Making the Past Present: GDR Photo Albums and Scrapbooks

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Making the Past Present: GDR PhotoAlbums and Amateur PhotographsCristina Cuevas-WolfPublished online: 19 Mar 2014.

To cite this article: Cristina Cuevas-Wolf (2014) Making the Past Present: GDR Photo Albums andAmateur Photographs, Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation, 30:1, 33-56,DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2014.879396

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Making the Past Present: GDR Photo Albums andAmateur Photographs

Cristina Cuevas-Wolf

This essay explores how everyday lives, institutional histories, and collective activities in EastGermany are preserved through the material format of the album as well as professionaland amateur photographs. It will discuss how the album was used to document theimmediate present as it happened, how the album itself acts as a repository of memoriesmeant for future generations, and how these visual and textual records are part of a largercultural practice of documentation. A selection of East German photo albums andBrigadebucher (brigade scrapbooks) demonstrate that individuals, organizations, groups, andinstitutions frequently used albums to chronicle a range of activities from camping trips ofthe Freie Deutsche Jugend or FDJ (Free German Youth) to family vacations. Additionally,they served different purposes, from providing a record of family life to preserving thenation’s industrial heritage. The diverse uses of the album together with professional andamateur photographs permit contemporary scholars and students to understand how thismedium assisted in shaping a collective identity for East Germans on both an official andindividual level through personal experiences.

Keywords: East German Memories; Photo Albums; Brigade Scrapbooks; AmateurPhotography

Within a socialist society, vernacular photography was not relegated to the privacy ofhome and family. It existed both in the private and in the public spheres of everydaylives, institutional histories, and collective activities. In the public realm, professionalphotographs became intertwined with vernacular or amateur photographs that gavea personal, eyewitness character to official photo albums and scrapbooks. Theyshaped the popular memory of East Germany, the Deutsche Demokratische Republikor GDR (German Democratic Republic) and form part of the history of the workingclass and the legacy of the Worker-Photography movement during the interwaryears.1 The very idea of worker as photographer who provides the needed visual mate-rial to promote working-class experiences and values stems from this interwar period(1926–1939). In the private realm, amateur photographs shaped individual memoriesand perspectives. The GDR photo albums and scrapbooks provide an unexpected re-source on how both collective and individual memories developed over more thanthree decades in East Germany and how personal memories constituted anotherkind of collective memory (Figure 1).

Visual Resources, Volume 30, Number 1, March 2014ISSN 0197-3762 # 2014 Taylor & Francis

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The anonymous photographs collected in these photo albums and scrapbooksspeak to the cultural value individuals and collectives alike placed in the constructionof visual records. They reveal how amateur photographs in private photo albumsdocument a personal, private life that contrasted with the “life” shaped by the politicalleadership. Additionally, official and private photo albums and scrapbooks makeevident the entanglement of private and state interests, individualistic behavior(subcultures), and state control.

This essay explores how everyday lives, institutional histories, and collective activitiesin East Germany are preserved through private (personal) and commissioned (official)photo albums and scrapbooks. Similar to the snapshot collections at the Fotomuseumim Munchner Stadtmuseum (with over 400 albums and 60,000 photos) and the photog-raphy collection at the Berlinische Galerie (with thirty-nine albums and approximately4,500 photos),2 the collection of GDR photo albums in the Zentralbild-Bestand in theBundesarchiv Koblenz and the holdings at the Wende Museum (some 2,000 photoalbums), in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Culver City,3 provide the contemporaryviewer a wealth of evidence about different kinds of everyday experiences through pic-tures of a past life and culture that came into existence in postwar Germany. Yet,what do these albums reveal about the practice of amateur photography in the GDRas both a document of lived experience (as observed visual material) and the vernacularimage (snapshot) of individual and collective memories? As objects, they inform ouranalysis and reception of their content as representation and/or eyewitness testimony.This essay focuses on the use of amateur photography in private and official photoalbums, the relationship between these types of albums, and how albums served to

Figure 1 Page from a private photo album documenting a vacation in Poland in 1977. Silver gelatin prints, colorpostcard, other ephemera pasted on page; handwritten captions. The Wende Museum and Archive of the ColdWar, Culver City, California.

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remember and shape communal life in East German society as it was lived and experi-enced. It aims to show how GDR photo albums challenge our understanding of vernac-ular photography as photographic documents relegated to the private sphere andfunctioning outside of history and public communication. It will therefore attempt toclarify further the particular relationship between public and private self, individualand collective identities, the past and the present.

The GDR photo albums serve as cues to recover East German social, cultural, andpolitical memories. The material in these photo albums, as in scrapbooks containingphotographs, is rich in visual and textual testimonies about leisure, family, work,party congresses, and organized field trips for local associations and groups. Thebasic features of the photo album are the hardcover binding, blank paper pages inblack or an ecru white, and pasted-in photographs with or without printed or hand-written captions. Albums were available in numerous sizes, colors, and layouts with tra-ditional sewn or spiral bindings. Consumers could paste their images on the pages oruse adhesive corners (Figure 2). The differences between commissioned and privatealbums arise in how these component parts were put together. Private photo albumsare typically a compilation of amateur photographs, replete with witty and humorouscaptions and at times artful sketches. The tone and meaning of an album or a photo-graphic scrapbook distinguish it as personal rather than official. It is rare to find imagesunidentified and without captions in private albums created between the 1950s andmost of the 1980s. Official photo albums usually have the name of the state or massorganization embossed or printed on the cover. Professional photos were usually pre-sented in large format (8 × 10 inches or larger) without captions and one photo perpage. Some official albums included captions that were either printed or pasted in,

Figure 2 Page from a family photo album, 1972. Silver gelatin prints held in place with adhesive corners; hand-printed captions. The Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War, Culver City, California.

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handwritten or printed directly on the album page; photographs were then inserted inthe designated spaces, as in the case of a sport album shown in Figure 3. Within officialalbums, amateur photos were either intermixed with professional photos or in aseparate album that was organized not unlike a private family album.

