Previously he easily photographed landscapes - but then stopped Hamid Eddine Bouali down the protests against the Tunisian dictator Ben Ali with the camera and created lasting images of the revolution. Now they will be shown in Berlin - just in the Stasi Memorial in Berlin Hohenschönhausen.
The young woman rips open her mouth and hands in the air. Desperately, cheering, combative. She wears a large Tunisian flag, and the body of a painted white shirt. "Tunisia's mine and you and all," it says.
Even Hamid Eddine Bouali was there on that 19th February, at the demonstration for a free and secular country. The "Tunisian Victory", as the photo is called, will go down as the face of the revolution in history. But it is still part of the "Révolution à la tunisienne - le fil rouge" (Tunisian revolution - the thread), which could be seen in spring in Tunisia. Larger than life shone the red-white picture on a poster in front of the Mad'Art, the cultural center of the town of Carthage, 20 kilometers from Tunis. Behind, in a spacious room, which showed large pictures of what the photographer saw Bouali, as it is in January and February with its Lumix blended into the crowd.
"I've never seen so much in so little time," says the photographer. This Bouali is already 50 years old. He is small, almost frail, he has a mustache and thinning hair. He curated exhibitions, and has taught the first photo of Tunis club was founded. Before the revolution he photographed landscapes, simply wanted a "nice photographer" be. Late as 13 January he blogged enthusiastically of the victory of his people, as the dictator Ben Ali and his subjects freedom promised reforms. It was his last political commentary. Then decided Bouali, only to still speak with pictures - even though at the beginning of a colleague, the photographer Lucas Mebrouk Dolega, lost his life after he was hit at close range by a tear gas canister in the face. He had gone off very sober, tells Bouali, with his camera and the tear gas mask. The emotions he had left at home: "If a surgeon is guided by feelings, he can not operate It's the same with me.."
Barbed wire at the Place de Kasbah
The revolution has made large Hamid Eddine Bouali. Before he knew no one, not in Tunisia and elsewhere. Now his pictures move around the world to London to New York - and Berlin. As of Monday his pictures hang in the Memorial Hohenschönhausen, a former Stasi prison. Hubertus Knabe, director of the memorial, knowledgeable with the investigation of authoritarian systems. Even if there had fraternized with the German case, no wall demonstrators with soldiers, "I remember the photos to the upheaval in Eastern Europe."
On a trip to Tunisia in April, the historian who discovered the photos of Bouali, now he shows it in Hohenschönhausen . The photo of the protesters about that on 14 January , the day when Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia to carry the coffin of a slain rebels through the crowd. Or the "horsemen of the Apocalypse": Against a wall of tear gas is a garbage can with graffiti, the fog is distinguished from a policeman in black uniforms and combat boots, the visor of his helmet, he has folded up in the hands of a tear gas gun, which he directly be directed into the camera seems. Or the photo of the young couple who camped at the first occupation of the Place de Kasbah, along with countless young people who had come from the poorer parts of the country with a caravan to Tunis.
Nine months later, the Place de Kasbah is still cordoned off with barbed wire, soldiers with armored car guard him, the graffiti on the walls are painted over. Also, much remains hidden behind the walls. "There has probably been a big cleanup," said Knabe. The Stasi scouts from Berlin was the beginning of October the first German to win allowed insights into the secret past: In the rooms of the Interior Ministry in downtown freshly tortured detainee, to then be transferred to the Stasi. A place that did not exist officially.
Still occupy key positions in many old cadres - camouflage and concealment are as inevitable. "The walls are repainted, the floors scrubbed perfectly," says a boy from the cells. "The Interior Ministry spokesman said he had no idea where the files had," said Knabe. And yet the traces of the horrors are not to be overlooked. On the ceiling or hanging the hook for the "Poulet Roti", the barbecued chicken. With this method of torture, the prisoners hung, tied to poles and turned into unconsciousness on its own axis.
Tunisians have the truth "ourselves quite well"
Boy tries to convince the Tunisians from making the former prison into a memorial. Because of his experience in education of unjust regimes, he also advises the Tunisian Commission to establish the truth. "There are always the same four questions when a dictatorship collapses," says the historian, what happens to the perpetrators? As compensation to the victims? How to find the truth? And how they are carried into society?
Compared with the GDR, is a boy, "the Tunisians have ourselves quite so good." They would have forbidden such as the party of Ben Ali and immediately shut the party headquarters, membership card indexes have it - unlike the SED / PDS - can not disappear by and by.
And the things in Tunisia have also changed after the revolution quickly and continuously. A dozen independent radio stations and six television channels have obtained broadcasting permits, always appear new newspapers. People read, hear, discuss, at home, at work and on the road. Everything that has been displaced for years to break. Art, too, goes beyond its former limits. It was first performed at the Berliner Festspiele, the revolutionary song "Amnesia" of Tunisian theater Fadhel Jaïbi maker.
But again and again tilts the mood of disappointment and disillusionment to, even when artists and intellectuals. Large waves struck mainly the prevention of violent religious criticism of the performance of the film "Ni ni Maître Allah" by Nadia Al-Fani. Hundreds of Islamic militants chanted on 29 June, before the movie studio "AfricArt" Tunis "Allahu Akbar" - "God is great," forcibly penetrated into the cinema hall and beat up the owner. "It is dangerous when the new freedom is being undermined from within," says a boy.
It was not necessarily reassuring , that al-Nahda was silent until long before they were finally, albeit convoluted, distanced from the events. Al-Nahda, the Islamist party , which in the elections on Sunday has won well . But a turnout of around 90 percent shows that the struggle against dictatorships, is history. 23.10.2011 for the Tunisians who had what for the East Germans of the 18th March 1990 was: the first free elections, the state's history. After the overthrow of the president, it was the second historic event this year. And the first time that Hamediddine Bouali was allowed to choose freely.
http://www.spiegel.de
