Cafe Nord

1987 – 1988
The Cafe Nord was one of the trendy discotheques in East Berlin.

The Cafe Nord was one of the trendy discotheques in East Berlin. In 1988 I was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. I photographed for about a year in this trendy disco on Schönhauser Allee in Prenzlauer Berg. Because it was unusual at the time for someone to take photos in a disco, I asked the DJ to make an announcement at the beginning so that people knew what was going on. That worked really well, many people approached me and later came to my studio to look at the photos and of course they also got prints from me. Word got around very quickly and after a short time I was known and was able to take photos very casually.

In GDR times, people queued up here to get into the disco. The series of black and white photographs shows sweaty young people dancing, smoking, flirting, posing - "happy youth life", as it was called in GDR jargon.
At the disco, the state and the party didn't play a role (except for the choice of music: Only 40 percent of the music was allowed to come from the West). The focus was on fun and cheerfulness.

Zu DDR-Zeiten stand man hier Schlange, um in die Disco zu kommen. Die Serie von schwarz-weißen Fotografien zeigt verschwitzte junge Leute beim Tanzen, Rauchen, Flirten, Posen – „frohes Jugendleben“ eben, wie man so was im DDR-Jargon nannte. In der Disco spielten Staat und Partei mal keine Rolle (außer bei der Musikauswahl: Die durfte eigentlich nur zu 40 Prozent aus dem Westen kommen). Spaß und Frohsinn standen im Vordergrund.

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