Nearly 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it can be difficult to tell where East Germany ended and West Germany began. Alexanderplatz, the former epicenter of socialist life, full of listed architecture left over from the German Democratic Republic (GDR), is now a shopping square with one of the city’s largest malls. Many East Germans idolised and dreamed of all things Western – from films and pop music to Levi’s jeans – but without free access to consume and participate in its culture and media, they made their own. And while many things from the GDR disappeared after the Wall came down because East and West Germans alike preferred the Western version, the reputation of others, like Sibylle magazine, the Vogue of East Germany, remain beloved for the magazine’s take on photography, style and their honest depiction of the hopes and dreams of the Soviet woman.
“There were 200,000 copies printed of each edition and everyone wanted to have it,” says Grit Seymour, 53, a Sibylle cover girl of the Eighties. “It was a rare thing that you would fight to read. Each magazine was handed to at least 10 or 20 people. It had an element of dream and luxury that wasn’t part of the everyday life.” Founded by photographer Sibylle Bergemann, the first issue appeared in 1956, a decade after the Second World War. The magazine was tasked with covering fashion, without selling brands that represented Western consumerism. To get around this, it included sewing patterns for the designs featured in the magazine instead of fashion credits. This suited East Germans just fine, because much of the clothing in the government-approved stores was either low quality, unstylish or both. “I can’t remember anybody really buying anything in the shops. Everybody made things themselves, and if they couldn’t, they had a tailor make it for them,” Seymour says. If fabrics were hard to come by, people would make items from curtains or the material used to insulate strawberry fields.
Freedom from advertisers and pressure to market garments purely for sales made the magazine a hot spot for photographers, who liked the fact they could blur the lines between fashion photography and portrait or documentary styles. “In Sibylle, the photographers were not fashion photographers,” explains Ute Mahler, 69, author of Sibylle: Zeitschrift für Mode und Kultur (Sibylle: Fashion and Culture Magazine), who spent nearly 20 years taking pictures for the title. “Arnold Fisher, Sibylle Bergemann and Roger Melis, all made a name for themselves in art photography or documentary photography and photographed fashion in these styles.” She and her husband Werner Mahler, 68, were among the few East Germans lucky enough to beat other candidates from the Soviet Bloc for 12 places at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, where they majored in photography. They both freelanced regularly for Sibylle, too.
In the GDR, all East German media was subject to heavy censorship by party leaders, who scrutinised photojournalism to make sure it reflected government ideology. This led to prominent photographers, like the Mahlers, to turn to fashion publications, where they could be more honest about what they saw and how they felt. “The photography in Sibylle is special because many photographers didn’t have the opportunity to regularly publish photos. Knowing that fashion photos would be published every two months in Sibylle, photographers used fashion imagery to show their skill,” explains Ute Mahler. Photographers also used the magazine to send coded messages.
“A cover for the magazine where I stood behind a rail was banned,” Seymour says. “We had to do a reshoot, because it gave the association of being behind a wall and the government said East Germans have to be shown in front of walls. I was actually pretty pissed and it shows in my face. These are small things that the people in the East would read into. Nothing was an obvious protest but people would understand what you were getting at.” Werner Mahler, who shot and reshot this cover, says while party officials would occasionally censor a photo shoot for political reasons, once asking for a frown to be retouched into a smile, the fashion magazine, especially the photographers, enjoyed the freedom to push boundaries. “Fashion was not taken seriously,” he says. “People that could have made things more difficult for us didn’t care that much. We didn’t manipulate photos. The women and men stood amid real countryside or architecture, so it was, in a way, a picture of reality. It is difficult to criticise an untouched picture, because you can use the excuse of just having photographed what was there.” This excuse allowed photographers to sneak in critiques with impunity, like including a mother pushing a pram full of coal or a rundown housing development being used as the background to a fashion shoot.
