Clearing the Depths
Der Traum vom Reich / The Dream of the Reich

Following on from a number of projects that have drawn on various archive collections of functional photography (police, military, and urban planning archives), Arwed Messmer here turns to his own personal photographic archive. He looks back at the massive upheavals in East Germany and Berlin after the reunification of Germany in 1990. For this project, Messmer uses hitherto unpublished pictures and re-edits existing groups of works, creating new arrangements and new relationships between the different series. Problematic aspects of recent German history are exposed, highlighting the return of nationalist thinking in a reunited Germany. There are also views of the reconstruction of Berlin, with the first images showing the demolition of East Germany’s post-war modernist heritage. In the early 1990s, Arwed Messmer, b. 1964, turned his attention to the changes taking place in Berlin and East Germany, making this a focus of his work as a documentary urban photographer. He has mounted large-scale exhibitions and authored publications on East Berlin in the 1950s, the Berlin Wall, the Stasi archives, and left-wing terrorism in West Germany. Falk Haberkorn, b. 1974 in Berlin, works as an independent artist in Leipzig. Maren Lübbke-Tidow, b. 1968, is an art historian and political scientist. She works as a freelance photography critic, writer, and curator in Berlin.