one day: Mr Biskup, did you expect the border to be opened in 1989 - and remain open?
Biskup: I had the antennas upstairs. Already on 4 November 1989, everything was different: at a demonstration Jan Josef Liefers, Lothar Bisky, Stefan Heym - and the GDR state television has reported live, uncensored. That was the clear sign, the GDR leadership must dress warmly. Still, it was only puzzle pieces. I did not know what the finished picture would look like in the end.
One day: The day after the fall of the Wall, on November 10, 1989, you skipped a photo session for the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" in Bavaria to take pictures in Berlin. Did not you have any fracking?
Biskup: I did not think for five minutes: If the wall falls after 28 years, I have to go there. I had previously photographed the arrival of the refugees in Budapest, later the first arriving Trabis on the German-German border.
one day: Was not the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" gripped by the spontaneous rejection?
Biskup: When I called the head of the Bayern office in the morning at eight o'clock from a telephone booth in Berlin, he said: Luckily you went there!
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Photographer Daniel Biskup: The invisible East-West borderOne day: On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall you have put together a book of photographs and are making exhibitions with previously unpublished photos, from the turn of the century until 1995.
Biskup: On 3 October 1990, I photographed the reunification, but also witnessed the years after close up. I am concerned with the question of what came after the "Day of Unity". I believe that there is one of the explanations for some processes, for the invisible border that we still see between East and West Germany ...
one day: ... such as the shake of the head, with which the AfD election results in the East are acknowledged in the East?
Biskup: It pays to think back to the early years of German unity, which are often forgotten in the West. The East Germans wanted reunification. But they had no idea what to expect: that 80 percent of industrial jobs would disappear in no time. The West also had little interest in preserving or rehabilitating the Eastern industry. Then came the monetary union: The change from East to D-Mark was a happy day for many citizens. For many Eastern companies, however, it was the death knell, because many customers in the Eastern bloc could no longer pay the new D-Mark prices overnight. And because the citizens had D-Mark purchasing power, the demand for Eastern products abruptly collapsed.
One day: Her photos show factory workers, demonstrators or chimney sweeps, almost never known faces of those years. Why?
Biskup: This is the everyday life of the turning point. For the people in the West, their own lives remained practically unchanged. Everything was turned upside down in the East: German was still spoken, but all the principles of living together had changed. For many, that also meant that what they had learned was suddenly worthless. Whole life designs were canceled. Many degrees were not recognized, people had to work well below value.
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Daniel Biskup
Turning years: East Germany 1990 - 1995
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360
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one day: Can you give an example?
Biskup: Without wanting to idealize the GDR: There were not so large income differences there as in the West. In many neighborhoods the professor really lived next to the worker. Many older people raised in the GDR miss this today, as well as orientation towards the community, to the collective. From 1990, it suddenly came down to everyone doing their own thing. Many could not do that at the push of a button because they had not learned it. The West also had a 40-year lead. Many still struggle with it today. When you talk to people, they often tell you that they have lost their children. Not literally, but at 18, 19, most went over to the west because there are no prospects - to this day, except for a few lighthouses like the Dresden region. In many regions there are wonderfully prepared marketplaces, but in the side streets there is a lot of vacancy.
one day: What do your conversation partners say about the different perception of the change?
Biskup: A pastor on Usedom said: Daniel, if everybody in the West would have been as interested in us as you, then we would not have many problems. My impression: In the West, people were sitting in front of the television in astonishment for a few days in 1989/90 and then switched to everyday life. They did not participate in the change, for the majority it was and is very far away.
one day: Where does this special interest come from?
Biskup: My parents come from areas of present-day Poland that belonged to the German Reich until 1945. We were traveling as a family in the seventies in the Eastern Bloc, in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria. In addition, I photographed refugees from the GDR two days before the fall of the Berlin Wall on the Czech-German border. A young couple looked different somehow, they wore leather jackets. I took the two spontaneously home, in the end they lived with us for a year. Often we sat together in the evening discussing the upcoming reunification. At the time I understood that many leftists in the GDR wanted to try to remain independent. They wanted a democratic socialism - just a beautiful dream, as history has shown, unrealistic in the face of the collapse of the Eastern bloc. But their goal was certainly not just to imitate the FRG.
Germans on the run - Daniel Biskup's photos from 1989
"I could not help it": Exhausted and relieved - a young family at the Suben border crossing. As more and more GDR citizens headed west in 1989, photographer Daniel Biskup immediately left: "I just wanted to be there, to witness this historic moment, and I could not help it."
With the bike in the direction of freedom: this cyclist had already covered 600 kilometers when Biskup met him in August 1989 in Budapest. He cycled from the GDR border through the then Czechoslovakia to the Hungarian capital. For a better life, GDR refugees risked everything - and photographer Daniel Biskup accompanied them to freedom in 1989.
Asylum in the parish garden: GDR refugees help with food supply in Budapest (photo taken in August 1989). Many people did not return from their holiday in Hungary that summer, but tried to find shelter in the German Embassy, which was soon overcrowded. The GDR citizens found asylum in the garden of the Catholic parish The Holy Family: a refugee camp built by the Hungarian Malteser Hilfsdienst.
