Searching for Traces in Ruins: Maxhütte

Here are first impressions from the shoot about the Maxhütte steelworks in Unterwellenborn. In the old gas engine control hall, a building 110 metres long, 27 metres high and 32 metres wide, stand enormous gas engine turbines that once made the air vibrate at 110 decibels. Cameraman Jörg Junge and assistant Christian Klar floated through the hall on a crane. An imposing backdrop for interviews and atmospheric images – average temperature 10 degrees Celsius. Hard to believe that during the October shoot we had to go outside to warm up. In today’s steelworks, by contrast, we were met by almost 40 degrees. Glowing steel, tremendous noise, captivating images of metre-long liquid steel beams. Moving stories of people who spent their lives at the works, of women who after the war toiled just as hard as the men, of frozen ore trains from India that had to be hacked free in winter, of forbidden songs, of theatre performances in the former palace of culture, whose stately hall held 800 people. Old 16mm films from the former works film studio, from 1951 into the early 1980s. A story about the rise and fall of the GDR, about a picturesque landscape shaped by steel and by the lives of the people of the Maxhütte.