When ethnologist Heike Behrend visited her grandfather’s house after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she encountered the Christian prophet Gustaf Nagel at Arendsee in the Altmark region; he was born in 1874 during the German Empire and died in 1952 in a mental institution in the GDR. As part of the Lebensreform movement, the German nationalist prophet was subjected to various forms of persecution throughout his life. Drawing on his self-portraits on postcards and his writings—which local historians had already collected and archived during the GDR era—as well as through conversations with them and with the deceased, Heike Behrend pieces together Gustaf Nagel’s biography. In it, she also recounts conflicts, collaboration, and friendship in a present in which disappointment and dissatisfaction with reunification are finding expression—even among the residents of the Altmark—in new forms of self-assertion. Through dialogue with them, she learns not only to recognize her own uncertainty in her questions, but also what it means to generate ethnographic and historical knowledge collectively and in solidarity.
Following in the footsteps of an ostracized prophet, these Conversations with a Dead Man paint a picture of the Life Reform Movement, its colorful protagonists, but also its dark sides; they make photography comprehensible as a practice of resistance, explore feelings of belonging before and after German reunification, and show what it means not to turn familiar strangers into “others.” (Publisher)