




Anna Zett &
In her film Es gibt keine Angst [Afraid doesn’t exist], Anna Zett shows the charged period of transition in Germany between 1986 and 1990. In it, Zett combines film and sound material from the Berlin archives of the GDR opposition with poetry and music from the time. Since her research in 2018, she has presented the material with thematic areas of focus in several variations. This work originated in 2022/23 with a focus on the hunger strike and the second occupation of the State Security (Stasi) headquarter in Berlin in September 1990. Activists are shown attempting to prevent the destruction of Stasi files and demanding they be released. Interviews with passers-by and police officers on the street as well as intensive group discussions among the occupiers approach the theme multiperspectivally. Also to be seen are recordings of the Umwelt-Bibliothek (Environment Library), a network of engaged people that has been addressing important peace and environment themes since 1986 from its offices in the Zionskirche in East Berlin.
The film asks how oppression and surveillance was perceived at that time and can be processed today. On the one hand, one recognises Zett’s motivation in Es gibt keine Angst [Afraid doesn’t exist] of elaborating the possibilities of political engagement, while the material at the same time allows Zett the opportunity to retroactively process her own history. She was a child at the end of the 1980s. The found archive material helps her to »repair her own emotional world«, whereby Zett does not comment on but instead allows the material to emphatically speak for itself. The music collage composed by Matti Gajek and the lyrical insertions provide additional sensual points of access to this historical moment. In exhibitions, Zett ultimately creates a framework, within which her precisely researched films are combined with open group improvisations, through which they create space for the audience experience and participatory storytelling. (Kathrin Jentjens)