Aelrun Goette is waiting in a green parka at Kollwitz-Platz. The air is mild and Aelrun Goette is determined. “I believe that we have to tell positive stories to each other. I have decided to continue telling the good stories and not complain about what is not going well,” she says as she walks through the Mauerpark exploringly.
The director has just started shooting her new film In a country that no longer exists … began. It is your dream film. The film she’s wanted to make for ages. For which she had to fight for years – and which she can finally implement. It is a film that is set in the largely unknown fashion world of the GDR: in the magazine Sibyl, the VHB Exquisit and the shimmering fashion in the underground.
The story is based on Goette’s own biography – Goette, too, had to leave school as a teenager, triggered by a system-critical patch of the church’s peace movement that she wore on her jacket. She was discovered as a mannequin and thus escaped the path prescribed by the state. Your new film will be set mainly in the early summer of 89-90. It’s supposed to be a great movie. She had to work for a long time, but the material is important to her. “It was always clear to me: I want to tell this story, and I want to tell it big: full of sensuality, longing and joie de vivre. There are enough films in which the East is a place of horror that one has to escape from.”
The fashion scene was not as closely monitored as other arts. Some of the best photographers in the GDR worked here
In the GDR, the fashion scene was subversive in its own way. It wasn’t as closely monitored as the other arts. To the fashion newspaper Sibyl Some of the best photographers in the GDR gathered – Sibylle Bergemann, Arno Fischer, Ute Mahler. That Goette also photographed when she was still modeling. “The Sibyl had a very specific image of women: strong, upright, the self-confident personality. My goal is to reproduce what I experienced back then, “explains the director.” What is freedom? What is home? What price are we willing to pay for the life we want to live? That is a very contemporary question: because we all pay a price. “
Strollers drift by. Goette gives money to a street musician. She came to filmmaking through the theater and is best known for her documentaries. She looks exactly where most people prefer to look away – or scandalize. Her first documentary was Without parole, the story of a fifteen year old girl who, together with an eighteen year old girl, tortured a thirteen year old girl to death in Schwedt an der Oder. Goette became the perpetrator’s assistant and approached the crime in interviews with her and those around her. “I want to learn something from the substances I deal with,” says Goette. “The girl looks like an angel, but then the viewer is confronted with her deed. And he notices that she doesn’t fit into the pattern that our culture has made of young, pretty girls. That interests me: the individual in the Relationship to the world. ” Also in your documentation The children are dead it is about society and the individual. The documentary is about Daniela J., a young mother who locked two of her children, two and three years old, at home alone for two weeks while she was with her lover. They died of thirst. Here too, Goette spoke to the perpetrator, the neighbors and the youth welfare office. There is no narrator’s voice in the documentary, so you feel as if you are sitting across from the people. “The reintroduction of the death penalty was called for because of the case. Society wanted to see her hanging.” your crime scene “The Happy Death” dealt with euthanasia. “If you are successful, you will quickly be sorted by topic. I once said flippantly: There is no script in which a child dies that does not end up on my desk.” She is passionate about human abysses, “but I would also like to tell something else, develop myself further. Yes, and when the offers for new topics didn’t come, I wrote them myself”.
“My growing up in the GDR was often explained to me by people who didn’t even live there.”
Goette lives in the second half of her life in a country where she is confronted with patterns to this day in which she sometimes cannot find herself, she says. “Growing up in the GDR was often explained to me by people who didn’t even live there. I kept saying: Man, be interested in how I experienced, felt, and experienced it. As far as the East is concerned, I am Finally a specialist, I come from there. But often nobody was interested. That always frustrated me. ” Increasingly, Goette had the feeling that she was not alone – “but the people in the East struggle in vain for access to their own identity, because a template is always put on them, behind which they cannot find themselves”.
Arno Fischer, one of the photographers of Sibyl, made a series of articles together with Peter Paul Thömmes at an early age in which he introduced women to photographers. That was very unusual at the time. When asked about it in the last interview before his death, he said: “Why, isn’t it logical? Photography is female.” His reason for this was that “women take photos from the stomach and men with their heads. And that doesn’t work with the head. That is my experience over the decades. Six decades.” So the woman as a being guided by emotions? Feminists of today who are gendered theories would probably not be happy with that. But isn’t the point of Fischer’s argument in favor of promoting female photographers precisely in the fact that essentialist attributions are being reinterpreted in an emancipatory way? Whether you take photos with your head or your stomach, a clear compass is important. And Goette obviously has that. She asks at least as many questions as she gives answers. During the interview, but also in her films. “You always have to cut a breach in the system,” she says.
A little further on, some people are listening to an opera singer. “I’ll stay a little longer,” says Goette, who still likes to listen. It describes the way to the subway. “You don’t have to go back the same way, that’s boring”. A few streets away, cherry trees stuck against the gray sky. “That looks great, look at that,” one woman says to her dog. The dog has no opinion on this.