Photographer Roger Melis: The anti-heroes of the GDR

When the Berlin Wall was built in August 1961, Roger Melis immediately realized that something "very dreadful" was happening there. Shortly thereafter, he and a friend took the risky plan to run away from Potsdam through the sewers to the west, as he later told in an interview.

"No, you do not, that puts us in the trouble, you stay here" - with these words, his parents kept the then 21-year-olds from the "escape from the Republic" at the last minute. Melis let the friend escape alone and stayed in the GDR. He became the master of East German photo-realism.

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"I consciously refrain from refinements," Melis is quoted in the catalog for the exhibition "The East Germans", which can be seen in the Reinbeckhallen in Berlin until July. Many of the estate's photographs, curated by Melis' foster son Mathias Bertram, are now being shown in public for the first time ten years after the photographer's death.

His most important task, according to Melis, has always been to "create haunting images of people, preferably in their natural living and working environment, while not robbing them of their souls".

Because of adapted citizens

Melis was born in 1940 in Berlin, the son of a sculptor and completed after school a photographer's apprenticeship. But taking passport photos and photographing brides and grooms was not enough for him in the long term. Melis hired at the Berlin Charité, where he received sinuses and bruises in children's heads during operations. On the weekends, he portrayed artists such as the sculptor Werner Stötzer and developed the shots after hours in the hospital laboratory.

Thereafter, Melis worked regularly as a fashion photographer for the magazine "Sibylle". For him, "the personal charisma of the girls was often more interesting than the fall of the clothes". Bread jobs secured Melis financially, so that he could photograph the rest of the time, which captivated him the most. Reality around him as close as possible was always his biggest goal, he explained.

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The East Germans / The East Germans: Photographs from the estate / Photographs from the estate 1964-1990

Publishing company:

Lehmstedt publishing house

Pages:

208

Price:

EUR 28,00

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As a picture reporter, Melis provided footage for media in both East and West Germany. However, with the orders in the GDR it was over in the early eighties: Melis had worked together with the writer Erich Loest, who had moved to the Federal Republic of Germany, on a reportage for the magazine "Geo". Because of his regime-critical attitude expected the government Loest in his homeland from the fifties to the "system enemies".

Privately, Melis photographed record covers for his neighbor Wolf Biermann. In the old apartment of the rebellious singer-songwriter in the Chausseestraße 131, a resistance nest for oppositional intellectuals and students, Melis also portrayed intellectuals such as Robert Havemann, Helga Nowak or Sarah Kirsch. In addition, he created his street photographs, on which he wanted to capture the everyday life of the GDR.

Silent scenes on the roadside

So he focused on May 8, 1965, the 20th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi rule, not on the tanks at the joint parade of Red Army and National People's Army in the center of Berlin. He was more interested in the simple people on the side of the road: families with babies in their arms or older women who followed the action from a certain distance. Or members of the paramilitary "working-class combat groups" who were sitting unheroic on the pavement playing cards.

Roger Melis / Lehmstedt Verlag, Leipzig 2019

Focus on the roadside: Parade of the Red Army in 1965 in East Berlin

At the point where the Soviet Union and the SED regime demonstrated their military strength, a few years earlier the city palace, which had been damaged during the war, had been confessed. The GDR wanted to separate itself from the annoying ballast of feudal times and put there a huge area for state-directed marches and demonstrations.

Even when Melis met young people at a Berlin carnival at the end of the sixties, they did not live up to the image of the adapted citizens, who always advocated the ideals of socialism with a fiercely raised fist. The photos show teenagers who secretly smoked, loved cool clothes and just like peers in the West wanted to have fun together.

"Roger Melis, with his quiet street photography, was one of the pioneering artists of the GDR," says his colleague Harald Hauswald, born in 1954, in a conversation with Einestages. He met Melis in the early eighties: "a seasoned photographer, to whom I looked up". He had to thank the intercession of Melis his inclusion in the artists' association of the GDR.

"There is only the loner"

To photograph people on the street was much simpler than it was today: "People were not so suspicious," says Hauswald, who received the Federal Cross of Merit for his own documentary work after the fall of the Wall.

Roger Melis is characterized by humility towards his subject. This is noticeable in his photos from the Uckermark, for example: On a photo, rural workers with headscarves and young helpers rest together in a meadow. A plump woman looks rather suspiciously towards the camera.

The photographer always brought with him a lot of time to gradually gain the trust of the portrayed. So he told in an interview that he once accompanied a soap boiler until his day's work had actually done.

A few years before his death in 2009, Melis was once asked what had changed in the German photographer scene since the fall of the Wall. "You used to be able to talk to all your colleagues about what you were working on, which is inconceivable now," the great photorealist replied. "At that time, we helped each other, we miss that today, there is only the loner, the lone fighter."