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Photograph by Harald Hauswald: A couple in love on today's Schloßplatz, in front of the GDR Foreign Ministry, 1984.
Photo: Harald Hauswald / OSTKREUZ / Federal Foundation for Work-Up / C / O Berlin
Berlin-Kreuzberg, SO 61, Zossener Strasse.
A corner café.
Harald Hauswald first gets a black coffee and lights a cigarette from the big pack.
The 66-year-old seems to have fallen out of time here in the trendy neighborhood: the shoulder-length gray hair lashed into a ponytail, the full beard wild and anything but fashionable.
Plus a t-shirt and jeans.
His clothes are just clothes, neither a statement nor a staging.
Hauswald has lived in Kreuzberg for years, the district that magically attracted East Berliners like him before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Those who lived in Prenzlauer Berg during the GDR era usually also took the first west corridor here after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to the left-green alternative milieu, not to the bourgeois Kurfürstendamm.
In Prenzlauer Berg, in the northern part, Hauswald still has his work space with a darkroom and boxes full of negatives, contact sheets, prints on plastic and baryta.
Hauswald no longer really likes the former GDR dropout quarter.
In places where many newcomers live, it is too chic and sleek for him, the corners of the somewhat less gentrified north, on the other hand, are too lifeless.
But Hauswald knows what he owes Prenzlauer Berg.
Without the neighborhood he would not have become what he is today: one of the most important surviving photographers in the GDR, honored with the Federal Cross of Merit and the Citizens' Prize for German Unity, exhibited at home and abroad - and now also in demand on the international art market .
In the 1980s, Hauswald literally photographed his neighborhood.
There is hardly a corner in Prenzlauer Berg that he has not captured on film.
But it wasn't just pictures from the morbid, artistic-anarchic world of those who wanted to escape the rectangular prefabricated building socialism.
Hauswald looked through a magnifying glass at the agony, the decline of the entire GDR.
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Title: Full of Life
Publisher: Steidl GmbH & Co. OHG
Number of pages: 408
Author: Hauswald, Harald
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Photography icons have emerged that are repeatedly exhibited and published to illustrate the last phase of the GDR: Hausmann's photo of the march on May 1st, which loses all socialist order in the downpour and storm, or the furniture store over which the Illuminated advertising "home decor" is enthroned: The lights are no longer on, the plaster is peeling, the putty is crumbling from the window frames.
Furniture has not been available for sale here for a long time.
"It is probably the photo that the Stasi hated the most," says Hauswald.
Hauswald has almost a quarter of a million photos, captured on 7,500 films, in his archive, taken between 1975 (one year before the GDR expelled the songwriter and poet Wolf Biermann) to 1995 (one year after the Treuhandanstalt completed the liquidation of the VEB economy would have).
Most of these pictures, many in black and white, have never been published.
For decades they were largely unorganized in Hauswald's boxes.
more on the subject
Alexanderplatz in Berlin: The Scar Face by Markus Deggerich and Peter Wensierski
Trendy district before the turnaround: When Prenzlauer Berg was still wildBy Peter Wensierski
Pictures of everyday life in the GDR: The tank out of the box by Swantje Unterberg
Visit to GDR photographer Harald Hauswald: The darkroom in Kastanienallee by Peter Wensierski
Photographer Roger Melis: The antiheroes of the GDR by Corina Kolbe
Rediscovered GDR photos: The last fight on the beer bottle by Sebastian Hammelehle
For three years now, they have been sifted through and cataloged, financed by the Foundation for Processing the SED dictatorship.
A total of 6000 images are to be digitized in high resolution, photos that also trace Hauswald's path as a photographer, from the first, still shy approach to street photography to the opulent color series in the magazine "Geo" on the occasion of the 750th anniversary of the city of Berlin.
The photographer Ute Mahler made the selection.
Like Hauswald herself, she is one of the founders of the Berlin photo agency Ostkreuz.
Together with curator Felix Hoffmann and Ostkreuz colleague Laura Benz, Mahler has now selected 250 images from this selection for an exhibition in the photo gallery C / O Berlin, which opened over the weekend.
It is the first Hauswald retrospective that consists largely of unpublished archive material.
"His photographs are invaluable and form visual memories of German German history," says Hoffmann.
It is also a kind of photographic accolade for the subversive GDR photographer, 30 years after unification.
At the same time as the exhibition, a lavish, large-format photo book with all the exhibits will be published by Steidl Verlag.
Title of the show and book: "Full of life".
Anyone looking at the illustrated book and the exhibition could come to the conclusion that there was only the GDR photographer Harald Hauswald.
But even after the collapse of the GDR, Hauswald continued to take photos, for example a poetic road movie series about the journey with the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul - completely in color and digitally, often only with the iPhone.
Even during the GDR era, he longed for other topics.
In the summer of 1989 he used a visit from relatives in the west to get a West German passport and fly to Turkey for a few days and take photos there.
When he had developed the pictures at home, Hauswald remembers today, "I thought, not so bad at all! As a photographer, I don't even need the GDR".
Harald Hauswald: Full of life - until January 23, 2021 at C / O Berlin
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