Sunset

Sunset gathers photographs from the archive of the East German Ministry for State Security to trace the physical routes people used to flee across the inner German border.

The images were taken between 1961 and 1989 by Stasi officers, police, and NVA border guards, for surveillance of people and places, inspection of the border fortifications, and documentation of escape attempts, both failed and successful. Jens Klein's selection sets aside the fate of the people fleeing and follows instead the routes themselves: tunnels, waterways, directional arrows, dead ends, train compartments, open landscape. Sequenced through the book, the pictures form something like a labyrinth, where the historical record and the viewer's own imagination start to overlap. Stripped of their original function as case evidence, the photographs read as documents of a specific kind of energy, the pull toward the West as a place of longing, prosperity, and freedom.

Sunset is published by Spector Books, the Leipzig press whose list draws heavily on archival and design-historical material from the former East Germany. A hardcover edition adds text by Helmut Völter alongside Klein's image sequence.