The East of the Others

The artist Cornelia Schlemme puts on a hemp wig and pulls a stroller up and down by her pigtails in front of the house of the Stasi officer who looked after her files and her IM, the poet Sascha Anderson. She captures her action on Super 8 film. Art criticism in the West is enthusiastic. However, says Schleme thirty years later, her performance was not understood at all outside of the GDR, which had already disappeared by then. Her art has never been abstract conceptual, but always autobiographical and concrete: "They thought, it's from somewhere."

The film “Rebelinnen – Fotografie. underground. DDR.” It was often about hair. Gabriele Stötzer still ties her models to it and says: "That's a bit tormenting? That's good.” What pulls the hair is the past. In Tina Bara's photos, it's the hairy naked bodies. And Cornelia Slime says: "I am my brush." ​​Three biographies, two of them Slimes and Stötzers, begin in the historical year 1953, in East Berlin and Thuringia; Bara, born south of Berlin in 1962, has now been living longer in the united country than in the GDR.

Cornelia Slime shows the early works of her student days in Dresden, when she also sang in a punk band at the art school, as was proper at the time. She placed her bass player as a mummy in aluminum foil on the Elbe meadows like an alien and painted perspective crooked pyramids on the photos. She says she was never interested in perspective. The Stasi considered their symbolism to be a secret language and the Association of Visual Artists considered their performative work to be “garbage art”, which was tantamount to a professional ban. She wrapped herself naked in wire, ropes and hoses, hid her face in plastic bags and today explains the photos and films that were made of them as "parables of life in the GDR". She applied for permanent departure, which was granted in 1984. She took her son and moved west, leaving much of her work behind.

Gabriele Stötzer signed a petition against Wolf Biermann's expatriation in Erfurt in 1976 and was sentenced as the ringleader because she was the first on the list. She spent a year in solitary confinement in the Hoheneck women's prison. After that she became an artist. She painted, made series of photographs, made films, and still wraps women in gauze bandages to photograph them as kneeling mummies. "Art against dissolution," she says in the film "Rebelinnen"; the camera looks for a long time at a picture of the GDR in the late 1980s with the message: “And staying is also a decision. The refusal to go.” Gabriele Stötzer never went to the West.

In the film, Tina Bara stands in a green backyard that used to be gray and says: "It was never really nice." Prenzlauer Berg was the backdrop for her early photos. She also photographed the “Women for Peace” in the country, as naked as all the young people who made themselves available for them, and herself. The series of pictures from the Schkopau Buna works that she made famous in the alternative art world of the GDR. A ruin as a chemical plant, carbide landscapes, Erich Honecker as a holy image in the deserted canteen. Bara says the beautiful sentence: "I couldn't make a state with that." Shortly before the Wall came down, she went west.

In her director's statement, as the cineast calls the filmmaker's formal statement, Pamela Meyer-Arndt, the director, explains: "Would we (from the West) ever have expected as much sense of freedom within the GDR as there is from these three artists? Astonishingly, these images are only now being discovered, through this film and elsewhere, they are being brought to light from the dusty drawers. Finally.” Meyer-Arndt, born in Cologne in 1967, lived in Hamburg and New York, moved to Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg in 2003, according to her director's statement in the accompanying text on the website of her film distributor ever-resident East Bohemian” as a director. Sibylle Bergemann, Gundula Schulze-Eldowy and Helga Paris also introduced “Female Eastern Photographers” to the West. “The Photographer Roger Melis – Chronicler of the East Germans” was shown in cinemas three years ago.

Not that West Germans couldn't or shouldn't film East Germany. Sometimes you wouldn't even notice the western plaining. The lives of others also withstand the sharp view from outside and can make some things clearer.

The fact that “Rebelinnen” as a documentary and film portrait, for all its sensitivity and beauty, also seems a bit strange if you experienced the time it is about in the same way and have been watching films like this for three decades, about the so-called East Bohème is also explained by the director's statement. Out of a pride in discovery that Klaus Schlesinger, the writer and screenwriter, described in the early 1990s as an overreaction of ignorance: The honest West German at least admits that the Sahara interested him more than the GDR, at least before the unity and the charm the ground values. What Schlesinger missed: Since 1990, the West has also been interested in ideals, in stories. More engaging narratives to make your own.

You can clearly see the film's amazement at the sense of freedom described by Pamela Meyer-Arndt. One reason to be surprised would have been if the people in the GDR had lived as the GDR wanted and as the West still likes to imagine: Dissatisfied but in agreement with the caring state, GDR people have set themselves up between the seating area and wall unit with Nordhäuser Double grain and seasoned meat, with the Puhdys and the "Belts kettle". Without any sense of freedom. It is possible that there were such people in the comfortable dictatorship of the GDR. As in all dictatorships, the majority wanted to live more freely than they were, whatever that ultimately meant for them.

Some made art for it and stayed like Gabriele Stötzer. Others made art and left for it. Like Tina Bara, who suffered from a “migrant complex” in the West, as she puts it, and like Cornelia Slime, who was celebrated in the West for what she calls “poor exoticism” until the GDR introduced her in the guise of the Stasi files haunted again.