"This is now our chance": A GDR refugee sells the wait in Budapest with a skateboard - the boy in the background looks patiently. Biskup says, "Solved and expectant" was the prevailing mood among those who wanted to leave the country in that summer of 1989, "They felt something was going to happen, people were beaming out: now or never, we're not going back, that's our chance - and we will use it! "
"One-time humanitarian action": On August 31, 1989, these refugees arrived by bus from Hungary to Passau - only with the necessary luggage. A week earlier, on 24 August, the Hungarian government allowed 108 GDR citizens to leave the country in a "one-time humanitarian action".
A beer on the Red Cross sister! An employee of the German Red Cross distributes drinks to the GDR refugees, who arrive on 31 August 1989 by train in Passau. At the time, 150,000 to 200,000 GDR citizens were living in Hungary - only a fraction of them were planning to return home after their holidays.
Pulled over the border : Three good-humored young men try to balance a broken Trabant over the border. Taken on September 11, 1989 at the border crossing Suben in Upper Austria. On that day, Hungary finally opened the border. In the first three days alone, around 15,000 GDR refugees traveled via Austria to Germany.
Through muscle power through the Iron Curtain: Even this car from the GDR did not make it alone in the West, but had to be pushed by officials on the border crossing Suben (photo from September 11, 1989).
Together in a new life: A couple from the GDR is pleased at the border crossing Suben on the successful departure (taken on 11 September 1989).
A country dismantles itself: From the GDR sign on the Trabbi is only the "D" left - this four-by-four saw photographer Daniel Biskup on the margins of the A3 just before Passau south.
"BRDDR, everything German": With this slogan Vilshofen welcomed the people from the GDR. Taken on 11 September 1989 in the refugee camp of the border-near Donaustadt. Vilshofen housed around 1400 East German citizens in those late summer days.
Toast to a new life: Photographer Daniel Biskup met these two travelers in a parking lot on the A3 on September 11, 1989.
Marbled in the West: In love, this couple dressed in stonewashed jeans shines into the camera. The stonewashed divide, which was popular in the eighties, was called "marble jeans" in the GDR.
Chronicler of the upheaval: In the turning months, Daniel Biskup drove around 100,000 kilometers - but not with this Trabant, but with a red Mercedes station wagon. In his hand, the then 26-year-old autodidact keeps his Nikon camera, with which he documented the turnaround. Upheavals in Europe are what Biskup calls his "core theme". He portrayed the peaceful revolution of 1989/1990 as well as the change in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 2013/14 he photographically accompanied the protests in Ukraine. And since the beginning of the current refugee crisis, he is regularly on the road to document the fate of people pressing to Europe.
one day: In the West there is the evil word from Jammerossi ...
Biskup: At this point you get there quickly: What the mosern because, they've got our money. Sure, the East has gotten transfers and the D-Mark. But he would also need appreciation, yes affection and understanding. There is no stone left on the other! The West Germans have never been interested in the environment of East Germans. That's how it is still today: Most of them were in Berlin, maybe in Dresden, but really in the East? The great majority did not care about the GDR during the Cold War - and that is exactly how it has remained. Or even worse: many Wessis are, even if no one would admit, the East Germans in a way embarrassing, the Saxon, this certain callousness. At that time, East Germans, for example, thought: Here are our brothers and sisters from the West! That someone of whom they could pull over the table, they would never have thought.
one day: Is the alienation not mutually exclusive? What role did the West play for the East Germans?
Biskup: All East Germans have been interested in the West in one way or another, 90 percent have already been there. Many live in the West today, but have partially replaced their identity. The Leipzig author Jana Hensel once described this beautifully: During a reading in Düsseldorf, she wondered why people do not laugh in places where everyone else always laughs. She asked: Who comes here from the East? Almost all have registered - and laughed from there. But first nobody wanted to give the nakedness to recognize themselves as East German.
One day: The arrogance of the West Germans was criticized early: "Besserwessi" was already in 1991 "Word of the Year".
Biskup: It's not about glorifying the GDR and its society. But what happened is: in the West, the ramshackle cities and businesses were seen in the course of the turnaround - and of those also closed to the people. The people could not do anything about it.
one day: Did you already have the impression that something is out of hand?
Biskup: I remember a headline from the Leipzig edition of the "Bild" newspaper of 1990: "1.8 million East Germans unemployed!" It has to be made clear what that means. Today, the total number of unemployed in Germany is just over two million.
one day: Was not the reason for the mass unemployment not especially that many companies were dilapidated?
Biskup: With the introduction of the new currency, companies no longer had a chance to earn enough to earn their D-marks, but they had no chance against the Western competition. And the Treuhandanstalt never had any refurbishment in mind. Their only task was to sell as many state-owned enterprises as possible as quickly as possible and to save a little money with it. This has deeply burned into the collective memory in the East. I remember a picture of a van. The first time it was still in operation, shortly after reunification, the second time the company has only tried to make money as a billboard. In 1991, the car was just scrap metal in the ditch.
one day: In Dresden, Pegida was born in 2014, in Thuringia, the AfD hopes to be the strongest force in the state elections. Is the East more right than the West?
Biskup: I do not know that. Due to the wave of migration, the old topic has come up again: Many in the East have seen the welcome culture for war refugees from other countries and felt themselves reset. Last year, a book titled "Integrate for the first time" was released, which is pretty good. I see in it at least part of the explanation. Pegida in Dresden is also a demo against the West.