Amateur photographs had a defining presence in both official and private photoalbums. In the postwar period, amateur photographs—snapshots—capture a culturalmoment in East and West Germany when private and public images collided. Dailylife is turned into a succession of photo ops with the introduction of the instantcamera in 1960s and the East German state’s active encouragement of amateurphotography through advice literature and magazines, such as Fotografie. Thistechnology of picture-making becomes an extension of daily life, accompanyingpeople not just on birthdays, family trips, and vacations, but also to the cafeteria, theworkplace, in short, everywhere, especially in the hands of serious GDR amateur pho-tographers, such as Manfred Beier (1927–2002),4 and the East German Ministry forState Security (Stasi) that amassed an extensive photographic archive of its membersand activities, in addition to the amateur photographs it gathered from unofficialinformants.5

The snapshot, the amateur photograph, is the quintessential representation of ver-nacular photography and personal memories. According to photo historian DougNickel, the snapshot is taken by a family member, a friend, or an untrained personand preserved together with other snapshots and keepsakes in a family photo album.It is the domain of the average weekend amateur photographer, a member of thegeneral public. Its function is to commemorate a family or local event, document

Figure 3 Volkseigene Betriebe (VEB) Sport-Toto: Fotoalbum fur unsere Freunde, 1954. Photographs showingsport events; pre-printed captions. The Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War, Culver City, California.

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travel, retain the appearance of pets and loved ones, and memorialize objects of person-al importance.6 Amateur photographs are taken for largely private reasons. Theyprovide, however, a wealth of empirical evidence for studies on everyday life, alongwith the associative concepts of home, family, and recreation.

Considering this definition of the snapshot in relationship to family memories, canwe then assume that amateur photographs are only found in the family album? Evi-dence within professional albums suggests not. Within GDR society, a worker or amember of a group, association, or party member as an amateur photographer, wasfrequently charged with recording the field trip, activities at the Pionierrepublik (ayouth organization), or other occasions. Individual members of the Freie DeutscheJugend or FDJ (Free German Youth) created scrapbooks and photo albums thatwere considered a way of participating in the group and for the purpose of creatinga collective memory. The amateur photograph, as a vehicle for private self-expression,thus found its way into the brigade, pioneer, and FDJ scrapbooks and other officialphoto albums that chronicled, for example, party congresses, urban planning projects,and state achievements.

Yet, despite references to the photo album in the recent literature on GDR photog-raphy and cultural history, they have been left unexamined, even though GDR photoalbums and scrapbooks constitute uncharted territory in considering these objects astestimonials of lived experience.7 In the aftermath of the toppling of the Berlin Wallin 1989, private GDR photo albums became part of the public domain together withofficial albums, brigade scrapbooks, and discarded socialist ephemera and objects,and they continue to be surrendered and sold to private collectors and museums,such as the Wende Museum. While the act of discarding a photo album signals a rejec-tion of a past life and engenders fragmented biographies and histories, the survival ofboth private and official photo albums makes evident the will to document political,social, and everyday practices from various backgrounds, in different cities andregions of the GDR, and on a national and local level. They manifest many kinds ofindividual memories related to family life and friends as well as collective memoriesfrom social groups (such as the FDJ and Pioniere) and the state (such as the Sozialisti-sche Einheitspartei Deutschlands or SED and Palace der Republik or PdR [Palace of theRepublic]). Consequently, the individual keepers of these memories are foundthroughout GDR society, and, to an extent, we are indebted to their persistence inpreserving a visual record of a cross-section of life in the GDR.

Will to Document

The private family photo album captures the individual interest to see one’s life remem-bered. For East Germans, this will to document their everyday experiences in concertwith or even opposed to the socialist life under construction by the state is expressed intheir albums. GDR private photo albums chronicle family life and focus on particularexperiences (holidays, trips, outings), events (first day of school, a wedding, retirementparty), groups of friends, or even the deceased beloved spouse. The consistency of thevisual and written documentation over an extended period, despite the incompletenessof a large number of the albums, suggests the invested interest of the creator to compile


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and chronicle the experiences of a private community. The persistent visual recordingand compilation of photographs in an album or scrapbook, together with writtenimpressions, jokes, and witty comments, manifest the cultural inclination to documentlived experiences as they happened. Whereas the private self could become public in thespace of amateur photography exhibitions and journals, such as Fotografie,8 the privatefamily photo album and scrapbook became the only space where individual expressionhad the license to be less guarded and playful, and where the private self wasopenly documented over time, as in an album of a man documenting himselfthrough self-portraits for most of his adult life.

Although the album is often discussed in relationship to social and cultural con-ventions, family, and ordinary experiences, it is only recently that studies on photog-raphy and memory have focused on the album as a testimonial object that comesclosest to articulating the possible relationship between Alltagsgeschichte (everydayhistory) and the photo album.9 Martha Langford’s description of the photo albumas a mnemonic device and “a fine example of congruence between tradition andsociety in its adaption of oral consciousness to modernity’s literary guise” begins tosituate the album within the practices of storytelling.10 Verna Curtis explores thealbum as object and points out how albums, dating between 1899 and the 1970s,offer testimony to the appeal, versatility, and historical significance of album-making.11 According to Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, “testimonial objects [suchas the photo album] enable us to consider crucial questions about the past, abouthow the past comes down to us in the present, and about how gender figures in actsof memory and transmission.”12

Photography’s unique form, the representation of something real from the past inthe present, has remained constant across all theories of photography from RolandBarthes (1915–1980) to the digital age. However, I argue that photography does notshow history, but rather it reveals different formal constructs or moments throughwhich we can visualize history. As Bernd Stiegler points out:

Photographs are a view about history transformed into a picture. Photo-graphs are, that is my assumption would be, concrete visualization of histor-ical models. . . . The historical view of photography, one could formulatewith gentle interpretative authority, aims less at the history in the picture,the historical index, and hence the question, if photography shows history.More to the point are the different forms of the medium’s historicalnessor, a bit more abstractly stated, at the history models, which photographyis hinged upon. Photographs do not show history, but rather diverseforms that visualize history. This visualization is moreover not necessarilytied to certain pictorial forms.13

Photography, however, can visualize historical models that inform it.The GDR photo albums and scrapbooks from the 1960s and 1970s in the Wende

Museum’s collection make evident a historical model used to visualize GDR everydaylife.14 The photo album was a popular form of amateur photography and therefore isusually associated with the family and privacy of the home, placing it outside the reachof official amateur photographic culture in the GDR. Its private nature is achieved

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despite all the official efforts to promote amateur photography; organize it through re-gional, national, and international exhibitions; and to encourage it through articles inFotografie to transcend any individualistic or private motivations and embrace the col-lective.15 The photographs in the private family photo albums affirmed individualism,as it was articulated in the intimacy of the family and the domestic sphere. Consequent-ly, the family album rarely made a public appearance, except to be shown to family,friends, and colleagues. It acted as the unseen alter ego to the official photo albumsthat aimed to model themselves on the family album. The private and public facesof amateur photography visualize the increasing division between political lives per-formed in public and private lives acted out in the domestic sphere. GDR photoalbums were therefore produced in the liminal space between public and privatecommunication.

