02.07.18 – BERLIN ROYAL – this is the new photo series after and alongside the successful photo concepts berlin minimal, “Mystical Series”, “Other Worlds” and “City from Below”.
The first motives of BERLIN ROYAL were created in August 2018. The series will be continued, the goal is an illustrated book and exhibitions. The first motifs were exhibited at the Neue Art Dresden in January 2019.
The concept is to show the royal-Prussian and imperial Berlin – without nostalgia and ignorance. The achievements of the architects and master builders, the designers, sculptors and craftsmen are to be honoured. And of course, the viewers of the photographs should be encouraged to see the kings and queens, emperors and generals of the time with a new perspective, because they tried to do their best for the people entrusted to them, for science and the arts, according to the standards of the time in often difficult times.
The National Socialists have appropriated Prussia. An impertinence, especially because the last Prussian Prime Minister, the gnarled Social Democrat Otto Braun, offered resistance to the Nazis with all the power of the Free State of Prussia. And he did so together with the civil servants – because they served the state in the Prussian sense. That was the German Reich of the Weimar Republic. Prussia was crushed under Nazi rule as revenge. Hitler, as an Austrian, hated Prussia. Who knows that today?
And the Allies, the supposed liberators? They bad-mouthed Prussia and the Empire in the post-war historiography (before that they had even been partners and allies) and declared them to be the forerunners of the Third Reich. How convenient. Because that way they didn’t have to talk about land they took from the Germans. Not about old cities they bombed without need. Not about castles they robbed and not about the expulsion of at least 12 million Germans from their homes in East Germany and Eastern Europe. After all, the largest mass expulsion in the history of Europe.
So: let Prussia speak for itself – without a glorified or grim look back.
There are about 120 motifs so far.
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