“It’s difficult to keep the line between past and present. Do you know what I mean?” is the title of a textile series by Josefine Reisch, and it feels like a quiet tear in the fabric of the room. Anyone visiting the Eierhäuschen in Treptow these days is stepping into the past. In Conversation with Ghosts is the title of the exhibition at Spreepark Art Space(23.11.2025–22.02.2026). The exhibition is located in the shadow of Kulturpark Plänterwald, the only amusement park of the GDR, which later became a famous “lost place”. Its ghosts awaken in the historic Eierhäuschen, a building that has lived many lives: as a 19th-century excursion restaurant, storage place for props from East German television productions that were kept here in the 1960s, and youth café set up in 1973 on the occasion of the 10th World Youth Festival in East Berlin. And not least as the site of the radio programme Sieben bis Zehn: Sonntagmorgen in Spreeathen, which was broadcast live from the Eierhäuschen on several occasions. The participating artists, including Maithu Bùi, Franziska Pierwoss, Josefine Reisch and Gabriele Stötzer, weave personal and collective narratives about Spreepark and life in the GDR, in which the past does not simply end, but continues to travel and change shape.

Their ghosts rarely appear loudly, but they do speak. Maithu Bùi’s installation Mathuật – MMRBX draws on the Vietnamese tradition of water puppetry, in which stories, ancestors, and pain are carried forward in the collective memory, becoming embedded in places and materials. Josefine Reisch reinterprets commemorative textiles that were widespread in the GDR: fragile fabrics that today speak more of fractures than of festivities. Jackie Grassmann and Ernst Markus Stein, in turn, dedicate their work to the egg — a symbol that is at once universal, political, and intimate. A companion radio series picks up the thread of those Sunday morning broadcasts that once went out into the world from the Eierhäuschen. Franziska Pierwoss brings historical slogans back to light and, at the same time, opens them up to new layers of meaning. And then there is Annemirl Bauer, one of the most uncompromising voices against the repressive art system of the GDR. The exhibition does not unfold as a simple retrospective, but as an ongoing conversation. And through a rich accompanying programme, including a workshop on biographical writing, music, performances, and a film evening featuring works from Vietnam. All of this is free to access. Every now and then, when you look from the windows of the Eierhäuschen out into today’s Spreepark, the veil between then and now seems so thin that a few ghosts might easily slip through.

Text: Emma Zylla / Photos: Josefine Reisch / Stills: Gabriele Stoetzer

Spreepark Art Space, Kiehnwerderallee 2, 12437 Berlin–Plänterwald; map

Conversation with Ghosts 23.11.2025–22.02.2026. Opening 23.11.2025 11–18h including readings with Josefine Reisch and Gabriele Stötzer.

@spreeparkartspace

It’s 80 years since the surrender of the Nazis – and 80 years since millions of Germans were forced to flee Eastern Europe in the final months of the war. The desperate, punishing journeys westward were scarcely documented beyond official Wehrmacht photographs, but now an exhibition is showing a collection of unique images of one such displacement for the first time. “The Trek – Photographs of a Displacement, 1945” at the Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion and Reconciliation unearths 140 images taken over five weeks in 1945 by photographers Hanns Tschira and Martha Maria Schmackeit. The pair used their Leica cameras to document 350 German refugees as they fled from Lübchen (now Lubów) in Lower Silesia, as Soviet troops overran the German army. These never-before-seen images of the exodus are accompanied by contemporary photographs taken by Ostkreuz photographer Thomas Meyer. Retracing the route the refugees took 80 years ago and returning to Lubów, Meyer makes visible the village inhabitants who themselves faced forced relocations after 1945. Displayed in dialogue with the historical photos, Meyer’s present-day portraits reveal how the legacies of past expulsions continue to linger today.

Text: Benji Haughton / Photos: Thomas Bruns, Hanns Tschira

Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion, Reconciliation, Stresemannstr.90, 10963 Berlin–Kreuzberg; map

The Trek – Photographs of a Displacement, 1945
Until 18.01.2026, entry is free of charge.

@flucht_vertreibung_versoehnung