In the 1980s, the youngest generation of artists to have
been raised in the German Democratic Republic (GDR)
experimented collaboratively to produce work in
intermedial genres, with particular focus on synthesizing
poetry and such visual arts as photography and
printmaking. Drawing on the rich collection of East German
samizdat artists’ books in the Getty Research Institute,
this article examines diverse approaches to design
integrating photography and poetry that emerged from
within this vibrant community, including artistic
practices of dialogue across consecutive pages (Wolfgang
Henne and Marion Wenzel), montaged works (the artist’s
trio of the Günther-Jahn-Bach Editionen), and handwritten
poems combined with found photographs, drawing, and
overpainting (Inge Müller and Christine Schlegel). The
intermedial focus and the limited print-run editions,
which—because of a legal loophole—allowed for modest
circulation of these largely uncensored materials, enabled
artists to speak about controversial issues such as the
environment, the legal system, transgenerational feminist
solidarities, or accountability for Germany’s Nazi past.
Keywords
avant-garde, experimental photography and poetry, East
Germany, independent presses, intermediality, artists’
books
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Cite
Chicago
Anna Horakova and Isotta Poggi, “Overthrowing Reality:
Photo-Poems in 1980s German Democratic Republic Samizdat,”
Getty Research Journal, no. 19 (2024),
https://doi.org/10.59491/ZUEW3338.
MLA
Horakova, Anna, and Isotta Poggi. “Overthrowing Reality:
Photo-Poems in 1980s German Democratic Republic Samizdat.”
Getty Research Journal, no. 19, 2024,
https://doi.org/10.59491/ZUEW3338.
Introduction: Intermediality in German Democratic Republic
Samizdat
In the early 1990s, following the collapse of the German
Democratic Republic (GDR, 1949–89) the Getty Research
Institute (GRI) acquired a substantial collection of archives
and books from scholars, artists, and curators from the former
GDR.1
Among them, a remarkable collection of more than one hundred
handcrafted, limited-edition artists’ books, magazines, and
portfolios produced by small independent presses in the 1980s
stands out. This collection was originally assembled by
book-art scholar Jens Henkel, coauthor of the foundational
bibliography
DDR 1980–1989: Künstlerbücher und originalgrafische
Zeitschriften im Eigenverlag: Eine Bibliografie
(1991; Self-published artists’ books and graphic arts
magazines: A bibliography).2
While the Henkel collection has been available in GRI special
collections since its acquisition in 1993, the scholarly
community was not broadly aware of its presence prior to its
having been aggregated within the GRI’s Library Catalog under
one searchable heading.3
During the Cold War, across the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet
Union, independently (and often clandestinely) produced
literature was known as samizdat, after
самиздат (self-published) in Russian, or, for work
published by independent presses, im Eigenverlag in
German. Much like in other countries of the Soviet Bloc, there
were numerous types of samizdat in the GDR, including
environmental samizdat, samizdat by women and individuals of
marginalized sexual orientations and gender identities, and
the artistic samizdat under discussion here. The GDR’s
artistic samizdat of the 1980s represents the collaborative
work of a vibrant community of emerging artists experimenting
across media who were seeking to communicate with each other
while circumventing state-sponsored production, publication,
and distribution systems.4
By creating limited print runs (from a handful to fewer than
one hundred copies), artists could avoid having to secure
official permits and thus bypassed government censorship.
Overall, although numerous studies addressing artists’ books
and magazines produced by small independent presses in the GDR
have been published since the Wende (a term that refers to the
dissolution of the GDR and the reunification of Germany), much
of this important area of cultural production has yet to be
studied, due in part to the vast output of this kind of work,
which is, moreover, dispersed across various public and
private collections on both sides of the Atlantic.
Among the samizdat produced in the Soviet Union and Eastern
Bloc countries, the intermedial character of the samizdat
under discussion here stands out as a unique form of artistic
expression.5
As a descriptor of innovative artistic production, the term
intermedia was first introduced in the mid-1960s by
Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to refer to art that “fall(s)
conceptually between established or traditional media.”6
It more broadly applies to artwork that crosses the boundaries
between distinct art media, such as Marcel Duchamp’s
readymades, John Heartfield’s graphics combined with
photography, or American artist Allan Kaprow’s happenings, to
produce synthetic or synesthetic experiences.
Intermediality as an artistic practice in East Germany has
been a focus of art historian Sara Blaylock in her monograph,
in the context of her discussion of Intermedia I, the
legendary festival that took place in Coswig (GDR) in 1985.
Blaylock argues that while the conceptual framework for
intermedial art in East Germany was consistent in many
respects with the term’s inception in the writings of Higgins,
its theoretical grounding with particular respect to the East
German situation was enhanced and shaped not only by art
events such as the Intermedia I festival but also through
discussions conducted in the art journal
Bildende Kunst (Visual art), which, in 1981 and
between April and June 1982, published several articles on the
topic and even devoted a whole issue to experimental art forms
in 1988.7
Blaylock points out how in 1989 in East Germany art historian
Eugen Blume teamed up with Christoph Tannert, co-organizer of
the Coswig Intermedia I festival, to put together the
pathbreaking Permanente Kunstkonferenz (Permanent Art
Conference), demonstrating that there was a “vast movement
toward a different kind of cultural practice being led by
artists and art professionals,” despite the authorities’
attempt to undermine such developments.8
This vast movement developed over the years out of a legal
loophole that allowed visual artists to reproduce up to
ninety-nine copies without official permits. As book-art
scholar and East German samizdat collector Reinhard Grüner
explains, writers who had limited opportunities to publish
their work took advantage of this loophole by embedding their
texts into visual or graphic works; this intermedial
collaboration provided a platform for writers to publish their
work as integral art forms rather than as literary texts,
leading to new and autonomous ways of artistic expression that
could circumvent censorship.9
Since the early 1980s, the samizdat artists in the Henkel
collection collaboratively combined a wide variety of media
art, integrating texts (poetry and literature) with
printmaking, photography, music scores, and performance-art
documentation; they did this while borrowing styles and
techniques from various twentieth-century artistic movements
in the service of making work that suited their purposes and
turned out to be, nevertheless, very much of its moment. While
the artists often reclaimed prewar art forms such as German
expressionism, Dada, surrealism, and abstraction, they
integrated these with more recent forms of concrete poetry,
conceptual art, and plein-air actions.
Highlighting the GRI’s collection, this article draws
inspiration from the scholarship on the intermedial nature of
these self-published works. The works are characterized by the
deliberate combination and juxtaposition of different graphic
media—including printmaking, collage, and photography—with
texts to create dynamic combinations of at times incongruous
and polyvalent visual and textual narratives.10
Reflecting a variety of art media, the Henkel artists’ books
collection contains a gamut of contents and formats, sizes,
materials, aesthetics, styles, and designs. From books in
simple leporello formats, such as Manfred Butzmann’s series of
juxtaposed photographs
19 Schaufenster in Pankow (1989, Nineteen shopwindows
in Pankow), to the magnum opus of technical assemblage and
multisensory reading titled
Unaulutu: Steinchen im Sand: Ein Malerbuch (Unaulutu:
Pebbles in sand: An artist’s book) by Frieder Heinze and Olaf
Wegewitz, these works defy easy categorization. Still, the
material is rich in evidence of artists working together
across different media, composing narratives that integrated
images, poetry, and prose, and sometimes music in the form of
accompanying tapes or scores. Because the objects that they
produced were unsanctioned limited editions, they were
compelled to make do with the kind of printing tools that were
readily available. Accordingly, their output has a
characteristically raw, uniquely handmade look. The bindings
of books and journals might be fastened by staples on the
central-fold spine, glued with stationery-store supplies, or
elegantly stitched in the Japanese style. Multiple copies of
texts were mostly reproduced with carbon paper on a typewriter
or by mimeograph. Photocopying was used only rarely, when
artists could access photocopiers, which were closely
regulated by Eastern European regimes during the Cold War.
