Bernhard Heisig

In the mists of war and violence, the Harlequin, trumpet in hand, drifts through ravaged landscape passing a cripple and a marionette: Bernhard Heisig's pictorial worlds shock the viewer by depicting the great dramas of German history. Both a victim and a perpetrator in World War II and in the GDR dictatorship, the artist's search for sense and truth led him to his moving image formulas. Director Reiner E. Moritz converses with the renowned ex-principal of the Leipzig Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (Academy of Visual Arts) about his work, which influenced the development of art for many decades in the rigid GDR system.

Dammbeck, himself an alumnus of the Leipzig Academy for Graphic and Book Design, presents the origins of the new German realism developed by the so-called Leipzig School, which took place in the context of socialist-realist dogma in the GDR before the Wall was built in 1961. After the Wall came down in 1989, what happened to the major Leipzig School painters Werner Tübke and Bernhard Heisig, who had been called “Dürer’s red heirs” by West German journalists in the 1970s? In the film, Tübke, Heisig, and former GDR officials who were involved with the cultural scene in Leipzig at the time talk about modernism, conformism, political pressure, party discipline, personal claims, and fading memory. The documentary paints an insightful, often critical picture of early East German art history.