Beier Collection

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Manfred Beier (right) and his brother Günther 1950
Equipped Brandenburg Gate with red flag in 1957
Nativity car in 1970 on the Rosenfelder Ring in Berlin

The Beier Collection is the extensive photographic and documentary estate of the East Berlin teacher and photographer Manfred Beier. The collection covers the entire era of the GDR and a few years beyond in photographs and small films.

History of origin

Manfred Beier was born on April 24, 1927 at Grosse Frankfurter Strasse 86 in Berlin-Friedrichshain and lived through the last years of the war as an air force helper . In 1946 he successfully took part in an 8-month course for new teachers organized by the City of Berlin's magistrate and was appointed as a school helper on December 1, 1946. at the 12th elementary school in Berlin-Lichtenberg . After taking the 1st and 2nd teacher examinations, he was appointed assistant teacher on July 1, 1948 and teacher on December 1, 1950. He taught geography and German, later also English and astronomy. Around this point in time he began his more than 50 years of photographic work.

In 1980 Beier retired from school and worked for the Deutsche Außenhandelsbank until 1990 . He died on November 23, 2002.

From 1949 to 2000, around 60,000 black-and-white and color photos were taken on small and medium format negatives and slides, 400 narrow films and 37 film books, all of which Beier documented image by image on over 4,000 pages of an extraordinarily comprehensive “photographic diary”. In addition to many private photos, the estate contains historically interesting images from everyday life in the GDR, which stand out from the aesthetics of official GDR photographers (e.g. the General German Intelligence Service - Zentralbild ).

Preparation of the collection

After Beer's death in 2002, his sons began to process the estate and organized their first exhibitions. With the exhibition EinBlick Deutschland and a press conference, the handover of the collection to the Federal Archives was officially presented in April 2009 on the occasion of Manfred Beier's 82nd birthday and handed over to the Federal Archives, which archive the collection and digitize a selection and use it for Wikimedia Commons under a free License will provide. A larger exhibition is to be organized by the Federal Archives in 2011/2012.

Web links

Publications