The case studies in this article examine especially the
intermedial relationship between photography and poetry in
different approaches that take into account both prewar
avant-garde art forms and contemporaneous art movements and
trends. The status of these experimental works in the longer
history of European art movements has to be considered in
terms of their particular historical context; these works were
created, for the most part, collaboratively under the unusual
conditions of working on the margins of or parallel to the
East German art system and publishing industry. In art
historical terms, this samizdat emerged during the heyday of
postmodernism in Europe and the United States, which was
frowned upon by GDR officials and to which some of the artists
in question were exposed mostly through German translations of
works by French theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Michel
Foucault smuggled in from West Berlin by friends. Indeed, for
some poets, including Bert Papenfuß-Gorek, Rainer Schedlinski,
or Hans-Joachim Schulze, postmodernism provided theoretical
frameworks for critiquing official East German discourse in
their poetry and essays.11
More significantly still, the emergence of East German
samizdat also coincides with the integration of modernist and
avant-garde movements into the state’s official canon—a
convoluted process that began with de-Stalinization in 1956,
was negotiated at the 1963 Kafka conference in Liblice,
Czechoslovakia, and culminated in Erich Honecker’s
proclamation in 1971 that there would be no more taboos in the
GDR’s cultural production.12
This relaxation was not unconditional, as the expulsion of
East German songwriter and poet Wolf Biermann in 1976 served
as a demonstration of the limitations on artistic expressions.
Yet the 1980s saw the publication of numerous studies devoted
to movements that, officially, were previously
unsanctioned—from German expressionism to surrealism and
Dada—on which, as already mentioned, the samizdat production
in question draws. While a precise anchoring of this oeuvre in
relation to discourses of modernism, postmodernism, and the
(neo-)avant-garde is not possible, given the constraints of
this essay and the heterogeneity of the oeuvre, Slavicist and
comparatist Svetlana Boym’s capacious category of the
“off-modern”—defined as a “detour into the unexplored
potentials of the modern project [that] recovers unforeseen
pasts and ventures into the side alleys of modern history at
the margins of error of major philosophical, economic, and
technological narratives of modernization and progress”
(rather than, say, the postmodern captivation with the
absurdity of communication)—aptly describes the works’ varying
preoccupations with the ruins of the East German project, with
the utopian horizons of the historical avant-gardes, or with
previous generations of experimental or marginalized
authors.13
The latter gave rise to transgenerational solidarities,
especially among women artists and poets in the GDR, to whom a
portion of this article will attend by discussing the
collaborative artworks by Marion Wenzel (with Wolfgang Henne
and Steffen Volmer), the influences of European modernist
writers and American artists on the Günther-Jahn-Bach
Editionen, and Christine Schlegel’s engagement with
posthumously published poet Inge Müller.
Photo-Poetry
Poetry’s formal succinctness and well-established tradition in
the GDR made it an appealing mode of expression for East
German samizdat artists of the 1980s.14
But while poetry’s ubiquity in East German samizdat production
has attracted a fair amount of scholarly attention, its
integration with photography in samizdat publications has been
less scrutinized. In contrast to conventional GDR photography,
samizdat photography, produced for the most part by a younger
generation of photographers born in the 1950s, is
characterized by technical and thematic experimentation
aligned with that moment’s innovative trends in performance
art and conceptual photography.15
In East German samizdat, poems, rather than being accompanied
by traditional illustrations, were often an integral part of
the graphic work (such as engraving, etching, relief printing,
and serigraphy), etched or carved directly onto the printing
plates of original, limited-edition prints. Some artists
repurposed found photographs, photomechanical prints, and
collage as alternative forms of visual poetry. Poetry was also
supplemented or enhanced with photographic prints, often
reproduced in artists’ books as original gelatin silver
prints. What follows will examine East German samizdat’s
innovative practice of the intermedial genre of photo-poetry.
In his recent book on the history of photo-poetry, Michael
Nott, citing Nicole Boulestreau’s coinage of the term
photopoème, quotes Boulestreau: “In the photopoem,
meaning progresses in accordance with the reciprocity of
writing and figures: reading becomes interwoven through
alternating restitchings of the signifier into text and
image.”16
For Nott, Boulestreau suggests that the
photopoème “should be defined not by its production
but its reception, as a practice of reading and looking that
relies on the reader/viewer to make connections between, and
create meaning from, text and image.”17
Nott outlines the different types of relationships between
photograph and poem, those that can be “of disruption and
serendipity, appropriation and exchange, evocation and
metaphor.”18
Photo-poetry, in this sense, challenges the reader to consume
a message by interpreting it through reading and looking; the
two media (poem and photograph) require distinct vocabularies.
This interplay between the visual and textual components
invites an interactive and layered engagement with the
artwork, and the ensuing process of decoding and interpreting
both direct and indirect correspondences can evoke a unique
experiential response or stimulate metaphorical understanding.
Following Nott’s two-pronged emphasis on meaning-making and
reception, this study charts three different ways by means of
which photo-poetry artists have challenged their audience to
decode a message created from the combination of photography
and poetic verses. The study also explores the genre’s
significance to the generation of GDR artists that produced
it. Three different approaches to photo-poetry will be
discussed: separate juxtapositions of poetry and photography
as autonomous, discrete practices in dialogue within a
narrative sequence, across consecutive pages of an artist’s
book; montage of photograph and poem into a single work of
art; and more elaborate intermedial fusion that combines found
photographs with printmaking, painting, and poetic verses
transcribed by hand in the context of a poet’s oeuvre as a
visual and textual narrative.
Landscape as Signs
The artist’s book
Landschaft als Zeichen, messbar-vermessbar (Landscape
as signs, measurable, surveyable) explores the intermedial
aesthetics of juxtaposing self-referential forms of poetry
with photography. The book was made in Leipzig in 1983 by
book-artist Henne with printmaker Steffen Volmer and
photographer Wenzel. It is in landscape format and bound with
four small metal screws reminiscent of mechanical assemblage
components. The poetry is typed in Courier on red-lined metric
graph paper, followed on subsequent pages by original
black-and-white photographs of low contrast—ethereal
landscapes showing the silhouette of a leafless forest, barely
visible in the winter fog, or reflections of reeds in still
water, which look like abstracted signs of an illegible
language. Within foldouts beneath the photographs there are
mounted etchings or embossed prints in pairs (by Henne or
Vollmer) of abstract compositions that visually render the
themes of nature and artifice as coexisting, complementary, or
conflicting worlds.
