Letzte Generation Ost

Letzte Generation Ost focuses on the last generation born in the German Democratic Republic, centered on a housing complex in Hagenow, East Germany, where photographer Kristin Trüb herself grew up. Trüb interviewed nine of her peers who came of age there, combining their portraits with landscape photographs of the housing blocks and, crucially, surveillance records kept on their families by the East German state without their knowledge at the time. Presented alongside maps and individual dossiers for each family, the book pieces together how state surveillance shaped identities its subjects only later learned had been recorded. Published by Éditions Bessard in Paris in 2015 in an edition of 500, the book takes the form of a hardcover housed in a printed box, with a small portfolio of photographs riveted onto the cover and nine loose information-sheet dossiers, one per family.