Dispose, discard, discare: Environmental, political and emotional wastelands in the German Democratic Republic

In everyday use, waste refers to a material which is considered dirty, useless, or worthless, and therefore deserves to be dumped, ditched or disappeared. If these words are uncomfortable to read, it’s probably because they are frequently used as a metaphor in the social and political sphere. In English, there are numerous synonyms for trash and our separation from it. We might speak politely of disposal, but the underlying problem remains the same: how to get rid of dirty junk for good? Some crap can be directly composted or recycled, but that applies only to very specific materials in very specific places. Mostly, our reject is flushed away, burned, emitted into the atmosphere, or dumped on someone else’s ground. Throwing it in the bin is a comforting gesture, but the relief is an illusion. The bin fills up. It might then be emptied into a bigger container, but then what? To remain absent, the trash needs to be picked up by some kind of municipal or private waste management entity—civilization’s maintenance workers. However, even after waste incineration, sewage treatment, or any other industrial remediation process, some dirt always remains. No matter how far we manage to remove the shit from our personal window of awareness, no matter how much material we manage to filter, treat, transform and control, the concept of disposal always relies on the symbolic creation of an-other place, which can and will absorb all the place-less filth, that is simply supposed to be gone from here.

Anna Zett, Deponie 2 (2018), installation view at Zionskirche Berlin.
The picture shows an original concrete garbage bin from the GDR, once ubiquitous in public space. For this exhibition in a church that once hosted the illegal environmental library in East Berlin during the 1980s, I fixed the whole in the bottom with concrete, painted the insides with swimming pool paint, filled it with water and mounted it on three large pebble stones. Through the imperfectly sealed bottom, water keeps leaking to the church floor during the exhibition. In the background a broom-like object leans against the wall, equipped with wooden hands instead of brushes.

During industrialization, waste disposal became the state’s responsibility—no matter who had caused the waste to appear in the first place, whether people, private companies, or the state itself. In this text, I share some research about how a socialist state, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), handled this major public task, as well as some reflections on how fatal these waste politics proved to be for the society as a whole. These thoughts are accompanied by images of my own artistic practice—work that involved spending several years getting to know the dump and attempting to integrate it.

Anna Zett, Afraid doesn’t exist (2023), silent video, gif excerpt.
The excerpt shows a bunch of wrapped papers filmed by human rights activists who had occupied the former Stasi headquarters in September 1990 and performed a hunger strike to influence the soon-to-be-finalized negotiation of the German Unification Treaty. The footage is associated with footage from a chaotic GDR waste dump in a flickering montage.

My series Dump began as research work in the GDR Opposition Archive in Berlin in 2018. As part of an exhibition project in cooperation with this archive, I was invited by Elske Rosenfeld and Suza Husse to look into the environmental movement of the 1980s and respond to it as an artist. My practice, resulting in video and audio works, performance, installation, and participatory live-formats, is concerned with dialog in its various material forms. Rooted in poetry, cultural analysis, and embodied improvisation I am seeking to  create simple and open frameworks for myself and others to connect with the unknown. Until this project I had only been addressing my own East German background indirectly in my work. With this archival research, the double marginalization of a postsocialist dissident identity, and the wounds, strengths and situated knowledge that my 1980s childhood and 1990s youth in Leipzig had left with me, moved to the center of my work for a few years.

The GDR Opposition Archive, formerly named Robert-Havemann-Archiv after a dissident communist of the East-German 1968 movement, had emerged from the East Berlin underground institution known as the Environmental Library. This library was a grassroots initiative that sought to collect and spread knowledge about pollution and environmental damage in a state that kept its environmental data concealed and sent its secret service after those who attempted to collect evidence of the obvious and systemic environmental devastation around them. Today the GDR Opposition Archive is the largest archive of grassroots pluralist movements in the former GDR, including material by groups organized around civil rights, environmental protection, direct democracy, women’s and lesbian liberation, disability rights, punk, poetry, individual expression, free speech, and Christian religion among others. In 2017, the growing archive moved from Prenzlauer Berg to Lichtenberg, to the site of the former MfS [Ministry for State Security, a.k.a Stasi] headquarters—the former oppressors’ castle, structurally finalizing the illegal occupation of this building 17 years prior. The Stasi files themselves are no longer stored onsite, but are in the care of the BStU (Bundesbeauftragter für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik), an agency founded in 1990 for the purpose of making them accessible for personal and historical research.

