“Testaments to Social and Cultural Disappearance in East Germany since 1989/90” is the third in a series of journalistic pieces entitled “Decoupled Society. Liberalization and Resistance in East Germany since 1989/90” by Yana Milev, who is compiling the project in partnership with photographer and ethnographer Philipp Beckert. This section of the study deals with continuing the discourse on these blind spots – the abandoned and now forgotten spheres of culture and living – on the basis of photography and film as well as commentaries in and from the GDR.
The multi-part journalistic project by Yana Milev entitled “Decoupled Society. Liberalization and Resistance in East Germany since 1989/90”, which is to be published by Peter Lang Academic Publishers in Berlin, Bern, Brussels, Frankfurt, Oxford, New York and Vienna in 2018, examines and describes how the everyday culture and cultural heritage of the GDR is being damaged, eroded and devalued – a process which has come to be known commonly as “die Wende” (“the turnaround”) in German-German history. This chapter in social history has thus far been constructed from a West German perspective. Framing discussions on dealing with the GDR in colonial terms is neither desirable nor politically correct, an argument which is backed up by numerous publications, studies and statistics. The institutes, authorities, media and formats responsible for this seem to have been kept free of East German researchers (in the years 1945 to 1975). The project primarily bridges this gap and outlines an authentic view – one from the field of social concern.
“Testaments to Social and Cultural Disappearance in East Germany since 1989/90” is the fourth in a series of journalistic pieces by Yana Milev, who is compiling the project in partnership with photographer and ethnographer Philipp Beckert. This section of the study deals with continuing the discourse on these blind spots – the abandoned and now forgotten spheres of culture and living – taking as its starting point the testimony of photography and film as well as commentaries in and from the GDR. The opening motif, “Verschwinden heißt Vergessen” (“To disappear means to forget”), references the problems surrounding uprooting the affected East Germans and the opportunity of returning to a discourse of memory. To disappear means to forget – yet film and photography allow us to remember once more.
Alongside other protagonists, the screen work of film director Jürgen Böttcher is prominently discussed in this instalment. Böttcher's films originated in the GDR and rubbed shoulders very closely with it. They centre on people's faces, the stories behind them and the utopia that comes with the freedom of unspent being. From a formalistic point of view, Jürgen Böttcher is a pioneer of modern German film history. Yet his films would not be what they are today outside of the GDR. From a sociological point of view, the films he made then have become politically charged again today, as a work that remembers taboos of social history.
What is especially valuable about Böttcher's work is that he, unlike any other, offers a comprehensive testimony of that time on behalf of survivors of “die Wende” and the generations that followed – a testimony spanning over four dozen films. “Remembering lends meaning”, said Alaida Assmann in her essay entitled “On the metaphors of memory”. Böttcher's films are mnemonic reconstructions of precisely those social fields, which have been colonised by the way the GDR has been handled and devalued. He depicts people as they were before they became the suspended ones of this German-German project in 1989.
Image: Collage with film stills from "Jahrgang 45" ("Born in '45") directed by Jürgen Böttcher, 1996