ABSTRACT
Irina Liebmann’s snapshots of East Berlin’s Scheunenviertel district in the early 1980s convey something of the environment with which artists were confronted in the immediate years after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. They show the haphazard amalgamation of history, much of it in crumbling disrepair, typical of East Berlin’s neighborhoods where practicality trumped calculation first during post-war recovery and later under the economic constraints of the East German economy. 1 Structures in various states of deterioration interspersed with empty lots reveal a pastiche of materials which, ranging from pre-war brick to post-war concrete, register the city’s layers of historical accumulation. In the German Democratic Republic, pre-1945 history remained marginalized compared to the urgency of reconstruction—both physical and social—in the wake of wartime decimation and subsequent political division. Berlin’s heterogeneous urban landscape circa 1989, with its endless traces of past events and communities, offered a fertile and provocative set of raw materials for artists seeking to interrogate the city’s past and its impact on the present.