The book explores whether a landscape’s value can be measured,
surveyed, or quantified, and is critical of threats to the
environment from pollution and the exploitation of natural
resources.19
The three poems call for the recovery and preservation of the
natural landscape, addressing nature and culture as well as
the impact of humans on the environment. Henne’s concrete poem
“Landschaft” is laid out on graph paper across Cartesian
coordinates, for which the horizontal and vertical axes are
composed of the repeated plus (+) signs of a typewriter. The
grid-based composition evokes the mathematical procedure
involved in measuring the value of the landscape, comprising
the land and its natural resources (fig. 1):
landscape
landscape
landscape
landscape ’s spaces dreams
landscape in emigration
The words of the poem are typed abutting the vertical axis of
plus signs on both sides, with the final phrase traversing it,
running from the top-left quadrant toward the bottom-right
quadrant. The word landschaft (landscape) is repeated
four times on top, with a vertical line of eight plus signs
linking the first letter of the third and fourth instances,
creating a box, perhaps to suggest the parceling of land. The
layout physically embodies the notion of measured spaces,
which beneath the horizontal axis becomes “landscapes’ spaces”
and then dreams. In the last line, landscape is linked to
emigration, which might be read literally or symbolically.20
Two pages later, Wenzel’s striking, meditative photograph
shows a river in a misty, hibernal light (fig. 2). Wenzel has said that she was interested in capturing the
mood and the beauty of nature, the light, and the structural
composition.21
Flowing through a snow-covered field, the river cuts across
from the top left of the frame toward the bottom right margin.
The image contrast is so low that the horizon line between the
earth and the sky is almost invisible. In the foreground,
animal footprints in the snow appear as signs of a past
presence, evoking passage and movement. As a visual
correspondence with Henne’s verse “landscape in emigration,”
these signs could subtly allude to the subject of emigration,
rarely discussed openly in the GDR, where the erection of the
Berlin Wall in 1961 significantly curbed freedom of movement,
particularly the right to travel to the West.
Concrete poetry features widely in GDR samizdat. But Henne’s
combined use of graph paper and photography creates a
multilayered narrative, enhanced by the use of papers of
different colors or textures, and interactions among different
media. The book’s layout enfolds additional imagery with
original prints hidden within foldouts, which impart a dynamic
rhythm to the haptic experience of finding covert pathways,
correspondences, discoveries, and reflections. While the two
media of poetry and photography, having been printed on
different pages of the book, are not directly juxtaposed, the
book’s objective is to invite the viewer/reader to unfold its
intermedial dynamic by meditating on one work at a time.
Text / Image Equivalences
A more elaborate approach to the creation of photo-poems can
be found in the work of the artists’ group Günther-Jahn-Bach
Editionen, which for the most part conjoins the two media
through montage techniques: the typed text was projected onto
film negatives, after which the image was printed as an
integrated work of art.22
The trio’s foto-lyrik arbeiten (photo-poetry works)
were devised in the late 1970s by Weimar-based photographer
Claus Bach and Berlin-based poet Thomas Günther, who were soon
joined by printmaker Sabine Jahn. Born in Thuringia in the
1950s and friends since high school, the artists produced
special editions together throughout the 1980s. Günther, the
group’s poet, had been imprisoned at the age of seventeen for
running a student reading club and protesting the repression
of the Prague Spring. After his release, he moved to Potsdam,
where he worked as a gardener at the Sanssouci Palace and,
from 1974 to 1977, as a Regieassistent (assistant
director) at the Berliner Ensemble, the theater company
founded by Bertolt Brecht. Throughout the 1980s, Günther was a
caretaker at the Georgen-Parochial-Friedhof I in East Berlin,
pursuing his art collaborations within the unconventional
space of the cemetery wherein he is now buried.
Günther’s papers at the GRI provide unique archival
documentation of the poet’s artistic production in the 1980s,
including works that, on account of their provocative
subjects, could not find an official publication venue at the
time, such as the photo-poem “Das Gesetz” (The law) (fig. 3).23
On the verso of the photographic print, Günther annotated this
piece with the phrase “nach Kafka” (after [Franz] Kafka),
referring to the writer’s short story “Vor dem Gesetz”
(“Before the Law”), which recounts an individual’s inability
to tackle the law. Composed in 1981, Günther’s poem was
printed on transparent adhesive paper, mounted on top of a
photograph taken by Bach for this purpose, and then
rephotographed. Bach photographed the Schönhauser Allee subway
station in East Berlin dramatically framed from the street
under the elevated rail tracks, looking up toward the subway
bridge. From this angle, the station appears as a colossal
structure, an overwhelming receptacle, which dominates almost
the entire field of vision. The imposing structure overtakes a
pedestrian, barely visible through the entrance. Here the
human figure appears on the verge of being swallowed by “the
law,” or unable to break through its system.
“Das Gesetz” addresses the authority of the law. “The law is
made for you, so as not to dissuade you from the path that we
all walk together,” Günther asserts in the middle of the poem.
The verse highlights the norms of the law that compel one to
stay on the collective path, avoiding the “intricate ways”
that would make one “go astray and so become guilty in the
name of the law.” In the poet’s words, “loners are not in
demand” in a system where the law is a “line” that requires
one to walk on it without “stepping outside” of it. He assures
the reader that if one allows oneself “what is allowed, within
the framework of the law,” one can pursue it, or “forget it,”
which are his final words, implying the impossibility of
negotiating with the system.24
Günther and Bach’s collaborative photo-poem “Das Gesetz”
invites the reader to read the image while looking at the
poem, to experience the dissonance of the perspectival space
that frames the symmetrical composition of the poem—centered
rigidly within the spatially overwhelming elevated railroad
rack.
A year after making “Das Gesetz,” Bach and Günther created a
montage photograph representing their group’s manifesto, with
a staged action at dawn on an empty highway on the outskirts
of East Berlin (fig. 4). Bach
photographed Günther as he walked toward the horizon while
tossing their hitchhiking signs into the air and letting them
flutter to the ground behind. Günther’s performative gesture
signifies the trio’s artistic rejection of predetermined paths
and destinations. In their own words, they were not seeking
the theoretical frameworks of artistic movements as
inspiration but simply pursuing their own artistic
language.25
Centrally framed by the camera, Günther’s felt hat (a possible
allusion to Joseph Beuys’s signature attire) marks the
vanishing point at the center of the perspectival view,
calling attention to the core role of the poet, his
imagination springing outward in all directions.
Montaged below the portrait of Günther, a bard embarking on an
unscripted journey, is a quotation from poet Antonin Artaud.
Artaud’s line synthesizes the trio’s artistic vision: “Parce
qu’on a eu peur que leur poésie ne sorte des livres et ne
renverse la réalité” (Because they were afraid that their
poetry might leap out of the books and overthrow reality). The
quotation, a sentence that Artaud wrote with reference to the
surrealist poets, amplifies the power of poetry to overthrow
reality, recontextualized here for the trio’s artistic
purposes.26
If in “Das Gesetz” poetry is used to warn the reader about the
restrictions of “the line of the law,” in the manifesto it is
presented as a powerful subversive tool.27
Abstracting the perspectival view of the trio’s manifesto,
Jahn designed the cover of the portfolio Traumhaus, a
set of twelve foto-lyrik arbeiten by Günther and Bach
(fig. 5). The cover depicts four
triangles, two yellow ones on top and bottom and two green
ones on the sides, converging on a carefully designed
vanishing point at the center of the image, like Günther’s
felt hat. The capitalized title (TRAUMHAUS) is printed in red
and runs across the green triangles, with the point of
convergence being not the inner points of the green triangles
but the letter H, bounding the point of convergence
between the yellow triangles. As a grapheme, the letter can be
read as joining or separating the words to its sides, creating
a double meaning. Traumhaus, which translates as
“dream house,” evokes an ideal dream space. However, in
reading the words on the green background without the
connecting H, the German “Traum aus” translates as the “dream
(presumably to build a utopian world) is over.”
