WARUM DRESDEN/WHY DRESDEN (2017)
Seiichi Furuya Fotografien 1984/85

"MAY 1984
Picture post from home"
(Excert)

...It is 1984 and only irredeemable idiots still go to the May Day parade. It is well attended. Eduard Dietrich is no longer interested. Widespread agony, collapse, and hopelessness. A condition in which only fantasies offer comfort. The white beaches directly behind the Berlin Wall, the cafés of Saint Germain, only a hop, skip, and a jump from the landmined border, the Empire State Buildings, the leaning towers, the hula skirts, and rumba drums. Fantasies develop into projections. Projections become applications for exit visas, Ausreiseantrag, informal. In Dresden there are reportedly almost ten thousand applicants, the front runner. State agencies brandish bodily threats, not in the dailies, because there are no émigrés there. And besides, Helsinki was only signed eight years prior. The Finnish capital as the main argument in the rationale for the intended departure. Final Act, Principle VII, human rights. What a sinister word, until then only associated with Chile, or trampled underfoot by Congo Müller. Threats are distributed privately. Slight hints of chicanery, a little jail time, in the hole now and then, sleep deprivation, and you wouldn’t want anything to happen to your children, would you? The fact that some do disappear behind high, familiar walls makes the threats tangible. Here too fantasy runs riot, the most miserable, the most grotesque. Friends are rounded up, removed. They are simply gone. And no one knows where. Nothing else....

Copyright: Manfred Wiemer