The Wall as a canvas

In The Third Man, Carol Reed’s look at the post-World War II black-market scene in Vienna, Harry Lime, the arch villain portrayed by Orson Welles, muses on the relative merits of regimes’ contributions to society.

"Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo DaVinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love — they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

What, then, to make of the current show at the Arthur Ross Gallery of the University of Pennsylvania of the photography of Lutz Masanetz, who chronicled some 30 years of life in East Germany, from the erection of the Berlin Wall until it was torn down? Were those years of a totalitarian regime arguably the most repressive in the world, the progenitor of a fabulous culture? This show provides the documentary.

The comparison with post-war Vienna is apt, as the photographs are offered in harsh contrast with soft focus that barely conceal the baseness of life in East Germany. Reed’s masterpiece was shot in the same way, with thin zither music in the background failing to cover the horror of a black market in drugs that impacted young children and lined the pockets of a few.

In Masanetz’s work, one can hear the same thin music of the German honky-tonk caberet failing to cover up the desolation of everyday life. The work is evocative and personal. This reviewer was inducted into military intelligence as a direct result of the building of the Berlin Wall and, after four years of shadowy work, formed an appreciation for what can sometimes be a beauty to evil.

Masanetz, like Reed, used titled camera angles to give tension, suspense and an off-setting quality to the scene. Masanetz, again like Reed, used dark alleys, streets and steps for dramatic effect, often heightening the contrast by populating the scene with children at play.

The film’s scriptwriter, author Graham Greene, knew a thing or two about the realities of the Cold War in Eastern Europe and once commented that the film script was not meant to be read, only seen. In much the same way, Masanetz’s photographs do not want for, or need, lengthy captions.

Masanetz (born in 1944 and a resident of East Berlin since 1953) had more than ample opportunity to chronicle life behind the Wall. He is a distinguished photographer with both professional and academic credentials.

This exhibition, "Gilb: Yellowed Images of a Vanished Country — Photographs from East Germany," runs through Jan. 30. It was staged as part of an international scholarly conference at the university called "The Long Shadow of the Berlin Wall." Scholars from the departments of German and history have joined with counterparts from Germany, Poland, the former East Germany and the Czech Republic to examine the 15 years since the Wall came down.

The conference will look at the reasons for the collapse and how that captive population has coped with the end of Communism and the total transformation of their society. The "glib" in the show’s title is a variant on the German word "yellow," in the sense of aged paper yellowing. Any nostalgia for the "vanished" country, however, is quickly balanced by the intimacy of the camera. It seems Masanetz was everywhere, saw everything and understood completely his environment.

Over the course of years as a professional photographer, he took some 17,000 stills. It was from this pool of memory and product that he created the 30-year visual history of life on the other side of the wall. While Masanetz definitely has a point of view, he seems to have been able to divorce politics from his art in that, while powerful, it is up to the viewer to assign specific meaning.

Susan Sontag has written that even the meanest, mundane snapshot will morph into art given sufficient time and history. So, too, has the work of Mazanetz survived for enough time that it is a powerful art, at once familiar and distant.

Gilb: Yellowed Images of a Vanished Country
— Photographs from East Germany, by Lutz Masanetz
through Jan. 30
Arthur Ross Gallery of the University of Pennsylvania
220 S. 34th St.
Free admission
215-898-1479
www.upenn.edu/ARG