IDEA - Christian Stemmler - Berlin 1994-99 Anfang/Beginning

Overview

First printing of 750

The new IDEA book is ANFANG/BEGINNING: BERLIN 1994-99 by Christian Stemmler. Underage in the underground. Christian Stemmler left home at 17, dropped out of school, moved into a squat, found work in a club and started taking photographs. This was the nineties and this was Berlin.

And that was near on three decades ago. The photographs of that scene have not been seen. Until now, in the age of sharing everything, he has made a book. A book that takes you back.
ANFANG/BEGINNING: BERLIN 1994-99 is a personal visual history of the creative playground East Berlin became after the fall of the Berlin Wall. An alternative lifestyle book, an interiors and exteriors book, a photobook that documents a great and largely lost freedom. In 2025, it looks like a liberation from phones, social media and Zoom calls. An expansion of time to experience and learn from going out, meeting people, dancing.

"We were so curious. Hungry for adventure. We wanted to dance, to hug, to scream. We never wanted the party to end. We weren't aware that our way of living and clubbing would inspire so many and become the blueprint of how people would party for the decades to come. It was the peak and yet the beginning of the end of subcultures in the last years before the internet. An adventure that now seems like an exceptionally beautiful indie movie."
Christian Stemmler

• Softcover with Gatefolds
• 25,5 x 20cm
• 192 Pages
• First printing of 750