Wir durchstießen den Abend mit dem Kopf. Es gab keine Tages- und keine Nachtzeit. Bald rieben sich unsere Westenknöpfe aneinander wie Zähne, bald liefen wir in gleichbleibender Entfernung, Feuer im Mund, wie Tiere in den Tropen. Wie Kürassiere in alten Kriegen, stampfend und hoch in der Luft, trieben wir einander die kurze Gasse hinunter und mit diesem Anlauf in den Beinen die Landstraße weiter hinauf. Einzelne traten in den Straßengraben, kaum verschwanden sie vor der dunklen Böschung, standen sie schon wie fremde Leute oben auf dem Feldweg und schauten herab.
— Franz Kafka, Kinder auf der Landstraße
Maybe more interesting than to describe what we see in the images of “Ein Dorf”, (Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler, Ludwig Schirmer, Hartmann Books 2024) is what we don’t see. More than 4 billion people now live in urban areas – the number overtook those living in rural areas already in 2007 – today these numbers are probably skewed even more towards the city. While we all largely depend on the food production of these rural areas, the least of us have more than a rough understanding, “how the sausage is made”: Coinciding with the industrialization of food production is an advertising strategy, that more and more recedes into a mystified nostalgia, an almost primitive understanding of how crops and livestock works – how the life in the village is. Which is all the more easy to do, as our understanding of Village-life is already a second-hand one: One that smells of imagined apple pie, young love that goes against the ruling the patriarch, cows grazing leaned against the view of majestic mountains – especially that we only know from movies…
In Germany, this idealized idea of “Heimat” has always been an antidote against reality: In the 50ies the burgeoning “Heimatfilm” (movies, that usually played in the mountains, on huge estates, trumped up conflicts between competing patriarchs, with innocent you lovers caught in between) – the Village has always been a place for escapism (in this case, an escape from the harsh economic realities of Germany after the war and escaping confronting the historical atrocities of fascist Germany).
In the split-off GDR, this mystification found its way into with the ideal of the Arbeiter- und Bauernstaat of real existing Socialism. It is this mystical stage of “The Village”, that is the backdrop of Mahler’s and Schirmer’s book: One of the first images in the image show a young woman ducking under a tree; she wears flat shoes and a plain skirt and her hair braided – she smiles, the sun behind her, the tree and brushes are in bloom, it’s a beautiful spring day.
It is this kind of universality, that makes these images easy to claim. They have a timelessness, that makes them easily adoptable to the many ideologies that ravaged Germany. This is an image that could as easily appear in “Das Deutsche Lichtbild”, a photographic magazine that continued publishing photography throughout the whole era of the Nazis as in a publication of the GDR to celebrate the “Arbeiter und Bauernstaat”. The insidious malleability of photography lies in applicability to past or even current advertising, where it just as easily can be used to masquerade the industrialization of food production with a veil of innocence and nativeness…
Our concept of “Village” seems to be unfazed by the ideological background that tries to use it for its propaganda: And so these images seem to exist in a void, not showing much of the reality of the GDR, nor the ravaging of capitalism after the wall came down – they just lie there, waiting to be picked up for one “Leitkultur” or another…
References
Franz Kafka, Kinder auf der Landstraße, https://www.textlog.de/kafka/erzaehlungen/kinder-auf-der-landstrasse
Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler, Ludwig Schirmer: Ein Dorf 1950 – 2022, Hartmann Books 2024, https://hartmann-books.com/produkt/ute-mahler-werner-mahler-ludwig-schirmer-ein-dorf-1950-2022-2/