Photo Exhibition Totally East

Life in East Germany

The Goethe-Institut Manila presents a photo exhibition about everyday life in East Germany entitled "Totally East: Living in East Germany", jointly sponsored by the Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Eastern Germany and OSTKREUZ Agentur der Fotografen in 2018.

"Totally East: Living in East Germany" is on a university tour in Manila and now on it's third stop at the University of the Philippines Diliman this March 26 to April 19, 2019.

The exhibition will have an opening program this March 26 at Palma Hall in UP Diliman. The opening program will be followed by a symposium on the life and times in the former East Germany at 10:30 am at the College of Arts and Letters AVR. The symposium will feature Dr. Hidde van der Wall (Asst. Professor, Department of History, Ateneo de Manila University) and DVS Manarpaac (Asst. Professor, Department of European Languages, UP Diliman) as speakers.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

The exhibition shows an unvarnished GDR reality that even contemporary witnesses can hardly remember today. On 20 panels, the exhibition presents over 100 known and unknown photographs by Harald Hauswald. The texts of the exhibition were written by historian and author Stefan Wolle, who grew up in the GDR like the photographer. The exhibition panels link QR codes to short video interviews on the Internet in which the photographer reports on how and in which context the central photograph of the panel was taken.

 
ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER

Harald Hauswald Harald Hauswald, born in 1954 in Radebeul, completed his training in photography in Dresden and moved to East Berlin in 1978. In the eighties, he walked the city’s streets and took photos of thing that other photographers overlooked or regarded as uninteresting: scenes of everyday life, lonely and elderly people, couples in love, rockers, hooligans and young people in churches standing up for peace and environmental protection. “The focus is on the people” — this was one principle of socialist realism. Harald Hauswald had his own way of giving concrete form to this principle. In East Germany, he did not receive any art award for this, but got into trouble with the authorities. Of course, Harald Hauswald also took photos of decaying buildings and queues in front of food stores. But his photos were not meant to be subversive; they were rather a declaration of love to the people in East Germany. For a brief moment, there was an almost tender relationship between the people in the photos and the photographer, which can be felt by the viewer even today. Hauswald’s pictures, which shape our image of East Germany in its last years, feature in numerous exhibitions worldwide.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stefan Wolle Stefan Wolle, born in 1950 in Halle / Saale, completed his secondary education and training as a bookseller in Berlin in 1969. From 1971 on, he studied history and German language and literature at the Humboldt University in East Berlin. Because of his critical political statements, he had to leave the university in 1972 in order to “prove his worth in the production sector” for one year. After resuming and completing his studies, he worked at the Academy of Sciences, where, in 1984, he gained his doctorate on the relations between the German and Russian scientific communities around 1800. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Wolle became a Round Table expert for Stasi files and in March 1990 was co-editor of Ich liebe Euch doch alle! — the first published collection of Stasi documents, which became the last bestseller of East Germany. The historian later worked at Humboldt University, Free University of Berlin and other institutes. Since 2005, Stefan Wolle has been director of academic research at the DDR Museum in Berlin. He has become famous above all for his trilogy Die heile Welt der Diktatur. Many readers value his lively and realistic portrayal of East Germany, which is based on historical sources and on the author’s own experiences.

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