Amateur photography nevertheless played a key role in the state’s ideological con-struction of its new socialist citizens, as asserted in 1960 in the exhibition Vom Werdendes sozialistischen Menschen (On Becoming a Socialist Person) in Karl-Marx-Stadt (nowChemnitz). In April 1959, the party conference held in Bitterfeld and known as Bitter-felder Weg (Bitterfeld Way) paved the way for this photographic condition. Walter Ul-bricht pronounced the need to bring art and the masses together in the name of socialunity. He underscored the importance of art and work developing hand-in-hand tocontribute to the creation of a new socialist culture. This new cultural policy urgeddirect exchanges between photographers and workers. It promoted amateur photogra-phy, increasing the levels of funding it received, to advance a “‘dogma of proximity tothe People as a means of bridging culture and the ‘socialist community.’”16 The impact

Figure 4 Brigade Karnatz scrapbook, “Kampf um den Staatstitel, Kollektiv der sozialistischen Arbeit,” 1969. Titlepage. The Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War, Culver City, California.


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of this policy resulted not only in the photos produced by documentary photographerssuch as Evelyn Richter (b. 1930), but also in the so-called Brigadebucher (brigade scrap-books) that various worker-brigades in the factories produced to document their workand leisure activities (Figure 4). Historian Paul Betts asserts that the Volkseigene Betriebeor VEB (the people-owned enterprises) “tended to chronicle their achievements andevents in this family album aesthetic, seemingly in an effort to promote the paternalisticidea of the workplace as a second family.”17 Yet, what is this “family album aesthetic”that Betts speaks of? How did album-making within the family influence the making ofbrigade scrapbooks18 and other official photo albums, as visual records of party con-gresses and collective activities?

Family Photo Album

Family photo albums document memories of recent travels, summers spent withfriends, weddings, daily rituals, and the sharing of these experiences among friendsand family. They demonstrate an interest in the recording of events as well as thedesire to remember what happened, as in most families. However, in contrast toPierre Bourdieu’s suggestion that “there are few activities which are so stereotypedand less abandoned to the anarchy of individual intentions”19 as photographs in thefamily photo album, GDR private photo albums do not fit the stereotype, becausethey do not focus only on the family, or any preconceived notion of family, and attimes are about a circle of friends.20 These photo albums reveal the deeply felt valuesof community, leisure, and privacy in East German society.21

The reoccurring memories of travel to favorite vacation spots, first days of school,personal anniversaries, coming of age, and other important life-events create sites ofmemory that a GDR family shared through the photo album as common cultural ex-periences. A few GDR albums capture family history across generations from the youngnewlywed couple, parenthood and children, retirement and grandchildren, anniversa-ries, and friends. More often one finds photo albums that defined, recorded, andcelebrated “family,” as understood from the personal experience of a childlesscouple, step family, or single parent with children, very much irrespective of theGDR state’s notion of the nuclear family. Nevertheless, images of weddings are everpresent in GDR family photo albums, despite the high divorce rate, and find a romanticexpression in some albums and a more straightforward documentation in others. Yet,the photographs convey an intimacy between photographer and subject and capturecandid, even spontaneous, expressions. These wedding photographs seem to visualizethe widely circulated views at the time that socialist society was increasingly orientedtoward marriage and “the couple’s intimate life as the main refuge from thedemands and directives of socialist collectivity.”22 These images of marriage togetherwith everyday rituals and traditions documented in the family albums speak to conti-nuity in German social conventions practiced in a socialist society, such as the Kaffee-klatsch. This social convention of coffee drinking in the late afternoon at work or athome on the veranda appears in family albums. The Kaffeeklatsch, where one canspeak openly (. . . lost die Zungen / loosen the tongue) as the caption in Figure 5states, suggests that this convention was associated with joy and female sociability, as

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well as with frustration and even potential dissent.23 Photographs of such good, every-day memories shape the present image of private life in the GDR as a social and com-munal culture.

Figure 5 Snapshots of friends drinking coffee and laughing on the veranda in a family photo album, 1956. Silvergelatin prints. The Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War, Culver City, California.

Figure 6 Snapshots of travel sites arranged around a color postcard in a private photo album, n.d. Silver gelatinprints, commercial postcard. The Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War, Culver City, California.


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Travel albums, replete with snapshots of vacations, outings, and the tourist expe-rience at local and foreign destinations, performed the simultaneous function of photoalbum and diary. An album included at times a complete travel itinerary and chronicledthe various activities undertaken during the trip, providing proof through pasted-intheater tickets or samples of flora found along the hiking path to the summit. Inanother album, a series of photos reveals how a slideshow of a family trip to theBlack Sea became the excuse to meet and socialize among friends. This series demon-strates how photographs create occasions to communicate memorable stories on an in-timate, personal level and how they contribute to the creation of community in smallsocial groups as well as to a particular interpretation of the recent past. Additionally, theinterplay between the professional tourist color postcard of an idyllic lake and boating,centered on the page, and amateur black-and-white photographs that frame it, as seenin Figure 6, inadvertently display the discrepancy between the idealized tourist spot andactual experience. This is evident in the contrast of scale, quality, color, as well as thedifferent impressions conveyed by the “official” views of the tourist destination versusthe personal views. This example seems to foreshadow the ease with which amateur andprofessional photographs were to mingle in official photo albums and scrapbooks.Other albums collect postcards from all the places traveled or focus on a trip to a par-ticular destination, such as Poland, communicating a multivalent story about travel inEast Germany and the East bloc.

The very arrangement of the photographs in a family photo album conveys acertain crafting of a story. A page of an album can figure as a time capsule: a smallphoto of a couple with their new baby boy in a perambulator is contrasted with amuch larger photograph of the baby, as a young boy picking flowers on the lawn.

Figure 7 Snapshots of friends on an excursion taking a break, arranged on a page of a family photo album, withhandwritten caption “Pause! Sie sind mude!” 1970s. The Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War, CulverCity, California.

