OSTKREUZ and the Photography of a Country That Stopped Existing

For eleven years, starting in 1975, Sibylle Bergemann kept returning to the studio of the sculptor Ludwig Engelhardt on the island of Usedom. She went first out of friendship and later on commission from the GDR Ministry of Culture, which wanted the making of its new Marx and Engels monument for central Berlin recorded. The series she produced, Das Denkmal, ran until 1986. Its pictures show fragments of bodies, plaster and bronze, and figures hanging in the air. After the Wall opened, one of them, the figure of Friedrich Engels suspended from a crane, was picked up by the press again and again as a ready emblem for the end of the East German state, according to the Berlinische Galerie.

A photograph made to celebrate a monument ended up as a picture of collapse. That shift, from document of a present to document of a vanished past, describes much of the work produced by the photographers who in 1990 founded OSTKREUZ.

Seven photographers and a railway junction

The agency had seven founders: Sibylle Bergemann, Harald Hauswald, Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler, Jens Rötzsch, Thomas Sandberg and Harf Zimmermann. All of them had built substantial careers in the GDR. The Berlinische Galerie dates the founding to October 1990 and gives its purpose plainly: by backing one another, the photographers meant to stay independent inside the Western media business and to keep the rights to their own pictures.

The idea took shape abroad. The Versicherungskammer Kulturstiftung, which staged an anniversary survey in Munich, records that the group formed in Paris, where President François Mitterrand had invited East German artists to exhibit in the interval between the fall of the Wall and reunification. Their model was Magnum Photos, a cooperative owned and run by its photographers. The name came from home: Ostkreuz is the Berlin S-Bahn station that ties the eastern districts to the rest of the city. The agency’s own account still describes the station as a junction and the founders’ aim as asserting themselves on the market together while drawing like-minded people in.

The second half of the full name, Agentur der Fotografen, the photographers’ agency, carries the point. The pictures belong to the people who made them.

Experts of the East

Independence did not mean freedom from expectation. In a 2021 doctoral thesis at Kingston University London, Anne Pfautsch describes the agency as a survival strategy for a chaotic period. West German magazines and newspapers cast the founders as “experts of the East”, and most of their assignments in reunified Germany took them back east to portray their own compatriots.

Pfautsch also identifies a working pattern that the photographers carried over from the GDR, where many had worked freelance. They took commissions, and alongside them they built their own long series, which they then presented in exhibitions. The thesis looks closely at the self-produced exhibitions OSTKREUZ mounted between 2005 and 2015, a period in which the agency became its own curator.

Bergemann’s later career shows how far the commissions reached. From the 1990s she photographed for Zeit-Magazin, Stern and The New York Times Magazine, and from 1997 for Geo, which sent her to Yemen in 1999 and later to Ghana, Mali, Portugal and Senegal. The work moved into colour, which she printed herself.

Ostzeit, 2009

The clearest statement of what these photographers had seen before 1990 came in 2009, twenty years after the Wall opened. Ostzeit, shown at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin from 14 August to 13 September 2009, brought together work by four founding members, Sibylle Bergemann, Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler and Harald Hauswald, with Maurice Weiss. The HKW lists 150 black and white photographs, the earliest from 1972, presented as the photographers’ subjective record of everyday life, work and people in the GDR.

Each body of work took a different angle on the same country.

Harald Hauswald contributed his observations of daily life. The publisher of the accompanying book, Hatje Cantz, frames them as an essay on the drabness of East German routine and the comedy hidden inside it.

Ute Mahler showed fashion photography and pictures from the May Day parade in Berlin in 1980. A state ritual of mass display, seen through the eye of a fashion photographer, turns into a study of how people stand, wait and present themselves.

Sibylle Bergemann showed Das Denkmal alongside a conceptual series on the P2 model apartments. Hatje Cantz also singles out her pictures of Clärchens Ballhaus, the Berlin dance hall.

Werner Mahler showed a long-term study made in Bad Berka, in Thuringia. The HKW describes it as following a school class from 1978 through to reunification, so that the children age into adults just as their country disappears.

Maurice Weiss supplied the ending: pictures of the last moments before the Wall fell and of the passage into a united Germany.

The book that accompanied the show runs to 288 pages with 190 photographs, and adds texts by Marcus Jauer, Wolfgang Kil, Alexander Osang and Ingo Schulze. Its English subtitle, Tales from a Vanished Land, names the subject directly. The country in the photographs no longer existed when they were hung.

Photographing disappearance

What makes this body of work more than nostalgia is that the disappearance happens inside the pictures. Bergemann had already set the demolished old Amtsgericht against the glass facade of the Haus des Lehrers in GDR Berlin, the Berlinische Galerie notes. After reunification she photographed the dismantling of the Palast der Republik, once the cultural and political showpiece of the East, in front of the neo-baroque Berlin Cathedral. The same eye that recorded the GDR building itself recorded the united city taking it apart.

Before 1990, these photographers worked under a system that dictated an approved image of socialist life. Bergemann exhibited in the official portrait photography shows of 1971, 1981 and 1986 and in the Ninth and Tenth Art Exhibitions of the GDR, while trying to hold onto her own visual language without risking a ban on publication. Her pictures appeared in the more open magazines, Das Magazin, Sonntag and the fashion title Sibylle. The habit of looking slightly to one side of the official subject, at the waiting crowd rather than the parade, at the scaffold rather than the statue, is what lets these photographs hold up as history now.

A cooperative that kept growing

OSTKREUZ did not stay an East German club. When the Munich survey 25 Years Ostkreuz opened at the Kunstfoyer on 16 October 2016, running to 15 January 2017, the agency counted twenty photographers, and the exhibition traced a line from the founders’ GDR pictures to current work from Berlin, Germany and further afield. The agency’s site now lists 26 members, East and West German as well as international, who keep authorship of their work and pursue socially engaged projects across politics, social reportage and fashion.

Bergemann died in 2010. In 2022 the Berlinische Galerie gave her a retrospective, Stadt Land Hund, from 24 June to 10 October, with more than 200 photographs, 30 of them never published before. The catalogue carried an essay by Anne Pfautsch, the same scholar who had traced how the GDR’s photographic habits survived inside the agency.

The founders took their name from a station where lines cross and trains leave in every direction. Their most lasting work was made by staying put long enough to watch a country end.