Searching for traces of and with Johannes R. Becher
An artist's portfolio for the 100th birthday of Johannes R. Becher. An exciting piece of contemporary history.
In 1989, the Kulturbund of the GDR commissioned 18 artists to create an artist's portfolio to mark the upcoming 100th birthday of Johannes R. Becher. Johannes R. Becher (1891-1958) was both famous and controversial as an expressionist poet, the first president of the Kulturbund and the GDR's first Minister of Culture. His artistic positions varied accordingly. Many of them shed light on GDR society at the end of the 1980s and on the gaps in the culture of remembrance that were becoming increasingly apparent.
However, the portfolio remained unpublished. Although all participating artists had submitted their works to the Kulturbund in 1990, it was dissolved in May of the same year. The entire edition of the portfolio is kept in the Beeskow art archive of the "Utopia and Everyday Life" museum. In 2019, the 30 works were shown to the public for the first time in an exhibition.
From December 2023 to March 2024, the works of photographers Kurt Buchwald, Konstanze Göbel and Ulrich Wüst from the legendary portfolio were on display at the ZZF.
Photo volume at the ZZF
Ulrich Wüst is also represented in the ZZF library with several photo volumes: "Später Sommer/Letzter Herbst" (4° ZZF 27831), "Stadtbilder" (4° ZZF 37223) and "The Present of Something Past" (4° ZZF 38515). If you want to know more about him, we recommend the instructive interview that Annette Schuhmann conducted with him, which was published on our Visual History portal under the title "Ich will einfach fotografieren und die Dinge nicht verstellen".
Kurt Buchwald, on the other hand, is represented in our collection in several photo books, including "Von Menschen und Mauern" (ZZF 34569) and "The Freedom Within Us: East German Photography 1980-89" (ZZF 38541). There are very few books by Konstanze Göbel that have been published by a small Leipzig publishing house. We have none of them in our collection.
Graphics on Johannes R. Becher
The portfolio "Spurensuche" was not the first time Johannes R. Becher was honoured in the form of an artistic examination of his person and his work. The brochure "Grafik und Plakatentwürfe von 25 Künstlern der DDR" (ZZF 23323) was published in 1981 expressly for his 90th birthday. A year later, a brochure was published in which "67 artists articulate their views on the work of Johannes R. Becher" (ZZF 23333). Both brochures feature the Greek artist Fotis Zaprasis, who published 11 graphic "Variationen zu Liebesgedichten von Johannes R. Becher" with Aufbau-Verlag in 1981 (SB/L, BE65). This small portfolio can be found in the ZZF's bequest library of Simone Barck (1944-2007), who worked at the institute from 1992 until her death.
Books by and about Johannes R. Becher
Simone Barck was a literary scholar and historian. In 1976, she completed her doctorate on Becher's "Publizistik in der Sowjetunion 1935-1945" ("Journalism in the Soviet Union 1935-1945"), which is why our library now contains the edition of his works published by Aufbau-Verlag alongside many individual editions. There is also a wealth of secondary literature, some of it rare (cf. SB/L, Be1 to SB/L, Be67), which is being successively supplemented by new publications. These include Kristin Eichhorn's work "Johannes R. Becher und die literarische Moderne" from 2020 (ZZF 35796), the "political biography" by Alexander Behrens (ZZF 15509) or the many biographical approaches by Jens-Fietje Dwars (e.g. ZZF 15496).
We hope you enjoy reading, browsing and looking at the pictures.
the library team
(12.12.2023)