Christa Jeitner’s Visions of Trees

My first encounter with Christa Jeitner’s work Zakopane Tree (Zakopanischer Baum) was a black and white photograph of an outdoor scene in nature. It shows a hanging textile work in the center. Attached to almost leafless branches, the triangular fabric body hangs in the air while its ends rest on a field floor of stones and grass. Apart from a few tall, vaguely recognizable trees in the background, the upper part of the photograph is almost white, so that the dark branches and the light-colored fabric stand out strongly. Dated to 1979-80, this work was created by Jeitner in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and is preserved at the Berlin Applied Arts Museum (Kunstgewerbemuseum) today. After the work was first shown in 1981 in a solo exhibition of the artist at the Otto-Nagel-Haus in Berlin and in 1982 at the Quadriennale in Erfurt, the museum acquired the work in 1982/1983 with funds from the federal German Cultural Fund.(The exhibition in the Otto-Nagel-Haus included macramés and appliqués by Jeitner from the last four years. ‘Die Kurze Nachricht: Textile Kunst’, Neues Deutschland, November 25, 1981; inventory number G609 Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin, Inventarbuch Gegenwartskunst Ost: Nachweiszeitraum Der Zugänge 1974-1991 (Berlin: Kunstgewerbemuseum, 1991); Christa Jeitner, interview by Marie Meyerding, Blumberg, November 6, 2024.)

Christa Jeitner, Zakopane Tree (Zakopanischer Baum), 1979, macramé, 303 x 220 x 100 cm. Photographed by Georg Eckelt.

Only a close examination of the textile work on site can reveal the significance of its materiality. The cloak-shaped work in natural colored light linen yarn is clearly divided into a smooth and evenly structured outside and a bustling and dense inside made up by thick yarn threads and woven rows. This materiality can only be guessed from the coarse-grained photograph that was not taken by Jeitner herself, but by the object and industrial photographer Georg Eckelt. Hanging and photographing her large-format and therefore heavy textiles was a collaborative process that often involved several people.(Ein Weites Feld: Grüne Rückzugsorte Ostdeutscher Künstlerinnen (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 2024), https://voices.skd.museum/voices-mag/ein-weites-feld/.) When looking at the photograph, the image of a tree is directly evoked by the towering textile structure, with the branches extending into the picture at the top, placing the work in direct relation with the environment. In fact, the textile work itself presents an abstract form whose ecological affiliations only come to light through its materiality, its title, and installation in nature.

Inspired by Polish textile art, Jeitner became an artist and restorer whose practice revolves around the time-intensive manual work with flax plant fibers.(Christiane Keisch, ed., Kunsthandwerk Der Gegenwart: Zeitgenössische Arbeiten Aus Der DDR in Der Sammlung Des Berliner Kunstgewerbemuseums (Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstgewerbemuseum, 1994), p. 56.) This occurred during a period when an increasing number of women artists from Poland and across Eastern Europe were engaging with textile art, deliberately challenging associations with traditional female domesticity.(Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden et al., eds., Medea Muckt Auf. Radikale Künstlerinnen Hinter Dem Eisernen Vorhang (Köln: König, Walther, 2019), p. 33.) From the outset, Jeitner was in conflict with the GDR’s totalitarian socialist regime. After an unsuccessful application at the art academy Berlin-Weissensee, and likely due to her Christian faith that was noted in her file, she was accepted to study graphic design one year later than anticipated.(Ibid.) In 1955, she was expelled from the art academy and began private lessons with the painter Harald Kauffmann in West Berlin. In 1956, she was admitted to the Academy of Arts in West Berlin, becoming one of the few GDR art students able to study in the West, with support from the city government of West Berlin.(Ibid.; Felice Fey and Hannes Schwenger, Verschwiegene Kunst: die internationale Moderne in der DDR (Berlin München: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2021), p. 34.) Jeitner paused her studies for a year following her father’s serious illness and subsequent death, and she was ultimately unable to finish her degree due to the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.(It was not until 1996 that Jeitner was able to defend her diploma in fine arts and painting before a commission of the Kunsthochschule Weißensee as part of her rehabilitation. Christa Jeitner, “Vita CHR,” in Christa Jeitner – Notizen, Prozesse, Werke, ed. Kunsthaus Dresden, Städtische Galerie für Gegenwartskunst (Berlin: Distanz, 2021),  p. 296.) That same year, she had her first exhibition in Leipzig.(Fey and Schwenger, Verschwiegene Kunst, p. 81.) From the early 1960s, she worked as a freelance artist—initially focusing on works on paper, while from 1965 onward she started using textile materials.(Jeitner, “Vita CHR,” p. 296.)Jeitner also took on design commissions, including graphic and interior design work.(Fey and Schwenger, Verschwiegene Kunst, p. 81.) While she was still included in exhibitions in the early 1960s—such as the grassi exhibition series in 1964 and 1965—this changed after the 11^th plenary session of the central committee of the ruling communist party (SED) in 1965, which tightened cultural policy in the GDR.(Kunsthaus Dresden, Städtische Galerie für Gegenwartskunst and Kanuti Gildi SAAL, Tallinn, eds., Freedom to Be Free (Dresden, 2018), p. 8.) From then on, churches became one of the few spaces where she could show and exchange her work.(Christa Jeitner, Von dort bis hier: Bemerkungen zu einer Werkauswahl (Berlin: Hendrik Bäßler Verlag, 2023), p. 68.) The GDR’s government not only severely restricted work opportunities for artists but also sought to suppress awareness of the country’s worsening environmental problems.