In exploring her own intermedial combinations of photography
and text, Jahn used screen printing to do more than add a
chromatic dimension to the work. In 1987, upon finding a
catalog of black-and-white photographs of flowers by American
photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Jahn felt that these images,
in her own words, “screamed for color,” and she proceeded to
create a set of five screen prints that transformed
Mapplethorpe’s flowers by infusing the forms with brightly
saturated color in a high-contrast, pop-art style that
simplified and enhanced the flowers’ core shapes.28
According to Jahn, she was inspired by the work of two
prominent women artists, Georgia O’Keeffe and Patti Smith, who
were powerful not only on account of their own artistic
creativity but also because of the creative synergies that
ensued from working with their partners, photographers Alfred
Stieglitz and Mapplethorpe, respectively.29
Jahn conceived this portfolio as an homage to all four
artists, highlighting their interconnected creative
relationships by combining appropriated images and texts from
all of them. For example, in one plate, Jahn combined a poem
by Smith with a painting by O’Keeffe. Jahn further expressed
her admiration for these artists’ collaborative partnerships
by continuing to produce intermedial work over several decades
with her own partner, Günther.30
In addition to the bold-colored flowers, Jahn made a screen
print reinterpreting a portrait of O’Keeffe, appropriating a
photograph by Stieglitz that shows the painter sitting on the
floor next to her palette while looking back at the
camera.31
On the empty visual field created by the area of her skirt,
Jahn added text written by hand, a German translation of
O’Keeffe’s poem “I Have Picked Flowers Where I Found
Them.”32
Its text is a contemplative commentary on nature and the
desert landscape as sources of inspiration (fig. 6). By placing O’Keeffe’s personal words on the artist’s
figure and using screen print with poetry on a reappropriated
photograph, Jahn transforms O’Keeffe’s own body into her
poetic voice. Jahn’s portfolio also points to the influence of
American art from both prewar figures (such as Stieglitz and
O’Keeffe) and contemporary cultural stars such as Patty Smith
and Mapplethorpe, whose respective intermedial work (combining
images and poetry) is presented in other plates.
While overall the photo-poetry of the Günther-Jahn-Bach
Editionen reflects the group’s active engagement with
international artistic movements, referencing significant
prewar writers (such as Kafka and Artaud) as much as popular
icons of their time from across the Atlantic, Jahn’s
intermedial work elevates the concept of artistic
collaboration to a subject for her own art, showcasing
personal relationships as a driving force in her creative
process. Jahn does this not only by engaging with her own
group’s members but also by reinterpreting other artists’
works beyond spatiotemporal boundaries through her own highly
transformational process.
Intergenerational and Feminist Solidarities in
Vielleicht werde ich plötzlich verschwinden
Experimentation and the blurring of conventional distinctions
between media and artistic forms—including the fusion of
poetry and photography—became the salient feature of the final
generation of the GDR’s writers. To this end, the young
writers looked to the historical avant-garde, notably Dadaist
practices of collage and photomontage and German expressionist
draftsmanship and printmaking as well as techniques from
neo-avant-garde movements, especially concrete and visual
poetry and Fluxus. Drawing on several of these traditions, the
artist’s book
Vielleicht werde ich plötzlich verschwinden (Perhaps
I will suddenly disappear), created in 1986 by Schlegel (b.
1950), combines Schlegel’s collages, drawings, and
overpainting treatments with the poetry of the late East
German poet Müller (1925–66).
In addition to being intermedial, Schlegel’s engagement with
Müller is also transgenerational, which in the context of the
GDR carries both aesthetic as well as political implications.
According to literary historian Wolfgang Emmerich’s
influential tripartite generational classification of East
German writers, the first generation, comprising repatriated
antifascists who had fled Germany during the Nazi regime,
fervently adhered to socialist realism in service to the task
of building socialism.33
The second generation (born between 1915 and 1935) were, in
Emmerich’s view, engaged in the socialist project’s easing of
strict socialist-realist criteria for artistic production and
availed themselves of predominantly modernist aesthetics.
According to Emmerich’s model, the third and final generation
(born in the 1950s) assumed an attitude of disassociation
(Aussteigertum) from the political or aesthetic
projects of its generational predecessors.34
Yet while Emmerich’s study provides a nuanced lens through
which to read a body of work that spans the forty years of the
GDR’s existence, his neat ascriptions of political allegiances
and aesthetic norms can also obscure the exchanges, dialogues,
and homages that did take place across generational lines, as
evidenced by third-generation East German artist Schlegel’s
engagement with the poetry of second-generation East German
writer Müller. In addition, Emmerich’s conjecture—that the
final generation of East German writers had no interest in the
East German project whatsoever—coincides perhaps too neatly
with the post-Wende marginalization of East German culture
following the German reunification, where many rich and
incisive works produced in the GDR continued to be overlooked.
Both Schlegel and Müller were already marginalized in the GDR
on account of their status as women artists. Their work,
moreover, straddled officially sanctioned and unsanctioned GDR
culture of the 1960s and 1980s, respectively, and was
subsequently written out of the canon in post-reunified
Germany.35
Though Schlegel had studied painting and graphic design at the
Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden from 1973 to 1978, was a
member of the official artists’ union (Künstlerverband), and
had her work included in official exhibitions, the artist
viewed the official expectations placed on art as
“dictatorial” and became involved in the unofficial artistic
scene.36
She regularly contributed to the unofficial journals
und, usw., and Mikado, designed the
cover of ariadnefabrik (ariadne factory), and created
posters for various underground events such as poetry
readings, before emigrating to West Berlin in 1986. Schlegel
has also attributed her marginalization in the GDR to the
well-documented exclusion of women artists from the country’s
artistic underground (with Raja Lubinetzki and Gabriele
Stötzer as notable exceptions), and to the general position of
women in the socialist state, in which women’s emancipation
was an officially pursued goal that fell short in practicality
on issues such as the double burden, in which women bore the
dual responsibility of earning wages outside the home and
performing unpaid domestic labor inside the home.37
Schlegel came across Müller when, in 1986, twenty years after
Müller’s death, a volume of her poetry titled
Wenn ich schon sterben muß (If I do have to die) was
being prepared for publication with the official press Aufbau.
The volume was overseen by Dresden-based poet and publisher
Richard Pietraß, who also lent Schlegel all of Müller’s texts
from which to choose for her artist’s book.38Vielleicht werde ich plötzlich verschwinden thus came
into existence contemporaneously with the official publication
of Müller’s poetry.
Born in 1925 in Berlin as Inge Meyer, the author’s youth was
dominated by life in the Third Reich and the Second World War.
From 1942 until 1945, she was drafted into Nazi war efforts,
first working as an agricultural laborer, then as a maid in a
Nazi officer’s household (reportedly on account of her
“political unreliability”), and eventually, in January 1945,
as a Luftwaffenhelferin (assistant to the German air
force).39
Shortly before the liberation of Berlin, Meyer’s parents died
in a bombing orchestrated by the German air force against the
approaching Red Army, while Meyer herself spent three days
trapped underneath a collapsing building. The traumas of the
war resurface periodically in Müller’s biography—she died in
1966 by suicide after numerous attempts following the end of
the war—and in her work.