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The change in size and scale of the photographs marks the passing of time. Anotherexample is the series of photographs arranged along the diagonal of the page, aboutthree friends on an excursion that take a break by sitting on a bench, because theyare tired—as the handwritten caption states: Pause! Sie sind mude (A Break! They aretired)24—unabashedly displaying fatigue from the labor of vacationing (Figure 7).Other photographs capture day-to-day activities, the process of DIY projects as agroup effort or a father’s individual task. Portraits become a motif in the albumsfrom close-up photos of school-age children to group photos of family and/orfriends taken on outings or at home and arranged consecutively on a page. Even the“portraits” of domestic interiors, especially of the living and dining rooms, foregrounda sense of pride in the home. Young couples and their friends seem to be the organizersof holiday celebrations, such as New Year and Fasching, whereas Christmas and otherfamily festivities, such as anniversaries and birthdays, involved friends and family of allages. These visual vignettes highlight details found within these albums that are inter-esting, complex, and telling expressions of people’s lives within the family and its im-mediate community of friends and colleagues. Their characteristics are important indeciphering what these albums convey about everyday life in the GDR and how theyserved as a model for official photo albums and scrapbooks. Together with theimages and handwritten captions that make up the content of these albums, thesepersonal visions of life provide evidence for cultural historians, sociologists, andanthropologists alike to analyze the construction of the socialist people’s culture:from the concepts of home, family, and recreation to the socialist philosophy of theKollektiv, as well as what subjects or events are deemed worthy of recording, yetkept private.

Although similarities with our own family and travel albums may be apparent inthe first viewing of the albums, they suggest the possibility that individuals carvedout private, free spaces for a private life they envisioned in contrast to the life theGDR regime was focused on producing. This may be what is critical about these par-ticular photo albums. Within their traditional appearance, the tension between themeaning of private and public life in the GDR can be discovered in the albums,which also grants them historical value as objects of study. This dynamic defineswhat made them particular to their context and place in history.

Official Albums of Party Congresses and the Pioniere Activities

The official photo albums and scrapbooks of the state and its mass organizations werebuilt upon professional and amateur photographs that recorded significant politicalevents and festivals. These official albums and scrapbooks capture communal activitiesand official functions on the local, regional, and national levels. The individual and/orcollective producers of these albums evidently knew what they wanted to show and telltheir audience, a collective and captive audience made up of a group of comrades, alocal association, the ruling party or worker-brigade, and even foreign dignitaries.Hence, their approach to amateur photography is reminiscent of the Worker-Photog-raphy movement of the interwar years. This movement emerged out of the need forimages about working-class life in Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (Worker Illustrated


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Magazine). The magazine’s editor Willi Munzenberg (1889–1940) thus shaped aphoto-agency, the Association of Worker Photographers, which together with hismost popular illustrated magazine created a truly collective form of journalism inwhich the producers and readers of the periodical were one and the same.25 Art histo-rian Sarah James explains that although the SED co-opted the heritage of the Arbeiter-fotografie (Worker Photographer, a social documentary movement) of the 1920s and1930s, it held an ambiguous position towards this form of documentary photography.

However, the radicality of the earlier Weimar movement (1926–1939), and theways in which such photography had been put to use in the photo-essay to formulatepolitical campaigns and critiques of working conditions, did not fit comfortably withthe SED’s straight-jacketed conception of a photography that deployed class conscious-ness while presenting a unanimously positive portrayal of life in the GDR.26 Neverthe-less, the Worker-Photography movement provided a socialist model that justified thepromotion of amateur photography in the GDR. As of the mid-1960s, workers wereencouraged to take amateur photos at the workplace and have them displayed onfactory announcement boards.

What this cluster of official photo albums therefore affords us is a look at the waysthe state constructed history in the present and how it fashioned its legacy with an eyetoward the next generation’s reception of this legacy. Starting with the album docu-menting the Seventh Congress of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany in 1967, we

Figure 8 Photograph in the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) VII Parteitag (party congress)photo album, 1967. The Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War, Culver City, California.

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see a conscious attempt to produce pictures in the spirit of the photo op. There is even aphotograph that includes a television camera, suggesting the party consciously usedtelevision as well as photography to convey a positive view of itself to its public(Figure 8). Here, the public is both fellow East Germans as well as citizens throughoutthe viewing communist world. The mediums of photography and television permit theparty elite to instill pride in all members of socialist society, not only those memberspresent at the event, but also those who were watching it from home or abroad.Through these images, the party tried to convey a positive and receptive view of theSeventh Congress. The perfect responses to the leader’s speech, as captured in onephoto, suggest a certain degree of staging that affected all involved in the event. Inanother photograph of the official panel of speakers, many people in the audienceseem bored, distracted, and engaged in conversation rather than paying attention tothe main event. Could this mean that the staging of the perfect response was afailure or mere indication of the event’s formality that tried the audience’s patience?As one looks at other photographs in the album, it becomes evident that very fewofficial images fail to convey the necessary message.

Official albums and scrapbooks demonstrate their institutional origin through theagency’s name embossed on its cover or listed on its content page. Some of the agenciesthat commissioned the albums were the SED, pedagogical institutes, mass organiza-tions, trade unions, and the VEB. A worker-brigade designated a scribe to documentits activities at work and at leisure in a scrapbook. The authorship of these albumsand scrapbooks therefore consisted of a diverse group of professional, semi-profession-al, and amateur photographers as well as institutional members who photographed andthus documented, for example, the Schule der Freundschaft (The School of Friendship),

Figures 9 and 10 Photographs of a folk dance event in the Pionierrepublik “Wilhelm Pieck” photo album, 1970s.Silver gelatin prints, 8 ×10 inches each, no captions. The Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War, CulverCity, California.


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Pionierrepubliken, party congresses, the brigade’s activities, the Kombinat or industrialplant. Many of these albums provided a kaleidoscopic view of everyday scenes in theseorganizations: the building, location, dining hall, gymnasium, dormitories, classroom,lessons in session, and children taking part in group activities. Some of the albums wereculled primarily from the institution’s internal (professional, semi-professional, andamateur) photographs and others were made up of professional press photographs,providing two complementary views of the institution and its social role in GDRsociety.

