Claus Bach’s Views of Weimar

The photographs in Claus Bach’s View of Weimar date from the 1970s and 1980s. They document everyday experiences and suggest stories about life in East Germany. These images provide a context for objects in the Wende Museum’s GDR collection as well as address GDR customs and rituals related to shopping, transportation, leisure, people, and political demonstrations. The photographs complement the portfolio Niewiedererwachen (Never to Awaken Again) by Claus Bach and Thomas Günther, which the Wende previously acquired. This portfolio addresses Bach’s connection to the Berlin youth scene in Prenzlauer Berg and Friedrichshain that led to his collaboration with poet Thomas Günther and painter and graphic artist Sabine Jahn on a series of thematic portfolios, including this one. The group work with Günther and Jahn provided Bach with a way to expand his art beyond his experience in Thüringen. From 1979 to 1983, Günther, Jahn, and Bach combined their various art forms (which was typical of this generation of artists) and broke through the limits of genre to achieve expressive montages of text and image. Bach’s work is identified with the Galerie de Loch in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, which exhibited the work of this last generation of GDR counterculture.