FRG

The German playwright Heiner Müller observed that German history lies as if smothered by a blanket of rheumatism: underneath the heat and stagnation, just enough to give the impression that all is well, while the peripheries are frozen. Georg Kussmann’s photographs of West Germany were created under this metaphorical blanket. Taken in the Federal Republic of Germany over the course of a single summer, they depict everyday scenes of life, work and leisure, beneath which threats of discontent and violence simmer. Sometimes this discontent is explicit in the form of physical acts or graffiti slogans, but more often it is strangely suppressed.

Georg Kussmann made these photographs while exploring his homeland on foot, sleeping in the streets and often driven to keep moving by fear as much as curiosity. Gathered in a long, determined sequence, they describe a place caught between the weight of the past and the demands of the present. Evoking particular histories of the German work ethic, diktats and acronyms, Kussmann takes a tenacious but always subtle approach to contemporary Germany and the ways in which it struggles to understand itself.