The Work : pierregelyfort.com/work-perfume-of-ddr
Today, what is left of the former DDR*? The once model student of the former ex-USSR and of the forty years of authoritarian regime at the heart of the Eastern Bloc…
Above all, what is left of the daily life of these millions of East Germans? What remains of all that they lived through, saw, heard and felt over the course of four long decades?
One day in November 1989 a wall came down in Berlin, bringing with it the traces of these forty years of dictatorship that had regimented every aspect of the daily lives of our neighbours behind the Iron Curtain. Yet, in under ten or so years, the bulldozer of reunification had swept away almost all vestiges of that sombre period due to a hunger to live freely and to forget.
In 2006, the famous DDR museum opened in Berlin, brandishing the slogan, “a hands-on experience of history”, where everything is focused around the experience of daily life. The universe presented to visitors invariably leads them to ask the following question: how would I have survived under this authoritarian system, which seems to come from another era?
Our Western imagination, steeped in films like Good Bye, Lenin! (2003), The Lives of Others (2007) and Barbara (2012), finds an atmosphere resembling that of those films in this unusual museum.
Today, sixtieth anniversary of the Erection of the Berlin Wall, I chose to photograph the DDR museum in the presence of visitors, thereby offering an emotional and personal vision of a world that has now disappeared, seen through the prism of the museum. A museum that allows us to live vicariously thanks to the 300,000 symbols from that epoch.
When you close this book, perhaps a certain perfume of the DDR will linger…
A perfume, similar to that worn by an unknown figure, whose path we cross and whose image persists before they evaporate into the distance … Fleeting and bittersweet.
*DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik) is the German name for the GDR (German Democratic Republic).