Harald Hauswald: Voll das Leben! Reloaded

C/O Berlin presents the exhibition “Harald Hauswald. Voll das Leben!” Colorful punks, hippies, and kissing couples in a sea of Trabi cars, flapping flags carried by demonstrators at Alexanderplatz in East Berlin, tipsy drinkers at their local pubs and law-abiding citizens waiting patiently at bus stops: Harald Hauswald’s gaze is authentic and tender. His images radiate a sympathy for the objects and people he photographs, preserving their dignity and setting them apart from the surrounding decay.

In contrast to the West’s prevalent images of East Germany as a country defined by the Communist party, the Berlin Wall, and military parades, Hauswald’s photographs offer a unique and revealing insight into everyday life under communism, showing the evolving cityscape of East Berlin.

He also documented the activities of opposition groups, of which he was both an observer and a participant. This led to his being placed under surveillance by around forty Stasi informers. In 1985, the Stasi issued an internal warrant for Hauswald’s arrest on the grounds of anti-state activities, violating exchange-control regulations, and passing on unclassified information. The contents of his Stasi file are woven into the exhibition, which allows for a dialog between historical documents, photographs, and Hauswald’s artistic work.

As a co-founder of the photographers’ agency OSTKREUZ, Hauswald is one of the most important figures in German photography. In recent years, over 7,500 of his negatives have been conserved and digitalized by the Ostkreuz Association for Photography, supported by a major grant from the Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in East Germany. The images shown in Harald Hauswald . Voll das Leben! Reloaded are invaluable as visual documents of East and West German history. Due to popular demand, C/O Berlin is once again showing the exhibition, which showcases approximately 250 photographs taken between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s.

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