re·peat

Repeating: Versuche/Framed, single-channel video, 20 mins, 2018/2022

Material: Unedited video clips by Klaus Freymuth (courtesy of the Robert Havemann Gesellschaft e.V./ Archive of the GDR Opposition) of try-outs for a campaign video for the alliance of former citizens’ movements of the GDR in the first German post-unification elections of December 1990, with former Central Round Table attendees Ingrid Köppe und Wolfgang Ullmann. The election commercial appears not to have been completed or broadcast.

To repeat something is to say or do again the words or actions of oneself or of another, to experience or to produce again, to re-iterate, or restate something, or reproduce something from memory. For Sigmund Freud, repetition was a reaction to the experience of a traumatic event, through which that event is relived in the present. In the understanding of various schools of bodywork, such as the Feldenkrais Method, patterns of movement developed in response to traumatic experiences can archive this trauma in the body. When these counterreactions of the body to a past experience are integrated through therapy, patients have been found to achieve better functionality than that available before experiencing the trauma. 

* dedicated to Klaus Freymuth (1948 - 1991) 

This is a curtain of the assembly room at the Dietrich-Bonhoeffer-Haus in Berlin Mitte.
It was filmed on 7th December 1989 during the first meeting of the Central Round Table of the GDR by the East German independent filmmaker Klaus Freymuth.

The Central Round Table had assembled on that day for the first time, bringing together members of the revolutionary new groups and of the offical state-socialist organisations and parties. 

Klaus Freymuth’s camera films the curtain for a total of two and a half minutes. 

At one point the shadow of a camera passes through the image.

Klaus Freymuth attended the first meeting of the Round Table as a filmmaker and as a member of the citizens’ movement Neues Forum.

He sets up his camera before the start of the meeting.
He films the participants as they begin to enter the room and make their way to their seats. 

It takes him a few seconds to get the camera to focus.

I found Freymuth’s footage in 2009 at the Archive of the GDR Opposition.

I was looking for images of the revolution of 1989/90, which I had participated in  as a young adult. Images beyond the iconic photos and video of the Trabants passing into West Berlin through the border checkpoints and of East and West Germans hugging each other on the 9th of November.

I was hoping to find testimony to the collective emancipation that I had experienced in the images of the Round Table.

Freymuth’s recording of the 1st session of the Central Round Table, begins with a kind of a scramble. Participants are trying to get to their seats while members of the press fight for the best positions around the Table.

Freymuth’s camera catches the cameras of the press photographers and TV teams.

The particiapants have not decided yet, whether or not to allow members of the press, and especially camera teams to stay within the room during this meeting. The press are asked to leave until the participants have discussed and decided this matter. Reinhard Schult from the Neue Forum suggests that Klaus Freymuth be allowed to stay to create an informal recording.

I notice a cameraman on the right, who seems to be winking at
Klaus Freymuth.

The Archive holds recordings of all 16 sessions of the Round Table between December 1989 and March 1990. The later sessions were recorded and broadcast live by the East German television. 

The  first two sessions, however, were recorded only by Klaus Freymuth.

Once the press have left the room and the participants have settled, Ingrid Köppe, a member of the Neues Forum, reads a statement of the Oppostion about their understanding of the role of the Round Table.

Theses are some photographs of the same scene that I took off of the monitor at the Archive during my first visit. 

The statement says that the opposition does not consider the Round Table as a legitimate form of political represenation.

To film the  first meeting, Freymuth has positioned himself on the left side of the Table, next to, or rather behind his friends from the opposition.

Members of the socialist bloc parties are sitting on the right side, opposite Freymuth.




These particpants are less active than the others.




























The camera has to do a lot of panning from the left side of the room to its right side where the younger and more active members of the Socialist party are sitting.

I like the smudges created by the quick camera movements.

When I take a still photo of such a sequence, a smudge may turn back into an object or a person.

After a pan to the right, the camera comes to rest on the back and the back of the head of the next speaker. 

Gregor Gysi and Wolfgang Berghofer, two reform-oriented members of the Socialist Unity party are sitting on the right short side of the Table,  to the right of Klaus Freymuth.

I catch a moment where Gysi seems to be similing directly at Freymuth.

Two representatives from the UFV, Ina Merkel and Walfriede Schmitt were admitted to the Table spontaneously during the first meeting.

They are sitting almost directly in front, and slightly to the right of Klaus Freymuth.

He catches their heads from behind while they are speaking.

I try to catch some of the objects that Freymuth films in passing. The glasses and the lemonade and water bottles are those of my childhood. I like how the low quality of the VHS tapes and Freymuth’s quick pans make some of my photos look like paintings. 

About two hours into the first meeting a scene begins to unfold, that was logged in the minutes of the meeting under the title:
“Reaction of the Round Table to a demonstration outside the assembly hall.” 

