ABOUT

Following the saying of the French film director Robert Bresson "Make visible what might never have been noticed without you," the Berlin photographer Günter Steffen photographed an impressive cycle about East Berlin's center between 1984 and 1989, in which he lived and worked at the time. For him, the resulting images are testimonies of the attitude to life at the time such as helplessness, conflict and anger – an end-time mood, also triggered by the multiple loss of friends who left the West. 

This falling precepts in Steffen's photographs are opposed to selected text fragments from the dystopian novel "WIR" by Yevgenij Samjatin (*1884 Lebedjan," 1937 Paris), written in 1920 in the Soviet Union. This politically explosive precursor of other famous dystopian novels is the nightmarish description of a totalitarian surveillance state. First published in 1924 by exiles abroad, the novel, which is on the index throughout the eastern bloc, was only allowed to appear in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev in 1988.