Island of West Berlin – distance and empathy

He was the man with the camera. Kreuzberg was his world. When Wolfgang Krolow came from Mannheim to West Berlin in 1972, the student of visual communication at the University of the Arts, just 22 years old, has already gained a lot of life experience. He had thrown the school from a well -situated parents’ house shortly before graduating from high school and had hitchhiked to Turkey, Syria, Iran, to Afghanistan and finally to Iraq. The trip on the hippie route comes to an end in an Iraqi clay hole in which he is captured, the espionage suspicious. Krolow had photographed the corpses of executed opponents of the Baath regime.

Thanks to the initiative of his mother and the German consulate, he is released from custody and returns to Germany. He caught up with the Abitur in the Palatinate province and studies sculpture and graphics at the Mannheim Art Academy. However, the island of West Berlin practices its spell as a place of longing and Krolow with its thriving alternative scene and the prospect of life without conscription.

Krolow getsicted as a occasional worker, and increasingly succeeds in disprying his income as a freelance photographer. Kreuzberg has been the center of his life and work since the mid -1970s. In 1977 he moved to the Chamissoplatz and artistically merges with this unique biotope, which, as you have to say, no longer exists. Here, in the shade of the wall on the outermost eastern edge of the West Berlin island, Turkey-born so-called guest workers live with their families alongside long-established petty bourgeoisie-and the left hippie, punk and household scene.

Wolfgang Krolow, a friendly, lean man with a longer, struwig hair and leather jacket, moves in this dilapidated, early boheme kiez, which is largely left by politics, with an unexcited sustainability and open-mindedness in all milieus. The Turkish children are happy when Krolow appears with his camera, laughs with a laugh or have them photographed their childish game in an impartial manner. He wins the trust of the punks when “hippie” initially persona non grata in the scene pubs, at the counter. And finally, the everyday life of these different Kreuzberg living environments, which still go into symbioses and mix again, hold on with the camera.

Nd.Diewoche – Our weekly newsletter

With our weekly newsletter . We’re Doing Look at the most important topics of the week and read them Highlights our Saturday edition on Friday. Get the free subscription here.

His pictures of social reality reveal that the photographer is one with the living environment shown. They are photographs at eye level, its objects may be subjects, especially in their unadopherency, in the brokenness of the ambient that they revitalize them. Krolow photographs demonstrations for a decades and a half, especially the calm after the storm, street festivals, occupied houses and their inhabitants when repairing and protesting, portraits and street scenes working Turkish men, celebrating punks and in the scenes of the children playing only to demolish. In addition, house facades and entire streets that this human scene stages in the scene with the local chimney sweep by the roofs of Kreuzberg thanks to his camaraderie. The photographs of Krolow reveal an excellent view of the image section, presence of mind and enormous empathy. They are perspectives of a masterfully trained photo artist and, you have to say it, fellow people whose heart beat on the left. The distance to his motifs is dialectically absorbed by the sympathy, which makes up the tension of his pictures.

The artist, who died in 2019, never made a secret that Krolow’s photos should make a contribution to promoting resistance culture. Nevertheless: his photos are not an agitprop. His work is a chronicle of social conflicts that moved West Berlin and in particular Kreuzberg in the 1970s and 1980s and show them far beyond the biotope, which exemplifies the fight for affordable living space, a good life without fear of repression and fascism, for a city for everyone, a not sold life.

Today, since many of the hopes that were held at the time are destroyed, immersing immersion in the work of Krolow is eagerly and wistful, his photos touch immediately and remember what it is still important to fight. Above all, they give hope for better times, because they give an idea of what a lot would change: if we understand ourselves more than parts of a common world. In Association A, a large work show by Wolfgang Krolows has now been published as an epic illustrated book under the title “Kreuzberg”. An iconic science of Berlin counterculture.

Sigrid Heger, Andreas Homann and Rainer Wendling (ed.): Kreuzberg the world. Photographs by Wolfgang Krolow. Association A, 280 pages, born, 44 €.