Forgotten and forgotten and forgotten

This repetition from the lyrics of „Wolokolamsker Chaussee V” by playwright Heiner MŸller, ex–East Berlin–resident, composed by Heiner Goebbles, ex–West Frankfurt–resident, occurs in a Hip–hop version today. The line hammers into your brain until the melody becomes unforgettable. The text was set to music in 1988.
„Don't turn around...” it goes on. After two lost World–Wars, two failed revolutions and one historical regress of one third of all–German soil known as change, this might be desirable variety of survival. Memory of what, of who and by whom? Memory opens up gaps, because it presumes that the parts of the whole be forgotten to survive. Society's claim for momentary total oblivion has come onto the majority of the population in Germany several times in this century.
This inevitably leads to problems of perception and memory and mental behaviour. Discussions of mnemonic strategies on the executive floors of society cannot do away with that. Skin is thin and the construction, that holds it together is fragile as the never ending conflict at the Balkans show.
Well, Ute Weiss Leder has decided to recall things. To remember a house, that has almost disappeared. Her family's house. This smallest place of bourgeois living was in her case a hotel in a romantic scenery. Taking a look at the photos, on which her work bases, we get a feeling of agony and dismals. At first sight one recognizes that something has disappeared. Only the walls of the abode, the guest house, the hotel are still there. Wallpaper gives a last impression of, if you will, a rhizomically entangled culture. Today it is almost unimaginable, that dozens of different wallpaper patterns used to ornate the rooms of this little hotel. An example of a way of living long gone, a final beacon of a live style, which rested on dealing respectfully with the everyday things in life. All gone. Travelling through Europe one sees decay everywhere, apart from a few enclaves where the common wealth has not disappeared yet. It is a decaying culture and a decaying life style. As a result you get a loss of orientation, a break–up of conservation and careful continuity of tradition. But something new has come up. It seems to be uniform, exchangeable, sterile, unhistorical and faceless. A cultural contraption. The roots of settledness are cut off. What is left, is no better than a huge museum with tourists, separated from the rest of the world. A kind of culture– and history–hopping. We are living in a fast train, from which you cannot get off and which off and on leaves its tracks.
Seeking the tracks of one's own existence one must go back all the way to the roots of one's descent. With good reason do you find the most impressive literary documents in personal stories, which reflect the history of the century. Then you get the feeling as if the sky opens and you can look back into history with a more than clear view. On the pages of the catalog each year appears as a fragment of memory. Before our eyes we see decades whose character is hinted at through the clothing and the poses of the family members who in those photos try to hold onto a passing eternity. For the uninvolved these photos of reminiscence have a trivial association to romances and corny picture postcards. Who were those persons, what were their thoughts, what did they go through, where did that time go. In front of this wallpaper turned into threadbare wings on the stage of life the people are almost shadows of memories. Death and birth, travelling, arriving and leaving are prevailing throughout the catalog like a breath of time passing. The other side of the coin is the family history of this house, which has almost become a palimpsest on which nobody will ever write again. These fragments show our century as in a mirror that is gradually going blind. The landscape, the houses, the people seem faded. The remnants of residential areas are going down the drain or restored in a way that does not correspond to their former inner lives. Thus the catalog also bears witness to a slow death.
We are standing at the end of a bourgeois century, the ethics and fundamentals of which were based on private property. This right of ownership was abolished in the other, the socialist republic. The word for this process was and is expropriation. It was put into practice at different steps, the economicly most absurd, but ideologically most necessary was the campaign of 1972 that aimed at the middle class owners. Politically, it was meant to demonstrate the stage of a developed socialist society had been reached. As a young citizen of the Eastern state I did not believe my mother when she told me that up to the late sixties many things of daily life had changed for the better, but afterwards deteriorated bit by bit. In a historic retrospect, this holds true for every–day life. By means of this expropriation campaign, the GDR extinguished her middle class economic basis. The responsible ties to private property severed and substituted by ties of an abstract and collective character. The results of this campaign are well known. And one of these results stands clearly before our eyes, as we regard the work of Ute Weiss Leder.
However, today many former owners speak of three waves of expropriation, or, in terms of cultural history, severing from their property. The first one happened immediately after 1945, and is doubted nowadays. The second is the one we mentioned above, and the third one is the work of the Treuhand. (German Trust Company).
The land reform, for which the Soviet–Union is held responsible, is in fact the result of German caused World War II and at the same time it was the basis of German radical socialist politics. By questioning this land reform, one attempts, regardless of the concrete circumstances of historical development, to restore, at least partly, the old, long–lost life–structures. Renewed ownership of land, of estate, is to bring back something lost. One is tempted to answer in an Arabic saying: „Once lost, things seldom come back.”
Today, after merely ten years, the Treuhand and its succussing institutions appear to be a questionable attempt to re–establish, by means of free enterprise, a whole political economy in its original state. How could Ð through institutions and trust in God Ð cultural developments be corrected that had existed for nearly half a century and involved 16 million people, without changing itself, i.e. each and everybody and their instruments? Especially with long–existing private property such an approach was bound to fail. Again it resulted in ruins, not only in an architectural sense.
In a developed capitalism, there are no long–term ties to property and land. They are mere ballast in a world–wide economic structure that resounds with the ringing of 24 hour electronic cash registers. Everything and everybody have to be at disposal to maximize shareholder values. Capital has to flow. Except that with the worldwide electronically supported adaptation of the nursery rhyme: „Dollar, dollar thou must wander, from the one hand to the other...” after one hundred years of industrial production and meanwhile global money transfer, the debris lies before our eyes.
All we can document is loss, and doubt in the linearity of developments. Perhaps this is one of the tasks of an artist in the late 20th century.

Peter Lang