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Photography as the content of memory - Berlin photos by Günther Schaefer

For the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu photography has the function of minimizing the anxiety that the transience and temporality of human existence awakens in us. It is a magical remainder for that which time has destroyed. It makes us believe that we can wrest ourselves from its annihilating power. In addition, however, photographic images become, not only for the photographer Günther Schaefer, but also for Bordieu, something positive: memory aids and thus, in a particular way, the historical documentary content of memory. In this sense, who would be able to forgo them in their life?

Documentary photography aims, as the name says, at the image as document. It is convinced of the importance of that which exists or occurs. It often, despite the existence of color photography, deliberately arises from the pattern or coordinate system of black-and-white. Reality is presented in a form of dual, bipolar program of contrasts that at the same time recognizes a great many intermediate stages and therefore nuances. At the same time it is not necessary, as it has occurred in the history of photography – for example for the photographer Umbo - Otto Umbehr - to still make this ideologically charged. That means to argue that white is the good and black the bad, or indeed the evil. It suffices to see this bipolar representation of reality as an analytical relationship, meaning to associate interest with breaking down the world analytically, and for a start to renounce acts of approval and disapproval.

It is with this attitude that the photographer Günther Schaefer, who, with his photos “Berlin - Pictures From Two Millennia,” places himself in the series of Berlin photographers that begins with Friedrich Ferdinand Albert Schwartz (1836-1906) and includes, among others, such illustrious names as Heinrich Zille (1858-1929), Waldemar Titzenthaler (1868-1937), Willy Römer (1887-1979) and Fritz Eschen (1900-1964), operates. Schwartz provided us with the oldest photographic document of Berlin. Günther Schaefer presents us with the idiosyncratic, perceptible and imperceptible changes in the city since the spectacular fall of the “Berlin Wall.” On the one hand, scenes in the last decade of the 20^th century, on the other, those of the first seven years of the 21^st century; primarily scenes in the district of Mitte. The Berlin Wall, however, and its slow fragmentation and elimination from the face of the city, its displacement and the stripping away of an earlier burden as it were, run through his images like an inner red thread, which frame quasi-demonstratively and optically, and also definitively allegorically year after year. This with artistic claims at the same time, without developing a subjectivity in the objectivity that feigns this in a demented or even staged and distorted manner. This means that the images remain authentic despite a subjective touch. Günther Schaefer works in such a manner that he simultaneously composes that which he documents, in other words, he cautiously designs, which means structures based on angles of horizontals, verticals and diagonals, parallels and staggering, similarities and dissimilarities, wholes and segments and, thus, secret symmetries and here and there also asymmetries that endow the things and events depicted with a form of inner connection or contrast and furthermore impart a certain stability.

The photos, be it the Wall images, be it the portraits, radiate a certain calm and dignity. They are images that ensue after a decades long deep-seated horror, bearers of a catharsis that still carries remnants of the political potential for violence, which, fortunately, led to no explosively deadly results. They are not however, understood in a more narrow sense, sentimental images. For this purpose, this subjective documentarist, who goes beyond mere documentarism, is much too analytical in his language of forms, which he rightly allows himself, to impart an internal basis to the event through the discovery of a predetermined, however only just discovered architectonics, and in doing so gives the image cohesiveness and a measure of delight, without his action simply disintegrating into mere exertion or work, without being accompanied by appeasement.

Also in the selection of the one hundred and ten images and their arrangement, which only seemingly proceed chronologically, Günther Schaefer shows himself to be a photographer who combines chronology and composition, experience of great social events in the now, since 1990, history of the whole Berlin, and the repetition of the same motifs. Thus the motif “Neue Zeit” (New Era), the title of the newspaper of the former, in comparison with the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany), unimportant Ost-CDU (East Christian Democratic Union of Germany), appears numerous times as an advertising inscription on a wall located on East Berlin territory. It meanders through the volume, therefore as if the photographer, and thus also the viewer, like a rambler, is curious about what became of it and its double entendre.

Nevertheless, the volume of photos is full of humor despite the solemnity of the majority of the images: Thus the smile of a border guard who has shaken off the forced robotic quality from his face, the joy of a GI on the hunt for a stone from the Wall, the backs of Marx and Engels, a monument that had become all too cheapened in the GDR, the Love Parade and the Carnival of Cultures, the veiling of the Brandenburg Gate for renovation purposes. The ever ambiguous Berlin humor.

And finally the pigeon on the memorial stone with the three-line text in capital letters, “DEM UNBEKANNTEN FLÜCHTLING“ (the unknown escape victim), at the end of the volume.

The stone dominates the image. It is positioned in the middle, trapezoidal in form, without adhering to laws of geometry in its contours, and is gently flanked from right and left by the two towers of the bridge Oberbaumbrücke, that appear in the background. Truncated at the bottom, it towers aloft in this portrait format image, determining three-fourths of the center of the image, and demands the viewer’s attention, on the other hand the gaze is pulled to the beginning of the text directly below the middle, yet is simultaneously drawn again towards the top to the feature of this photo: to the pigeon whose feet stand exactly horizontal at the middle of the space between the two towers, and at the same time are suspended on the left half of the upper edge of the stone, an important compositional element. The pigeon, with its body parallel to the stone, turns its head almost front on to the photographer. With the bear and the eagle on the two points of the towers it creates a sort of triangle and brings the nature aspect of human existence into play, even when the bear and eagle have been transformed into metal.

Does the pigeon, metaphysically speaking, constitute the return of the unknown escape victim? Does the pigeon conceal the victim? Or does it sit there as a symbol of peace, reminding of peace time and again? Or is it only an animal that for a moment takes a rest from the restlessness, constantly on the search for opportunities for nourishment? The pigeon will fly away, but the stone will remain. Permanence and instant coincide for one second in the click of the photographer. Documentary photos are not only defined by their motif but instead are also form and hold the occasion recorded together in a particular way.

This is not the place to analyze the images individually. The viewers however should immerse themselves in each individual photo in order to find Günther Schaefer’s particular design formula. This leads the viewer further into his vision and perception. The photo thus becomes the lasting content of memory of the historical contradictions that have developed in this city.

Prof. Dr. Olav Münzberg, University of the Arts (Universität der Künste, UdK) Berlin

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