In the GDR, several hundred to several thousand children were separated from their parents and placed for adoption, a number that remains uncertain today. The state could revoke parental rights when a family was judged to fall short of the socialist upbringing set out in the GDR family code. The reckoning with this injustice is unfinished, and the subject continues to provoke dispute.

“was geschehen und nie geschehen ist” confronts that history as an artistic and documentary project, made by photographers Paulina Metzscher and Amelie Sachs with the author and filmmaker Eva Gemmer. Their approach joins a selection of artistic photographs with archival material, and sets factual texts beside poetic ones. The book asks what remains with those affected: grief, loss, perhaps hope. Its German title can be rendered as “what happened and never happened.”

Kerber published the book in December 2025: 300 pages, softcover, 14.8 by 21.0 centimeters, with German-language texts by Eva Gemmer and a design by Paul Spehr of Berlin. Gemmer, Metzscher and Sachs share editorial responsibility.

For collectors, the book’s value lies in its method. It treats a contested chapter of East German family policy through both image and document, and refuses the consolation of a settled record. Its photographic and archival materials face one another rather than combining into illustration, and the inclusion of poetic alongside factual writing extends that tension into the book’s language. The volume was named a one of ten equal winners of the Fotobus Library Award for 2026, which gives it a place in conversations around documentary practice and historical memory. Collectors drawn to work that holds an unresolved past open will find it worth returning to.