Disaster Protection
Thomas Steinert captured in pictures the feeling for life in the last two decades of communist
East Germany. His impressive photographs remain to be discovered. A visit in Leipzig. /2007


The building with the smashed windows has been prepared for demolition. A young man in jeans and a jacket appears on the dilapidated balcony and begins playing a violin. School children stop in their tracks and turn up their heads above their huge knapsacks. In a scenery of deterioration, the music unfolds its magic. Such scenes have been reported from the ruin landscapes in German cities after World War II, when art helped people through the trauma of destruction. But Thomas Steinert photographed this young music student in Connewitz, a district in southern Leipzig, in 1976 on his way home. The College for Graphic Art and Book Art was permitted to house students in the untenanted residential buildings until the latter were torn down. Painters, writers, and free spirits moved in and the district rapidly became the center for Leipzig’s bohemians. Steinert attended the photography class and remained here after graduating in 1977. As a postwar child born in 1949, he was not pampered, but lived in dank cellars, patched disintegrating roofs, and photographed what happened around him. Painters and ballet dancers and apartment squatters. When Gerd Harry Lybke and a few colleagues wanted to open the private gallery Eigen+Art around the corner, he lent a hand. The later star gallerist was still working as a nude model and appeared at the opening naked in a performance. Steinert’s photos of Judy Lybke with her wild curls and half-open bathrobe were later known around the world.

»All of that no longer exists. In a sudden measure shortly before the demise of East Germany, tanks of the National People’s Army drove up and pulled down the old buildings with ropes and chains,« says Steinert without any nostalgia. He sinks down in an armchair and sips his East German »Vita« cola, which is chic once again and is being produced in accordance with a new recipe. The attic apartment is in a renovated back courtyard. The former textile factories on the shore a few streets away are being remodeled as lofts, which are in great demand despite many empty apartments. The small rooms are crowded with cabinets and shelves full of prints and negatives. »I took most of the photos with an old ›Pentacon six‹«, says Steinert. »The shutter click was so hard at first that it shook the camera.« When Steinert bought it in 1968, he had just completed occupational high school in a mine and smeltery and earned his first money. »I came from a small village and felt isolated in the firm. Photography was a way for me to come into another world.«He heard about the college in Leipzig, applied, was drafted into the army, and afterward worked through the history of photography. Paul Strand’s nature photographs fascinated him; he tried out flexographic prints, photomontages, misprints, and Warholesque pictures and he photographed nudes, landscapes, interiors, and factories. Sometimes the world appears in Constructivist acceleration, sometimes in New Objectivist distance or with Surrealist comedy. But Steinert soon realized that he didn’t need the artistic experimental setup of a Man Ray. A nocturnal look out of his apartment window sufficed: there lay a drunk on the street like the heap of briquettes on the neighboring empty lot. The passerby bending over him is present like a shadow, as electric as the light trails left by a car driving past on the cobblestones, as if someone from outer space had been to visit.

Steinert preserved everyday life in pictures. He photographed the Puhdys, the most popular band in East Germany in the 1970s, and the politburo on a visit to the Leipzig trade fair. He captured the pseudo-decadence in the dance bar Haus Connewitz, which Western visitors were so attracted to. And he had an eye for icons of everyday use that mirrored the society. In the steel-pipe jungle gyms on playgrounds, he found the ugliness of everyday life in »actually existing socialism«—and its failed hopes in the streetlamps that also haunt Neo Rauch’s paintings. »Their futuristic design was once the epitome of a communist future that would be as aerodynamic and gleaming as these lamps,« says Steinert. He photographed them as frequently as he did the public baths, which were deteriorating, and the old cemeteries, which many people used as a quarry for building materials.

But Steinert’s pictures were much more than documentary photos. Nor is he a milieu photographer, as one publication released in 2006 for an exhibition in Leipzig’s museum of municipal history wanted to call him. He doesn’t open a fan of lived life in order to sink to his knees in it. The men and women who stand in front of a computer center waiting for a street car are shown in ballet-like grace as an urban tableau of existential waiting à la Samuel Beckett. The girl lying on a motorcycle in a short skirt playing a triola in front of a boy is an eternal Lolita shedding all inconveniences. Subtly, almost incidentally, Steinert captures how standards, convictions, and explanations shift, grow brittle, and lose contact with reality.

Thomas Steinert captures such intermediate states more precisely than Evelyn Richter, Arno Fischer, Günter Rössler, or other East German star photographers with prestige in East and West. When everyone sensed that East German society was dissolving but no one had found words for the process yet, he saw the beginnings of big changes in small gestures. Anyone who wants to learn something about the atmosphere of the last two decades of communist East Germany or to get to know the aggregation of images and feelings, yearnings and frustrations people were subjected to must look at these pictures. Here someone has taken himself so far out to the edge that he could get a glimpse of situations, signs, and moods that no one else wanted to see. The young factory workers on the vehicle of the telephone factory »VEB RFT Leipzig«, gleefully swinging telephones in a 1969 parade marking the 20th birthday of East Germany—this motif says more about life at that time than some novels do. How must people feel to whom the telephone is presented as a technological achievement—but one they are deprived of, while the world around them uses it as a matter of course? What kind of cheerfulness can this be that cheers this situation as progress?