In the fledgling GDR, Müller, who joined East Germany’s
communist party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands,
SED [Socialist Unity Party]) in 1948, worked as a journalist,
and became a successful children’s author. With her third
husband, renowned East German playwright Heiner Müller, whom
she married in 1955, Inge Müller cowrote several theater
plays, notably Der Lohndrücker (1957; The wage shark)
and Die Korrektur (1961; The correction). The latter
led to Heiner Müller’s expulsion from the official writers’
union and a ban on publishing his work in the same year, which
by association extended to Inge Müller, and which Ines Geipel
describes as the “beginning of the radical unraveling of Inge
Müller’s life.”40
While Heiner Müller eventually earned a considerable
international reputation along with which he regained his
standing in the GDR, the volume of 1986 was the first
significant publication of Inge Müller’s work in the GDR
following the ban of 1961.
Schlegel was “touched and inspired” by Müller’s poetry, which
she “decidedly liked” and found “absolutely contemporary”
(absolut zeitgemäß), even more than twenty years after it had
been written.41
She felt drawn to the poet’s thematic preoccupations,
including environmental concerns and the “vulnerability of
nature”; friendship; and death; as well as the “concision,”
“economy,” and “clarity” of Müller’s poetic language that,
nevertheless, gives its readers the “whole picture.”42
Interestingly, while the two artists belong to different
generations, the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961
represents a caesura in their lives and their respective
relationship to the state: while for Müller it coincided with
the publishing ban in the volatile atmosphere of the wall’s
construction, Schlegel identifies the building of the Berlin
Wall as a watershed moment of her childhood, after which the
situation in the GDR took a turn for the worse.
Vielleicht werde ich plötzlich verschwinden, titled
after a poem by Müller, contains a selection of twelve poems,
handwritten by Schlegel and distributed over the book’s thirty
pages. The poems are at times juxtaposed with illustrations,
at times integrated into adjacent drawings, and on several
occasions combined into photo-poems. The artist’s book is
gathered in a Japanese binding with a black-and-blue cover
that bears the title, as well as Schlegel’s and Müller’s
names, in hand-drawn lettering and embedded in an organic
composition that mixes abstract and figurative elements (fig. 7). The composition is organized around what can be recognized
as an outstretched hand, which might allude to the de-skilled
artistic gesture. Its rough finish recalls both the visual
vocabulary of the pictorial movement art informel and
an earlier tradition of expressionist woodcuts. The volume was
among several artists’ books produced by the Malerbücher
Eigenverlag (Self-Published Artists’ Books) under the auspices
of Sascha Anderson, the artistic impresario of the GDR’s
unofficial art scene and, as it was later revealed, a prolific
Stasi informant, who had also approached Schlegel about
creating the artist’s book, although the choice of Müller’s
poetry and themes remained, in Schlegel’s testimony, her own
decision.43
The present study concentrates on three works included in the
artist’s book—two spreads and one triple-page foldout—devised
around Müller’s poems “Drei Fragen hinter der Tür” (Three
questions behind the door) and “Freundschaft” (Friendship) as
well as a photo-poem of a found family photograph and
fragments of Müller’s poem “Der verlorene Sohn (1941)” (The
lost son [1941]). All three selections combine Müller’s poetry
with group photographs to negotiate themes such as national
and familial accountability for the Second World War, the role
of women in the Third Reich, and the relationship between the
Nazi past and the new sociality of the GDR.
Family Photographs, Unsettled
In its creative overpainting and overdrawing of an
appropriated photograph and Müller’s eponymous poem,
Schlegel’s rendering of “Drei Fragen hinter der Tür” layers
national and familial memories (fig. 8). The spread displays a photograph of the Monument to the
Battle of the Nations (Völkerschlachtdenkmal, completed in
1913) in Leipzig, a controversial site commemorating battle of
1813 fought between Prussia and its allies against Napoleon
that in its embodiment of völkisch (ethnonationalist)
motifs “revealed the growth of a popular nationalism” that was
later mythologized by the Nazis.44
Before the monument, a group of five people, ostensibly women,
can be seen posing for the camera. The photograph is likely a
found object—Schlegel collected “bizarre” and “strange” family
photos in thrift stores and secondhand bookshops.45
The artist overpainted crude outlines of the female body over
the body of the central figure. She distorts another figure
beyond recognition by adding a giant eye and jagged lines
suggesting an ominous grin.
If the group is supposed to be cast as female, the upper half
of the image of the monument is coded as male, signified by a
headless, nude male figure drawn hovering above the group,
Schlegel’s addition of stark outlines around the statues of
soldiers on the memorial, and the delineation of the phallic
shape of the memorial itself. The masculinist investiture of
the monument is countermanded by the painted lines, through
which Müller has crossed out and obscured portions of the
memorial and rendered the hovering male figure as decapitated
alongside the quasi-decapitated memorial itself, whose
photograph has been cut off at the top in the page layout.
Müller’s poem is created in a white space within painted black
outlines on the opposite page that echoes the shape of the
memorial and likewise resembles a decapitated torso, mirroring
the headless monument on the right page. The poem takes the
perspective of a child, who is unaware of the bygone cheer of
the poem’s addressee behind a “door” reminiscent of the fairy
tale “Bluebeard”:
DREI FRAGEN HINTER DER TÜR
aus Kindertagen
und Du hast gelacht
gestern vor zweitausend Jahren
THREE QUESTIONS BEHIND THE DOOR
from childhood days
and you laughed
yesterday two thousand years ago
The work stages and subverts what historian Mary Fulbrook
terms the “biological essentialism”46
of the Nazis, which attributed fundamentally different roles
to those men and women deemed to be part of the Nazis’
racialized community, and at once turns historically
victimized women into perpetrators. It encounters this past,
moreover, as something inaccessible, concentrated in the
background of the image that Schlegel nevertheless proceeds to
excavate.
If the past in “Drei Fragen hinter der Tür” seems to be
obscured, it is foregrounded in a photo-poem of a found family
photograph that Schlegel combined with verses from Müller’s
poem “Der verlorene Sohn (1941)” (fig. 9). The photograph features a seated woman—likely the
mother—surrounded by five children. The crux of the image is
undoubtedly a boy wearing a Prussian military uniform, who is
also the only figure that Schlegel leaves unmodified. The
remaining figures are given a spectral presence with spidery
lines tracing their silhouettes or, in the case of the mother,
with Müller’s poem, which thematizes family-sanctioned
sacrifice of children as soldiers toward the end of the war,
with words and phrases such as “parents” (“Eltern”), “betrayal
of the country” (“Landesverat” [sic.]), “he killed” (“tötete
er”), and “his brother” (“seinen Bruder”) written across her
head and clothing. The work confronts the viewer with the past
head-on, mobilizing the uncomfortable frontality of the image
in a manner reminiscent of German artist Gerhard Richter’s
painting Uncle Rudi (1965) and foregrounding the
connection between Prussian militarism and the Second World
War.47
The task of coming to terms with the past is evoked from a
different perspective in “Freundschaft” (Friendship) (fig. 10). The work consists of a three-page foldout featuring a
wide-angle photograph of a group of people, possibly officials
of some kind, that is cut off to show only the legs and the
feet. The empty ground at the photograph’s center features a
nearly illegible text—the text of the poem
“Freundschaft”—which appears as though it has been etched into
the dark background and then scratched out or otherwise
defaced. A clean copy of the poem is reproduced on the
following page:
FREUNDSCHAFT
Freundschaft ist sentimental
Unwissenschaftlich, dumm, dunkel
Nicht erkennbar wie alle Gefühle:
Sagen Wissenschaftler, Leute, Schriftsteller
Dichter? Sie verstellen die Schrift
Und benutzen die Schreibmaschine.
