When “documenta” started and materialized in the city of Kassel in 1955, located just a stone’s throw away from the border that divided West and East, “capitalism” and “communism,” it undeniably held a significant position in the cultural front of the Cold War, with the intertwined issues of artistic liberty and the role of experimentation in mass culture at its center of polemics. Six decades later, and twenty-five years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, this controversial legacy continues to loom over both the political landscape and socio-cultural scenery – we are now arguably further from the thaw of the 1990s than ever before, and certain elements of Cold War culture have resurfaced to haunt the aesthetic imagination of contemporary Europe. One notable aspect is the renewed fascination with the erasure of East German culture and history, in which Ulrich Wüst has inadvertently become a chronicler of sorts.
In his illustrious career as a photographer, spanning several decades since the late 1970s, Magdeburg-born artist Wüst has captured a vivid glimpse of his surroundings – the rural Uckermark, small towns of both East and West Germany, and the eventual reunification of the two. Through his lens, he has honed an unparalleled ability to capture the nostalgia and sense of loss that permeates these landscapes. His evocative monochrome shots of abandoned buildings in East Germany, frozen in the Brezhnev-era stasis, foretell the inevitable demise of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. What is striking is Wüst’s deliberate omission of human presence in his depictions of the sozialistischer Staat der Arbeiter und Bauern, the socialist state of workers and farmers. Symbolically, the workers and farmers are missing from their own republic, leaving behind a desolate and empty shell.
In contrast, Wüst’s photographs of Magdeburg in the post-1989 era, when the country was undergoing significant changes, showcase the superficial nature of these transformations. His more recent forays into exploring the history of the GDR, presented mainly as leporellos, focus on the little specks, fragments, and marks that serve as a silent witness to the past. With an archaeologist’s keen eye, Wüst reveals the muted echoes of a bygone era. There is a deliberate detachment from the melancholic undertones that characterize some of his most renowned images from the earlier period, like the one with an unknown woman sitting next to a Trabant, staring out at the stagnant gray waters of the Baltic Sea in the languid embrace of late summer. The image stands as a testimony to the emptiness that once ruled this land and continues to leave its mark on the landscape to this day.
www.ftn-books.com has a few Wust titles available.