I was quite familiar with this history, yet until I got access to a folder with uncatalogued video files at the oppositional archive, I didn’t know that this institutionalized transparency had been pushed for through a series of occupations across the GDR and especially in Berlin, where people from the Environmental Library and the direct-democracy activists of the New Forum had played a crucial role. As the German Unification Treaty was negotiated in the East German parliament (Volkskammer) in September 1990, a group of activists occupied the former MfS headquarters in Berlin Lichtenberg and staged a hunger strike that lasted for 16 days. That ongoing action, which manifested both in the streets, the parliament and the media, contributed to a change in the Stasi documentation law shortly before the treaty was finalized. In effect, the Stasi files were saved from being automatically taken over by federal German organizations, transported to West Germany to be kept under lock and key for 30 years. Moreover, a public debate was initiated about how to deal with the Stasi files in the interest of the victims of surveillance and political persecution.

Anna Zett, Freiheit 3 (2019), video still.
One of the video works developed within the Dump series picked up the metal relief, a sculptural form typically used in the Socialist world to honor soldiers, workers and mothers as heroes of a war-torn society that relies on collective bodily sacrifice. What would a relief look like that honors environmental and civil rights activism instead? The above video still shows a small person standing on a large heap of unstructured material, visualized through a common video effect that simulates a metal relief. Behind the relief which only covers part of the frame appears a drab winter-landscape.

The issue that first caught my attention while I was browsing through woody paper files, typewriter blueprints, transcripts of conversations, letters and samizdat publications like the “Umweltblätter” (Environmental Papers), was the “waste trade deals.” Never having heard about these deals before, I became very curious about these protests at the waste checkpoints around Berlin—openings in the Wall whose sole function had been to import household waste from West Berlin into the GDR, at a border otherwise patrolled by military personnel with shooting orders. Apparently, in the environmental movement in the East, this had been a central and highly symbolic topic. According to the 1991 Greenpeace Dossier on Waste Export, the inter-German waste trade began in 1972, after then-prime minister Willi Stoph had declared—internally—“the procurement of foreign currency at any price” as a guiding principle for government. The procurement of foreign currency was a key task of the “Division for Commercial Coordination” (Bereich Kommerzielle Koordinierung, abbreviated as KoKo), which operated largely independently of state controls and was directly subordinated to the head of the secret service. It had customs’ sovereignty and operated with the status of a “Devisenausländer” (currency foreigner)—GDR jargon for a (legal) person from the capitalist countries. The import of waste, the export of antiquities, art and weapons, the sale of forced prison labor to foreign companies, and the ransoming of political prisoners—or call them hostages—were some of KoKo’s top international businesses.

Over the course of the 1980s, as global demand for industrial products manufactured in the GDR continued to decline, the secret business of the Stasi became increasingly important for the GDR state economy. KoKo’s operating arm in the waste trade was the East Berlin company INTRAC, which accepted domestic and, in particular, hazardous waste from the West for a very competitive price in foreign currency, then handed it over to the VEB (Publicly Owned Enterprise) Deponie Potsdam (a landfill that encompasses three different sites) and from 1979 also to VEB Schönberg in the Rostock region. To this day, the latter is one of the largest landfills for hazardous waste in Europe—although today it operates under a different name (Ihlenberg Landfill), having been sold through the Treuhand, the agency tasked with privatizing GDR enterprises after German unification. Just like the landfills in and around the former chemical site Bitterfeld-Wolfen, it now operates as a private company, yet one that is 100 percent owned and funded by the state. Apparently, toxic waste remains a public responsibility, even when those who profit from trading these materials are primarily private businesses, such as garbage dealers, garbage brokers, the garbage mafia, or the recycling businesses.