Ihre Aufgabe: die Macht zu analysieren
Haben viele aufgegeben.
Freunde:
Außer den Toten: die
Den Befehl verweigerten
Die den Ängstlichen
Die Angst nicht vorwarfen.
Die jeden grüßten ohne Ausnahme
Die nicht sicher waren
Ob sie einen Fehler machten.
Aber sie taten etwas.48
FRIENDSHIP
Friendship is sentimental
Unscientific, dumb, dark
Not recognizable like all feelings:
Say scientists, people, authors
Poets? They distort the script
And use the typewriter.
Their task: to analyze power
Many have given up.
Friends:
Except for the dead: who
Refused the command
Who did not reproach the anxious ones
For their fear
Who greeted everyone without exception.
Who were not sure
If they were making a mistake
But they did something.
The poem claims that attempts by poets to describe friendship
fall short because they have given up on their task “to
analyze power”—a phrase that, due to the ambiguity of the
original German, can also be translated as the “power to
analyze.”49
Instead, the poem predicates friendship as a diachronic
alliance between the poetic ego, “the dead,” the antifascists
(those who “refused the command”), and antiauthoritarians. In
so doing, it recalls the utopian, antifascist aspirations
under the auspices of which the GDR had been founded,
countering the erasure of previous emancipatory and
antiauthoritarian histories. This erasure, one can say, is
visualized by Schlegel’s scratching out of Müller’s text, as
though it had been done by the feet of the solemn group
above.50
Schlegel thus might be trying to rescue not only moments of
resistance and utopianism that she felt the East German
project had abandoned with the building of the Berlin Wall but
also the poetry of a censored yet prescient Müller.
Conclusion
The three collaborative exchanges examined here are quite
different in nature and process. Henne selected photographs
that had been taken by Wenzel because they responded to his
artistic sensibility.51
Günther, Bach, and Jahn worked together, creating dynamic
montages with photographs often deliberately staged to
accommodate poetry or altered to visually enhance it. Schlegel
worked instead as a visual artist engaging with found
photographs and poetry.
Yet the use of poetry and photography to communicate between
the lines empowered these young GDR poets and artists to
challenge the official cultural mandates that organized
artistic media in compartmentalized ways. Their intermedial
art opened up new possibilities for bypassing censorship and
addressing taboo subjects, summoning the visual and linguistic
power of poetry to challenge the East German collective
imaginary. As the present case studies show, this art
addressed, for instance, the beauty of the natural landscape
threatened by industrial pollution and environmental decay in
the work of Henne and Wenzel; the urban, everyday public space
and personal experience of East Berlin (Günther, Bach, and
Jahn); and connections to the country’s historical legacies
and wartime traumas in the integrated work of Müller and
Schlegel.
Especially striking in this body of work is the recourse of
multiple women artists to the genre of photo-poetry, whether
to transmit concerns about the fragility of nature (Wenzel),
explore transnational aesthetic allegiances (Jahn), or enact
intergenerational solidarities with marginalized women authors
(Schlegel). If for Artaud the new poetry had the power to
“leap out of the books to overthrow reality,” the examples
discussed above show how this work generated a uniquely
intermedial language, giving rise to artistic networks and
influences across generations and international borders. It is
thanks to exchanges and collaborations such as these that the
last generation of East German artists could develop practices
that broke through not only aesthetic and geographic barriers
but also social and political taboos.
Anna Horakova is assistant professor in the
Literatures, Cultures, and Languages Department at the
University of Connecticut.
Isotta Poggi is associate curator of
photographs at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
Notes
The authors thank Skyler Arndt-Briggs, Barton Byg, and other
faculty at the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer
Institute program “Culture in the Cold War: East German Art,
Music and Film” at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst,
in June–July 2018; the Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft Film
Library at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Carl
Gelderloos (Binghamton University [SUNY]) for their invaluable
contributions to the project. Unless otherwise noted, all
translations from the German, including correspondence with
artists, are by the authors. The translation of Wolfgang
Henne’s poem “Landschaft” is by Daria Bona. All English
translations of Inge Müller’s poetry were completed as part of
the EXCEL Scholars Program, a faculty-student research
collaboration between the coauthor of this article Anna
Horakova and Julia McSpirit Beckett (BA History and German,
2021) at Lafayette College.
Berlin-based dealer Jürgen Holstein assembled the
archival materials and special editions on the “GDR art
experiment” (“Kunstexperiment DDR,” as he put it). See
Jürgen Holstein et al., eds.,
Bücher, Kunst und Kataloge: Dokumentation zum 40
jährigen Bestehen des Antiquariats Jürgen Holstein
(Berlin: Jürgen Holstein Antiquariat, 2007), 136–37. The
collections acquired by the Getty consist of the DDR
Collections, 1928–1993 (bulk 1950–1993), Los Angeles,
Getty Research Institute (GRI), 940002 (http://primo.getty.edu/GRI:GETTY_ALMA21123809170001551) and the collection of artists’ books and magazines
assembled originally by Jens Henkel.
↩︎
Jens Henkel and Sabine Russ,
DDR 1980–1989: Künstlerbücher und originalgrafische
Zeitschriften im Eigenverlag: Eine Bibliografie
(Gifkendorf: Merlin, 1991).
↩︎
The GRI’s collection of the East German samizdat from
the 1980s is linked in the Getty Library Catalog per the
initiative of Isotta Poggi under the aggregate phrase
“East German Samizdat collection,” which can be entered
into the search field at
https://primo.getty.edu/primo-explore/search?vid=GRI. As of October 2022, this collection counts 170
artists’ books, magazines, or portfolios. The list was
linked as part of the research project On the Eve of
Revolution: The East German Artists in the 1980s,
https://www.getty.edu/projects/on-eve-revolution-east-german-artist-1980s/. ↩︎
Notable exceptions aside, artistic samizdat in the GDR
had a relatively shorter trajectory than that of other
countries of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union. The
emergence of East German artistic samizdat in the late
1970s to early 1980s is credited in part to the vastly
demoralizing impact that the 1976 expatriation of
singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann had on the emerging
generation of East German artists as well as to a
loophole created by the Bildende Kunst bill from 31
August 1971, which postulated that editions of graphic
artworks comprising more than one hundred copies had to
be officially approved; the bill unwittingly shielded
small-scale interdisciplinary projects from the censor.
See Jay Rosellini, Wolf Biermann (Munich: C.H.
Beck, 1992); and Frank Eckart,
Eigenart und Eigensinn: Alternative Kulturszenen in
der DDR (1980–1990)
(Bremen: Temmen, 1993), 37.
↩︎
For the dynamic range of types of samizdat from the
USSR, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and the GDR, see
Wolfgang Eichwede et al.,
Samizdat: Alternative Kultur in Zentral- und
Osteuropa, die 60er bis 80er Jahre
(Bremen: Temmen, 2000).
