Art Always Finds a Way

The Getty Research Institute (GRI) project On the Eve of Revolution: The East German Artist in the 1980s focuses on the art scene in the final decade of East Germany—a short-lived country founded in 1949 as the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and ruled by a single party geopolitically aligned with the Soviet Union and the Eastern European bloc.

East Germans lived in a surveillance state, and the Berlin Wall, built in 1961, had abruptly ended any planned immigration to the West, leaving them relatively isolated. A militarized zone along the wall made it impossible for East Germans to get anywhere near it, and they could only travel abroad with an exit visa. To leave without formal approval from the regime meant risking being shot.

By the 1980s, though, a reform movement had spread across the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc countries. Younger generations found ways to communicate and exchange ideas through artists’ books and magazines produced by independent presses. This genre, known as samizdat (from the Russian term for “self-published”), became the lifeline of a “silenced” generation of artists who used this literature to talk, protest, and navigate through the regime’s restrictions and reach out to one another.

Samizdat art and literature had a crafty look: volumes were usually bound by hand and assembled original prints and vintage photographs with typescript poetry and essays reproduced on carbon copy paper. The work was also highly collaborative, as an image we use to represent On the Eve of Revolution shows.

The illustration is a mind map—a graphic way to represent ideas—drawn by three artists, Micha Brendel, Else Gabriel, and Rainer Görß, who, as young students in Dresden in the 1980s, conceived and visualized the process of creating their own independent artists’ magazine. They drew their diagram on a mural-size sheet of paper hung on a wall while brainstorming what the new publication should be about. We know that they wanted to invite artists to submit their most recent creative production and that the founders would select the most innovative work, combining poetry with visual and conceptual art and chance correspondence.

Samizdat could be provocative, too, as demonstrated even by the magazine’s title, USW, which stands for Und So Weiter (“and so on”). Such a phrase is generic enough to have multiple meanings and in that way invited recipients to read between the lines. (The title was devised after another, similar artist’s magazine titled Und [And], which the authorities had shut down.) Using such vague language gave artists a new way to exchange ideas with each other.

Samizdat works’ layouts were also charged with meaning that readers were to decipher. Note how the visual elements of the image contrast the texts and surround the triangle, inviting viewers to ponder the message more deeply. A photograph of three girls entering the sea, an ad ripped from a Western magazine, represents an escape to an idealized, imaginary destination. The idea of escape is reinforced by a purse featured under the “1” that symbolizes travel, transience, movement, mobility, and communication.

While USW folded in 1987, when Brendel moved from Dresden to Berlin, a new magazine was immediately launched with the title USF (Und So Fort; “and so forth”), as homage to the defunct periodical. The first issue of USF was dedicated to the topic of Flugversuch (flight attempt) and included the poem “Dessert” by Olaf Stoy, its words squeezed next to a hovering helicopter. This screen print (and design by Steffen Fischer) was juxtaposed with two photographs by Werner Lieberknecht showing an artist attempting to take off from the ground with his bare arms. Although the artists’ effort to launch into space failed, their poetry and art survived to tell the story of resilience and creativity on the eve of the Peaceful Revolution that spread in East Germany in 1989 and led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and downfall of the GDR regime.