Falk Haberkorn, After the gold rush – Journey to Eastern Germany, Fall 2004, 2018

Journey to Eastern Germany is a journey through the recent past of a country that is now history and yet still makes its presence felt today. In autumn 2004, fifteen years after the fall of the wall, the author visited Germany’s five new federal states: from 7 October to 9 November, in memory of the dates flanking the historical events of autumn 1989, he travelled to every corner of the former GDR. To Falk Haberkorn, who is old enough to have consciously experienced the socialist system, the journey seemed like a kind of catch-up course on local history: as an experiment free of any preconceptions about whether this country would still have something to say to him. And tied in with the question of how well its inhabitants had coped with the structural changes and whether this could be visualized. The journey developed into a photographic road movie. An inventory of a land that is still in transition, as seen through the window of a moving car.