Gardeners of Counterspace

In the 1980s a cemetery in East Germany became a place of artistic happenings and encounters.

The Georgen-Parochial-Cemetery, once the resting place of well-off citizens of the Weimar Republic, had been partially destroyed in World War II. Its partly overgrown graves, silence, and seclusion offered a space on somewhat out of public view.

It evolved into an island of artists, outsiders, nature lovers, and those waiting to emigrate to West Germany. This artists’ collective, which included Thomas Günther and his friends Sabine Jahn and Claus Bach, realized various photo-actions at that cemetery, transforming it into their creative ecosystem and spontaneous stage. They called it a group of “unusual and crazy birds of all kinds.”

Calling themselves BACH GÜNTHER JAHN, the collective worked on a range of different photo documentaries on topics such as the dying forests in the mountains of the Erzgebirge on the border of Germany and the Czech Republic and the air pollution in Friedrichshain, Berlin. They created photographic image-text collages and large-format screen prints. The latter were produced in a private screen-printing workshop run by their mutual friend Hanna Reichelt in what was then Karl-Marx-Stadt, and later in the basement of Sabine Jahn and Thomas Günther's Berlin apartment. The print run was always less than 20 copies in order to avoid the official approval requirement.

They also created the artist’s book Herbststein im grünen Gemäuer, which was published in 1989 and is now part of the Getty Research Institute’s collection. Herbststein im grünen Gemäuer includes poetry, photographs, as well as playful imagined dialogues with artists like Andy Warhol, Velvet Underground and the Rolling Stones. “In 1982, we painted Andy Warhol’s Flowers on the shelter at the Stollberger Straße bus stop in Karl-Marx-Stadt,“ says Jahn, “dressed in jackets also covered with Warhol's Flowers. People walking past were delighted with the colorful scenery.”

A poem by Günther, also published in the book, describes a morning during a workday in November 1982, during which he shovels coal into the basement of the cemetery chapel and observes “out of the corner of his eye in the dust the black limousines of the rulers” passing by at great speed “on their way to the center of power.” In this scene, which shifts from shoveling in black coal dust to the shiny black limousines, he thinks of the Rolling Stones’ album Exile on Main St. and grins, feeling “a gust from the sidelines.”

The cemetery collective’s legacy, as seen through the artist’s book, doesn’t belong to a binary East-West narrative, which juxtaposes constraints and scarcity on one hand and freedom and abundance on the other. Instead, it reveals an artistic life in the years of former East Germany as a practice with contradictions, nuance, humor, and melancholy. The book’s release coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall. “The defiance was fed by anarchic bohemianism,” Günther said at the time.

Jahn still lives in the Berlin apartment where they assembled the book. “This book is a part of life. Our lives,” she says. Her home, which overlooks a different Berlin cemetery, is filled with art of the last four decades, including books, drawings, posters, and photographs. Her overgrown courtyard feels like an oasis where time seems to stand still, and her memories come alive as she speaks. "Back then, you could move around the streets of East Berlin more quietly. There were far fewer cars and the city was less hectic,” she says. “I don’t remember those years in gray tones, but as part of a group of creative friends, activating our spaces. We really did our own thing.”

Explore the art world of the German Democratic Republic.