A World In Color, Magnum’s ongoing project in partnership with Fujifilm and MPP (the Heritage and Photography Library of Paris) continues to digitize thousands of unseen slidesheets hidden in Magnum’s color library archive, reviving a visual history for the public to explore, share, and learn from.
This latest chapter is dedicated to Germany, a country which, after the cataclysmic devastation of World War II, was at the center of Cold War tensions and geopolitical unrest for four decades. In 1949, two Germanies came into existence: the Federal Republic of Germany, occupied by the Americans, British, and French in the West, and the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or DDR in German) by the Soviets in the East. In 1989, the world watched as East Germans flooded across the Berlin Wall, a transformative moment leading to the country’s unification and triggering the Velvet Revolution in Czechia, revisited in the first chapter of A World in Color. While Magnum photographers’ coverage of Germany during the Cold War is mostly in black and white, these color images by Thomas Hoepker, Leonard Freed, Erich Hartmann and more provide a nuanced retrospective of life on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
East Germany
“Back then, Germany was simply the place where certain fault lines were the most visible after the war. That’s what convinced me not to do a book about France or Italy or some other pleasant subject, but to go precisely where oppositions were exacerbated and beginning to clash,” René Burri said about his black-and-white book Les Allemands, shot between 1957 and 1962. Burri created a visceral portrait of the West, mirrored by discreet glimpses of the East.
In East Berlin, Burri photographed a boy peering over the stands of the former Walter-Ulbricht-Stadion — named after Walter Ulbricht, the GDR’s First Secretary and head of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) — where the 1957 East German Athletics Championships took place. Burri switched to color here, framing the meticulous formations and a crisp flush of red. He captures a moment of symbolic social dissonance, as the boy’s wide-eyed curiosity collides with the rigid expectations of the state.
The image somewhat foreshadows Thomas Hoepker’s impression of the country two years later: “It was very grey, crumbling, the only color one saw was communist red, and nothing was spontaneous, everything was controlled,” he told The Economist in 2009. “People went to join a parade, there was no joy, it was something you had to do.”
From the end of the war until 1961, over three million East Germans had resettled in West Germany. On August 13 of the same year, to end the “brain drain” and “body drain,” as Hoepker put it, residents of Berlin woke to an unannounced, ominous partition. Soon it became a concrete wall bisecting the city. Lives were changed overnight: West Berlin was sealed off, an enclave surrounded by the communist East. East German civilians were forbidden to cross unless granted rare permission, and border guards were ordered to shoot at anyone attempting to escape.
Hoepker was the first accredited West German photographer to document East Germany, resulting in his book DDR Ansichten – Views of a Vanished Country. He photographed the Oberbaumbrücke crossing for West German citizens only (above), today the site of the East Side Gallery, the world’s longest open-air gallery on a preserved section of the Berlin Wall. During the wall’s existence, at least 140 people were killed or died trying to cross the border from East to West Berlin. And yet, Hoepker said in a TIME magazine interview, “Over time, the majority of West Germans had kind of accepted the reality of this absurd and deadly wall.”
The GDR’s ideology relied on Ulbricht’s Ten Commandments of Socialist Morality and Ethics, a working class code defending the collective over the individual. “They were really bringing up a new generation of Untertanen,” Hoepker added — those who were obedient to the state. One of his images shows a motto on a billboard which reads, “Our way (our DDR) is the right one.”
Yet, having photographed East German singer and songwriter Wolf Biermann, who was forced into exile in 1976 and wrote an essay in DDR Ansichten, Hoepker was interested in those who resisted. His portraits of GDR artists complicate the narrative of subjugation, demonstrating that young creatives in the East carved out modes of expression despite the authoritarian state’s prescribed channels.
Not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a young dancer poses at the Palucca School of Artistic Dance in Dresden, founded in 1925 by 23-year-old Gret Palucca. A protégée of expressionist dancer Mary Wigman, Palucca was forced to close her school under Nazi rule, yet reopened after the war. In the GDR and across the Eastern Bloc, ballet was the approved, state-sponsored dance, but Palucca’s avant-garde school persisted. Her style inspired Bauhaus School artist Wassily Kandinsky to create sketches based on her non-narrative, abstract aesthetic.
Just prior to Germany’s reunification in 1990, a building on Oranienburger Straße in Berlin was due to be demolished, yet artists transformed it into Kunsthaus Tacheles, a haven for innovative arts which lasted until 2012. Hoepker captured a glimpse of the dissident GDR-era creatives, who reclaimed their own space during the country’s breakthrough transition.
In the early 1960s, Leonard Freed developed a portrait of West Germany “in search of identity and purpose” after years of conflict, published in his photobooks Made in Germany (1970) and German Jews Today (1965). As a person of Jewish heritage, he struggled to come to terms with the atrocities committed during the war as he explored the country in constant transition. “Germany has been, in the grips of its history, a divided people,” Freed wrote in Made in Germany. “[…] The pivot of Germany’s tragedies and its greatest glories have been its geography. All that passes through Europe, east to west, north to south, crosses Germany and has affected its character directly and indirectly.”
