“The Secrets of the Darkened Chamber”: Michael Schmidt's Berlin nach 45*

It seems increasingly clear that the reputation of the late German photographer Michael Schmidt will rest on the three photo books that form his “Berlin trilogy:” Waffenruhe (1987), Ein-Heit (1996), and Berlin nach 45 (2005). These projects are linked by Schmidt's obsessive fidelity to Berlin and its history. Rather than offer a vision of German history through the representation of experience or through cognitive reconstruction—the strategies that structure Waffenruhe and Ein-Heit —Schmidt in Berlin nach 45 offers a vision of Berlin's history that is suggestively metaphorical. The overarching figure is that of theatricality: in a remarkable number of images, the viewer looks across a vast open stage—the great swaths of devastation left not just by the building of the Berlin Wall, but by battles, bombings, and capitalist neglect—toward a proscenium at the rear, a proscenium provided by Berlin's built environment. The viewer looks at the ruined landscapes not just from the great physical distance, but as i...