By the mid-1970s, photography and television had assumed a significant role inthe confrontation between socialism versus capitalism. With the increasing attentionafforded photography in the West, the Gesellschaft fur Fotografie or GfF (Society ofPhotography)27 was charged with coordinating the production of photographsacross national and local organizations such as Pionierorganization, FDJ, the citytheater, local newspapers, factory photography groups, SED-district leadership, andFreier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund or FDGB-district representatives. GfF built uponthe broad level of meaning the Zentral Kommission Fotografie or ZKF had establishedthrough its collaborations with photographers and art historians as well as regionaland national organizations. As of 1982, a working group that consisted of functionar-ies from the Kulturbund (Culture Association), members of the Verband der Journal-isten or VdJ (Association of Journalists), and Verband Bildender Kunstler or VBK(Association of Visual Artists) recommended photographic commissions. The Kultur-bund secured administratively its selection of projects, based on its ideological prefer-ences, since it had the abiding support of the other two associations. The GfFprimarily commissioned amateur photographers, who were required to propose a col-lective photographic process rather than deliver a singular, artistic-driven pictureseries. This resulted in the financing of amateur photographic projects, such asopen-air exhibitions, traveling newspaper displays, brigade scrapbooks, andothers,28 even though commissions were intended for all generations of photogra-phers and genres of photography that had a journalistic, artistic, and an obvious

Figure 11 Snapshots in the Zentrales Pionierlager “Werner Seelenbinder” photo album, showing various arts andcrafts activities at another Pioneer recreational facility, 1970s. Silver gelatin prints; typed caption on facing page.The Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War, Culver City, California.

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amateur context. These commissions evidently financed the creation of official photoalbums and were instrumental in creating an image of the GDR for consumption athome and abroad.

Nevertheless, official albums allow us to glean the complex process of constructingmemories that were meant to draw attention to the collective identity of the GDR. Thealbums from youth organizations, such as the Pionierrepublik “Wilhelm Pieck,” builtupon professional photographs that recorded the site, dining hall, landscape, and fes-tivities that took place at this Pioneer resort. Its blue cover and gold embossed title“Pionierrepublik” marks this as an official album that summarizes the activities thattook place on a seasonal basis at this recreational facility. In many ways, these collectiveimages of people and events at the Pionierrepublik are laid out as a photo-essay and aremeant to be viewed as a series and understood in association with one another. Theconsistent format of the 8 ×10-inch photographs, each occupying a page in thealbum, indicate that the anonymous compiler of this album chose to rely on the verac-ity of the image rather than turn to any assistance of a caption to convey the impres-sions of place and atmosphere (Figures 9 and 10).

The photo album Zentrales Pionierlager “Werner Seelenbinder” with its plain redcover assembles snapshots of the pioneer’s daily rituals and group activities atanother pioneer recreational facility (Figure 11). The amateur style of the album issignaled by the irregular sized snapshots grouped by subject, and accompanied by atyped caption, pasted on the facing page. The typed captions suggest an anonymouscompiler, the designated scribe, who was more likely a member of the organization.This album provides an intimate look at the members’ activities, and it indicates howmemories were built upon snapshots of personal experiences that were the touchstoneof comradeship among individual pioneers. While snapshots conveyed the necessaryfeeling of having been there in this photo album, professional photographs in the

Figure 12 Candid photograph of two men conversing in the Ausflug der Gemeindevorsteher des AltestenbezirkesAue am 8.6.75 nach Steinbach (Mit vorherigem aposteldienst in Eibenstock und einem Sangernachmittag) album,1975. Silver gelatin print with typed caption. The Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War, Culver City,California.


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previous Pionierrepublik photo album, captured the larger context and officialsetting of an individual’s participation. Additionally, these Pionierrepublik albumsaugment what Jane Schuch has encountered in the albums of the Schule derFreundschaft where both professional and amateur photographs coexisted in thesame album.29

The official album Ausflug der Gemeindevorsteher des Altestenbezirkes Aue am 8.6.75nach Steinbach (Mit vorherigem aposteldienst in Eibenstock und einem Sangernachmittag)(Community leaders from the oldest district Aue excursion to Steinbach on June 8,1975 [With a prior mass in Eibenstock and afternoon singers’ performance]) consistsof candid photographs of local community leaders on a field trip to Steinbach. It chartstheir trajectory from the district Aue by bus to Steinbach and their return to Aue at theend of the day. The highlight of the trip, the afternoon, open-air choir performance iscaptured in a series of photographs: for example, a small group of its members sit on abench to enjoy the singing of the choir that seems to be made up of the majority of thegroup, the image of the choir singing, and off in the distance, one photograph capturestwo male members who sit and enjoy each other’s conversation (unaware that they arebeing photographed) (Figure 12). The snapshots are carefully arranged and juxtaposedto relate the story as it unfolded throughout the day.

Other official albums document GDR achievements in industry, architecture, andurban planning, providing another view of socialist cultural history. These officialalbums, replete with propagandistic content, contain a wealth of evidence for the cul-tural historian to analyze how the state treated historical memory and to the extent thatit emulated the family photo album in the crafting of stories through images and cap-tions. The official albums are more structured by comparison to the family albums andare intent on being legible to its readers, the participants in the brigade, pioneer group,or local association for whom it was made. Like the family album, the brigade

Figure 13 “Produktionsberatung der sozialistischen Arbeitsgemelnschaft in Chloralkali-Elektrolyse-Betrieb III”in the VEB Elektrochemisches Kombinat photo album, late 1950s. Silver gelatin print. The Wende Museum andArchive of the Cold War, Culver City, California.

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scrapbook and official albums for local associations are unique to each group that madethem and thus build on the tradition of album-making found within the family. Otheralbums, such as the sport album previously mentioned, were made in multiple copiesand circulated as souvenirs of the event they document.

GDR photo albums and scrapbooks provide the bridge between the historian’sdescription of memory (individual and collective identities) and the photo-historian’saccounting for social and cultural conventions (aesthetic, biographical, political, orsociological) in East Germany. Consequently, these artifacts act as testimonialobjects that capture the traces left behind by everyday happenings and ritualizedevents in a socialist people’s culture over two generations. They provide visual evidencefor exploring how East Germany shaped different kinds of identities in private and inpublic spheres from collective and national, to political and social identities throughboth amateur and professional photography. These artifacts allow us to see the linkagesbetween everyday practices and shared intergenerational experiences, memory, andcultural conventions.

The memory-scape of any given society is shaped by the relative agency of its au-thorities or individuals and groups to determine memories that remain relevant orbecome irrelevant over time. Thus these decisions transform mere albums and scrap-books into interactive memory sites,30 because they communicate to the contemporaryviewer how authorities, groups, and individuals pursued their own paths in their

Figure 14 VEB Braunkohlenkombinat Bitterfeld brigade scrapbook page, n.d. The Wende Museum and Archiveof the Cold War, Culver City, California.


