A comparison of the years 1989 and 1990 would suggest that their presence in the collective memory takes very different forms. Most people can quickly bring the year 1989 to mind. Even after a gap of almost thirty years, it is easy to recount the sequence of events as they happened that autumn, when everything was condensed into a few highly dramatic weeks. By contrast, 1990 seems like a blind spot in the memory. Our recollections of a year like this are hard to grasp: our attention is claimed by events coming thick and fast and by unfulfilled wishes and unacknowledged wounds. Das Jahr 1990 freilegen deals with the different aspects of the year 1990 and their topicality today. It is a montage of pictorial documents and voices from 1990 mingled with essayistic reflections and stories that look back on this year from the perspective of the present.

With 32 texts by Alexander Kluge.

Photographs by: Wilfried Bauer, Christian Borchert, Christiane Eisler, Gerhard Gäbler, Silke Geister, Anselm Graubner, Harald Hauswald, Matthias Hoch, Martin Jehnichen, Harald Kirschner, Sieghard Liebe, Ute Mahler, Jürgen Matschie, Tomki Němec, Jens Rötsch, Andras Rost, Thomas Sandberg, Einar Schleef, Michael Schmidt, Gundula Schulze Eldowy, Maurice Weiss, Thomas Wolf, Ulrich Wüst, Martin Zitzlaff, and others.