Antal Lux
«Identity»

The tape is a technically complex montage of various visual and acoustic sources. Archive pictures of modern German history – in particular the Third Reich as a period in which the national identity was epochally ruptured – are juxtaposed with a long acoustic passage Lux taped from TV in which Otto Graf Lambsdorff (former leader of the liberal FDP party) pontificates on what is best for the population in former East Germany following the collapse of the Honecker regime and German re-unification. The politician stresses the model character of the West German economy, and the responsibility for the East to be shouldered by the Federal Republic – all this from a man who was formally convicted of tax evasion. The jerky montage is further fragmented by recurrent inserts of pieces of writing and picture windows.

Rudolf Frieling