POSTCARDS FROM POST-EAST

Urban Dream Management presents a new series of postcard-based blogging.

In this series, German blogger Ben Kaden depicts moments and changing scenes from places that used to belong to East German territory, and which 20 years ago shifted from the socialist East block to the Western market economy – yet at the same time dismissing its main aspects of culture and society for one that is in many angles diametrically opposed. This change led to a condition of being in-between, of permanent departure and rare arrival. Large parts of the east are still framed by transition.

Ben Kaden currently lives in two cities: Berlin (East) and Mannheim (West). He is originally from Eisenhüttenstadt, a city once designed to be the jewel of GDR’s socialist planning – but today rather a worn out gemstone partly in decline, with wastelands and abandoned buildings.

In the era of the all-embracing Internet, the postcard as a medium has become something unique and perhaps even more meaningful than in the past. It reminds us not only of the rapid physical and cultural changes these places of former East have gone through during the last 20 years, but as well of the changes of our means in communication. Thus, this series is transverse in a two-edged way: it crosses the gap between the pre-1989 and the post-1989 conditions, and it joggles a physical medium of the past with today’s digitality.