Wherever Klaus Staeck goes on his many travels through Germany, he takes pictures of customs. In East and West, before and after reunification, he captured what easily escapes the casual glance, images full of charming sadness and eloquent symbolism. The photographer does not move in a blooming landscape, but in an inhospitable public space in which the residents have left their mark. People rarely appear in Staeck's pictures; There's often something to read about it: signs, posters, graffiti, unintentionally funny slogans whose cheerful rhetoric doesn't quite match the shabby atmosphere. This is how the Germans have arranged it, a united people with an occasionally quite strange way of life.