Searching for Traces in Ruins: ORWO Wolfen

Wolfen near Bitterfeld: huge old halls from the heyday of the 1920s, faded logos, a museum with polished original machines, prefabricated housing estates and hundreds of stories. All of it recalls ORWO: “Original Wolfen”, the synonym for photographic and film material in the GDR. A vast combine in the dirtiest corner of the really existing socialist chemical industry. Here 21,000 employees – 80 per cent of them women – produced colour films, black-and-white films, music cassettes, film tapes, X-ray films, but also viscose, sausage casings and the works canteen’s own cola. ORWO had emerged from AGFA Wolfen, which in 1936 produced the world’s first colour film. ORWO went under in the 1990s, a few years before colour film died everywhere.

Today the vast site is one single building site. Of the 580 buildings that once stood here, only a handful remain. Most of the halls have been demolished: by the women who were temporarily employed by the redevelopment company. The plant still counts 750 employees today. The end of a long film history that began in 1910. In the 1970s Nina Hagen even brought colour film into the charts. Played at home on ORWO cassettes. At the Wolfen Film Museum this history comes alive. Hundreds of old machines stand there, advertising films about ORWO from the 1960s are kept there, and photographs and magnetic tapes testify to what it looked like when mum left early for work.