Anna Zett, Endarchiv (2019), video still.
A video performance produced during my initial archival research shows myself spray-painting messages directed at the environment onto a large heap of pebble gravel, and deleting these messages again by moving through the pebbles.

A pile of pebble gravel—at least when sold firsthand (secondhand gravel already qualifies as waste)—is in some ways the opposite of a pile of trash. It looks sorted, neat, useful, clean, raw. The pile in the picture above is located in a factory near Leipzig, where it is used as raw material in the production of concrete blocks. Usually pebble gravel is extracted from the ground to serve as a mineral filler on all kinds of construction sites. Before the restricted area around Schönberg became a landfill for hazardous waste, Western businesses with good contacts to GDR functionaries had actually been digging for gravel here. Instead, the excavators found clay—a popular foundation for landfill sites due to its density. An even better idea for the Schönberg area was born. Former gravel pits, like other open-cast mines, were often converted into landfills in the GDR and ex-GDR, sometimes in the name of the state, and sometimes without the permission of the state, the old or the new. Raw material out, (poisonous) waste in. In such cases, the responsible garbage brokers may themselves have wanted to believe that refilling former mine pits with industrial waste would be a fair trade-off with the planet.

Anna Zett, Incineration ashes in the household waste incineration plant in Berlin-Ruhleben (2019).
For the exhibition at Zionskirche I visited a contemporary household incineration plant in former West Berlin to get in touch with the material that remains when trash is burnt (and the heat is recycled).

Back then, in what today is the federal state of Brandenburg, the imported West Berlin garbage was dumped both into former pits and onto heaps. As people started coming there to search for the remains of valuable capitalist goods, these landfills had to be guarded or fenced in with barbed wire. The amount of garbage and hazardous waste that West Berlin could deliver to the GDR was contractually determined in 1974 for 20 years. But when the amount of household waste declined during the 1980s due to increased recycling in the West, the missing quota was topped up with hazardous waste—despite the fact that the Brandenburg landfills were not suitable for this type of waste. In return, the Berlin Senate was to finance the construction of a hazardous waste incineration plant, the first in the GDR, at the VEB Schöneiche near Potsdam. The focus of Western media coverage in 1988 was not on the garbage trade itself, but on the alleged scandal that the proposed plant did not comply with Western standards and that the business therefore constituted an environmental crime. At the same time, critical commentaries were passed around among the environmental activists in the East that slammed the eco-leftist and liberal media coverage in West-Berlin as sensationalist and full of Western arrogance. For the environmental movement in the East, the true political scandal was not the alleged—and debatable—backwardness of the site’s incineration technology, but the fact that their own supposedly anti-capitalist government was so shabby as to offer up their territory to the West for waste disposal: “We’ll take any crap in exchange for foreign currency.”

Anna Zett, Deponie 2 (2018), installation view at Zionskirche Berlin.
The picture shows a second original concrete-made garbage bin from the GDR, formerly used widely in public space. Positioned a few meters apart from the water-filled one above, this one is filled up to the top with house-hold incineration ashes from the incineration plant shown above. Through a hole in the bottom of the bin the ashes spread onto the church floor in such a way that the concrete bin came to be mounted on the material that it contains.

For the citizens of the “Zone” (a derogatory or self-deprecating term for the GDR), garbage wasn’t really an issue. While the so-called “throw-away society” of West Germany began to “drown” in (plastic) waste in the 1970s and was looking for cheap export opportunities, in the GDR all waste materials were sorted at home, collected by children for pocket money, and largely reused or recycled, due to the short supply of raw materials in the economy. Plastic packaging was virtually non-existent. The fact that the GDR socialist state ultimately became an ecological wasteland, despite perfectly sustainable practices of material consumption, shows clearly that environmental issues are systemic, political and industrial, and cannot be solved by saving resources on a consumer level alone.

