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The fall of the Berlin Wall has produced many different stories, some of which are so specific and complex that they require a profound knowledge of German history in order to be understood. When designing projects that deal with historical issues, it is necessary to find the right balance between historical precision and emotional accessibility to arouse the viewer’s interest.

The photographic project Deutschland Übergestern (sponsored by the Federal Foundation for the Study of Communist Dictatorship in East Germany – GDR) investigates the stories of those people who did not fit into the new system after the fall of the wall with their previous professional biography, drastically change their job and career and they had to leave their former life behind.

The Italian photographer Dario J. Laganà has met some of these people after extensive research on working and industrial culture of the GDR after the reunification period. In the exhibition he reconstructs a number of these personal life-paths in photographic portraits and interviews, which bring the reader and the viewer closer to this part of German history and its protagonists. Anyone who has worked or is still at work can easily identify with these types of stories. The universal connotation of work can be understood by anyone without the specific knowledge of the socio-political circumstances that characterized events after the fall of the Wall.

In addition to the radical changes that can be seen as negative changes in working life, there are also cases where the break with the past and reunification have brought a positive change and new opportunities.

Among other things, you will find stories of people who repaired umbrellas before the turnaround and now run a transportation company, a former member of the National Army that after run a gas station, a professor and dean of a West German university, who was denied studying in the GDR, the continuity story of Carl Zeiss company, who succeeded in overcoming the breaches of reunification or a woman from Vietnam who came to the GDR as a contract laborer and now works in a flower retailing shop.

It is not intention of the project to call on Ostalgie, the transfiguration of the past, a reunion and complete reconciliation of a society can only be achieved through the elucidation of the past, i. to look at the light and shadow sides without taboos.