Clockwise from top left: Red Flag, Original, GDR, I – IV Photo Series, 2011
Elske Rosenfeld
Installation, various media
A few years ago I saw Felix Gmelin’s video piece Farbtest, Die Rote Fahne II, in an exhibition in Berlin. In it, the artist restages a film by Gerd Conrad from 1968, which shows runners carrying a large red flag through the streets of Berlin in a relay run, which ends with the final runner brandishing the flag from the balcony of the Schöneberger Rathaus – the city hall of West Berlin. One of the runners was Gmelin’s father, a radical filmmaker and theorist. In an almost identical re-shoot of the film in 2002 Gmelin has his students at the Stockholm art academy carry a red flag through the streets of Stockholm, where they also run towards and enter the city hall, but this time without the triumphant finale on the balcony.
Earlier this summer, I started looking for East German produced red flags on eBay and a number of other online shops, the online images of which later became the photo series Red Flag, Original GDR. I also went on to purchase some of them.
The flags are of different dimensions, some looking almost new, some faded, some used, some are made of cotton, but most of synthetic fibre. Further research reveals that all seem to have been produced at the VEB Bandtex Kombinat in the city of Pulsnitz in Saxony between 1980 and 1989.
As the flags arrive at my house in the post, the confrontation with their physical materiality brings back feelings of discomfort that I remember from when I grew up as young girl of dissident leanings in East Germany – and that I almost forgot I had.
I am startled to realise that I have a sense of ambiguity towards the pieces of fabric that I do not feel when seeing the flag in other contexts, such as Felix Gmelin’s powerful piece. To explore my confusion, I decide to take one of my eBay flags on a walk through the Pankow neighbourhood, where the HomeBase LAB is located. Serving as an FDJ (socialist youth organisation) home for many years, the HomeBase LAB building was part of a topography of power that was at the heart of the East German socialist state apparatus, whose elites lived and worked in different Pankow neighbourhoods.
One block up from the compound, a typical East German Plattenbausiedlung (prefab public housing estate) – some of whose inhabitants will have lived there since it was built and through and past the demise of the East German state – extends north. To its west, on Majakowskiring, are the former homes of the Socialist Party leadership, among them Ulbricht, Pieck, Grothewohl and Honecker. Schloss Schönhausen, just along from there, was the official seat of the President of the GDR until, in the winter of 1990, the Round Table of the GDR started holding most of the meetings of its short period of existence here, bringing together party officials and representatives of the oppositional movements, with whom I at the time identified. This would be the itinerary of my planned walk.
As I begin to think the project through, I wonder what it will mean to expose my East German made red flag at these particular sites, in this area. Will its presence be read as provocation or as a (welcome or misguided) show of support? Or will it, quite simply, be ignored? In taking my ambivalent relationship to the tainted symbol of the workers’ movement to the street, from the safety of my studio into the public realm, will I manage a confident stride, breaking maybe, occasionally, into a run, or will I steal through the streets quietly? And, in the absence of students or comrades to help, will I find other potential runners along the way or will I have to run the whole course by myself, alone?
