What's missing in this picture?

Okay, I will have to vent a little in this post, hoping for some catharsis.

Having gone through the recent chain of 20th anniversary events in respect to Germany, I often feel like I have been looking at two of these search pictures one can often find in the puzzle section of papers or magazines: They appear to be identical, but one picture is missing a couple things original to the first image. The problem: What's missing in the picture? It might be a hat, a bird, or a flower. However, when it comes to historical events, we are often presented with the faulty image as the original. It's often an image reduced to what is historically, politically and culturally convenient. Claiming the original as the complete and more true picture is often ignored or characterized as the fabrication of a wild imagination.

20 years after the first and last truly democratic Volkskammer election in the GDR (March 19th, 1990) that brought to a disheartening end a few months of revitalized utopian hopes in that eastern part of the country, big survey (art) exhibitions about those past events and their fall-out have proven to be equally disappointing. Most curatorial strategies and also the individual works included may have considered and talked about East Germans, but were not by East Germans - it's the old issue of the other--in this case the other German--as being silent and silenced (see also the book Representing East Germany since Unification by Paul Cooke, 2005). The people who were THERE and most affected, then and now, are curiously missing in today's debates about THERE, or shall we say OVER THERE.

It is frustrating for someone--yes, like me--who has been trying in his/her work, over the years, to come to terms with East Germany/the GDR, its form of socialism and the events that started in the fall of 1989. Of course, I don't represent East Germans, far from it, but at least my work is a voice--or picture--that's more representative than the western-dominated chorus that we have been served in these recent exhibitions, a phenomena we already know all too well from the cinematic genre, with films like "Good-bye Lenin" (Wolfgang Becker, 2003) or "The Lives of Others" (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006). And to clarify: I argue for a genuine plurality of voices, meaning the full inclusion of East German ones, and not, as some might want to interpret my remarks, as the exclusion of the Western contributions.