East Germany saw photography’s aesthetic task in the celebration of heroic measures to build socialism and the collective. August Sander was held up as role model. Steinert photographed professional groups as well as the collective. It would surely be mistaken to call him a conceptual photographer. He never wanted to travel around the world taking frontal pictures of shaft towers in neutral, gray light, like Bernd and Hilla Becher in Düsseldorf. Nor did he adopt conventional mass genres and interpret them harder, like Thomas Ruff with his blown-up passport photos of fellow students. But there are definitely parallels. »Of course we also knew what was being done in the West. The photo magazines were available at the college,« says Steinert. But he wanted a softer approach to situations. The cleaning ladies in the public baths, the tobacco dealers, the children collecting non-ferrous metals, the sausage salesgirls, the part-time waitresses, the bohemians, and the way agricultural and industrial workers form an image of society, because Steinert portrays them in their surroundings and their skillfulness in the moment.

And the collective slides past him in the intoxication that takes hold of everyone and that no one mentioned. »There was always alcohol, even when the vegetable and meat shelves were empty,« he recalls. The staff of the Lankewitz coal store forms up beside the truck for a group portrait before a Father’s Day outing. In 1987, students sing with glasses in their hands in front of their excursion wagons. And the Karneval society in Connewitz’s Erich Zeigner clubhouse is alcohol-weary and in high spirits. A woman laughs about a man’s hands on her bosom and the half-naked revue girls gaze, as sweatily content as if they were ten-year-olds who had just completed their first ballet performance.

»These were not photos for the Party newspaper,« says Steinert, but for a long time he didn’t intend them as a critique of the system, either. »I thought I’ll capture this so that we can later see what we’ve left behind us when we’ve reached our goals.« His pictures show how folk culture mixed with socialism, how the dream of a better future, which every society likes to fantasize, arrived in »actually existing socialism« and failed. Life is collectively organized all the way down into leisure time; there is no space for individual withdrawal in the small apartments in the pre-fab slab-constructed buildings that now await demolition in the center of Leipzig. But the community is good for folk celebration. Steinert shows how the girls lift their skirts at the gymnastics festival. The soldiers of the National People’s Army sit in their uniforms in the beer garden on Sunday.

The functionaries didn’t forgive Steinert this sober gaze anywhere. In the shower at the steel foundry where he worked for two years, he saw the tattooed SS numbers in the armpits of some workers. He was then demoted to stand-in worker and received lower wages. At the college in Leipzig, the teachers simply kept his works to use in instruction. At his final examination they showed up with ice cream sundaes and gave him such low marks that he found no position and survived doing odd jobs. »I made one of the world’s ugliest postcards from a picture of the slab-constructed buildings,« he remarks. When he submitted one of his drab-colored collages for an exhibition, with himself spooning a red soup in the foreground and a statue of Lenin being towed away in the background, the picture wasn’t even hung.

When communism fell, Steinert did research for a 1000-page book on the life of Friedrich Nietzsche. Still unpublished, it documents kindred mentalities. Anarchists stand at the railway station fence and urinate between the bars after a demonstration. The later [neo-Nazi] NPD Chairman Franz Schönhuber believed spouting bromides during the first all-German elections would persuade naïve eastern Germans. The first satellite dishes are mounted on the crumbling facades in back courtyards on Ernst-Thälmann-Straße. In 1991, Gorbachev smiles down from the wall of the USSR trade fair pavilion onto emptied drawers and a lone telephone on the ground. The old vanishes, the new arrives, the photographer remains skeptical. On a wintry street in 1990, a transporter full of belongings being moved is emblazoned with an old script: »Disaster Protection«. The new beginning has failed before it began.

The new beginnings and transformations of the present and everyday life in globalization are for younger photographers to capture, he says. »They have different experience and a different gaze. They are closer to it.« But he does want to get a picture of it. In Wittgensdorf, close to the village he grew up in, lives the caricaturist Henry Büttner, who observed everyday life in communist East Germany for decades. »He held out in this little village and asserted his own world against it, and he never permitted anyone to photograph him,« says Steinert. A portrait of the soon-to-be octogenarian could be an emblem of resistance against the inertia of normality, which can paralyze creativity as much as a repressive society can. But then Steinert pulls out a »list« of as yet unrealized projects and dreams himself away for the blink of an eye. There is still a lot to be done.
—By Gerhard Mack



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Dr. Gerhard Mack, studied History, Political Science,
Philosophy, and English in Constance and Oxford.
Editor for art and architecture at the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Art critic for various
newspapers and magazines, including Cash, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Art.
Various publications on architecture, art, literature, and theater, including Œuvres
complètes Herzog & de Meuron, monographs on Hans Josephsohn and Rémy Zaugg.
He wrote Endzeitrevue, an extensive portrait of the artist Thomas Steinert,
for Art Kunstmagazin 02/2008.
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