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common history. The albums also document the influence that reoccurring acts ofcommemoration and ritual have on successive presents and across thegenerations. They have become symbolic elements of the memorial inheritance fromEast Germany.

Conclusion—Bitterfeld as site of memory

The Bitterfeld conference or Bitterfelder Weg was intended to realize the socialist idealsof the state on political, industrial, and cultural levels. As a group, the photo album ofthe VEB Elektrochemisches Kombinat (The People’s Electrical Chemical Company,Figure 13), the brigade scrapbook from Bitterfeld (Figure 14), and the collective-artist portfolio Bitterfeld 4444 communicate memories about Bitterfeld as place andcultural symbol over time, from different generational, official, and critical viewpoints.This clustering of objects about Bitterfeld enables us to see how GDR photo albums andscrapbooks chronicle the changes in opinion and perspectives on a particular place andhow these artifacts provide a pretext for Bitterfeld 4444.31 The artist portfolio providesthe meta-story to this place and its symbolic cultural role in the GDR, while summa-rizing the outcome of the cultural policy that paved the way for the formation of theGDR’s amateur photographic culture.

The photo album of the VEB Elektrochemisches Kombinat is presented as a photo-essay about the electrochemical industry in Bitterfeld. The images create a believableutopia of work, where production meetings, award-winning worker-brigades, and aneffective industrial complex, replete with cultural center and daycare centers forbabies and children, contribute to the construction of socialism in the 1950s(Figure 13). This stunning achievement of the GDR’s productive economy modelcould not be more advantageously presented. It is further supported by the brigadescrapbooks that show us how positive workers viewed their work experience, spenttheir leisure time as a group, and how employment in a Kollektiv shaped their profes-sional life. Nearly thirty years later, an artist portfolio titled “Bitterfeld 4444” docu-ments what had become of this utopian industrial town. What began in thenineteenth century as a small town with fertile and green landscape was transformedby mid-century into an environmental hazard. The chemical run-off had poisonedthe fresh water ponds, where fish once thrived, contaminated the drinking water,and the brown coal pollution had poisoned the air for Bitterfeld’s inhabitants. Thetown’s cultural center was the location for the 1959 Bitterfeld conference that choseto showcase this industrial complex as the seat of GDR culture. Here workers andartists were to collaborate in crafting East German culture in the pages of brigade scrap-books, literary writings, and artworks, according to the Bitterfeld Way (WalterUlbricht’s crowning cultural policy).32 The artists who contributed to the Bitterfeld4444 portfolio sought to address the damage inflicted on this industrial town andthe possibility of its renewal. Whereas the photographs in the portfolio capture the dis-repair of the electrochemical factory and the desolate character of the townscape, theimage of a green lung (Figure 15),33 suggests the introduction of a green belt in thetown. The portfolio also includes an environmental report based on data collectedby the East German environmental movement that was smuggled out of the East

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and incorporated into an environmental report published in West Berlin. The artistsinitially wanted to include a contaminated water sample together with the portfolio,but since the possibility of leakage could potentially damage the other works, theydecided against including the water sample. What remains are the water stains onthe paper, which is sealed together with the report in plastic. The print of a coal bri-quette evokes the brown coal that contributed to the air pollution. Another work inthe portfolio makes direct reference to a speech given at the second Bitterfeld confer-ence in 1964:

The five years since the Bitterfeld conference took place, since 1959, providedus with certitude and courage for our continuing path. New strength willcome. Let’s prove ourselves worthy of the nation’s trust through tirelesslabor (Vivid applause).34

Stamped across this quote are the words “Kunst ist wenn sie trotzdem entsteht” (Artoccurs in spite of itself). Together the twice-repeated excerpt from the speech andthe text in parentheses that suggests stage directions, indicate an artistic irony(through repetitive instances) and mocking of the official cultural policy (the audienceneeds to be told when to applause). The overriding blue text stamped on top of the re-peated black text further underscores the irony in this piece, as it asserts in the form ofthe “Art occurs in spite of itself” stamp that cancels out the official mandate and thus

Figure 15 Klaus Staeck (b. 1938), “Green Lung,” in Bitterfeld 4444, artist portfolio of diverse artworks, 1989. TheWende Museum and Archive of the Cold War, Culver City, California.


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acts out the very statement. Another textual work in the Bitterfeld 4444 portfolio printsthe word “Freiheit” (Freedom) backwards on a piece of flowery wallpaper with the cau-tionary words printed in red: “Actung! Seitenverkehrt” (Caution! Page laterally inreverse). This graphic work reveals the word “freedom” has been emptied ofmeaning through its inversion, placed up against such representations of generic hap-piness made evident through the pink flowery wallpaper.

This cluster of objects that span three decades from the 1950s to the 1980s dem-onstrates the eventual demise of the utopian belief in a new socialist culture. By theearly 1970s, party events, the factory, and the brigade had been superseded by the in-terest in the home and personal intimacy. Because these artifacts lend insight into howthe past was constructed on the level of official events, personal experiences, and artisticpractices, they make it possible for us to draw parallels, comparisons, or set in reliefhow issues of materiality and the loss of ideals and identity can inform our understand-ing of the present, not only in the United States of America, but also throughout theworld where cultural ideals are sacrificed for profit.

Private and official photo albums and amateur photographs represent thecomplex status of photography in the GDR as an instrument of power, culturalcommodity, as well as the repository of individual communications. They providesociologists, anthropologists, and cultural historians with documentation of howcitizens under the state’s direction contributed to the shaping of a socialistculture and simultaneously thwarted the state’s directives through the productionof private amateur photo albums. Beyond the recurring themes of life events inthe family albums, the viewer finds candid representations and testimonials ofprivate life that inadvertently reveal the contradictory nature of actual existingsocialism. This vast body of family photo albums provides an alternative to the of-ficial photo albums that seem intent on counteracting any images of individualism,and the mere consumption of leisure time by representing the Pionierrepubliken,party congresses, and worker-brigade, among other collective entities, as the sociallyeffective forms of community. Private amateur photo albums nevertheless suggestthat another kind of collective memory coexisted within the state’s dominant nar-rative of solidarity.

