It’s always strange to be confronted with something you know from TV but have never seen yourself. At the time I saw few images of the GDR in the Cold War, but I do have an image of that time, composed of everything I have learned and seen since then. And I’m sure I’d love to see the fall of the Wall on television. I was 16 and the cheering crowd – and David Hasselhoff – made a big impression.
There is such a thing as typical DDR architecture, Plattenbau called, which means flats that can be drawn in planes, like a grid. In a broader sense, it means construction with precast concrete slabs, and that is of course also the case in the West. But the East German Plattenbau has something characteristic. Recently, on my first visit to Leipzig, it was pointed out to me, and I was immediately sold. The rhythm in the seemingly dull balance of balconies and windows is irresistible. The first building I saw also had a playful kind of mosaic surfaces, alternately spread over the walls of egg-yellow concrete. With those circular neon letters on the facade of the shop below – this could be the first shot in a film about the GDR.
In the time before the Wall fell, visual artists had to navigate between the rules that were imposed on them. They were strict – abstract art was not allowed, social-realistic art was allowed – but in practice it could be tampered with quite a bit. What was and was not allowed often depended on the relationship with the art school teacher or client. If you fell out of grace, you could still be expelled from the art academy or association.
This painting by Wolfram Ebersbach (he is still alive and working) is such a fine example of realistic yet secretly abstract art. A Schoonhoven, I thought for a moment. With those beautiful boxes in relief, which means that the shadow and therefore the shape differ from every angle. It turned out to be an apartment. With shadows exactly like the ones you see when you’re in the Stedelijk Museum for that one Schoonhoven stands, with 48 of those rectangular areas† But it is a housing complex. Whether this strictly Plattenbau I dare not say, because there is relief in the balconies, they even seem to protrude diagonally from the building. But it is very much a grid. Hence the association with Schoonhoven; as if the art of East and West had a connection somewhere.
The 28 whole squares (and fourteen half) shown here are the living quarters of the invisibles behind the Wall, painted when I was 1 year old on this side of it. Each square has a hole, like the combs in a beehive, behind which people live. You see that closer. Every square – balcony in other words – is different. In the whole painting there is only one where nothing happens at all and the windows are white, and which therefore most resembles the deep cubicles that Jan Schoonhoven put together with papier-mâché in the evenings after work at the PTT.
The people in the work are terribly well hidden, but there are eight in all – even one standing inside, looking at us through the open door. The human only reveals itself up close, a symbol for a society that did not put the individual human being central. And for the viewer a pleasant messiness. With even a hanging sunblind, which, once you see it, feels like a silent resistance.