Georg Eckelt, Christa Jeitner Hanging the Zakopane Tree (Christa Jeitner beim Aufhängen des Zakopanischen Baumes), 1979.

During the 1970s, awareness of finite resources and the environmental damage from industrialization in both capitalist and socialist states fostered a heightened environmental consciousness in the GDR.(Kunstarchiv Beeskow, Simone Tippach-Schneider, and Annette Dorgerloh, eds., “Vermessene Idylle: Landschaftsmalerei Zwischen Zeitkritik Und Rückzugstraum,” in Zwischen Himmel Und Erde: Landschaftsbilder Aus Der DDR (Beeskow: Kunstarchiv, 2004), p. 63.) This shift spurred artists to critique increasingly visible ecological issues, urging a rethinking of humanity’s relationship with nature. Images of forest dieback (Waldsterben) caused by acid rain, which nearly reached crisis levels in West Germany in the early 1980s, prompted the GDR to respond. However, the GDR officially denied the existence of forest dieback on its territory, banning references and images of dying trees.(Michel Dupuy, “Justifying Air Pollution in the GDR, 1949-1989,” in Ecologies of Socialisms: Germany, Nature, and the Left in History, Politics, and Culture, ed. Sabine Mödersheim, Scott Moranda, and Eli Rubin (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019), p. 132.) By the late 1980s, the concept of Waldsterben itself faced scrutiny, as neither tree mortality rates nor severe damage appeared significantly increased, blurring definitions of forest health.(Wolfgang Zierhofer, Umweltforschung und Öffentlichkeit: das Waldsterben und die kommunikativen Leistungen von Wissenschaft und Massenmedien (Opladen: Westdt. Verl, 1998), p. 9.) Nevertheless, in the early 1980s, environmental protection gained political significance in the West, and the surveillance apparatus of the GDR’s Ministry of State Security (Stasi) began to treat environmental pollution data as a state secret, enforcing widespread censorship.(Eli Rubin and Scott Moranda, “Introduction,” in Ecologies of Socialisms: Germany, Nature, and the Left in History, Politics, and Culture, ed. Sabine Mödersheim, Scott Moranda, and Eli Rubin (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019), p. 18; Dupuy, “Justifying Air Pollution in the GDR, 1949-1989,” p. 128.) In light of severe censorship of the representation of environmental damage, as illustrated by the Waldsterben debate, might Jeitner’s ecological abstraction be read as political?

