Between 1984 and 1989, Günter Steffen walked the Mitte district of East Berlin in the early morning, before the city woke. Using a 35mm camera and grainy, high-contrast black-and-white film, he photographed empty streets, squares, backyards, ruins, and locations along the Berlin Wall. He has described these images as testimonies to the prevailing feelings of the time: helplessness, inner conflict, anger, and an end-times mood often brought on by friends leaving for the West. The photographs convey a sense of doom, which the book sets against selected text fragments from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We, written in 1920. This precursor to later dystopian fiction is a nightmarish depiction of a totalitarian surveillance state, first published abroad in 1924, banned across the Eastern Bloc, and permitted in the Soviet Union only in 1988. The pairing grants Steffen’s early-morning city a second register, sharpening what is already latent: a place observed under pressure, its surfaces intact while its social fabric thins.
The volume is edited by Günter Jeschonnek, who also contributes an afterword. It includes texts by Jewgenij Samjatin, with a German translation of Zamyatin by Sergej Gladkich, and is designed by Andreas Koch. The book runs 160 pages with 53 illustrations in German, English, and Russian, published by Hartmann Books as a foil-stamped hardcover. This trilingual structure, uncommon for a photobook of this scale, positions Zamyatin’s text as a parallel argument rather than a caption, echoing Robert Bresson’s maxim about making visible what might otherwise never be seen.
For collectors, the appeal lies in this conjunction. Steffen is not a widely celebrated name in the Western photobook canon, and 1980s East Berlin has been photographed often. What distinguishes the project is its sustained attention to a specific district over five years and its willingness to let a 1920 novel of surveillance shadow the photographs. A 2023 German Photobook Award bronze medal and a 2021 exhibition at Argus Fotokunst, Berlin, are documented, but the work’s interest rests on the discipline of the sequence and the photographer’s historical proximity to his subject.
Günter Steffen was born in Berlin in 1941, studied physics at Humboldt University, and after his 1967 diploma worked as a research assistant. In 1976 he became a freelance photographer focusing on documentary and street photography, traveling widely in the former Soviet Union. He lives in Templin.
