When the photographer Lysann Buschbeck moved into an apartment in the Hecht neighborhood of Dresden in the late 1990s, she began to meet her younger neighbors. They bummed cigarettes and often came to her place for tea. Lysann Buschbeck began to photograph these young people in the spaces they had created for themselves in the many vacant apartment buildings in Dresden in the period after the fall of communism. Over a period of thirteen years, the photographer followed them as they grew up. Hecht—the title is taken from the neighborhood in the Neustadt section of Dresden—offers a sensitive look at a group of East German teenagers whose parents lost their jobs in the early 1990s and could no longer offer their children a solid footing because they themselves had lost theirs. Alcoholism, physical violence, and drugs were part of the everyday lives of these young people, as becomes clear in interviews with the Hamburg-based author Claudia Gülzow.
