OSTZEIT Stories from a bygone country

Harald Hauswald

Alltag, 1976–1990

When he takes photographs, says Harald Hauswald, it is as if he were walking through a film whose images he is trying to stop for a moment. But in this captured moment, the one before should always remain visible, as well as the one after. These photographs of everyday life were taken on the street, in Berlin, at the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties, without assignment, without time constraints, simply while walking.

Sibylle Bergemann

P2, 1974

As in many socialist countries, a certain type of building was often erected in the GDR: Multuple stories tall and made of large, prefabricated concrete slabs. u0022P2u0022 refers to a specific type of prefabricated housing, which was first built in the early sixties. In the apartments, the kitchen was not separated from the living room, but open. The woman was not to be separated from the rest of the family, and the man was to be encouraged to do housework. Sibylle Bergemann photographed the apartments in 1974 for a documentary film that used the example of an apartment block in Berlin-Lichtenberg to tell the story of how one arranges oneself in the floor plan of life.

Werner Mahler

Berka, 1977

Berka is a village in Thuringia. In 1977, Werner Mahler went there for his graduation project and spent a year documenting the lives of the local community. He portrayed people of different generations and recorded the places and occasions where they met, the baker, the market, the sports ground, the field, the Jugendweihe (an atheist civic initiation ceremony) and the house slaughter. This resulted in 150 images of a village that contains everything that a community needs.

Ute Mahler

May 1st, Internationaler Kampftag der Arbeiterklasse, 1980

Berlin, Karl-Marx-Allee, on Labor Day. The people march past the government. A state-organized demonstration that is supposed to express the joy of conviction and yet always follows the same old choreography. What remains is the expression of the people when they face those who govern the country. Ute Mahler captured this look when she stood directly under the tribune in 1980.

Werner Mahler

Coal mining, 1975

Lignite is the country’s main source of energy. It is mined above ground with huge machines and not by hand, like hard coal, with jackhammers, a thousand meters underground. The “Martin Hoop” mine near Zwickau was one of the last to be mined for hard coal in the GDR. In 1975, Werner Mahler portrayed a workplace that has the feel of something from another era. Three years later, the shaft was closed.

Sibylle Bergemann

Clärchens Ballhaus, 1976

Clärchens Ballhaus is a privately run dance club in Berlin-Mitte. A band plays, there is bockwurst, boulette with bread, and on Wednesdays it’s “verkehrter Ball”. Then not quite young women try to meet not quite old men. Workers, soldiers, business travelers, strangers. Some guests come from West Berlin and have to be at the border checkpoint before midnight. But already after midnight they enter again.

Ute Mahler

Living together, 1972–1988

Ute Mahler started this series in 1972. She wanted to portray the way people live together. She wanted to show what exists between them and is not actually visible. Over a number of years, she photographed men, women, parents, children, families, friends, strangers across the country. She collected possibilities of the similar arrangements and in 1986, when she felt she had seen them all, she concluded the series.

Werner Mahler

High-school graduates, since 1977

These are the students of a high school from Oranienburg near Berlin. It is 1978, they are eighteen, nineteen years old, they have passed their Abitur and are now heading off into life. From then on, Werner Mahler met and photographed them at intervals of five years each. A timelapse, to witness how they became who they are. He started with all of them, some have since disappeared, one has died, nine remain. Between the first and the last picture lie thirty years – and the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

Ute Mahler

Fashion, 1977–1982

The photographs were taken in the late 1970s and early 1980s for the women’s journal “Sibylle,” a magazine for fashion and culture that appeared six times a year from 1956 onward and was always snapped up immediately. The featured pieces were mostly designs by the magazine’s fashion designers or by the fashion institute of the GDR, which never reached store shelves. The models were women who rarely stood in front of the camera for professional purposes. Photographs were rarely taken abroad, but often near the editorial offices in Berlin, close to Friedrichstrasse. “Sibylle” was not about giving women instructions on how they should be, but about showing a picture of themselves.

Werner Mahler

Der Verein, 1980

There were two soccer clubs in East Berlin whose supporters were bound together by a deep animosity. One was BFC Dynamo, the sports club of the Ministry of State Security, which supported it with all its resources – it became champion ten times in a row. The other club was 1. FC Union Berlin, which saw itself as an oppressed outsider. When the two teams met, it was always about more than just a game. In 1980, Werner Mahler accompanied Union fans to a game against their great rival.

Harald Hauswald

On the edge of the republic, 1982-1989

These are private pictures, taken in Berlin, in the early to mid 1980s. They show friends and acquaintances of Harald Hauswald. Artists, punks, opposition activists. He photographed them at readings, at environmental circles, vigils, illegal demonstrations, and at farewell parties after having been approved to leave the country. If some of these images lack the clear rigor that usually characterizes Harald Hauswald’s work, it reveals a conflict: He felt closer to these people than he wanted to get to them.

Sibylle Bergemann

Das Denkmal, 1975–1986

A monument shall be created. It is to show the two men who thought socialism, placed in the country where it became a reality. For eleven years, the sculptor Ludwig Engelhardt worked on the figures of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in his studio in Gummlin on Usedom. Sibylle Bergemann has documented their creation. From 1975 to 1986, from the first sketches to the final construction in Berlin, she describes the steps it took to create the monument.

Maurice Weiss

Upheavals, 1989–1990

The Wall had not fallen for 24 hours when Maurice Weiss arrived in Berlin. A photography student from Dortmund, he appropriated the new foreign country with his camera. He worked without an assignment and went to the places where the status quo was overturned. He saw the brief moment when the citizens were in the process of making their own state, before being reunified. Less than a year later, the country had disappeared.