“Many believe that life on the border with the GDR is entirely normal. But what does this life actually look like, with the division of Germany by fences and death strips constantly before one’s eyes?” asks journalist Günter Dahl in his article Kurz vor der Schmerz-Grenze (Just Before the Pain Barrier), published in 1983 in stern-magazin. The text is illustrated with eight photographs by Joachim Giesel, who between 1978 and 1988 regularly traveled through the so-called “Zonenrandgebiet” (border zone) along the “Sperrgebiet” (restricted area), as the then still “green” border was designated by the GDR on May 26, 1952, in order to prevent further mass emigration of its population to the West. Giesel worked primarily with a specially constructed 18×24 large-format camera that enabled exceptionally high resolution. His long-term project Grenzland–Niemandsland (Borderland–No Man’s Land), consisting of more than 1,500 images—mostly medium- and large-format transparencies—is a historical document of the division of Germany, in which he recorded the 1,393-kilometer “death strip” from Selmsdorf near Lübeck to Gutenfürst in the Vogtland from a West German perspective. In contrast to other photographers, Giesel was less interested in the martial border fortifications of the so-called “antifascist protective barrier”—with its watchtowers, barbed wire, and automatic firing devices, which cost nearly 900 people their lives—than in the depopulation and desolation of once-settled and cultivated areas. Alongside seemingly romantic landscapes, his photographs show decaying farmhouses, fields and farmland reclaimed by nature, blocked paths and roads ending in dead ends, disused railway tracks and stations where no trains stop, ferry harbors from which no boats depart, border crossings that no one may pass, and warning signs that no one reads. Paradoxically, in Giesel’s border landscapes the forty-year division of the country—through which people, families, and village communities were torn apart—appears almost idyllic. Yet Dahl notes that it is “idyllic only for outsiders.” In Kaiserwinkel, for example, white geese cross a road that once led to Jahrstedt but is now blocked by the border fence—only a short distance away, in 1961, the West German journalist Kurt Lichtenstein was shot by GDR border troops. Giesel, who otherwise places people at the center of his work, deliberately refrains here from depicting human presence. In his no man’s land, no people seem to live anymore. In 2012, together with Dieter Bub and a film crew from NDR (North German Broadcasting), Giesel revisited the same locations to document their transformation since the opening of the border. As part of this “road movie”—a journey back in time through reunified Germany—a chronology of the “Zonenrandgebiet” from the 1970s to the present day emerged. At the same time, Grenzland–Niemandsland represents a significant contribution to German author photography, narrating from a subjective perspective the history of a divided country and its people.
RICKIE LYNNE GIESEL & MARTIN SCHIEDER
| Grenze bei Lochtum (Border near Lochtum, from the documentation Grenzland–Niemandsland), Landkreis Goslar in Niedersachsen, 1982 (C-Print, 2024)
| Grenze durch Wildeck (Border through Wildeck, from the documentation Grenzland–Niemandsland), Wildeck in Hessen, 1980 (C-Print, 2024)
| Gaststätte Grenzblick in Offleben (Restaurant “Grenzblick” in Offleben, from the documentation Grenzland–Niemandsland), Offleben in Niedersachsen, 1984 (C-Print, 2024)
| Grenze bei Kaiserwinkel (Border near Kaiserwinkel, from the documentation Grenzland–Niemandsland), Landkreis Gifhorn in Niedersachsen, 1980 (C-Print, 2024)
| Grenze bei Lübeck (Border near Lübeck, from the documentation Grenzland–Niemandsland), Lübeck in Schleswig-Holstein, 1984 (C-Print, 2024)
| Stillgelegte Bahnstrecke bei Frieda (Disused railway line near Frieda, from the documentation Grenzland–Niemandsland), Werra-Meißner-Kreis in Hessen, 1981 (C-Print, 2024)
| Verfallendes Hotel in Wittingen (Decaying hotel in Wittingen, from the documentation Grenzland–Niemandsland), Wittingen in Niedersachsen, 1980 (C-Print, 2024)