AcknowledgmentsI thank my colleagues at The Wende Museum for kindly facilitating my research into thephoto album collection and providing a supportive environment. Special thanks is due toOlivier Lugon for his invaluable reading of an earlier version of this essay.

CRISTINA CUEVAS-WOLF is Manager of Collection Development at The WendeMuseum and Archive of the Cold War in Culver City (Los Angeles), California. She re-ceived her Masters and PhD in modern art history from Northwestern University.Among her recent publications is “Munzenberg and the Making of Communist Propa-ganda in Spain,” in Jorge Rebalta, ed., A Hard, Merciless Light: The Worker-PhotographyMovement, 1926–1938 (Madrid: Museo Reina Sofıa, 2011). She was the co-editor of thethemed issue “Germans’ Things: Material Culture and Daily Life in East and West1949–2009” in German Historical Institute (GHI) Bulletin Supplement, Washington,DC, 2011.

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1 My work explores the history of the Worker-Photography movement during theinterwar years: “Book Review: Die Eroberung der Beoachtenden Maschinen: ZurArbeiterfotografie der Weimarer Republik,” Zeitschrift fur Volkskunde: Halbsjahres-chrift der Deutschen Gesellschaft fur Volkskunde 109, no. 1 (2013): 145–49; “Mun-zenberg and the Making of Communist Propaganda in Spain,” in Jorge Rebalta,ed., A Hard, Merciless Light: The Worker-Photography Movement, 1926–1938(Madrid: Museo Reina Sofıa, 2011), 380–91; “Die Eroberung der beobachtendenMaschinen,” Workshop of the DFG Project Das Auge des Arbeiters, organized bythe Institut fur Sachsische Geschichte und Volkskunde Dresden, in collaborationwith the Deutsche Fotothek Dresden, April 2010, AHF-Information 109, May 20,2010, http://www.ahf-muenchen.de/Tagungsberichte/Berichte/pdf/2010/109-10.pdf;“Montage as Weapon: The Tactical Alliance Between Willi Munzenberg and JohnHeartfield,” New German Critique 107 (Summer 2009): 185–205; “A DefiantSpain: Munzenberg, Montage and Communist Media in France and Spain,” inJordana Mendelson, ed., Revistas, Guerra y Modernidad / Magazines, War, and Mo-dernity (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte ReinaSofia, 2008). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

2 Timm Starl, “Zur Inventarisierung von Fotoalben,” Rundbrief Fotografie N.F. 9, vol. 3,no. 1 (1996): 29–33, http://www.rundbrief-fotografie.de/les90901.htm.

3 The Wende Museum, an art museum, historical archive, and educational institute,aims to preserve Cold War artifacts and history that allow scholars and students toapply historical lessons of the past to the present. Its collection of photo albumsand scrapbooks reinforces its intention to collect objects that are pertinent to GDRculture rather than the definition of museum and/or archive respectively. TheWende, therefore, becomes a crossroads of reciprocal memories across time, genera-tions, and cultures.

4 Meg Jackson, “(Re)Framing the East: The Case of Manfred Beier’s Pre-Wall Photo-graphs in Post-Wall Germany,” Journal of Nostalgia, June 5, 2011, http://journalofnostalgia.com/2011/06/05/reframing-east-the-case-of-manfred-beier%E2%80%99s-pre-wall-photographs-in-post-wall-germany-2/. Also see Nils Beier, Alltag inder DDR: So haben wir gelebt: Manfred Beier Fotografien aus dem großten Privatarchivder DDR 1949–1971 (Berlin: Berlinbook, 2011).

5 The Stasi even organized internal amateur photography exhibitions to inspire its em-ployees. To an extent, it too was influenced by Munzenberg’s notion of photographyas weapon that informed communist propaganda in the 1920s. See Karin Hartewig,Das Auge der Partei: Fotografie und Staatssicherheit (Berlin: Ch.Links Verlag, 2004),137, and Paul Betts, Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 174.

6 See Doug Nickel’s definition of the snapshot in his Snapshots: The Photography of Ev-eryday Life, 1888 to the Present (San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Museum of ModernArt, 1998), 11.

7 See, for example, Sarah James, Common Ground: German Photographic Cultures Acrossthe Iron Curtain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013) and Betts, WithinWalls.

8 James, Common Ground, 129.9 Alltagsgeschichte can be translated as everyday history. It was founded by social histo-

rian Alf Ludtke and historian Hans Medick in Germany in the 1980s. Relevant


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microhistories for this exploration of the everyday through the photo album include:Paul Steege, Andrew Bergerson, Maureen Healy, and Pamela E. Swett, “The History ofEveryday Life: A Second Chapter,” Journal of Modern History 80 (June 2008): 358–78;Josie McLellan, Love in the Time of Communism: Intimacy and Sexuality in the GDR(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Franziska Becker, Ina Merkel, andSimone Tippach-Schneider, eds., Das Kollektiv bin ich: Utopie und Alltag in derDDR (Vienna: Bohlau-Verlag, 2000); Ina Merkel, Utopie und Bedurfnis: Die Geschichteder Konsumkultur in der DDR (Cologne: Bohlau-Verlag, 1999); Eli Rubin, SyntheticSocialism: Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 2008), among others.

10 Martha Langford, Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in PhotographicAlbums (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001).

11 Verna Posever Curtis, Photographic Memory: The Album in the Age of Photography(New York: Aperture and Library of Congress, 2011), 13.

12 Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, “Testimonial Objects: Memory, Gender, and Trans-mission,” Poetics Today 27, no. 2 (Summer 2006): n.p.

13 “Fotografien Bild gewordener Blick auf die Geschichte sind. Fotografien sind, daswaere meine Vermutung, bildliche Konkretionen von Geschichtsmodellen. . . . Derhistorische Blick auf die Fotografien, so koennte man mit sanfter interpretativerGewalt formulieren, zielt weniger auf die Geschichte im Bild, auf den geschichtlicherIndex und somit auf die Frage, ob Fotografien Geschichte zeigen, sondern vielmehrauf verschiedene Formen der Geschichtshaltigkeit der Fotografie oder, etwasabstrakter gesprochen, auf die Geschichtsmodelle, an die die Fotografien geknuepftsind. Fotografien zeigen nicht Geschichte, sonder verschiedene Formen, Geschichtezu visualisieren. Diese Visualiserung ist zudem nicht notwendig an bestimmte piktor-ale Formen gebunden.” Bernd Stiegler, “Zeigen Fotografien Geschichte?” Fotoge-schichte 25, vol. 25 (March 2005): 4 and 9.