↩︎
Higgins wrote extensively on intermedial arts that fit
this characterization. Richard Higgins,
Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of Intermedia
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984),
15. Higgins’s use and definition of the term first
appeared in his “Synesthesia and Intersenses:
Intermedia,” Something Else Newsletter 1, no. 1
(1966) (accessible on UbuWeb: Papers,
https://www.ubu.com/papers/higgins_intermedia.html), where he mentions the example of intermedia as a
painting that is fused conceptually with words.
↩︎
Sara Blaylock,
Parallel Public: Experimental Art in Late East
Germany
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022), 180.
↩︎
Reinhard Grüner, “‘Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland
. . . Es war ein Traum.’ Künstlerbücher ostdeutscher
Künstler, Eine fragmentarische Autopsie,” in
Imprimatur: Ein Jahrbuch für Bücherfreunde,
n.s., 28 (2023): 121–43. Grüner’s references on the
distinct circumstances of the intermediality of GDR
samizdat include: Helga Sauer, “Über die
Künstlerzeitschriften der DDR,” Deutsche Fotothek,
December 2000,
https://www.deutschefotothek.de/cms/kuenstlerzeitschriften-ddr.xml. ↩︎
Select publications in chronological order: Egmont Hesse
and Christoph Tannert, eds., Zellinnendruck,
exh. cat. (Leipzig: self-published, 1990); Erk Grimm,
“Der Tod der Ostmoderne oder die BRDigung des
DDR-Untergrunds: Zur Lyrik Bert-Papenfuß-Goreks,”
Zeitschrift für Germanistik 1 (1991): 9–20;
Thomas Wohlfahrt and Klaus Michael,
Vogel oder Käfig sein: Kunst und Literatur aus
unabhängigen Zeitschriften in der DDR 1979–1989
(Berlin: Druckhaus Galrev, 1991); Anita Kenner
[Christoph Tannert], “Avantgarde in der DDR heute? Ein
Panorama der Kunst-, Literatur-, und Musikszene,”
Niemandsland: Zeitschrift zwischen den Kulturen
5, no. 2 (1988): 94–110; Uwe Wittstock,
Von der Stalinallee zum Prenzlauer Berg: Wege der
DDR-Literatur 1949–1989
(Munich: Piper, 1989); Arnold Heinz Ludwig and Gerhard
Wolf, eds.,
Die andere Sprache: Neue DDR-Literatur der 80er
Jahre
(Munich: Text + Kritik, 1990); Eckart,
Eigenart und Eigensinn; David Bathrick,
The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the
GDR
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); Karen
Leeder,
Breaking Boundaries: A New Generation of Poets in the
GDR
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Peter Böthig,
Grammatik einer Landschaft: Literatur aus der DDR in
den 80er Jahren
(Berlin: Lukas, 1997); Birgit Dahlke,
Papierboot: Autorinnen aus der DDR—inoffiziell
publiziert
(Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1997); Alison
Lewis,
Die Kunst des Verrats: Der Prenzlauer Berg und die
Staatssicherheit
(Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003); Carola
Hähnel-Mesnard,
La littérature autoéditée en RDA dans les années
1980: Un espace hétérotopique
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007); Uwe Warnke and Ingeborg
Quaas,
Die Addition der Differenzen: die Literaten- und
Künstlerszene Ostberlins 1979 bis 1989
(Berlin: Verbrecher, 2009);
Poesie des Untergrunds = Poetry of the Underground:
Catalog of the Exhibition at the General Consulate of
the Federal Republic of Germany in New York City,
December 9, 2010 to March 3, 2011, exh. cat. (Berlin: Galerie auf Zeit, 2010); Seth
Howes, “‘Killersatellit’ and Randerscheinung:
Punk and the Prenzlauer Berg,”
German Studies Review 36, no. 3 (October 2013):
579–601; Birgit Dahlke, “Underground Literature? The
Unofficial Culture of the GDR and Its Development after
the Wende,” in
Rereading East Germany: The Literature and Film of
the GDR,
ed. Karen Leeder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2015), 160–79; Stephan Pabst,
Post-Ost-Moderne: Poetik nach der DDR
(Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016);
Fun on the Titanic: Underground Art and the East
German State,
a thirty-one-page booklet for an exhibition held at the
Beinecke Library, Yale University,
https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Fun
on the Titanic_Underground Art and the East German
State.pdf; Seth Howes,
Moving Images in the Margins: Experimental Film in
Late Socialist East Germany
(London: Camden House, 2019); Blaylock,
Parallel Public; Sarah E. James,
Paper Revolutions: An Invisible Avant-Garde
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022); Brianna J Smith,
Free Berlin: Art, Urban Politics, and Everyday
Life
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022); and Jutta Müller-Tamm
and Lukas Nils Regeler, eds.,
DDR-Literatur und die Avantgarden (Bielefeld:
Aisthesis, 2022).
↩︎
Dominic Boyer, “Foucault in the Bush: The Social Life of
Post-Structuralist Theory in East Berlin’s Prenzlauer
Berg,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 66, no.
2 (2001): 207– 36. See also April Eisman, “East German
Art and the Permeability of the Berlin Wall,”
German Studies Review 38, no. 3 (October 2015):
597–616.
↩︎
Honecker’s speech was given at the 8th congress of the
Socialist Unity Party. See also Thomas W. Goldstein,
“The Era of No Taboos? 1971–76,” chap. 3 in
Writing in Red:The East German Writers Union and the Role of
Literary Intellectuals
(Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell & Brewer, 2019), 69–96,
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781787441651.004. ↩︎
Wolfgang Emmerich,
Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR (Leipzig:
Kiepenheuer, 1996).
↩︎
Conventional photographic practices in the GDR adhered
to the prescribed role of photography as a tool to
document society and to promote the socialist values
that the state had outlined in the context of nation
building in its earlier decades, a role that was still
prevalent in the early 1980s. Official photography
exhibitions and photo books tended to promote the
“family of man” type of photography, based on pictorial
traditions that emphasized positive modes of
representation, from the beauty of the natural landscape
to the peaceful society of socialist people’s republics.
See, for example, the exhibition series
BIFOTA (Berliner Internationale FotoAusstellung) organized by the Zentrale Kommission Fotografie, or
ZKF, of the GDR, discussed by Sarah Goodrum in the
introduction and first chapter of her dissertation.
Sarah Goodrum, “The Problem of the Missing Museum: The
Construction of Photographic Culture in the GDR” (PhD
diss., University of Southern California, 2015).
↩︎
Nicole Boulestreau, “Le Photopoème Facile: Un Nouveau
Livre dans les années 30,” in
Le Livre Surréaliste: Mélusine IV (Lausanne:
L’Age de l’Homme, 1982), 164, quoted in Michael Nott,
Photopoetry, 1845–2015: A Critical History (New
York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018), 2.
↩︎
The authors thank Daria Bona (Curatorial Fellow, Alfried
Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Stiftung, 2021–22) for the
translation and interpretation of the poem and for her
email correspondence with Wolfgang Henne and Marion
Wenzel.
↩︎
Marion Wenzel, email message to author, 19 January 2022.
The location of this photograph is Klein-Trebbow (near
Neustrelitz) in the federal state of
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
↩︎
The authors thank Claus Bach and Sabine Jahn (along with
Jahn’s daughters Juliane Jahn and Philine Jahn) for
providing oral accounts of the history of the
Günther-Jahn-Bach Editionen.
↩︎
See DDR Collections, series XIV, Thomas Günther papers,
1979–1993, boxes 86–87, GRI, 940002.