Other crimes, like associating with political dissidents, were taken more seriously. This got a 19-year-old Seymour kicked out of her fashion degree program, where she had secured one of two seats, and banned from Berlin as well. She was one of the country’s top models at the time and recalls risking jail time to be in the city. “While I was banned, I snuck into Berlin on the weekends and saw my face all over the underground and I thought that it was such a crazy contradiction. Here are tons of larger-than-life photographs of me in the underground, all over Alexanderplatz, but I, as a person, am not allowed to be here.” Public life, especially in the capital, was a privilege. Anyone who failed to conform to the party’s standards would be arrested in public spaces. The same went for Sven Marquardt, once another Sibylle photographer and now Berghain’s famous doorman, and Frank Schäfer, who was a punk and makeup artist. Marquardt and Schäfer had a counterculture style, and while their work was celebrated in the magazine, their presence in prominent public spaces was illegal.
After her ban, the government forced Seymour to use her fashion training to work in clothing factories in the south of the country. “Things produced there were terrible,” she says. “I was in the design department, [and] the government would say you only have 0.5 metres for each piece, you can’t do a pocket, it has to be produced in so many minutes and you have to produce 200,000 pieces. In the end, no one would buy it.” The political pressure led Seymour to fake an engagement in order to escape East Germany – a process that took years. In the West she was exotic, as one of the first Soviet Bloc models to work for major designers. When the Berlin Wall came down on the night of 9 November 1989, she was in Milan, modelling for Gianni Versace.
The Mahlers were still working with Sibylle at the time and headed for the Wall that night to capture the celebration and the demise of East Berlin. “There were people dancing, partying on the Wall and jumping to the other side,” Werner Mahler says. “The guards were trying to keep the peace, telling us to go home to the West. But I told them that I was from the East and he found it so absurd that an Easterner wanted to go back. It was a great experience to walk through the ever-closed Brandenburg Gate.”
Life changed immediately. The publications that had employed the Mahlers for their entire careers either fell out of print or were taken over by Western publishers. Sibylle now had to sell ads and luxury Western products, and the photographers – who were revered in their old country – had to virtually start over. While they had the benefit of Western contacts and received curiosity from West German publications, like the weeklies Stern and Die Zeit, they had to deal with prejudice against East Germans. New colleagues weren’t ashamed to ask questions like, “Do you even know how to photograph?”, “Why do you have real cameras?”, and “You photographed fashion? Was there even fashion in the GDR?”
Still, the couple managed to build their careers again and founded, along with seven other East German photographers, the Ostkreuz Agency, which later incorporated a photography school. The Mahlers, who were 40 at the time, were excited by the challenge that a new world, new freedoms and Western photojournalism added to their work, but some of their former colleagues, especially the older ones, were not as lucky. “We can say it was amazing for us because it worked out,” Ute explains. “But for many photographers, it didn’t go so well. There were many that lacked the strength at the time and fell into obscurity.”
Left: Ute and Werner Mahler. Right: Grit Seymour. Portraits: Katja Stempel.
Sibylle was a casualty of reunification. The collapse of East Germany involved economic failure, material scarcity and technological backwardness – not a very high-fashion image. When a Western publisher took over, it was made a mid-market publication. “From 1990 to 1993 the magazine was thoroughly uninteresting,” Ute says. “Editors did not want to do the new content, everyone cancelled their subscriptions and there was no reason for West Germans to read a new mid-range magazine when so many similar titles existed.” Four editors bought back the failing magazine in 1993, hoping to restore it to its former glory, but it didn’t work, and in 1995, Sibylle printed its last issue.
This was the last time Ute or Werner Mahler photographed fashion. Unlike in the East, where limited options meant that photographers could have simultaneous commercial and artistic success, fashion was big business in the West, and if you were shooting fashion editorial, you were a fashion photographer. They both chose to develop their style in photojournalism, and later, art photography.
Although neither the Mahlers nor Seymour would go back to East Germany, with its Stasi, planned economy and seclusion from the West, they agree that the country had artistry and that its creatives spoke with a transgressive voice in hidden messages. “You cannot compare the fashion photography of today with that of that time in Sibylle,” Ute says. “Or even compare it to Western photography of that time. You can compare quality and say that something is a great photo, but it had a different purpose in the GDR.”
This article originally appeared in SLEEK 61, out now.
Sibylle – Die Ausstellung opens at Freundeskreis Willy-Brandt-Haus on 6 June through to 25 August.