While literature on Jeitner’s oeuvre exists, it deals only marginally with her depictions of trees and nature—a recurring subject I address in this article through an ecocritical reading of her work, ranging from her engagement with nature in textiles and reflections on her work as environments of remembrance to an analysis of her career as an artist and restorer.(These are, for instance, recent book publications on her work, such as Kunsthaus Dresden, Städtische Galerie für Gegenwartskunst, Christa Jeitner – Notizen, Prozesse, Werke; Jeitner, Von dort bis hier; or Hannelore Sachs’ writings: Hannelore Sachs, “Neue Wege Im Bildtextil: Zum Schaffen von Christa-Maria Jeitner,” Bildende Kunst 3 (1978): pp. 124–26; Hannelore Sachs, “Christa-Maria Jeitner,” in Auftrag Und Anliegen: Dreizehn Künstlerwege Hier Und Heute, ed. Erika A. Lehmann, vol. 2 (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1981), pp. 129–33.) I then look at her turn to textiles as a medium of freedom of expression against the backdrop of the prevailing textile scene in Eastern Europe at the time. Through a close look at Jeitner’s ecological abstraction, her visions of trees and her work Zakopane Tree in particular, I explore the artist’s engagement with political, historical and environmental issues in the contested field of the visual arts in the late GDR.

Nature in Textile

Christa Jeitner, Tree (Baum), undated, pen drawing, no size indicated. Image editing- mahlke.one.

As political pressures grew and conditions worsened for artists critical of the GDR, Jeitner shifted her focus to textile restoration in 1965. She worked with the Institute for the Preservation of Historical Monuments on projects for sites like Erfurt Cathedral and, from 1972, on the medieval textile treasures at Brandenburg Cathedral.(Jeitner, “Vita CHR,” p. 296.) From 1980, she also taught future restorers.(Ibid.) This new direction, presumably without a specific cultural-political agenda, allowed her to join the GDR’s Association of Visual Artists in 1968, after a restorers’ group within the association was formed.(Ibid.) This gave her more freedom than artists bound to Socialist Realism. Following a slight easing of cultural policy in 1973, she was invited to Association exhibitions and received her first state commissions. The Applied Arts Museum acquired a large Yarn Knot (Garnverknotung) piece for its permanent exhibition Arts and Crafts of the Present (Kunsthandwerk der Gegenwart), and in 1978–79 the artist created the monumental works Pervasion (Durchdringung) and Trunk, Arms, Foliage and Shade (Stamm, Arme, Laubwerk und Schatten) for the Palace Hotel in Berlin.(Ibid., pp. 296–97; Christa Jeitner, “Erinnerungen an Entstehungsprozesse,” in Christa Jeitner – Notizen, Prozesse, Werke, p. 59.) Restoration work, which was seen as apolitical by the authorities, gave Jeitner space to continue developing her textile art even as state control over the creative sector in the GDR tightened.

Her commission for the Palace Hotel reflects how, from the 1970s onward, Jeitner began incorporating forms taken from nature in her textile work.(Mennicke-Schwarz, “Überleben. Zur Aktualität des Werks von Christa Jeitner,” pp. 16–17.) In particular, she reveals the growth of nature that is inscribed in her work through the latter’s pronounced materiality: “In the linen yarn I use, nature is directly present, and through it, in the artistic object.”(Christa Jeitner and Hannelore Sachs, “Gespräch zwischen Hannelore Sachs und Christa Jeitner, 1983,” in Christa Jeitner – Notizen, Prozesse, Werke, p. 26. All translations in this article are by the author.) This also applies to Zakopane Tree with its coarse yarn threads and light earthy coloring, for which Jeitner extensively explored the materiality of his botany: “If I wanted to bring in the reality of the tree, I could not ignore its smooth surface […]. At the same time, the rotten wood inside the tree was characteristic, unstructured and spongy.”(Jeitner, “Erinnerungen an Entstehungsprozesse,” p. 67.) In this way, the memory of the found tree stump was translated into a textile work in the best possible way. The material experience with the work at the Applied Arts Museum described above shows that Jeitner achieves this translation through a differentiated material aesthetic of exterior and interior.

Christa Jeitner, Forest of Poles (Stangenwald), 1956, pen drawing, no size indicated. Image editing- mahlke.one.