Hazardous waste landfill Ihlenberg (formerly VEB Deponie Schönfeld) (2019), aerial view, Google maps.

As the anthropologist Mary Douglas and many other scholars have shown, dirt, as well as the problem of its disposal, is not only a material matter, but above all a symbolic one. In German, the official term for disposal—”Entsorgung,” literally discare—is associated with the sensation of getting rid of a worry, of removing a problem from one’s own sphere of care and responsibility. Even in everyday language, disposal does not imply solving a problem; it simply refers to an action of making sure that this issue is no longer my concern. Somebody else will have to take care of it—God, the state, foreign countries, the environment, the garbage collector, the cleaning lady—someone else. All I need for disposal to take place is a boundary between self and other, here and there, inside and outside, right side and wrong side—so I can deposit my waste behind that border or in that zone.

Anti-fascist symbol, author unknown.
Pictograms showing a person throwing a swastika into a garbage bin were omni-present in leftist, punk, and antifascist contexts in Germany during the 1990s and still circulate today. Their graphics are an adaptation of pictograms typically used on bottles and packaging which cannot be returned for refund and should be disposed of in a bin.

The border that divided Germany into two parts after Nazi dictatorship, and solidified into a wall in 1961 also had a disposal function. On a symbolic level, disposal was perhaps the most important function of this so-called “Anti-Fascist Protective Wall.” There still remains a lot to be understood about the role the temporary division of Germany played within the denazification project. Not only the two new states, but also the entire German population had the task of ensuring that a new beginning was possible on the grounds of sheer ungraspable social, emotional and environmental devastation. A terror regime founded on genocide, mass murder, rape, conquest, war, total submission, slavery, extractivism and all-encompassing systemic violence that had been actively or passively supported by the vast majority of the population, needed to be acknowledged, responded to, reconciled, analyzed, mourned, remembered and eventually let go of. Then, just like now, many refused to do their part of this care work. Then, just like now, disposing of one’s own undigested past elsewhere seemed far more comfortable.

Anna Zett, drawing.

Psychologists such as Annette Simon have analyzed the extent to which the inner-German border made it possible to remember the deeds without having to take full responsibility as a society. The division meant that both Germanys did not necessarily have to deny the crimes. It was possible to acknowledge the facts in principle – while at the same time disposing of the unbearable parts in the other Germany. Both parts of Germany could say: “Over there they are still Nazis. Unlike us, they didn’t manage to begin anew.” The pride of the West was its membership in the Free World and U.S. stimulus money; in the East, they could score with actual Communist resistance fighters and the moral high ground from having received harsh punishment by the Soviet occupiers. By accusing each other of fascist continuity, both the GDR and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) used the inner-German border as an anti-fascist protective wall. However, the GDR started out—and in many respects remained—inferior to the FRG. In this framework, the scandal of the inner-German garbage trade unfolds its full political drama. While both states were able to use the border for the symbolic disposal of Nazism, only the economically and politically superior FRG came into the position to also use this border for the physical disposal of toxic waste. Understandably, the GDR government did everything in its power to conceal this deal. Nothing about it could have been justified ideologically. On the one hand, the deal showed how broke the GDR really was; on the other, it simultaneously nullified any protective function the Wall may have actually had on a symbolic level. The special “garbage border checkpoints” around Berlin, which came to the attention of environmental activists in the 1980s, literally proved that the Wall was not a protective barrier. The Wall was permeable—not for GDR citizens, but for “dirt” and “toxic waste” from the West. This border seemed to be useful to the FRG, while it did not protect the GDR in the slightest.

Anna Zett, Drawing.