The scene begins when a man comes in from the outside and announces: There is a big demonstration outside. 

Throughout the sceme, the shouts and whistles of the people passing outside can be heard through the windows.

The participants inside talk for ten minutes. They try to agree on a response, but they fail to reach a conclusion.

I am amazed by the contrast between how the debate gets stuck on a verbal level  and the way the bodies are at the same time  thrown into motion. 

Elaborate choreographies unfold between hands, faces, eyes, arms, torsos, mouths and noses. 

In 2009, soon after my first visit to the Archive,
I began working with this scene.

I split the footage into two screens that converge and drift apart intermittendly. I slow down, repeat and zoom in on certain movements.

This edit eventually became the video work “A bit of a Complex Situation”.︎︎︎

This is a short clip from this edit: 

In my mind I have called this particular  two-minute clip
“The Ballet of the Round Table.” 

Because of Freymuth’s positioning on the side of the opposition, the bodies fuse in a peculiar way: It is sometimes hard to connect a had or an arm to a particular body.

The sounds from the outside create this tangle of limbs, heads and torsos.

In Freymuth’s footage, the bottles and microphones and pens and sheets of paper and table legs and curtains and windows tumble between them. 

One speaker from the opposition proposes to send some two or three people  outside. 
Another person thinks that it is necessary to make an announcement about the dismantling of the Bureau of National Security.
Someone else believes that this will, on the contrary, escalate things even further.
The first person says that it  would be impossible at this point to go outside with a shared statement. 

At the end of the scene, the heads of the oppositionals turn in unison to face a man who comes in with an update. 

He says: “I wanted to say that the situation is a bit less tense now. Those who were standing outside the building have started moving. The demonstration is moving past the building now. I think it is no longer necessary to send someone outside.”

The interruption of the Round Table lasts 11 mins and 31 seconds. In my edit I stretch it to 14 mins. The scene and my video end with the announcement of the man.

The participants return to the day’s agenda.

This is an image of another instalation of “A bit of a Complex Situation” where I hung a chandelier into the two-channel projection. 

In 2009, while researching the Round Table, I visited the assembly room where the first two sessions  had taken place in the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Haus in Berlin Mitte.

Some of the original fixtures were still there, but the tables and chairs for example, where different.

I also attended a commemorative event that was held in the original assembly hall on the day of the 20th anniversary of the 1st session of the Round Table on the 7th of December 2009.

This is a still from my recording of the screening.

Some of the original participants talked about their memories and their interpretations of the events.
There was also a screening of some material from the Round Table.


Together with a friend, I filmed the event.

This screening  included a short clip of the footage I used in “A bit of a Complex Situation” - of the interruption of the first session of the Round Table.

But, to my surprise, there was also footage of the  1st meeting filmed from the outside.

In the clip that I filmed off of  the projection during the screening in 2009, one sees  people standing outside the building with their backs to the camera, looking in through the assembly hall’s windows.

Presumably, this footage had been recorded by one of the camera teams that had been sent out of the room before the beginning of the first session.

I never found out more about this material. The only version of the scene outside the building that I have is the one that I filmed off of the projection.

The darkness outside makes the windows opaque and reflective.

The windows are the interface between the assembly inside and the demonstration outside and also the contact point between both of these recordings.

The windows reflect the  backs of the heads of the representatives of the East German establishment sitting close to the windows.
Behind and above those, the windows reflect the faces of their political opponents. 

I look out for Klaus Freymuth’s reflection in the window, but it seems that the exact spot where he stands is not reflected in any of the windows that he films in passing. 

The shadow in the previous picture is not that of Freymuth’s, but that of another, bigger camera. This is probably a camera of the East German state TV, but it was never broadcast, and I don’t know what happened to the footage that it recorded.  

In the footage from the screening in 2009, the camera outside catches Klaus Freymuth filming inside in passing.

I didn’t, however, find a corresponding movement in Freymuth’s footage. 

This is the same short side of the Round Table seen in the clip shot from the outside, filmed here by Klaus Freymuth in the opposite direction, towards the window in a scene about 15 minutes after the end of the scene of the interruption of the Round Table.

Gysi reads from an draft for a joint statement of all groups about the role of the Round Table in the East German transformation.

In the next thirty minutes,  paricipants vote on this joint statement, talk about a possible date for the planned elections, discuss the possibility of a general strike. They also  decide to install a working group of the Round Table to formulate a new constitution for the GDR.  

Here are some close-up and medium distance shots that Freymuth films of some members of the opposition during these discussions: Reinhardt Schult from the New Forum, Gerd Poppe of the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights and Wolfgang Ullmann of Democracy Now. 

A union representative at the far end of the Table, declares that there is a real danger that a general strike might happen. The shadow that is moving  behind him is that of the moderator

The moderators read out several letters written to the Round Table. Afterwards they announce a break of thirty minutes.

