In search for a chest of drawers, our colleague Susanne Strauch made a nice find on a flea market in the Brandenburg countryside last weekend. Among lamps and cutlery she discovered some old copies of the East German magazine "Fotografie".
"Fotografie" was published by VEB Fotokinoverlag in Leipzig and used to be the photo magazine in the GDR with the highest circulation. As 40% of its copies were exported, it also had a remarkable number of readers in the West. After the reunification and the sale of the publishing house, the magazine was discontinued, also due to the fact that there already was a same-named West-German magazine.
We post an article presenting Ute Mahler and her long-term project "Living Together" in the September issue of 1985.
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20 years ago - East German magazine "Fotografie"
20.10.2010 | | 20 years ago -
20 years ago - 3. October
04.10.2010 | | 20 years agoTwenty years ago, on 3 October 1990, the Brandenburg Gate was not the only place where Germany's reunification was celebrated: Werner Mahler spent the night in Friedrichsthal, a district of Oranienburg in the province of Brandenburg.
© Werner Mahler/OSTKREUZ -
20 years ago - Ute Mahler about Ibrahim Böhme
03.05.2010 | | 20 years agoAs already mentioned several times on our blog, OSTKREUZ is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. Because of this, we will be showing single images of 1990 from our archive during the following months. Images that remember a time of change, of new freedom and also the first disappointments. A time in which everything seemed possible in Berlin, after most things stood still for previous decades. Germany, then, was in transformation. The Wall had already fallen, the reunion, however, was still to come. The GDR still existed, but the first products from the West were already coming into the country and the people could cross the border freely for the first time.
We want to start this new category with a contribution from Ute Mahler about Ibrahim Boehme:
In March 1990 the first free elections were held in the GDR. New parties were being founded; Ibrahim Bohme was the odds-on favorite for the post of Prime Minister - he was the leading candidate of the SPD-East (Social Democratic Party of East Germany). He was charismatic, clever, charming and with a biography of a political dissident. "Our Little King", he was affectionately called by the comrades of the SPD.
The magazine "Stern" gave me the assignment, to photograph him during the campaign. I accompanied him over a period of 5 weeks. Not continuously, but I was present during his trip to Moscow, at campaign events in Dresden and at the party conference in Leipzig. The first photos still reveal a certain naivety in his face, later he could play his new role almost perfectly.
It came as a big surprise that he and his party did not win the elections. Days later, it was revealed that he worked as an "informal staff" for State Security of the GDR and had betrayed his friends.
The photo in the elevator, which I took 5 weeks after the first encounter with him, shows him at the end of his political career. Ibrahim Boehme hid from the public eye, no longer left the two-room apartment in Berlin, became ill. Two years lie between my first photo and the last one. Seven years later he died.
