7 November 1989

Beneath an upturned crystal glass the paper reads:
The situation continues to deteriorate. Anxieties are growing with the left-wing and right-wing extremists ready to use them. For this reason, the concept of reform, its goals...

Illuminated by wintry sunlight, the woman stands with eyes closed. Behind her to the right is an empty sweep of motorway and to the left a dirt track on which pools of rainwater reflect the cold blue sky.

A late fifteenth-century portrait of a woman in a close-fitting cap. Her eyes are also closed and her face marked by seven long scratches.

At the centre of the picture is a medieval carving of a woman with a lens in the palm of her hand and a knife cutting into her breast. To her right the head of Helmut Kohl appears above a scarred wall and to the left a phallus has been graffitied below the head of Egon Krenz. Along the bottom of the image, their backs turned, are a line of soldiers in the half-light. The man and woman appear naked in the foreground but are separated by the geometry of the picture. Cigarette butts cascade down from the centre line on which rests a small interlocked nut and bolt.

The danger is that Germany will become a country without a history, after the Second World War - and again now. The forty years of endeavour in the East will be dumped, forgotten, lost.

Radio interview with an East German socialist