Botany played a major role in Jeitner’s artistic work right from the start of her studies. Given her initial ambition to study biology and the fact that Jeitner continued to run her father’s horticultural business after his death—before the withdrawal from the agricultural production cooperative was successful and the land could be sold in 1963—this is not surprising.(Jeitner, interview, November 6, 2024.) On the advice of her university professor Curt Lahs, she spent a summer semester in the botanical garden.(Jeitner, Von dort bis hier, pp. 15–16.) She paid particular attention, also in her later work, to the depiction of trees and forests, mostly in the form of drawings.(Ibid., pp. 14, 18.) For instance, Jeitner’s work Forest of Poles (Stangenwald) from 1956 shows an abstract depiction of a two-dimensional forest of interlocking bare trees with wide ramifications. Blossoming, growing nature is absent; instead, the leafless skeletons of trees fill the black and white picture plane. Similar illustrations of groups of trees can also be found in Jeitner’s later machine seam drawings, such as Marsh Landscape in Winter (Sumpflandschaft im Winter) from 1982. In this work, too, the branching, leafless, almost abstract trees fill the white background, only now they are sewn with black thread onto light-colored fabric. One thing is certain: a living, growing forest looks different.

Christa Jeitner, Marsh Landscape in Winter (Sumpflandschaft im Winter), 1982, machine seam drawing, 15.5 x 20 cm. Photographed by Georg Eckelt.

In 1975, a few years before Zakopane Tree, Klaus Drechsler created his aquatint Broken Forest (Gebrochener Wald II/V), which refrains from using the term “forest dieback,” while nevertheless referring to the phenomenon. Antonia Napp writes of Drechsler’s work: “This kind of piece was doubtless to be viewed in the context of the discourse on acid rain and forest dieback that was ubiquitous at the time but, in the context of East Germany, it is always also a symbol of a withering social system.”(Antonia Napp, “Planet under Threat: the Environment and Destruction as Themes of East German Graphic Art,” in Außer Kontrolle! Farbige Grafik & Mail Art in der DDR, ed. Kornelia Röder, Sanja Alečković, and Staatliches Museum Schwerin (Köln: König, 2015), p. 67.) The same might hold true for Jeitner’s abstract textile works with their comparatively neutral titles, which leave plenty of room for interpretation as well as subversive criticism. Following Napp, could Zakopane Tree not only depict the artist’s encounter with the Polish landscape around Zakopane, but also imply a criticism of the changing ecosystem as well as the politics of the GDR? For an audience trained to read between the lines, as the citizens of the GDR certainly were, this would not be unlikely. I argue that, particularly against the background of Jeitner’s private and professional interest in the natural environment and the political and historical events in her home country, her macramé could be read as a critical analysis of the ecological and political crises of her time.

Environments of Remembrance

However, Zakopane Tree is not solely a textile work. In addition to its title, it is above all the photograph by Eckelt that documents its hanging in the tree, thus establishing the connection to nature and the environment. The work’s display in her garden was a conscious decision on the part of the artist: “I did not want to have this work be photographed in a neutral space. Hanging in an open landscape! The one hundred and fifty-year-old poplar tree, a familiar sight from the windows of my house, offered me a place to hang it. […] Both the photographing and the presentation were already planned during the process of creation, as a way to connect with an environment.”(Jeitner, “Erinnerungen an Entstehungsprozesse,” p. 68.) This macramé was therefore conceived as an artwork in direct dialogue with the natural environment.

The step out into nature is significant for Jeitner’s work. It was already prefigured in earlier works, as she notes: “It is no coincidence that my works often left the wall early on. They leave the rectangular format, become reliefs, enter the space, lie on the floor, becoming an environment.”(Sabine Maria Schmidt and Christa Jeitner, “Christa Jeitner. Dies Zu Sagen Ist Mein Leben Oder Künstlerische Kompromisslosigkeit Hinter Dem Eisernen Vorhang. Ein Gespräch Mit Sabine Maria Schmidt,” Kunstforum International, 2024, p. 74. In this retrospective description of 2024, Jeitner uses the English term “environment” to describe her approach, possibly to embed her work in this international visual arts genre that emerged in the late 1960s and is now firmly legitimized as a canonical term.) While she previously used the built environment as a frame of reference, as in her commission for the Palace Hotel, for the Zakopane Tree, she went into her own private garden to complete the work. While the references to the tree in her 1978-79 works Durchdringung and Stamm, Arme, Laubwerk und Schatten still appear fragmentary and abstract even as they are shown in public, Jeitner makes these connections explicit in Zakopane Tree both through the work’s title and through the direct installation in her family’s poplar tree.

