wild recuperations. material from below.

Only a multiplicity of stories will avoid historiography closing down history into one normative story. Samirah Kenawi

Dissident practices and sociabilities of the late GDR unfolded in a present that was largely detached from any utopian future. Their traces are alive in the memory of those involved in the cultural and political underground at the time and in numerous materials and documents held in archives and collections. This book is the result of a transdisciplinary research process that brought artists, researchers, writers, curators, archivists, activists, and multiple interlocutors together at the Archive of the GDR Opposition in Berlin. The materials gathered there draw a complex picture of individual and collective life worlds that deviated from repressive social norms and of the environmental, feminist and grass-roots democratic practices and radical proposals that took shape in response to the promises and failures of state socialism.

wild recuperations. material from below follows a shared desire to bring these experiences and environments from below into a meaningful dialogue with the present. Drawing on current artistic and political forms of working with archives and memory, the book gathers a plurality of approaches from and across critical post-socialist, queer*feminist, Black, post-migrant and intersectional perspectives. The positions from which histories are experienced, desired, and told–their situatedness in bodies, languages, and ecologies– are part of each story.

Contributors: Alex Gerbaulet + Mareike Bernien, Anna Zett, Elsa Westreicher, Elske Rosenfeld, Ernest Ah + Sabrina Saase + Lee Stevens of the Raumerweiterungshalle collective, Ina Röder Sissoko + Suza Husse, Irena Kukutz, Nadia Tsulukidze, Peggy Piesche, Samirah Kenawi, Technosekte + Henrike Naumann, and Katalin Cseh-Varga, Maria Josephina Bengan Making, Rebecca Hernandez García, Redi Koobak, Sebastian Pflugbeil, Tim Eisenlohr

Editors: Elske Rosenfeld and Suza Husse

Design: Elsa Westreicher

Publisher: Archive Books

An Archive Books and District*School Without Center publication in collaboration with Robert-Havemann-Gesellschaft e.V. Partners at the Archive of the GDR Opposition: Christoph Ochs, Jana Papke, Frank Ebert, Olaf Weißbach, Rebecca Hernandez García, Tina Krone. This book is the first iteration of Dissident Stories from the GDR and pOstdeutschland #1 which is made possible with the support of the Beauftragter zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur im Land Berlin.

Language: English and German editions available.

Price: 20 €
Shipping: 4 €

To buy a copy please contact: mail [at] elskerosenfeld [dot] net

CONTENTS

p 11 Prologue and Notes on Language

p 16 Nadia Tsulukidze Big Bang Backwards
Document: Stage design sketch for In the Shadow of the Glen by John M. Synge at bat-Studiotheater

p 44 Ernest Ah, Sabrina Saase, and Lee Stevens from the Raumerweiterungshalle Collective insufferable together. a documentary mosaic
Document: The private self-defense group presents its work. K. kicking S.

p 72 Anna Zett
 Waste Disposal and Landfills
Document: Urkunde [Certificate] – 40 Years of the GDR

p 90 Elske Rosenfeld A Vocabulary of Revolutionary Gestures. Versuche/ Framed
Document: No Man’s Land by Bärbel Bohley,

p 114 An answer that hasn’t been decoded yet
Irena Kukutz in conversation, 2009

p 124 Ties that went beyond an ordinary friendship
Samirah Kenawi in conversation, 1999

p 138 Peggy Piesche Archive (of) Gaps
Document: Report on the Safety and Security of the Lives of Foreign Citizens in Berlin (East) in Recent Months

p 154 Elsa Westreicher
 Intimacy, Transparency, Urgency: A few mornings ago, there were miles between yesterday and today
Document: Smash the Stasi structure No to new intelligence agencies No police state

p 176 wild recuperations. material from below. Images of the exhibition

p 214 Dissident Stories between GDR and pOstdeutschland. Resonances and Reflections.
Elske Rosenfeld and Suza Husse in conversation with Katalin Cseh-Varga, Rebecca Hernandez García, and Redi Koobak

p 234 Alex Gerbaulet + Mareike Bernien
 Along the Silver Road
Document: Pyramids of Ronneburg (Uranium mining spoil piles of the Wismut AG)

p 256 Environment, in an expanded sense
A conversation and archival readings with Alex Gerbaulet, Anna Zett, Elske Rosenfeld, Mareike Bernien, Sebastian Pflugbeil, Suza Husse,
Tim Eisenlohr and guests

p 276 I want nobody to find no trace of our existence
A conversation and archival readings with Ernest Ah, Lee Stevens and
 Sabrina Saase vom Kollektiv der Raumerweiterungshalle, Elske Rosenfeld, Maria Josephina Bengan Making, Peggy Piesche, Rebecca Hernandez García, Samirah Kenawi, Suza Husse, and guests

p 304
Ina Röder Sissoko + Suza Husse Longing is my favorite material
 for engaging holes
Document: Lesbians in Rural Areas

p 332 Technosekte + Henrike Naumann BRONXX
Document: GDR from below

p 356 About the authors

Team: Editors: Elske Rosenfeld and Suza Husse; Publisher: Chiara Figone/Archive Books; Design: Elsa Westreicher; Copy editors: Nine Eglantine Yamamoto-Masson, Pia Chakraverti-Würthwein; Translations: Adonia Bouchehri, Anita Di Bianco, Jesi Khadivi, Karen Peprah-Gyamfi, Sara Stevenson; Transcriptions: Jil Zepp, Julia Reinl; Proof reading: Archive Books / Corinne Butta; Photos: Emma Wolf Haugh, Jil Zepp, Suza Husse; Image editing: Hannes Wiedemann

© 2019 by the authors, the editors, Archive Books, and District*School Without Center.