Udo Hesse

“In the early eighties, the photographer Udo Hesse, at the time living in West Berlin, walked with his camera through East Berlin, a place that to him was strangely familiar and disconcerting at the same time . . . The postwar period lasted long in both parts of the city and even longer in the east . . . The result is a photographic document that laconically, silently, and yet impressively tells of the past in a vanished country” (from Andreas Krase's foreword). In the appendix Udo Hesse also tells of his encounter with the East Berlin Police and the Stasi. He rediscovered a few prints of his then confiscated negatives in his Stasi files in 2007. More than thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hesse’s photographs can now be seen in a new and different light. The viewer’s inner eye involuntarily compares the images of the past with the present of Berlin’s new center.