Else Gabriel and Max Goldt on the wedding day
Photo: private
Else Gabriel, who was at the show in Paris in 1990?
200 men, women and everything in between: musicians, dance, theater and fashion people and visual artists of all trades, who represented the unofficial, unadjusted scene in the GDR. The Auto-Perforation artists were there-Micha Brendel, Rainer Görß, Via Lewandowsky, Else Gabriel and Ratte Elke, freed from a Charité laboratory in 1988, since then. Durs Grünbein was there and sharpened my gaze to the details in the simultaneity of the uneven. We came to Paris and were distributed to host families for overnight stays.
How do Paris remember?
Especially the metro. If there was nothing to do in La Villette, I was on the way. And a moment of perfect silence when I stayed alone in the gigantic hall on my exhibit, a kind of steel coffin. It was very cold. A security man came late night. He spread without a word and lets a warming wool blanket over the artist and rat. There were only two, three days and nights. Then the spook was over.
Spook?
It was unreal. We came as zombies, the last battle of a dead system. Like a bagpipes that had been ignored to date, pumped thick again as an alibi for a left -wing utopia. Thrown off in the former Paris slaughterhouse, it sounds disturbing from all whistles at the same time. Until the air is out.
Interview
At the end of January 1990, 200 GDR artists came to Paris. The occasion was the exhibition “The other Germany behind the walls”, an initiative by Christoph Tannert. The first and last work show of the GDR endground on the site of the former slaughterhouses La Villette. One of the participants was also Else GabrielBorn in Halberstadt in 1962. The professor of fine arts at the art college in Berlin-Weißensee founded the artist group of Auto-Perforation artists together with Micha Brendel, Rainer Görß and Via Lewandowsky in 1982.
And what was your contribution to the work show?
We performed as a group and individually. For this I kneaded 50 kilos of yeast dough on site and ordered 20 liters of pig blood.
What did you do with it?
On a rope a doughy-bloody umbilical cord twisted to the highest point of the very high hall roof.
Then they were invited to the presidential palace. A legend says they have given themselves the edge in the Élysée.
Else Gabriel (on the podium) during her performance in Paris
Photo: private
There was a highly official invitation to lunch. At 11 a.m., 50 or 60 artists were put in buses. Probably those who just got around.
How did it go on?
We were chauffeured to the Élysée Palace. It was incredible! Cinderella-Else would like to be floated directly into the President in Haute Couture. However, there were delays. We were parked at the bar.
Not!
The East Germans, which are abruptly grafted into the city of the lights and now into this illustrious location, were only able to resist the temptation briefly. It was soon tried out. The reverence gave way, the mood rose. When the big wing door jumped to the buffet after almost an hour, there was little consideration of the dip. Hardly anyone had breakfast, everyone shoveled from everything on the finest porcelain.
Not to believe.
French welcome culture at the highest level! Arrived on long boards as a state banquet: oysters, mussels, terrines and pies, the whole grand cuisine and colorful macarons. And now the heroes of the Cuisine Française had to Looked at how a horde of East German artists – in the inevitable parka, with confused hair and many a man with a shaggy beard and all hacking – fell over their menu. I saw a cook. One of the many. Turned to the wall with its tall hood, the elbows in front of the forehead, shook their shoulders. Tears flowed.
It is said that some East German artists still have cutlery with the signet of the Élysée Palace.
Yes, it disappeared in the rejected of the East German protagonists. Not in mine. I would have been the one would have been caught. Then it came to the utmost: The imposing door wings and Danielle and François Mitterrand, President of the Grand Nation, were again rustling their honor and shook sticky hands. He was very small, the midrange, so tender.
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Why did the president come so late?
Helmut Kohl pushed reunification. Maggie Thatcher was strictly against it as Prime Minister of Great Britain. The iron lady now held that day in the Élysée-Palast Monsieur Le Président with a determination and speech requirement in a spell-and from receiving the Ostler à L’heure. In doing so, she involuntarily gave the uninhibited avant -garde the opportunity to get rid of the cliché of the noble savages …
Which gave the Ossis an authentic impression of the GDR.
With more appropriate etiquette you might have said: Look, the GDR, good people who are visiting here. These are also those who protested on the street. They can get their own government. This hope got an unmistakable crack that day. But – honestly: art and artists are a marginal phenomenon in all political mills.
They wanted to leave the GDR anyway.
Yes, actually right after the Abitur. But I didn’t want to make an application for a departure for political reasons. I found the inevitable lectures and embarrassing surveys unworthy. This most advanced real world system, which its inmates could only force to be happy with a shooting order, was a deteriorated shit. What else was there to talk? You could depolitize the procedure a little through family reunification-that is, qua east-west marriage.
Here Max Goldt comes into play …
The best of everyone! We are no longer married, but we are still very close friends.
How did you get to know each other?
Ulf Wrede, the father of my two children and the longest partner, played in a band. And Leonhard Lorek, responsible for the texts in many cases, had simply written contacts to the West and Max Goldt. Max came from curiosity with a daily visa from west to East Berlin. Several visits and joint concerts followed, in which the Stasi literally pulled the plug. I appreciated texts and music and wanted to get to know Max.
And how further?
Max wanted to visit Dresden. There was an artist party in September 1988. In tow we had a enthusiasm of young musicians from East Berlin. Everyone in my tiny apartment in Dresden Neustadt. And when these boys were still balanced around the pillows, Max spontaneously called: »Else, let’s get married! Then we all adopt them! ”I quickly switched on:» Adopting, let’s see. We talk about marriage tomorrow. ”The next day, in the Karl May Museum Radebeul, the fate took its course in the associated» Villa Bärenfett «: the engagement was sealed each with an old Saxterhand button.
Was that easy?
From then on it went his socialist walk through the state organs. And of course I was constantly ordered to “clarify a fact”. The hobby lecturer from the Ministry of the Interior was still too little heartache in the story. I had to improve several times. In the end I conjured up a love story that stirred me to tear when I wrote …
Max Goldt is gay.
This is nobility of the scraps of the throwing, which all over 4000 episodes of the ARD soap “Sturm der Liebe” puts in the shade.
Didn’t the Stasi know that?
No idea. In my file there is one of my lectures: “… laughs suddenly on”, “… wears black fingernails”, “… a haze of alcohol”, “… presumably lesbian”.
Are you drunk for the summons?
I finally wanted to be released from the GDR after 27 years and was now angry. With a little wine from Hungarian cultivation, I was able to clarify and avoid the unworthy justification theater on the occasion.
What actually turned out of the rat Elke?
She died in February 1990 after a fulfilled rat life and was buried at a nocturnal ceremony on the Dorotheenstadt cemetery. In the immediate vicinity of Brecht. She got two newspaper calls: in the “Titanic” and in the “young world”.
The dead Elke is with Brecht?
Elke was an artist in resistance and exposed to migration, i.e. intersectional discrimination as a hiking rat! Freed from the death wing of the test station in the Charité, traveled out of the GDR, reopened as an artist in Paris – portrayed several times. I close this report in silence.