Freymuth’s video ends on a shot of some empty chairs. We see the shadows of people moving whose voices are heard as a murmur.

Freymuth switches the camera off after some minutes.

Freymuth would film all of  the remaining 15 sessions of the Round Table, though only his recordings of the first two sessions are today available at the archive. 

I am not sure what happened with his remaining footage. 

I found this short sequence of Freymuth filming in the TV documentation of the last session of the Round Table.  


This last session took place on March 12th, six  days before the GDR’s first and last free (national) elections that had been made possible by the Round Table.

I found this footage during my research about the Draft for  a New Constitution of the GDR that was formulated during the three months of the Round Table’s operation.

I  used footage of the public reading of the Constitution Draft in another installation, in which I contrast the hopeful chaos of the first session with the somber public reading of the constitution. It was already clear to members of the Round Table by this point that the country that this consitution was written for would not exist for much longer.  

This is Gerd Poppe, a member of the Working Group “New Constitution” adjusting his glasses while reading a section of the Draft of the Constitution. 

The sequence where the camera pans over Freymuth as he is filming is at the beginning of the footage. It only lasts eight seconds. 

In the clip, one of Freymuth’s eyes is obscured by the camera. The other eye is seen for some seconds. Freymuth closes his other eye at exactly that moment.

This image of Freymuth with his camera reminds me a lot of this other image: 

This image of a woman looking through a camera is on the cover of Klaus Freymuth’s book “Videopraxis” that I found in an online 2nd hand bookshop at some point during my early research.

Freymuth pusblished this book in 1989, I believe it came out some time before the beginning of  the revolution.

In the book Freymuth instructs readers in the use of technology that was not avaible to his readers and the possession of which was still illegal at the time of publication.

Freymuth wants to teach readers  how to construct a “good” image:

On the page below he explains the use of the shot-counter shot principle.

On the opposite page he talks about different camera angles and perspectives.

On another page, Freymuths warns against overly symmetrical image compositions. 

Freymuth himself had beeen arrested in 1984/85, some years before the publication of the book, for „nicht genehmigten Besitz von Filmtechnik“[illegal possesion of film equipment]. His arrest also led to the closure of the amateur video studio that he had founded.

He was released without a charge thanks to the overwhelming solidarity of his friends, political comrades in the opposition and colleages at the Academy of Fine Arts, among others.

Freymuth describes the visual and psychological impact of different camera angles and perspectives. 

But it seems to me, that when he positions himself on the side of the opposition, or  rather, behind it, he chooses this position, not for professional reasons (to create the best possible image), but for political ones. 

Freymuth chooses a POLITICAL perspective.

I like the strange, fragmented and fused bodies that are created by his his affected, politically situated camera. 

These images are a form of activism, but they are also an aesthetic. 

In the photos that I took off Freymuth’s videos and in my edits of his films, I take this decomposition of the “good image” even further. I add my own aesthetic and political desires to the images as another layer.

Freymuth’s filmic activism did not end with the end of the Round Table in March 1990.

After the last session of the Round Table in March 1990, and the transition to a parliamentary democracy in the GDR in the run-up to the unification, Freymuth continued to put his professional practice at the service of the new movements, especially the Neues Forum. 

This is an image of a test screen from the beginning of a video tape that I found at the Archive of the GDR opposition in 2018, when I resumed my research into the work of Klaus Freymuth.

This tape is looged in the Archive’s index as: “Versuche Wahlspot Bündnis 90 - Grüne” [tryouts for an electoral campaign ad for the alliance Bündnis 90 and the Greens] and dated 21st November 1990. 

The GDR’s still young citizens’ movements that had made up much of the oppositional side at the Round Table  were competing in the first general elections of the reunited Germany in December 1990 alongside the established East and West German political parties. 

I worked with this tape for my video work “Versuche/ Framed” in 2018, which later became part of the Archive of Gestures as the gesture “Repeating”. 

This is the beginning of my video “Versuche/Framed.”  My camera person films me, or rather the screen,  as I watch Freymuths footage on a computer monitor hooked up to an old U-MATIC-recorder in the screening room of the  Archive of the GDR opposition. 

My video begins with me stepping through the image to take a seat. 

The video on the monitor also begins with someone stepping through the image. 

The next 10 mins of Freymuth’s tape consists of several takes of  the same scene: 

Freymuth films Wolfgang Ullmann and Ingrid Köppe, two participants of the Round Table for the opposition. He has asked them to comment on his footage of one of the first meeting of the Round Table shot a year before, in which both of them participated. 

In Freymuth’s footage, Köppe and Ullmann seem very uncomfortable with the situation.

At some point, Freymuth adjusts the  volume of the TV set. He shows Köppe how to use the remote to rewind the image.

At another point, he steps into the image to  move Köppes head out of the camera’s line of view.

