Konrad Hoffmeister – Von Panik keine Spur

Lehmstedt 2015

Konrad Hoffmeister captured life in the east of the sector city of Berlin in a way that we have not been able to do before. The photographs tell of a city that crossed the Cold War front, but whose inhabitants have long since got used to being the plaything of world powers. People no longer want to be upset when rebuilding bourgeois life and evidently do not want to expect the bitter end of the building of the wall. Hoffmeister, who at an early stage distanced himself from the practices of the SED regime and the freedom ideology of the West, avoided all poses. His pictures are owed solely to precise observation, a keen political instinct, a quick ethnological interest in his fellow human beings and a good dose of humor.