Having her own garden enabled Jeitner to show her work to other audiences outside the state-run exhibition institutions. With her partner Petra Pfeiffer, a church musician, she organized concerts with an increasingly large and international audience, so that in the early 1980s guests from West Berlin as well as diplomats from Italy, Sweden, and Norway dropped by their small house after the concerts.(Ein Weites Feld.) While the Stasi monitored these concerts by recording the car license plates on the street, the garden offered a more protected space in which Jeitner showed small exhibitions of her latest works on the occasion of the concerts.(Ibid.) The surrounding botany was of great importance for this, as is evident from one Stasi report that states that Jeitner’s family home was difficult to see and control as it was shielded by bushes and trees.(Bundesarchiv Stasi-Unterlagen-Archiv MfS BV Ffo AOPK 64/88 Band 1, 23.)

Christa Jeitner, VIII Defoliated Tree (VIII Entlaubter Baum), 1976, from the series Landscape in Autumn (Landschaft im Herbst), silk appliqué, 19 x 19 cm. Photographed by Georg Eckelt.

References to her family and nature can also be found in Jeitner’s other works. One example is the watercolor-like landscape series of silk appliqués Landscape in Fall (Landschaft im Herbst), which was also shown at the 8th art exhibition of the GDR in Dresden.(Jeitner, Von dort bis hier, p. 69.) Jeitner writes about one of the series’ works Defoliated Tree (VIII Entlaubter Baum) from 1976: “The trees that my father planted and the trees that we planted ourselves. I have seen them grow, year after year. Their leaves changing with the times and the light.”(Ibid., p. 74.) Referring to her family’s horticultural business and land ownership, which were affected by the political events in the GDR, she describes trees as her important visual and family-historical anchor that illustrates her relationship to time and light.

Nature as a bearer of history is also reflected in Jeitner’s later comprehensive examination of the Holocaust, for example in one of her most recent series Forestry Camp (Waldbaulager, 2020-2023), which is dedicated to the women imprisoned in the Ravensbrück concentration camp who were forced to make weapons in another camp (Waldbau Neubrandenburg).(Ibid., p. 141.) The concentration camp inmates referred to this place as the “forest punishment camp.”(“KZ-Außenlager Neubrandenburg (Waldbau),” zeitlupe | RAA-Geschichtswerkstatt, accessed May 3, 2024, https://zeitlupe-nb.de/de/ort/kz-aussenlager-neubrandenburg-waldbau.) Jeitner writes about her visit there: “The experience takes root in me.”(Jeitner, Von dort bis hier, p. 144.) The forest functions here as a place of remembrance. The same applies to the function of the work Zakopane Tree, which not only recalls the artist’s cross-border travels to Poland but also her extensive reflections on the possibilities of representing nature and the environment, which are illustrated by the textile reconstruction of a tree stump. The series Forestry Camp and her work Zakopane Tree appear as places of remembrance not only through their own expansive appearance as sculptural works, but above all through their embedding in a specific natural and man-made environment with historical references.

Christa Jeitner, Silviculture III – Stele- Courage to Survive (Waldbau III – Stele- Überlebensmut), 2023, from the series Forestry Camp (Waldbaulager) combination 196 x 37 x 36.5 cm, steel lattice tower 196 x 37 x 36.5 cm, execution by Ralf Priess. Photographed by Christoph Eckelt.

