The C/O Berlin exhibition ›Dream On—Berlin, the 90s‹ presents around 200 works by nine members of the OSTKREUZ agency, including co-founders Sibylle Bergemann, Harald Hauswald, Ute Mahler, and Werner Mahler as well as Annette Hauschild, Thomas Meyer, Jordis Antonia Schlösser, Anne Schönharting, and Maurice Weiss. The photographers offer a keen insight into the social changes and challenges faced by the once-divided city as it came together.
Shown 35 years after the founding of the OSTKREUZ agency and in the anniversary year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the photographs on display—including some never before exhibited or published—capture the ambivalent spirit of this pivotal decade and offer a fresh take on the transformative era.
In the following three pieces, photographers Werner Mahler, Anne Schönharting, and Thomas Meyer each offer a personal insight into the diverse and often contradictory experiences of 1990s Berlin through a single image they captured. Check out the latest issue of C/O Berlin Newspaper for more fascinating photo stories.
Werner Mahler
The evening of November 9, 1989.
The Berlin Wall has fallen, that symbol of division and exclusion.
It’s unbelievable. I have to be there, have to take photos.
My wife and son and I drive from Brandenburg to the border crossing at Bornholmer Strasse, which is rumored to be open.
Countless cars and people are teeming at the still-closed border. Only pedestrians can cross the border, so I head off on foot to take photos. I make plans to meet my family around midnight at Café Kranzler. I walk through the entire city, from the bridge at Bornholmer Strasse to the crossing at Heinrich-Heine-Strasse, reaching Kurfürstendamm at midnight. Naturally we can’t find each other amid the celebrating masses.
I keep walking to the Brandenburg Gate.
All the major Western news agencies have set up their cameras and broadcast vans on the Western side of the wall. At Brandenburg Gate the wall is quite wide, and euphoric people from East and West are dancing on it, lit by the glare of headlights. Like many, I jump over to the Eastern side. It’s an absurd feeling: one day before, the wall had been a no-go zone and approaching it would have spelled imprisonment or even death.
I look east at the Brandenburg Gate in darkness.
A happy-looking man with his arms spread walks toward me.
I shoot.
The eastern side is in darkness.
Small groups of seemingly helpless GDR border soldiers are standing with flowers in their gun barrels.
It’s very early on the morning of November 10, 1989.
A one-in-a-century day.
I want to get home and am one of the first to walk from the West to the East through the Brandenburg Gate.
Anne Schönharting
What I particularly like about this photo is the scope for multiple interpretations. When I took the photo twenty-five years ago, I was still young myself. Probably the boy’s gaze, as he sits with his mother and their dog at dinner, reminds me of my own feelings of discomfort during puberty. I remember the fascination and excitement I felt when regarded these three similar expressions.
Today it makes me think more about the start of gentrification and its effects on Prenzlauer Berg residents. I see a woman who might be frightened of losing her job, of the larger societal changes in the nineties, and being a single mother. Even the dog seems to mirror this state of mind.
Thomas Meyer
In the late 1990s and even in the early 2000s it was never a problem to take photos in clubs. You checked in with people or maybe you didn’t, and nobody cared. Only with smartphones, digital cameras, and social media did that begin to change.
In 2000 I photographed the Love Parade party at Tresor. I set my alarm for four a.m. and reached Tresor at sunrise, where the party had been raging since the previous day and would last for another two days. The expansive outdoor area was pretty full, so people were looking for somewhere to squeeze in. This included the small artificial island accessible by a suspension bridge. DJ West Bam was playing records, protected by his entourage, and those who still could were dancing to his techno beats.
The nineties were ending and increasingly, commercialism was brazenly coopting alternative culture. While the young people sought refuge on a small island, it began to rain—but the party didn’t stop.