↩︎
The authors thank Alina Samsonija (Getty Graduate Intern
in 2018) for the translation of “Das Gesetz.”
↩︎
See Thomas Günther et al.,
Texte zeigen Bilder Bilder zeigen Texte, exh.
cat. (Lüdenscheid, Germany: Kulturhaus der Stadt
Lüdenscheid, 1987), 15. In his introduction, Günther
writes: “Wir hatten dabei keine ästhetische Theorie im
Kopf, von der wir uns leiten ließen. Viel mehr
interessierte uns das freie und ungezwungene Spiel mit
der Wirklichkeit, das sich für viele Assoziationen offen
hält und rückwirkend wieder eine veränderte Sicht auf
die Bilder und die Zustände der Realität freigibt.” (We
had no aesthetic theory in mind to guide us. We were
much more interested in the free and unconstrained play
with reality, which keeps itself open to many
associations and in retrospect again reveals an altered
view of the images and the real-world conditions.)
↩︎
Antonin Artaud, “Letter on Lautréamont” in
Artaud Anthology, ed. Jack Hirschman, trans.
David Rattray (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1965),
123–27.
↩︎
Günther, who was involved extensively in the samizdat
art scene, contributing works to independent artists’
magazines such as Uwe Warnke’s Entwerter/Oder,
described East German samizdat as a “paper rebellion”
(papierne Aufbegehren) that provided a
much-needed “lifeline for a silenced generation,” a
case, he argued, unprecedented even for the previous
avant-garde movements. Thomas Günther, “Die
subkulturellen Zeitschriften in der DDR und ihre
kulturgeschichtliche Bedeutung,”
Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 20, no. 92
(1992): 27–36.
↩︎
Sabine Jahn conveyed her urge to give brilliant color to
the black-and-white images in an interview with the
authors on 5 September 2022. Apart from the Mapplethorpe
portfolio, for which Jahn uses vibrant colors, her
artistic practice favored, for the most part, softer,
calmer tones. Interestingly, after the Wende, Jahn
discovered in her Stasi (Ministry for State Security)
file that, from the early 1970s onward, she had been
assigned the code name Colorid, a fabricated, anglicized
word alluding to her professional work as a painter and
her purported love of colors.
↩︎
Jahn learned about Georgia O’Keeffe in a documentary
screened at the American Embassy in East Berlin in 1986
as part of a tribute to the artist, who had just passed
away that year, and about Patti Smith in 1978 in a
concert screened on the West German TV show
Rock-Palast that Jahn watched illegally in
Karl-Marx-Stadt.
↩︎
Jahn provided this information to the authors in the
interview of 5 September 2022. The visual-poetry
collaboration had started with
Zehn Gedichte [Ten poems]: Here Come the Ocean and Waves Down,
1986, a series of poems by Günther visually montaged as
screen prints by Jahn, housed in a handmade enclosure
featuring a glowing gold-on-red abstract composition on
its cover. The mandala-like image was based on a
photograph of a manhole (by Claus Bach), representing
the gateway to the underground. Here too the intermedial
dialogue created a highly dynamic composition work.
After the Mapplethorpe portfolio, Jahn and Günther
published Zwischenwaende (lit. “between walls”)
and Collagen (both released in 1993); and
Sabine Jahn: H-A & E/O:Kleiner Werkkatalog; Grafik 1990–2000 aus der
originalgrafischen Zeitschrift Entwerter/Oder& der Kunst- und Literaturzeitschrift
Herzattacke
(2000; small catalog of original prints published from
1990–2000 in the artists’ magazine
Entwerter/Oder and in the art and literature
magazine Herzattacke).
↩︎
See the source image, Georgia O’Keeffe, by
Alfred Stieglitz, on the website of the National Gallery
of Art, Washington, D.C., under “Collections”:
https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.60057.html. Jahn, however, found the photograph reproduced in an
art book in Berlin at the time.
↩︎
Jahn found the poem, translated into German, in Wolfram
Schäfer, Wolfram Berger, and Joseph Czestochowski,
Go West: Der Wilde Westen in Der Malerei
(Wiesbaden: Ebeling; 1978), n.p., fig. 96. O’Keeffe’s
poem has widely circulated since it was first published
with the title “About Painting Desert Bones” in
Georgia O’Keeffe: Paintings 1943, exh. cat.
(New York: An American Place, 1944). This information is
courtesy of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Library &
Archive, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Thanks to Elizabeth
Ehrnst, head of Research Collections and Services.
↩︎
Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR,
119, 404.
↩︎
For a detailed discussion of the underrepresentation of
independently published women artists and writers, see
Dahlke, Papierboot.
↩︎
This information was given to the authors by Christine
Schlegel in a telephone interview on 16 December 2020.
For Schlegel’s biography, see the “Vita” page on the
artist’s website:
http://www.christineschlegel.de/pages/vita/. ↩︎
For an overview of the situation of women in the GDR,
see Mary Fulbrook,
The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler
to Honecker
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 141–75.
See also Kristen Ghodsee’s recent comparative study
conducted in the context of the former Eastern Bloc:
Kristen Ghodsee,
Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century
Communism
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
↩︎
Christine Schlegel, email to authors, 5 January 2022.
↩︎
Ines Geipel,
Dann fiel auf einmal der Himmel um: Inge Müller, die
Biografie
(Leipzig: Henschel, 2002).
↩︎
Geipel, Dann fiel auf einmal, 211. See also
Inge Müller and Sonja Hilzinger, eds.
Daß ich nicht ersticke am Leisesein: Gesammelte
Texte
(Berlin: Aufbau, 2002), 123–31.
↩︎
The information quoted in this paragraph was given to
the authors by Christine Schlegel in a telephone
interview on 16 December 2020.
↩︎
Telephone interview with Christine Schlegel and the
authors, 16 December 2020.
↩︎
Christine Schlegel, email to authors, 5 January 2022.
↩︎
Jason Tebbe, “Revision and Rebirth: Commemoration of the
Battle of Nations in Leipzig,”
German Studies Review 33, no. 3 (2010): 619.
↩︎
Christine Schlegel, email to authors, 5 January 2022.
Schlegel also mentioned that her father, who was a
trade-fair designer, had a collection of politicians’
photographs, on which Schlegel also made drawings.
↩︎
See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Divided Memory and
Post-Traditional Identity: Gerhard Richter’s Work of
Mourning,” October 75 (winter 1996): 60–82.
↩︎
Inge Müller,
Wenn ich schon sterben muß: Gedichte (Berlin:
Aufbau Taschenbuch, 1997), 48.
↩︎
This insight stems from the many productive discussions
on translating Müller’s poetry between Julia McSpirit
Beckett and Anna Horakova.
↩︎
In Schlegel’s words, the scratching out of the poem’s
text is also an homage to Müller’s manuscripts, which
she remembers as being heavily redacted: “Sie [Inge
Müller] hatte viel an den Texten korrigiert. Oft gab es
mehrere Streichungen übereinander. Auf dem Foto mit den
Repräsentantenbeinen habe ich als Reminiszenz zu ihren
Texten alles durchgestrichen.” (She [Inge Müller] had
corrected her texts a lot. Often there were several
deletions on top of one another. On the photo of the
officials’ legs, I crossed out everything as a memory of
her texts.) Christine Schlegel, email to authors, 5
January 2022.
↩︎
Wolfgang Henne, email to authors, January 2022.
↩︎