"A teenager’s room in Malchin, soldiers in front of the marine museum in Stralsund, and chocolate as a snack for our train ride to Leipzig. The photos were taken in February 1990 while I was visiting the former GDR. I stayed with some relatives in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern for a few days. While I was there, I photographed some rather unspectacular details of everyday life, and tried to take some spontaneous photos of situations, encounters, and whatever else caught my eye. I came up against a lot of resistance. In particular, five-year-old Susanne protested. She said she would rather play with me than be the subject of my photos.
Initially, as a 'woman from the West', I was regarded with distrust because I didn’t have my hair dyed blond, wear a fur coat, or have red fingernails. All the same, people’s disappointment didn’t stop them from taking me along to the village disco, which meant travelling over bumpy stone slabs and down dark lanes on a rackety old van from one of the collective farms or in a tuned-up Trabi. Even Aunty Elfriede whipped out her eye pencil when she stood in front of the mirror. The local youths rocked away between light-brown imitation-wood laminate, under little coloured light bulbs, to the sound of 1980s disco hits I’d never heard before.
What I really liked were the conspiratorial nightly drives, the artificial leather Ska hats worn by the old men, the resolute look on the faces of the Russian soldiers on the countless monuments to heroes, and the pragmatic women’s pony tails that were always bobbing up and down."
Monika Filz (Dortmund)
