As the Berlin Wall recedes into history, the realities of dictatorship fade, overshadowed by nostalgia. Surveillance, control, and the suppression of dissent loose their immediacy, while younger generations inherit fragmented accounts that fail to capture the regime’s full impact.

Using archival materials—school slides, negatives, required readings, and journals—I examine the language of propaganda, militarisation, and the constructed image of the West as an enemy. Rather than preserving these artefacts as static records, I transform them through rolling, folding, and encasing them in resin, obscuring yet preserving their essence. These altered objects become part of my photographic and sculptural work, questioning how history is recorded and remembered.

In Pavlov’s Children and Faux Diamonds, black-and-white negatives of my former students, taken weeks before my forced reassignment in 1989, are encased in resin—artefacts of a system that demanded obedience. History Overwritten layers multiple portraits, dissolving individual identities into a collective mass. Weißer Regen reflects personal nostalgia and ideological conflict, using erased Soviet books and projected military training slides. Friedenskinder, inspired by Reiner Kunze’s banned book, places his text inside rifle shell cases, confronting the contradiction of the GDR’s “peace state” narrative.

Despite the historical evidence uncovered over the past 35 years, memories blur and perceptions shift. In present-day East Germany, nostalgia risks minimising the regime’s impact, replacing its complexities with a comforting narrative of unity and idealism. I am particularly drawn to the gap between how we recall the past now and how we experienced it then. Memory—shaped by time, collective amnesia, and the desire for reconciliation—distorts history, fuelling conflicting narratives that increasingly shape national discourse.