Hannes Meyer

Federal School of the Confederation of German trade unions (1928–1930), aerial photo ca. 1930
 

Natja Catalan, Tibor Weiner, Philipp Tolziner, Konrad Püschel, Margarete Mengel, Lilya Polgar, Anton Urban – members of the “Hannes Meyer architectural group” in Moscow, mid-1930s

Documentation of the Birobidzhan city planning project in «СССР на стройке», 1933/1934

Laubenganghäuser, 5 buildings for workers built by the Spar- und Baugenossenschaft Dessau (Savings and Building Cooperative Dessau), 1929/1930

Working from 1927 at the Bauhaus Dessau and being director until 1930 Hannes Meyer fostered left-wing discourse at the Bauhaus. After his dismissal he went to the Soviet Union, where he worked in urban planning and architecture along a group of enthusiast migrants. The growing Stalinist pressure forces him to leave Moscow in 1936 and he manages to avoid the fate of his spouse Margarete Mengel (executed in 1938) and fellow migrants like Heinrich Vogeler. Mengel, Vogeler and many other German passport holders wer not able to leave the Soviet Union, since as communists they would have been immediately imprisoned/executed by the Nazis.

Anri Sala

Intervista (Interview), documentary, 1998, 26 min, PAL – screenshot

Intervista (Interview), documentary, 1998, 26 min, PAL – screenshot

Intervista (Interview), documentary, 1998, 26 min, PAL – screenshot

Intervista (Interview), documentary, 1998, 26 min, PAL – screenshot

Intervista (Interview), documentary, 1998, 26 min, PAL – screenshot

Anri Salas 1998 documentary Intervista tells the story of him finding a tape without sound, clearly depicting his mother next to the Albanian Communist Party chief Enver Hoxha at a youth convention. Afterwards his mother is talking in a TV interview, but the sound is absent. Sala now begins his research to find out what his mother said, turns to former party members and the TV station, without success, and ends up with a teacher of sign language who deciphers his mothers’ lips. Confronting her with what she has said originally, Anris mother goes through a full set of emotions from denial and shame to rationalization and regret.

Jan Stefan Kolbe

Rot sind die Füchse (Red are the foxes). documentary, 90 min, Germany, 2011 (screenshot)

Rot sind die Füchse (Red are the foxes). documentary, 90 min, Germany, 2011 (screenshot)

Rot sind die Füchse (Red are the foxes). documentary, 90 min, Germany, 2011 (screenshot)

Rot sind die Füchse (Red are the foxes). documentary, 90 min, Germany, 2011 (screenshot)

“Red are the foxes” is a documentary by Jan Stefan Kolbe about three protagonists whose parents are confident communists. When they were children Anne, Peter and Gabi were member of the “Red Foxes”, a youth group of the MLPD (Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany). The notion of Marxism-Leninism already makes us aware that the party has not broken with old doctrines and leans towards a very traditional understanding of communism. While their parents worked in jobs like teacher, lawyer or medic, their ideology foresaw a factory worker career for their children. The documentary follows the different paths of the protagonists, chosen by their parents, with some of them trying to avoid the track and others positively living it. To add perspective the documentary also tells the story of some of the current Red Foxes.

Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers

Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, 1932

Ruwim Lissitzky, El Lissitzky, Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, Dziga Vertov, 1932

Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, 1930

Those, known and famous in our Socialist Country, poster, 1938

As a close collaborator with her second husband El Lissitzky, Sophie Küppers-Lissitzkys role in art history is unfortunately less known. However she contributed significantly to his work through ideas and realizing numerous projects in Moscow, while El Lissitzky was elsewhere to cure his increasingly weak health. Before moving with El Lissitzky to Moscow in 1927, she was an early supporter of avantgarde artists along Paul Küppers (director of the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hannover). In 1944 she was deported as enemy foreigner to Novosibirsk, where she continued to live under difficult conditions. Her son Jen tries to restitute paintings (by Klee, Kandinsky a.o.), which she left in Germany when moving to the Soviet Union, and which were later sold to collectors and museums after being marked as Entartete Kunst in 1937 by the Nazis.

Holger Wüst

Parkhaus Vaterland, photo montage, digital print on paper, 491 x 1230 cm, 2008

Parkhaus Vaterland. Ein Bild als Film. video, 136 min, 2009

Messianismus und historischer Materialismus, photo montage, digital print on paper, 500 x 2100 cm, 2009

Zekher (Part 2 – The Commodity of Labor), photo montage, digital print on paper, 500 x 2350 cm, 2010

Frankfurt based artist Holger Wüst‘s work is heavily influenced by critical theory in the broadest sense, demonstrated by references to Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx and Theodor Adorno (to name the most obvious). His large scale digital print Zekher, for instance, addresses through its subtitle individual labor as commodity and relationship of constrain. “Individual labor is a commodity because it can be sold—given the condition that people are free to make decisions about their own labor. Nevertheless, the people who have no assets are those particularly forced to sell their labor.” (Antje Krause-Wahl). On a visual level Zekher adds even more references, such as the working contracts that the miners hold in their hands, which have been initially torn up and later pieced back again.