bring a kind of joy to get mixed up in things that you think might be manipulated. And even after the fall of the Wall, there's still plenty of manipulation."

Grimmling, H.-H. [2010] Arbeiten: Auswahl. [Online]
http://www.h-h-grimmling.de/seite6.html [04/06/2010] 
Wojcik, N. & (Ed.) Bowen, K. (2009) East German Artist Encourages Painting against the Grain. [Online] http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4860853,00.html [04/06/2010]