Last month we were in the The Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg which contains some wonderful Northern Renaissance art and the world’s oldest globe. For the purposes of this blog though I was intrigued by a modern painting, a
View of Frankfurt/Oder seen from
Güldendorf
(1975) by the East German artist-writer Karl Hermann Roehricht, which has a slightly surreal and dream-like quality. Here is the museum’s description of it:
The painting does not show Frankfurt/Oder, which was constructed as an
ideal city of GDR-Socialism after World War II.Instead, the artist composed an idyllic landscape with only a few
buildings evoking what really could have been expected behind the hills.
Hence, the painting was meant to be a hidden criticism of the GDR town
planning. However, from 1976 to 1990 it was presented in the Palast der
Republik in Berlin where the East German parliament resided.
I’ll unpack this with a bit of help from German Wikipedia:
- Karl Hermann Roehricht (1928-2015) lived in Leipzig but studied painting in West Berlin, although he returned to East Germany when it looked as if his figurative art was going to be permanently out of fashion. ‘He repeatedly refused to work as an unofficial employee for the Ministry for State Security. Because of his uncompromising attitude, he came under increasing
pressure and was subsequently spied on and harassed. The television
version of his comedy Familie Birnchen was banned in 1976 because of
alleged fascist tendencies and was not broadcast on GDR television until 1982.‘ After his paintings were included in the Palace of the Republic he won the GDR Art Prize, but he was continually harassed and applied to leave in 1984. He wrote plays and poetry, fiction and memoirs (an American review of one of these isn’t very complimentary).
- Frankfurt (Oder) did have to be rebuilt after the war (93% of the centre
was destroyed) but I’m not sure it was an ‘ideal city’. A 2020 travel blog notes that ‘the town was badly neglected after the war, the communist authorities
could spare little money for reconstruction and while some efforts have
been made since German reunification, this is not a typical tourist
destination.’
- The Palace of the Republic opened in 1976 after three years of construction in which 5000 tons of sprayed asbestos was used, which meant that it was closed down in 1990. In addition to hosting the Volkskammer (parliament), it included a theatre, cafes, concert halls, a post office and monumental paintings prompted by the question ‘are communists allowed to dream?’ Tacita Dean’s lovely 2004 film Palast doesn’t show the whole building but is tightly framed on some bronze-mirrored windows that reflect a neighbouring dome. She described it as a building that ‘always catches and holds the sun in the grey centre of the city.’ As a recent resident in Berlin, she had ‘no inkling of what the building meant when it had meaning’ and admits she felt attracted by the totalitarian aesthetic. By then the original white marble had all gone, leaving just raw wood and dirty metal. It could have been left as a gradually rotting ruin but ‘the sore in the centre of the city’ would have been too public. When we last visited Berlin in 2019 it was long gone.