When a political utopia becomes reality, there are always things that must disappear and, in the worst case, this also applies to people. In Utopia there isn’t space for everything and everyone, because everything is supposed to be good. The more energy is used to maintain the fantasy that everything is, in fact, good here, the more drastic and messy the disposal of the bad becomes. Perhaps it’s not merely a coincidence that the best-known hazardous waste landfills of the GDR carry the utopian aliases Schönberg (Beautiful Mountain), Schöneiche (Beautiful Oak), and Freiheit 3 (Freedom 3). The government had good reason to conceal environmental data and to repress awareness of environmental damage as pollution continuously worsened with the industry’s technological and social decline. At least since the TV documentary Bitteres aus Bitterfeld (Bitter Things from Bitterfeld, 1988), there was an image for the failure of authoritarian socialism: the image of a landfill dotted with rusty poison barrels, the image of a stinking, toxic landscape, in which total chaos reigned. The film was produced in 1988 by GDR environmental activist Ulrich Neumann and shot secretly in Bitterfeld landfills with the support of sound and camera people from West Berlin. The film was the first to accuse the government of classifying environmental data as a state secret, and to expose the unregulated dumping of poisonous chemical and hazardous waste by GDR factories into rivers, lakes and former mine pits. With this film, broadcast on West German TV two years after the Chernobyl accident, the GDR landfills became a metaphor for a state which seemed to have lost control. There were many material shortages in the GDR, but people knew how to creatively deal with moderate supplies. Nobody was starving, there were no shocking images of poverty. Protest and police violence remained mostly invisible. Visually, the biggest threat to the reputation of the GDR turned out to be the image of waste disposal gone wrong. The “blossoming landscapes” promised by chancellor Helmut Kohl as his vision for a united Germany was likely also a reaction to the common representation of the GDR on West German television in the years prior: a wasteland.

Anna Zett, Afraid doesn’t exist (2023), video still.
The latest work of the Dump series, the pulsating archive-thriller ‘Afraid doesn’t exist’ addresses the (failed) repression of fear as a common effect of the Stasi regime in the GDR, associating it with the failed isolation of the dump.

Similar to the walled-in country of the GDR itself, the landfill is—or at least is supposed to be—a place isolated from its environment. At a landfill, the cycle of nature must be suspended, because wind and water coming into contact with the discarded material poses a risk of contamination. The landfill is expected to operate according to rules that fundamentally differ from the rules of ecology. It is based on the phantasm of isolation, on the utopian idea that a non-place can be sustained. If isolating the landfill doesn’t succeed, the area that needs to be isolated expands further; after a few years, it is not just the site of the landfill itself that must be isolated, but also nearby inhabited areas. There are plans for an underground wall to be built in Bitterfeld-Wolfen, to protect the Greppin district from poisonous ground water, which has been slowly but steadily creeping in its direction. The concrete wall will be 35 meters deep and 650 meters long, and is supposed to completely stop the groundwater flow to Greppin. It is one of the many forever projects of damage control in the East German industrial regions.

Anna Zett, Remediated former toxic waste dump ‘Freiheit III’ in Bitterfeld-Wolfen (2019).

The GDR was a state that, like any other, had the task of ensuring that industrial, domestic, and hazardous waste materials were somehow taken care of. At the same time the GDR was a state that, unlike any other, ended up having to be disposed of itself. The dismantling of a state is typically the result of a war of conquest and invasion. The end of the GDR, however, wasn’t accompanied by a military occupation, but rather a withdrawal of troops (the USSR’s). The state was not supposed to be destroyed, it was simply supposed to become obsolete as it merged into a larger, more efficient state. Unlike in a federation or a colonial treaty, German unification meant that nothing was to remain of the acceding state. From political institutions, laws and economic infrastructures to the most banal details of everyday life, like the recycling system, everything was suddenly to be organized in a fundamentally different way. Within a year, from 1989 to 1990, everything pertaining to the old state had become worthless. Since the old state had been omnipresent in almost all aspects of life to some extent, both people and institutions in the ex-GDR suddenly had a great deal to dispose of, materially as well symbolically. In the 1990s huge heaps of GDR-built scrap were forming all over Leipzig, the city of my childhood – thrilling playgrounds, just like all the abandoned factories, rotten hotels and teardown houses that hosted my youth. At the same time, a new border was drawn through society, which rendered some people as “Ausländer” (outlander), aggressively marking them as a human dumping ground for anyone’s dirty feelings of weakness, fear and failure, that haunted so many ex-/neo-nationalist East Germans when freedom and capitalism kicked in. “The border doesn’t run between peoples, it runs between top and bottom”—was a massive, widely visible rooftop graffiti in East Berlin in the 2000s. At some point, it was responded to on an opposite wall “The border doesn’t run between top and bottom, it runs between me and you.” Five years after both writings had been deleted by the respective landowners, I posted on social media in 2019: the border doesn’t run between me and you, it runs between Utopia and Dump (Utopie und Deponie). What would it be like to live in a world without such a border?