The Tree as Textile Sculpture

The conception of Zakopane Tree began with an encounter in Poland in 1976, but the work was not realized until 1979-80. This encounter took place during Jeitner’s first holiday near the high-altitude Polish town of Zakopane, which borders directly on the High Tatras and whose landscape left a lasting impression on her.(Christiane Mennicke-Schwarz, “Überleben. Zur Aktualität des Werks von Christa Jeitner,” in Christa Jeitner – Notizen, Prozesse, Werke, p. 18.) She describes how “The stump of the windbreak, taller than a man, fell into my eye and my heart. […] It was old, bare, hollow. […] It became an object of meditation, behind which my sculpture was already growing. […] Now the tree was a spatial textile structure. Rising up like a vascular cylinder, tapering to a point, the standing object seemed to be directed against everything textile.”(Jeitner, “Erinnerungen an Entstehungsprozesse,” p. 67.) In her use of the German terms “Gebilde” and “Textilgebilde” (literally translated as ‘spatial textile structure’) Jeitner refers to the made character of the shapes and forms, which she places in the open space to overcome this incompatibility, in contrast to her earlier mostly flat textile works.

To this end, Jeitner first made extensive sketches on paper, detailing the tree’s measurements and proportions. She also liaised with engineers to understand the physical principles and get her textiles to hang. Before Zakopane Tree, the artist had worked on Stream Life (Strom Leben) where she already experimented with sculptural textiles, but which had in that case remained rather two- than three-dimensional in its hanging. With a length of 303cm and a diameter of 100cm Zakopane Tree was significantly larger and, above all, more expansive than her previous work, marking the conclusion of one of the phases in Jeitner’s work: “Once the Zakopane tree was conceived […] the spatially hanging form as part of yarn knotting was exhausted as an important possibility for me.”(Ibid., p. 79.)

Zakopane Tree belongs to a group of works that Jeitner had worked on since the early 1970s, what she called the Schnürwerke, which can be translated as “lacing works”.(Mennicke-Schwarz, “Überleben. Zur Aktualität des Werks von Christa Jeitner,” p. 16.) She worked on this group of works for over twenty years, experimenting with different yarns and fabrics.(Ibid.) Jeitner describes her beginnings in textiles as follows: “After an exhibition of students freed me from the preconception that textiles were ‘female handicrafts,’ I chose it as my specialism in the field of craft subjects. […] After a profound knowledge of materials and handicraft techniques […] and subsequent Bauhaus-orientated striped compositions, we were released into free work.”(Jeitner, Von dort bis hier, p. 25.) Jeitner thus received thorough training in working with textiles and she would continue to engage with the Bauhaus and its development in the years that followed.(This may be related to the increasing Bauhaus reception in the GDR from the mid-1960s and especially in the 1970s. The first International Bauhaus Colloquium was held in Weimar in October 1976 and the restored Bauhaus building in Dessau was opened on 4 December 1976. I want to thank Judith Riemer for pointing out this connection.)

As there was no active textile art scene in East Germany, Jeitner turned towards two international sources of inspiration for her work. One was the 1965 published book On Weaving by Anni Albers, which Jeitner discovered at the Leipzig Book Fair, providing a view beyond the Iron Curtain. Albers had taught at the Bauhaus, but had to emigrate in 1933, moving to the US-based Black Mountain College. Her book shows how she expanded the Bauhaus approach to textiles by exploring indigenous textile cultures. Not being able to read English, Jeitner first thought that the textiles made by indigenous people were works by Albers herself.(Christa Jeitner, interview by Marie Meyerding, Blumberg, July 5, 2024.) This anecdote also illustrates the global translations and untranslatability that characterized the international art world, which was supposedly separated by an iron curtain.