20 years later, Freed photographed the SEZ Complex, an indoor sports center, equipped with a wave pool, gyms, a bowling alley, ballet halls, hair salons and restaurants. After its opening in 1981, up to 15,000 East Germans flocked there daily for a leisurely escape, a symbol of pride for the SED.
Moments of leisure in the East German archive contrast with the omniscient presence of the state. Freed captured the symmetrical precision of the army, foregrounding its calculated conformity down to each white glove.
On top of a fragile economy, Freed would have witnessed the scarcity of food products and consumer goods in the East, which he indirectly suggested here in his portrait of a man and his mother holding a modest collection of apples. Restrictions on foreign imports and private trade made even some staple products limited and expensive.
The man’s strictly-planned day trip across the Wall also underscores the years of estrangement experienced by families on each side of the border. “Germany…where families are now divided between East and West, and while they may speak German, they no longer communicate or agree to the meaning of the same words,” Freed wrote in Made in Germany.
West Germany
In many ways, the agency’s archived images of West Berlin explicitly differ from those of the East. Freed, Burri, Patrick Zachmann, and Erich Hartmann — who was forced to flee Germany at 16 as the Nazi regime rose to power — show a flourishing, consumer-driven cultural milieu replete with carefree picnics in parks, celebrations overflowing with beer, laidback postures, bustling commercial centers and sexual liberation.
A grinning man posing in a feather-lined dress suggests an open-minded West Berlin, yet the reality is not as categorical. While gay visibility was restricted in the East, the GDR decriminalized homosexuality in 1968, a year before West Germany. Historian Samuel Clowes Huneke notes that the West German government prosecuted more than 100,000 gay men between 1949 and 1969 — convicting 50,000 — which was far more than the GDR.
Dissatisfaction under communism throughout the Eastern bloc reached an apex in 1989. By the summer, Hungary had opened its border with Austria, compelling thousands of East Germans to escape as the regimes began to crumble. Mass demonstrations demanding free elections, freedom of press, and political reform in East Germany soon escalated.
On the evening of November 9, government spokesperson Günter Schabowski announced the opening of the borders — meant to be a temporary measure to go into effect the next day — spurring thousands of East Berliners to congregate at the checkpoints. Under mounting pressure, the guards opened the gates to cheering, emotional crowds, changing the history of the country and the seemingly impregnable Iron Curtain.
Inge Morath and 10 other Magnum photographers documented not only the fall of the Wall and its aftermath, but the feeling of both elation and disbelief across the capital. Yet, for some, the moment was fraught with disappointment: thousands protested against the country’s reunification on October 3, 1990, not wanting to abandon the socialist dream. Cultural integration proved difficult on both sides, yet East Germans struggled with the precarity of capitalist system, despite new opportunities, and were sometimes treated with “disrespect,” as Hoepker said, in the West. “They had lost the ground under their feet, […] they had to reorient themselves,” Hoepker added.
The Ministry for State Security headquarters — now the Stasi Museum Berlin — was ransacked after the Wall fell, but the Stasi continued their activities until the reunification. “This country was run by very limited minds, but very shrewd minds. […] They were very dangerous people indeed,” Hoepker said.
In 1991, Alex Webb’s warm hues in shifting light take on symbolic overtones, suggesting a sense of transition; the nation’s division is now behind them. “Ever since I started working seriously in color, I’ve been attuned to the critical importance of the color of light in my work, and hence, the time of day,” he said. “It’s a big part of the way I see and experience the world.”
In his preface to Made in Germany, published in 1970, Freed asked: “25 years from now, France will still be France, England will remain England and what can we expect to change in Italy…but Germany, what will be of Germany in 25 years?” Freed lived just over 25 years after his book, witnessing the country’s transition for himself. The archives provide an otherwise impossible experience: to re-examine the past with our knowledge of the present, bringing to life what Magnum photographers saw in living color.
Live Events
Join us at FUJIKINA Cologne from September 27-28 to celebrate the full scope of A World in Color. Uniting all previously featured countries in one space for the first time, the exhibition also presents the newest chapter dedicated to Germany, with new unseen images of the country, original slide sheets from the archive, and new photographs by Magnum photographers Cristina de Middel and Thomas Dworzak. Inspired by Leonard Freed, Dworzak investigates the lingering traces of the Iron Curtain in Bavaria, while de Middel explores the city of Pomerode, Brazil — a cultural enclave of German heritage. Don’t miss talks with both photographers during the weekend.
FUJIKINA COLOGNE
Flora Köln, Am Botanischen Garten 1a,
50735 Köln
September 27-28