Conversations with a Dead Man. Gustaf Nagel, Prophet from Arendsee

When ethnologist Heike Behrend visited her grandfather's house after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she encountered the Christian prophet Gustaf Nagel at Arendsee in the Altmark region. Nagel was born in 1874 during the German Empire and died in 1952 in a mental asylum in the GDR. As part of the Lebensreform movement, the German nationalist prophet was subjected to various forms of persecution throughout his life. Heike Behrend reconstructs Gustaf Nagel's biography on the basis of his self-portraits on postcards and his texts, which local historians had already collected and archived during the GDR era, as well as in conversations with them and the deceased. She also recounts conflicts, cooperation and friendship in a present in which disappointment and dissatisfaction with reunification are also finding expression in new forms of self-assertion among the inhabitants of the Altmark. In dialogue with them, she learns not only to recognise her own questions, but also what it means to generate ethnographic and historical knowledge together and in solidarity.

Following in the footsteps of a discredited prophet, these Conversations with a Dead Man paint a picture of the life reform movement, its colourful protagonists, but also its dark sides, make photography comprehensible as a resistant practice, explore feelings of home before and after reunification, and show what it means not to turn close strangers into others.