In the footage playing on the TV screen,  the Round Table is trying to react to a demonstration outside the assembly hall of the Round Table.

In  “Versuche/Framed”  the footsteps and voices of people passing through the corridor outside the screening room at the Archive are heard intermittently in the background.

I give my camera person a signal to start zooming in on the monitor for the second half of the footage. 

In this second part, Freymuth films Köppe and Ullmann in frontal view. In this part,  they are supposed to explain, why people should vote for  the electoral alliance Bündnis 90  that their groups are part of.

Köppe gets up and walks through the frame. She says that feels uncomfortable telling people who to vote for.

Klaus Freymuth cuts to a close-up of Köppes face in profile. In the clip we can hear her breathing. 

Fremuth says: Cut. 

In the next sequence Ullmann and Köppe in front and Freymuth behind the camera discuss what voters might expect to hear from political groups and parties. 

“Hmm, yeah... Asking people to vote for us...”

“But that’s the point of a campaign spot. Going on about theories about parliament is never going to catch people’s attention.”

“What will catch peoples’ attention?”

“It’s about getting people to say, yes, that’s right. If we want to get support if we lose our jobs, we should vote for these people. 

This topic keeps coming up in all campaign events: What happens if we lose our jobs? It’s not parliamentarism that is on people’s minds. And what will happen to our kindergardens. This is what people are worried about. They need to hear what we will hear about it.”

“Yes, but that’s what all the other party representatives are saying as well. From the CDU to the DSU....”

“Yes, but I have heard many people say that our stance on these issues is not clear enough.”

“Yes, but you also hear people saying, what’s the point? Parliamentary politics doesn’t make any difference, we’ve seen what happens. It won’t get any better. You hear people saying that, too.” 

Köppe repeats the last sentence from her script three times. Freymuth reminds her to look into the camera. 

Köppe  flings herself forward laughing because she has messed up her lines  again.

At the end of the video, after Ullmann has said  his last sentence, Klaus Freymths drums out a celebratory beat  off-camera. 

Freymuths footage cuts to static. 

I tell my camera person to start zooming out. I rewind the tape back to the beginning on the U-MATIC  recorder while she zooms out. 

To my knowledge, the campaign ad was never shown or even completed.

I did however, find a copy of a campaign ad for the Neues Forum made by Freymuth that was actually broadcast.

In the clip, an old man is playing the bagpipes by the roadside. Two cars, one of a socialst apparatchik and one of a Western manager drive by and splash mud into his face. A girl with a T-Shirt with “Neues Forum”emblazoned on it arrives by bike and helps the old man

This ad has also been included in a documentary about Klaus Freymuth titled “Dreams of a Better World”. 

In the documentary, Freymuth is seen watching and commenting on his campaign spot.

After watching the spot, he says, “This shows the illusions that we had back then”. He looks proud and a little embarrassed at the same time. 

Freymuth also comments on his recordings of the Round Table. He says that the Round Table was a school for a different kind of democracy from the one that we have now.

Later,Freymuth also says that he wants to make a film out of his footage of the Round Table.

Freymuth died in an accident in 1991. He never completed his film about the Round Table.

I never met Klaus Freymuth. But I spent so many hours with his footage and the documents about him that it feels as if I know him. 

In 2024,  I took a picture of the footage showing Freymuth watching his footage of the Round Table at the Archive..

In 2009, when I first came to the Archive, the footage had not been digitized. I watched and rewatched the footage from the first meeting from the VHS tapes. I eventually stopped because I worried that by watching the tapes I was also destroying them.

Through the graininess and the glitches in the video tapes time inscribes itself onto these images as an additional layer.

Freymuths voice in the documentary about him is clear, making him eerily present. 

The documentary ends with Freymuth talking off-camera about communism. In the clip below, I have added a sequence from earlier in the documentary to Freymuth’s voice-over. This footage is from a film Freymuth had made about the East German dissident Robert Havemann. Havemann had been an anti-fascist and a communist and later became a leading figure of the East German opposition, the circles from which the Round Table drew many of its members. In this clip, Freymuth films footage of Germans celebrating around the Brandenburger Tor. He zooms out to reveal the TV-set and the video recorder from which the footage is playing in the living room of the late Havemann. Freymuth must have filmed this in the months after the unification.  

In the voice-over, Freymuth says: “It’s about a more just society, freedom, equalit, brotherhood. Original communism. This is a great desire for many people. You can’t simply push this aside now by saying, they had their chance, they tried and it failed. For me this was not a real experiment, it was the wrong way unter the wrong conditions, it started in the wrong country, and therefore it never had a realistic chance to be realised in practice. So that is something we still have ahead of us.”

I am listening to Freymuth’s voiceover as I am working on this collage in 2025.

I am not sure if Freymuth is speaking from the past or from the future.