After the withdrawal of the Russian armed forces, the photographer Stefan Neubauer traveled through the eastern federal states for more than ten years and primarily photographed the interiors of more than 60 abandoned barracks.

After he initially had no sense of the pictorial power of the grandiose ruins with their weather-beaten murals, as he himself admits, the empty ballrooms, sports halls, theater stages with their remains of Soviet patriotic decor, but also amateur soldier eroticism, over time increasingly struck him Spell.

Kerstin Holm

Editor in the Feuilleton.

  • Follow I follow

The former military bases, shielded from the GDR population and subordinated to the Moscow high command until the end under the Warsaw Pact, were part of the supporting skeleton of the German sub-state - and are therefore part of Russian-German history, but not in the collective memory of the republic received space.

In order to establish justice and at least document much of what has since been lost, Neubauer has compiled a voluminous illustrated book from his rich treasures entitled "Cultural Heritage", which has been supplemented with a location map and instructive short texts by Andreas Hilger, Christoph Meissner and Tanja Zimmermann - in German, Russian and English, as befits a cultural mediation agency.

The pictures of mostly badly battered large buildings, many of which were built in Prussian times and some of which have since been demolished, first of all illustrate the size of the Soviet troops stationed in East Germany, with 350,000 to 600,000 men the largest contingent outside of the Soviet Union.

At the time of its dissolution, the Soviet state owned 36,000 buildings in East Germany, there were 800 military towns that the GDR had to maintain, 243,000 hectares, the area of ​​Saarland, were restricted military areas.

This army group was the most powerful of the Soviet Army, it had to deter NATO, since 1959 also with nuclear weapons.

Their units crushed the uprising in East Germany in 1953, and in 1968 they took part in the invasion of Czechoslovakia that ended the Prague Spring.

Neubauer's monumental, elegiac collection of pictures conveys an idea of ​​the fighters' cultural baggage.

Double-page panoramic camera shots depict socialist realism-style murals with Lenin confidently gazing into the distance, intrepid cosmonauts, athletes, and tanks, missiles, and heroic soldiers guarding it all.

The fact that the sculptures, which are quite template-like, are in a state of neglect and physical dissolution gives them something akin to antique grandeur.

The relief images of soldiers and fighter pilots at the deserted Rangsdorf airfield or the couple of athletes flying in step into the future at the former Krampnitz barracks near Berlin are of austere charm.

Unfortunately, some valuable works such as the cycle of paintings in the Teupitz psychiatric clinic, inspired by the mythical revolution and possibly inspired by the Mexican muralists, were destroyed during renovation work.

In order to brighten the mood of the patients, the walls of the military hospital in Jüterborg were decorated with colorful pictures of the Soviet comic doctor Doctor Aibolit (in English "Doctor Aututweh") based on the legendary children's poem by Kornej Chukovsky.

Peeling paintings show how the kind, white-bearded Aibolit treats tame and wild animals under his practice tree, binds the injured paw of a she-bear and is even used in Africa.

But it was only in the sauna that the Soviet Russian soldier soul came to itself. On the walls of former sweat baths are cheeky hobby paintings of slender bathing beauties, but also a devil-tailed bacchante, who joins the happily bathing in the hot kettle, as well as a dozing nudity with a foaming tankard of beer and move into dreams of private moments of happiness.

Stefan Neubauer: "Cultural Heritage".

With contributions by Andreas Hilger, Christoph Meissner and Tanja Zimmermann.

Könemann Verlag, Cologne 2021. 420 p., ill., hardcover, 29.95 euros.