Talk on the special exhibition "You Think We Were Different"
Former ZDF editor-in-chief Peter Frey and Petra Göllnitz , curator of the special exhibition “You Think We Were Different. Photographs from East and West from 1945 to 1989,” Petra Göllnitz, discuss systemic boundaries, photographs, fundamental media impressions, “aha” moments, and wounds—in other words, everything that still connects and divides us in Germany today.
Unequal Siblings?
Two Germans, born in the same year, who grew up in the ’60s. One, a native of Karl-Marx-Stadt, was photo editor of the magazine “Das Magazin” and laid the foundation for the renowned photo agency “Ostkreuz” in 1989. The other, from the Rhine region and a ZDF editor since 1985, has been traveling to the East since his youth; as a young journalist, he met Anna Seghers and took a seven-hour boat ride on the Müggelsee in the summer of 1989. He felt that nothing in the stuffy GDR pointed toward change. She can no longer bear the confinement, applies for an exit visa, and soon begins selecting the “Pictures of the Week” for the Hamburg-based magazine “Stern.” In 1992, due to German reunification, he leaves his dream job in Washington and moves to Berlin. She becomes a key figure in post-reunification German photography.
In what ways are Germans similar? What connected them across ideological divides? Which fundamental experiences are so different that they continue to have an impact to this day? What divides them? The images curated by Petra Göllnitz for the exhibition “You Think We Were Different” at the Kunstmuseum Ahrenshoop explore these questions—images of siblings who are, yet, unequal brothers and sisters. Petra Göllnitz, now a producer and curator, and Peter Frey, editor-in-chief of ZDF until 2022, discuss photographs, fundamental media impressions, moments of revelation, and wounds—in other words, everything that continues to unite and divide us in Germany to this day.
