Ostzeit Stories from a Vanished Country
Hatje Cantz
Edited by OSTKREUZ Agentur der Fotografen, texts by Marcus Jauer, Wolfgang Kil, Alexander Osang, Ingo Schulze, photographs by Sibylle Bergemann, Harald Hauswald, Werner Mahler, Ute Mahler, Maurice Weiss.
2010. 288 pp., 190 ills. in duotone
29.60 x 26.70 cm
hardcover
ISBN 978-3-7757-2486-9
In an authentic and unadorned way, these photos tell of a country that no longer exists, yet remains preserved in these images.
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Ostzeit presents photo series by the best chroniclers of the German Democratic Republic, culled from the first-class inventory of the Ostkreuz Agency. Founded on the concept of authorship in 1990 by photographers fromBerlin and Leipzig, the agency was named after a Berlin train station. Anyone wanting to enter East Germany had to pass through this station.
Ostzeit offers sensitive pictures of the GDR and its people: Sibylle Bergemann’s unrivaled, humane photographs of the legendary Berlin dance hall Clärchens Ballhaus. Werner Mahler’s long-term study of Bad Berka in Thuringia. Harald Hauswald’s photographic essay on the drabness and hidden comedy of everyday life in the GDR. Ute Mahler’s revealing photos of the May Day Parade in Berlin in 1980. French photographer Maurice Weiss’s documentation of the final hours before the collapse of the Wall and reunification. And last, but not least, Bergemann’s emblematic images of the creation of the Marx-Engels monument, which, ironically, are now part of the German Parliament’s art collection.
Exhibition: Haus der Kulturen, Berlin August 13– September 13, 2009.
About the Publisher:
Hatje Cantz publisher are committed to this motto more than ever – with our accustomed high quality we remain faithful to the standards set by Gerd Hatje: premium books that are produced in close collaboration with artists and curators. Our profile has always been shaped by tradition and avant-garde from all over the world. We present our program in a bilingual preview catalogue, in which masters of the twentieth century such as Paul Klee, Paul Gauguin, and Eva Hesse meet contemporary artists such as Michael Borremans, Gerhard Richter, and Filip Dujardin.
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