Anna Zett, Endarchiv (2019), video still.
This still shows the next-to-last scene of the video performance I recorded during my archival work in 2018. Sitting on a heap of gravel I look down onto a smaller heap of gravel showing my own temporary graffiti that reads: UNLEARN THE LANGUAGE OF POWER, LET IT DISSOLVE

The gravel heap that I write myself into in the video performance pictured above is located in a concrete factory in a village near Leipzig. I often pass by there to go for a swim in the quarry lake next to the factory. Since the recording of that video in 2018, the appearance and location of the gravel pile has shifted many times, by now it is completely gone. In the meantime, the wild vegetation has continued to grow. What the path around the lake looks and feels like changes all the time, depending both on natural and industrial forces. Even though signs saying “Private property! No unauthorized persons beyond this point!” are posted around the perimeter of the lake and at the factory gate, anyone who likes to be there tacitly shares the space. On the weekend, when the concrete block production pauses, people park their cars right in front of the factory and use its sandy and stony infrastructure for sunbathing. There are small sandy coves around the lake dotted with the remnants of campfires. Every time I take a walk there, I pick up some plastic litter and bring it to my garbage bin at home. Some years ago, when the shoreline became severely littered, anonymous notes were put up with the statement that “intelligent people” wouldn’t simply leave their garbage lying around, and the situation improved. Gradually the former quarry has morphed into a post-industrial wilderness that attracts plants, mushrooms, insects and birds otherwise hard to find in the area, which is defined by large fields of chemically treated monocrops. Lake and factory aren’t fenced off. Since entry is symbolically prohibited, however, it’s never too crowded with people either.

Although I already spent so much time there, this gravel quarry is still one of the most interesting places in the world to me. My regular walk around the lake and across to the factory has taught me what the coexistence of water, wind, stone, industry, people, teenagers, children, animals, and plants could mean. Since none of these forces seems to dominate there, this place sparks fantasies of an anarchic equilibrium, a Temporary Autonomous Zone in an ecological sense. In contrast to the binary zone of Utopia and Dump, this zone doesn’t feel pure, but alive. It thrives on the practical absence of borders, surveillance, security, ownership, control, and ideology. It’s a place that feels both free and safe enough for me to learn about change, presence and belonging. Recently, like other deep lakes in Europe, the gravel quarry has been affected by a disordered water circulation, which can trigger the massive growth of a purple bacteria, making the lake toxic for both animals and people, accompanied by a far-reaching disgusting smell—occasionally, not permanently, for now. So when I face the future, rather than the past, it’s now also a place for me to learn about the disasters of post-industrial climate collapse—the hard way, the heartbreaking way.

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

Anna Zett

Anna Zett is a Leipzig-born, Berlin-based artist and writer. Rooted in dissident and queer perspectives, trained in theory (MA Anthropology, Philosophy, Gender Studies) and informed by filmmaking, dance and group analysis, Zett's creative practice challenges structures of repression, and invites the live formation of encounters with the unknown. This work results in pulsating videos, vocal audio works, tangible installations, analytical texts and participatory live formats. Since their first film release in 2014, Zett's work is being presented in international contexts of art, film, research, and performance, at diy spaces as well as museums, theaters, festivals, and conferences. Zett's publications include two experimental radio plays for the German public broadcast and the literary text collection Artificial Gut Feeling (2019). Zett teaches media art (performance) at Academy of Fine Arts/HGB Leipzig.