The other important point of reference for Jeitner were the Polish Cultural Center in East Berlin and her own trips to Poland from the early 1960s on.(Jeitner, “Erinnerungen an Entstehungsprozesse,” p. 34.) Her first visit to Poland took place as part of a group trip—the only way for GDR citizens to get to Poland at that time.(Ibid.) During that trip she approached the painter Tadeusz Brzozowski, who was organizing an exhibition at the Zakopane Press Club at the time, and who later also curated a well-received exhibition of Jeitner’s graphics in Zakopane.(Ibid.; “Vita Und Künstlerischer Werdegang,” Christa Jeitner, accessed November 1, 2024, https://chr-christa-jeitner.de/vita/.) From 1963, she also made personal contacts in Wrocław, where she received two decisive impulses for her further work. These were a large exhibition by Władysław Hasior at the Silesian Museum (Muzeum Śląskie), which resonated with Jeitner because Hasior’s works went to the limits of horror; and a performance of Stanysław Wyspiański’s play Akropolis by Jerzy Grotowski’s Laboratory Theater.(Jeitner, interview, July 5, 2024.) Staged by Grotowski and former Auschwitz and Buchenwald prisoner Jósef Szajna, the performance had the actors act as Auschwitz prisoners, while also involving the audience. This impressed Jeitner, particularly because of its appearance as art that needs no words.(Jeitner, Von dort bis hier, pp. 111–12; Jeitner, interview, July 5, 2024.) At the same time, Poland also gave her other lasting thematic impulses, including for her macramé work Auschwitz – Hunger Cloth (Auschwitz-Hungertuch) from 1965, and her ongoing examination of the Holocaust.(Sachs, “Christa-Maria Jeitner,” p. 131.)

Jeitner’s practice has direct relations to women artists from Poland and Eastern Europe, especially in relation to the materiality of her work. Susanne Altmann has noted how in her textile-based abstract sculptures, Magdalena Abakanowicz blurred the boundaries between fine and applied arts, overcoming traditional techniques such as weaving, that were potentially still involved with Socialist Realism.(Susanne Altmann, “Disentangling. Women Artists in the Eastern Bloc Reinvent Textile and Fibre Art,” in Abakanowicz. Metamorfizm | Metamorphism, ed. Marta Kowalewska (Łódź: Central Museum of Textiles, 2018), pp. 228–53; Susanne Altmann, “Lecture. Disentangling. Women Artists in the Eastern Bloc Reinvent Textile and Fibre Art” (National Museum of Wroclaw, December 12, 2020), https://mnwr.pl/en/the-four-domes-pavilion-online/. On the deliberate choice and political implications of abstraction in art of the GDR see Susanne Altmann, “Formexperimente. Abstraktion und Autonomie,” in Hinter der Maske: Künstler in der DDR, ed. Ortrud Westheider et al. (Museum Barberini, München London New York: Prestel, 2017), pp. 146–51.) In the 1960s, Abakanowicz started to create large, three-dimensional fiber works, which she called Abakans, and which bear resemblance to Jeitner’s Zakopane Tree in their suspended, expansive installations. This is not surprising given that Jeitner mentions Abakanowicz as a big influence on her own work, having seen textiles by the Polish artist in the magazines Przekrój and Projekt before meeting her in person after 1970.(Altmann, “Disentangling,” pp. 235, 237.) Altmann further points to Abakanowicz’s unconventional use of visibly natural and organic materials, such as horsehair or hem, which recall vegetation growth, and of nature as an important point of reference for numerous Eastern Europe women artists working with textiles, such as Ana Lupaş from Romania, or Szenes Zsuzsa from Hungary, to name but two.(Altmann, “Lecture.” In her later practice, Abakanowicz even used tree trunks for her works. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden et al., Medea Muckt Auf, p. 178.)

The Medium of Freedom of Expression

As Jeitner noted, turning to textiles as an artistic medium for greater freedom of expression was not something that could be taken for granted: “In the GDR, textiles were officially categorized as mere handicrafts. I was conspicuous by my absence. But the materiality gave me cover. The term protected my work from ideological obligations.”(Jeitner, Von dort bis hier, p. 27.) Catherine S. Amidon recognized this as a larger phenomenon evident in the work of numerous female fiber artists working in Poland between the 1950s and the 1980s who were able to defy cultural obligations through their process-oriented abstract practice.(Catherine S. Amidon, “Different Voices with Common Threads: Polish Fiber Art Today,” The Polish Review 43, no. 2 (1998): p. 202.) She sums it up by stating that “[f]iber art was modernism protected by its process.”(Ibid., p. 199.) Due to its focus on materiality, in Eastern Europe, modernist work involving abstraction was therefore much easier in textiles than—for instance—in painting.