14 The Wende Museum acquired the photo albums and scrapbooks in its collectionthrough private individuals, who donated or sold them to the museum, as well as auc-tions. Additionally, it salvaged many that were discarded in the trash.

15 See James, Common Ground, 122.16 See Betts, Within Walls, 164.17 “Enterprises tended to chronicle their achievements and events in this family album

aesthetic, seemingly in an effort to promote the paternalistic idea of the workplaceas a second family.” See Betts, Within Walls, 213.

18 The state’s cultural authorities conceded in the 1970s that the exact correlative ofthe brigade image was the family image in the personal-private sphere. Eventhough an instruction book on writing the brigade scrapbook stressed the diffe-rence between the brigade scrapbook and the personal album, since the brigadescrapbook contributed to the construction of a true community, a collective,which was established at work. See Betts, Within Walls, 209. See also Ursula Lang-spach-Steinhaussen, Wie Schreiben Wir unser Brigadetagebuch (Berlin: VerlagTribune, 1970), 8.

19 Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990),7, 19.

20 I thank Josie McClellan for sharing with me her unpublished essay on GDR amateurphotography in which she discusses Bourdieu’s stereotypical view of the family photoalbum and how it is not applicable to GDR amateur photo albums.

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21 The cultural historian Paul Betts claims these to be deep felt values in GDR society andstipulates these values changed as of the 1970s, at which point GDR society becameincreasingly materialistic. See Betts, “The Twilight of the Idols: East GermanMemory and Material Culture,” Journal of Modern History 72, no. 3 (September2000): 764.

22 See Paul Betts, “Intimacy on Display: Getting Divorced in East Berlin,” in WithinWalls, 89.

23 As Katherine Pence argues, “. . . coffee drinking in the GDR became an importantcomponent in the construction of social distinctions and discrete communitiescounter to the ideological commitment of the state to a unified mass society.” SeeKatherine Pence, “Grounds for Discontent? Coffee from the Black Market to the Kaf-feeklatsch in the GDR,” in Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War EasternEurope, Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2012), 198.

24 It was rare to see images unidentified and without captions from the 1950s to the1970s and most of the 1980s. At some point in the 1980s, pocket size albums madeof plastic became available and they contained plastic sleeves to hold the photographsin place, leaving no space for written captions.

25 Cuevas-Wolf, “Montage as Weapon,” 185.26 James, Common Ground, 121.27 In the mid-1970s, the Gesellschaft fur Fotografie (GfZ) replaced the Zentral Kommission

Fotografie (ZKF) that had been in existence since the 1950s.28 Inka Schube, “Im Auftrag des Staates: Die Gesellschaft fur Fotografie im

Kulturbund der DDR: Ein potent-impotentes Allmachtssytem der 1980er Jahre,”Fotogeschichte 102 (2006): 25–30. Professional photographers, who were membersof the VBK, could also expect to receive commissions from the GfF. The commis-sions seemed to have been focused on exhibition projects and photographicactivities.

29 Jane Schuch, “Bilder der Freundschaft: Die offentlichen Bilderwelten der ‘Schule derFreundschaft’ in Straßfurt,” Fotogeschichte 102 (2006): 31–40.

30 See Mary N. Hampton and Douglas C. Peifer, “Reordering German Identity: MemorySites and Foreign Policy,” German Studies Review 30, no. 2 (2007): 374.

31 Bernd Lindner and Rainer Eckert, eds., Mauersprung (Leipzig: Stiftung Haus derGeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland Zeitgeschichtliche Forum Leipzig,2002), 178.

32 “Dafur war der Verband Bildender Kunstler zustandig. Er hatte ‘den Kunstlern zuhelfen, die Gesetzmassigkeiten des gesellschaftlichen Lebens’ zu erkennen. Die theor-etische Erziehungsarbeit allein genugte nicht. Die Kunstler mussten dem Arbeitenund Leben der ‘werktatigen’ Bevolkerung unmittelbar und institutionalisiert verbun-den werden. Dafuer wurden unter dem Eitkett Bitterfelder Weg neue Formenentwickelt. Die Kunstler, eingebunden und verpflichtet, sich kunstlerisch mit derArbeit und dem Leben der Menschen eines Betriebs, einer Genossenschaft, einerBrigade zu beschaftigen, sollten das Neue gestalten und dadurch, ‘die Menschenfur die Erfullung hoher Aufgaben begeistern. ‘. . . Die Kunstler hatten als verlangerterArm der Partei mit ihren spezifischen Mitteln den Menschen zu dem erwunschtenBewusstsein zu verhelfen und damit zu hoheren Leistungen zur Beschleunigungder Entwicklung, zur Erfullung des Siebenjahresplans beizutragen. . . . Deshalbsollten die Kunstler unmittelbar da arbeiten, wo der neue gesellschaftliche Reichtum


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geschaffen wurde. Denn, so Ulbricht, wenn ‘das neue brausende Leben des sozialist-schen Aufbaus die Kunstler erfullt, dann wurden auch ihre ‘Fahigkeiten wachsen,dieses neue Leben kunstlerisch zu gestalten. Seit der Kulturkonferenz 1957 wirktedie Partei verstarkt darauf hin, dass Kunstler in unmittebarem Zusammenhang mitindustriellen oder landwirtschaftlichen Betrieben arbeiteten.” Martin Damus,Malerei der DDR: Funktionen der bildenden Kunst im Realen Sozialismus (Reinbekbei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1991), 167 and 168.

33 Klaus Staeck (b. 1938, Pulsnitz/Kreis Kamenz bei Dresden) is one of sixteen artistswho contributed to the portfolio and who had a connection to Bitterfeld either asbirthplace, workplace, or domicile. Staeck grew up in Bitterfeld and is known forhis prints and graphic design work.

34 Die funf Jahre seit der Bitterfelder Konferenz, seit 1959, haben uns Sicherheit undMut fuer unseren weiteren Weg gegeben. Neue Krafte werden zu uns stossen.Erweisen wir uns durch unermudliche Arbeit des Vertrauens unseres Volkeswurdig! (Lebhafter Beifall). Quotation from an artwork in the Bitterfeld 4444portfolio.

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Making the Past Present: GDR Photo Albums and Scrapbooks

Documents

Transcript of Making the Past Present: GDR Photo Albums and Scrapbooks