AboutPrivacyLogin/RegisterDeutsch

A Demonstration: The “Round Table from Below”, East Berlin, 4 November 1990: Manfred Butzmann at the demonstration, "Round Table from Below" [5/5]

OBJECT INFORMATION

Info

November 4 1990
Berlin, Alexanderplatz
Created By: Jürgen Nagel

License: Not Creative Commons

From the Set

Exhibition theme: German Unification
Portraits

The graphic artist Manfred Butzmann, who pleaded in favour of painting the Eastern face of the Berlin Wall on 16 November 1989 at the general assembly of the GDR Visual Artists Union Berlin (Eugen Blume (Publisher): Butzmanns Heimatkunde in 24 Abteilungen, Berlin 1992, p.110-114)

"The Round Table was the point at which dialogue between new and old political leaders of the GDR took place" (retrieved and translated from Robert-Havemann-Gesellschaft e.V.: Runder Tisch, on April 23, 2009)

Depicts

animal, artist, crowd, demonstration, graphic art, handmade medium, protest sign

Context

criticism, escape, exile, German reunification, media, national day

People/Organizations

Alliance 90, Butzmann, Manfred, Die Grünen (FRG)

Places

Alexanderplatz

Text in image

Let's go - together! / Bündnis 90 - Die Grünen

Kein Gel[d] / [...]

Other items in this set

Memory

"31 August 1990, 1.42 p.m.

I’ve emigrated from my country without leaving it, without taking a single step. Instead, I sit here in the cellar of patterns from my frozen experiences, where all wasted opportunities are conserved – that have been wiped away, à la Mr. Clean, way up there, in glossy reports. It is there, at the top, that my rosy future is now being sealed, wrapped up in a thousand pages, in dark-blue leather bearing the insignias of former and future power.

The ink, all too hastily jotted down, has thirty-three days to dry. And pictures of the process are being sent round this still-divided world to be filed away as an historic fact of supranational significance – ready to be called up annually on a new national holiday, a black-red-and-gold citation. What shall I say one day when my grandchild asks me about these times?

I will probably say: a country swept over me with the colourless fine words of a gleaming steamroller – while I was dreaming of an alternative green and thus missed out on any realistic opportunities.

Today I respond to the sparkling-wine binges of the old and new big shots by taking an almighty swig out of a bottle of flat mineral water, knowing I'll never get my deposit back on the product of a country that no longer exists and which I have no choice but to call my home, even though it has never actually been that.

And so I celebrate this sudden annexation and (unceremoniously) ring in my new state of exile, my future."

(From Das Mauer-Syndrom, a collection of short pieces of prose written and compiled by the author between 1961 and 1990)

Jürgen Nagel (Ost-Berlin)