Hannelore Sachs emphasizes the abstraction apparent in Jeitner’s textile nature depictions: “Even in the works based on direct experiences of nature and the environment, applications of landscapes, trees, fields, reality is reduced to the essential and objectified into the material.”(Sachs, “Christa-Maria Jeitner,” p. 132.) While Sachs points out that Jeitner used abstraction “even” in her environmental representations, I argue that she did this especially in these works, as depictions of nature in the 1970s and 1980s in the GDR were by no means apolitical, as demonstrated by prohibition and censorship associated with the around the forest dieback.

Jeitner’s Stasi files reveal that she actively engaged with environmental issues of her time and was closely monitored by the authorities as a result. A 1983 report by an anonymous informer states: “Lately, she […] has been presenting herself as an environmental activist. During walks in the forest areas of Elisenau:Börnicke […], she collects litter (scraps of paper, glass shards, etc.), which she used as the basis for a petition to the local council of Börnicke. The source assesses that Jeitner’s […] actions are leaning in the direction of the ‘Greens’.”(Bundesarchiv Stasi-Unterlagen-Archiv MfS BV Ffo AOPK 64/88 Band 2, 220.) Stasi files from the same month also reveal that Jeitner and her partner Pfeiffer were aware of this surveillance by the “police state”, as they called it, after receiving envelopes that had visibly been tampered with.(Bundesarchiv Stasi-Unterlagen-Archiv MfS BV Ffo AOPK 64/88 Band 2, 211.) Jeitner’s artistic practice and her focus on ecological degradation and forest dieback also did not go unnoticed in the report: “She also expressed herself artistically on the subject of dying forests in the GDR. She is generally engaged with environmental issues, but according to current findings, without appearing openly anti-state or anti-socialist.”(Bundesarchiv Stasi-Unterlagen-Archiv MfS BV Ffo AOPK 64/88 Band 2, 398.) While Jeitner engaged with political and environmental concerns, she did so with enough subtlety to avoid being seen as openly opposing the regime. That is why to express environmental concerns through art, Jeitner deliberately chose to work in ecological abstraction, as is the case in her work Zakopane Tree.

This article has highlighted some of the complex relationships between the socialist government in the GDR and a woman artist dealing with local and transnational political and environmental issues. Christa Jeitner’s outdoor-hung textile Zakopane Tree represents a comprehensive examination of the memory of a dead tree, more precisely a tree stump in Poland. In her examination of that tree, she refers to material confrontations with natural fabrics as well as to cross-border processes of remembrance, something she continues in her later works on the Holocaust. Zakopane Tree shows how Jeitner creatively navigated personal surveillance and censorship regarding environmental degradation and pollution, especially regarding forest dieback, highlighting her attitude towards nature, and her own garden in, as counter-spaces to the official art world and the state apparatus of the GDR. Jeitner’s skillful transgression of the boundary between restoration and art allowed her to continue working with textiles. Turning to fabrics and abstraction, her work resonated with the practices of other women artists in Eastern Europe at the time who used similar strategies for their explorations of nature and ecology. As illustrated by Zakopane Tree, the formal language of ecological abstraction became Jeitner’s very own way of dealing with the changes and impermanence of the natural and political environment surrounding her.

Research for this article was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – 537272521.

This article is part of the Special Issue on the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts. Articles published as part of the Special Issue:

Marie Meyerding

Marie Meyerding is an art historian and postdoctoral researcher holding a Walter Benjamin Position (DFG) at TU Dresden. Her current project ‘Landscapes of Surveillance: Environmental Art and the Stasi in the Global GDR’ explores art and ecology under socialism. She is the author of Women and Photography in Apartheid South Africa (Routledge, 2025) and Sights of Struggle (Lecturis, 2023). Her writing has appeared in African Arts, Third Text, Critical Arts, Safundi, kritische berichte, sehepunkte and Camera Austria. In 2023, she curated the Open Call-winning exhibition Defiant Visions at apexart, New York. Her work has been supported by the DAAD, the Krupp Foundation and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, among other institutions. She holds a PhD (summa cum laude) in African Art History from Freie Universität Berlin.