Life in the GDR

From September 12 to January 31, 2021, C/O Berlin presents a retrospective dedicated to German photographer and co-founder of the Ostkreuz agency, Harald Hauswald.

Punks, hippies, kissing couples amidst a sea of Trabi cars; protestors holding banners in Berlin’s Alexander Square; shady figures in neighbourhood bars, ordinary citizens waiting for the bus: Harald Hauswald’s impressions of life in East Germany both sensitive and utterly authentic. He always retains his protagonists’ dignity, presenting them as counterparts to the madness and disintegration that surrounds them.

Hauswald (b. 1954) did not merely document the world depicted in these scenes, he also inhabited it. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he went on countless excursions through East Berlin and more remote parts of the GDR, capturing the sharp contrast between everyday reality in the country’s dilapidated cities, and the government’s laboured efforts to keep up the facade of a perfect socialist state. Humorous, candid and sharply satirical, the photographer’s oeuvre is now being celebrated in the retrospective ‘Voll das Leben!’ – on show at Berlin’s C/O Gallery from September 12 to January 31, 2021.

For further details visit C/O Berlin
Harald Hauswald