In einem stillen Land / In a Silent Country

In 2007, Roger Melis presented "In a Quiet Land," the first comprehensive portrait of the GDR and its inhabitants by a photographic artist from the East. No other photo book by a GDR photographer has garnered comparable resonance before or since. "There is hardly a more beautiful, more truthful book about the vanished GDR. Melis combines the registering rigor of August Sander with the graceful artistic attention of Cartier-Bresson to the sensations of everyday life," judged Peter von Becker in the "Tagesspiegel." The atmospherically dense, often symbolic images illuminate the everyday life, working and living conditions, and political rituals in real socialism with a sober and critical eye. They traverse the landscapes, villages, and cities between the Baltic Sea, Harz, and Ore Mountains, as well as his hometown of Berlin. Melis' masterful photographs testify to the skepticism and resignation of East Germans, but also to their pride, their spirit of contradiction, and their longings. Even three decades after the fall of the GDR, this interior view of the "quiet land" remains unparalleled. With the new edition, for which all printing templates have been thoroughly reviewed and updated to current technology, this long-out-of-print classic of German photography is finally available again.